"Only by instilling a high moral vision can a society ensure that its young people are given the possibility to mature as free and intelligent human beings, endowed with a robust sense of responsibility to the common good, capable of working with others to create a community and a nation with a strong moral fiber. America was built on such a vision, and the American people possess the intelligence and will to meet the challenge of rededicating themselves with renewed vigor to fostering the truths on which this country was founded and by which it grew. Those truths are enshrined in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights."
--Pope Saint John Paul II, Denver, Colorado, August 12, 1993
Showing posts with label morality. Show all posts
Showing posts with label morality. Show all posts
Thursday, October 22, 2026
Quote of the Day
Friday, July 3, 2026
Prayer for Independence Day and the Semiquincentennial of the United States of America
"We pray thee, O God of might, wisdom, and justice, through whom authority is rightly administered, laws are enacted, and judgments decreed, assist, with Thy Holy Spirit of counsel and fortitude, the President of these United States, that his administration may be conducted in righteousness, and be eminently useful to Thy people, over whom he presides, by encouraging due respect for virtue and religion; by a faithful execution of the laws in justice and mercy; and by restraining vice and immorality. Let the light of Thy divine wisdom direct the deliberations of Congress, and shine forth in all the proceedings and laws framed for our role and government; so that they may tend to the preservation of peace, the promotion of national happiness, the increase of industry, sobriety, and useful knowledge, and may perpetuate to us the blessings of equal liberty.
"We pray for his [her] Excellency the Governor of this State, for the members of the Assembly, for all Judges, Magistrates, and other officers who are appointed to guard our political welfare; that they may be enabled, by Thy powerful protection, to discharge the duties of their respective stations with honesty and ability.
"We recommend likewise to Thy unbounded mercy all our brethren and fellow-citizens throughout the United States, that they may be blessed in the knowledge and sanctified in the observance of Thy most holy law; that they may be preserved in union, and in that peace which the world cannot give; and, after enjoying the blessings of this life, be admitted to those which are eternal."
--Archbishop John Carroll (1735--1815), Prayer for the Church and Civil Authorities
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Thursday, June 18, 2026
Reflections on America's Semiquincentennial
by Justin Soutar
This year we celebrate the two hundred fiftieth anniversary of the United States of America, one of the greatest nations in the history of the world and certainly one of the greatest in modern times. Our imposing geographical size and relatively isolated position, our fertile soil and abundant mineral resources, our natural beauty and temperate climate, our vast and diverse population, our productive industry and commerce, our high employment rate and comfortable standard of living, our thriving financial sector, our large and well-trained armed forces, and our prominent influence in world affairs all contribute to our country’s greatness. However, the core of that greatness lies in 1) our appeal to universal and timeless natural law principles as the basis of human rights and liberties, and 2) our traditional character as a religious and moral people.
The concept of natural law formed the philosophical foundation for the American colonists’ rebellion against British tyranny and their eventual momentous decision, after many years of lively discussion and intense debate, to politically separate the thirteen colonies from England. This is clear from the ringing opening text of the Declaration of Independence, which was primarily authored by Thomas Jefferson and finalized by the Second Continental Congress:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
As men of faith and reason, our nation’s Founders unanimously recognized that “unalienable” human rights are gifts from God, and that the purpose of representative government is to protect these rights. In other words, they realized that human beings are given certain rights by God because of their very nature as persons created in his image, and that any government that refuses to respect these rights is not legitimate. It’s obvious that the Founders were not simply stating their subjective personal beliefs or opinions about the colonists’ problem and how it should be resolved. Justifying their course of action based on “the laws of nature and of nature’s God” anchored the Declaration firmly in the objective truth of natural law. Benjamin Franklin implicitly acknowledged this natural law basis for human rights when he wisely stated: “A nation of well informed men who have been taught to know and prize the rights which God has given them cannot be enslaved. It is in the region of ignorance that tyranny begins.”
This is an important lesson for us today in the difficult battle against radical secularism, a virulent philosophy that directly attacks our traditional identity as a Judeo-Christian nation and the natural law principles of her foundation. In recent years, to cite just two of many examples, innocent healthcare providers and wedding-cake bakers have been dragged into court and threatened with huge fines for refusing to dispense abortifacient drugs or contraceptives or to bake a cake for a homosexual “wedding.” The well-intentioned lawyers representing these good people usually base their defense on their client’s right to act according to his or her personal religious and moral beliefs and conscience, a right indeed protected by the Constitution. While this approach has been fairly successful, its major flaw is its failure to take advantage of the objective truth of natural law, leaving the arguments stuck on the subjective plane of “conscience rights”.
