Bishop Bruskewitz Addresses Marian Congress

by Bishop Fabian W. Bruskewitz

Dear Friends,

I am deeply grateful to Fr. Robert Fox for his kindness in inviting me to address you this morning, and, of course, I am grateful, indeed, to my dear brother in the episcopacy. Bishop Robert Carlson, for his gracious consent to my being here in his Diocese of Sioux Falls.

The theme of this year's Marian Congress is "The Heart of the Father." It is most appropriate that in this year of 1999, dedicated by our Holy Father, and presumably by all of us, to God the Father in preparation for the Great Jubilee of the Year 2000 that we should turn our faces and our thoughts in a solemn way toward the One in Heaven whom we so often and regularly call "Our Father." It is not only that His paternity has a claim upon us because He created the universe and sustains it, and this includes each and all of us, but also, because in Jesus Christ He shared His very life, and by sanctifying grace, our participation in His divine nature makes it possible for us to address Him with that Hebrew term of intimacy that the New Testament uses, that is "Abba." As St. Paul observes in his epistle to the Galatians, "It is the Holy Spirit within our hearts placed there by a loving Father that makes it possible for us to address Him in a terminology that would otherwise seem blasphemous.

Jesus, who is the mercy, grace, love, and forgiveness of this heavenly Father of ours, God, the great transcendent Yahweh, is the One who leads us into intimacy with Him. This intimacy must be sustained and guided, however, if it is not to be aberrant and go astray, by the prolongation and extension of Jesus in time and space, which is to say, by His Bride and Body, the Catholic Church. This brings us to the general gathering of our congress; it is a Marian Congress, and the Blessed Virgin Mary is, indeed, a type and model of the Church — at once the first and most exalted and important member of the Church, while being both daughter and mother of this Church, a spouse like the Church of the Holy Spirit, and like the Catholic Church the new Eve, which is to say, the Mother of all the living.

The Catholic Church, then, is the ground and pillar of truth, as the Bible tells us, and in this Church we find both our mother and our teacher. Less than a year ago, the Supreme Pontiff, the bishop of Rome, issued a very important encyclical letter entitled in Latin, Fides et Ratio, or "Faith and Reason." It was dated Sept. 14th, 1998, and although it is the product of his thought, prayer, and extensive erudition, our Holy Father intends, I think, that it be noted and read by all of us. As children of the Church, I think it would be a mistake not to pay the closest attention to what our Holy Father points out in this encyclical, and, consequently, I would make some observations, deriving from this encyclical the object of this talk. Nothing can bring us closer to the heart of the Father than the divine Son, whose Sacred Heart shows us the Father, and the Holy Spirit, and the Founder of the Catholic Church, who touches us most directly and particularly through the teaching of the Successor of St. Peter. As St. Ambrose observed so long ago, "Where Peter is, there is the Church, and where the Church is there is every gift and everlasting life."

French chefs who cook frogs have learned long ago, that it is not only cruel, but a mistake to insert the live frogs they are about to cook into a pot of boiling water. Frogs make every effort to escape from this scalding experience. However, the way in which the frogs are ultimately cooked for purposes of dining, is that they are placed in very comfortable room temperature water which is very gradually heated up to the boiling point. The frogs rest tranquilly in the water, not observing that it grows hotter and hotter, and contains their doom. In a certain way, these frogs, destined for the dining tables of French gourmets, symbolize our Western civilization, and specifically the civilization of the United States, which is the foremost cultural carrier of Western civilization. In a quiet way, perhaps imperceptible in the vast majority of Christians and Catholics, certain values, attitudes, outlooks, and erroneous philosophical principles are boiling us ultimately to doom in time and perhaps even in eternity. Our Holy Father's encyclical, Faith and Reason is in a certain way, a call to reflect on where we are in regard to these matters, and is a summons to evaluate a little more carefully where we are personally, and where our culture is and is taking us.

