Whoever studies the course of Western history cannot avoid one fundamental, bewildering fact: the Catholic Church stands in a permanent state of siege. From the bloody arenas of the Roman Empire, through the guillotines of the French Revolution and the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century, to the refined psychological warfare of the modern secular society — the Church is the unbroken target of mockery, marginalization, infiltration, and persecution.

To the superficial observer, this might appear merely the consequence of the failures, scandals, and sins of her members. And although the human failure within the institution is undeniably real and at times appalling, this comes nowhere near to explaining the systematic, almost metaphysical hatred that has fallen upon the Church through the centuries.

The real reason lies far deeper. The Catholic Church is the only remaining indivisible institution in the world, with more than a billion members, that lays claim to an objective, absolute Truth. A Truth that, by definition, transcends the state, the market, and the delusions of any given political moment. And precisely this makes the Church the ultimate obstacle to every form of worldly lust for power.

When Christ stands before Pontius Pilate — the ultimate representative of the worldly power of that moment — He says: “For this I was born, and for this I have come into the world, to bear witness to the truth.” (John 18:37). Pilate responds with the cynical, postmodern question avant la lettre: “What is truth?” For the world, truth is a consensus, a political compromise, or an instrument of power. For the Church, the Truth is a Person. An institution that holds fast to this divine, unchanging Truth is the absolute nightmare of rulers who wish to mold society according to their own will. Because they cannot move this rock, they have spent two thousand years trying to blow it up.

The Blueprint for Destruction: The French Revolution

The Big Bang of the modern struggle against the Church took place at the end of the eighteenth century. The French Revolution (1789) is celebrated in our secular history textbooks as the birth of liberty and equality. But for the Church, it ushered in an era of grisly persecution and a systematic attempt at total extermination.

The revolutionaries understood very well that their new secular utopia — built on the omnipotence of Reason and the abstract ‘Will of the People’ — could never take root so long as the Catholic faith governed the souls of the French. Liberty, for the Jacobins, meant freedom from God. Equality meant the destruction of every divine hierarchy.

In 1790, the revolutionary government imposed the Constitution civile du clergé (the Civil Constitution of the Clergy). Its aim was brilliant in its malice: the state did not seek to destroy the Church immediately, but to nationalize her. Dioceses were redrawn; bishops and priests were demoted to civil servants who had to be elected by ordinary citizens (including non-Catholics). Crucially, every clergyman was required to swear an oath of absolute loyalty to the French State. Every bond with the Pope in Rome was, in effect, criminalized.

Here we see the classical reflex of the totalitarian state: if you cannot tolerate a transcendent authority, you must subordinate it to the state apparatus. Priests who refused to take the oath (the prêtres réfractaires) were persecuted, deported, and murdered in great numbers. The Revolution degenerated into an anti-Christian bloodbath. In the Vendée, a deeply Catholic region that refused to surrender its priests and its king, the state carried out the first modern genocide. Hundreds of thousands of Catholic peasants, women, and children were slaughtered en masse to make way for the reign of ‘Reason.’

Churches were desecrated. Crucifixes were replaced by busts of revolutionaries, and on the high altar of Notre-Dame in Paris an actress was placed upon a throne to embody the ‘Goddess of Reason.’ It was the absolute triumph of secular absurdity. But the state learned a hard lesson: the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church. They could burn down the monasteries and behead the Carmelites, but the Truth could not be laid beneath the guillotine. Napoleon Bonaparte eventually understood that he could not govern the people without religious pacification, which led to the Concordat of 1801. The Church survived.

The Miscalculation of the Iron Chancellor: Bismarck and the Kulturkampf

Nearly a century later, the theatre of conflict shifted east. In 1871, Otto von Bismarck forged the modern, unified German Empire. Bismarck, a convinced Prussian Protestant and a formidable statesman, aspired to a homogeneous, strong, and centralized state. In his vision, every German citizen had to be loyal first and foremost to the Emperor and the Fatherland.

But Bismarck encountered a ‘problem’: roughly a third of the new German state was Catholic. To Bismarck, they constituted a Reichsfeinde (an enemy within). Why? Because they were members of an immense, transnational institution whose head sat in Rome. Especially after the First Vatican Council (1870), which had defined papal infallibility in matters of faith and morals, Bismarck was convinced that Catholics were governed by a “foreign power.”

