The Catholic view, the Catholic understanding, of how societies work is simply lost on Catholics, and their leadership.  That is a horrible tragedy with ramifications for all of us. 

 

For instance, not too long ago, a certain Bishop (whose name I shall not reveal) in a certain Diocese (which name I shall not reveal) issued a pastoral letter that brought attention to an anniversary of the founding of that Diocese.  He noted that the history of the Diocese was a struggle to follow “Jesus Christ and build a Catholic culture.”  However, he went on to limit that to three points: honoring the family, fostering vocations, and building churches.  Perhaps unwittingly this Bishop’s letter has given us an insight into the failure of what is known as the Catholic Church in the United States, and perhaps has unwittingly demonstrated the cause for the sorry state of the Church and the national culture in the United States.

 

A Catholic culture is a heck of a lot more than “honoring” the family (whatever that means), fostering vocations, and constructing churches.  If those three points are all this Bishop thinks are needed for a Catholic culture, then he, and his flock, are in a lot of trouble.  To think that you can build a Catholic culture, much less any culture, on those three things alone is ludicrous.  Or, it could be a blueprint for colonization of peoples by the American culture that had been devised primarily by Protestant, and now Jewish and pagan, but certainly anti-Catholic, elites as a means to control the polyglot, teeming, and huddled masses that passed underneath Lady Liberty.  The Bishop’s letter ignores the true meaning of culture and the realities of human nature. 

 

If we look at the definition of the word “culture”, we see that Webster’s gives the word a compact meaning by defining it as the “ways of living built up by a human group and transmitted to succeeding generations”.  Explicit in this definition is the idea of group, and that implies a consciousness by members of the group, that they belong to this group.  In turn, this means that the group views itself and its ways of living as having value, of having worth.

 

Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, authored Truth and Tolerance in which he wrote “faith is cultural.  It does not exist in a naked state as sheer religion.  Simply by telling man who he is and how he should go about being human, faith is creating culture and is culture.” (p. 67).  However, Ratzinger writes, faith “exists as a social and cultural community that we call `the people of God’” and which is an independent agent existing in historical societies or cultures.  These historical groups are, for instance, the Germans, the French, the Irish, and so on and so forth, or, in other words, people who share a history, a language, customs and institutions in time and space.  The faith community and the historical community are in constant tension with each other but it is “a tension that is productive, renewing faith, and healing the culture.” (p. 70).

 

Certain things have to happen if one is to be successful in maintaining and building a community.  The first and most important is to acknowledge the existence, and worth, of the community.  The proper relation of the individual to the group and the group to the individual has to be understood and taught.  Then the physical aspects of community must be addressed because these things are important.  Spatial, physical closeness to like-minded people is important to reinforcing identity, strengthening shared beliefs and values, and maintaining, if not expanding, the community or group.  So, where one lives, with whom one  works and associates, where one recreates and how one does so, what one seeks in life, the virtues and values that one practices—are all necessary to having a viable community.  A prerequisite for this is having a sense of identity, a sense of belonging to a group, and a necessary building block is liking your group, liking who you are.  

 

As some have observed, American culture today is nothing more than a battering ram that knocks down all legitimate communities.  For instance, if “white” people (also known as European Americans) express pride in their heritage, they are viewed as odd or disagreeable or boring, if not dangerous.  If United States citizens with European roots seek solidarity with one another on the basis of shared values and traditions, then they are called racists.   The rich history of the European peoples is ignored, or denigrated, in the American popular culture (and also within the American Catholic Church).  And so the emotional grip is so great on European Americans that many have accepted the elites’ vision of them as hateful and evil, and they have come to be self-loathing. This sort of thing does not allow for the creation of community.  Americans of European ancestry are afraid of showing any kindness or sympathy towards one another for fear of being demonized, and undergoing this torture all alone.

