Posted on 07/16/2011 7:24:33 AM PDT by greyfoxx39
In response to whether the public should vote for a Mormon for president, one should know what beliefs a candidate had.
Mitt Romney and Jon Huntsman have Mormon roots and they have been vague about their beliefs and loyalty to the LDS church.
Mormon theology includes ideas like their priesthood brethren will become the government leaders, or future kings of the world, in a globalized theocracy, and that their male leaders will take over when a second coming of Christ occurs. They believe they are the pre-ordained leaders to rule over a coming theocratic kingdom.
Worthy Mormon males are temple attending, dressing in white with special learned handshakes, altar rituals, Masonic rites and gestures and do secretive activities different from normal society.
They believe they are the future gods of new worlds in a life after this one. They follow prophets with ever-changing doctrine and change their fictional "Book of Mormon" every time it is found to be un-politically correct.
Their women are taught they are good for breeding, to have large families.
A member of this cult is loyal to its church leaders and to whatever their modern prophets tell them is gospel, which changes at their will.
They claim to be Christian, but Mormon polytheism of many gods/goddesses in a hereafter, rituals that must be performed in their temples, garment wearing and works (not grace) that saves a person is different ideology.
It is debatable whether Mormons are Christians, and they have other scriptures special to Mormonism written by their leaders, not just the New Testament, like their Doctrine and Covenants and Book of Mormon.
To learn about them and their practices, beliefs and personal character will help us determine whether they are the future leaders of Americans. Or are they really stuck in their controversial past?
“Incorrect. mormons supported Reid over Angle.”
Can you tell me where you found that? Not saying you are wrong, just want to know where it comes from. Some sort of exit poll? I looked but all I can find is speculation about what was going to happen, not the actual vote breakdown of what actually happened.
Freegards
- Jacques Maritain, Who is My Neighbor?
"For Maritain, all human enquiry has 'being' as its object; being, in other words, is the formal object of the intellect (Preface to Metaphysics, p. 25). But 'being' can be grasped in different ways, and Maritain distinguishes, for example, between sensible being ("the object first attained by the human intellect") and being as being (which is the object of metaphysics). It is because of this difference in object that he distinguishes (as he notes in his epistemology and his philosophy of nature, discussed below) among the activities of the empirical scientist, the mathematician, the philosopher, the theologian, and the mystic."
And you know this how?
These bigots are the equivalent of skinheads”
Well said.
Fortunately we have Orrin Hatch and Harry Reid to compensate for them.
Wow! You must have low standards for precision and elegance.
we as Christians are only in control of our own faith.
So your vision of Christianity is that we don't speak out against error? You might want to brush up on the New Testament a bit. You'll find lots of instruction to confront evil and error.
You probably hold the same intolerant view of Catholics because their view of works and faith are different from yours as well.
You Mormon apologists just love this red herring, don't you? Most "anti-Mormons" (as you would call them) are Protestants and would disagree with Catholics on the role of grace and works. However, we generally recognize that Protestants and Catholics worship the same Jesus Christ, the Second Person of the Trinity. For this reason, we would consider Catholics, but not Mormons, brothers and sisters in Christ, even if we disagree with them on certain theological issues.
You are just too gutless to make comparably intolerant statements about Catholics because it isn't fashionable.
Please review the forum rules so that you don't become the next in a long line of Mormon apologists who are booted from the thread because they can't resist making personal attacks.
Bishop Romney is very much a church insider.
JACQUES MARITAIN
WHO IS MY NEIGHBOUR?
(from Ransoming the Time)
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We hold that every man of good faith and right will, provided he does not sin against the light and does not refuse the grace interiorly offered to him, belongs, as we put it, to the Soul of the Church, or, in other words, is invisibly and by the motion of his heart a member of the visible Church and partakes of her life, which is eternal life.
JACQUES MARITAIN (1882- ) became a Catholic in 1905. From the first publication of his book on Bergson (1913) until, in the midst of his duties as French Ambassador to the Holy See, he published his Existence and the Existent (1948), he has been a flaming center of Thomism in the modern world. He has loved truth with the passionate and anxious fidelity characteristic of great men; he has been devoted to the cause of the human person, his dignity and his liberty, with a love which is nothing short of heroic. His philosophy, while remaining fully autonomous, has been open to the light of faith and the warmth of charity, to the experience and lessons of the past as well as to the needs and problems of the present. Yet the present in which Maritain lives is not a narrow now: it is a present in which, being turned toward God and toward his fellow man in God, he sees the world of time bathed in the mysterious splendors of eternity. He has been a prolific writer. Of his many books mention must be made of a veritable philosophical summa, The Degrees of Knowing (1932); Integral Humanism (1936); Science and Wisdom (1935); Ransoming the Time (1941). He has left few aspects of the modern world and its problems untouched. His many controversies show how little he lives in the clouds inhabited by so many philosophers. The following essay, one of the most magnificent that Maritain has written, is an enduring statement of the foundations of human solidarity.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
THE PROBLEM I SHOULD LIKE TO CONSIDER in this chapter is a very difficult one, but it is of vital importance. I think that there is a decided advantage for us in courageously facing this problem, and becoming aware of its reality, even if we are unable to do much more. The question is to determine whether the diversity of religious creeds, an evident historical fact, is an insurmountable obstacle to human co-operation.
Surely it is a paradox that despite the state of religious division in which mankind lives, good fellowship, brotherly intercourse and a spirit of union can be established between men in the earthly commonwealth, while each of them is bound to his God and is attached with all his heart to his faith in Him and to the form, of worship he renders Him. But man himself is a paradox. And more astonishing still appears the "exceeding great love" of Him who loved us first and whose very predilections work for the welfare of all.
