The Gosford signs

Australia must be one of the few nations to have a public holiday for a horse race, the Melbourne Cup. It has been called the race that stops the nation which is why one left-wing Anglican minister put up this sign:

It's a criticism of the Australian Government's policy of stopping the boats carrying illegal immigrants before they reach Australia.

I was curious to learn more about the Gosford Anglicans and their minister, Father Rod Bower. The first thing I found out is that there are many more such signs:

You might think that a flamboyant Christian minister might be a little more cautious in supporting the Islamification of Australia. After all, recent event in the Middle East include the wiping out of ancient Christian communities that once numbered millions and the formation of a caliphate which has imposed brutal executions for homosexuals.

Father Bower has considered this issue, at least briefly. It seems that the flooding of hundreds of thousands of immigrants into Europe this year has given him pause for thought. He does not believe, though, that extremism will ever happen in Australia for two reasons.

First:

We live in a world of extremes. We must not, however, fall into he trap of believing that all these extremes are easily transportable to Australia. We do not have the porous borders of Europe and no matter what the scaremongers say it not possible for people to enter without notice or permission.

Australia is in the unique position of being able to intentionally and systematically receive refugees and to enable them to contribute their own unique gifts to our ever-evolving culture.

This argument seems contradictory. We are reassured by Father Bower that we have nothing to fear because Australia does not have porous borders and can "systematically receive refugees"; at the same time, though, he believes fiercely that Australia should make its borders more porous and our immigration policy less systematic by allowing people to be smuggled into the country.

Here's another contradiction. Father Bower was very critical of Tony Abbot's speech in England, in which Abbott urged Europe to adopt the Australian system of detaining illegal arrivals. But if, as Father Bower states, Europe is in danger of extremism because of its porous borders, then surely the Europeans ought to follow Abbott's advice, or something like it.

This aside, Father Bower might like to consider that it has often been the children of the first arrivals who have committed acts of terrorism, so even screening on arrival does not rule out future problems.

Father Bower also believes that we are in no danger from Islamification because:

We are a rational people who reject extremism of all types whether it is religious or political. As Archbishop William Temple said “we are not moderately passionate, we are passionately moderate." In this exceptional land we have a unique opportunity to build a harmonious, diverse and life-giving society.

Interesting how this is massaged a certain way. Father Bower's liberal moderns do not just reject religious extremism, they mostly reject religion as a whole. In Gosford, Anglicans are outnumbered by atheists by 25% to 18%. Father Bower, as a minister of the cloth, might perhaps think twice before identifying too closely with a mainstream liberal culture.

I note too that Archbishop William Temple himself may not have been as keen on Islamifying Australia as Father Bower is. He wrote in his work Church and Nation (preface xi):

We all know about Turkey; it is the essentially Mohammedan power and Mohammedanism is the religion of oppression; it believes in imposing its faith by means of the sword.

Also, it is not so much a question of whether "we" are a rational and moderate people, but whether the future waves will be equally so.

And, finally, it's difficult to see recent social developments as being "passionately moderate". Is it "passionately moderate" to use migration to dissolve the distinct Western peoples? Or to reimagine nations as being something like large-scale business ventures? Or to dissolve the culture and the social supports that once supported a stable family life?

The old church was different

Was the Catholic Church always in favour of an anti-national universalism? The answer is clearly no. Bonald, for instance, has found an encyclical of Pope Pius XII from 1939 in which there is a harmonising of the claims of patriotism and universalism. Bonald has posted a longer transcript (worth reading), but I'll try a summary.

Pope Pius begins with a reminder of the basis of the unity of humankind:

that law of human solidarity and charity which is dictated and imposed by our common origin and by the equality of rational nature in all men, to whatever people they belong, and by the redeeming Sacrifice offered by Jesus Christ on the Altar of the Cross to His Heavenly Father on behalf of sinful mankind.

But this doesn't mean that nations don't have an important place:

And the nations, despite a difference of development due to diverse conditions of life and of culture, are not destined to break the unity of the human race, but rather to enrich and embellish it by the sharing of their own peculiar gifts and by that reciprocal interchange of goods which can be possible and efficacious only when a mutual love and a lively sense of charity unite all the sons of the same Father and all those redeemed by the same Divine Blood.

There is no contradiction between the unity of the human race and our membership of nations - that is what Pope Pius is emphasising here.

To further underline the point Pope Pius goes on to say:

The Church of Christ, the faithful depository of the teaching of Divine Wisdom, cannot and does not think of deprecating or disdaining the particular characteristics which each people, with jealous and intelligible pride, cherishes and retains as a precious heritage.

And then this:

The Church hails with joy and follows with her maternal blessing every method of guidance and care which aims at a wise and orderly evolution of particular forces and tendencies having their origin in the individual character of each race, provided that they are not opposed to the duties incumbent on men from their unity of origin and common destiny.

The balance here is good. We cannot treat those not of our tradition in any way we like, as we share a common humanity; however, the church blesses the effort to wisely develop the unique tradition we belong to.

Pope Pius then goes on to speak about the proper role of the state:

Hence, it is the noble prerogative and function of the State to control, aid and direct the private and individual activities of national life that they converge harmoniously towards the common good. That good can neither be defined according to arbitrary ideas nor can it accept for its standard primarily the material prosperity of society, but rather it should be defined according to the harmonious development and the natural perfection of man. It is for this perfection that society is designed by the Creator as a means.

The state should not be "something ultimate to which everything else should be subordinated and directed". In particular, the state should not usurp the role of the family. Parents have an important and independent role in guiding the formation of their children:

Undoubtedly, that formation should aim as well at the preparation of youth to fulfill with intelligent understanding and pride those offices of a noble patriotism which give to one’s earthly fatherland all due measure of love, self-devotion and service.

What cannot be reconciled

Jim Kalb has written a very good piece for a Catholic magazine (the points he makes should be of interest to non-Catholics as well).

It is about the fundamental opposition between the world view of Catholics and secular liberals:

That opposition leads to views of morality and justice in which drastically different claims and authorities carry weight. The Church values conscience, and accepts “this is right”—in general, this expresses the moral nature of a world that after all is God’s creation—as a claim that normally overrides other considerations. Today’s secular world values individual autonomy instead, and prefers the authority of claims such as “I want this” or “this is part of my identity as I define it.”

Furthermore, the "separate spheres" understanding of the authority of church and state has broken down, as the liberal state is now claiming authority in both spheres:

At one time it was possible to reconcile the two by saying that they dealt with different matters, the Church hierarchy with fundamental spiritual and moral principles and the state with worldly practicalities and standards of conduct generally accepted as a matter of vernacular natural law (otherwise known as common sense).

That view no longer works because of growing state absolutism resulting from the decline of transcendent religion and the sense of a natural moral order. All social institutions, including the family, are now viewed as state creations, so that determining what they should be in light of ultimate values such as equality and personal autonomy is considered a basic function of government. On such an understanding there is no room for the moral authority of the Church.

Modern liberalism sees the traditional Christian view as not only wrong but gravely so:

Secular society of course views things differently. From its standpoint the Church’s claims are not merely weak but outrageous. “This is right,” where “right” is presented as obligatory without regard to desires, chosen identities, or the needs of a public order that makes freedom and equality its supreme goods, is seen as an attempt to make the speaker’s outlook and preferences trump other people’s...Against that background secular society is coming decisively to view religion as a matter of private lifestyle and symbolism

What Kalb says next is very significant. He writes that unless Catholics are willing to acknowledge the fundamental differences, their point of view will either not make sense to a secular audience or else will be comprehended within the secular outlook:

Otherwise what we say will either be treated as incomprehensible or absorbed into the current secular outlook. A call for mutual love, for example, will be understood as a call for affirming and supporting the desires and self-defined identities of all people just as they are, subject only to the principle of mutual tolerance.

