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Posts Tagged ‘Morality’

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The Great Deception by J. Reagan

In 08 Musings by Jack Reagan on 2012/01/28 at 9:11 AM

The Law of Degradation states that things will continue to degrade further unless effort is made to stem the downward movement.  Humans begin physically degrading from conception.  Illness, left untreated, becomes worse. Garbage does not improve its aroma with time.  A mind not used well does not become more intelligent. Unused muscles atrophy.

This principle applies in the moral order as well.  One of the basic words in Catholic vocabulary is “sin.”  Sin has been and still is the major cause of personal and societal ills.  At the root of every social problem is a moral problem or habits of sin.    Sin and redemption are basic tenets of Catholicism.

Illicit drug use is a moral problem (instant gratification). Having illegitimate children is a moral problem (impurity).  Unwarranted price inflation is a moral problem (greed).  Political corruption is a moral problem (hypocrisy).  And so it goes.  We try to solve them with non-moral means, and, of course, it never works.  The worst of it is that Catholic pulpits are mainly silent on the subject of sin.  I cannot recall the last time I heard a sermon on the topic, and yet polls show that Catholics are as immersed in the sins of the culture as non-Catholics.

Sin is real whether we like it or not or believe it or not.  If we look at what used to be Christendom, we see immediately that sin is alive and well.  Too many people exist in lives of chronic sinfulness, some because of ignorance, some because of indifference, and others because of malice in the soul.  Habits of serious sin (mortal sin) have consequences because sin is a rejection of divine law.  It is a rebellion against God (which is a rather daring undertaking).  Sin always exacts a price.  Somewhere, somehow, sometime the sinner must pay the penalty for his accumulated sins.

What are some of the effects of constant, unrepented serious sin?

  1. Life becomes disordered, i.e. out of order.  God has set up an order by which each person can live and fulfill  his or her potential.  It does not involve sin.  Obedience to divine law assures us that we are in harmony with this divine plan.  Disobedience renders our life irrational, in that we, by habitual sin, thwart the divine plan and make ourselves incapable of attaining God’s best blessings.  A habitual sinner is like a person who refuses to obey the rules of math, and always ends up with a wrong answer.  Moreover, no human has the standing, legally or morally, to decide that divine law is optional for him, and that it can be ignored with impunity.  Thus the habitual sinner exists in a state of disequilibrium concerning God no matter how “successful” he may appear to be in the world.
  2. The constant sinner has rejected the concept that the creature owes a debt of commitment to the Creator.  Sinners are committed to things of this world first … money, power, popularity, illicit sex in inordinate amounts.  The greedy person never has enough of what he craves.  Power often leads to other forms of corruption, etc.  The Creator is forgotten or ignored in the pursuit of ephemeral delights.  He begins to look for ways to rationalize his way of life and to associate with like-minded people.  The problem is that natural debt to God does not vanish because someone finds it inconvenient.  The one who never attends Sunday Mass has rejected the debt he owes to God, but God  does not free him from the debt.  The final cry of the unrepentant sinner, “The past has deceived me; the present torments me, and the future terrifies me”.
  3. Habitual serious sin is grossly deceptive.  Our Lord called Satan the father of lies.  As soon as the human race appeared on earth, Satan set out on a “con job” and was very successful in the Garden of Eden.  He told Eve that God was the deceiver in telling her and Adam not to eat of a particular tree.  Satan said that if they did eat it, they would become just like God and He didn’t want that.  “So go ahead! Take a bite.”  They did.  Not only did they not become divine; they lost all the gifts and blessings they already had.  And Satan slithered off to look for Cain.

Habits of sin affect the mind proportionate to the sins involved.  We change our values.  We begin to think that evil is really “not that bad.” (In fact, there are attitudes around that say a certain amount of activity that used to be called sin is actually beneficial to you such as “free love”.) Changed values led to the deaths of 55 million aborted babies.  We see the odd sight of “Catholic” politicians endorsing and voting for sin at every opportunity.  Ultimately, sin destroys the society in which it becomes an accepted part of life.  Every one of the past civilizations that existed died from suicide caused by moral failure.  We are on the same road now. The regime in DC flaunts its disregard of traditional morality, especially in matters of life itself.  Just this week, the current administration issued an ultimatum to the American Catholic Church demonstrating that those in power could not care less about its doctrines or its conscience; Catholic institutions must toe their immoral line or else.

