Marks of Modern Liberalism
We may presume, I believe, that Alfredo Cardinal Ottaviani had the situation of our own United States in mind when he wrote that "for many years Catholicism has been enduring not only the attack of the enemies of the Church against the Church, the assault of those who launch the fierce attack of materialism against every spiritual doctrine, and every liberty and human dignity, but it has also been obliged to defend itself against the treachery of those who would substitute for the Church of God, the church of man."1 We have here the heart of the problem of liberalism as it has gnawed at the foundations of Catholic Christianity for the past hundred years. It is the older error of materialism in slightly different guise, not professing outright devotedness to things in preference to God, but centering man in a philosophy of social adaptation and advancement that seeks to place man's earthly objectives above his supernatural dignity.
Sociology or Theology?
This sociological orientation of theology does not arise from the true Catholic concept of social justice. Social justice is the application of Christian principles and Christian doctrines to the social problem. Liberalism begins with progressive sociology and seeks to have theology fit into its program. This cannot be done by a harmonious relationship between the tenets of modern sociology and the doctrines of Christianity, because sociology, as an applied science, has been built upon premises that are contradictory to Christian first principles and antagonistic to them. Consequently, premises have to be either vague or ignored in anything that calls itself "Catholic" liberalism.
Antagonism to the Past
The modern sociological first principle that man is essentially perfectible in the natural order, that he is a part of the necessary evolvement of a materialistic system of economics upon which the new and progressive social order rests, is in complete opposition to the doctrine of Original Sin and the need which man has for spiritual redemption. Historically, too, progressive sociology is at variance with the valid truths from the past vindicated by all human experience. It requires a veritable chain of perversions of theology conceived without true Christian premises to achieve the supposed harmony of Catholic truth with liberal sociological dogmas. The mark common to all these perversions is antagonism to the past proffered in the name of progress. In theology, art, literature, the spheres of ascetics and morality, the would-be "Catholic" liberal feels he must break with the past. He seeks to conceal Christianity and the part it has played in the progress of social betterment. His strategy is not to oppose it or disclaim it, but merely to let Christianity be regarded as superfluous, to let it die on the sociological vine.
The Church: A Nurturing Institution
The present is elusive and cannot be appraised; the future is never sure; the past alone is real. Upon these verities the Church and the Christian social order were built. Because of them tradition has become the process of true growth and all true progress. That is why the process of culture has always rested on an awareness of the past. It is a process like biological growth, retaining and utilizing all elements of the past, while assimilating with them whatever is new. The old is only discarded when it has become atrophied. It is not resisted or hated; it is simply dropped. The Church, as the mother of culture, has utilized the good things that men have achieved or even stumbled upon in the past. She makes them her own, hands them down to succeeding ages, cherishes them and recalls them. She never turns from them to the new; she greets the new with joy and advances by it in an ever widening and deepening stream, readying herself by means of the past to assimilate whatever the future may bring. In this sense the Church is progressive. But she is not at enmity with the past; she is not revolutionary.
Fundamental Tenets Denied in Liberalism
If liberalism, under any of its varying and confusing definitions, is to be truly of the Church, it will have to recognize this. Only that liberalism which, according to liberalism's standards, amounts to conservatism can have Catholic acceptance. It seems folly, therefore, to keep calling it liberalism, since all forms of modern liberalism have the element of revolution in them: revolution in the sense of breaking with the past. This counts for political and social liberalism as well as for religious liberalism. The modern forms of social and political liberalism have risen on denials of very fundamental and theological doctrines from the past, doctrines such as that of man's helplessness without supernatural grace; man's personal and individual worth as illustrated by the Incarnation and the Redemption; the efficacy of voluntary effort in the remedying of social ills; love rather than coercion, the freedom that arises from personal accountability and responsibility over and against the freedom which signifies license. All of these are, for purposes of life, denied in any brand of liberalism, regardless of the earthly paradise and the progress it seeks and promises.
A God-Centered View of Man
The Church and Christianity are a living heritage. They come to us from the past. They represent the crystallized good of the past, the sustaining good, the assimilating force of progress. They represent the very antithesis of the revolutionary process unleashed in the period of the Renaissance when men first turned sociologically from the God-centered world of religion to the man-centered world. Had the movement remained a renaissance of the truth from the past, and to the feeble extent that it did, it would have been and was the beginning of a new era of enlightenment and progress. But in relegating God's dominion to the past and accepting man's dominion as the challenge of the future, it became the revolutionary movement that begot all the disharmony, chaos and retrogression that succeeding revolutions have nurtured in the name of that which is new, progress. Man, with the true and basic elements of religion torn from his soul, with his view of a materialistic paradise achieved collectively, with his new dogmas of evolution (biological and social), has reverted to what might be called an intellectual barbarism. He has the momentum of Christianity and the social order built by Christianity still with him, but he is a rebel with a counterfeit cause at best, a cause that cannot lift him from his doom.
