from ouko joachim omolo
Colleagues Home & Abroad Regional News
BY FR JOACHIM OMOLO OUKO, AJ
NAIROBI-KENYA
FRIDAY, JANUARY 20, 2012
Pope Benedict XVI warned against the grave dangers that “radical secularism” posed to the Catholic Church and society in general during a meeting Thursday with US bishops. This is according to the pope is because the United States was founded “on certain ethical principles” that have “eroded significantly in the face of powerful new cultural currents.
These trends, the pope says directly opposed to core moral teachings of the Judeo-Christian tradition, thus increasingly hostile to Christianity as such. This is because secularism is purely human, and intended mainly for those who find theology indefinite or inadequate, unreliable or unbelievable.
The tradition is drowned from James 4:1-10 where Jesus has been alleged to have warned his followers not to be of the world. The “world” is in opposition to Christ and Christ is in opposition to the world. Those who become friends with the world become enemies of God.
“What causes quarrels and what causes fights among you? Is it not this, that your passions are yet war within you? You desire and do not have, so you murder. You covet and cannot obtain, so you fight and quarrel. You do not have, because you do not ask. You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, to spend it on your passions.
You adulterous people! Do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God? Therefore whoever wishes to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God. Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you.
Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you. Cleanse your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded. Be wretched and mourn and weep. Let your laughter be turned to mourning and your joy to gloom. Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will exalt you” (James 4:1-10).
Based on this trend, Judeo-Christian is a belief in the biblical God of Israel, in his ten commandments and his biblical moral laws. It is a belief in universal, not relative, morality.
In 1 Timothy 6:9-11 it warns: “Those who want to be rich fall into temptation and are trapped by many senseless and harmful desires that plunge people into ruin and destruction. For the love of money is root of all kinds of evil, and in their eagerness to be rich some have wandered away from the faith and pierced themselves with many pains. But as for you, man of God, shun all this; pursuer righteousness, godliness, faith, love, endurance, gentleness”.
In other words, there are many things in this world that can bring us temporary joy and happiness – sufficient money, business success, and good health, loving family, loyal friends. But no worldly thing can bring enduring joy and happiness.
We might become poor, fail at business, lose our health, or, by separation or death, lose our spouse or our friends. Even if we gain all of these, and more, and keep them, sooner or later we must leave them all behind and “go the way of all flesh”.
It means that religiously human beings are spiritually oriented-this could explain why before Vatican Council II many churches did not have toilets. The idea being that once you are in church you are no longer human being, therefore you do not need to go to the toilet.
Today, the trend of thinking and approach has changed. Many people today have not only preferred secularism than Judea-Christian tradition, but also resorted not to go to church. For example, in some of Catholic Europe’s largest dioceses in Germany, France, Italy, and Ireland, the percentage of Catholics who attend Mass regularly has slipped to as low as 20 percent, and in a few cities, like Paris, has reached as low as the single digits, according to figures compiled by the church.
In Italy, where 97 percent of the population considers itself Catholic, church attendance has fallen to 30 percent, according to figures compiled by Famiglia Cristiana, a popular Catholic weekly magazine. In large cities such as Milan, the figure is no more than 15 percent.
In France, where 76 percent of the population considers itself Catholic, only 12 percent say they go to church on Sunday, according to Georgetown University’s Center for the Study of Global Christianity, and Vatican officials say the percentages attending Mass drop as low as 5 percent in cities, such as Paris.
In Ireland, where 90 percent of the population is nominally Catholic, less than 50 percent attend Mass even once a month, according to church officials’ estimates. That figure is more dramatic given that 91 percent of the country attended Mass regularly just 30 years ago, according to a recent church study.
Even in Africa where Africans have been considered notoriously religious, it is no longer the case. In spite of all this, Pope John Paul II, in his Post-Synodal Exhortation after the African Synod, Ecclesia in Africa, pointed to the growing threat of secularism in Africa.
This is because the rapid evolution of society has given rise to new challenges linked to the phenomena notably of family uprooting, urbanisation, unemployment, materialistic seductions of all kinds, a certain secularisation and an intellectual upheaval caused by the avalanche of insufficiently critical ideas spread by the media” (Ecclesia in Africa, 14 Sept. 1995, no. 76).
In such a state, religious faith, for one reason or another, is felt to be superfluous. It is a state in which organised religion loses its hold both at the level of social institutions and at the level of human consciousness. As such, secularism is a datum of modern society. It is a world view which, in theory and/or practice, denies the immanence of God.