The Collapse of Trust

 I'm watching the Daily Wire What Is A Woman? documentary on Twitter while it's available for free (ending soon). If you see this post in time, you may still be able to watch it. 

I wasn't going to at first. I'll be the first to admit I'm not a huge Matt Walsh fan, but he did a really good job with this piece. He was respectful and not inflammatory, and the production was well done. Just asking fundamental questions (ie, the title of the documentary) which people seem to have trouble answering. Because like Pilate, it comes back to the issue: What Is Truth? What is reality? Is there an objective reality? Objective truth? 

Something weird is going on in Western civ. I especially liked the part when he flew to Kenya to visit an African tribe. They laughed and laughed at the bizarre questions  "Can a man become a woman, or a woman become a man?" as if it were a mistranslation, and answered his question of What Is A Woman? very matter-of-factly with simple common sense.

I think COVID really blew the floor out of the house.  We are all being institutionally lied to, and you don't have to be a "conspiracy theorist" to believe that. Not just COVID though. From the AMA to the APA to the NCAA to the U.S. of A., it is clear we cannot and should not blindly trust institutions that should be in the service of the common good. If you don't have common sense, how can you know what the common good is?

There are good agents in every field, people who want to tell the Emperor he is naked. But they get smothered and drowned out. I think Matt Walsh, given his temperament, is telling him plainly--not in a hysterical manner, but calmly and rationally. Of course all documentaries are slanted, but nothing is neutral today anyway.

In some ways, this is nothing new. But it just seems to be accelerating. 

When we get in a car, we trust other drivers on the road to have the competency to be behind the wheel. We can be as careful as we can be, and yet still be broadsided by a distracted or drunk driver; our lives, for better or worse, are in the hands of others. 

If we can't trust the government, our therapist, our doctors, the pharmaceutical industry, our institutions of higher education--or if that trust has been compromised with even just little turds in the carboy--then that is a foreboding sign for our society as a whole (as you'll get a taste of, if you watch Matt's documentary)

Like abortion, one can make oppositional claims against abortion and trans ideology without appeal to religious reasoning, though the Natural Law, philosophy, and theology can inform that truth. Christians do not (or should not) oppose trans ideology not because of hate or being bigoted or fear, but because we must tell the truth. That truth comes with a cost, as it always does for those who choose not to live by lies. 

̶S̶e̶x̶ Crisis Sells

 

When I was in high school, and before I was a Christian, I served as president of our school's Environmental Club. I remember doing sting-ops to expose how the contents of recycling bins would get thrown in the regular trash by maintenance workers, and campaigning to save the bison in the Article National Wildlife Refuge. The most concerning thing that kept me up at night, however, was "global warming" (aka, climate change). To say I was anxious about it, as well as our planet's imminent destruction would be accurate. 

I haven't given up all my ecological conscious choices--I still commute to work by bike whenever I can, compost, and take cold showers. But I'm hardly a zealot about it. I consider these relatively common-sense, do-what-you-can approaches to conservationism that should rest with the individual. I also think we could make smarter larger scale architectural choices to incorporate building practices that work with, rather than against, the natural envionment--things like passive solar heating and cooling, geothermal, natural building materials, etc. You can do these things in good conscience as a conservative without becoming a liberal eco-weenie.   

The thing is, I no longer worry about the destruction of the planet, whether or not the "science is settled" with regards to climate change. I attribute some of that to waking up to the fact that climate alarmists have been blowing this horn for over half a century now, and we're still here. I've also grown suspicious of the motives and agenda behind the "science." That isn't to deny that it may or may not be a thing, only that those in charge seem to be taking a cue from Winston Churchill that one should never "let a good crisis go to waste."

The best insight I read on this phenomenon of why the angry left is so angry (and perhaps, so anxious as well) came from a Federalist essay by the same title:

"Then there’s the fact that “Progressives” convince themselves that everything they’re doing is for the greater good, which supersedes the rights of any individual. It’s a case of “the humanitarian with the guillotine“: we’re doing this for the overall good of humanity, so it’s OK to start killing people. Or to be really, really mean to them in the comments field.

There’s the fact that advocacy of big government is by its very nature a quest for power and control, for the ability to use force against others—a cause that naturally attracts the bitter and intolerant.

I hate to say William F. Buckley was right, but I think it’s all about immanentizing the eschaton.

There are three basic views of what this ideal state is: the supernatural, the individual, and the social.

In its original context, for the traditional American Christian, the “eschaton” is supernatural: it is life in heaven. That means it’s something that will happen regardless of the state of this wicked world, and your place in it is dependent on you and your own inner spiritual state, not on other people. Hence the Christian’s confounded complacency. If I’m not on board with his religious vision, well, that sucks for me when the Rapture comes. Because my religious critic is a nice guy, he’ll pray that eventually I see the light and accept Jesus into my heart. But at the end of the day (or of history), it’s no skin off his soul.

