December 2025
Salvation and Civilisation
— by Royal Invitation!
On his birth-day, Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, "the image of the invisible God" (Col. 1:15), came forth from His bridal chamber, Mary’s virginal womb, and the Father made a marriage feast for His Son by joining the Church to Him through the mystery of His Incarnation. "He has set his tent in the sun, and he is like a bridegroom coming forth from his bridal chamber." (cf. Ps. 19:5-6)
The rest is history: salvific/civilising for those who accept the wedding invite; dehumanising/decivilising for those who refuse it.
As related by Christ in the parable of the marriage feast (Matt. 22:1-4): "a king who made a marriage for his son" — who was also a king: O God, give your judgment to the king, and your righteousness to the king's son (Ps 71:1) "sent his servants to call them that were invited to the marriage: and they would not come." Saint Gregory the Great, Pope and Doctor of the Church, explains the parable with alacrity:
He sent once, and He sent again, because first He made the prophets, and later the apostles, preachers of the Lord's incarnation. (…) Through the prophets He said that His only Son's incarnation would come about, and He proclaimed through the apostles that it had.
“But they paid no heed and went off, one to his farm, another to his business.” To go to your farm is to involve yourself excessively in earthly toil; to go to your business is to long for the gain brought by our worldly activity. Neither of you take any notice of the mystery of the Lord's incarnation and are unwilling to live in accordance with it (…).
Bingo! The root cause of all the wicked symptoms that defile our faithless world. And that's the least of it. St. Gregory continues:
Some, and this is a more serious matter, not only decline the gift of the One calling them but even persecute those who accept it.
In this regard, little has changed since Bethlehem. Those who accept the invitation extended from the manger are still the most persecuted on earth: tortured and done to death in Africa, Asia and the Middle East (see last month's book review); elsewhere designated and despised as "domestic terrorists" worthy of brutal treatment by the sort of Christophobic zealots seeking to erase any reference to the Christianity that shaped France.
"On Wednesday, October 1st," reports French news outlet MPI, "the Higher Education Council (CSE) approved, by a vote of 44 to 7, an amendment proposed by the FSU-SNUipp union to rename school holidays with Christian connotations.
The measure proposed replacing terms such as "Christmas holidays," "All Saints' Day holidays," and "Easter holidays" with neutral terms: "winter holidays," "fall holidays," and "spring holidays," respectively. ... Fortunately, this identity deconstruction, associated with leftist or woke ideologies in the name of secularism [pushed] by Freemasonic circles who hate Christianity, was not accepted by the Ministry of National Education."
"But let us remain vigilant," MPI concludes, "because these people live only on hatred of Catholic France."
Sinister agenda
Erupting from the pit of Hell, such anti-Catholic malevolence now smothers every country.
The original targets of Marx, Engels and Lenin — viz., Christianity and the intact family unit embodied in the Nativity — remain the laser focus of their neo-Marxist heirs. These, like the Founding Fathers of their devilish cult, not only reject God's royal invitation to join Him at the wedding feast but spit on it. Witness, for instance, Canada's governmental contempt for God's manifest plan for creation.
In Montreal, three homosexual men adopted a 3-year-old girl through Quebec's child protection services. Not satisfied with that sodomitic abomination they are now seeking recognition as three legal parents. Voicing the full support of the Canadian courts, one judge argued that limiting filiation to two parents "sends the message to multi-parent families and to society in general that only so-called 'normal families' with a maximum of two parents, represent valid family structures worthy of legal recognition."
Inverted and perverted, this toxic false-empathy is also moving England in the same direction. As regards adoption and surrogacy, the Coalition for Family (C4M) reports that:
England’s latest official figures show that 2,980 children were adopted from care in 2023–24, with 20% placed with same-sex. Sector guidance explicity aims to “increase the number of LGBTQ+ adopters” through targeted recruitment and practice standards. Meanwhile, Law Commission proposals on surrogacy would create “a new pathway to legal parenthood” so intended parents become the legal parents from birth.
Outcomes for children cry out against this. The strongest results still show the gold standard is being raised by one’s married mum and dad.
And how! Objective studies always verify God's masterplan.
