We inhabit an age in when the political Left has gained enormous ground across Europe, with the chief tenets of liberalism - its friendly ally for the time being - in the ascendancy, with much of its established dogma going largely unquestioned in society. Old certainties have given way to new certainties. There can be little doubt that we exist in a ‘new society’ vastly different and, in many ways, unrecognisable from that of even 100 years ago.
No doubt, there are signs that society in much of the West is not entirely comfortable with the liberal agenda with its plethora of competing parties, but Christianity is now so ostracised, its name so blackened that the dogmas of liberalism are preferred to the dogmas of Christianity, since the former signifies freedom in the popular imagination, while, with the exception of Eastern European nations and Russia - which still cherish the place of the Church in society - the latter signifies prohibition and the curtailing of human liberty.
Marxism itself, we can say, is dated and aging badly, its reputation as a political theory tarnished by its bloody history. Yet while the economic prophecies of Marx and Engels have yet to materialise, something of a historical dialectic can be observed as competing forces struggle and vie for supremacy in the world. This, however is principally an ongoing battle of ideas that stretch back in time before Marx and Engels and forward also to our present day and beyond.
This battle is one so fierce that it is now one in which the Church struggles even to speak its own language and, in this cultural atmosphere hostile to eternal truths, the Catholic Church finds herself uncomfortably poised in a new age in which a captivating revolutionary ideology holds sway over a greater part of mankind. The revolution has generally speaking been a velvet one, though at times and locales bloody, in which an old established order has been thoroughly overturned, as if almost while humanity was ‘sleeping’, in the sense that while the root of the new order existed in the Original Sin, its acceptance on a societal scale as the norm has taken not more than four centuries to achieve.
While the political terms of ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ can today be thoroughly misleading, we can say that where the Left has failed to convince the masses of redistributive or collective economics, we observe that even many of the conservative political movements, albeit with some notable exceptions, would seem to have accepted fundamental beliefs concerning man and his place in society and in the world which point to the success of this revolutionary ideology.
This all-pervasive belief can be summed up as a doctrine which exalts man above or rather to the exclusion of his Creator. Despite the scientific opinions that state the cosmos revolving around just one heavenly body, most of our societies are still taught in effect that man is at the pinnacle of Creation and everything is subject to him and revolves around him. Man - and his interests - are paramount, man is Polaris, with each realm of science, technology, the arts, human relationships, everything visible serving his needs, man convinced of the happiness this provides him with, despite no scientific or medicinal remedy for his imminent death, firm in the conviction that he is self-sufficient. This apparent self-sufficiency for many in the West, though, brings with it the isolation that even Marx recognised in his criticism of capitalist societies, the estrangement from self and from others which he mistakenly suggested could be healed by the common ownership of the means of production.
Man at the Centre, God on the Peripheries: The Resurgence of the Political Left
Yet, we find a perplexing puzzle when we observe that wherever man is placed ‘at the centre’ of human striving, whenever man is seen to be the summit and ultimate purpose of human activity (and this motto itself is particularly proclaimed by the ideological Left) man’s needs seem to be eclipsed in favour of ‘something else’ and man’s inherent dignity, the sense of which Marx held in theory, is often left behind, while civilisation congratulates itself as it progresses forward to an easier present and a 'brighter' future. Nevertheless, our forgetfulness of God means this is a time which masks its terrible insecurity with unending distractions to keep man from considering both his origin and his final end, the source of his very being and his ultimate destiny. In this sequence of human progress, liberated from the shackles of objective morality, man himself is quickly forgotten even when his achievements are praised, very quickly we are assimilated as cogs in a machine, mechanical parts in the revolution that cares nothing for either God or man alike.
Yes, even when man proposes that man’s fulfilment must çome first, ‘something else’ other than man’s unique dignity is served. Depending on our time and location, that ‘something else’ may vary in degrees, but seldom in outcome. This can be said without overlooking the injustices which flourish under unrestrained capitalism, but then few would argue that every man’s needs are emphasised by this economic system. Poverty, war, crime, disease, even environmental destruction all persist even while man and his needs are glorified as the primary good for each society to pursue and communism did not, wherever tried, bring an end to human suffering. It brought with it its own suffering, both real and existential. It also brought tyranny and the murder of countless numbers by the very people who endeavoured to build a utopian civilisation for man, placing man at the centre of their program.
The masters of our own age, as if the idea that the purpose of human activity is man’s own advancement were not lofty enough, have even broadened the ambitious scope of their ideology to surmise that not just man, but now nature and the environment, the air, the land, yes even the sea itself can find liberation with man’s cooperation. Indeed, depending on which Marxist-educated cleric you speak to, and these clerics need not be Churchmen, if he were presented with the hypothetical choice of ensuring the continuation of man’s presence on Earth or rescuing the Earth from further environmental degradation, you will probably find conflicting answers. Yes, they’ll all disagree about the final figures of how many human beings should be left on Earth after the solution had been enacted to create a sustainable environment with an ‘optimum population’ and however that population policy is manifested, you can guarantee that what was at first proposed as an end which required mankind’s cooperation will eventually require the revoking of his freedom.
