A New Missionary Age: The Year that was and the Year that will be are a Prelude.

Catholic Online ^ | 1/3/10 | Deacon keith Fournier

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...The Pope’s travels are not only good will trips; they are the modern missionary journeys of the Vicar of Christ. They are chosen strategically, led by the Holy Spirit and have a prophetic purpose as part of a plan for that full communion.

Similarly, his speech in Regensburg is the first step in engaging an ascendant Islam with the Truth claims of Christianity. He will do so with respect, but he will do so and we must do so as well, as part of the Church. The hungry secularism which has fueled what he so aptly called the “dictatorship of relativism” opened up the void into which Islam has rushed. However, that void resulted from the decline of a truly Christian vision for the human person, marriage and the family and civil society built upon it and a true understanding of authentic human freedom and solidarity. The future will not be secular. Secularism does not have any content to sustain a future. The challenge of Islam is an invitation to the Church to offer the true humanism which is Christianity as the path to the future.

Pope Benedict’s summons to Europe to return to her Christian roots in order to rebuild herself - and his commendation of some of the philosophical underpinnings of the American experiment ( as evident in his visit and his locutions while on our shores) - are oriented toward the same end. He is encouraging the building of a truly just civil and social order by proposing the Christian vision of the person, the family and the common good as the foundation. In short, we need a new Christian foundation for the West. ...

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We need a new Christian foundation for the West. The Catholic Church is in the first stage of a new missionary age.The collapse of the West will not be remedied by any political party or philosophy. In the United States, gripped by the lies of a culture of death and use, we do not need a “conservative revolution” as some pundits maintain. We need a Christian revolution. It was the Christian Church which gave us the understanding of the dignity of every human person because we are created in the Image of God. From that came the understanding that we all possess fundamental human rights.