I think the part that truly bothers me is that the diplomats from the nations that historically used to be called “Christendom” are -— as public policy and backed by the coercive power of the State -— pro-sodomy and pro-baby-killing to a man. Or to a woman. Or whatever.
It is a difficult adjustment to make, but Pope Benedict XVI was telling us this right through his pontificate - we live in a pagan society run by pagans where Christian belief and practice will no longer occupy a privileged place.
We must think about what it was like to live in the Roman Empire before Catholicism became the preferred religion of the empire. It wasn't all persecution (although at times, the persecutions were fierce). The Church was able to grow and even prosper. The Church became increasingly influential in the empire long before the Edict of Milan. But the Church did not enjoy the privileged place it occupied after it was adopted as the state religion, and especially after Rome began to fall apart, and it was often the Church that caught the falling pieces and maintained any semblance of order.
Yet, during that period, in spite of the great evils of Rome, it was still the best thing going.
So, too, the West, today. It's decadent. It's a shadow of its former self. It is no longer Christendom. It is becoming intolerant of Christianity.
But it is less decadent, less immoral, less evil and less intolerant of Christianity than the great sewage reservoir that is Islam.
The lesson here for the Church is that she, too, must come to grips what it means to have lost her privileged place in western society. It means that she must trust less in "multi-lateral" solutions and "international" diplomacy and law, as these are no longer based in, or even friendly to Catholic moral theology or even natural law.
Calling for global solutions is all well and good when the enforcers of those solutions were an explicitly-Christianized United States, a United Kingdom with a vibrant Christian state religion, and a France that could still be called the Eldest Daughter of the Church without either tears or guffaws for the irony inherent in the statement.
As for Mr. Ruse, one of his fatal flaws is that he thinks because many Islamic countries have laws that look superficially like those previously enjoyed in the West upholding traditional Christian morality that they flow from the same, or similar source. He seems to think that in Islam, he's getting a bargain-shelf version of Christianity and Christian morality. They do not flow from the same source, and he is not getting anything remotely similar to Christianity or Christian morality. They flow strictly from the will to power of the religious elites to control and oppress their satanically-oppressed subjects.
Remember, it was a revered ayatollah of Islam that literally wrote the book on how one might licitly have sex with a chicken, and then licitly cook, butcher, and eat it later.
Their “morality” has nothing to do with Christian morality. To think otherwise is syncretism with a fatal twist.
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