G.K. Chesterton said that unless man becomes an enemy of evil, he will not only become its slave, he will end up championing it.  How many “Catholics” vote at odds with their Faith? Far too many!  The divine moral law (the Ten Commandments) will never change even if every human votes to rescind it. It just doesn’t work that way. The Law of Degradation applies to sinners.  Those who begin their anti-God rebellion may begin with one type of sin, but it is not long before other types become habitual as well.  Just as one initial disease can cause others to appear, habitual sin has a way of expanding because the sinner can only rely on the grace of repentance.

It is no longer “cool” to believe in sin, judgment, Heaven, Hell, good and evil, truth and error. But these ideas matter and have objective existence even if we snicker and sneer at them. The most important moment of your life is the last one. If you have lived striving to be obedient to divine law, you can smile.  If you have lived according to your own laws …

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Politics and the Devil by Charles J. Chaput, Part I

In 03 Archbishop Charles Chaput on 2011/12/01 at 11:01 AM
Politics and the Devil  by Charles J. Chaput,  April 11, 2011
A healthy democracy depends on people of conviction working hard to advance their ideas in the public square—respectfully and peacefully, but vigorously and without apologies. We cannot simultaneously serve the poor and accept the legal killing of unborn children.

I have chosen to address the theme of “politics and the devil,” not because I plan to suggest that anyone in our national political life has made a pact with Lucifer—although, given the current environment, you never know; it’s not the sort of thing you’d put in a press release—but because it is the title of an essay by the late University of Chicago philosopher Leszek Kolakowski. Kolakowski was a former Marxist, a very gifted scholar, and a skeptic about many things—but not about the reality of evil or the nature of the devil. One of the disturbing things for Kolakowski’s secular colleagues was that he talked about Satan not as a metaphor or legend or the figment of neurotic imaginations, but as a living actor in history. That deserves some discussion, but let’s start at the beginning.

Politics often works like a virus. The simpler a political slogan is, the faster people absorb it, the faster they transmit it, and the less likely they are to really think about it—which means they don’t develop an immunity to its content.

For example, a theme we’ve heard from many of our cultural leaders over the past few years—at least when they’re not battling over the economy or health care—goes like this. America needs to return science to its “rightful place” in public life. And of course, who can argue with that? Science does an enormous amount of good. Obviously, science should have its rightful place alongside every other important human endeavor. But one thing that this theme often means, in practice, is that we need to spend a lot more money on research. Especially the controversial kind. And while we’re at it, we should stop asking so many annoying ethical questions, so that science can get on with its vital work.

I want to focus on those words “rightful place,” an interesting phrase. A “rightful” place suggests that there is also a wrongful place, a bad alternative. And words like right and wrong, good and bad, are loaded with moral judgment. A “good” law embodies what somebody thinks is right. A “bad” public policy embodies what somebody thinks is wrong, or at least inadequate.

All law in some sense teaches and forms us, while also regulating our behavior. The same applies to our public policies, including the ones that govern our scientific research. There is no such thing as morally neutral legislation or morally neutral public policy. Every law is the public expression of what somebody thinks we “ought” to do. The question that matters is this: Which moral convictions of which somebodies are going to shape our country’s political and cultural future—including the way we do our science?

The answer is pretty obvious: if you and I as citizens don’t do the shaping, then somebody else will. That is the nature of a democracy. A healthy democracy depends on people of conviction working hard to advance their ideas in the public square—respectfully and peacefully, but vigorously and without apologies. Politics always involves the exercise of power in the pursuit of somebody’s idea of the common good. And politics always and naturally involves the imposition of somebody’s values on the public at large. So if a citizen fails to bring his moral beliefs into our country’s political conversation, if he fails to work for them publicly and energetically, then the only thing he ensures is the defeat of his own beliefs.

