Ping!
“Otherwise,” he says—and did he enter a time-machine to inspect the United States in 2012?—“society would rise but little above the level of an aggregation of beings devoid of reason, and whose whole life would consist in the satisfaction of sensual instincts.”
He seems pretty prescient to me as well.
From the comments posted after the article, by ‘JERD’:
“Leo’s thesis is played out perfectly in the erosion of the marriage covenent in the United States since the mid 20th century. The law of the State built a society founded on no-fault divorce, contraception, and abortion, and now capped by same sex marriage.
Marriage has become more rare, divorce is common, and more children are born out of wedlock. As the number of intact families (mother, father, and children bonded together for life) declines, the morality imposed by law fills the void - tax payer funded abortions, mandatory contraception insurance coverage, and dependency on State benefits for impoverished abandoned mothers and their children.”
Not to mention that the state would actually work to achieve these things, as the more people dependant upon it the more power it has.
Pope Leo XIII warns about about this here:
Freegards, thanks for all the threads on FR