Abortifacient drugs unjustly kill innocent unborn children, violating their unalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That is a fact and not just someone’s sincerely held belief. No woman has a “right” to kill her unborn child. Contraceptives interfere with the essential love- and life-giving aspects of marriage as designed by the Creator. And natural law defines marriage as the union of a man and a woman; the immoral practice of sodomy is not “marriage”, and no two men or women have a “right” to call it that. Defense attorneys should be arguing their pro-life and pro-marriage cases from the natural law perspective that abortion, contraception for married couples, and sodomy are objectively evil (and thus harmful to society) by their very nature, not just because their clients happen to believe that they are evil and harmful, and that no one should be forced to participate in or to support such immoral activities. In order to effectively defeat the ideology of radical secularism, we should abandon the subjective territory of “conscience rights” and reclaim the unassailable moral high ground—-the objective truth of natural law.
Intimately related to the natural law basis for human rights at the core of America’s greatness is our longstanding identity as a religious and moral people in the Judeo-Christian tradition. This is evident at every turn, from the words and examples of the Founders, to the speeches and writings of our elected representatives and judges down through the decades, to the tens of thousands of churches dotting our landscape, to the prominent Catholic role in the development of our education and healthcare systems, to Congressional sessions opening with prayer, to the display of the Ten Commandments in our Supreme Court building, to our national motto, “In God We Trust.”
George Washington declared: “Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports.” John Adams remarked: “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” James Madison said: “We’ve staked the future of all our political institutions upon our capacity… to sustain ourselves according to the Ten Commandments of God.” Having toured the young United States, French political philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville concluded: “America is great because America is good; and if America ever ceases to be good, she will cease to be great.”
In his Thanksgiving Proclamation of 1863, Abraham Lincoln asserted that God’s blessings “should be solemnly, reverently and gratefully acknowledged as with one heart and one voice by the whole American People.” In his famous D-Day Prayer broadcast on national radio in 1944, Franklin Roosevelt said: “With Thy blessing, we shall prevail over the unholy forces of our enemy.” Ronald Reagan observed in the 1980s: “If we ever forget that we are one nation under God, then we will be a nation gone under.” In 2024, Donald Trump attributed his survival of an assassination attempt to “the grace of Almighty God.” The fourth stanza of our national anthem, “The Star-Spangled Banner,” includes the words: “Blest with vict’ry and peace, may the Heav’n-rescued land / Praise the Pow’r that hath made and preserved us a nation… And this be our motto: ‘In God is our trust.’” And in the Pledge of Allegiance, we declare that we are “one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”
Our traditional character as a Christian nation, combined with our traditional natural law basis for human rights and liberties, has allowed us to achieve many remarkable things in the past 250 years in the areas of agriculture, architecture, art, aviation, communication, culture, economics, education, energy, entertainment, finance, foreign aid, geology, health care, immigration, law, literature, medicine, meteorology, music, political philosophy, science and technology, trade, transportation, space exploration, sports, world peace, and many other fields. We should celebrate and give thanks to God for all of these accomplishments.
This is not to say that our nation, comprised of flawed human beings, has perfectly lived up to her own ideals. True American patriots wholeheartedly celebrate all that was and is good in our nation while candidly admitting her past and present failures in certain areas and realistically acknowledging her current state of deep division and crisis. We unwisely tolerated the development of a partisan political system, which is now dominated by two major parties that are diametrically opposed on nearly every issue. We unjustly forced most Native Americans onto reservations, tolerated slavery and racial segregation for decades, and bombed innocent civilians in Japan in 1945. We’ve experienced a general religious and moral decline in recent decades with the spread of alcoholism and drugs, pornography, divorce, out of wedlock pregnancies, tens of millions of abortions, sexual abuse, sodomy, transgenderism, and mass shootings, as well as petty theft, vandalism, and littering. Civics education and prayer have all but vanished from our public schools.
