A Prophetic Sermon About Christianity

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Source; https://patriotcommandcenter.org/forum/a-prophetic-sermon-about-chr...

Sent from a friend...... I'm not the most religious person, but the teachings are what America's Constitution and Declaration were based upon....... A Republic, if we can keep it............

“Wherever a religion other than the Christian religion holds sway…wherever the Christian religion weakens, the nation becomes, in exact proportion, less capable of general liberty…” ---Joseph de Maistre

A democracy's political order shares it philosophic space with Christian spirituality.  Both are pervaded with a sense of equality amongst humans. Christianity, whose moral absolutism in general states that all humans have the same dignity and moral worth, supports democracy as a “best in class” form of humanly possible government, although it cannot bestow upon it the sole title without becoming seriously distorted. A certain tension of juxtaposition emanates between the two. Democracy requites equality in the law, in the form of rights. Christianity teaches a voluntary equality of position through good works, charity and sacrifices. For another world, were humans are angels, that makes sense. For this empirical one, where humans are no such thing, it is suicide. Rights asserted will inevitably enhance one at the expense of another, destroying equality, especially Christian equality. When that happens morality is jettisoned for the sake of power or position. Of great concern since public morality is the basis for the legitimacy of the political order.  But without objectively grounded rights, the basis of society, order and good is reduced to nothing(1).

Christianity therefore helps define virtue within the political order by its transcendent tenets but does not mandate it copy its definition for the realm it operates in. Christianity does such by both defining and justifying the existence of rights, and their limits, for without limits rights devolve into license. Without this natural source of rights, they easily can become arbitrary, reconfigured by those in power at any given time. That of course destroys the very logic and substance of rights, changing them to opinion of the dominant political power. Rights as such can come and go regardless of their virtue and need.

Democratic political order therefore must ascend from a virtuous people to the institutions of government to which they consent. A political system, inclusive of its jurisprudence mechanisms, based solely on the empirical wants of the power structure abandons the moral substance needed to fuel a democracy. For law without morality is not law but just a shell. Democracy then, when in accord to that higher authority, becomes ultimately legitimate and not just the mob rule of the majority.

Can the institutions and traditions upon which a democratic society flourishes remain solid while their internal truth atrophies? Morality requires an orientation to truth. Nietzsche, getting the description right (but the prescription wrong) found that modern civilization’s impulses claiming to seek truth are in reality power masquerading as intellectual and moral virtue.

Western society, withering away its Christian roots from the assault on it by militant secularism(2), has less and less ability to comprehend and resist unvirtue, better known as the intolerable, or evil. Evil which Christianity, through its doctrine of original sin, recognizes the imperfectability of the human and its susceptibility to use its freedom for evil. America influenced and formed within a Christian environment has been less affected than other societies by that negative aspect of modernity, and its history and success confirms as much. But as Hadley Arkes has pointed out the shift, starting with the 1960’s generation, towards nihilism is transforming natural rights into legal positivism,  replaces the objective reality of natural rights (or moral truth), with outcome-based agenda rights, through the force of government. This creates a civil theology in conflict with its transcendent roots.   

 

Catholicism is not a market-research religion...it must be the naked truth, presented without cosmetics and exercises in public relations...It survived because what it taught was the truth...because it is always, everywhere, the same..." Paul Johnson

How far the Catholic Church has fallen is certainly a fact. During the Crusades it could unite Europeans from the Mediterranean to Norway.  In the first half of the 20^th century it was Albert Einstein who said of it “…the universities were silent…the newspapers were silent…Only the Catholic Church stood squarely across the path of Hitler’s campaign for suppressing truth…the Church alone has had the courage and persistence to stand for intellectual truth and moral freedom…”. And later that same century it was the Pope who was part of the triumvirate that created the foundation that overthrew the horrendous Soviet Union by the strategic ideological approach they created and supported. Yet today, the proportion of Catholics in the Scandinavian countries, to take but one example, is no more than 1% of the population-a terrible figure unless one notes that even the number of observant Swedish Lutherans is only 3%. More than 400 years after the Swedish Reformation outlawed Catholicism the faith claims a quarter of all believers in a land that Protestantism has lost.

