A Happy Suicide

Whenever I hear about a suicide, I always feel a bit of emptiness inside. I think it is because I briefly imagine the utter hopelessness that someone would feel when he makes a decision like that. There is a suicide, however, that does not make me feel empty, but joyful. Liberalism is currently committing suicide. It is killing itself; maybe not intentionally, but it is still happening nonetheless. Yes, it is true that the term "liberal" is somewhat overused, and is often applied to theological modernism as well as political degeneration in the same breath, but most know what I mean when I use the word.

The heart of liberalism is to abandon permanant truth and seek to break away from any restraints on belief. In liberalism, nothing can be heretical, except the denial of liberalism. Yet a system that is established on the rejection of truth will eventually reject itself, and that is what we are seeing with modern liberalism. Its adherents use words like "truth" and "lie" but they do not mean what we mean by those. They consider a truth to be that which they like, and a lie is that which they do not like. It has nothing to do with a universal unchanging truth. You cannot open the doors to everyone's opinion being right and expect to stand on stable ground.

The liberal ideal of freedom from any and all restraint (theological, moral, philosophical, legal, etc.) has led it down a road that is now destroying itself. The effort has reached its end and found itself empty and wanting. That is the point of suicide: unbearable emptiness. Liberalism is a self-defeating system because it does not know where to stop. It began with the Protestant Rebellion (which was the first "liberation" from the truth in the modern sense), and has led to all sorts of disaster; you know the list.

So let us rejoice at this suicide. It is not complete yet, but it very close. We are seeing it in our American political realm, where the "liberals" support a host of insane behaviors that would have gotten them either in jail or institutionalized just a few decades ago. We can see it in the Church as well, when we watch how empty Novus Ordo parishes are (numerically, and spiritually), and when we see vast numbers of the faithful seeking tradition and the historic unchanging faith. We must stand fast, and be ready for the void (and there will be one). Be faithful now, and we can be prepared to fill the gap when it comes. This is what God expects of us; let us fulfill our calling.