Misguided DEI policies have barred hundreds of thousands of qualified people from good jobs. Inflation continues to depreciate the value of our money. Our $38 trillion dollar national debt is far beyond unsustainable yet continues to rise daily. Political corruption and media bias and censorship continue to threaten the common good and obscure the truth. Power struggles and gridlock have replaced bipartisanship and collaboration in Washington as Republicans and Democrats are now bitter enemies, with Democrats attempting to destroy President Donald Trump and to manipulate election laws to their own advantage. Israeli radical Zionists are systematically eliminating Palestinian Christians from the Holy Land, and we’re doing little if anything to stop it. And Communist China has stolen our computer software intellectual property; purchased large tracts of American farmland near our military bases; planted thousands of spies in our city halls and universities; and is actively working to replace us as the world’s leading superpower.
Worst of all, the rise of toxic radical secularist (aka “woke’) ideology, openly embraced by corrupt Democratic Party elites, has taught a large percentage of ignorant Americans to hate their country; to reject our traditional Christian identity and natural law foundation; to assert various new “rights” that exist only in their deluded minds; to discriminate against innocent white men; to disrespect our immigration authorities and police officers; to tear down statues of our national heroes; to stage violent protests; and to assassinate their political enemies. This dangerous ideology has profoundly divided our nation, seriously threatening its integrity and survival.
However, there are many signs of hope that our nation will survive the present grave crisis and enjoy a brighter future. Young Americans flocked to churches after Charlie Kirk’s assassination, and purchases of new Bibles are on the rise. Millions of Americans are taking the free online civics courses offered by Hillsdale College, and Imprimis now has a monthly circulation of nearly eight million copies. Many employers are making color-blind and merit-based hiring decisions. More than 25 percent of American voters are now politically independent. The number of Planned Parenthood abortion clinics continues to dwindle. And the second Trump administration and congressional Republicans have already done much to repair and strengthen our country in many of the above-mentioned fields of endeavor.
America’s first Catholic president and Fourth Degree Knight of Columbus John F. Kennedy famously said, “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.” If we who continue to love this great nation are successful in converting and defeating her radically secularist traitors and in retaining the twin core of that greatness—-our appeal to timeless natural law principles as the basis of human rights and liberties, and our traditional character as a religious and moral people—-then she will not only survive, unite, and heal, but will also achieve even greater and more spectacular things in the next two hundred fifty years.
Long live the United States of America!
Copyright © 2026 Justin D. Soutar.
Thursday, February 27, 2025
Quote of the Day
"Integral human development presupposes the responsible freedom of the individual and of peoples: no structure can guarantee this development over and above human responsibility…Only when it is free can development be integrally human; only in a climate of responsible freedom can it grow in a satisfactory manner."
--Pope Benedict XVI, Caritas in Veritate, no. 17
Thursday, April 25, 2024
Quote of the Day
"The gift of the temperate person is therefore balance, a quality as precious as it is rare. Indeed, everything in our world pushes to excess. Instead, temperance combines well with Gospel values such as smallness, discretion, modesty, meekness. The temperate person appreciates the respect of others but does not make it the sole criterion for every action and every word. He is sensitive, he is able to weep and is not ashamed, but he does not weep over himself. In defeat, he rises up again; in victory, he is capable of returning to his former reserved life. He does not seek applause but knows that he needs others."
--Pope Francis, General Audience, April 17, 2024
Monday, January 17, 2022
Quote of the Day
“Cowardice asks the question - is it safe? Expediency asks the question - is it politic? Vanity asks the question - is it popular? But conscience asks the question - is it right? And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular; but one must take it because it is right.”
--Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929--1968)
Wednesday, June 22, 2016
Defending our Freedom
Of course, the main event that led our bishops to establish this annual observance was the controversial HHS mandate bombshell dropped by the Obama administration in January of 2012, which demanded that health insurance plans across the country include artificial contraception, sterilization, and abortifacients regardless of religious or moral objections to the distribution of such items. Although this mandate--the crucial centerpiece of the massively unpopular Affordable Care Act, generally known as ObamaCare--is still on the books four and a half years later, having been unfortunately upheld by the Supreme Court along with the rest of the ObamaCare travesty as somehow "constitutional" in June of 2012, dozens of lower court rulings against it have provided temporary injunctive relief to scores of Catholic and other Christian religious groups, healthcare providers, charitable organizations, universities, media entities, and other institutions that have rightly refused to comply with this unjust law despite the threat of crushing tax penalties. Furthermore, last year the Supreme Court ruled that most businesses that object to compliance with the mandate on religious grounds should be permanently exempt from it. So while some progress has been made against this particularly egregious and unconstitutional attack on our religious liberties, more remains to be done: it must be completely overturned.