We also need to remember that most people—not everyone, of course, but most of us—root our moral convictions in our religious beliefs. What we believe about God shapes what we think about the nature of men and women, the structure of good human relationships, and our idea of a just society. This has very practical consequences, including the political kind. We act on what we really believe. If we don’t act on our beliefs, then we don’t really believe them.

As a result, the idea that the “separation of Church and state” should force us to exclude our religious beliefs from guiding our political behavior makes no sense at all, even superficially. If we don’t remain true in our public actions to what we claim to believe in our personal lives, then we only deceive ourselves. Because God certainly isn’t fooled. He sees who and what we are. God sees that our duplicity is really a kind of cowardice, and our lack of courage does a lot more damage than simply wounding our own integrity. It also saps the courage of other good people who really do try to publicly witness what they believe. And that compounds a sin of dishonesty with a sin of injustice.

Charles J. Chaput, O.F.M. Cap., is the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Denver and the author of Render Unto Caesar: Serving the Nation by Living our Catholic Beliefs in Political Life. This essay is adapted from the keynote address Archbishop Chaput delivered as part of the University of Notre Dame student-organized Right to Life lecture series.

Copyright 2011 the Witherspoon Institute.  All rights reserved. Re-printed on this blog with permission.  


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Politics and the Devil by Charles J. Chaput, Part II

In 03 Archbishop Charles Chaput on 2011/12/01 at 10:09 AM

Dwelling on the issue of science for just another moment, let me present some thoughts from two very different sources. Here’s the first source:

Science, by itself, cannot establish the ends to which it is put. Science can discover vaccines and cures for diseases, but it can also create infectious agents; it can uncover the physics of semiconductors, but also the physics of the hydrogen bomb. Science [as] science is indifferent to whether data are gathered under rules that scrupulously protect the interest of human research subjects . . . [or by] bending the rules or ignoring them altogether. A number of the Nazi doctors who injected concentration camp victims with infectious agents or tortured prisoners by freezing or burning them to death were in fact legitimate scientists who gathered real data that could potentially be put to good use.

The same source goes on to worry that, today, many of the bioethicists who claim to counsel and guide the moral course of American science “have become nothing more than sophisticated (and sophistic) justifiers of whatever it is the scientific community wants. . . . In any discussion of cloning, stem-cell research, gene-line engineering and the like, it is usually the professional bioethicist who can be relied on to take the most permissive position of anyone in the room.”

Now, from my second source:

What is our contemporary idiocy? What is the enemy within the [human] city? If I had to give it a name, I think I would call it ‘technological secularism.’ The idiot today is the technological secularist who knows everything . . . about the organization of all the instruments and techniques of power that are available in the contemporary world—and who, at the same time, understands nothing about the nature of man or about the nature of true civilization.

The words from my first source appeared in 2002 from the author and scholar Francis Fukuyama. If you know his work, you know that Fukuyama clearly supports the benefits of science and technology. He is not—to my knowledge—a religious believer, and based on his writings, he seems to have little use for Christianity. But he’s also not a fool. He sees exactly where our advances in biotechnology could lead us if we don’t find an ethical way of guiding them.

The words from my second source were written exactly 50 years ago, in 1961. They come from John Courtney Murray, the great Jesuit priest and Christian scholar. Murray was a thoughtful man, and he chose his language very carefully. He used the word “idiot” in the original Greek sense of the term, which is quite different from its meaning in modern slang.

For the Greeks, the “idiot” was not a mentally deficient man. Rather, he was a man who did not possess a proper public philosophy, or as Murray says, “a man who is not master of the knowledge and skills that underlie the life of a civilized city. The idiot, to the Greek, was just one stage removed from the barbarian. He is the man who is ignorant of the meaning of the word ‘civility’.”

