Thanks to technology and secularisation, the birth rate has plummeted in the West. But could that trend go into reverse? Yes, wrote the academic Eric Kaufmann in Metro. The populations of European countries will actually become less secular: “This is already largely the case in London due to religious immigration.”
As religious groups make up a larger proportion of the country, society will change. “This is already happening in Israel, where secular Jews are being overtaken by religious Jews. Jerusalem has flipped from secularism to conservative religiosity due to demographics, and the entire country will follow suit. America is likely to experience this in the 2100s.”
St Thérèse turned to poetry in a dark night
At Aleteia, Philip Kosloski told a story from the end of St Thérèse of Lisieux’s life. We know from her diary that in May 1897, while she was suffering from tuberculosis, God allowed her “to be plunged into a spiritual darkness”. She wrote that “the thought of heaven, which had consoled me from my earliest childhood, now became a subject of conflict and torture.”
This trial had gone on not for days or weeks, but “for months, and I still await deliverance. I wish I could express what I feel, but it is beyond me. One must have passed through this dark tunnel to understand its blackness.” She sometimes felt relief, but that only made the subsequent return of darkness even more desolating. Amid this agony, St Thérèse wrote a poem about St Joan of Arc in “a black dungeon”, awaiting execution. The poem meditates on St Joan’s resemblance to Christ, and says that Jesus has turned suffering into a “treasure”.
Eventually the dark night cleared, and St Thérèse died that same year, with the words, “My God, I love you!”
Praise for Vatican study on offshore finance
At Catholic World Report, Graham McAleer gave some qualified praise to a recent Vatican document which discusses offshore finance. McAleer quoted a study of the subject which called offshore “a tactic of wealth managers, ‘exploiting the conflicts and gaps between the laws of individual countries’.” Not all offshore islands are actually islands: Switzerland, for instance, is offshore because it permits “legal fictions” such as trusts, foundations and corporations “that prevent governments, creditors, and even family members from looking into the holdings of ultra-high net-worth individuals”.
McAleer found the Vatican’s document, Oeconomicae et pecuniariae quaestiones, a “vital intervention” if sometimes too sweeping. “It advances the novel argument that offshore is a tool cementing an emerging oligarchy” – which was true. “Emerging is what one financier calls insti-viduals: founders of family fortunes so large that the families are becoming institutions, their capital able to rival banks, their reach able to shape media and the messaging of political parties.”
These insti-viduals were effectively profiting at the expense of the common good, and helping push the interests of workers to the margins.
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