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Being Catholic #400: How Modernity Challenges Catholic Truth · Catholic Spirit Radio

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This is Being Catholic with Bob Johnston on Catholic Spirit Radio.
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Hi, this is Bob Johnston, and you're listening to Being Catholic right here
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on Catholic Spirit Radio, 89.5 FM and 92.5 FM in good old McLean County in Bloomington Normal,
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We're going to have a great show for you today. I'm here with my wife, Lynn.
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So anything you can do, as I said, will always be appreciated.
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And we're going to talk today a little bit about communism and how it operates
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in our modern society today.
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I'm going to read from a couple of articles in the New Oxford Review.
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Before I start, though, I want to turn this over to my wife,
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Lynn, and see what she has to say.
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Well, hello everybody out there.
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This is going to be a very timely discussion about communism.
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I can remember before we got married, we had to meet with the priests and stuff
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together and separately and stuff.
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And one of the questions was in the Catholic Church, this was before Vatican
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II, of course, was, as far as you know, is the person you're marrying involved in communism?
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Or believe in it.
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And, you know, now it's AOC and stuff you think they were.
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Well, maybe they are, you know. That's what they believe in, socialism and so forth.
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So I think this is very pertinent to what's going on in the world today.
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So I think we'll have a really good discussion about that. The other thing is
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the government's released the UFO or whatever they call them now.
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And what do we find out?
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That. We still don't know anything about them.
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Other than, yeah, we think there's something there and there's something real.
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What do we know about it? This has been going on for centuries, actually.
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You know, it has been. And it's nothing new. Nothing new under the sun. So...
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Take it for what it's worth. I'm sure not going to worry about it.
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So, okay, Bob, do you want to get started? All right. I'm going to read an article
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here about Stalin's daughter.
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And it's an article in the New Oxford Review, and it's in the current edition
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of the New Oxford Review.
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And let me look and see if that's May. I think it's May. Yes,
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the May 2026 issue of the New Oxford Review. And the article is written by Marcus Peter, Dr.
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Marcus Peter, and he is a scripture scholar and a theologian,
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philosopher, and commentator on the intersection of faith and culture.
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He's the director of theology for Ave Maria Radio and the Cresta Institute,
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and he's host of the daily EWTN radio program Ave Maria in the afternoon and
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host of the television program Unveiling the Covenants.
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He is a prolific author and an international speaker, and readers may follow
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his work on marcuspeter.com.
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So a very interesting article. It's not a really long one.
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So we're going to read from that. And then another article that bears on it
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and talks about what communism is really in the modern times.
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So I'll read this article by Marcus Peter, When Stalin's Daughter Found the Father.
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When Joseph Stalin's daughter, Svetlana Aliyeva, fled the Soviet Union in 1967,
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it was more than a political defection.
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It was the collapse of a theology.
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The regime she left behind had been built on a single conviction,
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that man could order paradise without God.
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Her father had devoted his life to that experiment, only to die shaking his
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fist at heaven, literally defying the God he claimed did not exist.
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The irony was not lost on Svetlana. In that last gesture of his,
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she realized the full extent of her father's failure.
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Stalin did believe in God after all. He just hated him.
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Witnesses reported that in his final hours, Stalin awoke from a coma,
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opened his eyes, and raised his arm toward the ceiling in rage before collapsing dead.
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For his daughter, who had long endured the psychological imprisonment of her
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father's ideology, that image was shattering.
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Something shook him at the very end, she wrote later, God grants an easy death only to the just.
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In that moment, she began to see what her father's atheism really was,
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not a philosophical conviction, but an act of metaphysical rebellion.
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The oldest sin in history.
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Stalin's mother had once hoped her son would become a priest.
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She sent him to a seminary in Tiflis, where he sang in the choir and studied scripture.
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Somewhere along the way, the young seminarian discovered Marx and exchanged
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the Bible for the Communist Manifesto.
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It was as history would show a tragic career change.
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The boy, who might have consecrated bread and wine, instead consecrated terror and famine.
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A prominent feature in communism is the priestly instinct gone rogue.
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It imitates Christianity's structure, but inverts its meaning.
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It has its saints, Lennon, Shea, Mao,
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sacraments, party membership, and liturgies, parades, slogans,
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and the public confession of sin called self-criticism,
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but its God is the state, and its gospel is resentment.
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At its core, communism is not an economic theory.
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It is a theodicy gone wrong, and a theodicy is sort of a religious formation.
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It could be secular, but it's based on sort of a religious, theological type of formation.
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It refuses to believe in divine providence and insists on human planning.
