Fostering positive change through education – how to recivilise the West

When we look around the modern world today we see a crisis in every dimension of our lives. A social crisis, in the widespread adoption of vice presented as virtue, a political crisis, which polarises our people according to their respective ideologies, and even a crisis in the Church which intensifies the confusion and disorder that has been normalised in every area of their education.

If we look at what is commonly taught to our children we can see why the foundations of their understanding of the world and their place and purpose in life is profoundly disordered. In school, in society, in advertising, news, entertainment, and sadly also in many purportedly Christian teachers we see the promotion and celebration of the political idols of Liberalism presented as the basis of wisdom and virtue.

Happily, the Church in its traditional teachings has provided us with the answer, and that is to furnish our children and ourselves with the sound foundations of a correctly ordered education.

When we stand on firm moral and philosophical foundations, the lives we build will not dissolve in the shifting sands of the tastes and crazes of the time. They will be rooted in the reality and being created by the Eternal Father, which brings us to the title of an encyclical written on this very subject.

As we shall see, Aeterni Patris is a blueprint for the rescue of our people, our politics, our society and our civilisation from the revolutionary madness which has tried - and failed - to permanently capture all our institutions.

Why am I talking to you about an obscure document written by a long dead Pope, and published in 1879?

This was the first of nine encyclicals of the Catholic Social Teaching of Leo XIII. If you read them, you will find in them an explanation of the omnicrisis we inhabit today - and perhaps more importantly - how to restore our civilisation.

These luminous masterpieces of practical and spiritual wisdom were published and introduced by Etienne Gilson in a book called “The Church Speaks to the Modern World”.

I have written a series on each of these encyclicals here, on my SubStack, which shows how each of them addresses the many dimensions of the state of emergency we inhabit today - and how to fix it.

Gilson’s introduction to the doctrine of the Catholic Social Teaching explains why an education in Christian philosophy is the first step towards rescuing our civilisation from its enemies.

Pope Leo XIII said in Aeterni Patris - “On the Restoration of Christian Philosophy” that to restore this basis to our education is to correct the “fundamental error” of the denial of the existence of God. This, he explains in later encyclicals, inspires the misguided philosophies of the Marxists, the Socialists, the worshippers of money alone and all other forms of nihilism.

Today, this nihilism has replaced the value of human life with price, as in the horrendous industry of surrogacy - which is the hire of women to produce babies for sale, and whose reliance on IVF results in around three times the number of unborn lives destroyed in America every year than those terminated by abortion.

Most of us do not even know this is taking place. This too is a mark of the beastly education we receive today, which subtracts from us the knowledge of the evil which has been normalised around us.

To restore our civilisation then, according to Leo XIII, is to use Christian education to detransition our peoples from the attachment to and belief in the false idols of Liberalism. In its political and economic beliefs it limits the value and meaning of life to the products and policies it produces for us to consume. This in turn sees human life itself reduced to a consumer transaction - as shown in the grave moral evil of surrogacy, for example.

We can and must provide the best of beliefs to our children so that they may enjoy a future of human flourishing, rather than one of universal degradation presented as progress. It is our duty to save our Christian civilisation from a death cult which not only confuses good with evil, but teaches that every moral wrong is a sort of human right.

This can only be done by restoring the teaching of the changeless nature of being and reality found in the metaphysics of Aquinas, Augustine and Aristotle.

The profound social and moral disorder we inhabit today is largely the product of the idolatry of Man absent Christ. The false god of equality, condemned as a dangerous delusion, includes the erroneous belief that all men are equal of changing their nature and being by means of sheer desire and belief alone.

This is the reason we see occult beliefs enter the mainstream today, with the most obvious example being that a man can wish himself into being a woman by saying so. His desire, mobilised with an erotic element in this case, is sufficient to the believer to assert a change in his basic nature.

The transgender cult is an occult belief backed and promoted by an industry, whose power includes that of attaching legal, social and career penalties to anyone who dares to blaspheme against this element of the Liberal State Religion.

This cult, as we all know, has been remarkably effective in transfiguring the self image of many children and young people. It is promoted as a cult of rights, promising liberation by means of histrionic desire and the securing of political and professional advantage by means of demanding recognition as the Peak Victim.

Trans-sanity is not restricted to transgenderism. Today we are told that anyone from anywhere in the world may come to England and identify as an Englishman. This is the same trans-sane make belief as that which asserts a man becomes a woman by saying so, by documentation, by the political power behind sheer make-belief. This is destructive to sanity, to the understanding of nature and reality, and makes a criminal offence of the natural and wise respect for the limits and conditions of God’s creation. It is therefore an evil which corrupts us from the inside out, man, woman and child alike.

It was the warning of Pope Leo XIII in 1879 that false philosophies have crept into every area of the State.

The normalisation of trans-sanity shows the essential need to detransition our children - and our people - from the worship of false gods which is now so deeply embedded in our public education that it is no longer even recognised as a political religion.

Bluntly, what is bad for us all is taught as Good, and vice versa.

Sadly today, the worship of vice as virtue is seen as the mark of the educated and enlightened. The result is the promotion of the politics of national suicide as the only respectable position for our people to hold in public. Penalties are attached to sane and reasonable opposition to the cult beliefs in open borders, the criminal industry of mass migration, the social revolutionaries of the rainbow flag and the depopulationist, deindustrialising Green Agenda.

These are all antinatalist and ultimately anti-life totems of the State Religion of Liberalism. Taken together, they represent a manifesto for the destruction of the meaning, order, and value of our lives. The result of a century of liberal miseducation is that neither we nor our children are capable of recognising evil as anything other than a strong dislike.

The effect of evil is to destroy, and the product of our education in school and in society is to promote the virtue of a politics of universal destruction. The political beliefs of Liberalism are revered as a secular religion in every aspect of the education of our people, in school and at work, at leisure, providing a social algorithm shaping the meaning of our lives according to the guidelines of a godless community standards. Correctly understood, this serves the purpose of a globalising counter-Christian philosophy, which seeks to standardise the world by levelling us all down to mere components in a vast, international machinery of population management.

If we are to save our children from this counter-sane cult, and if we are to restore our civilisation from the revolution which tried and failed to replace it with itself, we must begin with the basic recognition of the God given foundation of our lives, our world, and their purpose.

This is the meaning of providing a rightful education, for without it our entire civilisation will vanish under an avalanche of lies. This is the reason I talk to you of Aeterni Patris - “The Eternal Father” - for it is the education which begins and ends with Him which will restore our civilisation, and will help us to replace the politics of evil with the Common Good.