Dead Silence or Blind Eye

+ Cardinal George Pell, Archbishop of Sydney
30 Aug 2009

Most youngsters have heard of Hitler and his infamous programme of extermination against the Jews, although many are uncertain whether he started the First or Second World War!

What is unusual is that almost no Australian youngster knows about Stalin, unless his background is Polish or East European.

Stalin, the Russian Communist dictator, was responsible for at least as many deaths as Hitler.  Unlike Hitler, he had many of his inner circle executed.  But it is still interesting that he does not rank in the public imagination with Hitler as a moral monster.

This forms one part of a coherent pattern because for all the seventy plus years of the Communist empire in Europe (which was sustained by violence, lies, religious persecution and hundreds of concentration camps), progressive and elite opinion refused to face the facts and ignored or denied monstrous evils.  Anti-Communists were often abused, ridiculed.  Some claimed that our Western world was as bad as the Communists.  The will to disbelieve flourished. 

American writer Mary Eberstadt has recently pointed out that today we are in the midst of another revolution, also driven by bad ideas, which is damaging our societies and which the same progressive opinion refuses to acknowledge.

Many regard the sexual revolution as unambiguous evidence of progress and liberation, because non-marital sex has been legitimized so that sexual activity is one example of hygienic recreation.

Today's intellectuals are denying the costs of the sexual revolution, rejecting the abundant evidence that the fruits are worst for women and children, whether they be fetuses destroyed by abortion or adolescent victims.

Rock music and rap take their themes from the chaos; broken families and homes, their mothers' abusive boyfriends, sexual predators.

Who today makes any connection between the liberation sexual promiscuity promised on the one hand and the steady rise of sexually transmitted diseases (and consequent infertility) or the difficulties women have in finding a loyal steady boyfriend or a good husband?

Young men are the champions of sexual freedom, because the virus for them is slower to act.  They often seem short-term winners but divorced men have much higher rates of depression and alcoholism, while the children of the divorced generally are not as happy, law-abiding or successful as the children of intact families.  Why are so many young men suiciding?

Disbelief in the evidence is always dysfunctional, always causes damage, whether a person is irreligious or religious.  Young people need truth.