Bismarck launched the Kulturkampf (the Culture Struggle). Through the draconian May Laws he sought to strangle the Church. The state took complete control of the seminaries; clergymen could only be ordained after passing state examinations. Religious orders such as the Jesuits were expelled from the country. Bishops who resisted were fined, dismissed, or imprisoned. Within a few years a significant share of the German bishops sat in prison or in exile, and thousands of parishes stood empty.

Like the French revolutionaries, Bismarck thought he could bring the divine institution to its knees with the might of law and the apparatus of the state. But he had made a colossal miscalculation: he understood nothing of the spiritual resilience of the Church. Instead of breaking her, Bismarck’s repression forged the German Catholics into an unbreakable, heroic bloc. Priests secretly celebrated Mass in forests and barns. The laity organized themselves into the formidable Zentrumspartei, which won more seats with every election.

By the late 1870s, the ‘Iron Chancellor’ had to concede defeat. He had attacked an enemy that fought with the unshakable conviction that there is a Truth which outlives empires. The Kulturkampf was abandoned. Once again it was proven: frontal persecution strengthens the Church.

The Strategy of Today: Divide et Impera

The secular structures of power have learned from these historical blunders. The guillotines of Robespierre and the law-codes of Bismarck failed to destroy the Church; they only purified her. That is why in the twenty-first century the attack has taken on a fundamentally different and far more sinister form. Because the worldly powers know that they cannot destroy the institution from without, they attempt to derange her from within. The new strategy is as old as humanity itself: Divide et impera (Divide and conquer).

If the Catholic Church is the only bloc capable of uniting a billion people under one objective morality, then the most effective way to break this geopolitical and spiritual power is to sow theological doubt and to facilitate fraternal strife. A house divided against itself, after all, falls of its own accord.

The Creation of Culture-Camps and Hyperreality

How does this work in practice? We see today the successful creation of theological “culture-camps” within the Church. Aided by the algorithms of the modern mass media and social platforms, the internal dynamic of the Church has been transformed into a mirror image of polarized secular politics.

An online ecosystem has been engineered in which everything is magnified, ripped from its context, and weaponized. Philosophers call this Hyperreality. On platforms like YouTube or Twitter (X) it appears as if the Church consists exclusively of two extremes: either she is a band of modernists who deny the Faith in pink carnival Masses and worship indigenous statues, or she is a hotbed of rigid schismatics who clothe themselves exclusively in Latin and despise the Pope.

But anyone who on Sunday morning sits in the pews of an ordinary parish in the Netherlands, in Belgium, or anywhere else in the world sees a completely different reality. There you see a diverse group of believers — young and old, of every background — who simply gather for the Eucharist, pray for their sick, and try to follow Christ.

The Financial Engine Behind the Polarization

This division, this online “circus,” does not arise in a vacuum. Anyone who thinks that the loudest voices in the traditionalist or progressive camp (the influencers, the podcasters, the self-appointed inquisitors) are acting purely from pious conviction is not looking deep enough. There is a method, and there is a business model.

We live in an era in which outrage is an industry. Figures who weekly produce videos proclaiming that Rome has fallen, that the Pope is a heretic, or that the Mass is invalid generate millions of views. Behind these noisy prophets of doom — including certain well-known American commentators — lies a gigantic financial engine. The audience funds them through donations, book sales, and advertising, but conservative (often American-oriented) ‘dark money’ foundations, political networks, and think tanks also pour money into this theological civil war.

Why? Because Christ is an obstacle to both amoral, runaway hyper-capitalism and to secular state-absolutism. The Church defends life, the family, the dignity of the worker, and the care of creation. This independent moral voice is a hindrance to political ideologies on both the extreme left and the extreme right. By hijacking the traditionalist or progressive identity of Catholics, the Church is neutralized. The Faith is reshaped into a ballot. As long as Catholics tear each other apart over secondary matters, rituals, or the latest papal pronouncement, the Church is rendered impotent on the world stage.

The Instrumentalization of Abuse

Beyond this, secular power makes a chillingly clever use of the internal sins of the Church. The scandal of sexual abuse by clergy is a wound in the Body of Christ. We must not, however, gloss over the hypocrisy of the world.

Secular society — in which abuse within families, sports clubs, and public schools is a daily reality — often refuses to look critically at its own systems. Yet the sins of the Church are disproportionately and permanently instrumentalized. The suffering of victims is deployed by the media as a political weapon: a club with which to silence the Church on every other matter. “How dare the Church still speak about truth, abortion, marriage, or morality after what she has done?” runs the secular verdict. This is the ultimate divide et impera: to break the trust between shepherd and flock, so that the secular state can claim the moral monopoly for itself.