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It does not pray, Thy will be done. It demands, Our will be done.
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That is why every communist regime must first declare war on the family,
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the church, and private property.
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These are the three natural institutions that limit the reach of the state.
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Marx called religion the opium of the people, but he meant more than superstition.
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He meant rival authority.
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In the biblical worldview, the human person is the child of God,
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endowed with conscience and moral agency.
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In the Marxist worldview, man is raw material, defined by class and molded by the collective.
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The two cannot exist.
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And when the communist or the state demands that you say our will be done, I think it was C.S.
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Lewis that said that God says that there are two kinds of people.
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Isn't it, Lynn? that those who say, thy will be done, and others who say, my will be done.
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Exactly. And God grants both of them their wish. Yes. And that's exactly what happened to Stalin.
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And we can see that in our society today.
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The church saw this clearly, long before Stalin built his gulags.
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Pope Pius IX, in his encyclical, qui pluribus, a qui pluribus,
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I'm not sure the pronunciation, and,
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called communism absolutely contrary to natural law.
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Leo XIII, in Quad Apostolicy, Muneris, condemned socialism as a plague that
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threatened civil society with destruction.
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Pius XI was even more direct, writing in Divini Redemptoris,
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communism is intrinsically wrong, and no one who would save Christian civilization
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may collaborate with it in any undertaking whatsoever.
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This language leaves no room for ambiguity. No Christian can be a communist
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or even a socialist without rebelling against the very anthropology revealed in Genesis.
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Yet in the 21st century, Western Christians seem to have forgotten this.
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Politicians in designer suits now campaigned under the banner of Christian socialism,
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as if charity and confiscation were synonymous.
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And I remember when I was in college, there was a professor there who was a
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Marxist, and then there was a professor who was an associate of his.
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You know, not like a...
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Yeah, more of a friend, you know, not a teaching associate, but a friend.
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And he was, he called himself a Christian socialist.
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This is, he wasn't a Catholic, but he was a very nice man and so forth,
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thinking that you could, you know, socialize Christianity or Christianize socialism
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or one or the other or both.
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And of course, that went against the Catholic teaching and still does.
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And as if influencers post portraits of Marx superimposed over the Sermon on
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the Mount, trying to sort of equate the two. The ignorance is astounding.
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Marxism is organized denial of God.
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Socialism is its economic expression. To say Christian socialists is as coherent
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as saying pacifist warlord.
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In other words, if someone could be a pacifist and a warlord at the same time, you can't be one.
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And of course, you can't be a Christian and a socialist at the same time either.
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One automatically excludes the other. The infection, of course,
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did not stop at the Berlin Wall.
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When the Frankfurt School fled Nazi Germany, its Marxist professors landed comfortably
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in American universities, rebranding class warfare as cultural critique.
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Economic Marxism gave way to critical theory, which divided society not by wealth but by identity.
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The categories of rich and poor were replaced with oppressor and oppressed.
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Race, gender, sexuality, and religion were all reframed as instruments of power,
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and we still have this going on.
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This mutation allowed Marxism to survive in the very capitalist societies it sought to destroy.
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Today, communism's offspring flourish under new names.
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Gender ideology, radical feminism, queer theory, and intersectionality.
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And intersectionality is a theory that sort of classifies and ranks the various identities.
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In other words, if you're, say, let's say a woman, you're a feminist,
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somehow or another you're oppressed.
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But if you're a lesbian and a woman, of course, at the same time,
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then you're even more oppressed.
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And if you were a black lesbian woman, then you're even more oppressed than
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a white lesbian woman and so forth. It's how they rank them.
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This is called intersectionality.
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The same logic runs through them all. If reality contradicts our desires,
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then reality must yield.
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The result is a political movement at war with nature itself.
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That's the state that once seized the factory now seizes the family, the body, even the soul.
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It promises liberation but delivers dependency.
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It preaches equality while institutionalizing envy. It is the same rebellion in a new costume.
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And you see it going on in the transgender movement. I mean,
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if nature determines that you are a male or a female, then reality gets in the
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way. The heck with reality.
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You can become whatever you want. In other words, you can become like a god.
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If you are unsatisfied with your male identity, you can change it over to a
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female identity and vice versa.
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And this is exactly what communism preaches economically. and it does the same
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thing coming over here to the United States with the human identity or the identity of reality.
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Modern policy in the West bears the fingerprints of this inheritance.
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Massive welfare systems designed to replace family responsibility,
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education bureaucracies that replace parental authority, and social programs
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that treat faith as pathology.