That was a very good example to give, because it is becoming so rife within the various churches. It is common now to hear Christians argue that the commitment to love one another means accepting whatever choices people make, i.e. accepting them however they wish to be as a gesture of inclusiveness, even if these choices run counter to scripture or longstanding church tradition. It is dissolving of the notion of moral good, apart, that is, from the good of unconditional acceptance and inclusion.

Kalb finishes by giving some suggestions for what Catholics might do at the present time. One of them is to live well:

it remains true that in a time of moral confusion living well is the best offense. People know that the current order of things doesn’t help them lead good lives, and if they see someone who has something better many of them will eventually want to know more about it. We should live in a way that makes that the natural turn for their thoughts to take.

I think that's good advice for traditionalists in general (though not the complete answer). If we become known as the portion of Westerners who best display the masculine virtues; who make good husbands and fathers; who are positive and courageous in their attitudes; who are magnanimous in the sense of rising above pettiness - then that helps to prepare the ground for converting young people in the future to our cause.

Pope Francis on globalisation

In a recent interview Pope Francis made the following criticism of globalisation:

The globalization that the Church thinks of does not look like a sphere in which every point is equidistant from the center and in which, therefore, the particularity of peoples is lost. It is, rather, a polyhedron, with its different facets, in which each nation keeps its own culture, language, religion, identity. The present “spherical” economic globalization, especially the financial, produces one thought, a weak thought. And the human person is no longer at its center but only money.

That's a welcome defence of the importance of particular relationships. The challenge for the Church is to follow through with this principle, by supporting the right of nations to apply border controls in order to maintain their own distinct existence.

The Pope on fidelity

In a recent post I took aim at Giles Fraser, an Anglican minister, who claimed that we are always morally responsible to those most other to us. Giles Fraser wrote:

...you know, constantly in Jesus' teaching there's stuff about the stranger, there's stuff about the other, there's stuff about the Good Samaritan, and our moral responsibility is always to this person who is more other than us, rather than same as us.

My response was that this can't be true as Christian morality recognises the importance of fidelity in relationships. In marriage, fidelity means that we remain turned toward our spouse, seeking to deepen a union with them, and that we accept the service we are called to in this relationship, a service that fulfils a significant aspect of who we are.

Much of our daily moral responsibility is oriented to our spouse and to our family, i.e. to those we are most close to and familiar with, rather than to persons who are most other to us.

This model of fidelity is to be found, in particular ways, in a series of relationships, e.g. between ourselves as individuals and God; between ourselves and our wider family or community (clan, tribe, ethny, nation); between God and church and so on.

Now, by one of those coincidences I published this argument on November 17th and the very next day Pope Francis was reported to have given a homily touching on the theme of fidelity. Unfortunately the Vatican hasn't published the full text of the homily, but various excerpts have been given in the press.

The theme of the homily was that we do not negotiate everything in a spirit of adolescent progressivism, in particular we do not negotiate fidelity. Pope Francis began with a reading from the Book of Maccabees in which many Jews agreed to abandon their traditions in order to curry favour with King Antiochus:

L’Osservatore Romano reported that the Pope preached:

“Let us go and make a covenant with the Gentiles round about us; we cannot become isolated” or remain stuck in our old traditions. “Let us go and make a covenant with them, for since we separated from them many evils have come upon us.” The proposal so pleased them that some of the people eagerly went to see the king, to bargain with the king, to negotiate.

L’Osservatore Romano continued:

The Bishop of Rome likened their attitude to what he called the modern-day “spirit of adolescent progressivism” which seductively suggests that it is always right, when faced with any decision, to move on rather than remaining faithful to one's own traditions. “The people,” he said, “bargained with the king, they negotiated with the king. But they didn't negotiate habits … they negotiated fidelity to God, who is always faithful. And this is what we call apostasy; the prophets called it adultery. They were an adulterous people” who “negotiated something essential to their very being, i.e., their faithfulness to the Lord.”

Many people, he said, accepted the king's orders “which prescribed that all the people in his kingdom should be one: and every one should leave his own law.” However, he observed, it was not the “beautiful globalization” which is expressed in “the unity of all nations” who each preserve their own identity and traditions. No, he said, the passage describes the “globalization of hegemonic uniformity,” a uniformity of thought born of worldliness.

“Still today, the spirit of worldliness leads us to progressivism, to this uniformity of thought” … Negotiating one's fidelity to God is like negotiating one's identity, Pope Francis said.

In what ways does this support the argument I made against Giles Fraser?

The Pope's homily suggests the importance of fidelity as a moral concept within Christianity. For Pope Francis fidelity is important in upholding what is essential to our being and identity.

Fidelity has to do with our relationship to God, but it applies as well to our relationship with our larger ethnic or national communities. It is not always right, says Pope Francis, in a "spirit of adolescent progressivism" to "move on rather than remaining faithful to one's own traditions". It is important, in the Pope's view, that there be a "beautiful globalisation" in which there is a unity between nations who "each preserve their own identity and traditions" rather than a "globalization of hegemonic uniformity" in which we merge into sameness.

So is our moral responsibility always to the person more other to us, as Giles Fraser claims? Not according to this homily by Pope Francis, in which our moral responsibility is to practise fidelity - a faithfulness to God and to our own traditions and traditional communities, through which we uphold our identity and essential aspects of our being.

On fidelity

Giles Fraser is the Anglican minister who, in a recent BBC debate, claimed that Christianity means being always morally oriented to those who are most other to us:

...you know, constantly in Jesus' teaching there's stuff about the stranger, there's stuff about the other, there's stuff about the Good Samaritan, and our moral responsibility is always to this person who is more other than us, rather than same as us.

I want to sketch out an argument as to why Christianity can't be understood this way.

But first let me concede that our moral responsibility in Christianity does extend to the stranger. That is on the basis that as man is made in God's image, that to love God is to love our fellow man. And this is not only derived from the Bible, but can be argued for from natural law. We do share a common humanity, so we should help out a stranger in dire need on this basis.

However, to limit Christianity to this one principle is a prime example of "intellectuals' disease," in which moral positions are derived from a single principle or formulation.

Giles Fraser's single principle cannot explain a great deal of Biblical morality. Take, for instance, the issue of infidelity. There is no doubt that Christian marriages are supposed to be faithful. But why?

It could be answered, simply, that this has to do with sexual purity or that it is a matter of justice to one's spouse. Even if we leave it at that, we can see that our moral responsibility is not just to the stranger, but to the person closest to us, the one with whom we have become, in Christian terms, "one flesh".

But we can take this a little further. There is a post on marriage that has gone viral called "Marriage isn't for you" by Seth Adam Smith. The message of the post, in a nutshell, is that marriage is about selfless love. By selfless isn't meant an absence of self. It means being focused on others, in this case on your spouse, your children and your wider family. As Seth's father put it to him:

You don’t marry to make yourself happy, you marry to make someone else happy. More than that, your marriage isn’t for yourself, you’re marrying for a family. Not just for the in-laws and all of that nonsense, but for your future children. Who do you want to help you raise them? Who do you want to influence them? Marriage isn’t for you. It’s not about you. "Marriage is about the person you married.”

