|
Critical
Catholic
Commentary
in the Twilight
of Reason
When Catholics
are not Catholic
“Teach
this to your children”
“Train up a child in the way he should
go:
and when he is old, he will not depart
from it.”
(Prov. 22.6)
It has become
increasingly “correct” not only to ignore the past, but to repudiate
it — even expunge it (except, of course, when
the past provides fodder for grievances that may have once existed,
were redressed, and are no longer authentic — in this sense it is the
sine qua non of the intolerable liberal/progressive mindset —
which is intolerant of any tolerance of intolerance …). What had informed
us as a nation articulated in moral terms inseparable from its Christian
origins has not simply become banal but abhorrent. “This is not the
America we knew", we may say in any nostalgic discourse on the present
state of this country. It is a different America that has become the
symbolic and ultimately hollow statuary of an increasingly secular and
“liberal” — even Leftist America.
This especially pertains to the role of religion in the public polity
… if it is allowed at all in public discourse — and increasingly it
is not; and not just religion in general (as we find, say, in China
and North Korea), but specific religions: Christian religions in general
and Catholicism in particular. Islam — because it is feared by our politicians
and policy-makers — is largely exempt and accrues to itself a special
protected status much like the “protected-class” of homosexual citizens
— against whom alone incivility is actionable, falling under the protection
of special “civil-rights” not accorded other citizens.
That the official Catholic Church (as distinct from self-adulating liberal
bishops, priests, Religious, and nominal Catholics) is the primary obstacle
to many of the pernicious policies of this present administration is
unmistakable. The Catholic Church is the sole moral impediment to the
perversities (social, moral, and
political) that are legislated against the American people. There are
brave and uncompromising bishops and Catholics … but relatively speaking
they are few.
52%
It is significant that up
to 52 % of Catholics voted for Biden — the same percentage of
Catholics who voted for Barack Obama — and endorsed the platform
of the Democratic Party in the last two presidential elections. This
platform endorsed abortion, wide-spread contraception, the propagation
of the homosexual (LGBT) agenda, the HHS Mandate that violates the most
fundamental principle of the rights of conscience, radical feminism,
judicial activism and legislation, embryo destructive research, human
cloning, and rescinded (refused to enforce) the Defense of Marriage
Act (DOMA) describing it as unconstitutional (in their opinion — I will
restate that: in their opinion) … to name a few.
Are
Faith and Politics Separable?
In so many words, half of all Catholics turned their back on their Faith
in favor of popular social sentiment. Perhaps this is too broad a statement:
let us say, rather, that those who identified themselves as Catholics
did so — irrespective of their misinformed and deeply dissident understanding
of their own Catholic Faith. That is to say, many of those who identify
themselves as Catholic (those in accord with the authentic teachings
of the Catholic Church) … really are not. This statement will infuriate
these “Catholics” who bitterly (and illogically) contend that their
Faith and their politics are separable; that the authority of the Church
and the teachings of Jesus Christ do not extend to the political polls
or, for that matter, to their own sexual lives; that there are civic
and personal boundaries beyond which neither Christ nor His Church may
trespass, and beyond which they possess no competent authority.
Just as there is a separation
of Church and State in America, there is a separation of Faith and politics
—and most fundamentally (and most illogically) a separation between
Faith and the very articles and dogmas specific to it and which themselves
inform it as a specific, a unique, religion distinct from any other.
These “Catholics” are, we may say, “partly-Catholic” — they “agree with
some, or few, but not all” of the Church’s magisterial teachings.
They are Catholic in much the way that
the new capitalist entrepreneurs in communist China are Communist. That
Capitalism and Communism are incompatible economic and political models
does not appear to influence what they think and believe, let alone
what they do. In what sense, we are forced to ask, are they Communists
at all if everything they do is predicated on what is clearly Capitalism?
A rich communist is the equivalent of a poor capitalist — or an atheist
Catholic. It is an oxymoron, a contradiction in terms.