Like the other freedoms we enjoy as Americans such as freedom of speech and of the press, freedom to peaceably assemble, and freedom to petition the government for a redress of grievances, freedom of religion is a gift from our Creator that is guaranteed by our Constitution and must accordingly be protected by our government. No one should be forced into providing anti-life products and services that he or she considers immoral, against the dictates of his or her religion and conscience.
However, as Yuval Levin pointed out in an article in First Things magazine several months ago, we should beware of too narrowly individualistic, negative, and subjective an approach to religious liberty. Freedom of religion must not be confined to simply obtaining and retaining exemptions for certain individual persons and organizations that refuse to obey the law because they consider it wrong. Rather than being limited to a condescending exception for certain seemingly fanatical individuals within our society, religious liberty should be the rule for our society as a whole, as it was once upon a time. The idea here, which originated with our nation's founders, is that American society will flourish when all of its members are allowed to freely exercise their religious beliefs together as a community. In addition, it is fundamentally misguided to oppose the HHS mandate simply because we Catholics consider it an unjust law that attacks our religious liberties and moral conscience rights or simply because we Catholics regard contraceptives and abortifacients as immoral drugs. Such arguments are too narrowly focused and too subjective to be really convincing in the long run, and our radically secularist opponents have already seized on those weaknesses to bolster their own position. We must go deeper, building our defense on the bedrock of natural law and objective truth. Ultimately, we seek to rid America of the HHS mandate, not simply because we Catholics consider it an unjust law, but because it is an unjust law--not only for Catholics, but for pro-life Americans of all faiths and even for pro-life atheists. It isn't just an attack on our religious liberties and moral conscience rights; it's an attack on the natural law established by our Creator and upon our sacred right as human beings to act in accordance with that law.
Anchored firmly in the natural law, the concept of ordered liberty was a key founding principle of our nation that unfortunately is largely forgotten today. In a remarkably Catholic view of this concept, the Founders regarded freedom not as the totally unrestricted ability of human beings to do whatever the heck they may want to do, but rather as the ability to do what they ought to do, what they should do. While the freedom our Creator has given us is indeed very broad, it does have certain limits that He has laid down for our own good, and those limits are defined by the natural law, which is accessible to human reason. As long as we obey the natural law and thus act in accord with right reason, we remain truly free as individuals and as a nation. Morally speaking, to violate the natural law is an abuse of freedom, which was once commonly referred to as license or permissiveness.
A big part of the problem with America today is that we have largely abandoned this rational concept of ordered liberty rooted in the Creator's natural law in favor of a nebulous, ill-defined sort of "freedom" that is ultimately a product of moral relativism. In the past, our nation had laws prohibiting obscenity, indecency, and pornography in printed material and radio broadcasts; these entirely reasonable laws, which reflected the natural law, benefited our society by discouraging certain forms of immorality, which naturally helped to protect our freedom. No one at the time ever claimed that these laws violated anyone's right to freedom of speech. But if someone today advocates for bringing back such laws, he or she is derided as a crackpot fundamentalist who opposes freedom of speech. That's a shame. We must revive this forgotten concept of ordered liberty based on "the laws of nature and nature's God" in order to re-learn the true meaning of freedom, so that we can preserve this treasure and hand it on to future generations.
This is the first full Fortnight for Freedom since the Supreme Court's infamous ruling last June that overturned dozens of state marriage laws by elevating immoral homosexual relationships to the legal status of marriage throughout the country. As with the Obama administration's HHS mandate, this terribly misguided and wrong decision is not just a major attack on our religious liberties, but constitutes an assault on the Creator's natural law, in which the union of a man and a woman is the primary social institution for the good of the couple, their children, and the whole society. As we fight to defend our religious freedom on this particular front, our well-reasoned arguments must be grounded in the objective truth of the natural law and borne out by the personal witness of our own lives in order to resonate with the widest possible audience and effectively influence public opinion.
Returning to what was said above about the communal aspect of religious freedom, it should be underscored that only a truly religious people will value, fight for, protect, and defend their religious liberty. America's founders and colonists who fought for our independence from Britain and established our nation were deeply religious people of devout Christian faith, and we considered ourselves a Christian country until very recently. As the pseudo-religion of radical secularism increasingly dominates American society and strives to supplant the Judeo-Christian philosophy that made us a great nation, the question naturally arises as to whether we will remain a religious people tenaciously committed to defending our first freedom in an increasingly hostile cultural climate, or whether we will eventually surrender to the forces of militant secularism and allow this cherished freedom to be stolen from us by a handful of godless elitist pirates who have commandeered our Ship of State. It is to be hoped that we the people will retain the courage to stand up and retake control of our nation from the high priests of radical secularism; to recover and proudly reassert our nation's traditional Christian identity; and to consistently and vigorously defend the religious liberties and moral conscience rights of all Americans of good will, so that we can pass this great land on to our children and grandchildren as "one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all".