The truth of this is that marriage is not passively sitting back and getting things from your spouse. It is an active process of service to spouse and family and, as part of this orientation, to drawing together in a relationship with your spouse, physically and emotionally, i.e. to truly live as "one flesh".

Seth and his bride

Infidelity, it seems to me, is not just sexual. You could have infidelity when a spouse still performs the basic social role of husband or wife, and does not commit adultery, but has turned away from their spouse and no longer seeks actively to draw together into a marital relationship.

For those who are married, this effort to draw together within a relationship through what we gift to our spouse will be a significant part of our day to day orientation in life. It is not a commitment to the stranger but to the person with whom we are seeking the closest union, within a sacrament that has made us one flesh. And fidelity within this relationship matters a great deal.

It is a similar thing when it comes to fidelity in our relationship to God. Fidelity here means that we are turned toward the relationship, seeking out God and gifting ourselves in service. It is about a deepening union rather than a seeking out of the stranger (which is why, I think, I get so cranky when the mass is oriented toward secular politics- it is supposed to be time to stop from our busy schedules to turn toward God.)

One final point. If faithfulness in our relationships is morally significant, this applies as well to the particular relationships we have beyond family. Whether these are to clan, tribe or nation, they draw from individuals the same concern to give of themselves in the relationship, and to nurture and protect what is loved. This is particularly true of communities that we are deeply embedded in through ties of ethnicity (of shared descent, history, culture, language etc.), as these are the ties that call on us the most. The loss of these communities is felt deeply, in part, because it takes away one of the spheres of life in which we are set most closely in relationship with others and most challenged to give of ourselves.

Liberal moderns are not big on fidelity (in the sense I have described). They seem to seek out infidelity whenever they can. It is a pity that some Christians have followed them in this, on the basis, as Giles Fraser put it, that our moral responsibility is always towards those most other to us.

I don't see how that can fit into a Christian understanding of marriage, nor of fidelity in relationships in general.

Christians A and Christians B

An idea has occurred to me which I want to lay out in a post just to see where it leads. It has to do with two different types of religious people and how they fit together within Christianity.

Christians A

I read a post over at the Orthosphere some weeks ago on the role of sacrifice within historic cultures. People felt a burden of sin and were motivated to make sacrifices in order to be purified or redeemed.

The core theology of Christianity fits within this framework: it is through the sacrifice of Christ - the lamb of God - that the sins of the world are taken away.

This feeling - of the burden of sin - is obviously a powerful one, as it remained very strong in the West right up to the early modern period.

And today? It is still found powerfully within the churches. There is still a strong current of belief which emphasises how broken we are and how much in need of being saved.

This is the part of the church which sets itself amongst the moral outcasts, or those wounded or suffering - as Christ himself did.

There are secular liberals, too, who still seem to follow, in their own way, a similar framework. There are liberals who feel a burden of guilt and who seek atonement (sometimes through the sacrifice of their coethnics). In this way, liberalism does connect with a longstanding and significant part of the human experience, but it does so in a way that is unusually self-destructive.

Christians B

The second kind of Christian is the one who seeks communion, or who is oriented to the experience of God's presence in the world.

This kind of Christianity is not very theological, as what matters is the lived experience. It has been strongest in the Orthodox and the High Catholic and Anglican traditions. It is oriented to virtue, to the sacraments, to the dignity and solemnity of the mass, to the beauty of church architecture and music, and, more generally, to the experience of the transcendent in life, as for instance in the beauty of nature.

It is not a type of Christianity that is focused much on brokenness, as it is oriented to what is good, true and beautiful, so these Christians want to be held to high moral standards as part of a church culture.

A fusion?

So the question is whether the churches are to go with Christians A or Christians B. I should declare here that I fit much more readily in the B category. Even so, I don't think that the B category can ever fully represent Christianity. In its core theology, in the life of Christ, and in the powerful tendency for people to feel the burden of sin, there is much support for Christianity A.

The recent trend, anyway, has been for the Catholic church to try to divest itself of Christians B. If you go to a suburban Catholic parish, now, you will not find a beautiful church building, or a solemn and dignified mass, or a respect for the sacraments, or a focus on standards of personal morality.

It seems to me, too, that Pope Francis is attempting to steer the Catholic church in the direction of Christianity A. I get a sense of this when Pope Francis seeks to downplay church moral teachings in order to bring the church closer to those who are morally outcast.

Will the church be better off without Christians B? I don't think so. Christianity B is there in the Bible too and it has been in the church tradition from early on. Without it, Christianity would tend to drift in the direction (admittedly this is an extreme example) of the Lutheran minister, Nadia Bolz-Weber. (hat tip: Laura Wood)



Nadia Bolz-Weber

 

She is one of those moral outcasts:

A quick tour through her 44 years doesn’t seem likely to wind up here. It includes teen rebellion against her family’s fundamentalist Christianity, a nose dive into drug and alcohol addiction, a lifestyle of sleeping around and a stint doing stand-up in a grungy Denver comedy club. She is part of society’s outsiders, she writes in her memoir, its “underside dwellers . . . cynics, alcoholics and queers.”

She is almost celebrated for her moral brokenness rather than her virtue:

“You show us all your dirty laundry! It’s all out there!” the Rev. John Elford of the University United Methodist Church booms, as if he is introducing a rock star, leading the cheering crowd into an impassioned round of hymn-singing.

She's not too concerned about rules:

Her message: Forget what you’ve been told about the golden rule — God doesn’t love you more if you do good things, or if you believe certain things. God, she argues, offers you grace regardless of who you are or what you do.

Christianity, Bolz-Weber preaches, has nothing to do with rules

She seems to deliberately set herself apart from Christians B here:

“I think God is wanting to be known. And my experience of God wanting to be known is much more in the person who is annoying me at the moment rather than in the sunset,” she says. God is present in these challenging interactions, she says.

“I never experience God in camping or trees or nature. I hate nature,” she told the Austin crowd as she paced the stage. “God invented takeout and duvets for a reason.”

Everything is broken, everything a mess:

Bolz-Weber says she abhors “spirituality,” which she sees as a limp kind of self-improvement plan. She prefers a cranky, troublemaking and real God who at times of loss and pain doesn’t have the answers either.

“God isn’t feeling smug about the whole thing,” she writes about Jesus’s resurrection and the idea that the story is used as fodder for judgment. “God is not distant at the cross. . . . God is there in the messy mascara-streaked middle of it, feeling as [bad] as the rest of us.”

She is not oriented to what is excellent:

Four years and a seminary degree later, Bolz-Weber founded what today is casually called House. It’s a start-up of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, with an “anti-excellence, pro-participation” policy.

She is a very pure (radical?) type of Christian A. Unsurprisingly, she has attracted something of a following - as I wrote earlier, Christianity A does connect to something significant. But could a pure type of Christianity A really hold the same kind of numbers as one that brings together both A and B?

I really don't think so. The Catholic church did it better in the past, I believe, when it managed to draw in both.

The BBC Debate 2

In my last post I discussed a debate on immigration that was held on BBC radio. John Derbyshire has a report on the debate at Vdare and has also provided a transcript.

If you read through the debate you understand why things are going wrong in the West. Both the secular and the Christian participants held views which made open borders the "moral" position to take. They did so by following what you might call the "intellectual disease" which is to reduce life to a single intellectual principle and then try to derive moral positions from this single principle.

The Christian view was represented primarily by Giles Fraser, an Anglican cleric. Fraser is unusual in that he has very clearly rejected liberalism as a philosophy, but he has done so in the name of socialism (which goes to show that rejecting liberalism is only the first step, what comes next is equally important).