As I said, these two sources are very different. One was a believer. The other is not. Father Murray died more than four decades ago, long before today’s stem-cell and cloning debates. But both men would agree that science and technology are not ends in themselves. They’re enormously valuable tools. But they’re tools that can undermine human dignity—and even destroy what it means to be “human”—just as easily as they can serve human progress. Everything depends on who uses them, and how. Fools with tools are still fools; and the more powerful the tools, the more dangerous the fools. Or to put it another way, neither science nor technology requires a moral conscience to produce results. The evidence for that fact is the record of the last century.

Now I’ve talked about these things so far for a simple reason. The moral and political struggle we face today in defending human dignity is becoming more complex. I believe that abortion is the foundational human rights issue of our lifetime. We can’t simultaneously serve the poor and accept the legal killing of unborn children. We can’t build a just society, and at the same time, legally sanctify the destruction of generations of unborn human life. The rights of the poor and the rights of the unborn child flow from exactly the same human dignity guaranteed by the God who created us.

Of course, working to end abortion doesn’t absolve us from our obligations to the poor. It doesn’t excuse us from our duties to the disabled, the elderly and immigrants. In fact, it demands from us a much stronger commitment to materially support women who find themselves in a difficult pregnancy.

All of these obligations are vital. God will hold us accountable if we ignore them. But none of these other duties can obscure the fact that no human rights are secure if the right to life is not. Unfortunately, abortion is no longer the only major bioethical threat to that right in our culture. In fact, the right to life has never, at any time in the past, faced the range of challenges it faces right now, and will face in the coming decades. Physician-assisted suicide, cloning, brain-computer interface (BCI) research, genetic screening of unwanted fetuses, genetic engineering of preferred physical and intellectual traits, cross-species experimentation, and developments in neuroscience—these things already raise serious questions about the definition of “human nature” and the protection of human dignity in the years ahead.

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Politics and the Devil by Charles J. Chaput, Part III

In 03 Archbishop Charles Chaput on 2011/12/01 at 9:11 AM

In Europe and the United States, our knowledge classes like to tell us that we live in an age of declining religious belief. But that isn’t quite true. A culture that rejects God always invents another, lesser godling to take His place. As a result, in the words of the great Jewish bioethicist Leon Kass, we live in an age of “salvific science.” In the place of the God who became man, “we have man become as god.” And in place “of a God who—it is said—sent his son who would, through his own suffering, take away the sins of the world, we have a scientific savior who would take away the sin of suffering altogether.”

The irony is this: the search for human perfection implied in modern science—or at least, the kind of science accountable to no moral authority outside of itself—leads all too easily to a hatred of imperfection in the real human persons who embody it with their disabilities. The simplest way to deal with imperfections is to eliminate the imperfect. In our daily lives, Kass warns, “the eugenic mentality is taking root, and we are subtly learning with the help of science to believe that there really are certain lives unworthy of being born. . . . [T]he most pernicious result of our technological progress . . . [is] the erosion, perhaps the final erosion, of the idea of man as noble, dignified, precious or godlike, and its replacement with a view of man [as] mere raw material for manipulation and homogenization.”

Dr. Kass made those remarks at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, itself a monument to the murderous and genuinely satanic misuse of science and politics in the last century. But he wasn’t speaking about genocide in the past, in some faraway, alien dictatorship. He was talking about the temptations we face today in our own democratic societies, the temptations to create “a more perfect human”—and, in the process, to pervert science and attack our own humanity.

This brings us back to politics and the devil, and also, to the very important question: How does one live as a Catholic in the world as it now is?

The great French scholar Jacques Maritain once wrote that “the devil hangs like a vampire on the side of history. History moves forward nonetheless, and [it] moves forward with the vampire.” The devil is condemned to work within time. He works in the present to capture our hearts and steal our future. But he also attacks our memory, the narrative of our own identity. And he does it for a very good reason. The way we remember history conditions how we think and choose today, in our daily lives. That’s why one of the first things we need to do, if we want to “live as Catholics,” is to remember what being “Catholic” really means—and we need to learn that lesson in our identity not from the world; not from the tepid and self-satisfied; and not from the enemies of the Church, even when they claim to be Catholic; but from the mind and memory of the Church herself, who speaks through her pastors.

