Latest / Catholic Spirit Radio / Being Catholic #397: Christendom Lost: Reclaiming Faith in a Secular Age

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Being Catholic #397: Christendom Lost: Reclaiming Faith in a Secular Age · 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.
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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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Remember always that we are brought to you by you.
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We depend on your donations, and we always appreciate a donation,
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large or small, and we hope you make a donation today.
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And last week, we did a program on Christian nationalism, the case for Christian nationalism, and,
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And it was an article written by R.R. Reno, the editor of First Things Magazine.
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I think it was the, let me check here, the March 2026 issue.
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And we're going to talk a little bit more about that article today,
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so I'll pick it apart a little bit and maybe get in a few other things as well.
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And I think my wife wants to start on that, and maybe she has a few other things
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to say, so I'll turn it over to her. Well, thank you.
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Spring is here. That grass is starting to take a little bit greener.
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I always wait for that. And I saw a flock, a big flock of robins in the field across from our house.
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You know, it used to be we'd wait for the geese to come over going north as a sign of spring.
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Well, now they live here, so they're just ordinary things that are around all the time.
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So the robins have become my focus.
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It's how things change in your lifetime. You have to kind of keep an eye on
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it. The grass is starting to turn green, too, really.
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It started green. Well, yeah, I thought I started out saying that,
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didn't I? Did you? I don't know. Maybe you did. Maybe I wasn't okay.
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Oh, well, whatever.
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That's all it is this morning. It's one of those draggy Saturday mornings.
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We'll get to whatever we get and get done whatever we get done.
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It's all in the hands of...
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Whether I'm motivated, I guess.
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There's something I came across in the Bible this week, and I thought I'd bring
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it forth because I think it ties in to what we're talking about,
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the Christian nationalism.
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In Timothy 2, chapter 4,
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verses 3 through 4, it says, For the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching,
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but having its ears, they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their
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own liking and will wander into myths.
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As for you, always be steady, endure suffering, do the work of the evangelist, fulfill your ministry.
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But isn't it the truth, Bob, that people seek out.
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What they agree with to listen to. That's true.
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And they, you know, then even getting into myths, I mean,
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look at how in our culture things have declined and the amount of the tattoos
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and everything and the myths and the end times are coming.
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Well, we don't know that. When? They're going to come one day.
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But, you know, what are you going to do about it?
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Like they say, get up every morning and say, this day might be my last.
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And I guess one day you're going to be right.
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Yes. And that's, you know, how many of the saints live.
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Do the best you can day by day. Don't worry about it.
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They even kept a skull. Some of them did on a skull,
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a skeletal skull sitting on their work desk or bench or whatever to remind them
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that that's what's on the way.
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Yeah, they called that a memento mori, I think it was called. Yeah.
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Which meant a reminder of death. To remind themselves that this may be your last.
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You got to keep that in mind.
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So, well, last week when we talked about the Christian society,
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I said there were a lot of things to pick apart in it.
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And right in that first paragraph, I'm reading from this article,
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there's little doubt that relentless indoctrination in anti-American ideologies
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at school and in the media contributes to their lukewarm patriotism.
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But there is another cause. They're not stupid.
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The country shows signs of disease, and each year a shocking number of people die of drug overdose.
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Marriage rates have declined, and the rates of mothers without husbands,
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that's a single-parent family, has risen, and homelessness has risen.
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Now, within this paragraph, I'd like to talk about, you could talk about it
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all day, I guess, the ideologies at schools.
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It's getting pumped into the minds of all the students. And it starts at a very early age.
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They start off with, everybody has rights and all children have rights.
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Not what I was taught. But you have the right to exist in my father's house until I was 18.
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You obey the rules or else.
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But aside from that, I think I remember our daughters, too.
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They got that age when they got in grade school, even, you know,
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like second, third grade. I have my rights.
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Well, there's a door, too.
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And we've got to keep in mind what we're doing to our kids and what they're hearing in schools.
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And fortunately, more and more people are pulling their kids out of the public
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schools and going into private schools to teach what they believe.
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What do you think, Bob? Well, I think that that's true.
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I think more and more people are taking education of their children into their own hands.
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They're either sending their kids to some type of private school,
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religious schools a lot.
