Posted on 08/04/2011 3:37:24 PM PDT by NYer
DENVER, August 4, 2011 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Cardinal Raymond Burke, head of the Vatican’s highest court, delivered a dire yet hopeful message about the current state of society in an address at the 129th Knights of Columbus Convention Tuesday.
“We are witnesses of a society in which, in many respects, morality has ceased to exist,” said Burke. “We are called ever more urgently to the new evangelization of our culture.”
Cardinal Burke pinpointed the problem as “moral relativism,” which he said “has even entered into the thinking of some theologians in the Church and which has provided an ideological foundation for a culture which is predominantly marked by violence and death.”
The Pope, said Cardinal Burke, “described a moral relativism, called proportionalism or consequentialism in contemporary moral theology, which has generated profound confusion and deadly error regarding the most fundamental truths of the moral order.”
He exemplified the erroneous thinking, saying:
We think, for instance, of the justification of the murder of the unborn child in the womb as the exercise of the right of the mother to choose, weighing other goods, whether to bring to term the baby she has conceived; the justification of the abhorrent practices of the artificial generation of human life and its destruction, at the embryonic stage of development, as the means to obtain supposed cures for crippling or deadly diseases; the justification of the so-called “mercy killing” of those who have the first title to our care, our brothers and sisters who have grown weak through advanced years, grave illness or special needs, as respect for the quality of their lives; and the justification of the sexual union of two persons of the same sex as tolerance of so-called alternative forms of human sexuality, as if there were a true form of human sexuality other than the form written in the human body and soul by God.
Effectively, according to Burke, the culture’s need for evangelization now is as dire as when the Church first began.
“Even as the first disciples faced a pagan world which had not even heard of our Lord Jesus Christ, so, we, too face a culture which is forgetful of God and hostile to His Law written upon every human heart,” he said.
The “program leading to freedom and happiness” for each of us, said Burke, is “the holiness of life in Christ, in accord with our state in life and with careful attention to our ‘time and culture’.”
Burke described a holiness that would courageously proclaim Christianity despite the many voices seeking to exclude faith from public life.
“Religious faith and practice is important for the life of every nation, specifically for the right formation of the conscience of her citizens,” he said. “ When reason is not purified by faith in the political realm, the powerful and influential of the time exercise a tyranny which violates the fundamental rights of the very people whom political leaders are called to serve.”
Bruke concluded: “Yes, we face a struggle with those who would falsely exclude the purifying and illuminating service of faith to reason, those who would insist that, when it comes to civic life, we must bracket our religious faith, even to the point of violating our own conscience.
“But we know the truth about the critical service which our faith brings to political reasoning, and, therefore, we must remain steadfast in giving witness to it, even in the face of indifference and hostility.”
See Burke’s complete talk to the KofC Convention here.
Ping!
Morality has always existed and will always exist. It’s just semantics, but the Cardinal should have said that morality’s existence is no longer recognized by too large a proportion of our population.
Pinged for Truth!
Not even those fun loving Romans sanctioned fag marriage.
As in the days of Noah...
Really, by whose definition?
Let no one in any way deceive you,shalom b'SHEM Yah'shua HaMashiach
for it will not come unless the apostasy
comes first, and the man of lawlessness
is revealed, the son of destruction,
Vatican Cardinal Burke: In today’s society ‘morality has ceased to exist’
Heaven and the love of neighbour [Catholic/Orthodox Caucus]
Virtue of Prudence [Michael Voris video]
Back-to-School Virtues: Three qualities that help your child succeed in class and in life
How to Make All Our Conversations Virtuous [Ecumenical]
Advent -- A Season of Hope
Modesty En Vogue [Another one of the virtues]"
Prudence: Mother of All Virtues
The Virtue of Confidence
Is Courage a Masculine Virtue?
Cardinal Virtues: Obama and the Real American Infrastructure – Part One
Cardinal Virtues: Obama and the Real American Infrastructure — Part Two
Morality is Habit-Forming: The Cardinal Virtues
The Cross Exemplifies Every Virtue [St. Thomas Aquinas]
Living the Virtue of Humility
Libs have made a cesspool of America.
Society is rotting from the head down AND the bottom up!
In my humble, very uneducated opinion, society has always suffered from the same DEGREE of immorality—it’s just that different sins dominate different eras. Today, we’re a bunch of oversexed, irresponsible, lazy, perverted jerks. Yesterday, we tortured and murdered people who didn’t submit to the ruling class’s religion, and oppressed people for being the wrong color, representing the wrong ethnicity, etc.
We’re not getting more immoral. We’ve just shifted from violence to sex.
You say “... The Cardinal should have said...”
His words were (emphasis mine):
“We are witnesses of a society in which, IN MANY RESPECTS, morality has ceased to exist...”
He did not deny the continued existence of morality. He was obviously commenting on the existence of a moral sense in the lives of most people. Context is key.
People still commit the usual “social sins” (prejudice against groups for one reason or another, etc.), but the objects of the violence and hatred have simply changed.
And sexual immorality coupled with slothfulness and casual violence has always been a plague in any society.
The difference is that people in Christian societies at least knew it was wrong and didn’t try to justify it. If you were going to sin, you knew you were sinning. You and most of your friends may have done it anyway, but there was an ideal that at some point might have been able to pull you out of it or save you from truly horrible acts. Now we have no ideal.
Sin has been transformed into virtue (”gay marriage”) and society neither offers nor accepts any virtuous ideal. That’s a big, big difference, and we are probably the first society to have no personal moral code, relating to sex or anything else, for that matter.
Only if one forgets that abortion. infanticide, and euthanasia are just as violent as war.
“Even as the first disciples faced a pagan world which had not even heard of our Lord Jesus Christ, so, we, too face a culture which is forgetful of God and hostile to His Law written upon every human heart,”....
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Sadly, he has summed it up quite well there.
Libs have made a cesspool of America.
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True. But all of us are complicit to a certain extent by not holding the line hard enough against the sliming of our culture.
cycle of life and all. seems fitting for the end of things to resemble the beginning.
Society tells them they are not really sinning. Sins are the fault of society, not the sinner. A Christian country which once recognized the need for reconciliation with God in our sinful nature now goes to a counselor to be told that what they feel and what they have done is normal.
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