Perhaps my most outrageous opinion on anything is this: The West will see mass conversions to Roman Catholicism within the next century.

I say this having traveled to the farthest depths of secular nihilism myself — and having been jilted by the its false promise. The world of pure rationality posited by the "secular fundamentalist" is a dead world in which life's universal drive to live — and to live beautifully — is silenced, buried, and disposed of.

Once a man finds himself standing naked, his faith in modern trivialities shaken and lost, he cannot help but draw near to the cathedral and to Christ in the flesh.

Men cannot live in such a world for long. Eventually, human beings observe the ugliness produced by this manner of thinking, living, and believing — and they experience their "moment."

They pull back, they get canceled, they become disgusted and disillusioned with the very beliefs they once so fervently shouted in the streets. Such a man knows by what he has observed that the fall of man could well be true — and if he has any wits about him, he recognizes that every soul on earth needs guidance to contend with his own fallen nature.

Where better to find such guidance than from an institution that has weathered every storm of the tumultuous history of the West — a contiguous lineage of wisdom that has never been broken since the time of Christ? Its authority was not invented or improvised; it was not created on the fly by false prophets at such and such a date — it was born by the word of the Lord, and it lives.

And what is the antidote to man's wayward nature but selfless love of the other? Was this not, in many cases, the original impetus that brought many human beings to crave "social justice"? Was the secular vision of this thing complete? Was it effective?

It was not — and one finds quickly that it is only by laying down one's life for one's friends that one unlocks the beauty of human life and delves into a flavor of divinity denied by the secular, rational world and its rabid faith.

In short, the astute begin to register that Christ's life and holy sacrifice must represent the ideal vision of human life — that his way has survived as doggedly as it has for a very good reason. Once a man finds himself standing naked, his faith in modern trivialities shaken and lost, he cannot help but draw near to the cathedral and to Christ in the flesh. He cannot help but crave to bear witness to the miracle of the Holy Eucharist — and, in time, to accept the Lord into his own body as completely as a man could.

I do not believe that I am especially biased in making this assessment. I simply think that if history is any metric, solid, lasting, contiguous lineages of faith and wisdom rise from the ashes of false systems as those systems meet their merciful deaths. Spurious cults and sects are flashes in the pan; feverish attempts at rational mastery of life fall flat — and ceaseless hedonism deadens the heart.

When it is all over, the Church is there, and she will receive all who come. You may not believe that what I am writing here is true; you may imagine that it could never be true, but I have an unshakable faith that it will be proven true in due time. Perhaps there is nothing else in my life that I am as sure about.