The Source of All Blessings
By Fr Benedict Kiley, European Conservative.
The Cross is the most awful sign the world has ever known, and the only sign that brings victory and hope: “In hoc signo vinces.”
Most people know the apocryphal story of the person who goes into the jewellery store and asks for a Cross, to be questioned by the assistant, “one with the little man on it, or without?” An urban myth, perhaps, but remembering Tolkien’s point about myth and truth, it is highly likely that in the deeply secularised West, there are many who know nothing of the Cross, why this Friday is ‘Good,’ or who indeed the “little man” is, on that strange piece of body decoration. If you doubt that that level of cultural and religious ignorance exists—even amongst those expensively programmed into ignorance by our institutes of higher learning, a programming which is intentional—I will never forget, many years ago, attending a screening of the movie The Passion of the Christ and, while chatting with a friend before the film began, being tapped on the shoulder by a young woman and being reprimanded for “giving the story away.”
There are those who know the Cross; they know its symbolism, they know what Christianity claims, and they know who it is that Christians believe is hanging upon that Cross. Nine years ago, men clad in black marched twenty Egyptian Christians and one Ghanaian, onto a beach in Libya. Before they were martyred, by being beheaded, the spokesman for the followers of the ‘religion of peace’ pointed across the waters of the Mediterranean towards Rome and called the poor Coptic Christians they were about to murder, and all Christians, the ”servants of the Cross.” He claimed to be an enemy of the Cross, perhaps the only accurate statement he made. The Coptic martyrs, as is visible in the cruel video that ISIS recorded, died with the Holy Name of Jesus upon their lips, defeating with love the demonic hatred which appeared to be victorious. They were servants of the Cross, the Cross which brought peace and hope to men about to be executed; the Cross on which the Good Thief, St. Dismas, found redemption; the Roman centurion St. Longinus identified the Son of God; and the Cross on which Constantine saw the sign of victory.
What gives men, with an enviable simplicity worth more than a lifetime of academia, the courage to face death in visible peace, except the saving power of their belief in the Cross? Where is that power in the anaemic, therapeutic deism preached in the emptying churches of Western Europe and North America, and could there be, perhaps, some link between the failure of both faith in the power of the Cross and the preaching of that faith and those empty pews?
There are two lessons we can learn this Good Friday from the Coptic martyrs, saints of the Coptic Church, and acknowledged as martyrs now by the Catholic Church. The first is very simple, but possibly the most damaging and debilitating factor affecting the decline of Christianity in the West: the doctrine of universalism. In short, this is the belief that not only will all men be saved, but that all that we do on earth will not alter that fact. Despite being contradicted by the testimony of Christ and the unbroken tradition of the Church, this belief has penetrated deeply, not only into a vaguely deistic society, albeit secular, but, far more worryingly, into the fabric of the Church.
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