Fraser justifies open borders, and the massive transformation of Europe that necessarily follows, on the basis of certain passages of scripture:

The bit that comes to mind in the Scriptures for me is that very moving bit in Matthew 25 where Jesus goes, you know, "You saw me in prison, you didn't do anything, you, you didn't give me any food, I was a stranger and you didn't welcome me," and they go, "When was that?" and they say, "Inasmuch as you didn't do it to the least of these, my brothers and sisters, you did it to me." I mean, there's a whole implication there that if you're not welcoming the stranger, you're not welcoming Christ.

...you know, constantly in Jesus' teaching there's stuff about the stranger, there's stuff about the other, there's stuff about the Good Samaritan, and our moral responsibility is always to this person who is more other than us, rather than same as us.

The last line is the critical one. Fraser believes, from his reading of scripture, that our responsibility is always to those who are more "other" to us. If you believe this, then of course you're going to identify with the Muslim Africans seeking entry to Europe rather than with your fellow Europeans. Fraser, despite his repudiation of liberalism as a philosophy, has ended up with a very similar view of solidarity to liberals, namely that true solidarity is with those most other to us, rather than those we are most closely related to.

It should be said that you can see why Fraser might derive this idea from the New Testament. Jesus does emphasise in his teachings that benevolence is to be selfless (in the sense that we do not expect anything in return) and that it extends to strangers. Jesus says things like this:

But if you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners love those who love them.

In context, Jesus is clearly emphasising that we are not to be benevolent to get something for ourselves - that is the intended message. But you can see how it might be taken to mean that the love we have for those we are related to, and who have reason to love us, is insignificant.

I don't think such a reading makes much sense. Jesus elsewhere says that in order to be saved we must honour our father and mother - why would that be so important if all that matters is our relationship to the stranger?

In practice, too, it is no small thing to love those who love us. To truly love our spouse over a lifetime, through all the stresses and hardships of life, and still to cherish them, to admire them and to find delight in our relationship with them is no small thing. To truly love our children, to have a continuing pride in our paternal relationship with our sons and to seek out an active companionship with them, to feel a loving protectiveness toward our daughters, and to be driven to provide the best start in life for our children, that is no small thing. And to love those we are related to as part of our ethny, to sense the life that we share with them and to seek to uphold the good within our common tradition - that is no small thing either.

It used to be the case that Western civilisation continued to respect these loves, but also took seriously the injunction to be benevolent to "the least among you." That gave rise to traditions of Christian charity, of noblesse oblige and of codes of chivalry.

The codes of chivalry are particularly interesting. They combined Christian benevolence (mercy, protection of the weak and the poor) with duties to countrymen and faithfulness to the church. This is a much more viable basis for a Christian civilisation than Giles Fraser's dissolving formulation that "our moral responsibility is always to this person who is more other than us, rather than same as us" - a formulation which would deliver Europe to an Islamic and African future rather than a Christian European one.

The Pope Francis interview

Pope Francis gave a lengthy interview a few weeks ago which provoked much discussion. I've only just gotten around to reading it. I don't claim to have fully understood every nuance of it, but I thought I'd share what I found interesting.

First, I thought this was of interest:

Belonging to a people has a strong theological value. In the history of salvation, God has saved a people. There is no full identity without belonging to a people. No one is saved alone, as an isolated individual, but God attracts us looking at the complex web of relationships that take place in the human community. God enters into this dynamic, this participation in the web of human relationships.

It's worth thinking about what Pope Francis means by this. Obviously, a traditionalist would agree that "There is no full identity without belonging to a people" - so it's a nice quote to have to hand. I'm not sure though that Francis means it in the same way we would. I suspect he means that we can't show our complete moral nature unless we are in a relationship with others. For us, though, it is more literally a matter of identity: we are so constituted that our sense of ourselves, of who we are, derives in part from the ethnic or national tradition (the people) we belong to.

Second, Pope Francis does seem to reveal himself to be a "progressive" in the interview. I have to be careful to explain what I mean here. I think there is a progressive attitude to life, one which emphasises the "creative spirit," not just in terms of art, but more generally of the way in which individuals and societies "creatively unfold" themselves over time.

Those who hold to this mindset tend to see change as a good thing, as a moving forward of the individual or society. They tend to emphasise open-ended and fluid movement in society, rather than hierarchy, order or convention. They are committed to the process of self-making and the re-making of society.

There is a positive side to this, as a progressive politics will often attract those who are committed to social change rather than passively observing from the sidelines. But the great weakness is that progressives, so committed to what is creatively open-ended, don't have as strong a sense of how we (and the reality we inhabit) are constituted in ways that provide us with our purposes - our intended paths of development that best fulfil who we are. Progressives, therefore, can seem more interested in the process of change rather than having an adequate measure of what the quality of that change really is.

Pope Francis is not radically a progressive, but he does err on the side of progressivism. For instance, he emphasises the idea of history as a movement of progress:

human self-understanding changes with time and so also human consciousness deepens. Let us think of when slavery was accepted or the death penalty was allowed without any problem. So we grow in the understanding of the truth

Here is another example of Pope Francis rejecting the "static":

Those who today always look for disciplinarian solutions, those who long for an exaggerated doctrinal ‘security,’ those who stubbornly try to recover a past that no longer exists­—they have a static and inward-directed view of things.

I do have to say that we traditionalists could learn something from Pope Francis when he is in this "progressive" mode. He stresses the need to be dynamic, to be fruitful, to be searching, to be creative, to have audacity and courage. Here is an example of Pope Francis showing a commitment to shaping society:

We must not focus on occupying the spaces where power is exercised, but rather on starting long-run historical processes. We must initiate processes rather than occupy spaces. God manifests himself in time and is present in the processes of history. This gives priority to actions that give birth to new historical dynamics.

Somehow we have to take the best of the progressive mindset and meld it with the best of the traditionalist one. We have to take the strength of traditionalism, which is to have a close sense of what is good within created reality, and of an order within which these goods can be harmonised, which then gives direction and meaning (a telos) to human actions, and combine it with the strength of progressivism, which harnesses the creative spirit within human nature to shape individual life and to motivate a strong commitment to the shaping of society.

John Paul II on heritage

In my post on "The Elite Consensus" I argued that a core problem with liberalism is not so much materialism or even selfishness but a faulty concept of individuality:

From the liberal perspective, what we do in the family or as members of a tribe is simply conventional and doesn't therefore express individuality. They prefer the idea of an existence in which there is no entity larger than ourselves, in which there is a purely personal identity (i.e. I identify with myself) and in which relationships are incidental to our true purposes. In other words, they identify individuality (the creative unfolding of ourselves as persons) with a kind of detached self-making.

So the problem isn't at its heart one of materialism or selfishness. Instead, it's a concept of individuality which detaches the individual from particular forms of identity, belonging and connectedness, and also from those goods embedded within our own nature and reality which guide our development in a particular direction.

If the key problem is not selfishness then the churches are not going to change the course of liberal modernity by emphasising selflessness. If, instead, the key problem is a faulty concept of individuality, one which emphasises a detached self-making, then the churches need to put forward an alternative concept of individuality, one which emphasises the way that we fulfil our individuality as created beings.

The churches are mostly failing to do this, but there are exceptions. The example I'm going to post today is a long one, but well worth reading. It's from an apostolic letter, Dilecti Amici, written by Pope John Paul II in 1985. The letter was addressed to the youth of the world; the following section is on inheritance:

11. In the vast sphere in which the plan of life, drawn up in youth, comes into contact with "other people", we have touched upon the most sensitive point. Let us go on to consider that this central point, at which our personal "I" opens up to life "with others" and "for others" in the marriage covenant, finds in Sacred Scripture a very important passage: "Man leaves his father and his mother and cleaves to his wife".

