Replies

I attended Catholic schools all my life (including Catholic college). I collect books and have a book from Catholic grade school in 1955. I also have the 1909 McGuffey Readers which were used in public schools prior to the progressive era and mentions God all the time (no separation of God and state, huh, since we were founded under God). The Catholic book is revised from a public school book...identical except it refers to God and Jesus Christ several times.

My ideas have been garnered from extensive reading on the Progressive Era and especially The Closing of the American Mind by Bloom which explains the Post Modern German Philosophy (progressive) that was dominate in Europe in the late 1800’s and came here to the states by 1910....or so. The philosophy is in direct conflict with John Locke and Nature’s Law, Rousseau’s individualism, and Montesquieu’s separation of powers.

My point is that the reason the United States is NOT as atheistic, nihilistic and immoral ss Europe is now and was in the early 1900’s (that led to Weimar Republic, Mussolini’s Italy and Lenin is because of the strong Judeo Christian influence which the progressives had a much harder time destroying here in the states especially because of our unique system of government.

I’m not saying that all of the Founder’s philosophy has been destroyed, the tea parties are proof that it is not, but there is proof (Zero) that the progressives have the upper hand in this nation right now. True Christians (not progressives) need to recognize the ideas that are destroying this great nation so that we can take it back. (BTW, Notre Dame is a perfect example of progressives corrupting a Catholic institution). You can’t tell me that they advocate Christian thought when they entertain the devil and hold him up to esteem, as well as, promoting the Vagina monologues’ filth.

I claim no expertise on what happened to Europe. In the US, the Progressive Movement certainly has its faults but is not quite the the bugaboo that it is sometimes made out to be. "Paleo""conservative" think tanks like the Rockford Institute lose rationality at the mention of the word "progressive." Sensible folk ought not to do so.

As to specific programs of the Progressive Movement, Workers' Compensation was not an enemy of Christian or Western Civilization any more than was the life insurance program established back then by the Knights of Columbus for the families deprived of their breadwinners. Public sanitation is not an enemy. Various programs aimed at stiffening up professionalism were not enemies. I am as uncomfortable as the next guy and then some with the faux "moral superiority" of upper middle class and upper class pecksniffs who infested progressivism from the outset. OTOH, Teddy Roosevelt had a LOT of high points as POTUS (encouraging large families, building the White Fleet, gunboat diplomacy, setting a manly standard in his personal life, encouraging gun sports, etc.). Where Teddy failed was in appointing Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. to SCOTUS, and having a far too supportive attitude toward overtaxation.

1909 was late in the game for the Progressive Movement of the pre-Wilson variety.

Your Catholic school experience and mine may have been contemporary (?) but apparently verrrrry different. I would worry as much and a lot more about the influence of eighteenth century philosophes (whose notions led to the barbarism of the French Revolution) as I would about the notions of the more benign Progressives like Teddy Roosevelt. I attended a Jesuit Prep School in the early 1960s where the Jesuits pointedly turned their backs to Robert Drinan, SJ, when he debated Bill Buckley there and wildly applauded Buckley. Such books as you describe may have been used somewhere but not commonly in Catholic schools and certainly not at that prep school.

The Weimar Republic was dominated by Socialists who were often atheists. Mussolini was a communist before he was a fascist. Lenin was, well, Lenin. These are NOT Progressives but far worse.

If you review the Notre Shame threads here, you will find that I am in no danger of supporting the slime that misrule that once Catholic (more than 50 years ago) school. Personally, I think Fr. Jenkins has earned a purgative burning at the stake. I agree with my bishop, Thomas Doran of Rockford, that the school's name should be changed to Northwestern Indiana Humanist University for the sake of truth in advertising, that it should stop dragging Our Lady's good name through the mud and that Fr. Jenkins is in a state of public mortal sin. The elderly priest who was arrested there carrying a cross onto the campus (Fr. Weslin) has been a legal client of mine in pro-life activity decades ago. He was the single finest client I ever had.

As a Catholic, I am not at all sure that there ought to be an unmitigated connection of God and State. I worship God. I shall never worship the state nor assume that it is an arm of God's authority. The evidence of history is overwhelming against such a proposition.

Our founders were not infallible but their tendencies on Church and state were not bad. Catholics have flourished and grown here in a nation founded by a few Catholics and very many who were not Catholic.

I was apparently wrong in assuming that you are not Catholic.