As we’ve seen in this series, one of the most striking
characteristics of the shift in the basis of the natural law from the Intellect
to the Will is the necessity of rejecting reason itself — even among
individuals and groups who claim to base their respective positions on reason
and common sense. The “inner light”
Chesterton disparaged is their only guide and lamp unto their feet. As Knox explained,
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| Knox: "The enthusiast descries reason." |
“[The enthusiast] decries the
use of human reason as a guide to any sort of religious truth. A direct indication of the Divine will is
communicated to him at every turn, if only he will consent to abandon the ‘arm
of flesh’ — Man’s miserable intellect, fatally obscured by the Fall. If no oracle from heaven is forthcoming, he
will take refuge in sortilege; anything, to make sure that he is leaving the
decision in God’s hands. That God speaks
to us through the intellect is a notion which he may accept on paper, but
fears, in practice, to apply.” (Knox, Enthusiasm, op. cit., 3.)
Especially in the United States, where Msgr. Ryan ruled the
interpretation of Catholic social teaching, there was a strange reluctance to
question the validity of the assumptions underlying that interpretation. Part of this, of course, was due to Ryan’s
skill in evading questions, and in denigrating or attacking anyone who dared to
challenge what he regarded as his rightful preeminence.
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| Ryan: Ask no questions. |
As Franz Mueller related, “Ryan anticipated the accusation that his program
was socialistic or paternalistic, but this, he felt would be an attempt at refutation
by name-calling, not deserving serious attention.” (Mueller, The Church and the Social Question, op. cit., 106.) Father Charles Owen Rice, chief spokesman for the “Catholic Radical
Alliance,” an organization founded to promote Ryan’s ideas, in a barb that may
have been directed at Fulton Sheen, declared in a pamphlet in the 1930s that
those who opposed their implementation were “traitors to Christ.” (Pamphlet, Catholic University of America Archives, CIO central office papers,
1937-1941, quoted in Neil Betten, “Charles Owen Rice,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, Volume 94, 524.)
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| Benedict XV: "Old things, but in a new way." |
Consequently modernism remained “underground” (so to speak)
until the Second Vatican Council seemed
to give carte blanche to those who
wanted to reinterpret the Church’s mission in the world as purely
material. This, they believed (or
claimed to believe) would bring the Church into the modern world (hence the
name “modernist”), addressing the “new things” by completely jettisoning the
old, ignoring Pope Benedict XV’s “Old things, but in a new way” (Ad Beatissimi Apostolorum, § 25). “Aggiornamento” (“bringing up to date”) seemed to validate modernism as applied
in the Church’s social teaching, especially the New Deal that Ryan promoted so
assiduously.
Of course, anyone who has actually taken the time to read
the documents of Vatican II knows full well that nothing doctrinal was changed,
and there was no basis for the demands of the new modernists, any more than
there had been for those of the old adherents of “the Third Dispensation”
superseding both the Old and the New Testaments with the doctrines of the New
Age (cf. Knox, Enthusiasm, op. cit.,
583-584). There was to be a greater
emphasis on the work of social justice, but that was nothing more than the
popes had been saying since at least the days of Leo XIII.
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| Baffling liturgical innovation as well as philosophical shifts. |
Many of the changes, however, were a flat contradiction and
repudiation of everything that had gone before — except for the aberrations
that, thanks to Ryan, had become embedded as the new orthodoxy in Catholic
social teaching for the past half-century.
Ryan’s innovations were taken as validating the changes that many people
thought were consistent with the
presumed “Spirit of Vatican II.”
As a case in point, it seems that virtually every “second
generation” solidarist — those of the generation following that of Pesch’s
students — rejected Aristotelian-Thomism.
At the same time, they labored under the delusion that they were being
consistent with it. They reverted
solidarism to the principles articulated by Durkheim . . . all the while
seemingly unaware that there was any difference!
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| Aquinas overthrown. |
The innovations of Ryan and the modernists were now to be
extended to the whole of Church teaching and practice. This effectively overthrew Aristotelian-Thomism
and confirmed the shift from reason to faith as the basis of the natural
law. The fact that there was absolutely
no basis in fact for any of this was ignored.
We do not, of course, refer to changes in applications of
Catholic teaching, or externals of worship.
Changing the language of the mass from Latin to the vernacular annoyed,
even outraged many people, but changed nothing substantive. Claiming that charity now eliminated the need
for justice and common sense in accordance with the demands of “social justice”
and similar declarations, however, did
involve changes in doctrine and fundamental beliefs.
Naturally, this did not happen in a vacuum. The modern world to which the modernists wanted
to conform was and remains a world badly in need of itself conforming back to
the principles of natural law found in authentic Catholic social teaching. Nowhere was this more evident than in the
United States.
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| William Marbury (left) and James Madison (right). |
According to William Crosskey, possibly the premier American
constitutional scholar of the twentieth century, the whole thing started in the
United States by including a contradiction in the Constitution: slavery. In order to preserve and extend slavery, the Supreme
Court gradually used a perfectly correct decision, Marbury v. Madison (1803), to expand judicial review and thus the
power of the Court.
This, by the way, also illustrates in the most graphic
manner possible the fact that contradictions are always disastrous, one way or
another. In any event, there is a clear
line of descent from Scott v. Sandford
(the notorious Dred Scott case) in 1857, to Roe
v. Wade in 1973. The development of
and descent into moral relativism in religious society parallels (and, in fact,
relies on) the shift from Aristotelian-Thomist natural law theory, to legal
positivism as the prevailing philosophy in domestic, religious, and civil
society.
The question remains, however, How did such an anti-human
and irrational philosophy ever take hold in the Catholic Church, presumed by
Chesterton, Knox, and Sheen to be the last bulwark of reason and common sense on
earth?
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