Mary Immaculate, Patroness of the United States, pray for us!
Thursday, May 12, 2016
The Political Rise and Fall of Dr. Ben Carson
by Justin Soutar
(This article was originally published on the website Intellectual Conservative May 11, 2016 at http://intellectualconservative.com/the-political-rise-and-fall-of-dr-ben-carson/ )
More than two months ago in early March, following a slew of major defeats in the GOP primary elections, award-winning neurosurgeon, popular speaker, bestselling author and Tea Party candidate Dr. Benjamin S. Carson officially announced that he had decided to withdraw from the presidential race. For those millions of us citizens across America who had been his loyal and dedicated supporters for the previous several months and years, the sudden demise and fizzling out of Dr. Carson's remarkable presidential campaign came as a jarring and profoundly disappointing anticlimax. Carson's stunningly dramatic rise from relative obscurity to a leading presidential candidate in less than a year's time appeared to bode well for his chances of winning a substantial number of state primary elections--and thus a sufficient number of delegates to the upcoming Republican National Convention--to secure his adopted party's nomination for President of the United States in 2016.
Unfortunately, however, Dr. Carson's performance in the early Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Nevada primary election contests in February, as well as in the Super Tuesday primaries of March 1, failed to meet the expectations of his hardworking organizers and supporters, who had reasonably expected him to carry at least a handful of these critical early voting states. Instead, closely reflecting national polling data at the time, Ben Carson came in consistently third or fourth in each state's election returns behind Donald Trump, Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio. In the wake of Super Tuesday, with more than one fourth of the states having already voted, Carson had amassed a total of only about 60 delegates--not even one-twentieth of the total necessary to clinch the GOP nomination. Since the math and polling trends now rendered electoral victory extremely unlikely if not impossible, Carson's campaign team realized that it would be futile for him to continue to stay in the race. Calmly facing the unpleasant reality of defeat with his characteristic humility and wisdom, Carson acted prudently in bowing out of the primary election contest when he did.
Within two and a half years' time, Dr. Ben Carson's political star had climbed with extraordinary steadiness from the horizon to the zenith, where it shone with dazzling brilliance, and then suddenly it plunged toward the opposite horizon, disappearing from view entirely in a matter of weeks. What happened here? How did the previously little-known Dr. Carson so quickly achieve the status of a major presidential candidate, only to find himself leaving the race just as things were heating up?
Paradoxically, Dr. Carson had laid firm groundwork for his presidential run by building a solid reputation outside the political realm in the fields of medicine, education, business, and culture. He is probably best known for his trailblazing twenty-nine year career as the director of pediatric neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions, during which he performed more than 36,000 surgeries with an extremely low patient mortality rate, including the first-ever successful separation of twin boys joined at the back of the head. For his veritable encyclopedia of stunning achievements as a neurosurgeon, President George W. Bush awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2008. For a number of years, through the Carson Scholars Fund, Ben and his wife had been working to reform and improve America’s education system by setting up reading rooms in inner-city elementary schools across the country to encourage more kids to read books, stimulating better academic performance through a merit-based reward system, and offering scholarships to promising students from low-income families.
In addition to the significant business experience he accumulated as head of the multi-million-dollar pediatric neurosurgery division at Johns Hopkins for three decades, Dr. Carson had served on the corporate boards of a number of Fortune 500 companies, including Costco and Kellogg’s. Finally, Carson’s fascinating rise from a single-parent childhood of poverty in inner-city Detroit to a world-class neurosurgeon had won the respect and admiration of many Americans of different races and backgrounds who had read his popular autobiography Gifted Hands (1990) or seen the TV documentary of the same title (2009). More recently, Ben Carson’s influence on American culture was further strengthened by several other widely read books, including the number one New York Times bestsellers America the Beautiful (2012) and One Nation (2014); the latter sold an astonishing forty-two million copies in the ten weeks following its release, outselling Hillary Clinton’s simultaneously released autobiography Hard Choices three to one.