Nothing in history, indeed, goes to show that religious feeling or religious ideas have been particularly successful in pacifying men. Religious differences seem rather to have fed and sharpened their conflicts. And yet, if it is true that human society must bring together in the service of the same terrestrial common good men belonging to different spiritual families, how can the peace of that temporal society be lastingly assured if, first, in the domain that matters most to the human being in the spiritual and religious domain itself -- relationships of mutual respect and mutual understanding cannot be established? I prefer the word fellowship to "tolerance," for it connotes something positive and elementary in human relationships. It conjures up the image of travelling companions, who meet here below by chance and journey through life -- however fundamental their differences may be -- good humouredly, in cordial solidarity and human agreement. Well, then, for the reasons I have just mentioned, the problem of good fellowship between the members of the various religious families seems to me to be a cardinal one for the new age of civilization, the rough outlines of which are beginning to take shape in our present night. I should like to quote in this connection the words pronounced by Pope Pius XII at his coronation: "Our thoughts go out also in this solemn moment to all those who are outside the Church and who, we should like to think, will rejoice to learn that the Pope prays to Almighty God for them also and wishes them every possible good."
A deliberate attempt to bring closer together the believers of the various religious families is something relatively new. On a solemn occasion, Pope Pius XI called upon all men of good will to such an attempt. No doubt this attempt is partly due to the imminent dangers, to the spiritual evils threatening us: open atheism publicly warring against God, or pseudo-theism seeking to turn the living God into some protecting genius for the State or some demon of the race. If that is so, we must admit that it is a stern lesson for believers. Was it needful that God permit the frightful degradation of mankind that we are witnessing today, so many persecutions and so much suffering, to teach those who believe in Him to go down into the real depth of their own hearts, even into those mysterious regions where we more or less faintly hear the hand of the God of love knocking at our bolted doors?
Let me say immediately that this attempt at rapprochement might easily be misunderstood. I shall therefore begin by clearing the ground of any possible sources of misunderstanding. Such a rapprochement obviously cannot be effectuated at the cost of straining fidelity, or of any yielding in dogmatic integrity, or of any lessening of what is due to truth. Nor is there any question whatever either of agreeing upon I know not what common minimum of truth or of subjecting each ones convictions to a common index of doubt. On the contrary, such a coming together is only conceivable if we assume that each gives the maximum of fidelity to the light that is shown to him. Furthermore, it obviously can only be pure and therefore valid and efficacious, if it is free from any arriere-pensee of a temporal nature and from even the shadow of a tendency to subordinate religion to the defense of any earthly interest or acquired advantage.
I am sure that everyone is agreed on these negative conditions I have just enumerated. But one aspect of the paradox I mentioned at the outset is that, as soon as we pass on to positive consideration each one sees the very justification and the very reason for being of this good fellowship between believers of different religious families mirrored in his own particular outlook and in his own world of thought. And these outlooks are irreducibly heterogeneous, these worlds of thought never exactly meet. Until the day of eternity comes, their dimensions can have no common measure. There is no use closing ones eyes to this fact, which simply bears witness to the internal coherence of the systems of signs, built up in accordance with different principles, on which human minds depend for their cognitive life. Fundamental notions such as that of the absolute oneness of God have not the same meaning for a Jew a for a Christian; nor has the notion of the divine transcendence and incommunicability the same meaning for a Christian as for a Moslem; nor the notions of person, of freedom, grace, revelation, in carnation, of nature and the supernatural, the same meaning for the Orient as for the Occident. And the non-violence of the Indian is not the same as Christian "charity." No doubt it is the privilege of the human intelligence to understand other languages than the one it itself uses. It is none the less true that if, instead of being men, we were patterns of Pure Ideas, our nature would be to devour each other in order to absorb into our own world of thought whatever other such worlds might hold of truth.
But it happens that we are men, each containing within himself the ontological mystery of personality and freedom; in each of us the abyss of holiness of the Supreme Being is present with His universal presence, and He asks to dwell there as in His temple, by manner of a gift of Himself to us. Well, each one must speak in accordance with his outlook. I suppose there are readers of this book who do not share my own creed. I shall try to tell them as briefly, but also as frankly and as precisely as possible and this rankness is itself one of the characteristics of mutual confidence -- how the paradox of fellowship I am at present examining can be solved for me, a Catholic, from the point of view of a philosophy which takes into account the data of Christian theology. I do not apologize for this excursion into the field of theology, it is required by the subject I am discussing.
The Catholic doctrine concerning the status of non-Catholics before God
It is well known that, according to the Catholic Faith, God, after having spoken in various and imperfect ways through the prophets, spoke once and for all, in a perfect and final manner, through His own uncreated Word, who took flesh in the womb of a virgin of Israel in order to die for mankind. And that the deposit of this revelation of the Word of God was confided to a living and visible body, made up both of just men and of sinners, but specially assisted by the Spirit of God in its mission of truth and salvation. Thus authority plays a most important part for Catholics. But apart rom dogmas and their connected truths and apart from the discipline of salvation, freedom plays a big part also, and the diversity of opinions in human affairs is far greater in the Catholic Church than is generally realized by those not in it. I know that the teaching of the Church can deal with every matter connected with faith; but in being integrally mindful of this teaching, I can still disagree most sharply with other Catholics about political or social matters: democracy, trade unionism, the late war in Spain or the second World War, as well as about philosophical or historical questions. This is because it is only to the purity and integrity of the Word of God that the faithful are bound as such; the teaching authority of the Church intends of itself only to safeguard this living deposit of truth, just as the disciplinary authority of the Church has no other object than to enable the faithful to live by that truth. It is to the First Truth in person, speaking to my heart, that I adhere by means of the statements of dogma that bring the revelation to all. As a Catholic and by my Catholic Faith, I am bound in conscience to no human, theological or philosophical opinion, however well founded it may be, and still less to any judgments on contingent of worldly matters, or to any temporal power. Nor am I bound to any particular form of culture or civilization, and still less of race or blood. I am bound uniquely to what is universality itself and superuniversality: to the Divine, to the words and precepts of Him who said, 1 am the Truth, I who speak to you.
