The Catholic Populist

John Paul the Great beautifully articulated Theology of the Body

The 1930 Lambeth declaration whereby the Anglicans declared contraception acceptable was unprecedented in Christian thought.

Christianity has always been a call to heroism, a call to holiness, and a call to be the very best version of ourselves.  Jesus said: “Be perfect as your Heavenly Father is perfect!”  And: “But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life and only a few find it!”

At the same time, He also says: “But my yoke is easy and my burden light!”  The path to heroic virtue may be difficult but buoyed by the graces that Christ has made available, Christians can soar.

Oftentimes, the Catholic Church is accused of having a thick and unrealistic rule book that bans normal pleasures.  In other words, the Church is a long list of “Do nots” and “Nos.”

What people rarely realize is that the Church only proscribes a “No” in order to be part of the greater “Yes.”  That “Yes” is a yes to our mission on Earth — to become saints and to heroically fulfill the mission that God has entrusted to us in His plan for the salvation of the world.

The sexual acts is one of the greatest gifts our Lord gave to humankind.  John Paul II, in his Theology of the Body, said that sex is the second most sacred event performed by humans — after the consecration of the Eucharist.  Through sex, mankind is invited to become co-creators with God.

Accordingly, the Church has taught that this most blessed action should have five actions surrounding it.  These qualities of sexual love are modeled off of the love shown by Christ on the Cross:

1) It should be freely chosen (Liberty).

2) It should be understood (Knowledge).

3) It should be a complete self-gift (Unitive).

4) It should be permanent (In Marriage).

5) It should be open to life (Procreative).

These are the five characteristics that sex — one of the most treasured gifts of God — can and should share with the love that Jesus showed on the Cross.  It certainly is not easy to imitate Christ.

Christ gave Himself fully, understanding what He did.  He held nothing back and allowed his gift to be permanent (and oft-present through the Eucharist).  And he died that we might have life.

Independent of Christian thought, it is self-evident according to the Natural Order that reproductive organs are designed for the purpose of reproduction.

The Early Church Father Lactantius said in 307 AD:

“God gave us eyes not to see and desire pleasure, but to see acts to be performed for the needs of life; so too, the genital [’generating’] part of the body, as the name itself teaches, has been received by us for no other purpose than the generation of offspring.”

The Church teaches the Natural Law as it has always been known.

Contraception steps in between the true and deep love that should exist between spouses.

In rejecting it, the Church is giving a shallow No but a much deeper Yes.  It is saying yes to the deeper, more profound Love — an imitation of the greatest Lover of all, He who died on the Cross for us all.  In inviting us to that Love, the Church shares with us the graces to walk the narrow road that leads to eternal life.

This Fundamentalist Cartoon Accused the Modernists of Abandoning Christianity

Jesus entrusted the keys of His Kingdom to Peter: “You are Peter and upon this Rock I will build my Church and the Gates of Hell shall never prevail against it.  Whatever you declare bound on Earth shall be bound in Heaven and whatever you declare loosed on Earth shall be loosed in Heaven.”  Accordingly, the Catholic faith teaches that the Pope and the Bishops — the successors of Peter and the Apostles — have spiritual authority.  Jesus also taught: “Give to Caesar what belongs to Caesar and give to God what belongs to God.”  As a result, the Christian faith has maintained the necessity for a separation of Church and State — and a separation of duties to each — long before Thomas Jefferson ever did.

Protestantism is a challenge to the spiritual authority of the Catholic Church.  Once the authority principle has been challenged, there tend to be one of two general results.  In the absence of a separate spiritual authority within the Church, Martin Luther believed that the State should control the Church — thus preserving a legitimate source of authority.  John Calvin fiercely disagreed.  He supported a more Biblical separation of Church and State.  He believed that the people were covenanted to the State.  This was the ideological germ out of which was born the idea of Natural Rights in addition to Natural Law.