Jacques Maritain and Leszek Kolakowski came from very different backgrounds. Maritain was deeply Catholic. Kolakowski was in no sense an orthodox religious thinker. But they would have agreed that good and evil, God and the devil, are very real—and that history is the stage where that struggle is played out, both in our personal choices and in our public actions; where human souls choose their sides and create their futures. In Kolakowski’s own words, “we are not passive observers or victims of this contest, but participants as well, and therefore our destiny is decided on the field on which we run.”

Politics is the exercise of power; and power—as Jesus himself saw when Satan tempted him in the desert—can very easily pervert itself by doing evil in the name of pursuing good ends. But this fact is never an excuse for cowardice or paralysis. Christ never absolved us from defending the weak, or resisting evil in the world, or from solidarity with people who suffer. Our fidelity as Christians is finally to God, but it implies a faithfulness to the needs of God’s creation. That means we’re involved—intimately—in the life of the world, and that we need to act on what we believe: always with humility, always with charity, and always with prudence—but also always with courage. We need to fight for what we believe. As Kolakowski wrote, “Our destiny is decided on the field on which we run.”

I have two final thoughts. First, nothing we do to defend the human person, no matter how small, is ever unfruitful or forgotten. Our actions touch other lives and move other hearts in ways we can never fully understand in this world.

Don’t ever underestimate the beauty and power of the witness you give in your pro-life work. One thing we learn from Scripture is that God doesn’t have much use for the vain or the prideful. But He loves the anawim—the ordinary, simple, everyday people who keep God’s Word, who stay faithful to his commandments, and who sustain the life of the world by leavening it with their own goodness. That’s the work we are called to do. Don’t ever forget it. If you speak up for the unborn child in this life, someone will speak up for you in the next, when we meet God face to face.

Second, a friend once shared with me the unofficial motto of the Texas Rangers: “No man in the wrong can stand up against a fella that’s in the right, and keeps a-comin.” The message is true. Virtue does matter. Courage and humility, justice and perseverance, do have power. Good does win, and the sanctity of human life will endure. It will endure because if “God so loved the world that He gave his only Son” (Jn 3:16), then the odds look pretty good, and it’s worth fighting for what is right.

Charles J. Chaput, O.F.M. Cap., is the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Denver and the author of Render Unto Caesar: Serving the Nation by Living our Catholic Beliefs in Political Life. This essay is adapted from the keynote address Archbishop Chaput delivered as part of the University of Notre Dame student-organized Right to Life lecture series.

Copyright 2011 the Witherspoon Institute. All rights reserved. Re-printed on this blog with permission.  


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Challenge of the Media

In 07 Observations on 2011/09/10 at 12:00 AM

“We live in an epoch which puts a premium on sincerity.  And yet , our era has become known as the time of impostors, of falsehood and lying.  Among others, the list of impostors includes those member of the press, who spread scandalous indiscretions and slanderous insinuations, appeal to people’s lowest instincts, gradually corrupting their moral sense.  To the press one could add movies, radio, television.  These instruments useful in themselves, when handled by shrewd operators bombard people with sound and colors and hidden persuasion, which is all the more effective because of being hidden.  Such media are capable of little by little making the best fathers hated by their children, of making white seem black and vice versa.  This is how the habits of thought and the customs of people are being transformed today.  Whenever possible, we should use the means of communication to give sound doctrine to society as a whole.

We should stress those ideas which have a transcendental  importance for social progress: the defense of life from its conception; the dignity of the family and of the person; social justice; the right to work, due concern for the weakest members of society….In many cases we can communicate these ideals without difficulty…by writing a Letter to the Editor, by making telephone calls, by participating in opinion polls or on radio programs.  These means are available to us for showing our approval of a program or an article that either reinforces fundamental human morality or fails to do so.”

