In Chicago, Another Sign of the Catholic Church’s Decline

“If the Catholic Church doesn’t stand against paganism, one has to worry what basic principle it will abandon next.”

I’m not a Catholic, but I have an abiding respect for Catholicism’s role in bringing down the paganism that dominated Europe before the Church took over. At least one Catholic cardinal, though, seems to have forgotten that time. How else can we explain Cardinal Blase Cupich’s decision to participate in a Wiccan-organized conference to “enrich” his faith?

Before the Jews, the world was entirely pagan. People across the known world worshipped a panoply of gods tied to the visible and invisible phenomena of the earth. The gods didn’t provide an overarching morality. Instead, they were capricious beings that constantly needed to be placated, and they especially liked blood, whether animal or human. The stories of the Roman gods are a soap opera of vanity, matricide, patricide, incest, insanity, and random violence.

The Jews brought something new: a single, invisible God who had a powerful moral code that He demanded of His followers. The shorthand for this is “ethical monotheism.” Through Jesus, ethical monotheism spread beyond the Jews. Eventually, throughout Western Europe, it was the Catholic Church that took up this banner.

Being a Jew, I’ll be the first to admit that Catholicism, even as it wove ethical monotheism into the warp and woof of Western society, could be brutal. After all, its early adherents all came from paganism and, once Catholicism took hold, they all fought against paganism. There were those who fought with words and moral example, like St. Patrick, and those who fought with swords.

Continue reading at the American Thinker