TAKING AIM AT SECULARISM

FAME-SEEKING CRITICS

1. THE WORDS of the Supreme Pontiff are worth more than all the paid pundits, newscasters and professors of the world put together. Each generation produces a new crop of fame-seeking critics who gleefully bash the Pope and the Roman Catholic Church. The old saying “fame is fleeting” is no less true for publicity addicts than for anybody else.P

2. THE TEACHINGS of the Church on faith and morals will endure long after the last faultfinder of our time passes away. In recent weeks, our Holy Father’s newest book LIGHT OF THE WORLD: The Pope, The Church and the Signs of the Times has generated a lot of well-deserved praise. Predictably, however, pundits and reporters have pounced on the pontiff's comments on aspects of sexuality to the exclusion of just about everything else in his book.

PSYCHO-SOCIAL REFERENCE POINT

3. MILITANT SECULARISTS scoff at the Catholic Church’s Magisterium as an elaborate control mechanism for exploiting sexual repression and shame on all levels of society. “God’s will” is actually a mask hiding pretentious clergy who enforce their own will on morals and politics. The human conscience, far from being sacrosanct, is merely the psycho-social reference point for preserving human self-interest. For too long, it is argued, clergy have manipulated consciences to advance their own self-interest by appealing to universal norms in the name of the absolute.

4. The chief arbiter of man's moral nature is not Church but the scientific method. Anything more or less is ludicrous and offensive to human intelligence. All things including human beings are variations of materiality and thus quantifiable. Nothing exists that is beyond the rules of evidence. Not the load on a donkey. Not sex. Not God. No moral obligation or ethic exists that is unconditionally and universally binding. It is not religion that is peculiarly valuable, but rather the optimization of the global techno-cultural supermarket. Men and women must have the opportunity to choose from the widest possible range of connectivity products, services and ideas. The Church is an old grocery store chain unable to compete in a new era of global competition.

WHEN RELIGION IS ERASED

5. THE REALITY, say secularists, is meta-culturalism, a world-wide exchange of morally neutral options enabling human beings to freely make informed decisions using fluid value-schemes within interconnected global matrices. Not suprisingly, this eclecticism extends to all the “–ality’s”: rationality, sexuality, spirituality, liberality, abnormality, morality, carnality, and so forth.

6. SO-CALLED universally binding moral laws for right living belong to a previously dominant evolutionary stage of human social development. Therefore they are foreign to modernity and irrelevant. Also foreign is the "problem of evil", an anachronistic novelty which does not exist except as a consequence of a proprietary moral system. Indeed public officials have the responsibility to "zero-based budget" all moral laws for the sake of fairness. Eventually the problem of evil will go away completely when religion is erased from human consciousness. The Catholic Church's moral-ethical system is hopelessly over-engineered and insufficient in the modern world. Until all religious influence is legally suppressed or effectively neutered, the fight to mold public opinion must be waged agressively in the public square by special interest groups defending their constituents marginalized by the Church.

SOCIETY CELEBRATING ITSELF

7. THE SECULARIST doctrine is essentially the following: 1.) society exists to indulge the autonomous individual, 2.) infrastructure is the raison d’être of community, 3.) the salient gestalt of diversity annuls static shared values, 4.) all truths are articulated human perceptions, 5.) true freedom is a benefit of permissiveness and consumption, 6.) the cause of all human suffering is hierarchy, 7.) when religion is suppressed, the age of superstition will end.

8. IF THERE is such a thing as heaven, this state of affairs would bring it about. All human passions are appropriate and worthy of empowerment. The enlightened liberated society exists for the purpose of celebrating itself. Indeed, deconstruction theory has taught us that society is a writhing mass of inscrutibly complex interpretations, the most useful of which are revealed by processes of disintegration. Therefore each generation has the two-fold duty of celebrating its novel instabilities and to create its own working syllabus of deviancy. So-called harmful consequences are no longer threatening when perceived as transactional losses, normal and expected in human relationships. They can be controlled or written off like unserviceable debts.