This word "leaves" deserves special attention. From its very beginning the history of humanity passes-and will do so until the end- through the family. A man enters the family through the birth which he owes to his parents, his father and mother, and at the right moment he leaves this first environment of life and love in order to pass to a new one. By "leaving father and mother", each one of you at the same time, in a certain sense, bears them within you; you assume the manifold inheritance that has its direct beginning and source in them and in their family. In this way too, when you leave, each one of you remains: the inheritance that you receive links you permanently with those who passed it on to you and to whom you owe so much. And the individual-he and she-will continue to pass on the same inheritance. Thus also the fourth commandment of the Decalogue is of such great importance: "Honour your father and your mother".

It is a question here first of all of the heritage of being a human person, and then of being one in a more precisely defined personal and social situation. Here even the physical similarity to one's parents plays its part. Still more important is the whole heritage of culture, at the almost daily centre of which is language. Your parents have taught each one of you to speak the language which constitutes the essential expression of the social bond with other people. This bond is established by limits which are wider than the family itself or a given environment. These are the limits of at least a tribe and most often those of a people or a nation into which you were born.

In this way the family inheritance grows wider. Through your upbringing in your family you share in a specific culture; you also share in the history of your people or nation. The family bond means at the same time membership of a community wider than the family and a still further basis of personal identity. If the family is the first teacher of each one of you, at the same time-through the family-you are also taught by the tribe, people or nation with which you are linked through the unity of culture, language and history.

This inheritance likewise constitutes a call in the ethical sense. By receiving and inheriting faith and the values and elements that make up the culture of your society and the history of your nation, each one of you is spiritually endowed in your individual humanity. Here we come back to the parable of the talents, the talents which we receive from the Creator through our parents and families, and also through the national community to which we belong. In regard to this inheritance we cannot maintain a passive attitude, still less a defeatist one, as did the last of the servants described in the parable of the talents. We must do everything we can to accept this spiritual inheritance, to confirm it, maintain it and increase it. This is an important task for all societies, especially perhaps for those that find themselves at the beginning of their independent existence, or for those that must defend from the danger of destruction from outside or of decay from within the very existence and essential identity of the particular nation.

Writing to you young people, I try to have before my mind's eye the complex and separate situations of the tribes, peoples and nations of our world. Your youth, and the plan of life which during your young years each one of you works out, are from the very beginning part of the history of these different societies, and this happens not "from without" but pre-eminently "from within". It becomes for you a question of family awareness and consequently of national awareness: a question of the heart, a question of conscience. The concept of "homeland" develops immediately after the concept of "family", and in a certain sense one within the other. And as you gradually experience this social bond which is wider than that of the family, you also begin to share in responsibility for the common good of that larger family which is the earthly "homeland" of each one of you. The prominent figures of a nation's history, ancient or modern, also guide your youth and foster the development of that social love which is more often called "love of country".

We are not abstracted, detached beings. Our individuality unfolds within the social bonds of family and our larger family - our tribe or nation. We are spiritually endowed in our individual humanity through the social love that is more often called "love of country".

Collapsing distinctions

In 1975 the Catholic Church produced a document called Persona Humana dealing with sexual morality. Zippy Catholic has quoted a small passage from it, which I think is profoundly relevant today:

Hence, those many people are in error who today assert that one can find neither in human nature nor in the revealed law any absolute and immutable norm to serve for particular actions other than the one which expresses itself in the general law of charity and respect for human dignity.

What does this mean? It is saying that the command to love one another (the general law of charity) is taken by some people to be the only principle that we have to follow.

It's interesting that this problem was recognised by the Church as long ago as 1975. It seems to me today to be the chief error besetting the Christian churches, including the Catholic Church.

Why is it such a problem? The easy answer is that if you believe that the command to love one another is the only principle that we have to follow, then all other moral principles are dissolved or collapsed. I can go and commit any kind of sin I like, but none of it matters as long as I am oriented to a universal love.

But there's more to it than this. If the only thing we have to consider is a universal love, then we also collapse or dissolve particular forms of reality, such as the distinct ways that we have been created in our nature, the particular forms of relationships that we commit to in life, and the particular goods that we seek to uphold.

A good example of this is the theology of the leader of the American Episcopalians, Katharine Jefferts Schori. She believes that we should love every single person in the same way that we would love our "lover" (her term). So instead of there being a distinct expression of marital love, with its particular qualities, goods and duties, I'm supposed to extend the same love to everyone.

Katharine Jefferts Schori has even taken the "love your neighbour" command (caritas) to collapse distinctions between humans and microbes:

“Microbes are part of us, in a very real sense our intimate neighbors or members, and the task is to learn how to manage the system for better health as a whole and in all its parts,” Jefferts Schori proposed.

“This work is about consciousness of our connection to the whole, and tender care of the other parts of that whole,” Jefferts Schori intoned. “It is simply another form of loving our neighbor as ourselves, for the neighbor is actually part of each one of us.”

I don't believe that a church can survive if it doesn't take man as he really is, in his created nature, in the range and depth of his relationships, in his particular loves and attachments, in his full comprehension of the moral good, in the full range of his experience of the transcendent in life, and in the particular ways that he fulfils his created being.

To collapse or dissolve is the wrong path to follow. Caritas is certainly a core principle of Christianity, but not as practised by a detached or abstracted individual, but by individuals inhabiting a more complex order of being.

The elite consensus

What matters in life? There seems to be a consensus amongst the social elite, whether on the right or left, when it comes to this question. It is assumed that the real aim of life is to make yourself in the market. What is considered important morally is that nobody be disadvantaged by factors outside their control, such as their class, race or sex, when it comes to workforce participation.

It's understandable that the elite would share this assumption about life. The kind of people who rise to positions of prominence are often ambitious people who are highly committed to their career and who move within circles in which career is associated with power, wealth, fame and achievement.

But the elite consensus is a problem. First, it is highly reductive and leaves out much of what traditionally anchored human life. Second, it is dissolving of important forms of human identity and connectedness.

Let's take family as an example. The elite consensus assumes that career is what matters most and that the key thing is that family roles and responsibilities don't impede job opportunities, or earnings or status. And so the emphasis is on career being the organising centre of life, including family life, rather than family being an independent institution with its own principles of organisation.

That's why there is hardly anybody in mainstream politics who can really be counted as pro-family, regardless of what political party they are in. The effort to keep the family distinct from the market has failed.

It's a similar story when it comes to a larger communal identity (whether of ethny or nation). If what matters is the individual making himself in the market, then the most heroic person is the one who is an economic migrant, i.e. the person who pitches himself from one country to another to improve their job opportunities or their material conditions of life. But the mass immigration this justifies undermines the historic communities linked by a common ethnicity, i.e. by ties of ancestry, history, culture, religion and language.

In theory, the counterweight to the elite consensus is supposed to come from the churches. But in general the churches have done a poor job in providing an alternative account of what a human life is for.

At times, the churches emphasise the idea that human life is about selfless service to others. This does seem to be set against the elite consensus as it is a non-market and non-materialistic ideal of life. But in some ways it misses the target. Yes, it's true that the elite consensus can lead some people toward material ambition (some feminists for example are very focused on the holding of power in society). But what seems to be really at stake here is not so much materialism, but ideas about human individuality (the unfolding of the human personality).