The first and, perhaps, fundamental problem that the Pope sees, and that if we step back from our cultural environment we also should be able to see is a misunderstanding of freedom and liberty. We Americans, of course, are justly proud of the political and social freedom that we enjoy in our country and have enjoyed for nearly 223 years. However, freedom does not mean, as some of our fellow citizens seem to feel, that we can think and do whatever we please. Freedom, our Lord tells us, is linked with truth. Jesus (John 8:32), was emphatic in saying, "You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free." Pope John Paul II tells us that "truth and freedom either go together hand in hand, or together they perish in misery." People who misunderstand freedom, or who, in their own lives divorce freedom from truth, are not really free. They may be, even though it may not be clear to them, slaves to fashion, slaves to error, slaves to misunderstanding. As Edmund Burke once observed, "Some people can never be free because their passions form their fetters." More than we might suspect, we are oftentimes the objects of manipulation by advertising and political enterprises who even employ clever psychologists and psychiatrists to assist them in policing our thoughts and directing our inclinations. Unless we are brave enough to stand with the truth of our Catholic faith, and in particular, with the Founder of our religion, our Lord Jesus Christ, who not only tells us the truth, but in His very divine Person is the Truth, unless we are able to find within ourselves the fortitude to be counter-cultural when called upon by the truth to so be, we could all find ourselves chained by addictions, pleasures, self-seeking, possessions, wrong opinions, deleterious companions, and the like. It is not out of place for us to question frequently whether our adherence to a particular ideology, a political party, an inherited outlook and the like, may actually have a priority over our adherence to truth. In any such miscalculation, we would unfortunately find ourselves far from being free.

In the "Declaration on Religious Liberty," Dignitatis Humanae, of the Second Vatican Council, we are not told that it does not matter what church one belongs to or what religion one adheres to. On the contrary, the text says just the opposite. What the declaration says, of course, that human beings should be free from governmental coercion in these matters. It is especially important for us to adhere to the terms of this declaration, and unlike the frogs in the slowly warming water, to recognize the fact that a certain religion called "Secularism," a certain religion which has as its theme the absence of God and the absence of religion, is being foisted upon us by a godless culture which the trench-coated, hate-filled killing mafia of the Littleton, Colo., High School are a symbol.

Certainly, religion and placing God in public affairs is important beyond merely social utility, that is to say, only to help overcome the dreadful drug and crime infested inner cities of our country. However, it does seem to be very difficult to find any possibility of a long-lasting cultural and national morality apart from religion. Sen. Richard Henry Lee, one of the first senators from the state of Virginia, in the First Congress of the United States said, "Refiners may weave as fine a web of reason as they please, but the experience of all times shows religion to be the guardian of morals."

The new "State Religion" which is gradually being formulated in its doctrinal and moral elements by such things as decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States, is applying gradually, but with increasing intensity, the heat that we, perhaps unknowing and comfortable frogs are ignoring. Homosexual conduct, for example, as a constitutional right seems to be newly promulgated, as well as the radical feminist view that men and women are identical. Fads and sentiments, particularly as the media, and especially the queen of the media — television — portray them, are the determining elements, it appears in what is happening in our culture today. Compromise, consensus, and good feeling are made into absolute and supreme values, so that truth is eclipsed, overshadowed, and even evaded so long as these are allowed to prevail.

For many sectors of our society, public opinion polls are the determining elements as to what constitutes good and evil. Neither the natural law written in human hearts, nor the divine law revealed by God seem to have any impact on the thoughts and minds of our fellow citizens, and unfortunately, by gradual and implicit methods, these attitudes can also insinuate themselves into our own outlook.

Conscience is, of course, the supreme subjective arbiter and criterion of morality. However, conscience is not the inventor of morality and human beings have it within their capacity to own a conscience which is erroneous. Conscience is our reason passing judgment on the rightness or wrongness of a particular act, thought, or omission. If a conscience is either lax or scrupulous, and not tender, conscience can, indeed, lead one into error and into evil deeds or omissions. Consciences can certainly be malformed and in this case, if one has a suspicion or a certitude that one's conscience is erroneous, it is sinful even to follow one's conscience in such circumstances. Unfortunately, for many people, following one's conscience seems to mean doing whatever one pleases, which brings us back to the importance of truth. Unless the conscience of a person is in line with the truth, this person, even though he or she thinks he is acting in a free way, is really deprived of liberty.

Certainly, no human parent, particularly a loving father, would sell his children into slavery or allow them of their own volition to become slaves. This is why God, our Father, reveals His truth to us in Jesus, and through the ongoing work of the Holy Spirit in the Catholic Church. It is precisely this truth, that gives us what St. Paul calls the ability to live the freedom of the children of God.

