In 1907, the year after Monsignor John A. Ryan published his
doctoral thesis, A Living Wage, Pope
Pius X, whom the Catholic Church recognizes as a “saint,” issued Pascendi Dominici Gregis: “On the
Doctrines of the Modernists.” This was a
follow-up to the issuance of Lamentabili
Sane, the “Syllabus Condemning the Errors of the Modernists” published a
few months previously.
Even a less suspicious person than I might be tempted to see
at least a tentative link between the rapid spread of “the synthesis of all
heresies” in the Catholic Church, and the growing influence of economic and
philosophical theories directly at odds with the natural law and explicit
Church doctrines. Nowhere would this be more
evident than in the theories of Msgr. Ryan, whose teachings were to establish a
virtual hegemony
tantamount
to a new religion
over the interpretation of Catholic social teaching that has
lasted down to the present day. We also
see this in the way Keynesian economics, for all its obvious flaws, has come to
dominate global monetary and fiscal policy, with disastrous results.
Thanks largely to the efforts of Father Edward McGlynn, ably
assisted by other “Americanists,” and despite McGlynn’s excommunication, the
theories of Henry George had penetrated deep into American Catholic thought. Things had gotten so bad by 1907 that Pius X
actually went to the extraordinary length of warning people against what many people today accept as
the sole job of “religion”: taking care of people’s material needs.
This was bad enough, but (as we have seen) even
understanding of the active virtues, especially justice and charity, had been
confused and undermined. Consistent with
the program of Henry George, the mission of the Catholic Church in the world was
no longer to be a sure guide to understanding the precepts of the natural law
and an interpreter in matters of faith and morals.
Instead, everything was to be subordinated to meeting the
needs of the poor — and that by any means necessary. This is what Dr. Franz H. Mueller, the
solidarist economist, would call “meliorism” in his harsh critique of Msgr.
Ryan’s lamentable influence on Catholic social thought, The Church and the Social Question (Washington, DC: American
Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, 1984).
This egregious
misunderstanding of the roles of religion and faith may be the heaviest cross
the popes of the 20th and 21st centuries have had to
bear. As Pope John Paul II would remind the bishops
of North and South America nearly a century later,
The results could hardly have been unexpected. As the obsession with material wellbeing
increased, concern for spiritual goods decreased. In the latter half of the 20th
century, when the Second Vatican Council appeared
to give a purely “social Gospel” à la
Ryan the imprimatur, attendance at Sunday mass plummeted. Vocations declined dramatically.
This makes sense. If
“religion” can be summed up as “help the poor,” and almsgiving is the only
sacrament, why bother with all that meaningless ritual? What can a priest, brother, or sister do that
anyone else cannot?
Why
work for a heaven in the hereafter, when we can have it in the here and now?
This past “All Souls Day” at the parish where I sing in the
choir (a feast that Catholics celebrate November 2), there was a special series
of masses to pray for the dead, especially those who died during the year. At the noon mass — the “big event” for the
day — the choir almost outnumbered the congregation.
The rector, who celebrated the mass, complained aloud that
ten years previously the church would have been full. He counted barely forty people in attendance. He seemed to blame the poor turnout on
indifference.
This, too, makes sense.
Why, after all, pray that the dead may be loosed from sin in order to
enter a spiritual heaven, when the exclusive mission of the “Church Militant”
(members of the Church in this life) is to make a material heaven on
earth? Why waste money on masses for the
dead, on parish maintenance, or anything else, when you can give that money to
the poor?
And the less generous?
Why bother to go to mass when all you hear is how you are damned for all
eternity for not being poor, not being poor the right way, or not supporting
the right State programs or political candidates who will vote for greater
benefits?
“[L]ove
for the poor must be preferential, but not exclusive. . . . it was in part
because of an approach to the pastoral care of the poor marked by a certain
exclusiveness that the pastoral care for the leading sectors of society has
been neglected and many people have thus been estranged from the Church.” (Ecclesia
in America, § 67.)