For someone like me, who is not religious but an individualist, the ultimate end state I am seeking is in my own life. It’s about my family, my work, my home, my own personal interests. The goal I’m seeking is about things I have a lot of control over, much more than it is about other people. Politics is mostly just something that gets in the way of the real business of life. Our ideal end state is that we can reach the point where we’re able to think about our own lives and not have to care about politics any more.

For the secular leftist, the end state is social and necessarily political. It is all about getting everybody else on board and herding them into his imagined utopia. There are so many “problematic” aspects of life that need to be reengineered, so many vast social systems that need to be overthrown and replaced. But the rest of us are all screwing it up, all the time, through our greed, our denial, our apathy, our refusal to listen to him banging on about his tired socialist ideology.

For the Christian, the ideal end state is safely in the next world and therefore is never in doubt. For the individualist, it’s in his own life, and it’s mostly under his direct control. For the leftist, however, it is all outside his control. It requires other people, a lot of other people, and those SOBs usually refuse to cooperate. Talk about rage-inducing.

If the whole focus of your life is on getting everybody else to agree with you on every detail of your politics and adopt your plans for a perfect society, then you’re setting yourself up to be at war with most of the human race most of the time."

For the secular liberal for whom God is not real, climate change serves as a good stand in for the eschaton or parousia. They have the alarm going off, but they have no peace, no assurance, no comfort because they do not serve a living God, but an agenda which as Tracinski notes above, "it requires a lot of other SOBs who refuse to cooperate."  

(Catholic) Christians, however, do have the assurance of being able to say in the face of imminent destruction "I am saved, I am being saved, and I hope to be saved." This allows a degree of ardent zeal tempered by level-headed pragmatism: we will never get every one of those SOBs on board--so worry about yourself first and help others as you can to know where the bunker is. 

Of course, we can take things too far as Christians as well. There is no shortage of warnings from Our Lady and the saints and seers as to what is in store for us. The state of the Church is in disaray and the powers of Hell seem to be threatening to batter through her gates. 

But when has this not been the case? And what can you really do besides keeping yourself in a state of grace, praying the rosary every day, and trusting in the Lord's promises? Focusing on one's locus of control--despite the schismatic bishops in Germany, or the homosexual seminary pipeline in Latin America, or this or that scandal in the Vatican--keeps one grounded rather than being a Chicken Little. Yes, yes, we know the sky is falling. But we still have to get dinner on the table tonight!

The saying sex sells is an obvious point. But manufacturing and/or highlighteing crisis after crisis--whether ecological, ecclesial, or eschatalogical--to keep people on the edge is a useful way to turn a profit as well. Taylor Marshall has honed in on this years ago by this point, and has found his groove ad nauseum. Crisis magazine and The Remnant have some solid articles, but this is their M.O as well--the destruction of patriarchy, tradition, the Church, etc. We keep waiting for the Church to be hollowed out til she is nothing but a shell of her former self. 

And yet, as many a Communist head-of-state has found, these pesky saints of renewal keep crawling out from the crater of atomic destruction like cockroaches. Forces have been working to stamp out the Church for her entire history, and yet she is still here. Just like the planet, despite all the dire warnings of "population bombs," endangered species, and mass starvation. 

Catholics need to be mindful not to binge on fear-porn too often lest we become like these Chicken Little climate alarmists, but in another sphere. We are people of hope, people of joy, people who do not take refuge in anxiety and fear. If we should fear anything, it is at the level our own souls, as our Lord said,   

"Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather, be afraid of the One who can destroy both soul and body in hell." (Mt 10:28)

My dad, though he was not overly-religious, always had a way of calming me down as a kid when I would get worked up about all the seemingly unsolveable problems of the world. He would simply assure me that we would "figure it out" as a human race. "We always do," he would say. My dad had a good bit of faith and trust in science, the markets, and human ingenuity to come out the other side. I don't know if I have that level of trust in those things in particular...but I know my trust in the Lord of all is not misplaced. "Therefore, do not worry about tomorrow....for tomorrow will worry about itself" (Mt 6:34). 

Related: There Is No Fear In Love

Freedom From Tyrrany

 

Happy Independence Day. For our international readers, here in America we celebrate July 4th as the birth of American independence from Great Britain. The colonists did not initially favor complete independence during the Revolutionary War of 1775, and those who did were considered radical. But as hostility against Great Britain increased in the ensuring year, the tide turned and the Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence on July 4th, 1776

Americans have always had a revolutionary, independent spirit. In many ways, being an American and being a Catholic has always been held in historical tension. From Masonic influence to its Protestant roots, Catholics in America have had to work out what it means to be both Catholic and American and where their allegiance lies. Pope Leo XIII warned about the "heresy of Americanism" in the late 19th century, and there were concerns when the first Catholic president, John F. Kennedy, was elected. 