That in brief is how the Catholic outlook appears to me. Catholic theology teaches that it is upon our love, as Saint John of the Cross says, that we shall be judged; in other words, that salvation and eternal life depend on charity. It teaches that charity presupposes faith and has its root in faith, in other words, in truth divinely revealed.
It teaches that explicit faith in Christ, illuminating the human mind regarding the inmost secrets of divine truth and life, is not only the requisite means for souls to attain the highest degree of conformity with God and divine union, and a prerequisite for peoples to achieve a firm position of general morality and perfectly human civilization, but that that faith is also the response of reverence justly due to Gods gift, inclining His glory toward us. Explicit faith in revealed truth, therefore, is the first duty of everyone who is not incapable of hearing through his ears and in his heart the word of God. But Catholic theology adds that faith together with grace are offered to all souls, even if they are unable to know the truth explicitly in its integrity. If those souls are in good faith and do not refuse the internal grace offered to them, they have implicit faith in Christ and accept implicitly the entire divinely revealed truth, even if they only believe, having no clearer light, that God exists and saves those who seek Him. Cf. Heb. xi, 6. (And God knows mucn better than do they themselves whether they believe that.)
If, therefore, Catholics hold that there is no salvation outside the Church, you can see that this maxim can shock only those who understand it wrongly and who are ignorant of what is commonly taught concerning the "soul of the Church." All it means to us is that there is no salvation outside the Truth, which, explicitly or implicitly, is freely offered to all. And does that not seem fully in harmony with the nature of man and his essential dignity? Surely if there were salvation outside the Truth, f should not want such salvation, for I prefer the Truth to my own joy and freedom; or rather I know that only the Truth can give me real joy and set me free.
We believe that there is no salvation outside the Truth, and the fact that all men do not explicitly know the Truth, the fact of religious division, far from being a good in itself, is a mark of the distress of our condition. But we also hold, as I have just explained, that the Truth speaks to every mans heart; and God alone knows who these are, in whatever part of the world they may be born and whether or not they live under the regime of His publicly revealed word, who truly and efficaciously hear His interior and secret word. We believe that there is no salvation outside Christ, but we also believe that Christ died for all men and that the possibility of believing in Him -- either explicitly or implicitly -- is offered to all. We believe that there is no salvation outside the Mystical Body of Christ, but we also believe that those who visibly belong to that Body by confessing the faith and by the sacraments, and are thus designated to continue in time the work of redemption and receive more generous effusions of the vehicles of grace, are not its only members. We hold that every man of good faith and right will, provided he does not sin against the light and does not refuse the grace interiorly offered to him, belongs, as we put it, to the Soul of the Church, or, in other words, is invisibly and by the motion of his heart a member of the visible Church and partakes of her life, which is eternal life. And no man, withal, whether Christian or non-Christian, can know whether he is worthy of love or of hatred.
Catholics are sometimes reproached with speaking to others in a domineering or patronizing manner. Human weakness being what it is that may well be the case with some. Yet in reality, their position is far from being a comfortable one. They are twice wounded, with the wounds of their faults and with the requirements of their God. Not only does their reason show them that other religions can also transmit to mankind many great truths, although in their eyes incomplete or mixed, and on occasion, if it is a question of certain techniques of natural spirituality or of psycho-physical mastery of self-certain truths which the Gospel did not take pains to teach. But what is more important still, they see that, through the very supernatural truth which they have received not as a monopoly but as something to give to other men, belonging to other spiritual families, even poor idolaters can, if they are of good faith and if their hearts are pure, live better than some members of the own religious family. And who would not lose heart if he were not helped by grace! The tree bends, says Saint Thomas Aquinas under the fullness of its fruit. The Church rejoices over the testimony she is required to give, and the Christian rejoices in her. She knows that it is a bounden duty to acknowledge the holy reality of privileges received. For the divine freedom gives as it pleases to whomever it pleases. But, as Saint Paul puts it, it is in a fragile vessel that each faithful soul contains grace. That he should have on his pitiable human shoulders some measure of the burden of divine truth in no way justifies the believer in being supercilious or patronizing; rather he feels inclined to excuse himself and to ask forgiveness of every passer-by. Euntes ibant et flebant; going they went and wept. I know well that there are men -- and it is perhaps to make up for their little practical faith -- who despise others and ceaselessly repeat: we believers, we respectable people, we Christians, we Catholics, at times even we "born" Catholics, as if they were not born sinners like everyone else. They never suspect that, by thus placing their pride in evidence of their religion, they make those who see them want to blaspheme the Almighty.
The basis of good fellowship among men of different creeds, considered on the spiritual level
To RETURN to the question of the fellowship of believers. I think it is clear what the basis of such a fellowship is in the Catholic outlook. This basis is not of the order of the intellect and of ideas, but of the heart and of love. It is friendship, natural friendship, but first and foremost mutual love in God and for God. Love does not go out to essences nor to qualities nor to ideas, but to persons; and it is the mystery of persons and of the divine presence within there which is here in play. This fellowship, then, is not a fellowship of beliefs, but the fellowship of men who believe.
