Today’s unprecedented global prosperity coincides with a new paganism, one more subtle and pervasive than the worship of Baal or Jupiter. Many Christians still receive the sacraments, yet their faith remains empty because they lack catechesis. They approach the Eucharist or Confirmation as empty rituals rather than encounters with the living God. Others receive some formation but without apologetics; they cannot defend the Faith when challenged. They absorb the spirit of the age and quietly embrace heretical ideas such as relativism, gender ideology, or the reduction of Christianity to mere social justice— because they have never been taught why the Church’s teachings are true and necessary. The result is a generation of sacramentalized pagans who say they are “Christian” but live as if Christ never walked this earth nor rose from the dead.
In every age of material abundance, humanity has shown a disturbing pattern: the more prosperous societies become, the more they drift toward paganism. This is not coincidence, but a spiritual law rooted in human nature. When comfort replaces dependence on God, the soul grows restless and fills the void with idols such as wealth, pleasure, power, and self. The Catholic Church, founded by Jesus Christ Himself, has always diagnosed this disease and offered the only lasting cure: the sacraments, sound catechesis, and the intellectual armor of apologetics.
History testifies that this drift always ends in suffering. Whenever paganism rises, the world as a whole pays the price. Ancient Rome reached the height of its wealth and power only to descend into moral chaos: sexual license, infanticide, and the devaluation of human life. The same pattern repeated in the Enlightenment’s aftermath and in every secular experiment since. When sin is embraced as “normal,” society does not improve; it disintegrates. The signs today are unmistakable. Rampant sexual deviations and abuses now define public life. What was once hidden in shame is celebrated in parades and taught in classrooms. Mothers, once the guardians of life, increasingly view the child within them not as a precious gift but as an obstacle. Like the women of ancient times who turned to the altars of Molech, modern women are encouraged to have their babies ripped apart before birth in brutal procedures. This is not healthcare; it is child sacrifice dressed in medical language. Children are further sacrificed in the name of “progress”— through chemical alteration of their bodies, through pornography that grooms them for exploitation, and through a culture that treats them as commodities rather than souls entrusted to parents.
Without God, as St. Thomas Aquinas taught, human passions run unchecked. The intellect, meant to govern the lower appetites, becomes their servant instead. Violence and hatred rule daily life: mass shootings, domestic abuse, ideological rage on every side, and the quiet cruelty of a society that discards the inconvenient. Parents, who should be honored as priceless gems of wisdom, are instead euthanized or pressured into “assisted suicide” when they become burdensome. The elderly are no longer treasures but costs to be managed. Every one of these evils flows from the same source: the rejection of the God who made man in His image.
We are not merely repeating the sins of Sodom and Gomorrah or the violence of Noah’s generation— we are surpassing them. Sodom’s sin was localized; ours is global and technologically amplified. Noah’s world was destroyed by water; ours risks self-destruction through moral and demographic collapse. Birth rates have plummeted below replacement in every prosperous nation that has embraced this new paganism. Families dissolve. Loneliness epidemics rage. Mental illness soars. The very prosperity that was supposed to liberate us has instead enslaved us to our basest instincts.
The Catholic saints understood this dynamic perfectly. Whether they lived in prosperous or collapsing societies, they remained free because they clung to Christ. St. Augustine, once a man of the world, abandoned pagan philosophy for the truth of the Church. St. Thomas Aquinas himself synthesized faith and reason so thoroughly that no heresy could withstand scrutiny. Countless martyrs faced pagan emperors and chose death rather than compromise. They did not negotiate with the spirit of the age; they converted it. The Church they handed down— begun by Jesus, sustained by the Holy Spirit, and guarded by the saints— possesses everything necessary to reverse our decline: the sacraments that actually confer grace, catechesis that forms the mind and heart, and apologetics that equips believers to withstand error.
The remedy is neither complicated nor optional. We must repent. We must turn back to God now, before the judgment that history warns will inevitably fall. We must know Him through prayer and study, love Him above every idol, and obey only Him. We must embrace the full truth of Jesus Christ and His Catholic Church without dilution or apology. This means protecting the unborn with every legal and cultural means available, and honoring the elderly as living icons of wisdom rather than disposing of them. It means rejecting every lie that normalizes sin— whether sexual, ideological, or medical— and living instead according to the natural and divine law written on the human heart and revealed in Scripture and Tradition.
Prosperity itself is not evil, because all gifts come from God and God gives good gifts. But when prosperity becomes an idol, it always produces paganism. The only power strong enough to break that cycle is the one that has already conquered death: Jesus and the Faith He imparted to us, lived in its fullness. The saints showed us how to live faithfully in every time and culture, and each of them followed Jesus, who is the Way. The Church preserves that fullness through the presence of the Holy Spirit and the promise of Christ that not even the gates of Hell will prevail. The time to return is now— before the suffering that paganism always brings becomes irreversible.
