flight from reality

When a democratic, Catholic society reaches the point I have described below where maledicency has become incrustrated in its intitutions, specially its system of justice so that justice itself becomes an instrument of personal and political persecution, one important consequence follows. And that is that facts do not count anymore. What counts is words, that is, fantasy.

A Catholic, democratic society under institutional crisis is a society which tends to lose contact with reality, where the prevailing ideas, opinions and judgements bear no relationship with the facts of reality. People become aloof, disconnected from reality, as if they are living in a totally different world. This flight from reality only makes matters worse and it affects both the general population and elected politicians.

I consider it quite significant that our prime-minister said recently that he does not care for numbers when confronted with the fact that a couple of days ago more than two-hundred thousand people marched in Lisbon in protest against prevailing living conditions, and virtually each day now new protests are erupting everywhere in the country.