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These all descend from the Marxist conviction that society must be engineered from above.
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Anti-marriage policies masquerading as gender equality and abortion rights marketed
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as health care are not humanitarian progress.
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They are the practical atheism of dialectical materialism.
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Where God is denied, man must be redesigned.
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And I really get a kick out of
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that, don't you, the idea of this calling abortion health care, you know.
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Whose health? Right, and that, you know, people have a right to...
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Murder, end life, yeah.
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And abortion is part of healthcare. Mm-hmm. Totally against natural law, totally.
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But, of course, communism rejects natural law, and so does the society reject natural law.
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It's a rebellion against reality.
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Svetlana saw through it all. She lived at the center of the machinery her father
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built, the cult of personality.
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The censorship, the suspicion, and she watched it consume everyone, including him.
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In America, she found something the Soviet Union could not supply,
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the freedom to ask questions about meaning.
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That search led her to Catholicism. When she entered the church,
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she said she had finally come home.
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For her, the church was not another institution of control, but the very antidote to it.
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So we're going to stop here and take a break.
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So stay with us. We'll be right back. You've been listening to Being Catholic
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with Bob Johnston on Catholic Spirit Radio.
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Hi, this is Bob Johnson, and you're listening to Being Catholic,
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right here on Catholic Spirit Radio.
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We're back from our break, and we're talking about communism and how communism
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sort of changed coats or disguised itself and jumped into Western capitalist
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society and is alive and well today and going on.
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We're reading from an article by Marcus Peter, and it's when Stalin's daughter
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found the father, and it's talking about communism.
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And we will, of course, also go on to compare it and show how communism has
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morphed and modified and evolved and how it's operating today and how it's even
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making inroads into the Catholic Church itself.
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And at any rate, it goes on here.
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It says, it is worth remembering that the same church that welcomed Stalin's
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daughter also buried millions of his victims.
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From Ukraine's Holodomor, or I'm not sure how to pronounce, my wife is going
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to talk on that a little bit, to Poland's priestly purges, communism made martyrdom
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fashionable again. And you want to comment on that, Lynn?
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The Holodomor, I can't pronounce it either.
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Holodomor, I guess. Whatever. Yeah, that sounds more like it.
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That was part of the collectivization under Stalin,
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where the farms were taken over in a collective socialist way to make everything
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belong to the state to divvy out to all the people,
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saying it was a collective of all the people.
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And they would produce, especially the farmers, they would produce and feed
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everybody in the country.
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Well, these farmers had to give up their land. Some of them were moved to a
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different country even.
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And they farmed as a group.
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Sort of reminds me about the collectives and stuff of our age, the flower children.
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Remember them? And they did everything.
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Everything belonged to everybody. Well, it never works out very well because
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everybody doesn't share.
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In this case, it was the government.
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And if you didn't grow what they wanted you to grow and produce as much as they wanted you to produce,
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you would either be killed or deported to the gulags in Siberia for a period of maybe 10, 20 years.
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People had no choice. They had to grow, and people starved.
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The estimate is they don't know for sure, but they think it's between three
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and a half and five million people starved to death,
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died of scurvy, and malnutrition during this period of time.
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We're talking about 1932, 1933, where it was at its height, and people in Russia,
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and especially Ukraine.
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So we can see why people in Ukraine are not too happy about anything in Russia
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or anything to do with Russia, because they were under their rule, under Stalin,
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and the rest of them.
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That's, you know, another way of...
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Yeah, it was horrible. It was horrible. They even were told to grow cotton in
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some places so the government country could export the cotton.
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Well, not all land...
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Is favorable and meant to grow cotton, but it didn't make any difference to them.
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Yeah, it was a huge failure, and the people were forced to follow it.
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The farmers, Solon did this in order to force the farmers off their own land
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onto the co-ops and do everything the communist way, and of course,
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it was one monstrous failure.
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Anyhow, philosophically, communism failure was inevitable.
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By rejecting transcendence, it condemned itself to absurdity.
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And they did, as Lynn was saying.
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It was absurd what they asked these people to grow in places where stuff like
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that would not even grow.
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And it was a terrible misuse of the land. And it was a huge collective project
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where nobody could claim responsibility for anything.
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Machinery was left to rot. People didn't care for it. Nobody knew what particular
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thing they were responsible for, and it was not like private farming at all.
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And it didn't feed the communist society.
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It didn't feed anybody. It starved people to death.
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So at any rate, if there is no God, there can be no objective good.
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And if there is no good, then all morality is just a mask for power.
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Stalin understood this perfectly.