Throughout Europe such depressing rates of Christian belief point to a gradual extinguishing of the faith. In America, the rates of church attendance are better, but with one serious caveat, not with time tested religions. In Europe--though this is changing the longer secularism remains dominant--people know what Christianity is and have turned their backs on it. In the United States, people believe what they want and call it Christianity, as a quick perusal of any phone book will show. A similar attitude is spreading to Latin America, where Protestant churches are making inroads on what were once Catholic countries. In Brazil, the rate of Mass attendance among putative Catholics is less than it is in England. In northern Europe, the faith is weak. In southern Europe, things are generally better, but not much. In America, there is room for hope-but it is hope that requires work.

Perhaps this modern diminishing of the belief and reliance in Catholic faith is due to the fact that, in the words of Theodor Haecker:   “In the past the non-believers had a real sense and a vivid realization of what sin and guilt were, and in place of the certainty of punishment was offered the certainty of forgiveness. Today, things are otherwise. Since there is no longer any sense of sin, the evangel of forgiveness of sins has obviously no longer any point of incidence.” And that, as John Caiaza so astutely observed: “… in order for religion to work, the religious believer must actually think that the objects of his beliefs are real and that the doctrines of his religion are true.”

Yet, for all its flaws and downward trends, the Catholic Church remains the largest religion in the world, numbering roughly a billion people. It is stretched-unlike any other-over every continent in substantial numbers. It claims to be universal and is. It is also the most ancient institution in the Western World, dating back two thousand years. As Paul Johnson has written: "The church, mainly through the popes, stands for continuity, and for certitude. What it teaches is in all essentials what they taught in the first century A.D., when they were hunted men living in the catacombs. That truth, to most believers, is the central attraction of the Catholic Church, and the chief virtue of the papacy which rules it."

The Church stands, above all else, for defining historic truths. Truths that it has, to the best of the ability of the humans it has been entrusted to, faithfully carried on, expounded, and evangelized. Principles that have not been tried and found wanting, but that have been tried and found demanding (and unfortunately therefore, easy to abandon). But it is equally true that in the third Christian millennium there are powerful new challenges that only the Church can overcome-namely the challenges of technological sciences and modern social mores to human integrity.  Man is again on the road attempting to redesign what it means to be human. The object of Dr. Frankenstein, or his compliment, Mr. Marx, might soon become reality-indeed, their dreams, and our nightmares, easily surpassed.

There is, however, one serious opponent to this future. The Catholic Church is the only substantial institution with a well-articulated philosophy opposed to such artificial utopian quests, and only if the Catholic Church and Catholic people have sufficient power and influence can it be stopped. If the world truly is ruled by ideas, Catholic ideas need to extend into universities, laboratories, and government councils to a far greater extent than they do now. To stop the Brave New World future that might otherwise be in store is an enormous-apparently Sisyphean-task. But it is the Church, and the Church alone, that has even the remotest chance of doing it. As J.A. Schumpeter said: "Men of the most different types, origins and desires, extreme democrats and extreme authoritarians, cooperated with a smoothness that might have even roused the envy of Marxists, solely on the strength of their allegiance to the Catholic Church.”

The absence of God, when consistently upheld and thoroughly examined, spells the ruin of man in the sense that it demolishes or robs of meaning everything we have been used to thinking of as the essence of being human: the quest for truth, the distinction between good and evil. And as Thomas Aquinas pointed out, Christian faith is grounded in reason, and it is compatible with the philosophical investigation of it. That there need not be a dichotomy between a rational discourse of religion and consideration of its values, history, customs and traditions. Therefore, belief morality depends primarily not on the vicissitudes of human instinct, feeling and desire but on the nature of mankind, which includes his reasoning mind. And here's where faith comes in, the nature of mankind can be attributed to God through the instilling of that nature in us and making it discoverable through analysis and reason. From the recognition that reason can exist within religion (despite the fact that a vast portion of today's postmodernists think that laughable), its role in the realm of today's social and political spheres becomes justifiable, through the concept of free will.

