However, I, for one, can't let your boy get away with this one
Witness his proud claim that Christianity actually shaped the core tenets of liberalism in his August 17 Angelus address: “The Christian faith gave form [to Europe], and some of its fundamental values in turn inspired ‘the democratic ideal and the human rights’ of European modernity,” the Pope said.
The Pope did no such thing. First of all, Allen doesn't define "liberalism" here and, secondly, the Pope is speaking of CHRISTIAN FAITH which is not equivalent to Liberalism, no matter how one defines it, and who is Allen to say what the "core tenets" of such a political construct as "Liberalism" means from day to day.
Whatever it does mean, liberalism certainly does not mean the protection of the individual against the ever-growing Leviathan State.
Schindler's critique of American culture, as it exists presently, is spot-on. Let's see what he has to say:
... So, as a culture, we have an enormous problem -- and it's a religious one. Catholics need to respond by working to reinstate a sense of God so that we can regain an adequate sense of our own creatureliness -- in other words, "I'm not the source of my own being, my own moral norms. I'm not the author of my life and therefore not the one who decides about my death."The debate over public display of the ten commandments is a perfect example of the problems discussed by Schindler.What's happened in U.S. Catholicism -- thanks in part to [Jesuit Father] John Courtney Murray, who did many good things otherwise -- is that we now assume that we can't bring God into the heart of this discussion because, there are a lot of non-believers out there. But that's precisely the point. It's because religious questions have been so radically removed from our culture that we're so vulnerable to phenomena like Jack Kevorkian and abortion.
As the philosopher Will Herberg observed in his book, "Protestant, Catholic, Jew," Americans are privately very religious, but then in public we all agree to subscribe to the virtues that make us good democrats and good free marketeers, so that faith becomes essentially a fragmented, private reality. In effect, we're private theists and public atheists.
...Americans are religiously sincere and morally generous. This country has a tremendous energy and abundance of good will. In the light of God's infinite mercy, that's always a good reason to hope.
My fear is that we don't see the subtlety of how -- as the pope says in Evangelium Vitae -- democracy can invert into totalitarianism. We have the illusion that we're free because no one tells us what to do. We have political freedom. But at the same time, a theological and philosophical set of assumptions informs our freedom, of which we're unconscious. A logic or "ontologic" of selfishness undermines our moral intention of generosity. We don't have the requisite worldview that would help us address abortion or the more general, current threat to the family.
Can we unmask the assumptions of our culture and deal with them in a way that will free the latent generosity of the culture? Or will those hidden assumptions overcome our generosity? This is the real battle, both globally and in America. It calls for a new effort of evangelization -- which consists, above all, in first getting clear about the ideas in Evangelium Vitae; understanding the logic of self-centeredness in a post-Enlightenment liberal culture. Alasdair McIntyre has a great line: that all debates in America are finally among radical liberals, liberal liberals and conservative liberals.
....the conservative wing of liberalism... wouldn't even deny that, insofar as their project is to show that a benign reading of American liberal tradition is harmonious with Catholicism. That's what I'm challenging. Their approach doesn't go to the roots of our [cultural and spiritual] problem, as identified in this pontificate and in the work of theologians like De Lubac and Balthasar.
Contemporary U.S. culture is rooted in] self-centeredness. A false sense of autonomy centered in the self; an incomplete conception of rights. So we need to reinstate a right relation to God on all levels -- not only at the level of intention, but at the level of the logic of our culture. Our relation to God has to inform not only our will, but how we think and how we construct our institutions.
That's what it used to mean. Now it means Bolshevik.
The Leftists are hijacking our language. (e.g., Have you felt gay lately?)