During the two pontificates preceding Francis’, dogmatic conservatives were convinced that the post-conciliar turmoil generated by the radical “Spirit of Vatican II” had not only been halted, but clearly reversed by Saint John Paul II and Benedict. The idea of schism lay in the distant, past or future.

Holy Mother Church

Has left us in a lurch.

She’s confused

And we, abused!

The term is “irregular.”

It covers marriage misbehavior.

Theologically, Heresy is not the wholesale rejection of all dogma, but rather the sublimation or overemphasis of a specific doctrine.

Most high-placed proponents of natural marriage, including the Catholic Bishops of America, are convinced that the Supreme Court will shortly impose gay marriage uniformly throughout the nation producing a new genre “government marriage.”

As the tide of Modernity sweeps across the land imposing its individualistic credo on society at large, Western man is forgetting that he is a creature of God and thus accountable to Him, as well as denying the capability of reason to determine right from wrong, and our possession of the gift of free will to perform the duties of life.

“The Banality of Evil,” is a phrase coined by Hannah Arendt, a German Jewess and a leading post-World War II thinker.  She employed the term while reporting on the Eichmann, Nazi-trial in Jerusalem to describe a deadly force that Modernity has set in motion.

By striking a pose of public neutrality on the major issues of the day, homosexuality, gay marriage, and capital punishment, both the American Bishops and the Papacy have left their flock defenseless against the continually louder and defiant charges that Catholics who hold on to core, Natural Law concepts are fundamentalists, obstructionists, promote injustice and are bigoted.

Nature abhors a vacuum!  That vacuum has been created by Catholic Bishops’ reticence if not outright failure to keep Catholic citizens aware and informed of the Church’s position of the major issues of the day.  These issues are:

Social Issues: Marriage, Family, Sexuality, & Poverty
Financial Policy
Foreign Policy
Universal Healthcare
Immigration

Rome, October 2014
This is being written during the first days of the Extraordinary Assembly of the Synod of Bishops called by Pope Francis to discuss pastoral challenges to the family.

From man’s earliest beginnings to modern times, we have always considered ourselves as being in relationship – in relation to each other, to community and to God.  Modernity has reversed this natural bedrock relationship by isolating man, creating the cult of the individual.  Now man stands alone, beholden to no one.

Since Blessed John Paul II published his Encyclical, Veritas Splendor, (The Splendor of Truth), twenty years ago, modernity has wrought further havoc within and outside the Church.

In a brilliant display of invincible ignorance, Time Magazine’s eight page documentary on the massive, Catholic Latino defections to Protestantism concludes that Latinos are primarily pouring into Protestant churches to find “a closer relationship with God.”  (April 15, 2013)

Karl Rahner emerged as the most influential of the “new theologians” throughout, and for a long while after the close of Vatican II.  He provided justification for a variety of feminist, liberationist and revisionist moral theologies.

Individualism
Denial of Objective Truth
Denial of Sin
Sexual Anarchy
Reinterpretation of the Family
Sanctification of the State
The Culture of Death

The State cannot, by its very nature and by American Constitutional Law, define the Church.  The Church, any church, defines itself!

Who is a Catholic? Does each individual determine his Catholic status, or does the visible institution, which proclaims itself the Holy Roman Catholic Church, possessing a written charter, requirements for participation and a fixed creed, determine membership.

Socrates, Plato and Aristotle clearly defined marriage before the dawn of Christianity.  All subsequent, rational civilizations continue to employ their logic.  Our definition of truth, our court system, our concepts of life, liberty and justice, family and government all stem from their lucid thinking.

Recent events foretell a paradoxical future for Catholicism in the United States. A continual series of Government assaults against the Church highlight an acknowledged fact, that American culture, as a whole, has become more hostile to religion and particularly toward the Catholic Church which propounds a fixed set of absolute moral standards.