A sea change is occurring in the world today...

It would appear that under Pope Francis, the Church is acknowledging that popular opinion in western society has become so alienated by the legalistic efforts of conservative churches and political authority to uphold traditional morality, that Christians now urgently need a whole new framework to engage a culture that is steadily becoming more and more hostile to their values and worldview.

This is really a bad time to be a rigid traditionalist with old-fashioned notions of "God, honor, and country." In a sense, the world has simply passed them by - the world they speak of preserving and reviving has, in very important ways, already ceased to exist.

In its place, we have a global market economy where everything and everyone is basically commoditized into some monetary value, where even longstanding national borders are being rendered largely irrelevant by the demands of corporate profits, and where governmental and official institutions may claim to represent the will of the people as much as they want, but in practice must resort to playing catch-up with a tiny professional/managerial elite on the payrolls of multinational conglomerates.

We all uphold this system far more than our misgivings about it allow us to recognize.

What is really happening, under the radar screen of experts, is that western Christendom's materialist heresy - ultimately borne out of the Protestant Reformation, which in turn spawned the secular tsunami of the Enlightenment - is reaching its logical 500-year conclusion. It has flourished for this past half-millennium because that's how long it has taken to spread worldwide to a degree that allowed it to both conquer the western hemisphere and also fundamentally shake up the venerable Asiatic civilizations of the eastern hemisphere.

The nihilism that an essentially materialist worldview - even one that has so successfully cloaked itself with Christian belief for so long - simply cannot be averted. Modern Christendom has become a victim of its own success: by liberating the sphere of human material activity so dramatically, it has unleashed a beast that, despite its constant efforts to restrain it, progressively and inexorably becomes less and less manageable to any degree whatsoever, to the point where it devours the master who created it.