Throughout Christendom, the Church accumulated a social role, besides its fundamental spiritual role. Such was the responsibility on education, healthcare and a census – the registry of baptisms, marriages and deaths. Only the Church was allowed to carry these burdens and I will attempt to give a panoramic view on what it consisted of, and the consequences of its destruction.
History teaches us that the good services of education and healthcare were non-existent until Europe accepted the message of the Gospel, and, inspired by it, created them. In ancient paganism, these were scams played on the elites who could afford to be scammed, while the rest of the social body, if lucky, would have access to clean water and some tricks to survive.
About 600 years ago, with Humanism, a fundamental long process of change in people’s souls was initiated. European man’s deep Christian constitution has been slowly suffering alterations – on occasions under “anaesthesia,” on other occasions consciously. Popes and intellectuals call this explosion of pride and sensuality the Anti-Christian Revolution. The revolutionary pride shifted the Theo-centric medieval worldview to a belief of equality between self and God – a deification of the self. Over the centuries, this belief was imbued in minds and hearts as a tacit belief; many were inadvertently re-wired into it. When explicit, these reheated pagan beliefs are called agnosticism, atheism and religions (false ones). Whether through tacit or explicit adherence to the Revolution, Europeans started believing that each one of them was a god and that living in society was about keeping peace amongst people-gods, a Godless society of gods and goddesses. The French Revolution, the parabolic revolution, is a tale of trying to placate the impossible peace of the society of goddesses with lies, tricks and blood.
The soul that revolted against God and wants to be a god, wants to be worshipped. This creature is constantly confronted with reality and deep down knows the impossibility of these desires. The perception of the revolutionary soul’s own contingency makes him wish to not exist and have never existed. His own existence affirms: the one almighty God’s, the dependency of all things on this God, and the external glory to God creator given by his existence. This poor creature that did not create or maintain himself, desires at the same time to be worshipped as a god and to cease existing. Psychiatrists could say that an individual wishing two frontally opposed realities and constantly switching its inclination between the two, is an individual suffering from schizophrenia. There, I describe the co-naturality of the Revolutionary to Lucifer – they both want to be worshipped and to commit suicide.
The Revolutionary hatred had to attack all the unique institutions born from the Christian inspiration. There was obviously an attack on schools, hospitals and the holy census. It was not possible to immediately destroy them as the Revolution wishes to, therefore, we witness a maneuver carried on for centuries: the emptying of the Catholic spirit from these institutions in all that is transcendental and in all that is pragmatic.
A major victory they had in each country was making the population perceive and believe in education and healthcare as attributions of the State, financed by taxes. When the population desired secular care for their kids and secular support before leaving this world for Eternity, rather than receiving this from the True Church, their Faith in the Church was seriously undermined. The same applies to the acceptance of the state census: the serial numbering of people and the charging of taxes to provide services. This differs so much from prior history, when the Church would keep records of sacraments in the parish level, in complete confidentiality from higher ecclesiastical spheres and the State. In Christendom, the State does not know the exact number of people around, or the conditions of the families, as it should not know these things. The State’s mission is to deny freedom to evil and evildoers, and subsidize the Church in giving liberties to good and doers of good. The exaggerated belief in the State is an accessory to the exaggerated belief in one’s own self, and it represented a Revolutionary victory over the supernatural Faith and Trust we should entrust only to God Himself.
If disbelief was not damage enough, the Church’s spiral into abyss gets worse, as people start perceiving the Church as a social parasite. As the Church’s services in the social sphere are looted from it by the Revolutionary State and taxes pay their costs, the Church loses its pragmatic social mission. In the United Kingdom, the NHS is worshipped as yet another god in the society of gods. The perception of tithe as a useless burden becomes ingrained. The decline and deterioration of religious vocations become an incurable disease. Sadness and misery abound in a social structure amputated from the Church’s social mission and presence.
Liberals make a lot of fuss and noise to keep their god status, as well as to retain the god status of institutions, secularized areligious institutions. Christians receive constant violent warrants for false worship towards these goddesses; chatting to liberals is like receiving sprees of boxing combinations towards worship and compliance. On the other side of the ring, we fight in handcuffs. To make matters worse, pacifism abounds in Christian preaching, not towards the personal enemies, but towards the enemies of the Church – those with whom no peace treatments or ceasefires can ever be made.
The charge back on the subject of the social role of the Church in its full extent includes talking in the public square about the rightful monopoly of the Holy Church on teaching, healthcare and census.
The mission of the Church on teaching, sanctifying, and governing souls entitles the Church to the monopoly on this burden, as this mission requires a monopoly. As the Church works with the absolute Truth, each of these missions is impossible in a free-entrance marketplace whose institutions have lies as their foundations.