 

Coupled with this, there has been a similar assault on the Catholic community as well as upon the doctrine of the Faith.  The average man or woman in the pews does not really know the Catholic Faith.  He or she is constantly told how Catholicism is responsible for all the evils in the world from the Crusades to the Inquisition to the Conquest of the New World and on and on.  And, I believe to a large extent, that a false religion has been substituted in place of the Faith.  This religion is a mixture of the heresies of indifferentism identified by Pope Gregory XVI where the central belief is that one religion is as good as another, and universalism where all human beings are considered God’s children with no distinction.  The letters of Sts. Peter and Paul to the Faithful are known as the Epistles and these letters stress repeatedly the difference between the Catholics (or Christians, I the correct, non heretical sense of the term) who are the new Israelites, the new chosen people of God, on the one hand, and the non-believers as well as the rejectors of Christ, especially the Jews, on the other hand.  But even though every Sunday these readings are announced to the Catholic congregations, the pew denizens don’t seem to hear.  They don’t seem to see.  They don’t seem to understand.  Or, perhaps they are not allowed to see, to hear, to understand because of the actions of their spiritual leaders who seldom teach the Church’s unique mission and the Faith’s salvific precepts.    

 

The other day, myself and another parishioner proposed to a pro-life parish group that we as a parish honor the martyrs, the Christians (I mean Roman Catholics) who have died for the Faith.  There have been hundreds of millions slaughtered and persecuted over the ages, yet they seem to be forgotten, even by those who seem to be their own people.  The response by one of the luminaries of the parish was “So what?  What makes them so special and why aren’t we honoring all people who are slaughtered or persecuted?”  He disregarded the pleas of the Church to commemorate our beloved dead, and he dismissed the pronouncements of Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI in this regard by saying “I don’t care.”  Then he went on to disparage the Church as a “club”.  Now this comes from a man who calls himself Catholic and who is upper middle class undoubtedly earning a healthy six digit income in mid size Indiana city. 

 

As I reflect on these events, I note that he exhibited the typical behavior of one who holds to universalism, and indifferentism.  And I have come to realize that he and I have different religions.  I am a Roman Catholic.  He is not.  I really do not know what religion he is.  And we really have nothing in common (other than belonging to the same parish) so we have nothing to discuss and so we have no bonds to hold us together.

 

It is really something to see so many holding these dangerous beliefs and acting in such a self-destructive manner, especially when we all supposedly live in a “tolerant” or “multi-cultural” society where “diversity” is celebrated.  It seems logical that everyone, to include the disfavored ethnic and religious groups like Roman Catholics should understand this and celebrate their Roman Catholic Faith and their ethnic roots without shame.  But that is just not the case.

 

The Church has always recognized, and celebrated, national, ethnic differences.  Pope Pius XI in Mit Brennender Sorge (1937) told the German Reich that “No one would think of preventing young Germans establishing a true ethnical [sic] community in a noble love of freedom and loyalty to their country.  What We object to is the voluntary and systematic antagonism raised between national education and religious duty.” (para. 34)

 

Pope John XXIII in his encyclical, Mater et Magistra (1961), wrote, in summation, that to “attempt to undermine this national integrity is clearly immoral.  It must be respected and as far as possible clarified and developed, so that it may remain what it is:  a foundation of true civilization….`The Church…’ as Our Predecessor Pius XII observed with such penetration….`is certainly too wise to discourage or belittle those peculiarities and difference which mark out one nation from another.  It is quite legitimate for nations to treat those differences as a sacred inheritance and guard them at all costs.  The Church aims at unity…she does not aim at a uniformity….’” (paras. 176 through 181)  Universalism and indifferentism is really about imposing uniformity on everyone thereby destroying any sense other than of self..

 

So, it follows that with universalism and indifferentism comes a third – individualism.  The self is elevated above all else.  People are manipulated and controlled by the ruling socio-economic and cultural elites who appeal to the personal desires and wants and fancies of the population.  I believe that the rulers talk to us, the people on the ground, through the motion pictures they make.  One such time was in the motion picture K-19, which starred Harrison Ford as the skipper of a Soviet submarine faced with a malfunction of its nuclear reactor.  In one scene, the officer of propaganda for the submarine showed the crew pictures of life in the United States and tells them that the rulers of this capitalistic society controlled their people by appealing to their individualism with all sorts of material and earthly things.      

 

Individuals cannot make it in life.  We need others.  Families cannot exist alone in society, either.  Families need other families, as well as extended families.  These extended families are known as clans, or tribes, or ethnic groups.     This is the flaw, the danger of these family values groups that always seem to be started and operated by Protestants --  Evangelicals at that.  This in turn begs the question – are these family groups really nothing more than another, a more sophisticated, means of manipulating or controlling the populace by shunting any useful energy and talents to support a cause or promote a paradigm that is unrealistic and doomed to failure.  As any one knows, I am not a big fan of “Evangelical Christianity” or Protestantism, for that matter, because these are tools used by the rulers of society for the manipulation and control of people. These heresies have the ultimate goal and effect of destroying respect for authority and respect for the truth when they allow the substitution of private judgment for the teachings of the Faith and the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church.  This, in turn, has the practical result of isolating all of us in our individuality. 

