Reading the papers today, we see the growing crash of the Western world. . . . I am totally infuriated, not so much by the Left as by the huge bankruptcy of the “Right” that generated this crash, this dead end, with a complete absence of any dream, any ideal. Stifling boredom of capitalism, of consumerism, the moral baseness of the world that they created. What comes as a “replacement” is even worse. The guilty ones are those who, having power and opportunity, have led the world into that dead end.
Freedom? Capitalism is reducing it to the freedom of profit. The essential sin of democracy is its bond with capitalism. Capitalism needs the freedom guaranteed by democracy, but that freedom is there and then betrayed and distorted by capitalists. The vicious circle of the Western world is democracy without morality–at least so it seems to me.
The choice is frightening: a terrible “Right” or an even more terrible “Left”–they both have the same disdain for man and for life. There does not seem to be any third choice, which obviously should be the Christian one. But Christians themselves are divided into right and left, without any other idea.
– Fr. Alexander Schmemann, Journals pg. 49 (October 7, 1974)
These words, penned by a great man of the Eastern Orthodox Church, appear to hold no sway with the folks at Ancient Faith Radio who, regrettably, have given streaming space to so-called “Orthodox Christian Lectures” from this year’s Acton University. It brings me no comfort to report that “Actonism” is not a unique pathology infecting segments of the Catholic world; it has now made its way (ecclesiastically) east where it’s unlikely to meet the stern resistance it deserves.
