How can this be? Hardly a dead end!

"Atheism represents a supreme threat to humanity." Bishop Robert Barron says some super-powerful things in this video. He does it in his inimitable style, at once reassuring and frank. Please, take a look and a listen!

With each passing day, my schooling on Switzerland teaches me new lessons and gets more intense. A repeating or repeated message which it seems is important for people here from very different walks of life to share with me might be so expressed: "The so-called 'culture of death' is much more pervasive here than one would like to believe." 

Granted, I knew before I came that representatives of a notorious assisted suicide group have unlimited access to nursing care facilities where a priest might not be admitted to visit an elderly parishioner or the mother or father of someone in his parish. They tell me now that Italians tired of life cross the border into Switzerland to have themselves killed. I could go on. All of a sudden that third category in society in terms of religious profession: "Catholic", "Protestant", "No religious affiliation" or simply "None", becomes frightfully ominous in terms of its consequences, not just for individuals, but for the sake of the life of the world.

Between Halloween and threats of a staged exorcism in St. Louis, much has again been said about the diabolical, about Satan, who ultimately tempts people to deny God in favor of the illusion that their own preferences may reap them other than the whirlwind. Godlessness is a terrifying, death-dealing resignation to darkness, which destroys one and all who get in the path of that person. Good people are dumbfounded by the lack of response at all the horrible revelations of late concerning Planned Parenthood, and a whole series of people, some paying lip-service to religion and even to Catholicism, continue to insist on infanticide, whether inside or outside the womb, no long even denying the dark and far from infect free hell of the abortoria, which are as back alley as you can imagine. "Atheism represents a supreme threat to humanity."

I don't suppose we can get "Nones" to fear hell, to dread eternal damnation; they live it now without God. Still, maybe we should try, because dreading the loss of heaven and the pains of hell is the anti-chamber to hope and the embrace of Christ's unbounded love.

How can so much sadness resist in the shadows of such a beautiful land? Why resist the Good News which saves and allows us to enter into the company of the saints, here and now, one day, sooner than we think, in glory for all eternity? The unbaptized and unconverted whom I have known or observed in my life are either dumbed down to despair or frazzled nerves on the verge of crashing and burning. The unenviable and terrible "periphery" of our world is a clogged, dark and murky mainstream, which kicks against the goad.

We owe this world our frankness and our joy. Saints of God, come to our aid and theirs! Please, God, that no more souls be lost to everlasting death!

Arranging my books on the shelf the other day, I saw a good sized biography of St. Niklaus von Flüe in French there. Maybe somebody else's gift left behind will help me gift others and touch hearts here at the top of the world, as the great hermit did born now almost 600 years ago.

Un silence qui fonde la Suisse.