In the course of the French Revolution, the Jacobans took a prostitute and enthroned her on the high altar of Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. They crowned her and called her "Reason" and pretended to worship her. More than we might suspect, something similar is happening, though in a less flamboyant way in our own culture. There is a certain tyranny of the majority which is permitting and promoting such horrors as the vile slaughter of millions upon millions of innocent little babies before they are born. Pope John Paul II said in his encyclical. The Gospel of Life, "Abortion and euthanasia are crimes which no human law can claim to legitimize. There is no obligation in conscience to obey such laws. Indeed, there is a grave and clear obligation to oppose them by conscientious objection." He goes on to say, "In the case of an intrinsically unjust law, such as a law permitting abortion or euthanasia, it is never licit to obey it or to take part in a propaganda campaign in favor of such law, or to vote for it."

The Jesuit scholar, Fr. John Courtney Murray, once remarked, "The American concept of government by the people, does not attribute to the people the divinity implied in the French revolutionary idea of 'sovereignty of the people.' It simply embodies the ancient principle of consent in a developed and still recognizably Christian sense. The American system neither supposes nor effects an exile of God from society. Finally, the State itself, in its distinction from society, rests on no pretense that even political life can be organized without any regard for God or for the order established by Him. On the contrary, the Constitution of the United States has to be read in the light of the Declaration of Independence, in which there is an explicit recognition of God and of an order established by Him, the order of human rights which is part of the universal moral order to whose imperatives the political order must be obedient."

Our Holy Father, Pope John Paul II said, "It is true that history has known cases where crimes have been committed in the name of truth. But equally grave crimes and radical denials of freedom have also been committed and are still being committed in the name of ethical relativism. When a parliamentary or social majority decrees that it is legal, at least under certain conditions, to kill unborn human life, is it not really making a tyrannical decision with regard to the weakest and most defenseless of human beings? Everyone's conscience rightly rejects those crimes against humanity of which our century has had such sad experience, but would these crimes cease to be crimes, if, instead of being committed by unscrupulous tyrants they were legitimated by popular consensus? Democracy cannot be idolized to the point of making it a substitute for morality, or a panacea for immorality. Fundamentally, democracy is a system and as such, is a means and not an end. Its moral value is not automatic, but depends on conformity to the moral law, to which it — like every other human behavior — must be subject. In other words, its morality depends on the morality of the ends which it pursues and of the means which it employs. If today we see an almost universal consensus with regard to the value of democracy, this is to be considered a positive sign of the times as the Church's Magisterium has frequently noted. But, the value of democracy stands or falls with the values which it embodies or promotes. Of course, values such as the dignity of every human person, respect for inviable and inalienable human rights, and the adoption of the common good as the end and criterion regulating political life, are certainly fundamental and not to be ignored. The basis of these values cannot be provisional and changeable majority opinions, but only the acknowledgement of an objective moral law, which, as the natural law written in the human heart is the obligatory point of reference for civil law itself. If, as a result of the tragic obscuring of the collective conscience, an attitude of skepticism were to succeed in bringing into question even the fundamental principles of the moral law, the democratic system itself would be shaken in its foundations, and would be reduced to a mere mechanism for regulating different and opposing interests on a purely empirical basis."

In his encyclical. Faith and Reason, our Holy Father points out that relativism is one of the great philosophical errors of our time; namely, that there are no fixed and immutable moral principles or doctrinal truths out of which one can formulate ultimate attitudes or civil laws.

Among the errors which Pope John Paul II points out in his encyclical Faith and Reason, is a type of relativism called historicism. This is the denial of the enduring validity of truth. Historicists claim what is true in one period may not be true in another. Thus, in the words of the Pope, "For them, the history of thought becomes little more than an archeological resource, useful for illustrating positions once held, but for the most part outmoded and meaningless now." It is said that recent surveys show the overwhelming majority, in the vicinity of 90% of American high school students, do not see anything intrinsically wrong with lying or cheating on examinations, and only feel that it is wrong if one gets caught. Implicit, of course, in such an attitude are that there are no ultimate sanctions, and that if one can "get away with it" that is all that counts in the whole field of morality. Obviously, it is simply not the morality of justice or truth, but every aspect of morality that is touched by such an attitude. It may have been wrong in the past to lie and cheat, but, according to American high school students, it is now perfectly legitimate to do so as long as you do not get caught.