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There are people who send people who are not very religious,
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but nevertheless, they will send their kids to a religious school because they
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prefer the discipline in the religious school.
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And they prefer the values that are taught there, the virtues and so forth that
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are taught as opposed to what they're getting in the public schools or outside
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the school system itself in the society.
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And so there are people that are religious and send their kids to religious
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school as well, feel that it's better.
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And that's a burden on people, but a lot of people are carrying that burden,
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facing that burden, because they're just tired of the public schools usurping
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the parental rights, and a lot of public schools are doing that,
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and parents are tired of it, and there's a resistance to parents asserting their
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right in the public schools that there never used to be at all back at the time we were in school.
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Parents pretty much had to say so as to how the schools were run and what they
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taught and so forth to a great degree. I mean, they didn't come in and,
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you know, pick on details of the curriculum and so forth.
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But the schools pretty well knew what parents, you know, values they had and
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what they wanted for their children.
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And the schools, you know, stayed within those parameters.
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Right. And today, what do we have? We have schools.
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The teachers cannot consult with the parents in many cases.
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And the school authorities cannot tell, according to our law,
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tell the parents what's going on with their children with their sexual behavior.
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That's all kept away from the parents. Everything's wonderful.
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Yeah, there's a lot. I didn't grow up in a wonderful, everything wonderful in
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the world. Did you? No. No.
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No? I think we were products. So when we were born, we were born,
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you know, right during World War II was going on when we were born.
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And the depression had just taken place and people were very,
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very frugal because of what happened during the depression. I mean,
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a lot of people were out of work.
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People didn't have the money to have now. And even prior to the depression,
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people weren't quite as wealthy as the wealth that they have today.
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Actually, though, the wealth today is sort of going down.
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People are not doing as well as they have been doing, say, 10, 15, 20 years ago.
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But they were, you know, doing better here for a while.
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But back in those days, people were very, very aware of the depression and then
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the war was going on and there were shortages of things and so forth.
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And so it was a different era.
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And people were more careful about the money that they spent.
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And they certainly weren't allowing children to run around and having a lot
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of individuals say so on their own.
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They pretty much had to do, you know, what the family did.
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That's right. That's right. And then we get to, that's the schools.
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I mean, this goes on until, you know, you get out of college.
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And what are they teaching?
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God only knows anymore. I mean, you can get a college degree in modern dance.
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What happened to the classic education where you actually learned things and
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learned how to think in a logical order?
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That doesn't exist in most schools today, even in the higher education,
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especially there. You either agree with what they say or you flunk.
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It's a disgrace what's happening. That's a big part of our decline.
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The other thing came across, too, in this first paragraph, that the media contributes
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to their lukewarm patriotism.
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Oh, could go on for hours about that one.
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Everything is so slanted to what their politics are, whoever's running,
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you know, owning the station or whatever.
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There are so many more liberal ideas that are put out there.
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And this idea of freedom, everybody has their freedom, and everyone is an individual.
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You know, there's something to be said for being an individual to an extent.
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But you have to realize that when you're given freedom, you're also giving responsibility
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to be responsible for what you teach.
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Yeah, during the war, there was a lot of unity.
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Yes. Well, yeah, a lot of it.
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And it lasted, you know, quite a bit after the war, too.
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I mean, there were things during the war, scrap drives and so forth,
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you know, for the armed forces and all kinds of things that people did,
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made sacrifices and so forth. And that lasted after the war, too.
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I mean, when we were in Boy Scouts and that, we raised almost all of our own
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money. We didn't get that.
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You know, any money that was given to us, we went out and had scrap drives and
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cookie sales and all that stuff like the Girl Scouts did and so forth.
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There was a lot of self, you know, promotion and so forth that you had to do back then at that time.
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That's right. If we went to a ball game when we were in Little League,
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for example, in Chicago, we had a trip to Chicago each year,
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each summer, went up and saw a ball game.
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And what we did was sell tickets to a movie or something like that and that
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would pay for the trip, our trip up, you know, to see the ball game.
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We had to pay for all those things ourselves.
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That's right. I remember the Boy Scouts paper drives.
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They have the trucks come around and people used to get the local newspapers every day.
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And they'd save them. And they'd save them, especially for that drive.
