The Political Form of Evil - D. C. Schindler | Catholic Culture Podcast
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- Опубликовано: 12 июн 2022
- D. C. Schindler's book The Politics of the Real: The Church between Liberalism and Integralism is one of the richest entries in the ongoing Catholic debate over liberalism, political authority, the common good, and the relation between Church and State.
Schindler offers subtle, convincing arguments as to why liberalism is "the political form of evil", specifically consisting of a rejection of the Christian form - specifically, the Jewish-Greek-Roman synthesis embodied in the Catholic Church.
Liberalism creates a situation like that described by comedian Stephen Wright: "Last night somebody broke into my apartment and replaced everything with exact duplicates." It adopts aspects of the Western tradition but only on radically different grounds, with a fragmented vision of reality. Even when liberalism claims to make room for religious tradition, it does so only by reconceiving religion as a mere object of individual choice - that is, precisely as non-traditional.
But Schindler goes beyond criticizing liberalism, offering a profound and beautiful ontology of the social order and a somewhat different model of the relation between Church and State from the one proposed by Catholic integralists.
Schindler joins the podcast to discuss the book, including topics such as:
--Why objecting to non-liberal thinking as "impractical" is a rejection of man as a rational creature
--Liberalism's false claim of neutrality (or non-confessionalism)
--The "Christian form" and its fragmentation
--Why liberalism is “the political form of evil”
--The roots of liberalism in medieval nominalism
--The anti-Catholic meaning of the Declaration of Independence's “laws of nature and of nature’s God”
--How the "neutral public square" subverts every tradition it "makes room for"
--The problem with distinguishing "civil society" from the state
--Why property is central to understanding the relation between individuals and society
LINK
The Politics of the Real newpolity.com/new-polity-pres...
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Wow. This was excellent. Thank you!
Thank you!
excellent discussion
Thank you!
anyone that searches for truth-beauty-goodness is my natural ally
Would someone please define "religious liberty" in the Catholic sense because Blessed Pope Pius IX wrote:
"For you well know, venerable brethren, that at this time men are found not a few who, applying to civil society the impious and absurd principle of “naturalism,” as they call it, dare to teach that “the best constitution of public society and (also) civil progress altogether require that human society be conducted and governed without regard being had to religion any more than if it did not exist; or, at least, without any distinction being made between the true religion and false ones.” And, against the doctrine of Scripture, of the Church, and of the Holy Fathers, they do not hesitate to assert that “that is the best condition of civil society, in which no duty is recognized, as attached to the civil power, of restraining by enacted penalties, offenders against the Catholic religion, except so far as public peace may require.” From which totally false idea of social government they do not fear to foster that erroneous opinion, most fatal in its effects on the Catholic Church and the salvation of souls, called by Our Predecessor, Gregory XVI, an “insanity,”2 viz., that “liberty of conscience and worship is each man’s personal right, which ought to be legally proclaimed and asserted in every rightly constituted society; and that a right resides in the citizens to an absolute liberty, which should be restrained by no authority whether ecclesiastical or civil, whereby they may be able openly and publicly to manifest and declare any of their ideas whatever, either by word of mouth, by the press, or in any other way.” But, while they rashly affirm this, they do not think and consider that they are preaching “liberty of perdition;”
It seems clear to me that Pius IX condemns Vatican II's religious liberty in this part of Quanta Cura.
www.papalencyclicals.net/pius09/p9quanta.htm
Dignitaries Humanae does not regard a non-confessional state as ideal, or say that there should be total freedom and lack of restraint on speech or on varying religious practices. It proceeds from Leonine principles insofar as it says religion is (ever since divine revelation) a supernatural good over which the state, on its own, has no authority. The Church may grant the state authority to coerce the baptized but only on the Church's behalf. If the Church does not grant this authority to a given state, it has no right to regulate religion at least insofar as it is a supernatural good.
@@CatholicCulturePod So Vatican II disagreed with Pope Leo XIII when he writes:
"Wherefore, civil society must acknowledge God as its Founder and Parent, and must obey and reverence His power and authority. Justice therefore forbids, and reason itself forbids, the State to be godless; or to adopt a line of action which would end in godlessness-namely, to treat the various religions (as they call them) alike, and to bestow upon them promiscuously equal rights and privileges. Since, then, the profession of one religion is necessary in the State, that religion must be professed which alone is true, and which can be recognized without difficulty, especially in Catholic States, because the marks of truth are, as it were, engravers upon it. This religion, therefore, the rulers of the State must preserve and protect, if they would provide - as they should do - with prudence and usefulness for the good of the community. For public authority exists for the welfare of those whom it governs; and, although its proximate end is to lead men to the prosperity found in this life, yet, in so doing, it ought not to diminish, but rather to increase, man's capability of attaining to the supreme good in which his everlasting happiness consists: which never can be attained if religion be disregarded."
I wonder what Vatican II's Fathers thought that Pope meant by the Latin word for "must." If the teaching about Christ's social reign is a doctrine, do those Fathers doubt that doctrine? Did they try to change it?
www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_l-xiii_enc_20061888_libertas.html
What did they believe about this condemnation from the Syllabus of Errors?
77. In the present day it is no longer expedient that the Catholic religion should be held as the only religion of the State, to the exclusion of all other forms of worship. - Allocution “Nemo vestrum,” July 26, 1855.
www.papalencyclicals.net/pius09/p9syll.htm
Here's my favorite quotation on this subject because we Catholics know we shouldn't be worldly. Sadly, it suggests that Vatican II tried to change repeal some condemnations in the Syllabus. How did the council maintain continuity and consistency if it did repeal some condemnations?
