HOMILY DELIVERED AT A REQUIEM MASS FOR THE PONTIFICAL SOLDIERS WHO DIED ON THE 20TH OF SEPTEMBER, 1870, IN THE DEFENSE OF ROME By Fr. Ignacio Barreiro
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In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit
On this sad anniversary, we offer the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass on behalf of the souls of the Pontifical Soldiers who perished in the defense of Rome and Christian Europe and also for the souls of the enemy soldiers who died in that battle. Indeed it is a Christian virtue to pray for all the deceased, so in the same way as Blessed Pius IX ordered the faithful after the battle of Mentana to pray for the souls of their enemies who had died, we also do so today.
We cannot honor the memory of so many good men who gave up their lives in defense of the ideal of Christian society without at the same time upholding those same ideals. A basic sense of coherence leads us to proclaim a Christian view of society based on the Social Kingship of Christ. A society that rejects Christ will never find happiness because He is the only rock on which we can build society.
The twentieth century, in many respects one of the most horrible centuries in human history, came to an end with the apparent victory of liberalism. This ideology has apparently defeated other ideologies, which in a direct or indirect way also came down from the Enlightenment, such as totalitarian Marxism or an extreme form of nationalism that has broken its roots with the healthy traditions of the people. Liberalism has a view of man and society that is closed to the truth of God and man because it is agnostic toward transcendental values. Adherents of this ideology are mostly concerned with the promotion of mere instrumental values for the establishment of what they consider to be a more open society. Such a society in real terms brings about a self-destructive libertarianism, leading men to become slaves of their most base passions and at the same time making them dependent on those few who dominate consumer society for their own benefit. This libertarianism destroys marriage through divorce, grants legal protection to homosexual unions, and brings about collective suicide through abortion, euthanasia, and contraception. (God considers the sin of contraception so serious that He punished with death the first man in the Bible who is described as having committed it.)
We all know that behind a facade of civility, the liberals actively seek the destruction of the Catholic Faith and of the few remaining traditional values. On top of the direct and explicit aggression against traditional values, we are suffering the tragedy, as was recently underlined by the Holy Father John Paul II, that "European culture gives the impression of a silent apostasy by a man who, having too many material possessions, lives as if God did not exist." This silent apostasy has many causes: from a liberal and secularist propaganda that has been active for more than two centuries, to pastoral shortcomings within the Church, which has not been able or has not known how to transmit the faith, as Cardinal Ratzinger has recently enumerated.
Confronted by this tragic situation, we have to promote a society that is based on the values that come from the natural law and Christian revelation as it has been taught through the centuries by the Magisterium of the Church, a model of society that became real and life-giving under great Christian emperors and kings of the past. It is a type of society that even today, after several dark centuries, could be reestablished if the men of our time were to return to the only faith that saves. A Christian society maintains always the same substance and the same grounding principles, but at the same time it can admit of differences, taking into account the different particular traditions of the nations and the changing circumstances of time and place. It would be utopian to try to copy in a literal way the models of the past, but it is not utopian to do everything that we can to reestablish the same permanent grounding principles that previously gave us a society based upon the Social Kingship of Christ.
Now we are witnessing another step in the process of the destruction of the traditional values of Europe with the approval of the "Treaty Establishing a Constitution for Europe." Reading the preamble, it is easy to see how this document is a direct descendent of the revolutionary Enlightenment that has brought about so many tragedies in Europe as well as in countries all over the world.
From its very first paragraph, the preamble begins with a brash lie when it states that the inhabitants of Europe "have gradually developed the values underlying humanism: equality of person, freedom, respect for reason." First, we should state that values are never developed by men, but are gifts from God that man receives partially through natural revelation and fully through the knowledge that derives from supernatural revelation. So to say that man is a creator of values is a lie that in the end constitutes a blasphemy against God. Second, we should remember that it is not by accident that these ideas are regrettably all too similar to the counter values that can be found in the proclamations of the French Revolution. There is no doubt that all men are equal by essence, but it is also obvious to everyone that men are different between themselves in so many ways that to speak of equality without speaking about those great differences leads to a great injustice that damages the common good. Liberty for the drafters of this document means a total autonomy of man to do whatever he wants to do, which in the end leads to a lawless and antisocial lifestyle. Instead, liberty is for us the moral capacity that man possesses to choose the good. What do they mean when they speak about respect for reason? They speak of an autonomous and self-sufficient reason. To be truly rational, human thinking has to be grounded in reality and, in particular, grounded in the truth, which is God.
Without hiding their satisfaction, the drafters of this document state that "Europe intends to continue along the path of civilization, progress and prosperity." Then they provide us with a comprehensive list of all sorts of nice things that they are doing and conclude this list with the promise of "solidarity throughout the world". A person would have to be truly blindfolded to consider that this continent, which has given birth to the most horrible ideologies, which in their own turn have caused the most horrendous massacres in these last centuries, is moving along the path of civilization. (A partial listing of the horrors that have taken place across Europe in recent centuries would take us from the terror of the French Revolution, to the Soviet Gulag, to the martyrdom of thousands of Catholics in 1930's Spain.) These horrible crimes regrettably are not something from the past, but rather they continue in our own day as we now witness millions of human beings killed in the wombs of their mothers and thousands of old and sick persons that are murdered because contemporary society, which has "progressed" so much in its civilization, is too selfish to take care of them. They talk to us of progress, one of the Enlightenment myths, and instead we see regress and decadence all over. How can we talk of progress on a continent where the demographic winter has arrived with a yearly population decrease? At the same time that this happens, the identity of Europe is at risk by an illegal and uncontrolled immigration from non-Christian nations. How can they speak of prosperity when we find a high rate of unemployment and when so many workers earn miserable salaries with which they cannot support their families? How can we talk of solidarity throughout the world when the common agricultural policy of Europe, besides causing long-term damage to European farmers and making them dependent on a band of bureaucrats, seriously damages the economy of so many poor countries as may be seen in the recent conference of the WTO at Cancun? (This is said without in any way giving legitimacy to these international organizations that are not inspired by traditional Christian values.)
As one can see, this preamble is an accumulation of lies because the true unity of Europe will never be grounded in false ideologies, but only in the Eternal Truth, the same truth that comes from God and that for centuries has become incarnated and taken root on this continent. This is the faith that has been lived by the different Christian nations that have built Christian Europe with their sweat and blood. For that reason we have to be deeply aware that either Europe remains Christian or it is no longer going to be Europe. A Catholicism that came alive in the institutions of so many European nations, a totalitarian and Jacobin centralism is today trying to destroy. This attack on the spiritual, cultural, and historic identity of European nations has been constantly denounced by the Holy Father John Paul II. For these reasons we strongly object to a draft of the European Constitution which lacks all references to God and to the Christian roots of our continent.
We hope that Europe, the history of which cannot be separated from Christian civilization, will return to its roots in Christ. Union with Christ is the only reality that would bring about the unity of Europe.
To conclude our prayer, we seek the intercession of the Immaculate Virgin Mary and of Blessed Pius IX, asking their assistance first and foremost for the souls of the deceased Pontifical
Soldiers and of their enemies, and secondly, we also pray that we remain faithful in our battle for the establishment of the Social Kingship of Christ in a Christian Europe.
This homily was delivered by Father Ignacio Barreiro on September 20, 2003, at the Church of Corpus Domini in Rome. A native of Uruguay, Fr. Barreiro was ordained in the Archdiocese of New York in 1987 and is currently Director of the Rome Office of Human Life International.