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He once asked mockingly, How many divisions does the Pope have?
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The answer came decades later, not in tanks but in conversions,
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including that of his own daughter.
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The Church, as it turns out, has more divisions than any army.
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It has saints, martyrs, confessors, and penitents who refuse to bow to Caesar.
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Stalin's descendants in modern politics fare no better.
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The progressive state claims to champion human dignity while denying the creator who endows it.
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It claims to defend the poor while bankrolling fraud, and boy,
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we are getting more and more fraud in this country.
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As the fraud in Minnesota especially, and Maine and some other places and so
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forth, where the Somalians and so forth our living is a perfect example.
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It claims to liberate children while indoctrinating them.
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It is the old serpent whispering through bureaucratic channels, you shall be as gods.
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And of course, it turns out to be a disaster.
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For Christians today, Savannah's story is both a warning and a call to arms.
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Her father's empire collapsed, not from external invaders, but from internal
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rot. the spiritual rot of a system that believed it could abolish sin by abolishing God.
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We see that same rot spreading through the West under gender slogans,
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equity, inclusion, and I shouldn't say gender, under gentler slogans,
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equity, inclusion, and sustainability.
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But the principle is the same. Replace the father with the state,
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and you will eventually get gulags, whether physical or psychological,
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and the fact is that ultimately you'll get both physical and psychological kulaks.
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The Church's answer has never changed. It is not a new economic system or a five-year plan.
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It is Christ crucified, the eternal Logos who reconciles man to the Father.
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The sacraments are the true revolution, and the Mass the only politics that
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saves. everything else is theater the christian life in the public square therefore has two tasks.
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To proclaim the truth that sets men free, and to defend the liberty to proclaim
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it. Every other cause is derivative.
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It is fashionable now for young activists to imagine that socialism can be baptized,
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that a collectivist economy can be infused with Christian ethics.
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But the Church's magisterium is explicit. No one can be at the same time a sincere
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Catholic and a true socialist. That's in Quadrasimo Anno in 1931.
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Those who attempt it end up with the worst of both worlds, bureaucratic inefficiency
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wrapped in moral arrogance.
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Svetlana's conversion is not a footnote of Cold War history. It is a parable.
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The daughter of the man who tried to kill God found God waiting for her.
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The ideology that starved millions could not feed her soul.
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In her memoirs, she wrote simply, The more I lived abroad, the more I saw the
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light of Christ everywhere.
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That is the antidote to every utopian delusion, not political reform,
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but personal conversion.
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Svetlana's life reminds us
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that every system that denies the father eventually devours its children.
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Communism claims to liberate humanity. Instead, it enslaves it.
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Socialism claims to equalize society. Instead, it infantilizes it.
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Progressivism claims to perfect man. Instead, it amputates him.
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Only the gospel reconciles freedom and truth, because only in the father's house
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does the prodigal son find his name again.
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Solomon's final act was to raise a fist at heaven. His daughter's final act
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was to fold her hands in prayer.
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Between those two gestures lies the entire drama of human history,
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the pride that builds Babel, and the humility that builds the kingdom.
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Every generation must choose which gesture will define it.
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The lesson, then, is neither academic nor distant.
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It is the daily work of Christian witness in a culture flirting once again with
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the idea that government can be God.
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The Christian duty is to refuse the lie, to speak truth, even when the new commissars call it hate,
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and to remember that faith is not a private sentiment, but a public allegiance.
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And boy, don't we get that all the time, Lynn.
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Every time you speak the truth, you're a hater. Right.
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In the end, all ideologies fail or fall.
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The party slogans fade. The statues crumble.
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And the manifestos collect dust. But the creed endures.
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The tomb that once tried to contain the word of God is empty.
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That is why Svetlana's story matters, not because it is quaint or tragic,
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but because it proves that even from the house of Stalin, a child can find her
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way to the house of the father.
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And that, in a world still tempted by red banners and blue bureaucracies,
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is the only solution and the only revolution worth joining.
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Very good article. Very timely. I think so.
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And there's another article here we'll turn to that is a parallel to it.
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And let me find it here. Page 18, I think.
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Here it is. And it's more an article showing what's the inroads that this same
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communism, you know, under disguise,
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disguise again as the oppressed and oppressors or however you want to put it
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in a different way, is making inroads into the Catholic Church itself.
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And in other words, being baptized, so to speak.
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And it's an article in also the same magazine, New Oxford Review, the May issue.
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And it's by Richard A. Spinello. And he is an associate professor of practice,
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of the practice and assistant chair of the management and organization department
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in the Carroll School of Management at Boston College.