Illustrissimi by Albino Luciani  (Pope John Paul I)

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Some Truths About False Gods

In 08 Musings by Jack Reagan on 2011/08/20 at 7:00 AM

The Creator-God, because it is His nature to be good, wishes that every human being who has ever lived or will ever live should be able to fulfill his or her purpose of life and come to eternal happiness after death by being in the presence of God Himself. Not everyone has been exposed to Divine Revelation, but everyone does have a means of determining that there is a Supreme Being who has also implanted in the human soul a sense of moral right and wrong (conscience). This human reason can deduce the existence of a Supreme Being without any reference to anything religious. The most obvious and easiest way is to simply observe the wonders of nature and the universe, realizing that no one on earth could create it all. There must be another being outside the universe that brought it all into being.

The ancient peoples, without the aid of divine Revelation and millennia of human experience to build on, sensed that there was a Supreme Being, but usually ended up worshipping false gods, distortions of reality. Without science, some groups explained natural phenomena by inventing rain gods, moon gods, fire gods, fertility gods and others (polytheism). Still other groups concluded that things did not merely exist in a religious milieu, but were part of an all-absorbing deity, of which all things were a part (pantheism). Many did not see things as part of a godhead, but rather each individual thing that existed was divine in itself (animism). A few became so perverse that they invented gods that were evil in themselves such as those that demanded human sacrifice (Aztecs of Mexico) or the Middle Eastern god, Moloch, who demanded the sacrifice of children. (Remind you of anything going on today?)

We can assume that early man was attempting to find the true God, but he usually failed because every person is burdened with the effects of Original Sin whether he knows it or not. The only ancient people that did find the true God were the Jews of the Old Testament.

Contemporary man is different. He is not looking for a Supreme Being; he has already found one … himself, and his false god is himself and his ego. All truth resides in him. No truth exists outside of him. He decides what is good or bad, moral or immoral for himself. If you disagree with him, you just have to live with it. Feelings, not human reality, are his guide. Because he fails to deal with reality (or Truth), he has set up a core of sub-gods among which he is free to chose whichever one suits his fancy. Thus modern man adores such entities as the body, and his religious rituals are gyms, exercise, diets and health fads. His goal of life is fitness to avoid as long as possible the unspoken dread: death.

Another of his sub-gods is what used to be called illicit sexual activity (or even further back, sin).  But his god has deceived him and left him with disease, death, frustration, impersonal relationships and all the ill-effects of rejecting Divine Law.

Many have come to worship sports and entertainment (one of the causes of the decline of Rome, according to Arnold Toynbee, a British historian). My TV has dozens of channels dedicated to every sport known to man and a mere 4-5 religious channels. One city in NC has wasted millions of tax dollars in artificial white-water rafting, a racing museum, new stadiums while old ones still functioned. Children are urged to compete at an early age on teams of all types.  Baseball used to be referred to a “pastime.” No sport is anything but all-consuming today.

Political parties have become false gods to many. They have become an end in themselves, rather than a means to influence elected officials. “This is MY party: right or wrong.”

Presidential politics has become on-going in the media. As soon as one presidential election ends, the media start right in on the next one. There is no respite. Sometimes a party, to curry favor with the “correct” people, will support immoral and/or stupid ideas. This does not seem to have much impact on membership roles at all. “Christians” will vote for a candidate who openly professes his non-Christian moral values. “MY party: right or wrong.”

In education and science, the great false god is Darwinian evolution, as yet, far from proved, but nevertheless is  new religion. I read that any professor who balks at evolution will not be hired by most college biology departments. Evolution is an egregious error perpetuated by those who claim to seek truth in science. Apparently, the truth must coincide with preconceived ideas; if not, too bad for truth.

The list of modern false gods could go on and on…money, power, prestige, popularity, etc. It is important to note that there is NOTHING wrong in themselves with any of these things that become false gods to many. They become false gods when their adherents exaggerate their importance and will do too much to attain them. Money is not evil, but greed is. Sex is good, but only within the context of Divine Law. Those who deny objective truth lose their ability to think logically and systematically; therefore, luring them to false gods becomes relatively easy.

