In an address to the leaders of the Christian Associations of Italian Workers Friday, Pope Benedict XVI warned, "As history demonstrates, a democracy without values easily turns into open or thinly disguised totalitarianism."
Benedict XVI highlighted how, in our time, science and technology "present huge possibilities for improving everyone's lives," but warned that "the misguided use of such power can provoke grave and irreparable threats to the future of life itself."More at Lifesite..."The defense of life - from conception to natural end - wherever it is threatened, offended or trampled underfoot, is the primary duty of an authentic ethic of responsibility, and this may be coherently extended to all other forms of poverty, injustice and exclusion," he said.
In addition to laws offending life, the Church sees the potential for totalitarianism wherever natural law is rejected, such as in the case of homosexual unions.
While I'm glad that the Pope is talking about these issues, there's nothing really new here - we've all heard this before. Yet , for most of us, as we sit passively by on the sidelines, life continues to move on by us as we watch society march away from values and the lessons that faith and history has taught us, and toward those "grave and irreparable threats to the future of life itself" that our Pope is now talking about, as did the Pope before him.
Gradualy, as values are chipped away, so is life as we know it. And now, we are confounded by another evil even greater than secularism and modernism, the jihad of radical Islam.
In a way, we've all contributed to setting ourselves up for it, by allowing others of little or no faith and values, to move our culture ever closer to the rejection of natural law, away from the defense of life, and into a spiritual poverty.
Cross-posted: Hyscience
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