This puts me in mind of a recent piece Robert Royal wrote for
The Catholic Thing. Although the article is about Edith Stein, he begins with this:
“Every generation thinks it’s living in unusual times. Ours really is. We are witnessing the passing of our civilization and – like someone having brain surgery while wide-awake – are conscious of what’s happening. Or at least a few of us are.
We’re suffering – among other things – massive amnesia. Juvenile rebellion, too, by people of all ages, against what’s taken to be “our civilization.” But the greater problem, by far, is that for most people our basic traditions have just dropped below the horizon. They don’t see that anything else than what they’re familiar with ever existed.”
We are witnessing the death of a civilization. But nobody notices because they never noticed that it was ever there in the first place.