From the liberal perspective, what we do in the family or as members of a tribe is simply conventional and doesn't therefore express individuality. They prefer the idea of an existence in which there is no entity larger than ourselves, in which there is a purely personal identity (i.e. I identify with myself) and in which relationships are incidental to our true purposes. In other words, they identify individuality (the creative unfolding of ourselves as persons) with a kind of detached self-making.

So the problem isn't at its heart one of materialism or selfishness. Instead, it's a concept of individuality which detaches the individual from particular forms of identity, belonging and connectedness, and also from those goods embedded within our own nature and reality which guide our development in a particular direction.

If the churches are to challenge the elite consensus, then it doesn't help much to emphasise an abstract selflessness, or for that matter abstract moral concepts such as justice or equality. These, if anything, only further encourage the abstracted, detached concept of individuality that the liberal elite operates with.

To be an effective counterweight, the churches would have to emphasise the way that we fulfil our individuality as created beings, made for particular relationships within particular social entities. To be fair, it's possible to find instances of church leaders doing just this (I've got a fine example lined up for a future post), but the general trend runs the other way.

A terrific review

I'd like to recommend that you read the intelligent and sympathetic review of Jim Kalb's new book that you'll find here.

It's best to read it in its entirety, but there are a few bits that particularly appealed to me. Here, for instance, is Kalb explaining why the liberal understanding of inclusiveness harms real community:

In fact inclusiveness destroys community by reducing the importance of personal ties, making us interchangeable with others and making our goals as much a matter of individual choice as possible.  There is nothing special to distinguish shoppers at a shopping mall from each other, so there are no divisions among them.  They do not constitute a community, however, because there is nothing that brings them together other than a common interest in acquiring consumer goods.  Each has come for his own purposes.  They have very few positive duties toward each other and they could just as easily be somewhere else, if they found some minor advantage in doing so.

But perhaps the most important part has to do with these papal quotes:

Pius XII, for instance, tells us that “[t]here exists an order, established by God, which requires a more intense love and a preferential good done to those people that are joined to us by special ties,” while Bl. John Paul II speaks of spiritual gifts we receive via our history, our culture, and “the national community to which we belong.”

Kalb concludes that:

If particular cultures and national communities have such importance for the way we become human and connect to God, then an understanding of diversity and inclusion that abolishes legitimate boundaries between them and so makes them nonfunctional cannot be acceptable, and multiculturalism, which deprives every culture of any setting of its own in which it can function as authoritative, must be wrong.

The part that I've italicised is critical, I think, for the argument that religious traditionalists ought to develop.

Two Catholic quotes

Catholic social teaching is sometimes too universalistic to fit in well with traditionalism. But sometimes there is a considerable overlap. Here, for instance, is Pope Paul VI analysing liberalism back in 1971:

35. On another side, we are witnessing a renewal of the liberal ideology. This current asserts itself both in the name of economic efficiency, and for the defense of the individual against the increasingly overwhelming hold of organizations, and as a reaction against the totalitarian tendencies of political powers. Certainly, personal initiative must be maintained and developed. But do not Christians who take this path tend to idealize liberalism in their turn, making it a proclamation in favor of freedom? They would like a new model, more adapted to present-day conditions, while easily forgetting that at the very root of philosophical liberalism is an erroneous affirmation of the autonomy of the individual in his activity, his motivation and the exercise of his liberty. Hence, the liberal ideology likewise calls for careful discernment on their part.

The part that I bolded is the starting point for my own criticisms of liberalism. So I can at least claim the support of Catholic social teaching in this respect.

Here's another good quote, this time from Pope Benedict (at the time Cardinal Ratzinger) in 1986:

[O]ne cannot abstract from the historical situation of the nation or attack the cultural identity of the people. Consequently, one cannot passively accept, still less actively support, groups which by force or by the manipulation of public opinion take over the State apparatus and unjustly impose on the collectivity an imported ideology contrary to the culture of the people.

Is this Catholicism or liberalism?

The Catholic Archbishop of Los Angeles, Jose Gomez, has given a speech urging American Catholics to support the legalisation of millions of illegal immigrants.

What is particularly disturbing about the speech is that it is framed almost entirely within a political liberalism.

The archbishop breezily advocated the creation of a new America via immigration:

“Immigration,” he emphasized, “is a question about America.”

During his remarks, Archbishop Gomez addressed the root of the immigration debate by asking the questions that underlie the issue: “What does it mean to be an American? Who are we as a people and where are we heading as a country? What will the 'next America' look like?”

“What should the next America look like?”

Talk about a fast and loose attitude. There is no concern at all for upholding a people and a tradition, just a casual embrace of change from one America to the next.

Can such a fast and loose attitude really be confined to issues of national identity? If you're willing to throw out your nation this casually, then why not change your church or religion while you're at it. Why not ask "What should the next religion look like?"

To put this another way, most people don't compartmentalise the different strands of their own tradition. If we value our tradition, and see the good in it, and want to uphold it, then we are likely to want to hold to the different aspects of it, including our national identity and the religion associated with it.

But Archbishop Gomez wants us to be so careless of our tradition that we will throw away our national identity in favour of the next one - whilst still caring about the fate of the historic Western religion. He advocates that we adopt an attitude that is both careless and caring - a contradictory impulse that is unlikely to hold.

The archbishop then appealed to a liberal civic nationalism:

The archbishop noted G. K. Chesterton's comment that the U.S. is the only nation founded not on a material basis such as territory or race, but on a belief – a vision.

The Founding Fathers – the writers of the Declaration of Independence – envisioned a nation “where men and women from every race, religion and national background could live in equality.”

But these days all the Western nations hold to a liberal civic nationalism. It is not distinct at all - it makes America no different to Australia or Sweden or Canada. It is a mere pretence that such a nationalism makes America unique.

And here's another problem with basing a national identity on liberal values of equality and non-discrimination. Because every traditional society did discriminate in order to uphold its particularity, then they all failed the test of these values. Therefore, the past is looked on negatively in terms of how morally tainted it was. The archbishop himself has adopted this liberal mindset. He said,

The American Dream has always been “a work in progress...not fully delivered,” Archbishop Gomez told his listeners. Slavery, nativism, and race discrimination have always been blights upon that dream, the reality of which has been both “painful and partial.”

How can you maintain a sense of continuity and a love of tradition if you adopt this liberal understanding of what a nation should be? What does it mean if the word you use to describe the history of your tradition is "painful"?

And how would the church fare if it were held to the same standards? Should American Catholics turn their backs to the historic church because the church discriminated to maintain its sense of itself and of the good that it embodied? After all, the church did not ordain women. It discriminated against homosexuality. It did not see polygamy as being equal to monogamy. You might argue that the church would not be the church if it accepted everything as being equal; that, in fact, it would be pointless to have a church that accepted everything as equal - that it would no longer be meaningfully a church. And you would be right. But the same thing can be said of a nation. If a nation is universal then can it really be a nation?

Which brings me to a final point. Archbishop Gomez peppers his speech with appeals to liberal moral terms, such as diversity and anti-discrimination. This is unfortunate as these are the very moral concepts that are likely to increasingly impact on the church itself in America.

Why? These concepts derive from a liberal idea that what can be truly and definitively known about individuals are their wants and desires. These wants and desires therefore constitute the good that individuals seek, and so what matters is that they can be pursued equally without impediment. Therefore, if there is a morality, it is based on qualities of non-interference, i.e. on concepts of individual rights, of tolerance, inclusion and non-discrimination.