Typically, Professor D Paul Sullins, using large representative U.S. data, has reported that at age 28 those raised by same-sex parents were "at over twice the risk of depression… as persons raised by man-woman parents." C4M reports that "His broader work [also] points to higher risks for emotional and developmental problems compared with married, joint-biological parents." (Not to mention the disproportionately sky-high child abuse statistics for homosexual households, related in these pages down the years and correlating with the overwhelmingly homosexual nature of clerical sexual abuse within the Church.)
Meanwhile, despite strong provisions ensuring parental access to all contents of proposed courses, the Government's new school Relationships, Sex and Health Education (RSHE) guidance for England further embeds a sinister anti-family agenda that mocks the Nativity and therefore God Himself.
Published by the Department for Education on 15 July 2025, the updated statutory guidance will come into force on 1 September 2026. Schools are required to have regard to the guidance. Any departure from it must be justified. And guess what? "There is absolutely nothing about the benefits of marriage at all in the guidance," states paediatrician Dr Julie Maxwell. C4M adds:
The new guidance equalises same-sex relationships with man-woman marriage, which is at the core of its anti-marriage agenda. This asks children to ignore biological reality, serious lifestyle consequences and population-level outcomes. It is a fundamental category error.
Corrosive effects
Just how fundamental was underlined by Edward Davies of the Centre for Social Justice.
Writing in The Spectator he pointed out that the annual anguished debate about why working-class pupils fare so badly at school, which broke out once again after the 2025 GSCE results, points to a simple driver hiding in plain sight — family stability. "The more stable your home, the better you do."
He observes that "Just two in ten children in the poorest white quintile live with married parents compared to almost nine in ten of the wealthiest white quintile."
Tellingly, C4M notes that children from poorer non-white families, nearly six out of ten of whom live with married parents, do better in school than their white counterparts.
The corrosive family-breakown effects go on and on.
Davies notes the inevitable welfare, housing and crime costs, highlighting home ownership to illustrate the wider stability dividend. Citing the Institute for Fiscal Studies, he says, "there is no home ownership problem at all among married couples." IFS analysis bears out the broad point, with married couples almost 30% more likely to own their home than cohabiting couples, who in turn are ahead of lone parents.
And of course this is all played out against a background of rampant illegitimacy.
Since 2021 the majority of births in England and Wales have been outside of marriage. In 2022, 51.4% of live births were registered to women outside of marriage or civil partnership. "That," laments C4M, "is the social weather in which today’s pupils are growing up."
Thus, as ever, it transpires that the perennial classroom problem is largely a home problem of a degenerate, post-Christian society. What is missing in governmental considerations of chronic underachievement, insists C4M, "is the courage to name family stability and marriage as central to any serious solution."
Pillars of death and decivilisation
Unfortunately, in this arena Protestant organisations, and too many 'Catholic' ones, are not about to raise the universal use of contraception and abortion-on-demand as the mechanistic drivers of societal destabilisation and the death of Christian civilisaton. Yet any "serious solution" to home problems that trigger school problems, such as chronic illegitimacy, must confront that concrete fact. As must serious classroom attempts to address "serious lifestyle consequences," and "population-level outcomes."
To ignore a culture of death constructed upon the pagan pillars of contraception and abortion — intrinsically linked and the real "core" of the "anti-marriage agenda" — is, in C4M's own phraseology, "a fundamental category error."
However daunting the task, a return to God's plan by facing down, in Britain's case, sixty years of institutionalised 'family planning' and reversing all its sterilising methods and mechanisms, is the civilising sine qua non of marriage, family and the common good.
Most certainly, government policies like Japan's recent novel decision to approve a "morning after" emergency contraceptive pill being sold over the counter (without prescription, with no age limit or parental consent requirement), are antithetical to a selfless, loving, life-giving, sustainable civilisation.
Godly signs
Nevertheless, such endless horrors cannot obscure the disparate godly signs we readily observe at home and abroad: social, political and spiritual awakenings which we dare to hope are portents of a return to the familial and social blueprint made manifest in Bethlehem.
Poland for one provides some Christmas cheer.
Brought to its knees by the toxic twin fruits of rising Modernism — viz., contracepting 'liberal Catholics' and demographic implosion — the country has been forced to rethink. A recent summary report from MPI:
The Polish President has signed a law abolishing personal income tax for parents raising two or more children, with the aim of supporting and encouraging families and stimulating the economy. The new law abolishes income tax for families earning up to 140,000 zlotys (€32,973) per year. Thanks to this tax break, an average Polish family should be able to keep an extra 1,000 zlotys (€235) per month.
