Posted on 03/31/2004 6:47:44 PM PST by Land of the Irish
"Ferocious pride is the real spirit of the Revolution. This pride has so established itself in the world that it has exiled reason. It has a horror of reason. It gags it. It hunts it. And if it can kill it, it kills it. Prove to it the divinity of Christianity, its intellectual and philosophical reality, its historical dimension, its moral and social dimension. It wants none of it. That is its 'reason,' and it is the strongest one. It has placed a blindfold of impenetrable sophisms on the face of European civilization. It cannot see the heavens or hear the thunder." (Louis Veuillot, Mélanges, x, 45-46).
Where Are the Apologies?
As I write this brief commentary, the entire globe is justly united in sympathy for the innocent victims of the terrible bombings in Madrid on March 11TH. Would that it were as equally unified in connecting the dots from that event to the deeper historical underpinnings of such horrible actions! If it were, it would stimulate a demand for a major correction of the dominant, Pluralist world view, and the offering of an apology to a man who saw what was coming down the pike one hundred forty years ago: Blessed Pius IX.
If, as the Spanish Government first argued, the ETA, the Basque separatist movement, had been responsible for the bombings, then the world would have been faced with yet another example of the long string of terrorist actions provoked by nationalist groups since the 19TH Century. Nationalists, as Giuseppe Mazzini, one of their most eloquent spokesmen, makes clear, ultimately believe that the morality of an action is based upon whether or not it promotes the cause of a unified, independent, strong, ethnic nation. Anything favoring that cause is morally good; anything opposing it is immoral. The chief voice raised against such concepts was that of the Church, Blessed Pius IX in particular, who, in his Syllabus of Errors of 1864, condemned them vigorously. And yet, Modernity, to this day, still attacks Pius IX as an obscurantist, and his nationalist opponents as “freedom fighters”. Is the assault in Madrid not an apt moment for the formation of a mass movement to force the powers-that-be to issue a global apology to this truly great Pope for the modern world’s failure to understand the prophetic vision that he and the Catholic activists behind him possessed?
If, as now seems likely, Al Qaida is to blame, a still greater and more complex apology is owed to Blessed Pius IX. For what? For having failed to recognize, along with him, that no fulfilling, just, and truly human social order, national or international, can be built upon cheap and purely materialistic foundations, and that exasperated resistance to it would inevitably emerge from many varied quarters. For having cynically and insanely used the badly marred concepts of freedom and toleration which the Pope identified and attacked to promote and defend that victory of the strong over the weak which such a materialist order assures. For having ignored Pius IX’s fear that the worldwide acceptance of such erroneous notions would guarantee that most of the resistance to an unjust system would be equally irrational and wicked. For having, in sum, denied one basic fact that the Syllabus so firmly underlines: that all ideas and all religions are not the same, and that only the True Faith provides the grounds of a solid, secure, and just future for mankind.
For years, I had been stumbling around studying politics, history, etc., vaguely recognizing something didn't really add up. When I read the Syllabus, I found myself nodding in agreement, compelled by its logic and insights, and, perhaps, most compelled by the simple assertions that there were actually Absolute Truths and that these Absolute Truths were knowable.
I had married a Catholic. I had agreed to raise my children Catholic.(though it would be several years before we had children.) But I had never before seriously entertained the notion the entering the Church.
Without doubt, simply reading the Syllabus was the first actual step toward my conversion.
"Such is the rush of present-day life that it severs from the divine foundation of Revelation, not only morality, but also the theoretical and practical rights.
We are especially referring to what is called the natural law, written by the Creator's hand on the tablet of the heart [Romans ii:14] and which reason, not blinded by sin or passion, can easily read. It is in the light of the commands of this natural law, that all positive law, whoever be the lawgiver, can be gauged in its moral content, and hence, in the authority it wields over conscience.
Human laws in flagrant contradiction with the natural law are vitiated with a taint which no force, no power can mend."
[Pius XI, Encyclical mit brennender Sorge, 1937 March 14]
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