 

So, the family values movement and its many organizations, and the traditional values groups are all means to waste people’s time and energy in fruitless exchanges with the dominant culture.  These phenomenon serve only the “civic religion” noted by Harvard professor Samuel Huntington and perhaps first articulated by the Great Emancipator, Abraham Lincoln.  This “civic religion” is a false religion whose tenants forge the links of powerful emotional and psychological chains for all of those who ascribe to it.

 

When a long time friend of mine just this last week noted that none of the workers in the company with whom he is employed seem to work together, we get a glimpse of the pernicious effects of this individualism.  He said that they are all out for themselves and their own families, and there is no solidarity.  As a result, accomplishing the business of the corporation has become an exceedingly difficult task due largely to the lack of cooperation among the workers.  

 

You can see the effects of this individualism perhaps in your own parish or church.  How many times do other parishioners invite you to their house for dinner or for coffee?  How well can you count on them to help you in times of need?  How often are they with you to celebrate?  The other day I invited everyone in the Parish Council of my parish to call me and together we could go to see a movie.  To date, four months later, there has not been a single call except from the President of the Parish Council, a decent, good man who, true to his mandate, checks on the welfare of members of the council. 

 

Of course, with an individualistic outlook on things, one’s career and welfare become paramount.  Alliances, not friendships, are formed, and the strength of the alliance is determined by the mutual benefit each ally may provide to the other.  No one is going to rock the boat, and, no one will want to be seen with or affiliate with those who are considered to be marginal or unpopular or outside of the halls of power.  The cult of celebrity is glorified, and giving to the poor, or the unfortunate, or any of a number of popular causes of the day is just a matter of “playing the game”, going along with the flow and ingratiating ourselves with the rulers. 

 

And there you have it – with individualism, all that matters is brute power.  Not the truth.  Not the Faith. Just power – the guy (or gal) with the greatest money, influence, and force rules and determines what is true and what is false, what is right and what is wrong.  Those groups who keep cohesion and their identity are therefore at a distinct advantage over those who ascribe to the unholy trinity of individualism, universalism, and indifferentism.  The groups with pride in and a sense of who they are will be, and are, those who rule the society.  

 

The society that rejects the Faith and accepts these pagan precepts, will fall into perdition.  That is the lesson of the Old Testament for every time the Israelites fell away from God, they were conquered by their enemies.  Today, Mexicans are flooding the United States and effectively taking away the southwest, and in Europe, Moslems are building mosques in Berlin.  It is Biblical, it is logical, it is certain.  The only way to reverse these trends is for the group to return to the Faith.  The Faith, the Church, is the life blood of any people, and without it, a society dies.

 

Finally, even among those of us who hold to the same beliefs and are of one mind with each other, individualism has crept into our thinking and our acting.  It is not uncommon for members of like-minded groups to go off on their own, to make their own way, to think they can write the last great novel, or to think that they can lead the next great movement, or to find just one more truth.  Oftentimes, a hidden motivation is self aggrandizement or self-gratification, but just as often it is the result of a need to make a living, to have an existence, in a society that is fragmented. Contacts and conversations are circumscribed out of fear of appearing to be telling others what to do or seeming too intrusive, we let our brothers drift away in a crushing, debilitating isolation.  Like-minders get together for coffee or a meal and then disappear for long stretches of time pursuing their own course, and thereby accepting the values of the very system that is destroying them.

 

Group solidarity has to come about, and only then will the poisons of the dominant culture which have seeped into all of our psyches start to be flushed from our systems. The martyrs were revolutionaries because they defied the rulers, with their ideologies of enslavement.  They died for their witness, but they changed the societies in which they lived. 

 

Bella Dodd, former American Communist Party official, said after her conversion to Catholicism that it was an act of  resistance to stick together as a group in this society.  And it is said that change starts with a single act of defiance.  European Americans should be proud of our heritage, and we must stand in solidarity with all our brothers and sisters.  And, I am a Roman Catholic, and I call on all to convert to the one, true Faith, and in doing so save their souls, and their people.