What right does a non-religious organization have to comment
on a religious event? Every right,
evidently, if you are the media. The
problem, of course, is that, even with all the best will and good intentions in
the world, if you don’t understand the underlying principles of reason that
support a religious organization’s faith, you’ll probably get a lot of things
wrong, and misinterpret or misunderstand what you get factually correct.
A case in point is the recent “Synod on the Family” held by
the Catholic Church. Even some of the
participants seemed uncertain what the whole thing was about, inserting
discussions on what to do about same sex unions, divorced and remarried
couples, and who knows what-all. We don’t recall reading any reports about discussions involving the subject
allegedly under discussion: how to restore and maintain the integrity of the
plain, old, normal family — you know, the billions of domestic arrangements
that plain, old, ordinary people are in.
We did see one analysis of the Synod that hinted something
was being overlooked in all the diversionary issues and discussions. That was “Father Z.’s” blog posting, which
can be accessed here.
A few minor quibbles and one major, all “sins of omission”
in our opinion, freely given, and that’s about what it’s worth (our opinion,
that is, not Fr. Z’s analysis, which we — mostly — agree with).
Quibbles? 1) the categorization of Catholics (or any other
religious believers) into “liberals” and “conservatives.” We think “orthodox” and “unorthodox” would be
better and more accurate. 2) Another
word: “progressive.” It used to be
something good, cf. Theodore Roosevelt, Archbishop John Ireland, Judge Peter S.
Grosscup, etc. Then Roosevelt lost the election of 1912 and
progressivism degenerated rapidly into another form of socialism. 3) A few other things, but even mentioning
the quibbles detracts from the main point that, in our opinion, Fr. Z. should
have addressed, but did not:
The rejection of reason as the foundation of faith on the
part of both “liberals” and “conservatives.”
This does not mean that reason should replace faith, any
more than faith should replace reason.
Faith fulfills reason, just as charity fulfills justice. Once you get away from that, you lapse almost
inevitably into the twin evils of modernism and, strange to say, theosophy (“New
Age”) thought; we were astounded last month to come across a “recommended
reading list for Catholics” by a leading conservative Catholic intellectual
that included E.F. Schumacher’s A Guide
for the Perplexed, a theosophical tract, positing only a difference in
degree, not in kind, between the orders of creation and God.
Aquinas warned about the abandonment of reason 800 years
ago. We haven’t gone earlier than the
19th century with the popes, but Pius IX and every pope since, including John
Paul I in a Wednesday allocution, have issued similar warnings. The problem is what to do about it.
In our opinion, the orthodox position would soon reestablish
itself if people were empowered with control over their own lives. As it is, with the concentration of power in
private hands as in capitalism, and in the State as in socialism, ordinary
people cannot act in accordance with human nature except at great cost to
themselves. Offend your employer and you
lose your job. Offend the State, and you
can lose everything. (Which is why
capitalism is marginally better than socialism.)
It is, in our opinion, no coincidence that both modernism
and theosophy developed in a world in which ordinary people were rapidly losing
property, and thus power. The different
forms of modernism — and there are both liberal and conservative forms, as
became evident in the late 19th century — linked up with socialism and
capitalism. Theosophy linked up with
socialism.
This is not to say that both liberals and conservatives are
not well-intentioned. We believe they
are. The problem is that by trying to
put everything on faith and charity instead of reason and justice in matters
pertaining to natural law, and on unsound reason and false notions of justice
in matters pertaining to faith and charity, they are not doing themselves or
anyone else any favors. They are clearly
suffering from what Ronald Knox termed “enthusiasm,” which he defined as “an
excess of charity that threatens unity.”
If people were able to apply reason to the situation, and
allow themselves to be guided by the teachings of their religion, this nonsense
would soon stop. Academia, however, has
largely abandoned reason, turning into training for jobs that don’t exist. Consequently, both modernism and theosophy
present ways of dealing with the “new things” of the world that circumvent or
ignore reason, usually to secure material wellbeing; what the solidarist
economist Franz H. Mueller called “meliorism” is, in effect, a new religion, as
Chesterton pointed out in his conclusion to St.
Francis of Assisi.
And then there’s the new definition of “distributive justice”
that developed in the early 20th century.
This is, in our opinion, the best (or worst) example of the distortions
that have been forced on understanding of the natural law. We believe that Fulton Sheen was a victim of
this sort of thing at the Catholic University of America, given what he wrote
in God and Intelligence in Modern
Philosophy, his first book. Sheen
inadvertently made himself a target of both modernists and theosophists in all
religions by insisting on reason and faith, not reason or faith.
Rather than do “Old things in new ways” as Pope Benedict XV
said was the ideal in his first encyclical in 1914, liberal modernists try to
do new things in new ways to update religion, while conservative modernists
attempt to preserve a past that never was and do old things in old ways in an
effort to “freeze” a religion in whatever time period they think was its heyday
(of course, this begs the question, for if a religion is true, every day is its heyday). This leaves the orthodox of all faiths out in
the cold, baffled by events like the Synod and confused by the media.
Yet again in our opinion, what is needed to prevent such
hijackings in the future is for religious leaders of all faiths (we’re not just
picking on Catholics) to issue clear statements of the principles of economic
justice (participative justice, distributive justice, and social justice), and
suggest ways in which ordinary people can become owners of capital without
either redefining the natural right of private property or redistributing
existing wealth. As Leo XIII said (and
reading “social” for “labor”),
“We have
seen that this great labor question cannot be solved save by assuming as a
principle that private ownership must be held sacred and inviolable. The law,
therefore, should favor ownership, and its policy should be to induce as many
as possible of the people to become owners.” (Rerum Novarum, § 46.)
Once people have regained control over their own lives, and
have relearned how to think, that is, use reason properly, they will easily see
through the efforts of others, especially some misguided clergy, to change
fundamental principles of the natural law to accommodate people who should,
rather, be corrected and rehabilitated.