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He is also a member of the adjunct faculty at St. John's Seminary in Brighton, Massachusetts.
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He is the author of many books and articles on philosophy and ethics,
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including Four Catholic Philosophers, Rejoicing in the Truth by Jacques Martin.
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Another one by Edith Stein, Dietrich von Hildebrandt, and Carol Watler.
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Sorry, Rejoicing in the Truth, and it's about Jacques Martin,
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Edith Stein, Dietrich von Hildebrandt, and Carol Watler.
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So the title is, Is Moral Truth Immutable or Historically Conditioned?
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And there are people in the world who believe in what is called historicism,
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and they're saying that our moral truths, including the truths of Catholicism
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that have been handed down for 2,000 years,
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are simply conditioned by history and that they must change with history.
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And in my opinion, what they're doing is simply inventing a means by which they
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can argue for some of the various changes that they want,
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especially to put normalization on the practice of homosexuality.
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And this is going on quite a bit in a German church, as we'll see.
32:19
What is truth? Is it objective and permanent, or is it historical and mutable?
32:25
And what are the criteria for discerning truth? These foundational questions
32:30
have overshadowed Catholic theological discourse for the past several decades.
32:36
Many progressive theologians in the post-conciliar era have opted for some version of historicism.
32:43
In their opinion, it is virtually axiomatic that Catholic dogmas and doctrines
32:48
conceived under the guise of revelation are an historical reality,
32:54
always evolving and subject to reinterpretation.
32:57
In other words, they don't want the deposit of faith to be handed down and interpreted
33:03
in the same way from the very beginning until now,
33:07
they want to assert that those kinds of truths are changed by history and progress
33:14
and so forth as man lives in history and progresses along, and that what was true for people,
33:21
say, 2,000 years ago is not necessarily true for people today.
33:25
And so... Isn't that kind of revisionist history? Yes, it is.
33:31
Revisionist history. Not only revisionist history, but the whole idea that even
33:36
if you don't revise it, that the same thing means something different than it did then.
33:42
That it means something different today than it did then. Or times our human beings have changed.
33:48
That things that were forbidden to human beings 2,000 years ago need not be
33:54
forbidden today because the human nature has changed.
33:57
And of course— That's a big heresy. Yes, it is.
34:02
But this is what these people assert. This is, of course, a recipe for,
34:07
as you said, Lynn, in different words, this is, of course, a recipe for moral relativism.
34:16
As novel moral truths are often conditioned by shifting conventions.
34:21
In other words, there is no such thing as truth in such a theory.
34:27
Many members of the hierarchy are also convinced that moral precepts should change over time.
34:32
It was recently reported that 90% of Germany's bishops support modifications
34:37
to the Church's traditional teachings on sexual morality.
34:42
Bishop Peter Kolgoff of Mainz, for example, has indicated that scriptural statements
34:48
about homosexuality should not be interpreted as timeless truths based on the
34:54
presumption that the moral norms in St.
34:56
Paul's epistles and the Gospels are historically and culturally conditioned.
35:02
In other words, those are changed over time.
35:05
And Bishop Heinrich Kimerevers of Dresden-Meisen is seeking changes to church
35:12
teaching on gender identities and sexual orientations to keep pace with scientific
35:17
and cultural developments.
35:19
In other words, the woke scientific and cultural, so-called cultural developments
35:24
of our day somehow supersede the teachings and so forth of St. Paul's Day. Yeah.
35:30
These German bishops can find reinforcement for their heterodox views in Fr.
35:36
Mark Moss's controversial book, Catholic Fundamentalism in America,
35:41
which revives the debate about the nature of truth.
35:44
Fr. Moss's principal task is to expose Catholic fundamentalism in the United States.
35:51
He describes sometimes with unabashed irreverence what he considers the emblems
35:56
of fundamentalism, such as the Eternal World Television Network.
36:01
We're going to have to stop here and take a break, so stay with us.
36:04
We'll be right back. E-W-T-N, he's talking about. That's right, exactly.
36:08
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Hi, this is Bob Johnston. You're listening to Being Catholic right here on Catholic
37:50
Spirit Radio, and we're talking about the communism in the modern world,
37:57
sort of being baptized by people and actually making inroads into the Catholic Church through,
38:04
especially in this article here,
38:06
through the German bishops with this idea of historicism, the idea that the
38:11
morality and so forth changes depending on the history of the Catholic Church.
38:15
And changes with the times and even Catholic traditional,
38:20
teaching, the dog was and so forth, handed down by the church,
38:24
must be reinterpreted in light of modern knowledge and changed.