False Messianic Ideals
The sociological philosophies of Hegel and Marx in the mid-nineteenth century were the inevitable results of liberalism. They provided systems in harmony with liberalism's perennial messianic ideals in a world without God. Humanity and humanitarianism became the substitutes for God and religion in the social order. Sociology developed on the basis of these and in line with the evolutionary theories of Darwin applied to the economic order. The end result was modern pragmatism, flowering as it has, even in its most humane forms, into state socialism.
Many Christians have become infected with liberalism, not realizing that, along with the necessary evolution of materialistic progress, they were accepting apostasy from God and the spiritual nature of man. Religion without these bedrock facts as its foundation becomes a superfluous handmaid of sociology, perhaps a deadlier degradation of it than agnosticism and atheism, and certainly a more deceptive one. Little wonder that Cardinal Ottaviani speaks of our era as follows: "We are unfortunately in times which call for resistance, not only to open adversaries, but also to those who, behind the lines, look more sympathetically to the enemy's camp than to their own, and who thus do more harm from within than they would do if they had already crossed over to the other side."2
Humanitarian Objectives No Substitute for Truth
Almost every aspect of materialistic sociology has been manifesting itself in some segments of the Catholic press of America as being in harmony with Christian ideals of social justice. Undoubtedly some objectives are in themselves humanitarian and altruistic. But to confuse objectives with the principles of philosophy that seek to attain them is not valid logic. If the objectives, no matter how worthy, are materialistic, we must take into account that they can only be pursued in the measure they are in harmony with valid Catholic moral doctrines. We shall find that the social and political liberalism — which for the present seems to be the favored philosophy of so many Catholics — does not bear up under true theological scrutiny. We are failing God and human freedom, in its true sense, when we are willing to substitute collective efficiency for personal action, not always so effective. But personal action is fundamental to Christianity, because on it are based doctrines of conscience, prayer, charity, responsibility, loyalty, perseverance, right intent, merit, initiative, and sacrifice. Take these out of the social order and we can have at best a prosperous hell on earth instead of a civilization. No person can have happiness without these; no personality can have true expression.
These ideals, all truly Christian, permeated our Western world from the doctrines of Original Sin and the Redemption, the Christian contradictories of liberalism's social and economic utopia. It is a sign of how frighteningly far would-be "Catholic" liberals have drifted toward the camp of the enemy that we find deceptive articles on Original Sin minimizing man's disordered state after the fall of Adam and suggesting that there is "good" other than mere ontological goodness possible in man without grace. This type of theology does not merely countenance materialism; it is paving the way for an outright rejection of Christianity's basic doctrine of man, and his need for redemption. It amounts practically to a renouncing of Christianity.
Breaking With the Past
It is a strange phenomenon (a manifestation, in fact, of Christian decadence beyond possibility of belief were it not evident to us daily) that there are many "Christian" liberals ready to throw out fundamental and vital doctrines of Christianity on assumptions of materialistic uplift. Of course, those guilty are not prone to admit this. Perhaps it is not a well-thought-out conviction on their part that leads them to reject those basic Christian doctrines. Perhaps it is more a penchant to think like worldlings — a "looking to the camp of the enemy with a certain envy" — rather than purposeful subversion, which impels them to subordinate their theology to sociology. In many it can hardly be called an articulate philosophy or viewpoint. It is more a tendency to conform to what they believe is a new world outlook.
We read, for example, passages like the following, which reveal how deviously these intellectuals seek to break with the Catholic past:
History has no answers to the educational problems of today and it would be a mistake to look to the past for an ideal of Catholic education . . . He asserted that our educational system, inherited, has its roots in the Greco-Roman world, a world which not only did not believe in progress, but which looked back to a golden age irretrievably past. We have been guilty of this same tendency for generations . . . Looking to the past can help us only in a general way . . . we must solve our own problems.3
Envy for the Camp of the Enemy
Or, again, a treatise on Original Sin which has as its title: "Has Original Sin Darkened Man's Intellect and Weakened His Will?" and subtitled "Theology for Everyman"4 which concludes that the Council of Trent really leaves this an open question and that, although "man needs God's help to resist temptation and in the present order of his supernatural destiny God's help comes in the form of grace, we must not, however, so stress the need of grace as the result of the sin of Adam that we make grace alone the cause of man's salvation and deny to nature the inherent goodness that belongs to it as a creature of God."
