Fratelli Tutti: "how various ideologies operate"

Wikipedia

The Holy Father's latest letter has hit the stands. The pundits are out, quills at the ready.

After a quick read, the following stood out, a convincing assessment of the shenanigans which evacuate brains, permit evil to fill the voids left behind, and which lead to alienation and despair.

The end of historical consciousness

13. As a result, there is a growing loss of the sense of history, which leads to even further breakup. A kind of “deconstructionism”, whereby human freedom claims to create everything starting from zero, is making headway in today’s culture. The one thing it leaves in its wake is the drive to limitless consumption and expressions of empty individualism. Concern about this led me to offer the young some advice. “If someone tells young people to ignore their history, to reject the experiences of their elders, to look down on the past and to look forward to a future that he himself holds out, doesn’t it then become easy to draw them along so that they only do what he tells them? He needs the young to be shallow, uprooted and distrustful, so that they can trust only in his promises and act according to his plans. That is how various ideologies operate: they destroy (or deconstruct) all differences so that they can reign unopposed. To do so, however, they need young people who have no use for history, who spurn the spiritual and human riches inherited from past generations, and are ignorant of everything that came before them”.[10]

14. These are the new forms of cultural colonization. Let us not forget that “peoples that abandon their tradition and, either from a craze to mimic others or to foment violence, or from unpardonable negligence or apathy, allow others to rob their very soul, end up losing not only their spiritual identity but also their moral consistency and, in the end, their intellectual, economic and political independence”.[11] One effective way to weaken historical consciousness, critical thinking, the struggle for justice and the processes of integration is to empty great words of their meaning or to manipulate them. Nowadays, what do certain words like democracy, freedom, justice or unity really mean? They have been bent and shaped to serve as tools for domination, as meaningless tags that can be used to justify any action.

[10] Post-Synodal Apostolic Exhortation Christus vivit (25 March 2019), 181.
[11] CARDINAL RAÚL SILVA HENRÍQUEZ, Homily at the Te Deum, Santiago de Chile (18 September 1974).

If there is a timely argument for the enduring worth of Tradition and the experiences of our wise elders, the Letter has provided it.