Western education as we know it started on the Christmas of 789 when Charlemagne instituted the schooling free of charge in all parishes of his Empire in Europe [1]. The priests were obliged to teach in the parish to whoever wanted to learn (Alcuin of York was deeply involved in this and the advent of chant). High performing students would get all scholarships to keep on studying, researching, and pursuing knowledge on larger cathedral schools or monasteries. This impulse towards education had so much success that 400 years later a completely innovative institution would be born in Christendom, the University: Bologna, Oxford, Cambridge, Salamanca, Padua, Naples, Coimbra, Charles, Vienna, Heidelberg, Jagiellonian, St Andrews, Basel, Copenhagen, Uppsala, and many more. This is how the work of grace inspires an institution to be born in a healthy, sanctified social body. The Church and its good people fostered and worked towards investigation and debate of different schools of thought and points of view. And this was possible due to the authority of Church – at that time present and acting. The fundamental Truth was shared and on top of this solid rock, science flourished. [2]
When the Revolutionary spirit managed to take over, instead of progress, the efforts were towards marketing of hoaxes and lies through the education system. Love for the formation of the future generations was extinguished, and we live its catastrophic consequences. It was during the Napoleonic rule of Europe that schooling was mandated as obligatory. All children had to go through Revolutionary indoctrination. Even the school hours for each discipline were standardized. The smiley and polished revolutionary wrath over our kids has never diminished or ceased. Schooling free of charge under the authority of the Church is fundamentally different from obligatory schooling under the authoritarianism of the Revolution. When the latter became the norm, this institution was emptied of its internal strength, and over the centuries was unable to do anything against its decline.
A lot can be said about how the Church’s charitable spirit inspired specialized schools for diverse people: schools for girls, schools for orphans, schools for the deaf, etc…
Healthcare in Christendom was run with nuns as nurses. These poor, generous souls would receive only food and a bed to sleep; Heaven was their reward for a life of charity and giving of themselves. Financially, this is the only way to run healthcare for all and for the poor without high debt and financial machinations, and without propaganda to persuade the public of the utopia it is. In Christendom, hospitals were not exclusively about ceasing physical pain and curing physical maladies, but it were also about spiritual preparation and support in our last hours. At the hour of our death, there is a special spiritual battle that is fought by all; that battle can determine our afterlife. The Church always knew this and aided these moments with sacramentals and sacraments – from this spirit hospitals and all healthcare institutions were born.
Any time the Revolution manages to infiltrate power, it generates artificial crises for its profit. The anti-Christian revolution advances in its destruction via these crises and the maintenance of oppression. When it comes to secularised healthcare and education, the Revolutionary State will force taxes to maintain it running, even on people who quit and go their own way, be it private or home-based. Their activity is so immensely oppressive, that community-based alternatives are crushed immediately, as any attempt to establish healthy local community spirit is.
Living under such liberal authoritarianism, the dilemmas of democratic republics could not be more difficult. The socialist healthcare machine that demands constant payment quickly stops functioning properly. These “free” services become enormous lines of waiting patients while services decrease in quality, until one by one they collapse. The collapses are scheduled for crisis maximization, Revolutionary profit and humiliation of the Christian society – services to the elderly and vulnerable tend to collapse prior to services to men in working and fighting conditions. For education, the same applies – humanities and all formation for transcendence will collapse first whilst the system will keep the indoctrination and some applied exact sciences teaching.
As the destruction of the Holy Church is the essential utopian objective, the ecclesiastical sphere is the prime target of infiltration. Germany, Austria and other countries will make sure paying the tithe is tied to declaring oneself as a Christian. It was through great effort, that some traditional communities in these countries managed to have that their tithe directed to their traditional seminaries and parishes. They had to change legislation in order to do this, and we might see the same happening to healthcare and schooling – mechanisms to opt out. But only history will tell if these concessions are being made because it is already too late and the institutions are already compromised the point of total control, when even money and property are being redefined hastily on a large scale.
Fortunately, the Revolutionary efforts are acts of destruction, and, being so, act against nature and against grace. The Revolution goes on as one brushing a horse against the direction the hair grows. We, on the other hand, have nature and grace on our side. By simply ceasing the revolutionary propaganda of strange concepts, utopias and lies, and ceasing the emptying of the institutions, the regeneration goes fast! Nature and grace are constant and abundant in the Christian social body. The restoration of natural and desired institutions always happens. By its own nature, this living body grows. Our Lady is not a lady of unfinished works.
The Church’s social role as sole provider of education, healthcare and census-taking has been completely wiped out from Western minds, but as it comes from a Natural and Divine Architecture, it will always bounce back. The Revolutionary forces emptied and weakened these institutions. The Church was deprived of this exclusive task and much suffering resulted. Keeping the proper golden vision of the Christian Order in our minds and prayers is the first step of the restoration.
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[1] 789 Admonitio Generalis, as in Richard Winston, “Charlemagne, From the Hammer to the Cross” (New York, 1954); and Louis Halphen, “Charlemagne and the Carolingian Empire” (Amsterdam, 1977).
[2] Rodney Stark, “The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism and Western Success” (Random House, 2007). The British version and audible version are not good, the American original version is different. This book keeps exploring the long subject of Catholicism as the only possible culture for scientific progress and debunks dark legends. The eulogy on Capitalism is flawed but does not make the book less interesting and helpful.
Image: Saint Elizabeth of Hungary Bringing Food for the Inmates of a Hospital. Wellcome Collection, UK.