HYSTERICAL SEARCH FOR VALIDATION

9. NOT SO, says the Roman Catholic Church. Hard-core secularism is a malevolent agenda which threatens the sanctity of human life and violently opposes the divinely-authored rights which protect it. There is a term for this, the mark of Cain. It is an appeal, not to reason, but to a calculated tyranny seeking to destroy the persons it cannot enthrall. The Church counters that promiscuity and consumption are poor if not worthless markers of human dignity, being neither the price of freedom or a roadmap to Shangri-la. These excesses evidence a gnawing appetite for power and exploitation which will not tolerate the just man who pleases God with his offering.  [cf. Gen 4:4] 

10. THE MASSIVE fact staring us in the face is that human beings are fallen creatures capable of creating meaning where none exists. Yet monstrous lies do not appear out of thin air. They emerge rather from the rotting compost of a spiritually and intellectually exhausted society. When ordinary people are enthralled to lassitude and give up trying to distinguish the truth from the imaginary, irrational optimism fills the void. Society condones and even encourages its members’ disordered and hysterical search for validation:

IF THE promotion of the self is understood in terms of absolute autonomy, people inevitably reach the point of rejecting one another. Everyone else is considered an enemy from whom one has to defend oneself. Thus society becomes a mass of individuals placed side by side, but without any mutual bonds. [John Paul II, Evangelium Vitae No. 20]

JAW-DROPPING CRUELTY

11. POPE JOHN Paul II observed that as "freedom is made absolute in an individualistic way, it is emptied of its original content". [John Paul II, Evangelium Vitae No. 19] This phenomenon is not neutral as if human beings, after emerging from a moral-patriarchal wilderness, are now happily feasting at a cultural rest-stop. Rather it is a prelude to the horrifying spectacle of a civilized community devouring itself with jaw-dropping cruelty. Consider the following quotations—each significant in its own realm—which evidence an appallingly puerile yet dismayingly familiar contempt for the worth of human dignity:

Outside of the killings, Washington has one of the lowest crime rates in the country. [Marion Barry—former mayor, Washington, DC.]

A woman who has an abortion is not actually killing the fetus: in those instances, no one is killing the fetus. The fetus is removed from the uterus, that’s all: the woman ceases to provide her bodily resources to keep the fetus alive and developing. [Unnamed blogger]

When the death of a disabled infant will lead to the birth of another infant with better prospects of a happy life, the total amount of happiness will be greater if the disabled infant is killed. [Peter Singer, philosopher, Princeton University]

I only ran the trains. I didn’t kill anyone. [Adolph Eichmann—Nazi mass murderer]

We should hire three or four colored ministers, preferably with social-service backgrounds, and with engaging personalities. The most successful educational approach to the Negro is through a religious appeal. We don't want the word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population, and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members. [Margaret Sanger—Founder of Planned Parenthood]

MODERNITY’S COMPULSION TO SELF-ANNIHILATION

12. WHEN WARPED logic trumps human decency, ordinary people learn to tolerate predation. The amazingly modern twentieth century will be remembered for its transactional losses—the violent deaths of well over 200 million people from multiple world wars, genocides, pogroms, ethnic cleansings, regional conflicts, civil and guerilla wars. Added to this incomprehensible toll of human life is the staggering loss of over 40+ million unborn children aborted annually worldwide. The sheer number of these deaths stands in absolute condemnation of truculent secularism's malignant fiction--human beings can save themselves. While self-salvation has never been established as fact, abundant evidence exists that man is perfectly capable of destroying himself. All-too-frequently in the enlightened era, he has happily stalked the road of savage ferocity.