Unfortunately, the emphasis on meeting the needs of the poor
above all else meant that socialism, because of its ostensible concern for the
poor, would be preferred over capitalism, which clearly marginalizes the
poor. Further, either one would be preferred
over a common sense system based on the full spectrum of natural rights, i.e., life, liberty, and property, such
as the Just Third Way.
This, of course, raises the question as to what, exactly,
this “modernism” is all about. Perhaps
most simply put, modernism (while being anything but modern) is the application
of the shift from sound reason to bad faith in religion. We noted this already in reference to
the understanding of the natural law applied in civil society. As Pius XI declared in his first encyclical in
1922, “There is a species of
moral, legal, and social modernism which We condemn, no less decidedly than We
condemn theological modernism.” (Ubi Arcano Dei Consilio, § 61.)
Once we understand that modernism is the manifestation in
religious society of the legal positivism that William Crosskey noted in civil
society, things fall into place. Crosskey pinpointed the problems in his
analysis of the infamous Dred Scott decision and the effective nullification of
the Fourteenth Amendment by means of the “crafty” opinion the Supreme Court
rendered in the Slaughterhouse Cases
in 1873. This, as we have noted, shifted
the basis of the Constitution from the lex
ratio (reason) found in the Declaration of Independence, to lex voluntas (will/faith), by means of
which might makes right.
Problems Crosskey noted included the tendency to redefine
basic concepts, twist words, even manipulate facts to justify a position. Thus, Crosskey claimed that James Madison
creatively edited the minutes of the Constitutional Convention to preserve
slavery (vide “The Ex-Post-Facto and
the Contracts Clauses in the Federal Convention: A Note on the Editorial
Ingenuity of James Madison,” 35 U. Chi.
L. Rev. 248 (1968)).
By 1873 and the Slaughterhouse Cases, however, slavery had
finally been abolished — but the Supreme Court had tasted power and obviously
liked it. Slaughterhouse enshrined the
change in the whole concept of human nature and natural law into American
politics and jurisprudence, from whence it has yet to be ousted.
Similarly, by redefining basic concepts, twisting words, and
manipulating facts, modernists made Catholic doctrine subject to the will of
the strongest, rather than reason. The
analytical framework shifted from sound reason to unsound faith. The first point of attack in modernism was
scholastic philosophy, the strongpoint of reason, particularly the philosophy
of Aquinas. As Pius X noted,
“If we
pass from the moral to the intellectual causes of Modernism, the first which
presents itself, and the chief one, is ignorance. Yes, these very Modernists
who pose as Doctors of the Church, who puff out their cheeks when they speak of
modern philosophy, and show such contempt for scholasticism, have embraced the
one with all its false glamour because their ignorance of the other has left
them without the means of being able to recognize confusion of thought, and to
refute sophistry. Their whole system, with all its errors, has been born of the
alliance between faith and false philosophy.” (Pascendi Dominici Gregis, § 41.)
The common thread in all forms of modernism and positivism
is the separation of being from personality. If rights are not inherent in human beings as
part of their unchangeable nature from the moment of creation, but are a revocable
or amenable grant after a human being
comes into existence, then everything is up for grabs. Who is in the right — and who, therefore,
grants rights — depends on who has the power to force his or her will on
others. Nothing in this framework is or
could possibly be objectively true, while effective sovereignty depends on who
has power.
This accounts for both the “raw judicial power” exercised by
the U.S. Supreme Court in, e.g., Roe v. Wade (410 U.S. 113 (1973)), and
the bullying and intimidation one sees increasingly in religious circles. With reason and knowledge meaningless
concepts, true debate becomes impossible.
Trickery, deceit, and pressure tactics become the order of the day in
civil society (the State), religious society (the Church) and, increasingly,
domestic society (the Family). Without a
solid foundation in the natural law based on reality — nature itself — and
discerned by reason instead of faith in either God or the State, the social
order at every level dissolves in chaos.
