One of the questions I have asked God is, “Why does it always take so long to build something up while it only seems to take moment to tear it down or destroy it?”
Destruction is always so much easier than construction. Decades, centuries, even a millennium of building a culture (e.g., Christendom) seems to have vanished overnight.
All I get from God is, “Never mind, just keep working.” It would seem that God finds value in the work, not just in the results. Even so, my question (my frustration, actually) remains. However, I will do what He asks and keep on teaching, building, and working.
The following commercial speaks humorously to my concern. Months of mathematical analysis is destroyed in a moment by a tuned-out man who does not recognize the beauty or value of what he erases.
Father, I wonder about the exact same thing (the deterioration of former Catholic culture in the USA and around the world), which appears to be disintegrating at an ever-increasing rate. The Bible verse about “unless those days were shortened, no flesh could be saved” pops into my mind each time. I believe God in His mercy is advancing the rate of deterioration, so that a new culture (the triumph of the Immaculate Heart of Mary) may grow up to replace it.
If the collegial consecration of Russia, Ukraine, and the rest of the world to the IHM on 03/25/2022 does not fulfill the original request in made back in 1929, then I do not know what possibly could. The graces are now available; however, it is up to each individual soul to accept these graces and to work diligently to correspond to them. Do you see that happening? I for one do not. Therefore, if after a certain “grace period” sufficient people do not repent, convert and amend their lives, and if the believing Christians do not do penance for their own sins and the sins of the entire world, then we (collectively, so to speak) would be forcing the hand of God to undertake to do the job for us. And those days will be dire days of destruction, indeed.
I don’t agree with the premise, I think instead, we don’t recognize the presence of God and how He can make all things new, and rather quickly.
I can think of two examples in my own life where a humbling before God allowed Him to work through myself and others in ways that radically transformed our understanding of “best practices” and resulted in rapid landscape changes that achieved “impossible” results beyond imagination.
It would take up too much space to recount those here, but in both cases the catalyst seemed to be a collective agreement to aim to do God’s will first.
We only get upset and focus on the apparent destruction because of our pride, which lies to us and beckons us to declare “that is not how things ought to be!” – and that preoccupation might as well be a blindfold because it prevents us from seeing the glorious nature of God all around us.
I guess my answer to that is because the Church/Christendom/culture are all living things. They must be continually built or they immediately cease to exist. They only stand for as long as we are building them. In one generation of not building any of those things (and probably other things as well), they come completely unbuilt. They are not static like the Parthenon or a roadway (and even those need to be maintained at regular intervals). The institutions you mention are living and also therefore at every moment dying as well. The trick is that we have to build and maintain them faster than they are able to die, but obviously our present generations are distracted by far to many things and so they die.
I like both comments: if we live a full earthly lifetime, it is in the nature of things for us to grow and develop little by little, whereas we are never more than about 4 minutes from death and dissolution (but each breath resets the clock)! On the other hand, we know that in the twinkling of an eye, we shall be raised from death! Alleluia!