13. A BOY cries out for his father. Wounded soldiers call out for their medics. A threatened nation summons its army. But no living generation of human beings can cry, call or summon 200 million dead, justify why they died, eulogize them, or redeem them. If this modern multitude of extinguished lives could speak with one voice, its haunting despair would never cease to be heard. This desolate harvest condemns modernity for the barbarism it desperately wants to hide. It judges modernity for its compulsion to self-annihilation, lest this generation confess its mortality, its inherent sinfulness, its propensity to failure, its persistent errors and seek salvation in the name of Jesus Christ.

IRREPROACHABLE AND BLAMELESS VOICE

14. SIN IS like lead—heavy, malleable and poisonous. Humanity bears the weight of its crimes and its sinful nature. Humanity must confess that it cannot redeem itself or the host of innocent dead. If a worthy voice cannot be summoned to speak to the wilderness of the dead, a voice irreproachable and blameless, humankind has no reason to continue in existence. The reality that mankind's humaneness is at risk cannot be ignored. Absent a cleansing of his essential humanity, man is valueless and undeserving of the natural order and its ferae naturae (Lat. animals wild by nature). He must turn to God and accept the discipline of a moral order of universally binding precepts precisely because it exists and precisely because humanity is powerless to pronounce forgiveness over itself.

15. BUT IF humanity will heed the one impeccable voice worthy to address the dead, they will know it as God’s voice.

AND GOD said to me, "Son of man, can these bones live?" And I answered, "O Lord God, thou knowest." Again he said to me, "Prophesy to these bones, and say to them, O dry bones, hear the word of the LORD. Thus says the Lord God to these bones: Behold, I will cause breath to enter you, and you shall live. [Eze 37:3-5]

“GLORY OF GOD IN THE FACE OF CHRIST”

16. GOD’S DIVINE revelation is the only source of knowledge available to humankind that is neither synthetic nor derivative from what was created “in the beginning”. [cf. Gen 1:1] Though God has gratuitously revealed himself throughout history in utterly new and marvelous ways, it was to the Hebrews--"For you are a people holy to the LORD your God; the LORD your God has chosen you to be a people for his own possession, out of all the peoples that are on the face of the earth." [Deu 7:6]--the Creator acknowledged a filial and spousal relationship.

17. GOD REVEALED the Truth about himself and his human creation to Abraham and, in the fullness of time, to the apostles of the Church. This is the truth: God became man so that mankind could know and love him. Jesus Christ—the eternal word made flesh—came into the world to teach human beings how to live and serve God in this life. The Lord Jesus founded his Church to strengthen and ennoble his followers, indeed all human beings in the world until the day of his coming in glory:

FOR IT is the God who said, "Let light shine out of darkness," who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ. But we have this treasure in earthen vessels, to show that the transcendent power belongs to God and not to us.” [2Cor 4:6-7]

HOW TO LIVE A HOLY WAY OF LIFE

18. INSTRUCTING THE world about the beauty and sacredness of the human person is the Church's mission. This means evangelizing the truth of Christ, the origin of all goodness and enduring peace. But the world of men fears giving its free-will assent to the sovereignty of God over human affairs. So in every generation, therefore, the Church’s magisterium must strive to understand God’s eternal Truth more perfectly and convey it more effectively to a conflicted world.

19. TO SAY that the Church exists for the sake of compulsion is a cheap shot. The truth is that the Church exists expressly to advance human contentment on earth and prepare her members for eternal happiness in heaven. The Church, a voluntary society, leads people to Christ and teaches her individual members how to live a holy way of life worthy of God:

IT EMERGES that men and women are on a journey of discovery which is humanly unstoppable--a search for the truth and a search for a person to whom they might entrust themselves. Christian faith comes to meet them, offering the concrete possibility of reaching the goal which they seek.

MOVING BEYOND the stage of simple believing, Christian faith immerses human beings in the order of grace, which enables them to share in the mystery of Christ, which in turn offers them a true and coherent knowledge of the Triune God. [John Paul II, Fides et Ratio, no. 33 (1998)]

“THEOLOGY” OF PROMISCUITY AND CONSUMPTION

20. THE CHURCH’S mission to instruct the world is an urgent task in the present generation. Many people, attracted to current fashions and the latest innovations, are vulnerable to claims of mysterious and secret knowledge. They lunge for theories of empowerment, embracing all-encompassing explanations of reality, hoping to gain therapeutic approval for their promiscuity and consumption.