The conviction each of us has, rightly or wrongly; regarding the limitations, deficiencies, errors of others does not prevent friendship between minds. In such a fraternal dialogue, there must be a kind of forgiveness and remission, not with regard to ideas -- ideas deserve no forgiveness if they are false -- but with regard to the condition of him who travels the road at our side. Every believer knows very well that all men will be judged, both himself and all others.
But neither he nor another is God, able to pass judgment. And what each one is before God, neither the one nor the other knows. Here the "judge not"of the Gospels applies with its full force. We can render judgment concerning ideas, truths or errors; good or bad actions; character, temperament, and what appears to us of a mans interior disposition.
But we are utterly forbidden to judge the innermost heart, that inaccessible center where the person day after da weaves his own fate and ties the bonds binding him to God. When it comes to that, there is only one thing to do, and that is to trust in God. And that is precisely what love for our neighbour prompts us to do.
There are some people who do not like that word, "love." It embarrasses them, because it has become hackneyed, and because we hear it as well from lips that have gone to rot, or from hearts that worship themselves. God is not so squeamish. The Apostle John tells us that God is self-subsisting Love.
There is only one proper and fitting way through which peace and union can come to men, and that is through love: first, love springing from nature for beings -- for those poor beings who have the same essence as we have ourselves, and the same sufferings, and the same natural dignity. But that love is not enough, for the roots of strife are too strong for it. There must be a love of higher origin, immediately divine, which Christian theology calls supernatural, a love in God and for God, which both strengthens in their proper sphere our various inclinations toward one another in the natural order, and also transcends them to infinity. Charity is very different from that simple human benevolence which philosophers praise, which is noble indeed in itself, yet inefficacious in the end. Charity alone, as Bergson observed in his great book, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, can open the heart to the love of all men, because, coming from God who first loves us, charity desires for all men the same divine good, the same eternal life, as it does for ourselves, and it sees in all human beings the summoned of God, streaming, as it were, with the mysteries of His mercy and the prevenient gifts of His goodness.
I should like to dwell a moment on the inner law and the privileges of this friendship of charity, as regards precisely the relations between believers, of different religious denominations (as well as between believers and non- believers). I have already made it sufficiently clear that it is wrong to say that such a friendship transcends dogma or exists in spite of the dogmas of faith. Such a view is inadmissible for all those who believe that the word of God is as absolute as His unity or His transcendence. I know very well that if I lost my faith in the last article of revealed truth, I should lose my soul. A mutual love which would be bought at the price of faith, which would base itself on some form of syncretism or eclecticism or which, recalling Lessing's parable of the three rings, would say: "I love him who does not have my faith because after all, I am not sure that my faith is the true faith and that it bears the device of the true ring," in so saying would reduce faith to a mere historic inheritance and seal it with the seal of agnosticism and relativity. Such a love, for anyone who believes he has heard the word of God, would amount to putting man above God.
That love which is charity, on the contrary, goes first to God, and then to all men, because the more men are loved in God and for God, the more they are loved themselves and in themselves. Moreover, this love is born in faith and necessarily presupposes faith, at least the implicit faith I mentioned earlier. And it remains within faith, while at the same time reaching out to those who haven't the same faith. That is the very characteristic of love; wherever. our love goes, it carries with it our faith.
Nor does the friendship of charity merely make us recognize the existence of others -- although as a matter of fact here is something already difficult enough -- for men, and something which includes everything essential. Not only does it make us recognize that another exists, and not as an accident of the empirical world, but as a human being who exists before God, and has the right to exist. While remaining within the faith, the friendship of charity helps us to recognize whatever beliefs other than our own include of truth and of dignity, of human and divine values. It makes us respect them, urges us on ever to seek in them everything that is stamped with the mark of mans original greatness and of the prevenient care and generosity of God. It helps us to come to a mutual, understanding of one another.
It is not supra dogmatic; it is supra subjective. It does not make us go beyond our faith, but beyond ourselves. In other words it helps us to purify our faith of the shell of egotism and subjectivity in which we instinctively tend to enclose it. And it also inevitably carries with it a sort of heart-rending, attached, as is the heart, at once to the truth we love and to the neighbor who is ignorant of that truth. This condition is even associated with what is called the "ecumenical" bringing together of divided Christians; how much more is it associated with the labour of bringing into mutual comprehension believers of every denomination.
I distrust any friendship between believers of all denominations which is not accompanied, as it were, by a kind of compunction or souls sorrow -- which would be easy and comfortable; just as I distrust, any universalism which claims to unite in one and the same service of God, and in one and the same transcendental piety as in some Worlds Fair Temple -- all forms of belief and all forms of worship. The duty of being faithful to the light, and of always following it to the extent that one sees it, is a duty which cannot be evaded. In other words, the problem of conversion, for anyone who feels the spur of God, and to the extent that he is pricked by it, cannot be cast aside, any more than can be cast aside the obligation of the apostolate. And by the same token, I also distrust a friendship between believers of the same denomination which is, as it were, easy and comfortable, because in that case charity would be reserved to their fellow worshippers, there would be a universalism which would limit love to brothers in the same faith, a proselytism which would love another man only in order to convert him and only in so far as he is capable of conversion, a Christianity which would be the Christianity of good people as against bad people, and which would confuse the order of charity with what a great spiritual writer of the seventeenth century called a police-force order.