38:28
And they're talking about Father Massa, who's written a book asserting that
38:33
there is a certain amount of what he calls Catholic fundamentalism,
38:38
and that is, in other words, teaching that is primitive and not accurately today,
38:44
that has change, and he considers especially the teaching that goes on in the
38:50
Eternal World Television Network,
38:52
the teaching that goes on at Christendom College and in Crisis Magazine,
38:57
all very traditional and conservative Catholic venues.
39:02
And his harsh polemic singles out EWTN for particular scorn,
39:08
and he says, fundamentalist Catholics fail to apprehend that truth is not ahistorical.
39:15
In other words, truth is not to be found outside of history.
39:19
Hence, they remain trapped in the old paradigm of orthodoxy.
39:23
Doesn't it sound pretty much like what the communists always said?
39:27
Capitalism is going to go down into the dustbin of history, and the new Marxism
39:33
is going to take over. It's the order of the day.
39:35
History has changed and all of that nonsense and so forth that we know now is
39:41
nothing but nonsense and turn the world into a disaster.
39:45
Well, they're saying the same
39:46
thing now about the Catholic tradition and Catholic dogmatic teaching.
39:51
It says, on the contrary, Catholic institutions must accept the new paradigm
39:55
that began to take shape at the Second Vatican Council. Sounds the same.
40:00
There you have it. There you have it. The communists, the same thing.
40:04
We're the avant-garde. We're the new order of the day is what they proclaim
40:08
back in the early part of the 20th century.
40:13
And, of course, they were going to take over, and all people all over the place,
40:17
all kinds of intellectuals, jumped on a bandwagon and said, this is the whole new paradigm.
40:21
This is the where to be. This is going to make the world into a paradise and
40:26
so forth. And, of course, it turned into a hellhole.
40:29
And that paradigm insists on the historical character of dogma,
40:33
which is not fixed and propositional, but mutable and often ineffable.
40:38
And that means ineffable. It's
40:41
so overwhelming and so great that it really can't be explained in words.
40:45
That's pretty much exactly what the communists were saying 100 years ago or longer.
40:51
In the past, it goes on here, it says, Father Lonegren,
40:55
1960 address to the Canon Law Society of America, the transition from a classicist
41:02
worldview to historical mindedness, offers the perfect foundation for mass's conclusions.
41:08
He distinguishes between historical consciousness and the more classical static
41:14
worldview consistent with the scholastic philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas.
41:20
And believe me, I will take St. Thomas Aquinas any day before Father Massa.
41:25
The classist position is conservative
41:28
and traditional, while the other is modern, liberal, historicist.
41:32
That's exactly what the communists said. This is communism just rehashed into a different format.
41:41
Classicism sees the world in terms of unchanging laws, shaped by the reality
41:46
of a supernatural order.
41:48
Historical mindedness, on the other hand, sees the world as caught up in an
41:52
endless sequence of changes and upheavals that sometimes require the revision
41:57
of well-established truths.
41:59
Usually those revisions of well-established truths always have to be revised
42:04
along the lines of something that these people believe in the first place.
42:08
It always seems that their theory always points to what they want to believe.
42:13
Classicism represents the philosophy of being, while historicism affirms the
42:19
anti-Platonic philosophy of becoming.
42:22
Yeah, it does, the not yet. In other words, communism bets everything on the
42:27
world to come, and so does this new historicism in the Church.
42:33
The classical perspective concedes of the human person abstractly through a
42:38
universal definition that captures his immutable essence.
42:42
Accordingly, human nature transcends history and culture.
42:47
The other perspective regards mankind as a concrete aggregate developing over time.
42:53
Human nature, therefore, is not constant. Rather, it is a plastic reality that
42:58
can be redefined in many ways, unconstrained by antecedent order of creation.
43:03
And that's exactly how communists saw human beings.
43:09
With a plastic nature, the new communist man, man could be reshaped into anything
43:15
a person wanted to reshape him into.
43:17
And he was infinitely malleable. and the new society called for an entirely
43:22
new man and the communist party therefore had the right to reshape him accordingly.
43:27
And you can see what hell that turned into.
43:31
According to Massa, this viewpoint has become normative, not only in Western
43:36
culture, but also among Catholic scholars who recognize that historicism rescues
43:43
us from the tyranny of the past.
43:45
And isn't that what Marxism said, Lynn, that Marxism would rescue us,
43:50
you know, from the dustbin of history. It would rescue us from the tyranny of the past.
43:55
Yeah, right. Exactly the same thing.