21. OBJECTIVITY IS feared as "group-think". Truthful self-assessment is searing to the human conscience turbocharged to maximize pleasure. Little wonder that excessive preoccupation with trivia, squalid subject matter, and sordid experiences engulf people and threaten to overwhelm them. Florid and weepy, they dither between good and evil, truth and lie, benevolence and exploitation.

“LOSS OF THE SENSE OF SIN”

22. POPE PIUS XII identified the root cause of moral desensitization laying it squarely on the doorstep of the 20th century: "The sin of the century is the loss of the sense of sin". [Radio Message October 26,1946] Far from being a mordant condemnation, the pope’s expression “sense of sin” contains within itself the first step needed for recovering humanity's humaneness.

23. MEN AND women must awaken their consciences to the natural law, the core of aboriginal and universally binding moral precepts that ennobles and safeguards their incomparable human dignity:

IN THE depths of his conscience, man detects a law which he does not impose upon himself, but which holds him to obedience. Always summoning him to love good and avoid evil, the voice of conscience when necessary speaks to his heart: do this, shun that. [VATICAN COUNCIL II, Gaudium et Spes 16]

SCHOOL OF HUMILITY – NORMATIVE GUIDE

24. THUS, AWARENESS of a “sense of sin” has positive meaning for all human beings, referring to one’s formal recognition of good and evil and his conscious commitment to avoid all evil acts with their harmful consequences:

O MY God, I really want to listen to You. I beg You to answer me when I say humbly: What is truth? Make me see things as they really are. Let nothing cause me to be deceived. [John Clarke OCD, ed. and trans., ST. THERESE OF LISIEUX: HER LAST CONVERSATIONS (Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 1977) 105]

25. CULTIVATING AN informed “sense of sin” is crucial, but it does not mean adopting pharisaical sullenness or censure. Rather, it means growing in the “mind of Christ” [1Cor 2:16]—the school of humility where the moral content of God’s divine revelation becomes one’s normative guide in life:

AND SO, from the day we heard of it, we have not ceased to pray for you, asking that you may be filled with the knowledge of his will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding, to lead a life worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing to him, bearing fruit in every good work and increasing in the knowledge of God.

MAY YOU be strengthened with all power, according to his glorious might, for all endurance and patience with joy. . . [Col 1:9-11]

ABANDONMENT OF LOGIC AND SPIRITUAL RELEVANCE

26. THE CONSEQUENCE of an uneducated and unexamined conscience is dangerous superficiality. This phenomenon extends far beyond misguided individuals to hamstring entire societies. Though human society prizes a technically proficient and competent work force, it fails to grasp the enormous social costs imposed by a population of persons—like "a wave of the sea that is driven and tossed by the wind” [Jas 1:6]—whose critical life-decisions are purposeless, random and very often shockingly injurious to themselves and others.

27. THE SIGNAL failure of contemporary discourse is the abandonment of reason and spiritual relevance in favor of arguing the wrong point. Justice, as a consequence, becomes disfigured in critical aspects. Perception negates ideas. Opinions suffocate reason. Compelling issues deserving of thorough discussion are ignored.

DEVASTATING THE ECOLOGY OF HUMANENESS

28. THE GENUINE needs of people--most especially society's weak and innocent members--are trivialized. Everything is subject to multiple conflicting interpretations, with the effect that each cancels out the other. Context is annihilated. Worse still, humankind fails to see how this devastates the ecology of its humaneness, convincing itself that it can survive—even flourish—in a spiritual wasteland. Or worse still, that it somehow remains untouched by it.