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They knew it was coming up. And that was an extension of, you know,
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what happened during the war.
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During the war, people saved movies and saved papers.
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I mean, they had paper drives during the war. And then after the war,
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you had the same thing going on, the same thing with scrap metals and so forth.
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Right, right. So there was a lot of participation that was going on in your society.
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And you pitched in and that created a lot of patriotism.
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Right, that's for sure. And, you know,
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It's not a little that, it's how we're steered from childhood on.
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We're steered in this culture to accept authority from where?
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Where do we look to for authority nowadays?
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Well. You got a night, you know, it isn't to the police.
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They want to do away with the police.
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It isn't too for your parents because you have rights as a child.
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I'll tell you, I can remember my daughter when she was like nine.
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I mean, she's a really, really bright kid.
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But she really got pulled into this. I have my rights. And as punishment,
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one day I sent her to her room.
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The next thing I knew, the neighbor called me and she said, you know,
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your daughter is out picketing.
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I was picketing. Yes, she got her little blackboard walking up and down the
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sidewalk saying, my mother is not fair or something. Yeah, unfair.
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She snuck out her front window. Yeah.
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Unfair. Unfair appearance. She's violating my rights. I mean,
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she could use that violation.
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She was at that level. This kid read all of Sandberg's history of Lincoln,
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all volumes, in the sixth grade.
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I mean, she was really, but kind of a handful when they're picketing.
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I thought, oh, my God Almighty.
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I did pull the kids, the girls, out of public school.
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Two younger ones especially. Well, we're going to have to stop here and take
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a break, so stay with us. We'll be right back.
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Hi, this is Bob Johnston. You're listening to Being Catholic.
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We're back from our break, and we've been talking about the article that we
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read from last week, The Case for Christian Nationalism, that was in the First
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Things magazine, the March issue of this year.
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R.R. Reno, the editor of the magazine, wrote it.
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And my wife has been reading from it and also talking about it We've been sort
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of picking at it a little bit As we said we would do last week And she has more
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to say on the subject So we'll return to that Yes, I want to go back to the media,
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One thing I think that we overlook, many of us do, in the media is the entertainment side of it.
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Now, this started probably in the 60s, 70s, well, in the 70s for sure.
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That the sitcoms and how they angled at getting us to accept the deviant to become the mainstream.
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If you look at promiscuity, you know, when we were at first with TV, even like I Love Lucy.
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This goes way back. Many of you probably don't know I Love Lucy,
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but anyway, or any comedy or anything, you never saw a married couple in the same bed.
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They were always in like twin beds that you would see that they had.
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Things were kept so that little children wouldn't be asking questions,
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I suppose, and they kept things on a higher standard as far as that goes.
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Now we have declined gradually over the years to the point where we're supposed
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to accept homosexuality as a normal thing,
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and it's brought to us as a comedy,
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as this is funny, isn't it is it
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going against scripture is that
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funny but it happened some of
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the programs uh think of for
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instance some of the uh
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anti-police and so forth that we've become to accept the fact that uh the police
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and the authorities in our in our life should be eliminated you that's reflected
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in everything they show you on TV.
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And you know what the Bible says about that? There's a, in Romans.
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And I don't have it marked right now, and I neglected to do that,
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but it did say that you accept these things,
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that you should receive,
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that you are, you know, leading yourself down, down, down, down.
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You're going to be in decline.
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You have to have that Christianity, the idea of what is right and wrong.
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It isn't just, you know, you've got the Ten Commandments, for instance.
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Nothing guides us in this day and age. I think that bothers me,
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too. And also the scripture tells us that you should not accept these things.
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And people that do, and then they turn around and go to church and forget that
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they accept all this is funny and hilarious and this is the way things are and we should accept it.
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And it's just not homosexuality. It's the promiscuity, the treatment of each
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other in these comedies.
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I can remember even Cher, what was her husband's name? Bono. Bono, yeah.
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Sony Bono, okay. I can remember them when their program first came on.
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Our daughters were at the age where that was really wonderful.
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And I finally told them there are other things to watch or do because they were
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forever degrading each other.
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And that was, isn't that funny? Isn't that wonderful?
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Well, you can't accept those kind of things.