It seems to me that well-known non-traditionalist Catholics rarely quote pre-Vatican-II documents. Maybe Archbishop Vigano is right about circularity. He seem to believe that bishops always cite that council's documents when they want to justify something else from those documents. Anyhow, here's the quotation I first found in Pope Benedict XVI's book "Principles of Catholic Theology."
": If it is desirable to offer a diagnosis of the text [Gaudium et Spes] as a whole, we might say that (in conjunction with the texts on religious liberty and world religions) it is a revision of the Syllabus of Pius IX, a kind of countersyllabus. Harnack, as we know, interpreted the Syllabus of Pius IX as nothing less than a declaration of war against his generation. This is correct insofar as the Syllabus established a line of demarcation against the determining forces of the nineteenth century: against the scientific and political world view of liberalism. In the struggle against modernism this twofold delimitation was ratified and strengthened. Since then many things have changed. The new ecclesiastical policy of Pius XI produced a certain openness toward the liberal understanding of the state. In a quiet but persistent struggle, exegesis and Church history adopted more and more the postulates of liberal science, and liberalism, too, was obliged to undergo many significant changes in the great political upheavals of the twentieth century. As a result, the one-sidedness of the position adopted by the Church under Pius IX and Pius X in response to the situation created by the new phase of history inaugurated by the French Revolution was to a large extent, corrected via facti, especially in Central Europe, but there was still no statement of the relationship that would exist between the Church and the world that had come into existence after 1789. In fact, an attitude that was largely prerevolutionary continued to exist in countries with strong Catholic majorities. Hardly anyone today will deny that the Spanish and Italian Concordats strove to preserve too much of a view that no longer corresponded with the facts. Hardly anyone today will deny that, in the field of education and with respect to the historico-critical method in modern science, anachronisms existed that corresponded closely to this adherence to an obsolete Church-state relationship. Only a careful investigation of the different ways in which acceptance of the new era was accomplished in various parts of the Church could unravel the complicated network of causes that formed the background of the "Pastoral Constitution", and only thus can the dramatic history of its influence be brought to light.
Let us be content to say that the text serves as a countersyllabus and, as such, represents, on the part of the Church, an attempt at an official reconciliation with the new era inaugurated in 1789.
~ Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Principles of Catholic Theology,
(San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1987) pp. 381-2.
www.rosarychurch.net/marxism/counter_syllabus.html
You have to slow down and read what you're citing - Dignitatis Humanae nowhere contradicts your Leo XIII quote. Nowhere does it say there should not be a confessional state and nowhere does it say that the stage must treat all religions as though they were the same, not favoring one over the others. Furthermore you should not be jumping at the chance to claim a contradiction before you have even read the documents carefully, but looking for ways to reconcile the varying emphases. That is how a Catholic reads the magisterium.
@@CatholicCulturePod I'll grant that it's often imprudent to turn a country into a Catholic confessional one. For example, it's a mistake when Catholics are a minority there. I'm all for trying to show that Vatican II is compatible with what came be before it. I never said the council taught the all religions should get treated equally. But please remember when I quoted from Dr. Sire's book "Phoenix from the Ashes." I did that because Pope John Paul II cited Vatican II to justify the inter-religious prayer meetings he chaired in Assisi in 1986 and 2002. If they didn't suggest equal treatment, I don't know what would do that.
Now please tell me why theologians still debate what DH means now nearly 60 years after that council and why Pope Benedict XVI coined "hermeneutic of continuity" if there's obvious continuity between Vatican II and what came before it?
I quoted that Pope's paragraph from his book "Principles of Catholic Theology" because "counter" can mean "against" as in "Counter-Reformation" and "counter-revolution."
I don't mean to be difficult, let alone to hint that I know better than the Church does. But since you disagree with what I told everyone in my previous post, I'd appreciate your argument against at least a part of it. If you don't want to argue against anything I said,, that's alright. Still, I'd love to know what you think Pope Benedict meant by "counter-syllabus" and why the Council doesn't distinguish between religious liberty and religious tolerance when we know that some kins of religious liberty got condemned in Mirari Vos and in Quanta Cura.
www.papalencyclicals.net/greg16/g16mirar.htm
www.papalencyclicals.net/pius09/p9quanta.htm
"Hermeneutic of continuity" is not a claim that continuity is obvious - it actually acknowledges that continuity is *not* always obvious - but we trust that it can be found because of the reliability of the magisterium. That's why we need to be reminded to use that hermeneutic, because sometimes it requires an effort to reconcile and synthesize.
It is for those who claim there is a contradiction between Dignitatis Humanae and earlier teaching to show where in their specific statements they contradict each other. You have cited large blocks of text that clearly have a contrasting emphasis, but that isn't enough to show a contradiction.
Dignitatis Humanae does have a flaw. It is that while it says previous teaching goes unchanged, it does not, itself, show us precisely how to synthesize its teaching and emphasis with the earlier one. And arguably, this omission was because of those council fathers who were uncomfortable with the old teaching. This was addressed in my interview with Thomas Pink.
I don't have an opinion or much knowledge about the whole counter-syllabus thing.
I don't like liberalism either but it baffles me how far people will go in their criticism of it.
If liberalism is the rejection of Christianity, then shouldn’t we criticize it thoroughly?
Did you read the book? Just look at the world around you. It should give you all the justification for criticism you need...
LOL