The global left through Communism and forms of socialism has hitherto failed, in a catastrophic fashion, to usher in the age of universal peace and brotherhood it has long promised, but it isn’t for want of trying. At this junction in history we need to be reminded of Communism’s much overlooked crimes, crimes against humanity and crimes against God. Many of Communism’s opponents are in fact still alive. Having failed in this first ambition to ‘save’ man from economic servitude and the injustices wrought by capitalism, it is not credible either that Governments can ‘save the planet’.
It is within this context of a resurgent Left that has demarcated the institutions of marriage and the family for demolition, having already erected laws which protect the killing of the unborn and in many countries the aged, sick and infirm albeit with some consent, that we find the Catholic Church struggling to vocalise Her faith, questioning even whether it even has a language, having largely dispensed with Latin, with which to communicate itself to the contemporary man and woman. Indeed, even these accepted terms are now considered in some circles to be too ‘binary’ for common usage.
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| When doctrine was not a dirty word. |
The Church Inundated with the Waters of the World
Today, we see with terrifying and enormous verbosity the Catholic Church, which we naive Catholics had imagined routed Communism during the reign of St John Paul II, place its bets on a future in which the Church survives as an institution, but no longer as a combative opponent of evil. We must take a second look at what is taking place in the Church and the world through a lens that captures events unfolding in their real, if unflattering light.
It is with a sense of great sorrow that many, though far from all Catholics believe we have reached a turning point during just one pontificate, as we witness, through the Pope’s hymn to Mother Earth, Laudato Si, as well as other documents, speeches, interviews, homilies and ‘signs’, the Church gamble Her spiritual heritage and identity, as well as Her present and future on just such an ideology as that which we were told the Church had once defeated. Some people may think such a claim a little hasty, but we shall see it is not so.
Before we begin to even to think of the intricacies of the environmental problems we are told we must solve, or rather, that Governments must solve, we need first to address the first goal, the original goal of the progressive movement, from whose line Francis surely is, the one that was and is not, but is yet to come, that of raising man from his ignorance and his poverty, his insecurity and isolation, to become the ‘new man’ who enjoys peace and finds himself in harmony with himself and his fellow man in a perfect brotherhood of mutual understanding and concord.
The Pope of the Revolution
For the global Left, the Pope is the new ‘great white hope’. If Pope Francis is to be portrayed as the figurehead of a new priesthood, one that enjoys the praise of the progressives, we must for our own safety and that of those who come after us strive to discover and familiarise ourselves with his teaching.
So let us expound upon a riddle. People have tried to decipher the actual teachings of Francis, but it is here that the thinking man (he need not hold a doctorate) finds himself within a maze of competing and often contradictory moral claims, ensuring that his audience are left wondering where his loyalties lie, whether his desire is to serve the Church in a bold and refreshingly pastoral way, charting the Church’s course in this new age, or whether his principal loyalties - and audience - lie elsewhere. The reason for this - and the warning this essay wishes to sound - is quite simple.
Both the Church and the World are familiar with Popes upholding unpopular teachings, so when a Supreme Pontiff arises whose sentiments and statements appear to indicate a tangential break or imply some kind of reversal of traditional teachings, or even appear to 'muddy the waters' on morality, or shift the emphasis to 'new horizons', the Church can suddenly appear to be as expedient or opportunistic as that which the world is used to in its politicians. By and large, it has to be said, that politicians, even popular ones, have an expiry date in terms of their popularity. The Church occupies a place in society which certainly gives it a political influence and political clout, but it is not of its nature a political organisation. It is certainly not a political party. It is a religious organism and, for Catholics, the Body of Christ on Earth founded by the Son of God for mankind's Salvation.
For such reasons, solid positions held on matters of morality, deeply divisive and unpopular as they may well be, have for Popes hitherto been untouchable, not because Popes enjoy traditionally enjoy courting the ire or animosity of the often decadent socieities in which it dwells, but because Catholic teachings do not form part of some kind of religious or quasi-political manifesto, something which could be altered or doctored over time to suit any particular age, including our own, as we experience with political parties. When political parties and leaders make 'u-turns', the world is usually not impressed. When religious leaders consider that the friendship of the world will be gained by making similar mistakes in the profession of religious faith, there is similarly no reason why the world should be impressed.
In the context of this seamless tradition of Popes who defy the World by proclaiming the Christian message of eternal Salvation steps the man we know now as Pope Francis. Reactions to this pontificate have varied across both the political and religious spectrum. To some, Pope Francis is a sign of hope for a modern form of Christianity that places the figure of Jesus Christ well within the moral paradigm of our times. For others, Francis is a messenger of the catastrophic collapse of the Church's faith in Jesus Christ.
The world deserves some kind of explanation for how in four short years, the Catholic Church can in various regions, most notably within the Vatican itself, reject the traditional teachings held by Benedict XVI and his predecessors, in favour of those held by a Pope with a 'concillatory' tone towards the world, for whom the unpopular teachings of the Church would appear to be an unnecessary obstacle to the friendship of it. In assessing four years of Pope Francis's rollercoaster pontificate. While it is true that it probably isn't within a layman's sphere to give it, it is by now clear that Francis himself will not do so of his own volition. Therefore, we are left as Catholics to interpret the times and the statements and the 'signs' as they appear. Until clarity arrives, Pope Francis will be 'interpreted'. He himself has willed that this be the case.
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