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It makes your whole culture decline. It all goes in hand in hand.
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The other thing we talked about in this first paragraph, the marriage rates have declined.
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Well, how much of that is related to the media, too? It's okay if you aren't married and have sex.
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Well, okay, then you look around at how many mothers are single parents,
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and how do you handle a teenage boy as a single parent?
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To me, that would be a nightmare. You have to carry a club, I guess.
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But part of this, too, is to our culture, the Great Society of Lyndon Johnson.
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If you look back during that period of time,
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low income and this Great Society was to help those of low income to climb out
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of where they were in their status, to bring them up.
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But in doing so, there was a part of the law was that if a male were presiding in a house,
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a mother could not receive any government funding because he should be providing.
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Well, you know, that sounds good as a taxpayer until pretty soon there's no male in this house.
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So what happens to the kids? What happens to the idea of marriage?
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Don't need them. And we had the women's rights movement and so forth.
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You know, we're trying to do, in the name of doing good, what have we ended up with?
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It's bad news. So, you know, I think the point, just in that first paragraph,
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there are so many things to think about.
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And then the reaction of, you mentioned Karl Popper, was the exponent of anti-nationalism.
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Well, this was right after the war. And what was the biggest fear in this country, Bob?
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This fear of the closed society, a society being too unified,
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a society moving toward fascism.
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To fashion? Fascism. Oh, fascism, okay.
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And it also was a reaction to the Nazis. Yeah. And what happened to Germany,
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I think that's a big part of it.
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No nationalism. You can't be patriotic, you can't whatever, because this is
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going to happen again. And we can't have that.
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You know, we have so many intentions. No wonder in the Psalms it says God watches
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and laughs at the kings and the people in authority and so forth because they
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have these big ideas without thinking about what's down the line.
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I mean, we do things to our culture ourselves.
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And the article actually, you know, is trying to point out, very well written,
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that we have done away with reliance on God.
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The Christian influence has receded and we've gone to hell, more or less, our culture.
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Things have fallen apart. Nobody knows what to do to bring it back.
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Of course, you know, the obvious, like I quoted you, go to church to hear what
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you want to hear because they tell you what you want to hear and things have broken down.
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I mean, that's just the first paragraph.
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That's my take on it, things that bothered me.
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And throughout the whole article, I think it was a very good article,
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but there are many things to bring out in this article and think about,
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apply it to what's really going on today. Look around and see.
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The Christianity invented secular politics.
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The doctrine of two swords, the spiritual sword of the church and the secular
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sword of the magistrate.
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You need to create room for this idea of governance.
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And all authority comes from God.
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But we bend it to what we want to hear and what we want.
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So I'll leave it there, Bob. That's just to touch on things I've been thinking about this week.
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Okay. We need to get the Christian ideas back into our culture.
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You can't do things without God.
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It's just plain and simple. Okay, there are.
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Other things that we could talk about, other points on that article as well,
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and maybe we'll get some more of those in.
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There is an article here that sort of refers to this or bears on this and makes
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it maybe a little bit clearer, called The Church.
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And so I think if we've got time, and I think maybe we do, I think I can get
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it in. It's not a long article, and I'll try to get it in.
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So I'll go ahead and read. It's an article in the New Oxford Review,
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and it's in the March 2026 issue, and it's by Christopher Biding,
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and he's a contributing editor of the New Oxford Review and is archivist at
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the Waldorf University and editor-in-chief of the Catholic Social Science Review,
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and it's called Know Thine Enemy.
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And it's a review of the religion of the day by the University of Mary from
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the University of Mary Press.
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And I'll go ahead and read from it. And I think it'll have quite a bit of bearing
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on what you were just talking about and why a lot of these things are the way they are.
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It says here, In 2020, the University of Mary published From Christendom to Apostolic Mission,
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Pastoral Strategies for an Apostolic Age, which I reviewed, and this is Christopher
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Biding, in the October 2022 issue of the New Oxford Review.
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That brief book provided a profound diagnosis of what is wrong with the Catholic
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Church's approach to the contemporary world and what she needs to do to fix it.
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In a nutshell, the problem is that she fails to understand the nature of the
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times and thus responds wrongly.
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The authors in that earlier collection of essays identified two modes by which
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the Church approaches the world.