29. THE GREAT hope of medieval chemistry, of course, was transmutation. Wealth, health and eternal youth on demand were possible if only an alchemist could discover the right substances. Then Everyman surely would grasp the cornucopia and its inexhaustible gifts. He would banish the vicissitudes of life forever and make real his own unfulfilled aspirations.

SIMPLICITY OF UNATTAINABLE GOALS

30. CRUDE THINGS like base lead, disease and aging would transmute to their perfect opposites in the twinkling of an eye. Young and healthy elites could expect to spend unlimited gold in pursuit of human power and pleasure. We shouldn’t laugh, really. The modern mind finds much to ridicule in the medieval world, especially its search for the “philosopher’s stone” that would dethrone Midas and Aphrodite. Yet one hardly can fault alchemists of old for being enchanted by the dazzling simplicity of unattainable goals.

31. FALLEN MORTAL creatures perennially dream of low-risk fast-track solutions to life’s fundamental concerns. But the hope of “striking gold” is no more realistic today than it was for medieval dreamers. When the philosopher’s stone is turned over, the crude deception hiding underneath shrivels in the light of day. Human beings who place ultimate trust in the material order are guaranteed disappointment and failure. The natural world is insensible to any and all human attempts to divinize it. Such efforts are self-delusional and betray an egregious ignorance of human history and the frailty of mortal human beings.

ONLY GOD IS WORTHY OF ULTIMATE TRUST

32. NATURE DOES not demand a pledge of ultimate trust from human beings as a condition necessary for their earthly prosperity. However beautiful and vital the natural world is for the well-being of humans, materiality is unworthy of man’s ultimate trust. Moreover, ultimate trust cannot be divided and parceled out to contrary realities—mortal or divine, spiritual or temporal, truth or lie—as if one could manage a portfolio of human goods:

NO ONE can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and mammon. [Mt 6:24]

33. TRUST IS a spiritual good enabling persons to commit their vulnerability to one another in the belief that each has the other's good in mind and therefore deserves confidence. Yet not even human beings are worthy of each other’s ultimate trust. Only God the Creator, the self-existing and infinitely perfect divine Spirit, is worthy of a human being’s ultimate trust.

TRAGIC AND FAR-REACHING EFFECTS

34. IRRESPECTIVE OF one’s hunger for excellence or the general goodwill of people, no principle or concept exists by which the spiritual regeneration of mankind may be accomplished apart from God. Ultimate trust either is given to God or withheld from God. This solemn trust is reserved and received as an activity exclusive to a relationship between divine and human persons.

35. THEREFORE, HUMAN beings have no power to attach ultimate trust to one another or to any object within nature or to nature itself. Either one surrenders ultimate trust to God, or, having renounced this fundamental act of faith, capitulates to self-delusion and misery. Nevertheless human attachment to temporal goods is possible, even to sinful obsession and self-destruction, and its tragic and far-reaching effects are felt in every generation. Lamentably, human faith, erroneously schooled, can be made to violate truth and in turn distort what it beholds:

FOR FROM the greatness and beauty of created things comes a corresponding perception of their Creator. Yet these men are little to be blamed, for perhaps they go astray while seeking God and desiring to find him. For as they live among his works they keep searching, and they trust in what they see, because the things that are seen are beautiful.

YET AGAIN, not even they are to be excused; for if they had the power to know so much that they could investigate the world, how did they fail to find sooner the Lord of these things? [WisSol 13:5-9]

PARTICULARLY VULNERABLE TO SELF-DELUSION

36. THE SEARCH for low maintenance-high reward solutions to everyday problems will continue to occupy the best and brightest minds of every generation. But the present generation seems particularly vulnerable to self-deception—craving affirmation, crying for attention, and wanting something for nothing. Abhoring the genuine consangunity of faith and reason, it wants alchemy. Rubbing the stone, it should be evident, will never erase the reality of hard work, social responsibility, and nagging unresolved personal and social guilt.

