The Inevitable and the Deliberate

Even those of us who strongly resist so-called Progressive ideology tend to assume unwarily that history is controlled by certain forces, entropic or economic, where masses of men tend toward a certain behaviors, or tend to follow a certain Spirit of the age.

It is not so. The movement of a mass is merely the sum of the movement of all individuals in the mass, including those individuals trying to follow the mass, trying to lead the mass, or trying to oppose or mislead.

For example, in my youth I was convinced that the gradual relaxation of moral strictures called the sexual revolution was inevitable, and a good thing. Then, growing wiser, I thought it was inevitable and a bad thing.

Now, I doubt whether it is inevitable at all nor ever was. Surely the growing luxury of the West allowed the temptation to be greater, but the decision to surrender to the temptation was a decision, not inevitable.

The sexual revolution was made possible by the laxity of the divorce laws, made possible by the laxity of the marriage laws. The relaxation and abolition of Blue Laws against the Sabbath breaking, as well as the deliberate decristianization of the education in Europe and America had parallel effects and open up parallel temptations.

All these ills were foreseeable, yes, but not inevitable.

Allow me to quote from that most interesting tract THE WAR OF ANTICHRIST AGAINST THE CHURCH AND CHRISTIAN CIVILIZATION by Msgr George F. Dillon, DD. (1885). Please note this was written before the Great War. He is discussing the efforts of secret societies, especially Freemasons, to oppose and overthrow the Catholic church in particular and Christian civilization in general, via conspiratorial subversion.

I would have dismissed these as a vaporing of a conspiracy theorist had I not lived through the events of the dawn years of the the Third Millennium, where the deliberate nature, the funding, the unlikely political alliances, and even the names and persons involved in the subversion became matters of public record.

The words below are his:

France, Italy, Germany, Spain, America, and the rest of the world, deluged with immoral novels, immodest prints, pictures, and statues, and every legislature invited to legalise a system of prostitution, under pretence of expediency, which gave security to sinners, and a kind of recognized status to degraded women.

We find, wherever Masonry could effect it, these bad influences brought to bear upon the universities, the army, the navy, the training schools, the civil service, and upon the whole population.

... in France under the Empire, Paris, bad enough before, became a very pandemonium of vice; and Italy just in proportion to the conquests of the Revolution, became systematically corrupted on the very lines laid down by the Alta Vendita.

Laws subversive of Christian morality were caused to be passed in every State, on, of course, the most plausible pretexts.

These laws were, first, that of divorce, then, the abolition of impediments to marriage, such as consanguinity, order, and relationship, union with a deceased wife’s sister, etc.

Well the infidels knew that in proportion as nations fell away from the holy restraints of the Church, and as the sanctity and inviolability of the marriage bond became weakened, the more Atheism would enter into the human family.

Moreover, the few institutions of a public, Christian nature yet remaining in Christian States were to be removed one after another on some skilfully devised, plausible plea. The Sabbath which in the Old as well as in the New Dispensation, proved so great an advantage to religion and to man—to nations as well as to individuals—was marked out for desecration.

The leniency of the Church which permitted certain necessary works on Sunday, was taken advantage of, and the day adroitly turned into one of common trading in all the great towns of Catholic Continental Europe.

The Infidels, owing to a previous determination arrived at in the lodges, clamoured for permission to open museums and places of public amusement on the days sacred to the services of religion, in order to distract the population from the hearing of Mass and the worship of God.

Under the Empire, the most disastrous blow struck by the Arch-Mason Talleyrand was the formation of a monopoly of education for Infidelity in the foundation of the Paris University. But it was left for the Atheistic plotters of this century to perfect the plan of wresting the education of every class and sex of the coming generations of men from out of the hands of the Church, and the influence of Christianity.

...[T]he hopes which Masonry had from Protestantism in countries where the population was mixed, were clear...

The jealousy of rival sects was to be excited, and when they could not agree, then the State was to be induced to do away with all kinds of religion “just for peace sake,” and establish schools on a purely secular basis, entirely removed from “clerical control,” and handed over to lay teachers, whom in time Atheism could find means to “control” most surely. But in purely Catholic countries, where such an argument as the differences of sects could not be adduced, then the cry was to be against clerical versus lay teaching.

Religious teachers were to be banished by the strong hand, as at present in France, and afterwards it could be said that lay teachers were not competent or willing to give religious instruction, and so that, too, in time, could be made to disappear.