From the Church Militant to the Church Pusillanimous

When I was 15 and heard Malcolm Muggeridge speak at a Festival of Light event in Adelaide, my adolescent perception that the Christian Establishment  had given up the ghost — that it no longer defended with any conviction its most ancient and sacred beliefs — was endorsed by a wry Cambridge-educated man of the world. His voice and visage seemed to convey in their sadness all that accompanied such knowledge.

Muggeridge would tell anyone who listened that the Church in the West had not been overrun or overthrown from without. Rather, its end loomed because it had opened the gates and invited its enemies into the very heart of the citadel. The world had triumphed by destroying the Church’s will to defend its traditions, sacraments and beliefs. I thought of this often during last year’s homosexual “marriage” campaign and again just the other day, on December 9, when the amendments to the Marriage Act turned one year old.

The rationalising of passivity in the face of the…