Another error which our Holy Father points out in his encyclical that derives, as does relativism and historicism, from a denial of the link between truth and freedom, is the error of scientism. In our time there are undeniable triumphs of scientific research and contemporary technology. Our ancestors who lived at the turn of the last century would be flabbergasted and utterly dumbfounded to see what we are doing here at the close of this century. Unheard of and astounding feats of science and technology are falling upon us every day, and we are profiting from so much of what is accomplished in those fields. At the same time, there is no intrinsic contradiction between faith and science, between religion and reason. But, there are those in the field of science who fall into the philosophical error of scientism, maintaining that if something is technically possible, it is, therefore, morally admissible. Those who follow the false teaching of scientism would maintain in a certain kind of materialistic way, that ultimate questions about the meaning of human life and about the destiny of humanity are not really in the purview of the human mind to grasp.

The Pope also warns, in his encyclical, about the error of pragmatism. For us Americans, this is an especially dangerous cultural inclination. Pragmatism, too, divorces truth and freedom, and as a result, it makes all our judgments exclude any ethical principles, and makes all that we judge dependent on results alone. One of the great apostles of pragmatism was the atheist-philosopher John Dewey, the American who has influenced and continues to influence American public education to a very large extent. The Pope remarks that there is a growing support for the concept of democracy which is not grounded upon any reference to unchanging values. Whether or not a line of action is permissible is decided by the vote of a parliamentary majority. The denial, theoretically or practically, of the connection, of the necessary connection between truth and freedom which leads to such things as relativism, historicism,, scientism, and pragmatism, all inevitably lead, as the Pope points out, to nihilism, which is the denial of all human dignity, and indeed, the humanity and identity of human beings as images of God Himself. I think the tragedy of Littleton, Colo., and so much else of what goes on in our society, the self-destructive tendencies of so many people, are all illustrations of nihilism.

The complaint is often made that the religion and religious wars have been deleterious to mankind in the course of man's journey through history, but our century proves that non-religion and atheism, are far more destructive than religion or religious wars. One thinks of Nazism, and its neo-pagan racism; one thinks of the even more horrendous horror of Communism, which is inherently and intrinsically atheistic. Marxism and all of its socialistic manifestations are a certain formula for a nihilistic outlook.

Walking into a new century and into a new millennium, let us then, not be like the deceived frogs of the French kitchen, gradually warmed until we are boiled in the ghastly slime of relativism, historicism, pragmatism, scientism, and ultimately, nihilism. Since we are celebrating the Year of the Father, and since the theme of our congress this year is the heart of the Father, let us understand that this Father who would never give His children a stone when they ask for bread, or a scorpion when they ask for an egg, will bestow on us in Jesus and through His Holy Spirit, every good thing. We must reach up and cooperate with His grace, and thus, confront those aspects of our culture which can only bring ruin and harm in time and in eternity to us, and to those who are journeying with us across this desert called life to the promised land of Heaven.

Since this is a Marian Congress, and since the feast we celebrate is that of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, allow me to conclude this talk with the words by which our Holy Father concludes his encyclical Faith and Reason:

"I turn in the end to the woman, whom the prayer of the Church invokes as Seat of Wisdom, and whose life itself is a true parable illuminating the reflection contained in these pages. For between the vocation of the Blessed Virgin and the vocation of true philosophy, there is a deep harmony. Just as the Virgin was called to offer herself entirely as human being and as woman that God's word might take flesh and come among us, so too philosophy is called to offer its rational and critical resources, that theology, as the understanding of faith, may be fruitful and creative. And just as in giving her assent to Gabriel's word, Mary lost nothing of her true humanity and freedom, so too when philosophy heeds the summons of the Gospel's truth its autonomy is in no way impaired. . . . In Mary, the holy monks of antiquity saw a lucid image of true philosophy. . . . May Mary, Seat of Wisdom, be a sure haven for all who devote their lives to the search for wisdom. May their journey into wisdom, sure and final goal of all true knowing, be freed of every hinderance by the intercession of the one who, in giving birth to the Truth and treasuring it in her heart, has shared it forever with all the world."

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