During the Protestant Reformation, Lutheranism and Anglicanism came to dominate Protestant Europe.  The mighty armies of England and Prussia fought to ensure that Martin Luther’s vision of State control of the Church dominated Protestant Europe.   Puritans were repeatedly defeated and persecuted by Catholics, Anglicans, and Lutherans.  After Napoleon, state control of the Church was (and mostly remains) almost universal in both Catholic and Protestant nations.  When the Left swept across Europe launching a full-fledged attack on Natural Law, Anglicanism and Lutheranism slowly came under the influence of Leftist ideology.  Catholicism became politically impotent in Europe.

In the United States, things were much different.  Catholics, Lutherans, Anglicans, and Puritans were thrown together into an enormous melting pot.  The Catholic Church in the US was until 1965 time very introspective, defensive, and self-contained.  Due to its fortress mentality, it had little influence over the Protestants in the United States.

A question arises: Did Lutheranism and Anglicanism — managed by state control in their respective mother countries in Europe — exert Leftist influence on American Protestants?

Not for a long time.

They would have but the Evangelical movement swept up most Protestants into a more Calvinistic belief in personal holiness and the separation of Church and State.  This occurred during the First Great Awakening  from 1720 – 1750 (which helped build support for the Declaration of Independence), the Second Great Awakening from 1800 – 1840 (which helped build support for the Abolition of Slavery), and the Third Great Awakening from 1880 – 1910 (which helped build support for Prohibition and Women’s Suffrage).  Each Great Awakening was followed by a Populist breakthrough in the United States.  The Great Awakening sparked renewed commitment and fidelity to Natural Law and Natural Rights (except in the case of Prohibition, which was a radical overreach).

Throughout Leftist governmental control of the Church, the State had often de-emphasized Christian teachings less convenient (like certain moral teachings) and put greater emphasis on those teachings more conducive to Leftist rhetoric (like solidarity for the poor).  By 1930, the Left was finally prepared to attempt to challenge Christian dogma.

Modernism had been on the upswing in Mainline Churches (the more government-controlled Churches adhering more to the principles of Martin Luther).  Modernists argued that Christian dogma had to change with the times.  In Europe, the times had become almost universally Leftist.  Fundamentalists and Evangelicals (ideological heirs of John Calvin) fiercely disputed that any Christian teachings had to ever change.

According to universal Christian thought (until 1930), sex has always been both unitive and procreative.  In order for the sexual act to have its most full, most beautiful, and most powerful meaning, it had to be within the context of a life-long commitment, fully unitive, and open to new life.  Christians believed anything less cheapened the act of sex as God had intended it.  Christianity has never ideologically compartmentalized sex in order to separate it from either procreation or the raising of children.

Contraception advocate, Planned Parenthood founder, and atheist Margaret Sanger attended the Lambeth Conference where Anglicans issue dogmatic statements in 1930.  Over the vehement objections of most of the American Anglicans, the Lambeth Conference for the first time announced that contraception was a morally acceptable choice.  In 1931, the Federal Council of Churches in Christ made a similar pronouncement.

This was the first time in the history of Protestantism that a long-held Christian doctrine was repudiated.  Furthermore, a direct attack was launched on the Natural Law from within Christianity.  This allowed the Left to gain its first real foothold in the US.

Throughout this era, the Catholic Church was insular and not very influential.

This was how the Left used Mainline Protestantism to promote its ideology first in Britain, then in the Anglican Church, and then in the Episcopal Church on this side of the Atlantic.

The Left has retained a firm foothold in the United States ever since.

Claims of contradiction on Catholic teaching on religious liberty were promoted by SSPX

Archbishop Lefebvre, the founder of the Society of Saint Pius X, was never a fan of the Second Vatican Council — even while he was still in communion with the Church.

Failing to make distinctions between the condemned Modernism of the Left condemned by the Church (the idea that truths change as society evolves — often violently — towards post-suffering utopia)  and the Modernity of Populism (which replaced Natural Law and Revealed Law with Natural Law and Natural Rights), the the Archbishop condemned the ideological alliance between Catholicism and Populism.  In 1988, he ordained four Bishops without papal approval — thus launching the Society of Saint Pius X into schism.

That same year, he published a blistering critique of Vatican II in They Have Uncrowned Him: From Liberalism to Apostacy: The Conciliar Tragedy.  In it, the Archbishop charged that the Church had succumbed to Modernism in endorsing the moral viability of a nation governed by Populism, which is the guiding principle the United States, rather than by the principle of Christianity, which was the guiding principle of Christendom.

