religious liberty

Just Claims

Just Claims on May 30, 2009

On the assumption that the Second Vatican Council established within the Catholic Church a serious split between Catholic Truth and Catholic Authority, “Eleison Comments” three weeks ago (“Flat Contradiction”) divided today’s Catholics between those who cling to Truth and have problems with Catholic Authority, and those who cling to Catholic Authority and have problems with Catholic Truth or doctrine, for instance on religious liberty.

Setting up such a parallel between “Conciliarists” following Vatican II and “Traditionalists” following the age-old doctrine and liturgy, may well shock numbers of both, for the reasons evoked above, but let us appeal to the realities in the Church around us. Do we not observe that as Traditionalists who wholly reject present Church authorities risk losing their Catholic sense, so too Conciliarists who wholly scorn present Traditionalists (as do most German bishops) risk ceasing to be Catholics for lack of any sense of doctrinal truth?

However, the parallel only goes so far. For while outright “sedevacantism” and outright Neo-modernism are in this logical respect comparable, they are by no means equivalent, because Truth is higher than Authority, which only exists to serve Truth. If all Authority disappeared, Truth would still be there (“My words will not pass away,” says Our Lord – Mk.XXV, 35). But if all Truth were smothered in lies, as is happening today, we would see, as we are seeing, all Authority discredited with it, and being replaced by brute force. Truth and its ensuing Justice are the life-blood of Authority. Authority is merely the servant and protector of Truth and Justice.

This is why Traditionalists clinging to Truth are, as such, repeat, as such, better Catholics than Conciliarists clinging to Authority – judge by the fruits! And while Truth, by its nature of corresponding to the object and not to the subject, cannot bend to Authority, on the contrary the Church authorities, Popes and Cardinals and Bishops, must one day bend back to the Truth, and the sooner the better. Nor is saying so remotely an arrogant claim on the part of Traditionalists, as Cardinal Ratzinger once opined, because Traditionalists never invented Tradition, Tradition was a given, from being merely faithful to which they got their name. Archbishop Lefebvre had engraved on his tombstone St. Paul’s “Tradidi quod et accepi” (I Cor.XI, 23), because he was the very first to maintain that he had done no more than hand on what had been handed down to him.

This fundamental primacy of Truth over Authority applies inside and outside the Catholic Church, inside and outside any part of the Church. But modern souls have lost almost all grip on Truth. Here is the drama.

Kyrie eleison.

Flat Objection

Flat Objection on May 16, 2009

A friend has just reminded me of the classic objection to the teaching of the true Catholic Church on religious liberty, outlined here last week. Here is the objection: Major: To force anyone’s belief is absurd, because belief is not something that can be forced. Minor: But to refuse people’s religious liberty is to force their beliefs. Conclusion: Therefore to refuse religious liberty is absurd.

The Major here is true. What someone does or does not believe in matters of religion is the choice of his inner free-will, which either cannot be gotten at from outside of him, and/or – especially in the case of the Catholic Faith – should not be gotten at from outside, because “Nemo nolens credit” (St. Augustine), i.e. nobody can believe against his will. So outer forcing of Catholic belief is either impossible or wrong.

The problem lies in the Minor of the objection. The Traditional Church doctrine that a Catholic State should not grant to its citizens religious liberty does not mean that the State should force anyone’s private belief, nor does it mean that the State should force anyone to act in public in accordance with Catholic belief. What it does mean is that a Catholic State has the right to prevent the public practice of any religion contrary to Catholic belief, and if the prohibition will do more good than harm, it has the duty to prohibit such practice. This is because every State made up of human beings comes from God as do they, and it has from God a corresponding duty to provide temporally (i.e. to do what it can in time, here below on earth) for the eternal welfare of its citizens (i.e. their salvation in Heaven). Citizens are normally influenced by everything going on in the State around them, so their eternal salvation is normally hindered by the public practice of false religions.