The co-operation of men of different creeds, considered at the temporal level
IT FOLLOWS from what I have said that from the Catholic point of view (which is mine) a rapprochement between believers of diverse religious denominations can be accomplished, on the religious and spiritual level itself, only by and in friendship and charity, by and in the pure spirituality and freedom of love, It cannot in any way involve any less intangible, more definite, more visible communion expressed in the order of the speculative and practical intellect by some community of symbol or of sacred ritual. But on the level of the temporal and profane life and that is indeed quite another level, it is proper that the effort toward union should express itself in common activities, should be signed by a more or less close co-operation for concrete and definite purposes, whether it be a question of the common good of the political community to which we all respectively belong, or of the common good of temporal civilization as a whole.
No doubt in that field it is not as believers but rather as members of a given fatherland, as men bound together by customs, traditions, interests and particular outlooks of a fleshly community, or as men having in common a given concrete historical ideal, that believer belonging to different religions are called upon to do a common work. But even in that common temporal task, ethical and spiritual values are involved, which concern the believer as such. And in that common temporal task itself, the mutual good will and fellowship I have been discussing remain factors of primary importance (I say primary; I do not say sufficient) for the pacification of men. In this sphere of temporal and political life, the most suitable phrase is not the phrase love of charity, but rather civic friendship, which is a virtue of the natural order, that must, however, be leavened by charity. It is a great pity that in an agonized world, men who believe in the supernatural, enchained as they are by so many sociological prejudices, should be so slow to broaden their hearts and to co-operate boldly in order to save from the inheritance of their fellows the elementary values of threatened humanity. From the English Blue Book anyone may learn about the atrocities and abominations committed in Nazi concentration camps, which blaspheme the image of God in the human person. But why were these things, that the British Government had known very well for many years, published only when war had already broken out? Anyone may also discover for himself the similar degradation of the human person practiced in Soviet prisons and concentration camps or during the persecution of the Kulaks. If a true feeling for justice and friendship had, at the appropriate time, brought into play the firm intervention of free peoples against such indignities not by war, but by normal political or economic pressure and for aims purely and truly disinterested in place of their seeking business accommodations with butchers, maybe the world could have avoided today's dreadful convulsions.
It is impossible to exaggerate the vital importance, so little understood by the sectarian liberalism of the nineteenth century and by the paganism of the present, of the spirit of friendship in human society. Perhaps by force of contrast the extreme sufferings and the terrible conflicts that men are undergoing today will at least have the effect of awakening in a goodly number of them a feeling for friendship and co-operation.
The cruel anomaly with which we are concerned here lies in the fact that historically, as I have pointed out, religion seems to have done as much to divide men and sharpen their conflicts as it has to pacify them. This anomaly is linked with what is deepest in mans nature. If man is not drawn above himself toward eternal values, he becomes less than human; and when he makes use of these eternal values for the sake of his own world of weakness and sin, he uses them to feed and strengthen, and to hallow his passions and malice. To this contradictory situation there is only one key; that key is charity. Religion, like everything great and noble and demanding within us, increases the tension in mankind, and together with the tension, suffering; and with the suffering, spiritual effort; and with the spiritual effort, joy. Tantum relligio potuit suadere malorum (So much evil could religion precipitate) said Lucretius of old in a formula after all amphibological. He should have added, and how necessary also is it to the very breath of humanity! And what great good it has been able to call forth, what hopes and virtues it has been able to inspire! Nothing that has been done through the substance of the centuries has been lastingly useful to human beings without religion, at least without religion in its purest forms. It is not religion that helps to divide men and sharpen their conflicts; it is the distress of our human condition and the interior strife in our hearts. And without religion we should certainly be far worse than we are. We see today how, when man rejects the sacred traditions of humanity and aspires either to free himself from religion by atheism, or to pervert religion by deifying his own sinful blood through a kind of racist pseudo-theism or para-theism, the darkest forms of fanaticism then spread throughout the world. Only by deeper and purer religious life, only by charity, is it possible to surmount the state of conflict and opposition produced by the impact of religion upon human weakness. To bring to an end all fanaticism and all pharisaism will require, I believe, the whole of human history. But it is the task of the religious conscience itself to overcome these evils. It alone is capable of doing so. It is the religious conscience which, by spiritualizing itself in suffering, must gradually rid itself and the world of the leaven of the pharisee and the fanaticism of the sectarians.
I believe that when we think of all these things, we better perceive the dramatic greatness of our time. As has often been pointed out, a certain unification of the world is taking place on the sub human level of matter and technique, whereas on the human level itself, the most savage conflicts come into being. In an apocalyptic upheaval, which imperils the very foundations of life, the advent of men to a new age of civilization is thus being prepared, which doubtless will indicate not only an historical transformation of great importance, for good as well as for evil, in the forms of consciousness and culture, but also the coming of a higher state of unity and integration. In the meantime, and it is this which lies at the root of our unhappiness -- technical progress has outstripped the mind: matter has gone faster than spirit. And that leaves to those who would hope -- I am among them -- only one hope: hope in a heroic effect of spiritualization thanks to which all progress in the material and technical order -- a progress we must utilize, not condemn -- can at last serve to effect a real progress in the emancipation of the human being.
