by Robert Royal.

Looking at the way that the human race manages its affairs is enough - if such were possible - to make angels weep. Or laugh. For most of its existence, the Church at least offered something of a counterexample, starting with surviving for 2,000 years, which isn't likely to be the case for any current nation, international body, NGO, LGBT regime, or Silicon Valley empire. Longevity may not be proof of much, but it is proof of life, despite radical historical changes.

What kind of life does the Church now enjoy? A question worth probing, because both the Church and the world are now in no little peril.

The terminally tiresome debates over Vatican II now tend to obscure a crucial development. We're often reminded that the Council "opened up" the Church - for good or for ill - to "the world." But is that world the same as today's?

The world then (1962-1965) was undergoing rapid post-WWII change itself, moving away from nationalism, which was partly responsible for the war, and towards progressive internationalism. The U.N. was formed as the war ended, and the first stirrings of what would lead to the European Union were also underway.

Jacques Maritain, the most influential Catholic philosopher of the first half of the twentieth century helped shape the U.N. Three Catholics were prominent in the emergence of the EU: Robert Schuman of France (the first president of the European Parliament); Konrad Adenauer of Germany; and Alcide di Gasperi of Italy. Pope Francis has declared Schuman "Venerable." De Gasperi's cause, too, is proceeding.

These were all admirable men, serious Catholics in their day. It's a sad commentary on human history to see what their good intentions, after the horrors of a world war, have come to.

At the UN, various ne'er-do-wells form the large majority of the General Assembly - and seek to exploit it. Western nations often now use it as an instrument for imposing a woke agenda. Does anyone think the United Nations could help with anything like the Russian attack on Ukraine, or the carnage in Gaza?

The EU's founding documents invoke Catholic principles like subsidiarity, the proper autonomy of individual nations within a general inter-national union. But if duly elected governments in Hungary or Slovakia resist EU policies on, say, LGBT indoctrination, or an even larger group - Italy, the Netherlands, and others - oppose the EU stance on illegal immigration, they're threatened with the withholding of funds and slandered as undemocratic.

Nevertheless, a kind of "populism" is rising, from the UK to Czechia and beyond, somewhat similar to the MAGA phenomenon in America. Large percentages of populist voters - dismissed as "extreme right" of course - have emerged in France, Germany, Austria, etc. In Romania, the EU invalidated a democratic election because the "wrong" candidate won - a nationalist whose party wants to negotiate with Russia.

Even NATO, created "to keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down," is undergoing necessary readjustments. America, with $37 trillion in national debt, will no longer carry the defense burden for Europe, which has had a free ride since WWII. NATO will not disappear, as some Europeans fear. Mr. Putin has seen to that. But Europe is going to have to re-arm, and its leaders are figuring out how - at what cost.

And what does the Church have to say about all this? It's hardly an exaggeration to say that Rome and several of our bishops in the United States have little appreciation of the moment we're in. The world they're open to seems largely the 1960s and 1970s.

For example, Francis has advised using a percentage of military budgets to eliminate hunger and promote sustainable development worldwide. A neo-Pax in terris vision. Laudable goals, if other threats, pressing contemporary ones - e.g., Russia, Iran, China - were absent.

He has also deplored the rise of "populists" whom he's characterized as proposing simple solutions to complex problems. ...