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	Pope Benedict Looks to the Fall of the Roman Empire to Scare People By Bridgette P. LaVictoire Lez Get Real December 25, 2010 http://lezgetreal.com/2010/12/pope-benedict-looks-to-the-fall-of-the-roman-empire-to-scare-people/ The Roman Empire was a decadent, corrupt, heartless, metropolitan civilization bent on conquering all that was within their ever expanding visage in order to try and bring their so-called civilization to the world. Then it collapsed. It collapsed because lo and behold, there was this new doomsday cult that gained acceptance throughout the Empire which said that the world’s Savior was coming soon and it was alright if everything went to wrack and ruin. After all, if you believed, then your reward was in Heaven and not on Earth. Romans had little sense of community, nor any caring for the poor. Their Senate was the most corrupt that money could buy, and they enjoyed slavery, gladiator fights, and subjugating anyone in their path. The conquered cultures for whom warfare was about honor and not land. It is to this civilization that Pope Benedict decided to turn to describe the peril that he sees in the future of the world. He actually said in his Christmas speech that “the future of the world is at stake.” He described the most innately morally corrupt civilization’s fall as: “The disintegration of the key principles of law and the fundamental moral attitudes underpinning them burst open the dams which until that time had protected peaceful coexistence among peoples. The sun was setting over an entire world. Frequent natural disasters further increased this sense of insecurity. There was no power in sight that could put a stop to this decline.” Anyone familiar with Rome knows that the supposed peace between diverse peoples was a sham, and that citizens born of Romans were seen as being superior to the offspring of barbarians. Furthermore, while Rome was more than willing to absorb all comer’s religions, they were not doing so in order to try and be diverse, but to absorb these people and turn them into Romans. Among the people that the Romans persecuted the most were the Celts, and Druidic religions were, according to Julius Caesar, little more than people “worshiping trees and sacrificing people to them.” The notion that the Celts would take hundreds of criminals and burn them to death in a great big wicker man was something that Caesar came up with on his own and has never been bourne out by any other records. Of course, Benedict continued to compare the fall of the Roman Empire, something brought about by the rise of the Christian faith, as this “For all its new hopes and possibilities, our world is at the same time troubled by the sense that moral consensus is collapsing, consensus without which juridical and political structures cannot function. Consequently, the forces mobilized for the defense of such structures seem doomed to failure.” In truth, when a society favors their wealthiest and strongest above their weakest and poorest, then they are doomed to die, as did the Romans. When a society hides the beauty of two people in love both sexually and emotionally, then they are doomed to die. As far back as Empress Julia, the wife of Caesar Augustus, a Celtic Queen (who may have been a monarch in her own right and power) proclaimed that while the Celts “made love to their best in the light”, that is without shame, the Romans “were debauched by their worst in the dark.” The pontiff did decide to address the child sex abuse scandal. While child sexual abuse has only just been recognized within the last two decades as being a problem within the Roman Catholic Church, it has been documented as having occurred for well over a thousand years, except in the areas where the Celtic Catholic Church took root. There, priests were allowed to get married, including to same-sex partners as evidenced by St. Brigid of Kildare and her wife Darlughdacha. He called this crisis one of “the great tribulations ot which we have been exposed during the past year.” He also said that this past eyar was the “Year of the Priests” and went on to say: “We were all the more dismayed, then, when in this year of all years and to a degree we could not have imagined, we came to know of abuse of minors committed by priests who twist the sacrament into its antithesis and, under the mantle of the sacred, profoundly wound human persons in their childhood, damaging them for a whole lifetime.” While Benedict tried to put the blame for these abuses on the disintegration of society, the reality is that people no longer want their children to be sexually abused and no longer implicitly trust their priests. Until the Roman Catholic Church actually addresses the reality that this has been a systemic problem since the early days of the Church, it is not going to change. Still, he said that we cannot “remain silent regarding the context of these times in which these events have come to light.” In other words, let us go back to the days when the parish priest was sacrosanct and above reproach and no one dared say a word about them raping a child. Rome was notorious for its prostitution, and the pontiff wanted to also discuss the issues of child pornography, sex trafficking, and drug abuse by saying “No pleasure is ever enough, and the excess of deceiving intoxication becomes a violence that tears whole regions apart – and all this in the name of a fatal misunderstanding of freedom which actually undermines man’s freedom and ultimately destroys it.” Benedict tried to put the evils of these on the ideas of moral relativism and the warping of the conscience: In order to resist these forces, we must turn our attention to their ideological foundations. In the 1970s, paedophilia was theorized as something fully in conformity with man and even with children. This, however, was part of a fundamental perversion of the concept of ethos. It was maintained – even within the realm of Catholic theology – that there is no such thing as evil in itself or good in itself. There is only a “better than” and a “worse than.” Nothing is good or bad in itself. Everything depends on the circumstances and on the end in view. Anything can be good or also bad, depending upon purposes and circumstances. Morality is replaced by a calculus of consequences, and in the process it ceases to exist. The effects of such theories are evident today. In truth, the notion of a boy being used as a sexual toy by his elder was common among the Greeks, and preserved by the Roman Catholic Church for many centuries. Typically, Greek elders who took on students had sexual relations with those students. Some formed deep bonds that lasted long beyond the point where the student was now a teacher in their own right. The practice was not uncommon in Rome either, though many Romans also had eunuchs to satisfy their sexual desires. Basically, this does not come down to any moral relativism. It comes down to the decision of some like Benedict to sweep the problem under the rug and hope for the best. He also wants political leaders to “put a stop to Christianophobia” while also saying that “healing can only come from deep faith in God’s reconciling love.” Which means- adopt OUR brand of Christianity and be healed, or go with some other faith and be damned. He feels that only through his versions of the truth which are “derived from the Christian heritage” can “a consensus of the essentials” regarding “constitutions and law function” be reached, and that is currently at risk because the Christian morality is being ignored. He then concluded that “To resist this eclipse of reason and to preserve its capacity for seeing the essential, for seeing God and man, for seeing what is good and what is true, is the common interest that must unite all people of good will. The very future of the world is at stake.” Never mind that Christianity is anti-reason, and has been against reason since the beginning of the Renaissance. That it is still fighting reason and rationality in order to try and force the world into a belief system which is irrational, unreasoning, and morally, environmentally, and humanly destructive.
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