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The Christendom mode for when she is a dominant or significant force in society
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and the apostolic mode for when she is not.
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Neither approach is necessarily better than the other.
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Both have their strengths and weaknesses, but using the wrong approach at the
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wrong time can be catastrophic.
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This is precisely what is happening now.
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So maybe this is why we haven't been able to understand why the church hasn't
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been able to be more influential in what's going on in the modern age,
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because it's using an approach from when the church was a dominant force in society,
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and we need to understand that the church is no longer a dominant force in the
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sense that we live in a Christendom society. We don't anymore.
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Our society, as you pointed out, Lynn, has changed, and we are living now in
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a time when we need an apostolic approach to our society.
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We need to to make converts and to rebuild the church. This is what we need
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to be doing now, not living as if the church is still the dominant force that it once was.
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This is precisely what is happening. The church is in Christendom mode when
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she needs to be in apostolic mode.
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For all its brilliance, from Christendom to apostolic mission,
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left plenty of room for elaboration, which is now presented in its sequel, The Religion of the Day.
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That's another book that has come out from the University of Mary,
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the sequel to the first one.
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Does the sequel stack up to its predecessor? It does.
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Informed, the religion of the day is also slim, well-organized,
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approachable, and easy to read, while still being profound and insightful.
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Like its predecessor, it is a group effort by a number of scholars at the University
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of Mary, a Benedictine institution in Bismarck, North Dakota,
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with a single coordinating editor left unnamed.
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Monsignor James P. Shea was the lead editor of the first volume.
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It also contents itself with diagnosing the problem rather than providing a
31:33
cure, because there is not indeed, there indeed cannot be one single blueprint for success.
31:43
Solutions ultimately must come from the actions of the Holy Spirit and the myriad
31:49
charisms he will provide to the many reformers he will raise up.
31:54
It is possible to do many Catholic things and yet not have a Catholic mind.
32:00
These words open the religion of the day and ably summarize its aim,
32:05
the recovery of a Catholic worldview.
32:09
If the Church needs to switch to apostolic mode and develop a new imaginative
32:14
vision in order to combat what St.
32:17
John Henry Newman called the religion of the day, then we need to know what that is.
32:24
Contrary to the contemporary view that we are living in a non-religious or post-religious
32:30
age, the book maintains that we in the West are living in a highly religious age.
32:36
Unfortunately, that religion is not Christianity, but what the book defines
32:43
as modern, neo-Gnostic, progressive, utopian religion, or more simply,
32:49
progressive religion, a weltshanung that is a religion despite its adherents'
32:56
denial of that fact. And that's true.
32:59
Progressives deny, and a lot of atheists deny that they're religious people, but they are.
33:05
Man is inherently religious, as I've said before. He can't help but be.
33:09
And so they make a religion out of progressivism, or they make a religion out of atheism.
33:15
And that's what we have going on now. The good news is that Christianity faces
33:20
just the latest iteration of something it has faced many times before,
33:27
Gnosticism, that spiritual parasite which predates Christianity and is one of its.
33:36
The bad news is that by virtue of its persistence, Gnosticism is difficult to eradicate.
33:43
It's amorphousness calls to mind attempting to pin jello to a wall with a fencing foil.
33:51
So we're going to have to stop here and take a break. So stay with us. We'll be right back.
33:55
We'll come back and talk a little bit about what Gnosticism is and what the
34:00
religion of the day is and how to combat it.
34:03
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35:26
Hi, this is Bob Johnston. You're listening to Being Catholic right here on Catholic Spirit Radio.
35:31
We're back from our break. We've been talking about Christian nationalism,
35:38
and my wife has been talking about some of the points of Christian nationalism
35:42
that she wanted to go over.
35:44
And I'm reading from an article now in the New Oxford Review,
35:48
and it's called Know Thine Enemy.
35:51
And it's a review of a book called The Religion of the Day by the University of Mary.
35:57
And it's telling that Catholicism and the church is in the wrong mode today,
36:04
that we are living not in an unreligious society, but in a very religious society,
36:10
but a religion that is no longer Christianity,
36:13
a religion now that we can call, you know, a sort of secular progressivism.