43:58
But they don't recognize that human nature does not change. No.
44:03
Moral doctrines must evolve over time to keep pace with the inexorable march of history.
44:09
And, of course, you know, back at the 1900s and 1920s and 30s,
44:15
Communism was the new inexorable march of history.
44:21
There's always there, inexorable march. And the inexorable march always is the
44:26
march that marches right along with whatever these people proposing,
44:30
these absurd theories want to believe. Mm-hmm.
44:33
It's what, yeah. And so according to these people, what's needed is a far more
44:38
dynamic vision of the human person. And boy, don't we have that today.
44:42
Men can become women. Women can become men. Men can have babies.
44:47
I mean, you know, it's really dynamic. And, of course, it's turning a lot of people into...
44:55
Vegetables in a form of misery that rivals what the communist misery was. Talk about a gulag.
45:05
Father Massa refers to moral theologians like Joseph Fuchs, S.J.,
45:10
and Bernard Herring, CSR,
45:13
who both theologians were influential in orchestrating the paradigm shift Massa
45:19
claims took shape at the Second Vatican Consul.
45:23
Father Herring also descended from many other Orthodox Catholic teachings,
45:27
such as the indissolubility of marriage. There it goes.
45:31
And he argued for the authority of conscience over moral doctrine.
45:35
Well, the fact is the Catholic Church puts a huge emphasis on conscience,
45:40
but it says at the same time that conscience must be properly formed.
45:45
And how must it be properly formed? Of course, by the eternal verities that
45:50
the Church teaches that have been handed down to it from Jesus Christ and from
45:54
Jesus Christ to the apostles and from the apostles on down to us.
45:58
That's how. Yes, but since Vatican II, nothing is a sin unless,
46:05
you know, you don't commit a sin unless you believe it's a sin. Yeah.
46:09
So it would be then that if Adolf Hitler, if he totally believed in what he
46:15
was doing and he was perfectly at ease with his own conscience,
46:18
then I guess it would be okay for Hitler to do it.
46:22
That's what they seem to be saying to me.
46:26
You know, he may be wrong, but hey, it ain't his fault. He's a true believer.
46:34
So beware then if that's the kind of morality that you're going to have to deal
46:38
with because everybody can say that.
46:41
Who's to argue with you? If you say, hey, my conscience is just fine.
46:45
It tells me that this is what I should be doing, even if it means that,
46:49
you know, millions of people dying miserable deaths.
46:52
Moral theology, therefore, must recognize the need for new moral values to accommodate
46:57
historical progress, and those values will be found in the zeitgeist.
47:01
Oh, that's where they will find the values. Oh, yeah, right. The world spirit.
47:05
The zeitgeist is the world spirit. We'll just find it in the zeitgeist.
47:08
And don't we have the zeitgeist all over the place today?
47:12
Yeah. Or the transgender and everything else? It just goes to show you nothing's
47:17
changed since the Garden of Eden.
47:19
No. And they supposedly ate that apple, you know.
47:24
It goes to show you how far people can go and the things they can make up to
47:29
rationalize their behavior. Yeah.
47:31
First, is there any warrant to the claim that a major paradigm shift began at
47:36
the Second Vatican Council?
47:38
You know, is there really any, does it say that at the Vatican,
47:42
at the Second Vatican Council? And I'm not trying to defend the Second Vatican
47:47
here because there are things wrong with it.
47:50
But it says, can this parodon ship be verified by any of the conciliar documents?
47:59
No. In other words, if you look at the Vatican II documents,
48:03
even if you disagree with Vatican II, there are no documents that say that historicism
48:08
somehow is the new order of the day.
48:10
None. On the contrary, the documents that directly address moral issues affirm
48:16
a universal and immutable natural law.
48:19
For example, Dignitatis Humanae, the Consul's Declaration on Religious Liberty,
48:25
states that the supreme norm of human life is the divine law itself,
48:30
eternal, objective, and universal.
48:33
So, Vatican II does not overturn divine law.
48:39
He can't. Adore in the documents of Vatican II, is there even an intimation
48:45
that the laws of morality must be rewritten to accommodate new historical or social realities?
48:53
They were supposed to, it was in Vatican II, one of the things was that they
48:58
were to maintain the Latin and saw what happened with that, what's happening now.
49:07
Oh, no, huh? A lot of people read and read Vatican II as they wish.
49:12
There's room, I mean, to criticize Vatican II, but not because it had blatantly
49:18
said that historicism is the order of the day.
49:22
Herring and others who propose the possibility of change and human identity
49:26
offer no examples to support their arguments.