Thus the Catholic Church teaches that religious liberty must be denied 1) only in the case of false religions, 2) only in their public practice, and 3) only where it will do more good than harm to prohibit such practice. This used to mean only in Catholic States, because where there is little or no Catholic Faith, such a prohibition makes little to no sense. Today it means in hardly any States at all, because the citizens of all modern States are so steeped in liberalism (the quasi-religion of liberty) that even in supposedly Catholic States today such a prohibition would outrage people’s worship of freedom and so it would do more harm than good.

However, of these three conditions, the first is the key. If I do not grasp that Catholicism is the one and only completely true religion, I shall never conceive why all other religions should ever be blocked in public. Contrariwise, if I grasp that Catholicism alone (accepted at least implicitly) can send souls to Heaven, and that all other religions, as such, repeat, as such, send souls to Hell, then it follows automatically that their public practice should, where reasonable, be blocked. It comes down to a question of Faith. “Lord, I believe, help thou my unbelief” (Mk.IX, 23).

Kyrie eleison.

Fatal Turn – II

Fatal Turn – II on August 30, 2008

To say that the “turn to man” is the key-note of Vatican II is not an insult to Vatican II. Was not “die anthropologische Wende” (“the turn to man” in German) at the heart of Fr. Karl Rahner’s thinking, and was not Rahner one of the very most influential minds at work in the Council? The question is not whether or not Vatican II turned to man. The question is whether that turn was a good or bad thing.

The Council’s Declaration on Religious Liberty, Dignitatis Humanae(Of Human Dignity), argues that every civil government must grant to all its citizens the civil right to practise in public whatever religion those citizens choose to practise, because even if they misuse that right by choosing to practise a false religion, still their intrinsic dignity or worth as human beings demands that they be granted that liberty to choose. No liberty, no dignity.

Here is the key quotation: “The right to (civil) religious freedom has its foundation not in the subjective disposition of the person” (broadly equivalent to what we call “second nature”) “but in his very nature” (what we might call, as against second nature, man’s “first nature”). “In consequence, the right to this immunity continues to exist even in those who do not live up to their obligation of seeking the truth and adhering to it . . .” In other words, where the Catholic Church always used to teach that the prime worth of a human being so consists in his getting closer to the true God that a State may – wherever it will not be counter-productive for the salvation of souls – forbid the public practice of false religions, i.e. all non-Catholic religions, the Conciliar Church henceforth teaches that the prime worth of a human being so consists in his making his own choice of religion, true or false, that no State should place any civil hindrance in the way of any citizen practising in public the religion of his own choice.

The difference may seem slight at first sight, but the implications are enormous: man in the place of God. For Catholicism, a man’s prime worth or dignity consists in the right use of the free will intrinsic to his (first) human nature. Free will is not an end in itself but merely a means of so choosing good as to get to Heaven. God’s good is the end, man’s freedom is merely the means. Man’s first nature is for his second nature. First nature is not enough for eternal salvation.

On the contrary, for Conciliarism a man’s prime worth so consists in his first nature that the mere exercise of his free will, regardless of the good or evil he chooses, is more important for the human person and therefore for the State than the right use of his free will. In other words man’s free will comes before God’s right or wrong, before God’s Heaven or Hell. The mere exercise of freedom is becoming an end in itself. “First nature” now has priority over second nature. If “God” condemns men to “Hell” for “misuse” of their free will, that is God’s problem (or a problem of the old religion), not a problem for man!

Could any doctrine put men more surely on the road to Hell than such a “turn to man”?

Kyrie eleison.

Fatal Turn – I

Fatal Turn – I on August 16, 2008

Man, says Vatican II (Gaudium et Spes), is the only creature that God wants for its own sake. Typically for Vatican II, this statement has two possible meanings, one orthodox and the other profoundly revolutionary. Unfortunately for the “conservatives” who try to maintain that the Council was Catholic, it is the revolutionary meaning that clearly corresponds to the key doctrine of another Council document, Dignitatis Humanae, and is therefore the Council’s true meaning.