36:19
Or secular humanism, if you want to call it that, or liberalism.
36:23
And so if we're trying to combat this with the idea that the church is still
36:31
in its Christendom mode, that is, you know, that the church is still one of the main programs.
36:39
Forces in society, we're doing the wrong thing because it no longer is.
36:44
And we have to understand that. And the church needs rebuilding.
36:48
And to rebuild the church, we have to look at things from an apostolic point
36:52
of view, a point of view of rebuilding and getting new converts and so forth into the church.
36:58
And it goes on here and it says, where the religion of the day truly shines
37:02
is in its identification of the features of modern neo-Gnosticism.
37:08
And here's what the features of modern neo-Gnosticism are, six of which it examines in detail.
37:16
First, progressive religion can often look superficially Christian because it
37:22
steals elements and ideals of Christianity, but presents them in non-Christian ways.
37:29
For example, it sees human beings as suffering and in need of salvation,
37:35
but it sees salvation as accessible only through human action.
37:40
It is hostile to God and any social order based on Him.
37:45
It rejects the Christian idea that we must be patient and rely on Him.
37:52
Second, progressive religion holds that evil is not found in sin or in the individual,
37:59
but in oppressive external elements of human existence, however defined.
38:06
This view denies the fall, has nothing but hatred for the world as it is, and is driven by pride.
38:14
Third, progressive religion believes it, and only it, can overcome contemporary human problems.
38:22
Such as alienation and lack of personal fulfillment.
38:26
Some dismiss progressive religion as a kind of paganism,
38:31
which is very much a mistake, as pagan societies were often marked not by human alienation,
38:40
but by harmony with nature and all the attendant suffering and cruelty that
38:45
go along with such harmony,
38:47
although I think that there is some of that paganism in some of the harmony
38:52
that some of the greenies try to impose upon us,
38:56
you know, with the windmills and the other forms of so-called free and green
39:02
and non-polluting forms of energy.
39:05
Fourth, progressive religion holds that the salvation it provides can only come
39:11
from destruction of the oppressive external elements of contemporary human existence.
39:17
In other words, from the destruction of our society and the destruction,
39:22
Lynn, of our unity in cohesion.
39:25
And that's what we're having now, the breakup of society. As such, it hates the past.
39:32
It worships progress. And for all its talk of tolerance, is incapable of respect
39:39
for or dialogue with any other group.
39:43
In other words, it preaches tolerance, but its definition of tolerance is you
39:48
agree with me, or you're not tolerant and we can exclude you. Exactly.
39:55
Exactly. And that's what it is.
39:59
Instead, its adherents are impatient, angry, and obsessed with revolution as
40:05
the only means to bring about change.
40:07
In other words, it has to destroy what exists now, has to destroy the society we have.
40:13
And you're talking about all of the things it has introduced through television
40:17
and movies and so forth, little by little, to destroy our society.
40:23
Well, it's done an awfully good job of doing it. Well, yeah.
40:26
I mean, we have advanced from television to the cell phones.
40:33
And the hand computers is what we've got. And the iPhones, that's a computer.
40:40
And it opens up a different world.
40:45
And it did this little by little. It's like boiling a frog. Yes.
40:48
You start out with the cold water and you turn up the heat. You get used to it.
40:52
Fifth, progressive religion believes destruction of the contemporary order will
40:58
ultimately lead to new freedoms and to the creation of an entirely new type of human being.
41:05
And that's exactly what it sets out to do is destroy what we have.
41:10
And as I say, it's done a good job.
41:12
As a result, it is closed-minded. It's not open-minded at all.
41:18
Intensely tribal, often given to irrational displays of group loyalty,
41:24
such as virtue signaling, and we've got a lot of that.
41:28
Prone to demonizing others, we've got a lot of that.
41:31
And driven to violence and killing, and you see a lot of that.
41:35
You see a lot of that going on in Minnesota with the war against ICE.
41:40
Six, progressive religions leaders believe they possess a special kind of technical
41:46
knowledge. gained through their own efforts by which they can affect their proposed societal change.
41:52
This imparts a simplistic silver bullet attitude toward problem-solving,
41:58
yoked to a technocratic lust for power that is more characteristic of medieval
42:05
sorcery than it is of modern science. And we saw that with COVID.