“Major events in history are determined by many factors, but the most important single one is always the quality of the people in charge…” –Paul Johnson.  The situation facing the Catholic Church today is in part a crisis in the priesthood, a major failure of its leadership, precipitated in large part, as Archbishop Elden J. Cyrtiss has said, by: "... people who want to change the Church’s agenda, people who do not support candidates who accept the Church’s true principles…and by people who actually discourage viable candidates from seeking the priesthood.” In the late 20th century, Graham Greene addressed that issue by arguing in favor of more robust priestly vocations saying: "I think that for many people, especially the young, the priesthood must have the attraction of a crack unit. It's an organization which has to train for combat, one which demands self-sacrifice...I'm convinced that the drop in vocations has to do with the fact that we don't put across clearly enough the attraction to be found in a difficult and dangerous calling." Father James Gould, who is the director of vocations for one of the most highly seminaries in America, confirms this observation saying: "There have been plenty of highly suitable good men "who have been turned away simply for embracing the teachings of the Church, especially about the nature of the priesthood and issues of sexual morality. The rejection of good candidates has helped cause the artificial shortage of priests in America."   Today the Church, more than ever, needs a few good men, perhaps many good men, for such campaigns to win the hearts but mostly minds. As H.W. Crocker III said: "Sometimes Christianity needs hard men." 

Predicting the future is impossible, unless you believe in Protestant predestination. Man however can and will find his future. What he finds, and if he even continues to be around for the endless search, is anybody's guess without the Church. The life of the Catholic Church, from its beginnings with the Apostles filing out from the Holy Land, to its rising to be a check and balance over kings and empires, to its continued survival and worldwide development, even in the face, since its inception, against every conceivable form of persecution, is the most extraordinary story in the world, without parallel.

The problem that the Church is facing today consists of its coming to terms with its creed of infallibility. The neo-liberal influence upon the Church, its condoning beliefs and acts contrary to the Catholic creed, are indeed causing a slow and dangerous destruction of the very things the faith stand for. Hedonism and materialism encourage the young to disregard the Church's teachings. Feminism and environmentalism is pushing them into paganism and Wicca. This is specifically manifested with the homosexual abuse problem surfacing today, which is but a result of the larger issue of the Catholic Church's straying from its traditional principles. It is time the Church recognizes that is problems stem from its human component, which too is susceptible to error (the concept of Original Sin at play again). The Church needs to rediscovery its theological vigor by subjecting itself to the very tenets of its own creed. First its clergy must admit its sins, seek forgiveness and pursue salvation through contrition and acts of contrition. Then, once the "rock upon which Christ has built his Church" is again purified, they can then minister to the flock's problems.

 

Despite it all, the Church will prevail(1). It survived the Diocletian and Julian the Apostate. It outlasted Arianism and Manicheanism. It will probably outlast the Protestant heresies. As Jesus said: "The gates of Hell will not prevail..." The Catholic Church has been and remains a great positive force, and perhaps through it, indeed, only through it, will Christianity have a chance to be valued and give value to mankind again.  "If Christians would toughen up a bit, get out of the religious closet, follow their faith instead of their fears, and live their beliefs in a more robust way, we would once again change the face of this nation more drastically ...[T]rue faith is resilient. It can handle scrutiny. It has answers for tough questions. It has solutions for societal pollution." --Doug Giles

 

1.      For example, Catholics in Asia grew from 12 1/2 million to 121 million between 1900 and 2010 and from 6 1/2 million to 128 million in Africa during the same period.

 1.  “A liberal democracy depends for its very existence on a set of cultural assumptions that it did not create and cannot sustain on its own, that on the one hand expects people to be hard-working, self-sacrificing, frugal and produce, and on the other hand encourages people to be indulgent, selfish, acquisitive and consume.”---Bockenforde Paradox

2.  These anti-Christians do not extend the same standard of tolerance, acceptance, and endorsement they sought for themselves to those who disapprove of their activities.

 

 

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