All this is to say that the world itself is serving men an awful summons, and this summons is primarily addressed to those who are believers. The future will be good neither for the world nor for religion unless those who believe understand what is first and foremost required of them. If those very men who wear the insignia of the spirit allow their souls to become subject to those forces of destruction which desperately set evil against evil, and if they enlist religion -- even, as some may say, in its own interest -- in any undertaking whatever of domination and violence, I think that the disaster for civilization will be irreparable. What is required of believers at the outset and before everything else, even in the struggles of this world, with all the harsh means they imply, is not to dominate but to serve. It is to preserve among men confidence in good will, in the spirit of co-operation, in justice, in goodness, in pity for the weak and the outcast, in human dignity and in the power of truth. These are big words, but it is not enough to let them remain words; they must be made flesh in our lives. If we speak the truth without doing it, we run the risk of leading men to regard truth as an imposture. It has been said again and again in recent times, and rightly, that the believer is specially called upon to confess his God in social and temporal life, in the hard work of men. Many things which he accepts today in the earthly state of his fellows and in the conditions of human societies, will appear later to be as little worthy of acceptance as now appears to us the slavery of antiquity. The tragedy of unemployment, the tragedy of the refugee and the emigre, the tragedy of war, are symptoms of a deep disorder which we must work tirelessly to remedy.
Undoubtedly the world needs bread. It is horrible to think that there are so many millions of men on this earth who cannot satisfy their hunger. But what the world needs also and above all are the words that come from the mouth of God, words of active truth, of effective and fertile truth; it needs -- I do not say solely or exclusively, but I do say primarily -- the contemplation of the saints, their love and activity. And from us who are not saints it needs that in the patient insignificant acts of our everyday life, and in our social and political activities, each of us should faithfully witness, according as his state of life permits, the love of God for all beings and the respect due to the image of God in each human creature.
The analogical similarities in basic principles and ideas required for the co-operation of men of different creeds in the temporal order
THERE is still one question about which, in conclusion, I should like to say something. In the first part of this chapter, I emphasize the fact that religious division creates for believers of different denominations a fundamental plurality of points of view, and I drew attention to the illusion of seeking for the basis and purpose of good fellowship in a common minimum of doctrinal identity a common minimum which would be seen gradually to shrink to nothing while we discussed it, like the wild ass's skin in Balzac's story.
Yet on the other hand I have just said that this fellowship, based on friendship and charity, should extend, on the level of temporal civilization, to common action (doubtless not free from a certain amount of inevitable opposition and conflict); that it should extend real cooperation for the good of temporal society. But how can such common action be possible without common principles, without certain basic community of doctrine?
Before passing to more concrete considerations, I shall first answer this question in my own philosophical language. We are all bound together by a more primitive and fundamental unity than any unity of thought and doctrine: we all have the same human nature and, considered in their extra-mental reality, the same primordial tendencies. That sameness of nature is not sufficient to ensure community of action, since we act as thinking beings and not simply by natural instinct. But it subtends the very exercise of our thought. And the nature we hold in common is a rational nature, subject intellectually to the attraction of the same fundamental objects; this unity of nature lies at the deepest foundation of what similarities our principles of action may have, however diverse they may be in other respects. Now, in order to do the same terrestrial work and pursue the same temporal goal, there must be a certain community of principles and doctrine. But there need not necessarily be, however desirable and obviously more effective this might be in itself, a strict and pure and simple identity of doctrine. It is sufficient that the various principles and doctrines between themselves should have some unity and community of similarity or proportion or, in the technical sense of the word, of analogy, with regard to the practical end proposed. Besides, this practical end in itself, although subordinated to a higher end, belongs to the natural order. And no doubt it will be conceived differently according to each one's particular outlook, but in its existential reality it will be placed outside each one's particular conception. Considered thus, in real existence, it will in a measure fall short of, and, at the same time, give actual reality to, each one's particular conceptions.
Therefore, men with different religious convictions will be able not only to collaborate in working out a technique, in putting out a fire, in succouring a man who is starving or sick, in resisting aggression. All that is obvious. But -- and this is the problem that concerns us here -- if there really is that "analogical" likeness I have just mentioned between their principles, they can also cooperate at least as regards the primary values of existence in this world in a constructive action involving the right ordering of the life of temporal society and earthly civilization and the moral values inherent therein. I acknowledge this possibility at the same time, and the two things are not incompatible as I realize even more keenly my personal conviction that a complete doctrine, based on all principles of Catholic teaching, is alone capable of supplying an entirely true solution for the problems of civilization. I shall give an example of what I mean from the field I know best, namely Western Christianity, and an example which relates to the religious life itself. The practical problems connected with the relationship between the spiritual and the temporal, and their practical solutions, are so much alike for the Orthodox Church in the Soviet Union, for the Catholic Church and Protestant communities in Germany, that the experience and testimony of believers belonging to these different Christian families are, with their sufferings, a kind of common property. Another example can be drawn from the practical convergence which appears today, in connection with questions of civilization and the defense of the human person, between speculative outlooks as incompatible as Karl Barth's and my own. A Thomist and a Barthian will always clash in theology and philosophy; they can work together within human society. But we must be even more precise. I have said that the basis of fellowship between believers of different spiritual families is friendship and the love of charity. I now add that it is the implications of love itself that supply us with the guiding idea we need and that make manifest for us the "analogical" likeness of practical thought I referred to earlier.
It is obvious in fact that if, I am right in what I have said, the primary and fundamental likeness between us is the acknowledgment of the fundamental and primordial ethical value of the law of brotherly love, however much this law may have different theological and metaphysical connotations for us, according to the religion or school of thought to which we belong. For the Christian it corresponds to and raises to divine levels a fundamental though terribly thwarted tendency of our nature. It is the second commandment, which forms but one with the first: the commandment to love out neighbour as ourselves. "I feel," wrote Gandhi in a note on the Satyagraha in 1920, "that nations cannot be one in reality, nor can their activities be conducive to the common good of the whole humanity, unless there is this definite recognition and acceptance of the law of the family in national and international affairs, in other words, on the political platform. Nations can be called civilized only to the extent that they obey this law."(2 Report of the Commissioners appointed by the Punjab Subcommittee of. the Indian National Congress, 1920. Vol. L Chap. 4.) That, I also believe, is the truth.
