In our own time, not only in Australia but across the West, we see growing division, distrust, and distress among peoples. Outbreaks of violence in London and Belfast following the death of Henry Nowak in 2025 are only two visible signs of a wider cultural conflict.
Across the globe, many people are reacting to their leaders with outrage and disgust, and their reactions express a kind of powerlessness in the face of political crises in one area after another.
Yet politics is not the root of the disorder; it is one of its symptoms. The deeper crisis is spiritual: the loss of a shared vision of God, the human person, and the moral order. A sweep of history might assist us in uncovering the root of our current cultural and spiritual malaise.
Throughout the ebbs and flows of European culture, monasticism remained an essential guarantor of cultural continuity. More importantly, it preserved fundamental religious and moral values, kept alive humanity’s awareness of its ultimate destiny, and stood as a force prior to and higher than political authority.
In this sense, monasticism enabled repeated rebirths within Western civilisation. It was the guide holding the lantern in dark times. Another thing to remark is that at the high points of Western history, God and king were understood to be aligned.
The office of priest was found in the church, while the king took his role seriously as an office with holy duties. People obeyed the king in temporal matters and the priest in sacred matters. Public life was therefore shaped by a shared understanding that political authority was not absolute, but answerable to a higher moral order.
A decisive shift occurred after the French Revolution. The sacred foundation of history and of the state was rejected. History was no longer measured against belief in a pre-existent God who shaped it. The state came to be understood in purely secular terms, founded on reason and the will of citizens.
As a result, the state declared God to be a private affair. God no longer played a role in public life or in the formation of the popular will. Religion and faith were assigned to the realm of feeling rather than reason, and God and His will ceased to be considered relevant to public life.
When God dies in the hearts and minds of a people, something strange happens. In the West, there is now an eerie lack of will for the future. Children, who are the future, are increasingly seen as threats to self-realisation.
“A civilisation that treats its own continuation as a burden begins to live off what will eventually break it apart, because it no longer possesses vital energy of its own,” wrote Joseph Ratzinger in Western Culture: Today and Tomorrow.
The West is no longer progressing in the truest human sense. Seduced by the idea that progress is primarily material and technological, it has become blind to the deeper progress of peoples, which is not the evolution of matter but of spirit.
Having fallen away from religion, the West has turned toward the worship of technology. Because human beings are naturally religious, when they reject God, they inevitably fall into the worship of idols. The French Revolution’s confidence that reason alone could order society has not produced the promised liberation.
In the current age, religion is often treated as a relic of the past, while materialism is presented as the sure path to happiness. The aim of life and society becomes so-called progress, and to the god of progress almost anything may be sacrificed, even human lives.
The result is ‘’the drying up of souls and the destruction of moral conscience’’. (ibid). The loss of humanity’s certainties about God, the human person, and the universe – the answers to the primordial “why” that rises from every human heart – is at the base of the self-destruction we are now witnessing.
If the crisis is spiritual, the remedy must also be spiritual. The religious factor must therefore be reintroduced into public life, not as a nostalgic ornament, but as the foundation upon which a people can recover meaning, moral confidence, and hope for the future. Once the cause of the West’s crisis is recognised, the search for a cure can begin.
But that cure will not come from the masses. It will be from creative minorities and exceptional individuals. It is to them that we must look for the reintroduction of the religious element into society. The basic religious question to address then is this: what promotes human dignity and a life lived in conformity with it?
We must return to the non-negotiable idea that man is made in the image and likeness of God and to the recognition that, consequently, there are values no one may manipulate.
We must bring to a halt the destruction of the image of the human person. When Catholics remain silent in the face of current cultural lies, they deny people vital knowledge to which they have a right.
“The destiny of a society always depends on creative minorities. Believing Christians should understand themselves as one such creative minority and contribute to society’s recovery in service of all people” (ibid).
Ideas obvious to the Catholic mind – such as the origin of the person from the communion of man and woman, the dignity of suffering and its power as prayer for others, our eternal destiny, and the complementarity of faith and reason – must be expressed with clarity and courage.
The West will not be renewed by technology, sentiment, or political management. It will be renewed only if it recovers the truth about God and the human person, and if those who still see that truth are willing to speak and live it without apology.
The task before Catholics, then, is not to retreat from public life, nor to baptise the idols of the age, but to become once more a creative minority: clear in thought, courageous in speech, and faithful in witness. The future of the West depends on whether such witnesses are willing to hold the lantern again.
Kate Cleary is the founder of The Farm in Galong.
