There are many issues in the world that are heating up, but a few require prayer.
As always, I am getting my information from news medias, largely the BBC, but also from good websites like Seattle Catholic, who in turn get their information from a wide variety of sources, from Asian sites to Italian, to Australian and American.
The issues I see as ominous are: the strengthening social laws in Europe and the Philipines on religious life; the more frequent and more legal-like demands of militant homosexuals in Europe and the Middle East; and the oil/nuclear crisis blooming in Iran.
These seem like diverse problems, and they are: but they are all potentially conspiring to produce a very frightening situation for those with moral and religious standards.
In Europe, the abortion/liberal culture has resulted in a population unable morally to carry itself into the future. With the diminishing population of these formerly Catholic nations, has come a need for a work force, and filling this gap have been people from Africa and the Arabic and Middle East, most of them Muslim. Today, we see a two-cultured Europe, each part diametrically opposed. We see on the one hand, ghettos in many European cities filled with Muslim families, many of them having more children than their European counterparts; these young people grow up in hard economic conditions, and like the young black people in the ghettos of cities like New York and Los Angeles, they look for their identity in their ancestral roots and express them in a tribal/gang language. They are trying to survive; they see the injustice and the status quo around them in a Western society: and from this outside view, some of them do not get sucked into the materialism, but rather they see the corruption, the oppression, the immorality, the hypocrisy of words like "freedom" and "democracy" and "free market".
Many of them, in search of survival for their identity, misplaced as they are, look to their ancestors and the glory days of their former lands. When they look, they see Western troops occupying Iraq, placing pressure on Iran not to develop nuclear capability, and Israel building a Great Wall across Palestine with the silence of the West a deafening statement of cooperation.
Not all of what they see is reality; it is hard to ever see reality, because we are so dependent on images and news channels which have themselves a viewpoint, and a mandate to sell crisis. Often what is being filmed is, in reality, a tempest in a teapot. However, the damage is done when people's viewpoints are shaped by those images. The tempest then is let out of the pot and becomes a real storm. However, a lot of it is very real, and the real suffering no one often sees. Also, in such a 'small' world, we forget too often the very deep and old cultural differences and divisions: we do not all see the same thing alike, nor speak of it in the same way. Babel still holds sway, the one exception being within the family of Christ and His Church.
The young Muslims in Europe band together, much like the sixties generation over Vietnam; but their heritage and their religious narrative is much more lethal rather than immoral self-destruction. They strike out at the corruption in Western culture, but like vigilantes: thus was the killing of the filmaker Van Gogh (descendant of the painter) , who produced artistic pornography, porn with a message against religious and social fundamentalism, this just being one example of many incidents, not the least being the terrorism so prevalent. Now the governments are reacting: the banning of traditional religious Muslim wear. This, I believe, will be like putting kindling on an already burning fire. Also, there are incidents of Christian homeschoolers being threatened with losing their children in Germany, and nuns having to discard their headgear in the wake of the French "headscarf ban". Also, Catholics and Christians who are unwilling to take part in an abortion may have trouble getting through medical school or may lose their license to practice. In the Philipines, a vote is being taken on a population control policy that has been labelled "China-lite". And this in a country that is thought to be a majority of Catholics!
Meanwhile, in the Western nations, and in Israel, the homosexual lobby is gaining incredible strength- and as E. Michael Jones stated, the homosexual is the ideal secular/liberal citizen, fulfilling perfectly the twin demands of no children and materialism. Magistrates in Europe are threatened by legal suits and loss of jobs if they do not recognize the legal rights of homosexuals to marry eachother. I am not, here, condemning the soul of the person who calls himself homosexual, but rather the actions, personal, moral and legal, that are so damaging to him, to society, and are now beginning to be the prow of religious oppression.
Thus, there is a "clash of cultures"- or a clash of militant secular, individualistic pluralism with belief in God, belief in a moral and legal code that governs all people, belief in natural and theistic laws.
Now, put into this mix the nuclear crisis that is brewing in Iran, in an already volatile Middle East: and add a large handful of tension in the fact that most of the oil, oil that greases the economic machine of the world, comes from this area. I have also read that it is an over-looked fact that the oil in the earth is running out.
This brew sounds bad. The interesting thing to me is that all of these seemingly diverse and non-connected streams are now playing on eachother to create a new tune: I call it "Clamp-Down". I mean, it seems to me that the secular answer to this will be the few controlling the many, with the excuse that this will be the only way for people to survive.
The good news? God is in control. And as Our Lady of Pomain said, "My Son is moved by prayer." And to me, it seems that there will be a more black and white choice: for our Faith, or for the secular government- and to those with good will, it will become apparent that the only faith with any humanity, with any Godliness and charity and moral cohesion is the faith in Christ and His Church. The choice will be more clear than it has ever been, and this is a good thing.
As a friend said once, "It has never been easier to be a saint: all one has to do now is practice the Faith."
I finish with the thoughts of Yeats, in one of my personal favorites:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of "Spiritus Mundi"
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
-- William Butler Yeats, "The Second Coming"
