Many years ago I remember my father telling me a joke. It was quite funny then but not so funny these days. If I remember, the joke went something like this: A man arrives at the American Embassy in London requesting permission to immigrate to the United States. The man at the Embassy asks him why he wants to leave England. Well, says the man, I was a little concerned when homosexual practice was legalized because it legitimized sodomy as an acceptable practice. Now we are being told that homosexuality is equal to heterosexuality. I’d like to get out of here before they make it compulsory!

It might not have been the funniest joke even in those relatively innocent days, but any humour attached to it has long since been dissipated by the fact that it is becoming not so much a joke as a prophecy.

The joke came to mind when a good friend of mine in England wrote to tell me that things are so bad in my native land that he fully expects, within the next few years, that Catholic bishops will be sent to prison if they refuse to allow homosexuals to “marry” in Catholic churches in their dioceses. Things are not that bad in the United States, at present, though the Obama administration is obviously hell-bent on getting the US to where Europe is on this issue.

The bad news is that a period of persecution might be approaching for Catholics in those parts of the world that have succumbed to secular fundamentalism and the decadence that follows in its wake. The good news is that such decadence is unsustainable and will herald its own self-destruction. The population implosion, which is the inevitable consequence of the culture of death, will bring social and economic collapse. The culture of death is killing itself.

The immediate future might belong to the denizens of death but the longer term future belongs to children and those who have them. The future belongs to those parts of the world who refuse to follow the lemmings of the death-culture to the suicidal abyss.

Chesterton once said that when the whole world is marching to the abyss the poor will be following behind in the rear. One has to hope and expect that the poor countries in the rear will witness those rich countries in the vanguard of modernity plunge to their deaths over an abyss of their own devising and will change direction before it is too late. As the old adage reminds us, pride precedeth a fall and “gay” pride precedeth a fall from a peculiarly great height. In contrast, as Christ reminds us, it is the meek who shall inherit the earth.