What initially catapulted Ben Carson into the political limelight was his brilliant, thoughtful, frank, courageous, and respectful off-the-cuff address at the 2013 National Prayer Breakfast attended by President Obama and Vice President Biden—a monumental discourse which deserves a place in the annals of conservative oratory alongside Barry Goldwater’s 1964 speech at the Republican National Convention and Ronald Reagan’s famous “Evil Empire” address of 1983. In this eloquent and well-balanced critique of contemporary America, delivered while he was still practicing neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins, Dr. Carson put ObamaCare, our nation's tax system, our national debt, and our moral decline into perspective and suggested some biblically-based, common-sense solutions to these problems. To those who heard him speak that February morning, it was obvious that Dr. Carson was endowed with a rare ability to discuss complex issues in simple terms that any layperson could easily understand. It was this highly accessible speech that introduced him to the nation as a great communicator with a solid grasp of America’s founding principles and ignited a national movement to draft Ben Carson into the 2016 presidential race.
From that time onward, as a popular speaker and author of multiple bestselling books, Dr. Carson became increasingly well-known within both the African–American community and the wider American cultural arena for his insightful and articulate reflections on what made our country great; for the simple stories he often used from his own experience to illustrate a point; for his intelligent and original opinions on how to resolve our national problems; and for his optimistic vision of America's future based on a return to our nation's founding principles. And his character traits of self-reliance, hard work, honesty and integrity, humility, courtesy, and compassion, combined with his devout Christian faith, traditional moral values, and record of exemplary achievement, made him a principled leader and a shining example of the American dream whose mass appeal transcended racial and political boundaries. In short, millions of Americans already knew, liked, and trusted Ben Carson for months and years before he ever became a presidential candidate.
The ironic thing is that, despite his authentic leadership credentials, Dr. Carson had never desired or intended to run for President of the United States. When the suggestion was first made to him immediately following the 2013 speech, he laughed it off as ridiculous. After all, he was a sixty-plus-year-old pediatric neurosurgeon on the verge of retirement and a registered Independent with no prior experience in politics. But his address at the National Prayer Breakfast had unwittingly prompted the establishment of a super PAC called the National Draft Ben Carson for President Committee under the leadership of conservative political activist John Philip Sousa IV—and once that ball got started rolling, it continued to steadily gain momentum. During the next two years, at the instigation of this committee, upwards of 500,000 Americans insistently clamored for Ben Carson to run for president on the Republican ticket, claiming that his leadership in the White House was desperately needed to straighten our country out. Finally, in May of 2015, the reticent Dr. Carson acquiesced to the will of the people and threw his hat into the presidential ring, entering an already crowded field of contenders for the GOP nomination.
At that time, national polls registered Ben Carson as the presidential choice of about 5 percent of Americans, so it wasn't surprising that the mainstream media initially paid him little attention. He was a classic longshot candidate for the White House, and most observers never seriously expected him to surge out of the bottom category into the top tier of likely presidential candidates. They were in for a surprise. Carson's entry into the race further elevated his public profile, stimulating his modest and already growing support base to expand at an accelerated tempo. Slowly but unmistakably, Ben Carson's national poll numbers started to climb out of the doldrums, leaving single digits behind within a few weeks. (During this time, he also made quite a splash as the surprise winner of the first televised Republican debate.) By the end of June, Dr. Carson had risen to 18 percent, making him the second most popular Republican candidate, and he continued to surge throughout the summer, steadily gaining on Donald Trump. In August, he was tied with Trump for the number one spot, and by early October, Carson had actually overtaken Trump to become the leading Republican presidential candidate in national polls--and despite the predictions of naysayers, he managed to hold that enviable position for the next two months straight.
If Ben Carson's five-month ascendancy from near-oblivion to the pinnacle of the GOP field and his two-month dominance of that field represented astonishing achievements and newsworthy events from the perspective of any reasonable observer, the reaction of the radically secularist mainstream media pundits on both sides of the political aisle was even more astonishing. With conspiratorial uniformity, they ignored Dr. Carson almost entirely. Despite their earlier casual dismissals and negative predictions, here he was leading in national polls, sharing the center of every debate stage with Mr. Trump, yet there was no serious discussion of why this was happening, no thoughtful commentary on this remarkable and unexpected development, no extensive interviews with Ben Carson on the major networks. Instead, we were saddled with a nearly total mainstream media blackout of Dr. Carson, while the lion's share of big media attention remained obsessively devoted to Trump, Bush and Christie. This incomprehensibly hypocritical and blatantly unfair treatment of Ben Carson on the part of America's media elite represented a prime example of biased and irresponsible journalism. Journalists bear a responsibility to the general public to convey and reflect upon the truth of what's actually going on, but in this case the Beltway journalists were obviously at pains to conceal the truth because it didn't mesh with their radically secularist agenda for our nation.