42:10
Look at the raw and brute power that It was unleashed with a COVID scare.
42:17
Scant practical evidence for the truth or feasibility of these elements of progressive
42:22
religion, and much strong evidence against it,
42:26
matters not at all to its adherents, who cling to its so-called truths with
42:31
all the blind fideism of which they accuse their religious-minded opponents.
42:37
As such, in the end, progressive religion always runs afoul of reality. Always.
42:45
The revolution, its engineers will invariably fail.
42:50
The revolution it engineers will invariably fail to deliver on its impossible
42:56
promises and will wind up making things worse rather than better.
43:01
And we see a lot of that just with the impossible promises of the so-called green energy movement.
43:07
You know, it can't deliver what it says it can deliver.
43:10
We freeze to death and starved to death if we tried to.
43:15
Live on what they say that they can do. When adherents of progressive religion
43:20
inevitably step on the rake of reality, they prove remarkably incapable of self-reflection.
43:28
Instead, they either fall into deep cynicism or begin chasing the next variation
43:34
of progressive religion, hoping that this time it will deliver,
43:39
restarting the cycle once again.
43:42
The luckiest manage to attain the degree of self-reflection necessary to break
43:47
out of the cycle, abandoning the false faith for the true one, which is Christianity.
43:53
But they are usually the exceptions. One reason the Church has always opposed
43:59
Gnosticism so strongly is because it is, in practice, dangerous and difficult to detect.
44:06
One reason Gnosticism opposes Christianity is because of the separation Christianity
44:13
draws between the secular and the sacred,
44:16
a separation that prevents elevating politics to the be-all and end-all of society, a god, really,
44:25
the way progressive religion does.
44:27
And it does. The progressives are almost totally political.
44:33
Recent history has seen different versions of progressive religion fight for dominance.
44:39
That is, feminists versus transgenderism, and so forth, and we are all the poorer for it.
44:47
A weak mainstream religion, these days, a comfort-seeking and disworldly deviation
44:53
of Christianity called moralistic therapeutic deism,
44:58
offers little help in resisting the evils of progressive religion.
45:03
The only solution is real religion.
45:06
Christianity, with its light yokes, Hard teachings and liberating truths.
45:13
For the religion of the day to continue its focus to an examination of the elements
45:18
of progressive religion, it would be valuable enough and appeal to any serious Christian.
45:25
But the book provides two more surprises.
45:29
One is an extended metaphor entitled Catching All the Diseases of the World,
45:36
which will interest all who find themselves wondering what is happening to the church these days.
45:43
The answer is that any problems that affect the world affect the church.
45:48
This is, in fact, good, however unpleasant it might be to endure.
45:54
As a body must get sick to develop antibodies for resisting future illnesses,
46:00
so, too, the church must experience all the evils of the world so as to learn how to resist them.
46:08
As Gnosticism is a particularly virulent and protean disease,
46:13
it is small wonder the Church must be infected by it time and again in order
46:19
to be able to continue to fight it.
46:21
We Catholics grow discouraged when all we see is the sickness rather than the
46:27
cure that one day will come from it.
46:30
Consider the example the religion of the day presents from the Old Testament.
46:36
Much of the sufferings of the Jewish people and the events of salvation history
46:42
were driven by God's attempt to pound the first commandment into them.
46:47
So much drama to grasp the most basic truth that there is only one God,
46:54
but grasp it the Jews eventually did, such that when Jesus finally walked in the flesh among them,
47:02
idolatry was not one of the problems he had to worry about.
47:06
And so the Old Testament provided a path for Jesus to appear in the new.
47:12
Moreover, in our focus on the bad, we sometimes overlook what is not immediately visible.
47:20
God's kingdom is made up of his saints first and foremost, and it is not always obvious who they are.
47:28
And no matter what problems the church has and how often she fails,
47:33
there are still some things she provides that never fail.
47:37
The sacraments always work, everywhere, every when, 100% of the time.
47:44
The final section of the religion of the day drops the matter right into the laps of the faithful.
47:51
Faced with all the problems of the church and a foe-like neo-gnosticism, what are we to do?
47:58
As the The Asian Jews had to learn to resist the temptations of the false gods all around them.