37. THERE IS no stone. The mythical horn of plenty is hollow. Until people are finally convinced that the material order is not the sole and ultimate reality, they cannot face the deeper questions. People who make a point of dodging the personal and social consequences of their acts will always criticize those who do not. They are intolerant of anyone deviating from their own deviations. Whenever the pope, bishops, and the Church's teachings on faith and morals are publicly demonized, be on your guard!

HOW TO DO THE GOOD

38. AD HOMINEM attacks against the pope and bishops will continue to pollute the intellectual environment until they vanish like smoke on the day of the Lord. In the meantime, the vehemence of these scoldings spikes when serious issues are debated and the Church clearly articulates the truth of Christ. Whether listless or highly charged, habitual carping will accomplish little except to sidestep honesty and the wider philosophical debate. The Church, meanwhile, will continue to proclaim that human beings are not merely individual autonomous members of their species. On each, God confers the sovereignty of human personhood with its panoply of rights and responsibilities. As creatures of intellect and will, all human persons therefore are ennobled by faith and reason to pursue the good and its origin, God.

39. SCATHING ATTACKS on such things as the pope's personality, the Catholic hierarchy, and the male priesthood are a clear sign that the Church's defense of human personhood is a threat to powerful special interests. The Church is not in the business of teaching people how to perform gravely disordered acts according to some imagined sliding scale of evil. She will never counsel people to commit evil nor will she advise people on how to do this by degrees. The Church will always advise people on how to do the good and to abstain from immoral behavior altogether.

ENGAGE LIFE MORALLY AND CONSCIOUSLY

40. ALL HUMAN beings are culpable for the consequences of their actions and for the good owed to others. If one refuses to engage life morally and consciously, he or she is refusing to be a human being. The words of John the Baptist ring true, "No one can receive anything except what is given him from heaven." [Jn 3:27] Engaging life fully is possible only when the universal community of human beings accepts both the body of universally binding moral precepts (moral order) and the God who reveals it, and then solemnly agrees to honor it.

41. READ AND learn. In all history, no mortal emperor, king, procurator, prime minister, president or guru ever said to his people, I will deliver you from all your sins. I will give you everlasting peace. Only one person, the god-man Jesus Christ, preached "a kingdom of truth and life, a kingdom of holiness and grace, a kingdom of justice, love and peace" [SACRAMENTARY Preface "Christ the King" P 51 p 475]:

PILATE SAID to him, "So you are a king?" Jesus answered, "You say that I am a king. For this I was born, and for this I have come into the world, to bear witness to the truth. Every one who is of the truth hears my voice." [Jn 18:37]

"KINGDOM OF TRUTH AND LIFE"

42. IF YOU choose the man, you must choose the Truth as well. There is no other way human beings may accept Jesus as the eternal high priest and universal king:

AS KING, he claims dominion over all creation, that he may present to you, his almighty Father, an eternal and universal kingdom: a kingdom of truth and life, a kingdom of holiness and grace, a kingdom of justice, love and peace. [SACRAMENTARY Preface 51 “Christ the King”]

KEEP IN mind the notorious example of the apostle Judas Iscariot who sealed his doom with a kiss. He embraced Jesus as the man of Nazareth, but he refused to acknowledge him as the Christ of Truth.

43. CONTEMPTUOUS OF sentimental, feeble shepherds, wolves go among the lambs to devour them. How many times must God take human beings back to the starting point? The lamb holds nothing in common with the wolf! This is affirmed in God’s word of Truth: Evil is always perpetrated in the name of good. No good is ever accomplished in the name of evil. Never do evil that good may come of it. [cf. Rom 3:8]

PRAY CONSTANTLY!

44. PRAY CONSTANTLY with the Sacred Scriptures! Consult frequently the CATECHISM OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH. Renew your Christian commitment to the sacraments. Meditate on your own approaching judgment before God. He will hold you personally accountable for doing good and avoiding evil. "Even now the axe is laid to the root of the trees," John the Baptist cried out, "every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire"! [Lk 3:9] Strengthen your minds and hearts.