The corrupt mainstream media elite and the corrupt Washington political establishment--which, for convenience, may be treated as a single entity, since the same mega-corporate interests essentially run both entities and they share the same radically secularist agenda--couldn't tolerate the mere idea of an honest and principled citizen statesman like Ben Carson getting into the White House. If that were to happen, the deeply entrenched political corruption that buttresses and sustains their jealously guarded power and influence would be pulled like a rug from beneath their feet and the power of the federal government would revert from these usurpers back to its rightful owners, i.e., we the people. So these cunning and worldly-wise media moguls had to figure out some way to derail Ben Carson's astoundingly successful grassroots presidential campaign in order to prevent him from winning the Republican nomination. They knew they wouldn't be able to smear his reputation with any dirt from his past because there isn't any dirt in his past to dig up. They had attempted to spread some lies about him, but that didn't work very well because most people already knew the truth about him, and those who didn't discovered it soon enough. They tried to find some juicy errors or omissions in Carson's income tax returns--a huge potential "gotcha"--but that search came up empty. And they knew that his political campaign (unlike their good pal Hillary Clinton's) was being run entirely in accordance with federal election law, so they couldn't shut him down legally or call that into question.
Consequently, the mainstream media executives settled on a strategy of deliberately ignoring Ben Carson and relentlessly focusing their primary attention on their own favorite GOP candidates, Donald Trump, Jeb Bush, and Chris Christie. This approach extended to the Republican debates, where despite his high poll rankings and central position on the stage, Dr. Carson was generally given far less time to speak than the mainstream media darlings. As the months passed, this strategy of marginalization proved effective. Not seeing or hearing much of their candidate on TV, millions of less fanatical Carson supporters gradually became discouraged and drifted into the more visible and noisier Trump, Cruz, and Rubio camps. By the end of 2015, Carson had slipped to second place in national polls; he was at third place this past January, and had sunk to fourth place by the time actual voting began in early February.
Yet even with this perceptible decline in nationwide support precipitated by the big media boycott, Carson might still have won the Iowa caucus on February 1 had a despicable last-minute dirty trick not been pulled off by a rival and less principled GOP campaign team. Just hours before voting began, a false rumor that Carson had dropped out of the race was deliberately circulated by the Ted Cruz presidential campaign, deceiving who knows how many thousands of Carson supporters into casting their ballots for Cruz instead. Spreading this lie about Carson enabled Cruz to steal victory in the Iowa primary election. Although he would not withdraw from the race for another month, it's apparent in retrospect that the Ben Carson presidential campaign was essentially finished at that point. Dr. Carson already had enough of a challenge trying to win state primary elections with official campaign and super PAC funding limited to grassroots donations and the heavy media bias against him, but when a dishonest tactic by a fellow candidate on opening day was thrown into the mix, the stage was unfortunately set for his presidential campaign to flounder beyond reasonable hope of recovery.
Although history indicated that Carson didn't necessarily have to win Iowa to win the Republican nomination this summer, and so technically his chances were still pretty good, it was critical that he score victories in at least some of the other early voting states to give him a realistic shot at winning his adopted party's nomination. But with the deck stacked against him, he lost one state after another, and his chances of making it to the GOP convention as a presidential finalist correspondingly dwindled. Regrettably, Dr. Carson's campaign never recovered from the major damage it sustained in Iowa.
So in essence, Ben Carson rose to political prominence on the strength of his credentials as a principled citizen statesman, but he failed to clinch the Republican nomination because the corrupt mainstream media and D.C. political establishment conspired to do him in. Shame on them. However, there is more to the story than that. While many of us ordinary Americans do profess traditional religious and moral values, we have nonetheless almost unconsciously allowed the propaganda being constantly cranked out by the radically secularist mainstream media machine to influence our thinking and shape our political loyalties. As a result of this, we have gradually abandoned a humble, honest, great, wise, selfless, moral, principled, civil, commonsense citizen statesman candidate--Ben Carson, a true populist--in favor of an arrogant, dishonest, petty, foolish, self-seeking, immoral, unscrupulous, rude, and ridiculous establishment politician--Donald Trump, a fake populist. Shame on us. Apparently, we’ve allowed ourselves to become so intoxicated by the mainstream media propaganda that we are unable to clearly distinguish between a counterfeit and the real deal. Unlike Carson, who truly represented "we the people," Trump is a charlatan who merely pretends to represent us, while in reality he represents himself and his bank accounts and the Washington political establishment he craves to join. Unlike Carson, Trump is a shameless braggart and a rabble-rousing demagogue who cannot be safely trusted to govern this nation in accordance with the principles of the Founders. Yet this clanging cymbal is seemingly trusted by more than two-fifths of the American populace.