49:29
They just make assertions that aren't true.
49:32
Rather, cultural transitions and upheavals demonstrate that there is something
49:37
in the human person that transcends time and culture.
49:40
We can look at that simply by looking at history itself and taking a look at
49:46
what people were like in all the various different parts of history.
49:52
They're the same then as they are now.
49:54
They suffered from the same wants and needs and hopes and dreams and so forth as people do today.
50:02
They're not any different. You take these people from 1,000 years ago or 2,000
50:08
years ago and put them in the world today.
50:10
They would very quickly adapt to the world. They would very quickly be able
50:14
to learn all the things that we learn and that we know.
50:17
And they would have the same hearts, the same wants, the same dreams,
50:21
the same disappointments, the same foibles, the same failures,
50:25
the same strengths, the same weaknesses. They're no different.
50:30
You can go back to the cavemen and they're a little different. Right? Yeah.
50:36
They made mistakes, they learned from their mistakes. They had people that were
50:40
a whole spectrum of different kinds of people and so on.
50:44
You can take a look at the Escaloes and even the smallest groups of people to
50:48
the largest groups of people.
50:50
Thus progressives like Father Massa, who endorsed the prominence of historical
50:54
consciousness and the mutability of human nature, cannot find confirmation for
51:00
their heterodox view in Vatican II, and they can't find it in history either.
51:03
In addition, they must contend with the magisterial teaching of Veritatis Splendor,
51:09
which insists that there are
51:10
intrinsically evil acts that are prohibited always and without exception.
51:16
The conclusion, then, historicism and normative flexibility are also incompatible
51:22
with Scripture and the Church's immense tradition,
51:26
which includes the witness of countless martyrs to eternal moral truths.
51:32
If we embrace the new paradigm Father Massa proposes, the validity of many moral
51:39
teachings of the New Testament, such as those St.
51:42
Paul expresses in 1 Corinthians 6, 9 to 10, are jeopardized whenever they conflict
51:49
with the social conventions of liquid modernity.
51:52
And that's a good term, liquid modernity.
51:56
Yeah, I never heard that before. It really is a good description.
52:01
Yeah. Yeah. You can make it anything you want to make it.
52:06
You can make it a stew of whatever you please you want to cook up.
52:12
It goes on here, the most direct witnesses of the truth against the new morality.
52:16
The new morality Pius had in mind was precisely the rejection of fixed moral
52:22
order and from which are derived true moral precepts that exclude certain actions in all circumstances.
52:30
And it goes on here.
52:34
And the Pope should be faithful. The Pope should be a faithful promoter of that
52:39
same eternal moral doctrine.
52:42
That is part of the church's apostolic inheritance.
52:45
So, you know, this is something that Leo XIV should be proclaiming.
52:51
Both John Paul and Benedict XVI made great strides in this regard,
52:57
especially through their encyclical and other writings.
53:01
Through their encyclicals and other writings. One wonders, of course,
53:05
what Pope Leo XIV thinks about these matters.
53:09
How he answers the questions at the beginning of the discussion will help determine
53:14
the future of Catholicism as it struggles to sustain a coherent moral vision
53:19
amid the shards of postmodernism and the tidal wave of the sexual revolution.
53:25
So these are things that the Catholic Church is facing.
53:28
We're seeing them more prominently in Germany, but they're right here in this
53:34
country under the surface or maybe even right at the surface anymore and in
53:39
other countries as well.
53:41
And this is something modernity itself is facing and our whole society is facing,
53:45
Western civilization is facing.
53:47
And it's something we Catholics should know and should understand,
53:50
the difference between the classical and historical.
53:55
And history is fine and a great subject, but the fact is that human nature rides
54:02
through history just like our great cathedrals do.
54:05
It does not change.
54:07
And the moral precepts that were laid down by Jesus Christ at the beginning
54:13
of the church are the same moral precepts that will sustain human beings and
54:19
build a just society and a decent society now.
54:22
And the church teaches that, and we need to stick to that.
54:26
So we're going to say our prayer, St. Michael, the archangel,
54:29
defend us in battle, be our protection against the wickedness and snares of the devil.
54:35
May God rebuke him, we humbly pray, and do thou, Prince of the Heavenly Host,
54:40
by the power of God, thrust into hell, Satan, and all evil spirits who wander
54:46
through the world, through the ruinous souls.
54:49
Amen. You've been listening to Being Catholic with Bob Johnston on Catholic
54:54
Spirit Radio. If you'd like to contact Bob, email bob at catholicspiritradio.com.
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