Now this very law of brotherly friendship in practice has many implications. The first truth it implies, and which underlies all the rest, is that our existence is directed towards God and that, in accordance with the first commandment, we must love God above everything. How indeed can the law of love have absolute value transcending all the conflicts and discords which flourish among men, unless all men, whatever their race or colour, their class, their nation; their social conditions, their natural shortcomings, receive from an Absolute above the world the bond creating between the a more fundamental and far-teaching communion than all their diversities, and unless they are created to love first and foremost this Absolute in which all things live and move and have their being? We see only too readily that, in the great contemporary movements in which God is in practice denied, whether by virtue of an atheism that refuses to admit His existence or by virtue of a pseudo-theism that blasphemes His nature, love and charity are alike rejected as weaknesses and as the worst enemies either of the State or of the Revolution. The theorists of these movements make that abundantly clear in their writings.
The second implication is on the one hand the holiness of truth and on the other hand the eminent value of good will. If man can bend the truth to his own desires, will he not also want to bend other men in like manner? Those who despise charity are also those who think that truth depends, not on what is, but on what at each moment serves most effectively their party, their greed, or their hate. And those who despise charity also despise good will. The word to them seems pale and dangerously liberal. They forget at any rate the Christians among them that the word has its origin in the Gospels. It is true enough that good will is not sufficient, and that men who mistake that will which is good will for that willingness which is weakness cheat people. But goodwill is necessary and of primary necessity It is useful in everything. Real, authentic good ill indicates the sacred mystery which spells salvation for men and which makes it possible to say of a man that he is purely and simply good. It enables men to go out of themselves to meet their neighbours halfway. That is why the pharisees and the fanatics, walled up in their whited sepulchres, wherein they would like to enclose the whole world, are not only suspicious of good will; they detest the very idea. The third implication contained in fraternal amity is the dignity of the human person with the rights it implies and the realities of which it is based. I refer to the spirituality of the human soul and its eternal destiny. In the text from which I have already quoted, Gandhi also pointed out that it [Satyagraha] is called also soul-force, because a definite recognition of the soul within is a necessity, if Satyagraha is to believe that death does not mean cessation of the struggle, but a culmination. I as a Christian know very well on what my faith in the immortality of the soul and the dignity of the human person is based. I read in the Gospels: What doth it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul? I read also that the hairs on each of our heads are counted, and that the angels who see the face of the Father watch over each of the children of men, who are equal in that dignity, and that we must love our enemies. And I read the story of the man who went down from Jerusalem to Jericho and whom robbers left half-dead by the road side. A Samaritan, in other words a foreigner, with whom the Jew did not mix and whose religious beliefs were different from theirs recognized his neighbour in that man by having pity on him; whereas a doctor of the law and a priest, going on their way with closed hearts, by so doing excluded themselves from neighbourship with men. The mysterious words of Christ on this matter mean that it is up to us really to become the neighbour of any man, by loving him and having pity on him. It is not community of race, of class or of nation; it is the love of charity that makes us what we ought to be, members of the family of God, of the only community where each person, drawn out from his fundamental loneliness, truly communicates with others and truly makes them his brothers, by giving himself to them and in a certain sense dying for them. Nothing that has ever been said points out more profoundly the mystery and dignity of the human person. Who is my neighbour? The man of my blood? Of my party? The man who does me good? No. It the man to whom I show mercy, the man to whom is transmitted through me the universal gift and love of God, who makes the rain from heaven fall upon both the good and the wicked.
The existence of God, the sanctity of truth, the value and necessity of good will, the dignity of the person, the spirituality an immortality of the soul: these, and all the other implications bound up with them which I shall not mention here, correspond to spontaneous perceptions of our reason and to primary tendencies of our nature; but they are not understood in an identical and univocal way by believers in the various religions of humanity. Thus Christianity and Buddhism have different conceptions of the human person; the survival of the soul has a different meaning for those who believe in personal immortality and in the resurrection of the body and those who believe in transmigration; the sanctity of truth appears in a different light according to the fashion in which both revelation and human reason are conceived; the value of good will has different connotations for the Catholic who believes in sanctifying grace, for the Orthodox who believes in the sanctifying uncreated Spirit but not in created grace, for the Protestant who believes that the merits of Christ are imputed to an essentially corrupt nature, or the Israelite who believes in the Law; for the Moslem who believes in salvation by the mere profession of Islamic faith; and this difference is still greater as between these religious groups and the religious groups who believe in Karma. As regards the existence of God itself, I do not think that Buddhism rejects, as is often stated, the existence of God, nor that it is in reality an atheistic religion. I believe that this apparent atheism comes from the fact that Buddhism has developed historically as a kind of mystical destruction of the Brahmanic affirmation, so that the Buddhist ascesis and Nirvana are, as it were, like a vast apophatic or negative theology, standing alone in emptiness. But this example does serve to cast light on the extent to which the idea of God may differ among believers of the various religions. It should be added that those who believe that they are non-believers may, in their practical lives, by choosing as the aim of their activity the authentic moral good, choose God, and may do so by virtue of Gods grace, without their knowing God in a consciously and conceptually formulated manner.
