The Rebirth of the Roman Catholic Faith and Culture by Dr: William Marra
Editor's Note: This is an edited version of a speech given by Dr. Marra at a Seton Conference in Toronto in 1993.
The topic of my talk is the Rebirth of the Roman Catholic Faith and Culture, and in this case, precisely through the home schooling initiative. I by no means say that home schooling is the only answer, but it is a very important answer to this collapse of Catholic culture and the Catholic Faith. There are four points.
Firstly, I want to note briefly what happened to Catholic culture, why it died?and it is dead for the most part. Secondly, I want to note that the rock basis of any culture has to be Truth. When truth does not prevail, pseudo- truths—errors, falsities, which people mistake for the truth—found their own culture, and give us their diabolical fruits. Thirdly, I want to note the means of establishing serious communities rooted in the truth, and specifically, the natural truth that God exists, and the supernatural truths of the Roman Catholic Faith. The fourth point will be to look at culture as a cause and then as an effect of a truth community.
When it comes to the death of Catholic culture, everyone should know the existence of the books written by the marvelous professor of the classics, Dr. John Senior. He spent his entire career teaching in a public university, the University of Kansas, in Lawrence. He had a wonderful curriculum which fostered Catholic culture in Latin, poetry, music, etc. Senior wrote two books: The Death of Christian Culture, and The Restoration of Christian Culture. These books are absolutely necessary if you want to see the whole picture of what we mean by a Catholic culture, how it dies, and how it can be reborn.
When I speak of the death of Christian culture, and above all Catholic Christian culture, I am speaking of the western world, Europe. Hillaire Belloc once said, "Europe is the Faith, and the Faith is Europe." Whether you went anywhere on the continent, and then when the European culture came to North and South America, it was Catholic culture, the Catholic Faith which came. Now, we see the death of Catholic culture, especially in Europe.
The first thesis for the recognition of the death of Catholic culture, Jesus Christ told us two thousand years ago: when the salt loses its savor, it is fit to be trampled upon by men. When we are strong in Faith and we gather around the truth of our Faith and we worship together, from the hierarchy down to the lowliest kindergarten student, then Jesus Christ is the center of our lives. Nobody tramples on us. But when we have the internal suicidal experience with heretical theologians, wimpish hierarchy snubbing the supernatural, then we have lost our savor. How do we know we have lost our savor? Because Jesus Christ is ridiculed!
In the United States you don't dare say certain religious or ethnic jokes, except, of course, if it be directed against Christians. Jesus Christ, the Blessed Mother, the Roman Catholic Church are ridiculed with impunity. Nobody is ever supposed to be hurt over the blasphemous jokes and the horrible libels that they will utter against the Church, Jesus Christ, or the Blessed Mother. The most pornographic films are accepted as part of our "cultural diversity." That tells me we are dead! If we had the slightest life in us, we would burn the theatres down which have the blasphemous films. They can desecrate the Blessed Sacrament. They can do anything they want, and we still praise the wonderful institution of American pluralism! It allows people to blaspheme, to spit out the Blessed Sacrament, to desecrate statues of the Blessed Virgin, and we say, "How wonderful! This is freedom!" Now, that is the funeral rite for Catholic culture!
We no longer have any leaders. We no longer have men who are defending Catholic principles. The salt has lost its savor! There are always minor exceptions; there are always little enclaves where it has not lost its savor. But, for the most part, that is not so. We can say that even thirty years ago, the Catholic Church was wooed and feared by the politicians. They hated us, but they knew they had to kiss our babies and shake hands with cardinals to get elected. They didn't dare say thirty years ago what they are saying now. Now, they don't care. They don't need to woo us; they certainly don't fear us.
Society perfectly reflects this culture of death. Speaking from my own experience, even thirty years ago things were much better. My father was an immigrant working in lower class heavy manual labor. He and my mother raised four children. We saw our mother by daylight. There was very little crime; there was no filth. Today, when we look at the death and destruction of family life: the pornography, abortion, contraception, the entertainment, the horrible, tasteless, blasphemous idiocies, and worse, we know that this culture has not been formed by the salt of Jesus Christ! There is no light in this culture. The salt has lost its savor. We are trampled upon, and we are disregarded by men. This is our fault, not their fault. The enemy is always expected to ridicule and trample upon us; we were expected to fight back, and we did not.
The Roman Catholic institutions are paper tigers, and have nothing to say to the death culture. They will mumble something like, "life is sacred" and "we all ought to be good," but their own institutions are sapping the Faith.
The second point is that our Catholic culture is founded on truths both natural and supernatural. The supreme truth of our Faith is that God exists. We used to have an institution called the Confraternity of Christian Doctrine—CCD. Up until 1950-1960 it was excellent. The motto on every one of their textbooks was: "Deus est"— God exists. That is where we are starting from. What do we mean by God? We mean a personal Being—not an energy, not some electricity, not some cloud of nitrogen—but a personal, holy, omnipotent Being. That is our first truth.