In the religious world, Martin Luther's 95 Theses nailed to the door in Wittenberg in 1517 was a kind of Protestant "Declaration of Independence" from the "tyranny" of the Church of Rome. He was not original in this--heretics have been breaking off from Christ's Church for centuries before and centuries after, leaving the Baroque of Peter to form their own independent churches. This is the spirit of how America was born, and yet it is the very antithesis of what it means to be a Catholic, the hallmark of which is allegiance to Rome. 

St. Iraneus (whose feast day we celebrated yesterday) was countering the Gnostics in the 2nd century, and saints and popes throughout history have done the same. The Church Fathers wrote of the primacy of Peter as the mark of a true Catholic. St. Cyprian, for one, wrote in 251:

“The Lord says to Peter: ‘I say to you,’ he says, ‘that you are Peter, and upon this rock I will build my Church.’ . . . On him [Peter] he builds the Church, and to him he gives the command to feed the sheep [John 21:17], and although he assigns a like power to all the apostles, yet he founded a single chair [cathedra], and he established by his own authority a source and an intrinsic reason for that unity. Indeed, the others were that also which Peter was [i.e., apostles], but a primacy is given to Peter, whereby it is made clear that there is but one Church and one chair. So too, all [the apostles] are shepherds, and the flock is shown to be one, fed by all the apostles in single-minded accord. If someone does not hold fast to this unity of Peter, can he imagine that he still holds the faith? If he [should] desert the chair of Peter upon whom the Church was built, can he still be confident that he is in the Church?” (The Unity of the Catholic Church 4; 1st edition [A.D. 251]).

For dissident Catholics who regard the dogma of the Church as a kind of spiritual "tyranny," they have no problem employing this particular American sentiment of noble revolutionary spirit to break away and render themselves anathema. They are a dime a dozen. Should they stay as "cafeteria Catholics," they only undermine their allegiance and make clear they are children of this world, content with the bitter herb of perceived spiritual independence and so-called enlightenment by their own waywardness.

But for the Catholic today who lives, breathes, and dies as an American, we know where our allegiance lies--to the King of Kings and Lord of Lords. Sometimes the two will square, and sometimes they will not; when we chose our national identity in this world as a higher ideal over our identity in Christ and His Church, we get the kind of JFK Catholicism that bears out its fruit of cognitive dissonance we see now in our current presidency (under the 2nd Catholic president in our history). 

I sometimes wonder why there are not more American saints. Certainly they are out there, whether canonized formally or not. Our history does not go as far back certainly as Europe, but it begs the question, which seems beyond the scope of a half hour blog post--is there something inherent in fervent Americanism that works counter to the faith? Has freedom become our idol? Are the ideals of our country--religious freedom, self-governance, the dignity of all men, the ideals of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness--compatible and worthy of emulation in the life of our Catholic faith? As much as I love and cherish being an American, and that there has never been a system of government so ahead of its time, it is nonetheless called the "American experiment" for a reason. 

As Benjamin Franklin wrote, "Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom. As nations become corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters." If we as a nation are not virtuous people (can it be argued otherwise?), are we truly capable of freedom? And if not, is it any surprise that our bloated government has stepped in to assume the role of master?

Freedom is a precarious thing. As the American Revolutionaries and all those who fought and died to establish and ensure that freedom know, it is anything but free. If we do not secure it with virtue (freedrom from the tyranny of sin, which comes from Christ and His teachings), we may well find the American Experiment an untenable affair in the years to come.  

See also: Darkness Before Dawn; The Golden Triangle of Freedom

Healing The Church...From The Ground Up

 There's a economic philosophy in Catholic social thought called Distributism; some of you may be familiar with it, with Chesterton and Belloc being it's chief proponents. Although I haven't studied it in-depth, my main takeaway it's based in the concept of subsidiarity--that "a community of a higher order should not interfere in the internal life of a community of a lower order, depriving the latter of its functions, but rather should support it in case of need and help to co-ordinate its activity with the activities of the rest of society, always with a view to the common good."

I've thought about this economic philosophy as it applies to the "lower orders" of the Church--that is, the domestic Church, i.e., the family.  From the head on down, we see nothing but dysfunction in the institutional Church. Any "top-down" solutions are fraught with bureaucratic oversight and inefficiencies, not to mention not being in touch with the nature of the lower orders. 