Or again such passages from seminary publications as these: "To approach man as an individual without Christ is folly; to approach man as an individual with Christ is blasphemy." "St. Paul says that Christ became a member of the human race in order to espouse its cause and represent its interests." Of course, such statements could lend themselves to an orthodox explanation, but the sad fact is that they occur as viewpoints of a new theology and one cannot but discern that they are made in deference to collectivists, rather than as truths for men to live by. They are the type of assumption that compromises vital truths in order to pave the way for Catholics to espouse the social and political tenets of economic liberalism. And no one can deny that much of the Catholic press today is replete with this espousal.
Non-Resistance is not Charity
Another mark of liberalism is its advocacy of non-resistance. It permeates much Catholic pacifist literature, but it is also applied to religious journalism in general. "We must not be against anything; we must be for things. The Holy See reserves condemnation to itself. Above all, charity,"5 which can well mean non-resistance to error, nonresistance to propaganda, non-resistance to lies and misrepresentation in the secular press, non-resistance to the content and techniques of progressive education, etc., etc., etc. Or such basically untrue and inadequate utterances as this:
No matter how grave its errors and its illusions, socialism was in the XIX century a protestation of conscience . . . It carried on a crude and difficult struggle in which were expended many loyalties, loyalties of the most touching human quality, the loyalties of the poor. It loved the poor. It cannot be criticised effectively unless we attribute to it many very sure claims.6
One would have to forget the intellectual perversions of those in the nineteenth century who formulated and propounded socialism and the work of the saints and leaders in the Church who truly loved the poor and truly instituted principles and institutions of social justice, to be able to swallow whole the observation that "socialism loved the poor and struggled alone in their behalf." But such is the climate of our liberal intellectualism that writers propose brazenly that social justice in the Catholic sense will only make progress in the measure it espouses socialism and socialism's objectives. And when we recall that world-Communism proposes world conquest on the same espousals, we might begin to comprehend how far from true Christian principles and techniques so many of our would-be "Catholic" liberals have departed.
Catholicity is its Own Sociology
A grave and damaging misconception crept into Catholic socio-theological thinking somewhere during the past few decades. It is the misconception that sociological principles must be applied to our apostolate. The encyclicals of the Popes are cited as demanding this. But any truly discerning reading of the encyclicals will reveal that the social apostolate should signify the application of theological truths to the social apostolate. The profound concept that Catholic Christianity is its own sociology must be grasped if we are not to continue playing into the hands of enemies of the Church by our flabby brand of sentimental liberalism. We are urged by the popes to apply Christianity and not to refashion it according to human designs. The only valid and world-bettering principles that have come to mankind are basic Christian truths, like the supernatural destiny of man, the consequent worth of persons, the redemptive power of work and suffering. Christ's own sociological object lesson on the cross, the efficacy of personal action in the amelioration of misery exemplified by the parable of the good Samaritan, the efficacy of charity when men associate for its application to the social order, the objectivity and universality of the binding force of the natural moral law — these are a few basic Christian principles which all too often are bartered for liberal and, sometimes, outright Communist slogans of uplift. All of these can be summed up in the oft repeated exhortations of the popes that we practice "charity and justice."
Liberalism is Hostile to Man
The errors in the socio-theological journalism and propaganda are errors that derive from Jean Jacques Rousseau's naturalism, Hegel's collectivism, Engel's economic necessity and Marx's socialism. All of these are profoundly hostile to Christianity's view of man. All of these were propounded in cynicism of man's true social needs. We cannot apply Catholic principles to them, nor can we transfigure them by slogans of mystical togetherness. We are in dire need of Christian first principles, an elucidation of the doctrines of Original Sin and the Redemption in relation to the social problems of man. This would lead us back to personalism and a healthful individualism, to an awakening to the greatest of all social truths — that enunciated by Pope Pius XII when he declared that "society exists for man, and not man for society." Instead of borrowing the slogans of liberalism and state socialism about an evolving social and economic order and man's submergence into it, we would be awakening to the challenging truth that the social problem today, as it always has been and always will be, is a theological problem. And this would shield us from envying the camp of the enemy and confusing his weapons and strategy with our own.
"Man has broken all the bonds which Rousseau and his followers described as chains. He has put away the service of God and the pursuit of truth, and folly is in vogue. He has cast aside respect for tradition and civilization, and barbarity is in fashion. Man has broken all his most sacred ties and still he has never been so enchained as he is today." — Alfredo Cardinal Ottaviani
Notes
1. Letter to Very Rev. Francis J. Connell, C.SS.R., American Ecclesiastical Review, Vol. CXXXVIII, p. 372.
2. Ibid., p. 372.
3. NC News Release on Toronto Institute of Medieval Studies, Oct., 1958.
4. Boston Pilot, Davenport Messenger, St. Cloud Register, May-June, 1959.
5. This statement is a direct contradiction of the Catholic Profession of Faith oath.
6. Relations magazine, Montreal, No. 213, p. 228.
© 1959 Joseph F. Wagner, Inc.
This item 6037 digitally provided courtesy of CatholicCulture.org
