Sunday, April 19, 2009
The synthesis of all the heresies
Michael Liccione quotes an American RC priest (I’m guessing an older one) who thinks this is a good thing:
Faith (as modern Americans construe it) is not some objective reality into which they feel they should fit; rather, faith is the way people choose to assemble their ideals, in accord with the force or thrust of those ideals. That, my friends, presents the basic spiritual problem from which all of America’s ecclesial and social ills flow.
Of course because it’s a culturally Protestant country: the happy hunting-ground of sectarianism as Mgr Ronald Knox called it.
SCOTUS said in 1992, and was believed almost without question when it repeated in 2003: “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe and of the mystery of human life.” That’s exactly the right our first parents claimed for themselves. It works politically as long as the golden rule, the harm principle, is enforced but objectively of course it’s wrong. To anticipate the reaction a good friend of the blog, I agree that the neocaths sometimes fall into the same traps as their liberal opponents (just like fundamentalism is itself thoroughly modern unlike the traditionalism we both believe in) but this is still good and I give credit where it’s due.
Comment:
The really scary thing that I’ve begun to notice (being a recent Boston College grad and knowledgeable of all the goings-on there) is that cafeteria Catholicism is not purely a subjective choice which presupposes some form of inclusiveness. Rather, many of the faithful select their own dogma and then try to impose it on the Church as if the fate of the civilized world depended on it — it’s tyrannical, which is ironic since that’s the dissenter’s word of choice for the Vatican. Liccione adds:
It’s subjectivity masquerading as objectivity. Everybody has a pope in their belly. In other words, the imperial self. Labels: the Catholic faith
7:44 PM Permalink
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Some jottings about the news