Catholics,
Communists, and Capitalists
It is not that we fail to
recognize this contradiction (logically we cannot), but that we deliberately
refuse to recognize the incompatibility at all. It is, at best, a thin
but resilient veneer much like the meniscus enclosing a bead of water
upon a smooth waxed surface: were logic permitted to penetrate the social
meniscus that supports this bead of otherwise mutually exclusive ideologies
it would collapse under the artificial and unsustainable contradiction.
By policy and a presumed social expedience we deny the needle of logic
its due, even legislate against it, because it would be inconvenient
to and incompatible with the purpose (the policy, really) at hand.
There is only one way to
reconcile incompatibilities: ignore them. That is the preference of
50% of Catholics at the polls:
“I am a faithful Catholic, but in the
way of social issues I am an atheist.”
It is the same logic we see at
work in China:
“I am a faithful communist, but in the way of monetary
issues and real estate appropriation I am a capitalist.”
Wang Jianlin,
originally of Sechuan, reportedly has $14.5 billion in assets. According
to Forbes magazine, China boasts 626 members among the the annual Forbes Billionaires
in 2021 ...” 1 China is officially
a communist country; indeed, the largest … and wealthiest. What of the
dissonance between the official and the actual? We ignore it, insisting
that China is a Communist country. The Leadership Conference of Women
Religious (LCWR) in America and the Chinese billionaires appear
to have much in common. They are both among “the faithful” of their
putative ideologies, however irreconcilable their conduct is with their
ostensible professions (one political, “I am a committed communist …
billionaire”, and one religious, “I am a professed Catholic Religious
… Pro-abortion sister”).
Ignorance
as the Propaedeutic to Policy
As we had said earlier,
the only one way to reconcile incompatibilities is to ignore them. Of
course, this is not reconciling them at all … it is merely methodologically
suspending them. Acknowledged incompatibilities paralyze us. We can
only move beyond them by suspending them. This, of course, is the implicit
acknowledgment that we recognize them — and therein lays the guilt.
Even according to the scandalously liberal National Catholic Reporter
(NCR):
“We found that half of adult Catholics (50 percent) know the
church’s teaching regarding the real presence and half do not.
We also found that close to two-thirds of adult Catholics (63
percent) believe that “at the consecration during a Catholic
Mass, the bread and wine really become the body and blood of
Jesus Christ.” 2
Upon reading a thoughtfully written article
in Crisis Magazine titled Saving Catholic Culture from Destruction
3 by Michael Tamara, which I encourage you to read, three verses from
Holy Scripture immediately come to mind — and one from a very early
Church Father:
First,
the Biblical:
“Lay up these my words in your hearts and minds, and hang them
for a sign on your hands, and place them between your eyes.
Teach your children that they meditate on them, when thou sittest
in thy house, and when thou walkest on the way, and when thou
liest down and risest up.”
(Deut. 11.18-19)
“The Lord hath sworn truth to David, and
he will not make it void: of the fruit of thy womb I will set
upon thy throne. If thy children will keep thy covenant, and
these my testimonies which I shall teach them: Their children
also for evermore shall sit upon thy throne.”
(Ps. 13.11-12)
“Train up a child in the way he should
go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it.”
(Prov. 22.6)
And from Saint Ephraim
the Syrian (306-373 A.D.)
“Do nothing at all without the
beginning of prayer. With the Sign of the living Cross, seal
all your doings, my son. Go not forth from the door of your
house till you have signed the Cross. Whether in eating or in
drinking, whether in sleeping or in waking, whether in your
house or on the road, or again in the season of leisure, neglect
not this sign; for there is no guardian like it. It shall be
unto you as a wall, in the forefront of all your doings. And
teach this to your children, that heedfully they be conformed
to it.”
The admittedly lengthy preface to this
article has been articulated simply as a preface to a much more important
issue, a fundamentally deeper issue that Holy Scripture — and Saint
Ephraim — brings to relief. It is an issue of failure, specifically
the failure to hand on, to deliver (tradere) Sacred Tradition,
together with the unequivocal dogma and indisputable teaching authority
through which it was articulated.
