Bishop Williamson- Country Advantages

Country Advantages

Cities and suburbs do do harm to man,
But pray to Almighty God he always can.

Since no human being was ever created by God on this earth for any other reason than to go to Heaven (I Tim. II, 4), then the goodness of God is at work all the time, in one form or another, more or less strongly, to attract all souls towards Heaven. And if a man begins to respond to that attraction, he is bound to realize sooner or later that the mass of souls surrounding him today are either unaware of that attraction or are positively resisting it. And the more serious he may become about getting to Heaven himself, the more seriously he must wonder what are the factors in the world around him which make so many souls careless of Heaven, or at least of getting there.



Some of these factors may be immediately apparent to him, like the recent advance of unnatural vice and its triumph in the worldwide legalisation of same-sex “marriage.” Other factors he may need rather more time to appreciate because they are not so obviously opposed to virtue and because they soaked into the environment much longer ago, like living in cities or sub-cities, i.e., suburbs. Now only a fool would claim that every country-dweller is full of virtue while every city-dweller is full of vice. On the other hand country living is obviously closer to Nature than is city living, so that if Nature was created by God to be the indispensable carrier of that Supernature without which no soul can enter Heaven, then country-dwellers will, as such, be closer to God than city-dwellers, and a city-dweller wishing to get to Heaven must at least take stock of the fabric of his life in the city.
“Learn from your enemy,” said the Latins. Communism is one of the most terrible enemies ever of Catholicism, and two outstanding Communists are famous for their hatred of country-dwellers, or peasants. For Lenin (1870–1924), leader of the Russian Revolution in 1917, a major obstacle in the way of the godless Revolution wa s the old-fashioned peasant, rooted in the earth, profoundly aware of his nothingness as a creature surrounded by the mystery of Creation on which he depended, whereas the city-dweller living in an artificial and man-made world of factories, machines, and human robots, a world laden with various kinds of resentment (raging against the rain is an exercise in futility while “road rage” is growing all the time), was wholly apt for Revolution (here is why de Corte says modern politicians are constantly promising “change”).

For Antonio Gramsci (1860–1937), master of the Revolution’s key transition after Lenin and Stalin from “hard” Communism to “soft” Globalism, the peasantry represented likewise a redoubtable enemy which the Revolution had to overcome. With its “common sense” and its “natural order” the peasantry had been the foundation of a whole system of values that had to go. Religion, family, homeland, army, nature, culture, had to give way to a whole new way of thinking in accordance with a New World Order. To shift men away from their old mentality, their total culture was to be subverted no more by a violent assault upon their economics, but by a “march through the institutions,” all their institutions. The Revolution would remould their education, arts, entertainment, news, sports, etc., every feature of their culture in the broadest sense, to undermine the total way of life previously embodied in the peasantry. And Gramsci’s Revolution has so succeeded in overthrowing the old natural order that the farmers now working the land are so dependent on machines and the banksters that they are hardly peasants in the old sense any more.

But the Revolution today is such outright war on “everything that calls itself God” that there is no possible human way of reconstructing any peasantry to stand up to it. The best possible peasantry, merely as such, is not the solution. The problem is not merely cultural. The real problem is our apostasy from God. The real solution starts with prayer, which the seemingly almighty Revolution is nevertheless powerless to stop.
Kyrie eleison.