Polish President Karol Nawrocki presented the bill as a way to financially support families and encourage a sustainable birth rate in a country that, like most other European countries, is suffering from a demographic decline.
"We must find financial resources for Polish families," Nawrocki said during the bill's presentation. He emphasised that Poland was suffering from a birth rate crisis. Last year, the number of births in Poland reached a historic low. The Polish birth rate is one of the lowest in the world, set to be 1.1 in 2024, well below the replacement rate. Only eight countries have a lower birth rate than Poland's.
Public consultations on the law before its adoption revealed that the tax break is very popular among Poles. Some 76% of respondents said the law was "absolutely necessary," and only 16% strongly opposed it.
This radical pro-family legislation does not seem as short-term and superficial as so many past attempts by national governments to financially coax and cajole couples to have more children. Both necessity and sincerity seem to have motivated Polish legislators. Yet whatever cynical motives may underlie a positive policy or initiative, and no matter its chance of success, we know that he who is not against us is for us (Mk. 9:39); that it is all grist to the providential mill of Almighty God, Who has everything in hand. St. Gregory assures us that:
[T]he one who sees himself despised when he issues the invitations will not have the marriage feast of his son, the king, empty. He sends for others, because although God's word is in danger from some, it will find a place to come to rest.
Prayer, thanksgiving, perseverance
This confidence does not blind us to dangers we face on every side—within and without the Church.
The perverse Italian episcopal conference depicted herein typifies the hell we endure at the hands of diabolically-disoriented hierarchies.
While without, the 'progressive' neo-Marxist cabal remains unforgiving: hell-bent on smashing the foundations of civilisation — viz., the principles of natural and divine law embodied in the Nativity and enshrined in the teachings of our holy Faith.
Moreover, despite global pushback by godly patriots the cabal is not about to take its tyrannical foot off the pedal while still in the driver's seat and speeding towards its designated Digital D-Day of 2030. Through their slavish placemen high and low — who dictate policies, funding and media narratives, while engineering cataclysmic 'events' ever more brazenly, even unto World War III — the bankers and financial elites control the switching points of global power. Not least those pertaining to their migration-replacement project tearing nations asunder: fomenting civil wars.
So, yes, we are in dire straits on every front. The great consolation of the Incarnation, however, lies in His victorious avowal of our painful predicament.
"In the world you shall have distress," He confirmed. "But have confidence,” He demanded, “I have overcome the world."
For the Incarnation came not to obliterate pain but, rather, to fill it with His Presence; to conquer it through reparative suffering intimately united with all He endured from Crib to Cross, to open the gates of Heaven for each and every soul created in His image and likeness.
These include the benighted and benumbed souls acting out around us like drugged and brainwashed characters from Huxley's Brave New World.
Their lives — painful because empty — can only be renewed and filled with meaning by the Child.
We must pray without ceasing that God will once again raise up great missionary saints like Columbanus to convert and civilise them. For the godless fallout they embody continues to degrade erstwhile Christian societies in inverse proportion to their decision noted by St. Gregory: namely, to ignore "the mystery of the Lord's incarnation" and refuse "to live in accordance with it." A fatal choice, that is, to spurn the wedding feast that joins His Holy Church to His Holy Child: "the firstborn from the dead" through and unto Whom "all things have been created"; Who "is before all creatures... the head of the body, the Church"; in Whom "all things hold together." (Col. 1:15-18)
Insofar as the Father's magnanimous invitation is accepted, the diabolical downward spiral into chaos and madness will come to a screeching halt. A rapid heavenly ascent to a civilisation of love and life will immediately ensue as Catholic Truth and the Social Kingship of Christ prevail: so that not just all families but "all the families of nations that have been disunited by the wound of sin may become subject to His most sweet dominion" (Collect, Feast of Christ the King).
For our part, in these apocalyptic times, while thanking the Child anew for the grace by which we joyfully accept His Royal Invite, let us also determine to heed St. Gregory's sober warning: to preserve our wedding garment:
But you, my friends, since you have already come into the house of the marriage feast, our holy Church, as a result of God's generosity, be careful lest when the King enters he finds fault with some aspect of your heart's clothing.