But by nature, the Church is hierarchical, so we are working within the confines of this chain of command. If you are an American conservative, you are already familiar with the view (counter to our current administration) that the purpose of government is not to solve every societal problem through over-regulation and control, but through ensuring the rights of the populace by way of the Constitution. That is, the principals on which this nation was founded supported "we the people" to self-govern and gave them the means to do so by ensuring those rights. But this requires virtue, as John Adams famously noted, "Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other." 

Likewise in the Church, Her raison d'etre is to lead men to Heaven, not carry them there. She does this by way of the Mass, the Sacraments, doctrine, holy scripture, and giving us tools for our toolbox (sacramentals). The saints are our guides in the varying ways one may attain to this goal, those building blocks which form the foundation of the Church Militant. When the Church is ensuring those things are in order, even fallen man is given the resources and hope, in cooperation with grace, to attain to virtue and save his soul. 

But note the important caveat in Distributist thought--the higher order should not interfere in the internal life of the community, depriving the latter of its functions. 

Friends have been sending me news of the possible revocation of Summorum Pontificum and the return to the motu proprio; I'd be lying if I said I wasn't filled with a low-level dread at the prospect of this happening under Pope Francis' pontificate. Summorum Pontificum allowed greater freedom for priests to celebrate the Traditional Latin Mass (though, arguably by many traditionalists, this should be the standard, not the allowed exception). If the indult is revoked...well, I'm not exactly sure what that would look like, but I think it's safe to say there would be less access and greater restrictions for traditional worship. From where I'm standing on the ground as a layman, father, and husband trying to lead his family to Heaven, this seems to qualify as "depriving the latter of its functions," and is a intentional "interference in the internal life of the community." 

As I've written before, our family has benefited from great grace by way of the traditional Mass, and have appreciated the ability to take part in traditional worship. I don't know why it ever went away in the first place, but that's a post for another day. 

As I wrote in yesterday's post, there are some in the Church who feel they have been psychologically or spiritually harmed by "traditionalists" who act without charity. This is not a 'top-down' but a 'bottom -up' problem. No amount of reform in taking away the Traditional Latin Mass and attempting to scatter traditionalist faithful will stamp out those who want to worship in this way.  And so the solution lies in healing at the root (sanatio in radice) through the building of virtue and healthy spirituality that expresses itself in charity and self-giving. The onus is on the families--not to be responsible for other people's hurt feelings, but to ensure they are doing everything they can to live out their faith and do their part well, with the tools to do so. 

I've pondered how to live this out in my own life and the life of my family as a way of healing the Church from the bottom up. One thing my wife and I came up with, however, trivial, is to host a once a month gathering of disconnected Catholics in our area for food, fellowship, and spiritual study in fellowship, which we will be starting next month. Our hope is to fortify one another and draw on that human capital present in other Catholics "on the ground" so that if and when "the sheep are scattered," we will at least have made contact with one another and can reach out for support here in the "lower orders." Living the virtues ourselves, praying the family rosary, attending Mass, inviting others in and outside the faith to explore Her claims, tithing and sacrificing for intentional causes--these are all ways we are trying to heal the Church and build her up. I've also been trying to invest more in our men's scripture study, which I lead once a week, so that the men might have fraternity and be able to lead their families well. 

Honestly, I'm not sure what else to do. We are focusing on the local level with the hopes it will fan out and in a whisper-down-the-lane way, give people the perhaps soon to be restricted access to the tools they need to live holy lives should things go dark. What I do know, is that help is not coming 'from the top.' If we weren't on our own already, we may soon well be. 

Memorare

Memorial Day is a distinctly American holiday that we can and rightfully should observe as American Catholics to respect and remember our fallen soldiers and the sacrifices they made for our country. 

As Americans, we realize our freedoms depend on the defense of these national ideals by those willing to pay the price for us to enjoy them. We owe them a debt of gratitude.

As Christians, though, we can sometimes forget that our freedom was bought at a price as well--our freedom from sin, bought with the blood of the only one able to atone for them and mitigate the wrath of God by way of sacrifice. Like Americans born on native soil into a culture we so often take for granted, we as Christians can sometimes forget the high price of such a sacrifice--the suffering and death of God's only begotten Son. 

We can enjoy--yes enjoy--the freedom from the stranglehold of sin and death by way of this sacrifice. When we are living in a state of grace, we enjoy the fruits of the Spirit--peace, hope, assurance. We give honor to God when we use this gift in a fitting manner--to sacrifice our own self-will in order to love our neighbor and will the good of another, to be the hands and feet of Christ--we do not squander, but honor, the gift that has been given to us. 

When we remember Christ's supreme sacrifice on the Cross, we are imbibed with the gratefulness of a ransomed prisoner who owes his life to the one who bought it for him, who paid the price. Gratefulness and remembrance on our part is also a small price to pay tribute on this day as Americans enjoying the fruit of freedom, which, as we all know, isn't free.