The Spiritual Catastrophe: The Altered Gaze

The most tragic consequence of all this, however, is not political but spiritual. The orchestrated struggle alters the gaze of the believer.

When you are continually deluged with scandals, theological quarrels, and theories about the imminent end of the Church, you fall psychologically into a chronic fight-or-flight response. In such a survival mode, man is spiritually incapable of contemplation. He who must survive cannot adore.

If at Holy Mass you no longer look at the mystery upon the altar, but, full of theological irritation, scrutinize the homily of the pastor, the clothing of your fellow parishioner, or the absence of Latin, then you have been successfully distracted. The focus is no longer vertical, directed toward God, but horizontal, directed toward judging your neighbor.

This is, quite literally, of the devil. The Greek word diabolos means “the one who throws apart” or “the divider” (in contrast to symbolon, which means to bring together). The Enemy no longer needs to set the churches on fire, as in the French Revolution. He no longer needs to outlaw the liturgy, as under Bismarck. It is more than enough if he can ensure that during the Mass we stare at one another with mistrust and hostility, instead of losing ourselves in the love of Christ. So long as we are kept busy with meaningless conflicts — “keeping everyone busy” — there is no progress toward the Truth.

Conclusion: Return to the Anvil

Why is the Church always under fire? Because she is the bearer of the One Thing Necessary. Christ was clear on this: “If the world hates you, know that it has hated me before it hated you.” (John 15:18). The hostility against us comes not merely through our failures, but through the Light we carry into a world in love with the darkness.

How, as Catholics in the twenty-first century, are we to arm ourselves against this? The answer is radical and cuts straight through every modern culture-camp.

First, we must refuse any longer to be extras in this orchestrated theatre of division. Step out of the trenches of the internet. Disconnect from the influencers who profit financially or politically from your spiritual panic. The true Church is not found in the comment sections of YouTube, but in the silence of adoration, in the confessional, and in the service of the poor in your own town.

Second, we must return to the hardest, most provocative command of the Gospel: “Love your enemies.” Even — or perhaps especially — when that “enemy” sits in your own parish. Do not let your peace be stolen. Irritation toward your brother or sister is a warning sign that your gaze has turned away from the Cross.

The Church is an anvil on which many hammers have already been worn down, as the theologian Théodore de Bèze once aptly put it. Napoleon’s empire has fallen. The mighty Prussia of Bismarck is no more. So too the postmodern algorithms, the cancel culture, and the secular dictatorship of relativism shall scatter on the wind of eternity.

So long as the world attacks the Church — whether with the hammer of the state or with the subtle poison of internal polarization — it proves only one thing: the Church is still relevant.

She possesses the Truth.

Our task is not to save the institution in panic, but to let ourselves be saved by the Truth, to remain standing In Veritatem, and joyfully to let the waves of time break upon the immovable rock of Peter.

---

Postscript on the painting: L’Angélus (1857–1859) by Jean-François Millet

Whoever reads and finds value in this article would do well to let his gaze rest upon the world-famous painting L’Angélus (1857–1859) by Jean-François Millet, which accompanies this piece. The canvas shows two simple peasants in a field who, at the end of a long day’s work, lay down their tools. In the soft evening twilight they bow their heads to pray the Angelus. Far on the horizon, almost swallowed by the approaching night, a church tower is just barely visible — the silent, immovable connection between the toiling earth and heaven.

This understated masterpiece captures the absolute essence of the conclusion. While totalitarian powers strive after absolute control of the human soul, and while the modern internet today, with its shrill voices, ceaselessly tries to force us into a state of theological panic and division, Millet shows us the true Christian resistance.

What we see here is the ultimate rebellion of the ordinary Catholic: the resolute refusal to take part in the madness. On this field there is no politics. There is not a trace of theological culture-war, no sensational faction-forming, no glowing screen screaming for attention and outrage.

What remains is the silent, imperturbable reality of prayer and the duty of the day. It is the believer who, amid the delusions of the day, tears his or her gaze from the horizontal and turns peacefully toward the divine. Let us, in an age of deafening noise and orchestrated quarrel, have the courage to follow this example. Withdraw from the arena of indignation, bow the head before the Mystery, and return to the humble, essential Christian life. There — and nowhere else — is the Truth preserved.