And so when the Catholic Church makes a different kind of moral pronouncement, one based on the idea that something is inherently right and wrong, and that it is so for all people (a non-relativist moral position) it is condemned by liberals as fundamentalist. What is more, it is thought to be judgemental and to violate principle of inclusiveness.

In a liberal morality, for instance, it makes no sense at all to oppose the idea of gay marriage. If that is what people want to do, then to respect their expression of desire equally means allowing them to do what they wish to do. It would be thought mere bigotry or a phobia or prejudice or discrimination to think otherwise. So why shouldn't the church be forced to agree to gay marriage or else face legal sanctions? If, that is, such a liberal morality really is legitimate.

But if it's not legitimate the church should not be using it to justify amnesty for illegal immigrants. It is a dangerous thing for the church to be supporting the use of liberal moral concepts when it wishes to do so, but then to suddenly swing around and object when these concepts are used against the church itself.

Does Pope Francis want a Muslim Europe?

Pope Francis has chosen as his first papal visit the island of Lampedusa. This is an island belonging to Italy but close to the African coastline. It is where Muslim Africans seeking to enter Europe illegally head for.

In a sermon on Lampedusa, Pope Francis made it clear that he supports the migration of Muslims into Europe "on their voyage toward something better". He said,

I give a thought, too, to the dear Muslim immigrants that are beginning the fast of Ramadan, with best wishes for abundant spiritual fruits. The Church is near to you in the search for a more dignified life for yourselves and for your families. I say to you “O’ scia’!” [trans.: a friendly greeting in the local dialect].

This doesn't bode well for the Church under Pope Francis. First, it means that the Church is committing itself to a false and unorthodox understanding of solidarity. Second, it means that the Church is orienting itself toward fitting in with secular liberal modernity rather than standing against it.

I knew immediately when I first read about the Pope's visit (hat tip: Laura Wood) that this was an expression of a certain understanding of solidarity. And, sure enough, in the Pope's sermon he takes solidarity as his theme. For instance, he says in reference to those Muslim African immigrants who drowned chancing the voyage to Lampedusa:

These our brothers and sisters seek to leave difficult situations in order to find a little serenity and peace, they seek a better place for themselves and for their families – but they found death. How many times do those who seek this not find understanding, do not find welcome, do not find solidarity!

Why call this a false understanding of solidarity? It is false because it is part of the tendency to redefine solidarity as meaning compassion for the "suffering other". Who could be more "other" to Europeans than Muslim Africans? Therefore, it is with them that we are to find solidarity.

There is a disastrous logic to this understanding of solidarity. If we are to welcome and find solidarity precisely with those most different to us, then we will necessarily dissolve our own existence. If solidarity requires Europe to welcome African Muslims, then the long-term result will be the dissolution of a European Christianity. Pope Francis is following a policy that will ultimately dissolve his own church.

In truth, solidarity is based on relatedness, and the particular loves and duties which flow from these forms of relatedness. Therefore, I am commanded to honour my father and mother, because of the close and particular relationship I have with them. I am to provide for and protect my wife and children as part of my duties as a husband and father. I am not to shame my family name, nor to be disloyal to my ethnic kin. And, yes, it is true that I am also to be hospitable to the stranger, as I do have a degree of relatedness to him as someone made, like me, in the image of God. But my duty, and my compassion, toward the stranger, does not oblige me to do harm to those I am more closely connected to.

That is why the Catholic Church developed the ordo caritatis:

The exercise of charity would soon become injudicious and inoperative unless there be in this, as in all the moral virtues, a well-defined order...

The precedence is plain enough...Regarding the persons alone, the order is somewhat as follows: self, wife, children, parents, brothers and sisters, friends, domestics, neighbours, fellow-countrymen, and all others.

That is the orthodox Catholic position. So why are so many churchmen reversing the order of charity?

Unfortunately, I think it has to do with an ongoing dispute in the Church about how the Church should relate to the secular liberal world around it.

The last pope, Pope Benedict, early in his life supported Vatican II, which was supposed to lead to the Church being more open to the secular world. But over time he saw how the principles of liberal modernity clashed with those of the Church and he took the view that the Church would have to resist, rather than join in with, the trends within the larger society.

Pope Benedict was very skilled in describing the principles of liberal modernity and how they could not be reconciled with those of Christianity. In particular, this is true of his writings on gender and the family (see here and here). But even on issues of communal identity he was critical of trends within secular liberalism. For instance he said:

This case illustrates a peculiar Western self-hatred that is nothing short of pathological. It is commendable that the West is trying to be more open, to be more understanding of the values of outsiders, but it has lost all capacity for self-love. All that it sees in its own history is the despicable and the destructive; it is no longer able to perceive what is great and pure. What Europe needs is a new self-acceptance, a self-acceptance that is critical and humble, if it truly wishes to survive.

Multiculturalism, which is so passionately promoted, can sometimes amount to an abandonment and denial, a flight from one's own things

He also opposed the idea of Turkish admission to the European Union on these grounds:

In the course of history, Turkey has always represented a different continent, in permanent contrast to Europe. Making the two continents identical would be a mistake. It would mean a loss of richness, the disappearance of the cultural to the benefit of economics.

But there is a significant section of the Church which wishes to reconcile itself with liberal modernity. And one way that this can be achieved is for the Church to emphasise the theme of "solidarity with the stranger" because that fits in well with the liberal belief in "solidarity with the other".

Where do liberals get this belief in solidarity with the other?  I think it has to do with the way that liberal morality has developed over time. Liberals believe in autonomy as the overriding good. Therefore, they believe that what matters is that we are unimpeded in freely choosing what we do, i.e. what matters is the free choice, rather than what we choose.

However, this requires us to not infringe on other people making free choices. Therefore, a liberal morality will also emphasise qualities of non-interference, such as openness, diversity, tolerance and non-discrimination. So these become the liberal equivalents to positive virtues. And how then do you show that you are the most virtuous? You have to be the one who is most open and tolerant and non-discriminating and welcoming of diversity.

And how do you show this? You show this by identifying with (and being in solidarity with) the people who are most "other" to your own society. Hence the liberal cult of the other.

So can you be a good Catholic and also a good liberal? Not really, given that liberals don't generally believe in objective forms of morality and, as Pope Benedict pointed out, the liberal pursuit of autonomous freedom is incompatible with the Christian tradition. But those Catholics who want to approach liberal modernity can do so by emphasising the idea of "solidarity with the other". That's where a point of crossover can be constructed.

Further reading on this issue:

Upholding the four relationships

Losing the particular

Did the institutions in 42 really need marching through?

There are people who blame Cultural Marxism/The Frankfurt School for what has gone wrong in the West.

The argument runs as follows. In the 1950s the West was going well. But a group of European Marxists (the Frankfurt School) had developed a new strategy. Instead of relying on a class war to win power they would instead begin a long march through the institutions. The 60s student rebellion gave these cultural Marxists their opportunity and they began to win influence in the institutions. This has then led to Western decline.

This theory of decline does have its merits. It refers to something real that did have seriously negative consequences in the West. It's worth understanding the particular theories generated by the Frankfurt School and how they influenced university life in particular from the 1960s onward.

But there are problems with the theory as well. And a major problem is the timing. The theory suggests that things were basically OK in the West until the 1960s. I don't think that's true and I'll give just one bit of evidence for that in a moment. Apart from this, the theory also suggests that the liberalism which dominated the West up to the 60s was also OK and that it was only when Cultural Marxists subverted this liberalism that things went wrong. That seems to me to let Western liberals off the hook and to discourage the kind of rethinking of liberal orthodoxy that needs to take place.

