the jungle

In Protestant countries, despite the various interpretations of Christianity by different Protestant denominations, there remains a common denominator, Christianity itself. Institutional churches could vanish from those societies, and yet Christianity would remain alive and well because Christian religiosity is there a deeply personal experience.

Not so in Catholic countries. Christian religiosity is in these countries mostly an institutional experience, an experience that is inseparable from the institution itself and which applies to all or none: the Catholic Church is Christianity and there is no Christianity without the Catholic Church.

Thus, if under the banner of secularism or any other, we try to remove the Catholic Church from public life we are not merely removing the Church, we are actually removing from public society the very foundations of it - namely, Christianity. Make no mistake about it, what we will get as a result is not a secular society, but no society at all - that is, the jungle.