Our second truth is that from all eternity God dwells in a Trinity of community. The Father is God, the Son is God, and the Spirit is God. God in no way needs the Creation. God is fully within an ecstasy of love within the Godhead.
The Second Person of the Blessed Trinity took on flesh: "Et Incarnatus est." He became Man, taking on a human nature from the Blessed Virgin. This God-Man, Jesus Christ, established one Church. Every other church is more or less a mockery of the one Church founded by Jesus Christ, especially these churches that just started up thirty years ago, but also those started four hundred years ago. There is only one Church established by Jesus Christ with His authority, His sacraments, His acceptable sacrifice, His truth, His light. What, then, is the alternative to these truths? The alternative is all around us! Of course, it is in the government schools, but also in every part of culture, and now, it is even in Catholic schools.
The central truth of Faith and Reason is that a rational, moral, personal, holy Origin accounts for the flora, fauna, sun, moon, stars, planets, the ecological system, the human person, the mystery of sexuality, everything. The alternative choice is "In the beginning was matter." Take your choice of which element is your favorite—nitrogen, oxygen, or maybe some sub-atomic particle, and always go back enough years, because zeroes are free: four thousand, four million, four trillion, 400 trillion. Evolution says, without reason?this is the key to evolution—that matter just happened, twisting and turning in an endless series of blind alleys. Once in a while, the right combination came along, and things started coming to a higher and higher level. As a result, there was this "ascent" of the lowest form of reality, some particles, some "metaphysical soup," and after "millions and millions" of years of this tortuous stuff, we have evolved from cavemen, to hominids, to graduates of Harvard University!
Evolution is a 150-year-old myth. This myth had been broached in Plato?s time, 2,400 years go, but in the last 150 years, we have been given the myth of "ascent" and the new myth of "progress": every generation is better than the predecessors, new codes of genetics are being developed. Finally, there is the myth of "polygenesis." The great Pope Pius XII already foresaw that. Some people say, "Why don't you leave evolution alone? Let the scientists figure that out, while you take care of the Catholic Faith." I could live with that. However, the trouble is that when you listen to the scientists who tell you that there was a population of primates, which were not capable of being rational, not capable of understanding, or loving, or willing, and the right conditions were there, that they started this "'ascent," and therefore, we had several sets of "first parents." Therefore, if we traced our genealogy back, we would find that some of us came from one set of parents, while others came from different sets of parents. This is "science," you understand! If we had the courage, we would blow the whistle on these frauds, by using real science and real philosophy. But we are too nervous of pluralism and too afraid to be called members of the Flat Earth Society. We are afraid to be called irrational—above all in Catholic circles, by the way.
The real impact of evolution is that it has shaken the foundation of the Bible. The Bible says, "In the beginning, God..." The Book of Genesis is supposed to be a simplified version of essential metaphysical truth. The whole story, the whole world of human experience begins with a spiritual, personal, eternal, holy Being—God. God brought the first man and woman into existence, and from their loins alone, the entire human race descends. That is why we speak of an original sin. That is why we say that the progeny, the issue of these two sinning parents is such that we are born with this curse laid upon us. That is why Jesus Christ came on earth—to buy us back, to redeem us. We had been delivered to the Evil One. With the myths of polygenesism, evolution, which pair of hominids sinned? Was it this pair? That pair? I might have come from the good pair! We are all immaculately conceived!
The doctrine of the Immaculate Conception is not all that old; it was defined a doctrine of the Church in 1854. It is a wonderful, popular way to say: if Mary is exempt from the curse of original sin, then that implies that the rest of us are not. She was delivered through the anticipated merits of her Son, Jesus Christ, so that she was full of grace, perfectly immaculate. However, the rest of us bear the inherited curse. The waters of Baptism, light of Christ, the food of Christ, the sacramental system of the Church alone can reverse the curse of that original sin. Of course, the modern secular world laughs at this. Too many professors and theologians are embarrassed if you repeat something so simplistic as Adam and Eve, original sin, or the Fall.
There are many assaults on truths. Evolution is just the underlying basis because it seems so respectable scientifically. Our age has a superstitious awe of science without any critical faculty. Our age is the age of every assault on truth—natural or supernatural. It is the age of subjectivism and relativism: "If something seems so to you, then it is so for you, but it need not be so for your neighbor." Everybody has his own private truths, and that they conflict is one of the "virtues of pluralism!" There is a cacophony of error and contradiction, and it is supposed to be a sign of "life." It is a sign of madness and barbarism! Nowadays, one does not investigate whether something is good or evil— that would be the discipline in ethics. One simply does a sociological survey: 53% of the people "think" fornication is evil, 43% of the Hispanics think so, and 70% of the Swedes think so—this has replaced ethics. Even in the Catholic schools, sociology is the great "science." It is just a poll-taking mechanism which counts noses; it has very few things to teach us.
Content taken from the June 2003 Seton Home Study School Newsletter.