So what is some evidence that things were going seriously wrong before the 1960s? In 1941, when the Axis powers were triumphant in Europe, there was a conference of liberal Anglicans in Malvern, England. Led by the Archbishop of York and 23 bishops, these Anglicans wanted to lead "the ordering of the new society" which they were sure would emerge following the war.

How did they envisage this new society? Most notably, they were keen to build a European Union:

After the war our aim must be the unification of Europe as a cooperative commonwealth

There were also debates about dropping the importance of the mass in favour of social activism and of switching from private ownership of property. But what is really noteworthy are the speeches about how the old order must be swept away in favour of a completely new society - and this new society was envisaged in modern liberal terms.

Anyway, in 1942 an even more significant conference took place of American Protestant church leaders. This occurred in March around the time that the Japanese were invading Java (in other words, when the Axis powers were still predominant). 375 representatives of 30 denominations met together at Ohio Wesleyan University. What did they decide?

It was their view that the U.S. should lead the way in creating an international system of government. Here are some of the post-war policies they favoured:

• Worldwide freedom of immigration
• A world government of delegated powers
• Elimination of all tariff and quota restrictions on world trade
• International control of all armies and navies

The ultimate aim to be achieved was the following:

a duly constituted world government of delegated powers; an international legislative body, an international court with adequate jurisdiction, international administrative bodies with necessary powers, and adequate international police forces and provision for enforcing its worldwide economic authority.

So the question to be asked is this: did the churches really need to marched through and captured by cultural Marxists? Or had they already reached a point of post-nationalism under the influence of liberalism as early as the 1940s?

I think it's clear that the rot had already set in. Liberalism had already done the job by the 1940s - there was no need for the cultural Marxism of the 1960s to swing the churches.

Another significant Benedict quote

In 1997 the then Cardinal Ratzinger, later to be Pope Benedict, gave a long interview to a German journalist, Peter Seewald.

In this interview, Pope Benedict rejected the idea that men and women are interchangeable in their roles in society. He explained the belief in interchangeable roles in a similar way that I do. According to Pope Benedict, moderns think of freedom as being a liberty to self-author or self-create. But to be free to self-author means rejecting the given parts of our nature.

Pope Benedict described the modernist mentality this way:

The idea that 'nature' has something to say is no longer admissible; man is to have the liberty to remodel himself at will. He is to be free from all of the prior givens of his essence. He makes of himself what he wants, and only in this way is he really 'free and liberated'. Behind this approach is a rebellion on man's part against the limits that he has as a biological being. In the end, it is a revolt against our creatureliness. Man is to be his own creator - a modern, new edition of the immemorial attempt to be God, to be like God.

Moderns believe that in taking this approach they are maximising individual freedom. That's supposed to be the selling point.

But what kind of freedom is it really? In the traditional view, my identity as a man connects me to a masculine essence, which exists independently of me as an objective value. But in the modern view, there is only an arbitrary, invented identity that doesn't connect me to anything outside myself. It seems that in adopting the modern view I am losing something rather than liberating myself.

"The West has lost all capacity for self-love"

I went to mass today at Our Lady of Victories in Camberwell. The priest officiating this morning was very impressive. He spoke clearly and concretely and he managed to uphold both the universal values of the Church but also the particular traditions which carry forward the good over time.

He began the homily by talking about how man was made for community. He then asked why so many Catholics no longer take part in the community of the Eucharist. He thought that part of the reason was that Western societies have become more individualistic and that traditional communal identities have waned in modern multicultures.

Included in the mass were two prayers, which I wish I could remember verbatim, but they were about preserving cultural and civilisational traditions and how we are links in a chain connecting generations past, present and future.

Whilst on the topic of the Catholic Church, I was interested to read a lecture given by the then Cardinal Ratzinger, later Pope Benedict, to the Italian Senate in 2004. It is about European identity and the crisis of European civilisation. The lecture has faults, I think, but it does at least take seriously the gravity of the situation facing Europe:

At the hour of its greatest success, Europe seems hollow, as if it were internally paralyzed by a failure of its circulatory system that is endangering its life, subjecting it to transplants that erase its identity. At the same time as its sustaining spiritual forces have collapsed, a growing decline in its ethnicity is also taking place.

Europe is infected by a strange lack of desire for the future. Children, our future, are perceived as a threat to the present, as though they were taking something away from our lives. Children are seen—at least by some people—as a liability rather than as a source of hope. Here it is obligatory to compare today's situation with the decline of the Roman Empire. In its final days, Rome still functioned as a great historical framework, but in practice its vital energy had been depleted.

Another excerpt:

This case illustrates a peculiar Western self-hatred that is nothing short of pathological. It is commendable that the West is trying to be more open, to be more understanding of the values of outsiders, but it has lost all capacity for self-love. All that it sees in its own history is the despicable and the destructive; it is no longer able to perceive what is great and pure. What Europe needs is a new self-acceptance, a self-acceptance that is critical and humble, if it truly wishes to survive.

Multiculturalism, which is so passionately promoted, can sometimes amount to an abandonment and denial, a flight from one's own things.

German cardinal: we are a dying people

How's this for a coincidence. A few days ago I wrote about the decision of a former Archbishop of Cologne to build the Neviges cathedral in a modernist style.

Now it's the current Archbishop of Cologne, Cardinal Meisner, who is in the news. He has criticised the German Government's family and immigration policies in a courageous way.

Read on, because you don't often hear figures in positions of authority speaking out like this. It began when a journalist challenged the Cardinal on his opposition to abortion. He replied:

We are a dying people, but have a perfect legislation for abortion. Is that not the suicide of a society? People want most of all to shut women out of families so that production continues. But with money alone you can't get children.

He was then asked if he was against formal child care:

No, but it would be better for society to create a climate in which women bring more children into the world. That is to say: to bring to awareness the high worth of the family with a mother and father for the children.

He went on to talk about his experiences in communist East Germany:

I have already been part of the whole one-sided tragedy in East Germany. The women there, who stayed home for the family, were told they were demented. Because labour forces were needed childcare was brought in. A socialist educator said of this: "The creche (the "child crib") is in the Bible a temporary thing and we have made of it a permanent institution."

The interviewer then objected "But women want to self-actualise in a career." The Cardinal replied:

Not all. Where are women really publicly encouraged to stay at home and to bring three or four children into the world? One should intervene here and not - as Mrs Merkel does currently - only present immigration as the solution to our demographic problem. We cannot take the young people away from Portugal and Spain and thus rob their countries of their future just out of selfishness. We should train these unemployed people and offer them perspectives, but then allow them to return home where they are needed.

What's impressive here is that the Cardinal has recognised a need for the German people to survive into the future by being encouraged to have children of their own rather than relying on taking the youth of other nations. He wants the family as an institution to be accorded value and not just the market.

It turns out that the Cardinal has also (unsuccessfully) taken a stand on cathedral design. Back in 2007 the artist Gerhard Richter completed a new stained glass window for the historic Cologne Cathedral. Richter based his design on his trademark "random pixel" paintings (randomly computer-arranged coloured pixels).

I haven't seen the window personally, but I would have thought that art in a cathedral should attempt to be inspired rather than randomly generated:

Gerhard Richter's stained glass window in the Cologne Cathedral

Maybe it looks better when you're there, but from the photo I'd have to say that Cardinal Meisner was correct in thinking that this doesn't work as religious art (the colours fit, but it comes across as chaotic).