The problems with any false gods are:

  • The worshipper must first invent the false god. That makes the inventor the god’s creator.  He then worships what he himself made, thereby relinquishing his role as superior to his creation. (The true God is always supreme.)
  • False gods are fickle and undependable. Sometimes they please, and sometimes they annoy or outrightly fail to deliver on promises. (The true God is always consistent and never fails to give what we need.)
  • False gods promote of all kinds of immorality, especially physical and social. (The true God never endorses any sin for any reason.)
  • False gods are by their nature very, very temporary. Illness, age and frustration can end your “religious” life. Death will certainly end it. This is the problem with all habits of sin: Those habits rule you until some circumstance alters the situation. (The true God is eternal and is present before and after death and through all the ups and downs of life.)
  • False gods are anti-human because a person who refuses to think reasonably is not acting fully as human beings. To fail to act in a human way is to fail to attain the goal of human life which none of the false gods can offer. (The true God offers an eternal destiny fully in accord with human needs.)

In the long run, false gods never satisfy because they are incapable of it. Even in the short run, they often fail to give the worshipper what he is looking for. There is always a pennant “next year”, another dollar to be made, another man/woman to be seduced, another election to be fought and so on. The reason they don’t satisfy is relatively simple: As St. Augustine said, “Our hearts were made for Thee, O,Lord, and they will not rest until they rest in Thee.”

We were not designed to be satisfied for long by false gods. If we persist in idolizing them (and they are idols), even up to the moment of death, we will be unknown strangers in the eternal world of the after-life. Our former gods will simply be setting out to lure other fools.

Are we  so blinded and deafened by the siren lure of those false gods in this life that we don’t hear the quiet knocking on the door of our hearts by the One Who is the Way, the Truth and the Life? When we’re stopped by death and face the eternal gate of heaven, what will we say to St. Peter….if we even recognize him?

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Voice from the Past for the Ears of the Present

In 14 Book Corner on 2011/08/03 at 9:22 PM

In 1891 Pope Leo XIII wrote his encyclical:  Rerum Novarum, regarding industrialization, capitalism and class differences. He staunchly defended the right to private property and the right to work, warning about the dangers of Marxism and irresponsible capitalism.  In encyclicals or other documents all subsequent popes have continued his teachings which are as applicable and essential today as much as they were then.

This man, whose wisdom and insights are still admired had also long been championed social issues.

But Rerum Novarum was not Leo’s first or only social encyclical. In fact, from the first In 1877 he had written another encyclical:  Sapientiae Christianae in which Pope Leo defined the duties of Catholics in civil society: that Catholics need to obey God, even if that brings them into conflict with civil authority particularly if the civil law clearly contradicts divine law saying clearly that “then, truly, to resist becomes a positive duty, to obey, a crime.”

This is a lesson our modern Catholic legislators are ignoring to the peril of their souls.    For today in particular, every where, laws are being instituted and supported that directly contradict divine law. Pope Leo made it very clear that  Catholics “should make a deep study of Catholic doctrine” and then fulfill their duty to defend the truth publicly. Had Pope Leo been listened to and followed, the disasters of the years since could have been avoided or at least mitigated; but now unthought of behavior is being not only condoned but encouraged and supported.

This might not have been the tragedy if the past fifty years had been an age of faith and tradition, but clearly it was the very opposite, an era of change and deep challenges to the most basic Catholic moral teaching. In the face of the sexual revolution and the rise of no-fault divorce, abortion, contraception, and overt homosexuality, indifference and retreat have been the default responses of most Catholics who cite “prudence” and a desire not to lose credibility with the world around them.

Like Leo, we should have no patience with silence. “To recoil before an enemy, or to keep silence when from all sides such clamors are raised against truth,” he warns, “is the part of a man either devoid of character or who entertains doubt as to the truth of what he professes to believe.” When those who know the truth are silent, the enemies of truth win, and a war is loss because of cowardice that could easily have been worn with the truth and courage of convictions.

