Benedict XVI Compares Our Times to the Fall of the Roman Empire

Benedict XVI Compares Our Times to the Fall of the Roman Empire is the focus of this video.

Every year, a few days before Christmas, Pope Benedict XVI would meet with members of the Curia for his traditional Christmas greetings, which gave the opportunity for him to give his views on the state of the Church and society in our world.

In his speech given on December 20, 2011 the Holy Father used strong words to describe the seriousness of the situation, and compared today's current state of affairs to that of the collapse of the Roman Empire.

Here are large excerpts from the Pope's address:

Excita, Domine, potentiam tuam, et veni. (Arouse, Lord, Your Power and Come.)

Today too, we have many reasons to associate ourselves with this Advent prayer of the Church.

For all its new hopes and possibilities, our world is at the same time troubled by the sense that moral consensus is collapsing, consensus without which juridical and political structures cannot function.

Consequently, the forces mobilized for the defence of such structures seem doomed to failure.

Excita (Arouse); the prayer recalls the cry addressed to the Lord who was sleeping in the disciples' storm-tossed boat as it was close to sinking.

When his powerful word had calmed the storm, he rebuked the disciples for their little faith.

He wanted to say: it was your faith that was sleeping.

He will say the same thing to us.

Our faith too is often asleep.

Let us ask him, then, to wake us from the sleep of a faith grown tired, and to restore to that faith the power to move mountains – that is, to order justly the affairs of the world.

The Book of Revelation includes among the great sins of Babylon – the symbol of the world's great irreligious cities – the fact that it trades with bodies and souls and treats them as commodities.

In this context, the problem of drugs also rears its head, and with increasing force extends its octopus tentacles around the entire world – an eloquent expression of the tyranny of mammon which perverts mankind.

No pleasure is ever enough, and the excess of deceiving intoxication becomes a violence that tears whole regions apart; and all this in the name of a fatal misunderstanding of freedom which actually undermines man's freedom and ultimately destroys it.

In order to resist these forces, we must turn our attention to their ideological foundations.

In the 1970s; It was maintained; that there is no such thing as evil.

Anything can be good or also bad, depending upon their purposes and circumstances.

Morality is replaced by a calculus of consequences, and in the process it ceases to exist.

The effects of such theories are evident today.

Against them, Pope John Paul II, in his 1993 Encyclical Letter Veritatis Splendor, indicated, with prophetic force in the great rational tradition of Christian ethics, the essential and permanent foundations of moral action.

Today, attention must be focused anew on this text as a path in the formation of conscience.

It is our responsibility to make these criteria audible and intelligible once more for people today as paths of true humanity, in the context of our paramount concern for mankind.

Alexis de Tocqueville, in his day, observed that democracy in America had become possible and had worked, because there existed a fundamental moral consensus which, transcending individual denominations, united everyone.

Only if there is such a consensus on the essentials can constitutions and law function.

This fundamental consensus derived from the Christian heritage is at risk wherever its place, the place of moral reasoning, is taken by the purely instrumental rationality of which I spoke earlier.

In reality, this makes reason blind to what is essential.

To resist this eclipse of reason and to preserve its capacity for seeing the essential, for seeing God and man, for seeing what is good and what is true, is the common interest that must unite all people of good will.

The very future of the world is at stake.

Benedict XVI

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[livingpurgatory]

Jesus, Mary, I love you save souls!
Reparation prayer saves a soul & repairs 1000 blasphemies
Our Lady of Fatima said many souls go to hell because there is no one to pray for them.
Impirmatur Cardinal Fossati, Turin, Italy. 1949

[Heart_on_Fire]

I have a graduate degree in National Security and Strategic Studies and very much in consensus that we are heading toward a fall of a superpower just like the time of the Roman Empire due to our moral decay. America was founded under God and now is slipping towards sins. It was protected in WWII to become a world power since it had a strong faith foundation. The world has now become more dangerous with competing powers like Russia and China and I am unsure if we will have the same protection from God as we did in the past. The number of abortions has been trending up not down in America and throughout the world. The blood of innocent children has reached Heaven just like the time of Abel and Cain crying out for justice. Blessed Mother said in Fatima, "the cup of iniquity is full- stop offending God for He has been so much offended."

[frankk.]

You said Benedict the fifteenth- he is the sixteenth

[livingpurgatory]

Christ promised Lusia Piccarreta protection from God's full wrath in areas where her book, "The Hours of the Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ, " are recited and save a soul with each word recited.
She's approved by the Church, endorsed by Padre Pio, up for beatification, and lived on the eucharist for almost 70 years. GOD bless!