48:05
So we Catholics must resist the false tactics of progressive religion.
48:12
And like you say, Lynn, there are these false gods all around us everywhere,
48:17
on television, in the movies, on the radio, in society, on the Internet,
48:23
especially the Internet, everywhere we go.
48:27
And just like the Jews had to learn in the Old Testament by having it pounded
48:31
into their heads, it has to be pounded into our heads also to resist these.
48:37
Consciously rejecting the things that are bad but seem normal merely because
48:42
they are contemporary is no simple thing, but it is necessary.
48:47
We must remember that there is more to the world than mere politics,
48:52
which is a means and not an end.
48:54
And we must also remember that for us Christians, our true end is elsewhere.
49:00
Similarly, there is no such thing as a single silver-bullet solution to any
49:05
problem, and we must employ a variety of approaches, as the Holy Spirit prompts us.
49:12
We must resist secular thinking, utopian thinking, and the dualistic thinking
49:18
that goes along with them.
49:20
Christ promised us salvation in heaven, not perfection in this world.
49:25
Furthermore, more, we cannot use the enemy's weapons and tactics to win the Lord's battles.
49:32
Pride, for example, is always and everywhere a sin, and a grievous one at that.
49:38
Most importantly, we must always remember the fall and its consequences.
49:43
We cannot save ourselves.
49:46
Only Christ can save us, and a new and better kind of man comes about via his actions, not ours.
49:56
All we can do is cooperate with his efforts.
50:00
Through the long, slow, difficult process of cultivating virtue and following Him.
50:07
The final marching orders provided by the religion of the day consist of an
50:12
admonition of only one word drawn from St. Paul's letter to the Ephesians.
50:18
What must we do?
50:20
Stand. That is what is most important. Stand.
50:25
We must hold fast to the truth. We must refuse to be moved from our ground.
50:30
The book concludes with a reminder of the iron law of spiritual warfare.
50:36
The devil cannot defeat Christians by making their lives miserable,
50:41
by persecuting them, or even by slaughtering them.
50:44
The only way he wins is by convincing us to abandon the truth or to give up the good fight.
50:52
As long as we do not do these things, we win. and when we win,
50:58
we provide better witness of the Christian faith and thus we make more converts.
51:03
This is the church's most important tactic as we move from Christendom to an
51:09
apostolic age, which we're in now, and it behooves us not to forget it. Very good.
51:17
It does tie in with what we're talking about.
51:21
And Reno ends up in his article talking about The main problem facing America,
51:28
this is Reno, is not a lack of faith in Jesus Christ.
51:33
It's a lack of belief in anything whatsoever.
51:39
Our society tends towards a tactic and sometimes explicit nihilism.
51:46
And what does nihilism do to the human psyche?
51:51
It destroys it. Demoralizes the whole society. Well, you're right.
51:55
And in the end, many people do away with themselves.
52:00
They kill themselves because they have nothing to believe in,
52:03
nothing to grasp to, no hope for the future.
52:08
So I guess we better pray. Exactly. And I think it's important that we understand
52:14
that we need to switch over to the apostolic.
52:17
We need to start rebuilding the church and making converts and being apostolic
52:22
in nature and not being Christendom in nature.
52:26
Christendom is now in the past. We're no longer living in Christendom,
52:30
and we need to understand that.
52:32
We need to rebuild it. And to do that, we have to start from an apostolic point of view.
52:37
And I think the University of Mary is very correct in their assessment of what's going on.
52:43
And it's catastrophic for the church to be in the wrong mode at the wrong time.
52:48
So we'll have to stop here.
52:51
And end our program, so we'll say our prayer.
52:54
St. Michael the Archangel, defend us in battle. Be our protection against the
52:59
wickedness and snares of the devil.
53:01
May God rebuke him, we humbly pray.
53:03
And do thou, Prince of the Heavenly Ghost, by the power of God,
53:08
thrust into hell, Satan, and all the evil spirits who want us to the world for the ruin of souls.
53:15
Amen. You've been listening to Being Catholic with Bob Johnston on Catholic Spirit Radio.
53:21
If you'd like to contact Bob, email bob at catholicspiritradio.com.
53:26
Again, that's bob at catholicspiritradio.com.
53:30
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