Olivier Roy, the social philosopher, has returned to the earlier theme, explored in his Holy Ignorance: When Religion and Culture Part Ways (2010). In Is Europe Christian? he offers little comfort to those who hope for the revival of Christian Europe. “Dechristianisation never takes a step backward”, he asserts.

If Dante read Roy’s book, he would surely suggest that the scandals surrounding the Banco Ambrosiano, in which Archbishop Marcinkus, abetted by John Paul II, were involved in Mafia-style skulduggery on a murderous scale (witness the corpse of Roberto Calvi, found hanging under Blackfriar’s Bridge in London in June 1982) were of greater significance than the fact that some Catholics practise birth control.

Apart from the murder, usury itself is a mortal sin in which Marcinkus revelled, eluding arrest for murder and fraud because the saintly pontiff refused to allow his extradition from the Vatican.

Usury is persistently forbidden by scripture, as by the tradition of the Church. The ways in which the Church as an institution, and Christian Europe, as a whole, came to terms with this, have varied, and there has no doubt been much hypocrisy over 2,000 years. Papal encyclicals, however, until our own times, have been consistently anti-usury. That is, anti- not merely the way that banks operate, but anti- the entire economic system on which the Western world, since the invention of modern capitalism in the City of London in 1694, is founded.

Paradoxically, today, it is the Muslims, on the whole, who keep alive what used to be Christian values in Europe—family virtue, and dread of usury.

The Almighty has created this world as a trial and test for man; every person has therefore been made to depend on others for his living. No one in this world can live independently as regards his needs and requirements. A person of the highest rank turns to the most ordinary to fulfill them. In other words, every single person has an important role to play, without which this world cannot continue.

This role depends upon his abilities, intelligence and inclinations as well as upon his means and resources, which vary from person to person. In fact, it is because of this variation that a society comes into being. Consequently, laborers and workers, artisans and craftsmen, tillers and peasants are as indispensable as scholars and thinkers, savants and sages, leaders and rulers. Every individual is an integral component of the society and contributes to its formation according to his abilities.

By creating various classes of people, the Almighty is testing whether the big and the small, the high and the low create a society based on co-operation and respect or create disorder in the world by disregarding the role each person has been ordained to play.

Labels: Natural law = Sharia law, Natural law = Soviet law, Sorosia

¶ 12:59 AM