Amongst all the material creatures on this earth, man alone is rational, i.e. endowed with faculties capable of knowing and loving God. All the rest of material creation serves only as a trampoline for man to bounce his short life on, until either he jumps to Heaven or crashes into Hell, and as soon as the last soul appointed by God to make that choice has done so, then all material creation will be consumed by fire, says Scripture (II Peter), because it will have served its purpose. In this sense it is true that God wills all creatures for man, and man alone for himself.

But that God wants man for man’s own sake is absolutely false in relation to God because God cannot want any creature, even man, for anything other than for the sake of God himself. God is Self-Being, Self-Good, totally Self-Sufficient, totally Self-Perfect. He can be in no want outside of His Divine Self-Being, because that would be in Him a need, a lack, an imperfection. That does not exclude his wanting to create creatures other than himself – look around! – but it does exclude his wanting them ultimately for anything other than for his own Goodness. Penultimately, i.e. prior to ultimately, he may want them for their own sake, for instance man to share in his Bliss, but ultimately he can only want them for his own Goodness, otherwise he would be needing them to perfect him – blasphemy!

St. Thomas Aquinas explains this ultimate and penultimate willing of God by a comparison with sweet and sour medicine, Ultimately I take the medicine, sweet or sour, only for my health, but if the medicine is sweet then penultimately I can be taking it also for its sweet taste. Ultimately God can want nothing but his own Goodness. Only penultimately can he want any creature for its own sake, e.g. man, to share in the Divine Bliss.

Does the distinction seem subtle? In the present case it is all the difference between man being centred on God, as the true Catholic religion knows, or God being centred on man, which is what the false religion of Vatican II is promoting – the “turn towards man.” Stay tuned for the proof from Dignitatis Humanae that the centring of God on man is the Council’s true meaning.

Kyrie eleison.

“Pascendi” – II

“Pascendi” – II on November 3, 2007

Before the centenary year of Pope St. Pius X’s great anti-modernist encyclical, “Pascendi,” closes out, let us give two examples of the light which it throws upon today’s undiminishing confusion in Church and world: the primacy of objective truth, and the non-binding nature of sedevacantism (the disbelief that recent Popes are true popes).

Over the last two centuries, the modern world has fallen more and more into the grave error of subjectivism, whereby every man (or subject) makes his own truth, so that he is free from any supposedly objective truth imposing itself upon his mind from outside. One hundred years ago this error threatened to undermine the objectivity of all Catholic dogma – hence the Encyclical. Yet one hundred years later, despite Pius X’s efforts, the mass of Catholic churchmen are awash in this error – hence Vatican II, Religious Liberty, Ecumenism, etc.

In Pascendi, Pius X nailed the unhooking of the subjective mind from objective reality as the foundation of the coherent Newfaith of the modernists’ Newchurch. What mental rest and spiritual relaxation to be able to lean on the one true religion given to us from outside and above by the one true God, without our having to pay heed to the mass of modern fantasies!

However the Conciliar fantasies have taken such a grip on many of today’s churchmen that the temptation arises to consider that none of them are churchmen at all, in particular the last few Popes. But Pascendi can offer a way out of this temptation by its same teaching that subjectivism unhooks churchmen’s minds from reality. Are they fully aware of how mad they are, when virtually everyone shares in their madness? And if they are not fully aware, do they necessarily disqualify themselves as churchmen? Pascendi suggests at least to me that sedevacantism is not binding.

By no means everyone agrees with letting the Conciliar churchmen off the hook in this way, but that is of secondary importance. Back to Pascendi – what is of primary importance is to give glory to God and to save our souls by submitting our minds to that one objective Faith which God has revealed, and without which nobody can please God (Heb XI:6).

Kyrie eleison.