All this goes to show that there is nothing univocal between the various paths travelled by men, and that practical good fellowship is not based on a common minimum of doctrinal identity. In a certain sense, less than a common minimum is to be found there, since ultimately no notion appears to be univocally common to all the different religious outlooks. Yet in another sense there is much more than a common minimum, since among those who, belonging to different religious families, allow the spirit of love to enter into them, the implications of brotherly love create, for the principles of the practical reason and of action and as regards terrestrial civilization, a community of similitude and analogy which corresponds on the one hand to the fundamental unity of our rational nature and is, on the other hand, not merely concerned with a minimum number of points of doctrine, but penetrates the whole gamut of practical notions and of the principles of action of each one. The coming together of such men to co-operate for the good of human society is not based upon an equivocation. It is based upon "analogical" likeness as between the practical principles, motions, and progressions implied in their common acceptance of the law of love, and corresponding to the primary inclinations of human nature.
And why should I, a Christian, according to whose faith a single Name has been given to men through whom they can be saved even in the temporal order, why should I disguise the fact that the community of analogy itself supposes a primum analogatum purely and simply true; and that implicitly and ultimately everything which is authentic love, working in the world for the reconciliation of men and the common good of their life here below, tends, under forms more or less perfect, more or less pure, toward Christ, who is known to some, unknown to others? In this philosophical attempt, to solve a difficult problem, I have spoken in accordance with my faith, and I hope that I have said nothing which might offend the conscience of any of my readers. I shall be glad if I have succeeded in outlining with sufficient daring what are, from my point of view, the foundations of mutual fellowship and understanding between believers of different, religious families and of a constructive co-operation between them for the good of civilization. The good of civilization is also the good of the human person, the recognition of his rights and of his dignity based ultimately on the fact that he is the image of God. Let no one deceive himself; the cause of religion and the cause of the human person are closely linked. They have the same enemies. The time has passed when a rationalism fatal to reason, which has prepared the way for all our misfortunes, could claim to defend the person and his autonomy against religion. Both against atheistic materialism and against an irrationalism drunk with inflicting domination and humiliation, an irrationalism which perverts the genuine instincts of human nature and makes of the political State a supreme idol and a Moloch, religion is the best defender of the person and of his freedom. And finally if I am asked what I believe to be the reason for Gods having permitted the religious divisions in mankind, and those heresies which "must be," according to Saint Paul -- I should answer: For the education of mankind, and in order to prepare the way for final religious unity. Because on the one hand it is something above human powers to maintain purity and strength in the collective virtues of any natural community, unless it be within the particular hereditary bias of this earthly, sociologically closed social group. And on the other hand the common life of the Church, the Kingdom of God, is that of a spiritual, supernatural, supra-racial, supra-national, supra-earthly community, open to all humanity as it is open to Deity and divine and deifying blood. Much suffering and many purifications throughout human history are necessary to extricate us from any restriction and adulteration of spiritual unity brought about by fleshly unities.
On the day when all the faithful could live with men of other creeds in perfect justice, love and understanding, and at the same time keep the true faith perfectly whole and pure, on that day men would not need actually to practice these virtues toward people of other creeds, because infidelity and religious division would on such a day have vanished from the face of the earth.
END
You are a long term Mitt Romney supporter here and you never knew that he was a Bishop and even a Stake President? You never learned anything about Mormonism while pushing him here?
All this feigned ignorance of Mormonism and the Romney history and his powerful presence in his religion is as phony as a three dollar bill and is just another route for you to keep fighting for Romney.
I wouldn’t be inclined to vote for Romney, even if he were an evangelical Methodist. A progressive Republican is a progressive Republican, and they are worse than most Democrats. ...Dominionism bothers me, be it from Mormons, Muslims, Masons or Christians, and it doesn’t matter who is running for office, it pays to know a little about the forces that motivate them. Mormonism isn’t an absolute roadblock to my vote, but it is definitely an obstacle that a Mormon candidate would have to overcome. Give me a genuine conservative Mormon against a liberal Democrat satanist, or progressive-Republican Christian, and the conservative gets my vote. ...As spiritual matters go, there are many bad ones in politics. It’s a minefield out there.
Too bad that the Catholic church has taken such a strong stand, that Mormonism is not Christian.
It must put liberal, pro Romney Catholics in an awkward position as they promote his religion and him, and side with the liberals and atheists, and romneybots here.
“By the purple socks of Donny Osmond.”
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Now THAT is funny! Thank you for a good laugh to start the day.
You assume too much. And attack too quickly. But then, it is so impossible to have a pleasant conversation here. No where is freedom of thought and speech so little valued as at freerepublic.com. As for me, I will support the Republican nominee, no matter who it is, in order to get Obama out of office. As Rush said, Elmer Fudd would be better. Anyone on the stage in New Hampshire, or Christie, or Perry . . . any of them would be better than Obama. If you prefer to choose Elmer Fudd over Romney, well, that is your choice. I simply think the situation is far too dire, the fate of the future of this country far too endangered, to quibble. The only man I am “pushing” is whoever goes up against Obama. I’m sorry that’s not good enough for you, because Obama is the real enemy.
Luckily fascist skinhead cult members cannot force Christians to vote for cult members.
Freedom to vote as we wish, and to discuss the merits or flaws of candidates as we wish, even if the candidate is a practitioner of Mormonism, that is the freedom we have.
No one has the right or the power to force a religion restriction on the American voter.
Catholics and Christians know what I mean though, and they care.
Take it up with the boss. It's really tiresome to see these mormonism defenders complaining about FR while at the same time using Jim's bandwith to do so.
Only Islam and some of the human sacrifice jungle cults should be automatically dismissed from consideration. Mormons are certainly no threat; you don't hear of them mugging and thugging, or trying to spread their beliefs at swordpoint. That said, I would prefer a committed Christian.
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