Resolute
Refusal
Let us be absolutely simple:
since Vatican II, Catholics have not just failed to hand on, to deliver,
their Catholic Faith to their children — they have resolutely refused
to. They had lost the Faith, retained a diminishing similitude to it,
churned their children through useless and often heretical CCD and Catechetical
programs in which they learned nothing of it, and flocked to the polls
to support every issue contrary to authentic Catholic teaching. They
had pre-marital sex to which their parents turned a blind eye or simply
winked, and then had the abortions that followed. Abortions require
abortuaries and necessitated the abattoir, the slaughter-house, of Planned
Parenthood — which then took the responsibility which you had abdicated
to teach your children, and subsequently taught them everything … including
every sexual perversity … from primary school on.
You simply paid the money
to psychiatrists and psychologists to help your children sort out a
sexual identity crisis that would never have existed had you done your
work and kept your Faith instead of leaving it to the government and
NGOs. When your children committed suicide you scratched your head and
wondered why … when they developed incurable STDs you paid for the prescriptions;
when they had abortions, you drove them there … and comforted them with
lies that their lives would be the same. And if you lived long enough
to be “could-have-been-grandparents”, you may have watched your daughter
fall into irrecoverable depression in the prime of her life ... and
you may have even waked her at your local funeral parlor. You were “correct”
… and she correctly died. You may have grandchildren you know nothing
of because you told your son that condoms were the answer to the question
you did not have the courage to answer forthrightly. Or perhaps he acquired
AIDS from another man or women, or both — because sexual promiscuity
is “correct” in your culture, or the culture you ruined, and after looking
at the mess, dismissed it altogether with all that had once accompanied
it and was noble and good and demanding.
You brought ruin to yourself, and now you
bring it to your children that all may equally perish. Wasn’t it all
about “equality” anyway … “acceptance” and “tolerance?” When you decided
that there was nothing that was “right” or “wrong” … only “different”
and “acceptable”? Consequences? What are they? Haven’t we genetically
engineered them to our liking yet? And there is, after all, no God,
you arrogantly proclaim — until you hope that there is when you or your
children die.
These are harsh, severe sayings; cruel pronouncements, you say? They
are far less cruel and infinitely less harsh than realities that will
come to your door — unless you teach your children as Holy Mother the
Church once taught you before you despised Her in your arrogance and
vanity; perhaps as cruel as the government and social correctitude that
brought you to the sad state in which you find yourself today.
When you lost God you lost everything. Everything. Your children, your
country, your freedom, and ultimately your soul. This is the cruelest
consequence of all.
But you are “enlightened”, “educated”, “progressive” … an “intellectual”
— aren’t you? And these are the things of children. Yes? Would that
they were only of children ….
The Remedy
Oh, yes! The remedy! Teach
your own children better than your parents had taught you. Teach them
authentic Catholic doctrine, and not the prevailing and perverse
social sentiments that will poison their minds, depredate their bodies,
and cost them their immortal souls. You may have lost yours already.
But give your kids a break. “Train up a child
in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from
it.” (Prov. 22.6) … the way that you did.
Editor
Boston Catholic Journal
Printable PDF Version
Comments? Write us:
editor@boston-catholic-journal.com
_________________________
1
http://www.forbes.com/sites/russellflannery/2014/03/03/2014-forbes-billionaires-list-growing-chinas-10-richest/
2
http://ncronline.org/news/catholics-america/knowledge-and-belief-about-real-presence
3
http://www.crisismagazine.com/2014/saving-catholic-culture-from-destruction?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+CrisisMagazine+%28Crisis+Magazine%29
Totally Faithful to the Sacred
Deposit of Faith entrusted to the Holy See in Rome
“Scio
opera tua ... quia modicum habes virtutem, et servasti verbum
Meum, nec non negasti Nomen Meum”
“I
know your works ... that you have but little power, and
yet you have kept My word, and have not denied My Name.”
(Apocalypse
3.8)
Copyright © 2004
- 2022 Boston Catholic Journal. All rights reserved. Unless
otherwise stated, permission is granted by the Boston Catholic
Journal for the copying and distribution of the articles
and audio files under the following conditions: No
additions, deletions, or changes are to be made to the text
or audio files in any way, and the copies may not be sold
for a profit. In the reproduction, in any format of any
image, graphic, text, or audio file, attribution must be
given to the Boston Catholic Journal.
|
|