The Council document that does the most heavy lifting on this issue is Dignatitis Humanae (The Declaration on Religious Freedom).  Archbishop Lefebvre’s critique justified two conclusions.  It justified the newly schismatic SSPX for breaking off from the Church since it seemed that (contrary to the promises of Christ) the Gates of Hell had gotten the better of the Church at last.  It also justified self-identified “Catholic” Modernists (although Modernism is in fact a heresy or theological error).  Modernists claimed: “The Church does change its position on Truth and therefore truth does change.  Who knows what will be next?  Perhaps some of our favorite targets — contraception and women’s ordination.”

The Modernists and SSPX are both radically wrong, of course.

A central question arises:

Can the Church endorse as morally acceptable as governing principles both Populism and Christianity without contradicting itself?  Can the Church give the impramatur of moral acceptability both to Historic Christendom and the United States of America?

The answer is simple: The Church can do so and it has done so.

However, in order to take their argument seriously, we must examine the seemingly stark differences in the early papal encyclicals and the later papal encyclicals.  The key encyclical that was later the springboard for all subsequent commentary is Mirari Vos (On Liberalism and Religious Indifferentism) — an 1832 Encyclical promulgated by Pope Gregory XVI:

“Now We consider another abundant source of the evils with which the Church is afflicted at present: indifferentism. This perverse opinion is spread on all sides by the fraud of the wicked who claim thatit is possible to obtain the eternal salvation of the soul by the profession of any kind of religion, as long as morality is maintained.”

“This shameful font of indifferentism gives rise to that absurd and erroneous proposition which claims that liberty of conscience must be maintained for everyone.”

“Nor can We predict happier times for religion and government from the plans of those who desire vehemently to separate the Church from the state, and to break the mutual concord between temporal authority and the priesthood. It is certain that that concord which always was favorable and beneficial for the sacred and the civil order is feared by the shameless lovers of liberty.”

This article postdates the Peace of Westphalia that ended the Thirty Years War.  The only country openly trumpeting its freedom of religion was France.  France happened to be the Catholic nation that adopted Ethnic Nationalism as its guiding policy in place of Christendom.  Ethnic Nationalism — inherently warlike and self-interested — has never been considered morally acceptable according to Catholic teaching.  Furthermore, the Left had laid hold of France with its slogan of Liberty (with an endorsement of a post-moral license), Fraternity (ethnic nationalism), and Equality (utopian equality of result).

Indifferentism has always been a serious theological error within Catholic thought.  There is no question that French Policy — represented by the slogan — had enormous levels of indifferentism.  Although France had a state-managed Catholic Church installed by Napoleon, the Church was subordinate to the state in every way.  Amoral license, ethnic nationalism, and worldly utopia are all in direct opposition to Catholic teaching.

None of this applied to Populism.

Populism did not separate Church and State ideologically as the Left does.  The Declaration of Independence cites the justification for the state in the “Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.”  They operate in a separate fashion in practice.  However, there is no promotion of the idea that the state has a different ideological source from the Church.

Furthermore, the Founders considered there to be a stark difference between what they called license (amoral freedom) and Liberty (the freedom to operate within the Natural Law).  The Founders did not believe in a freedom of conscience that trumped Natural Law.  In a correct application of founding principles, Utah was not admitted into the Union until it first abolished polygamy.  Mormon religious conviction was trumped by Natural Law.

Finally, Populism respects the Church and calls for its urgent application.  George Washington addresses this in his Farewell Address at length.  Here is a snippet:

“Of all the dispositions and habits, which lead to political prosperity, Religion, and Morality are indispensable supports … Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure—reason and experience both forbid us to expect, that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.”

The Church has always and will always endorse Christianity as a governing principle — as was the case with Christendom.  However, without ever contradicting itself, in 1965 it has also now endorsed Populism as an alternate morally sound governing principle.

The Church never uncrowned Christ, as Lefebvre maintained.  It left Christ with his crown intact over Christendom.  But it also prepared for a New Evangelization in the Populist era.