Now that the battle is raging on all levels of society and in all means of communication, we have an opportunity to go into combat.  We must follow Christ and defend the truth regardless of cost.  We must exemplify our beliefs in words and actions and convey them to others clearly and with conviction.  It is the only charitable thing we can do for our neighbors who are being seduced by numerous sirens.

It would have been better if Leo’s injunctions had been heeded earlier, but it is never too late to do our part.

http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/leo_xiii/encyclicals/documents/hf_l-xiii_enc_15051891_rerum-novarum_en.html

http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/leo_xiii/encyclicals/documents/hf_l-xiii_enc_10011890_sapientiae-christianae_en.html

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“Now Let’s Not Be Judgmental!”

In 08 Musings by Jack Reagan on 2011/05/14 at 10:00 PM

How many times have we heard this or something like it. When someone says this, it is a signal to cease all conversation or discussion about a particular topic because something “offensive” might be said.

The ability to make judgments is a function of the human intellect. No other creature has this gift. There are two kinds of judgments. The first is external and objective which enables us to evaluate actions or ideas from the viewpoint of the five senses, or from a historical perspective or from past  experience.  We make these judgments routinely when we decide whether something is good or bad, wise or unwise, necessary or unnecessary, moral or immoral. Christ Himself gave guidance for these kinds of judgments when he said that we could judge something by its fruits, by its effects. He made such judgments often…when He cursed the fig tree, when He called Herod a fox, when he dispersed the money-changers.

The other type of judgment is subjective and internal. This occurs when someone declares that another person is a sinner, or that Bin Laden is in Hell, or that so and so is heading for Hell. Such judgments are not within our mental competence. We simply do not know how anyone stands in the sight of God. He is the “scrutator cordium”, the searcher of hearts and He alone knows how guilty we are or are not. Thus this kind of judgment is never allowable.  It is this kind of judgment that Christ warns us about when he tells us not to judge others. (Many erroneously use this verse to avoid all intellectual judgments.)

The modern problem with judgments does not lie in the physical or earthly realm; it lies in the spiritual realm. Thus no one objects to passing judgments on sports teams, restaurants, customer service, autos etc… But, when the topic is religion and morality, negative judgments are not wanted, even if thy are objectively true. One’s personal view of religion and morality (or lack of it) are considered to be sacrosanct and no one has the right to object on any grounds, not even logical grounds. Thus if someone equates Christianity with Islam, and many do simply because both religions worship one deity (not the same God, but a single God). Thus contradictions are quite acceptable in this attitude. The Christian who says God is a triune God  is no more right than the Moslem who claims a unitarian god.

This attitude or philosophy clouds our rational judgment. Reason rejects contradictions, but some, for the sake of “being nice” will accept all kinds of nonsense just to avoid “offending” someone. The result is a mishmash of conflicting ideas and a society wandering in a labyrinth of uncertainty and doubt.

The failure to be judgmental when it is called for means that the person who holds the objectively false idea can never be corrected. He is seen to be better off left in his error than that to be offended. (If he is offended, he might resist and come to hear valid objections to his position.)

Failure to express reservation about false ideas also means that a person is not given a better alternative and perhaps has  lost an opportunity to improve his religious or moral practice in accord with divine Revelation.

Objectively speaking, those who insist on living out their false philosophies are not living in accordance with God’s plan for the human race. We don’t have the option of rejecting God without consequences. Our free will allows us to so, but there will be consequences. Too many people today have  forgotten (if they ever knew) that man is made in the image and likeness of God. Modern man has remade God in is own image so that God is a “good ol’ boy” who severest reprimand is “Tsk, tsk”.  God is what He is whether we believe it or not, like it or not, act accordingly or not. If someone needs correcting, do it graciously and with Christian love.

In the words of St. Augustine…”Our hearts were made for thee,   O, Lord, and they will not rest until they rest in Thee.”

It requires effective and rational judgment to reach that place of rest.