Country
Advantages
Cities and
suburbs do harm to man,
But pray to
Almighty God he always can.
Since no human being was ever created by God on this
earth for any other reason than to go to Heaven (I Tim. II, 4), then the
goodness of God is at work all the time, in one form or another, more or less
strongly, to attract all souls towards Heaven. And if a man begins to respond
to that attraction, he is bound to realize sooner or later that the mass of
souls surrounding him today are either unaware of that attraction or are
positively resisting it. And the more serious he may become about getting to
Heaven himself, the more seriously he must wonder what are the factors in the
world around him which make so many souls careless of Heaven, or at least of
getting there.
Some of these factors may be immediately apparent to
him, like the recent advance of unnatural vice and its triumph in the worldwide
legalization of same-sex “marriage.” Other factors he may need rather more time
to appreciate because they are not so obviously opposed to virtue and because
they soaked into the environment much longer ago, like living in cities or
sub-cities, i.e., suburbs. Now only a fool would claim that every
country-dweller is full of virtue while every city-dweller is full of vice. On
the other hand country living is obviously closer to Nature than is city
living, so that if Nature was created by God to be the indispensable carrier of
that Supernature without which no soul can enter Heaven, then country-dwellers
will, as such, be closer to God than city-dwellers, and a city-dweller wishing
to get to Heaven must at least take stock of the fabric of his life in the
city.
“Learn from your enemy,” said the Latins. Communism is
one of the most terrible enemies ever of Catholicism, and two outstanding
Communists are famous for their hatred of country-dwellers, or peasants. For
Lenin (1870–1924), leader of the Russian Revolution in 1917, a major obstacle
in the way of the godless Revolution was the old-fashioned peasant, rooted in
the earth, profoundly aware of his nothingness as a creature surrounded by the
mystery of Creation on which he depended, whereas the city-dweller living in an
artificial and man-made world of factories, machines, and human robots, a world
laden with various kinds of resentment (raging against the rain is an exercise
in futility while “road rage” is growing all the time), was wholly apt for
Revolution (here is why de Corte says modern politicians are constantly
promising “change”).
For Antonio Gramsci (1860–1937), master of the
Revolution’s key transition after Lenin and Stalin from “hard” Communism to
“soft” Globalism, the peasantry represented likewise a redoubtable enemy which
the Revolution had to overcome. With its “common sense” and its “natural order”
the peasantry had been the foundation of a whole system of values that had to
go. Religion, family, homeland, army, nature, culture, had to give way to a
whole new way of thinking in accordance with a New World Order. To shift men
away from their old mentality, their total culture was to be subverted no more
by a violent assault upon their economics, but by a “march through the
institutions,” all their institutions. The Revolution would remold their
education, arts, entertainment, news, sports, etc., every feature of their
culture in the broadest sense, to undermine the total way of life previously
embodied in the peasantry. And Gramsci’s Revolution has so succeeded in
overthrowing the old natural order that the farmers now working the land are so
dependent on machines and the banksters that they are hardly peasants in the
old sense any more.
But the Revolution today is such outright war on
“everything that calls itself God” that there is no possible human way of
reconstructing any peasantry to stand up to it. The best possible peasantry,
merely as such, is not the solution. The problem is not merely cultural.
The
real problem is our apostasy from God. The real solution starts with prayer,
which the seemingly almighty Revolution is nevertheless powerless to stop.
Kyrie eleison.
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