If, at the end of the day, we the people are really on the side of the corrupt media and political establishment, what does that say about us? It says, for one thing, that we are a gullible bunch, easily bamboozled into believing exactly what the establishment wants us to believe. This lack of discernment and critical thinking would have horrified the Founders, who regarded an intelligent and well-educated citizenry as indispensable to the continued health and wellbeing of the American republic. While Carson intuitively held, as he put it in one of the debates last autumn, that "the American people are not stupid" (his emphasis), he was clearly overestimating our intelligence. Yes, we are stupid. Just as a certain crowd, at the instigation of certain religious leaders, preferred the release of a convicted murderer over the innocent Son of God himself, so we, under the influence of our own media and political elite, would rather elect an assertive, blustering, corrupt, and ambitious worldly real estate mogul as President of the United States than a meek, quiet-spoken, ethical, and trustworthy Christian doctor, philanthropist, speaker and writer. We prefer Trump to Carson. We prefer vice to virtue. And because of that, we’ve cavalierly passed up our first real chance to nominate and elect a truly great president since the days of Ronald Reagan, leaving America vulnerable to the capricious whims of a corrupt, immoral, and tyrannical Trump or Clinton presidency and ensuring continued national decline for at least another four years.
During the past two months, I've been asking myself why God permitted Ben Carson to achieve such remarkable early success as a presidential candidate if he knew that his campaign was ultimately doomed to failure. I had sincerely believed that God was raising up Dr. Carson to be our next president, and I was also convinced--as I still am--that he was the only presidential candidate who would have healed and united our broken and wounded nation and restored America to greatness. Apparently, for some strange combination of reasons, God willed that Ben Carson emerge for a brief span of time as a prominent national figure in the political arena, but did not will him to be our next president. Perhaps one of those reasons is that God wanted to expose the interior nastiness and rottenness of our radically secularist mainstream media and political establishment and to show us how easily we good folks are awed, taken in, and deceived by the gleaming exterior of that omnipresent establishment. On the positive side, I would also suggest that God willed to clearly show us, through the beautiful witness of Dr. Carson's words and actions, the path we must tread as a nation if we wish to reclaim our former greatness in the years to come. There may be other reasons as well. At any rate, I continue to trust that God, in his infinite wisdom and providence, has a plan for this beleaguered country of ours, and that Carson's tragic political demise—which guarantees a continued absence of principled leadership in the White House, at least in the near term—is somehow a part of that mysterious plan.
With his amazing roller-coaster ten-month sojourn in presidential politics now behind him, the inimitable soft-spoken conservative genius Dr. Ben Carson is back where he prefers to be, living the quieter life of a private citizen, albeit a much better known one now. He may have lost his one and only bid for the presidency, but unlike his fellow contenders for that high office, at least he had his priorities straight: he would rather lose an election than lose his soul. He will undoubtedly spend his remaining years on this earth continuing to serve his beloved country in any way he can. He will remain and be remembered as a great American physician and speaker and writer and philanthropist, a tireless defender of Constitutional government and a fervent champion of liberty and justice for all, respected for his character and values and renowned for his abilities and accomplishments.
Although he never wanted to run for President of the United States, Dr. Carson did it on behalf of “we the people”, out of genuine love for us and genuine concern for our country, offering a noble and splendid example of both Christian servant leadership and authentic patriotism. For months on end during the height of his popularity, he calmly yet firmly stood his ground and steadfastly weathered the storm of unjustified political and media hostility and prejudice and indifference that beat mercilessly upon him, without becoming bitter or retaliating against his enemies. For that example of selfless service and that tranquil steadfastness in the face of adversity, he deserves our sincere admiration and our humble gratitude.
Unlike any of the other leading presidential candidates, Ben Carson was a true Christian gentleman and a true patriot, and his absence leaves our current political arena acutely impoverished. At a time of constantly deepening national crisis, Dr. Carson's definitive departure from the 2016 presidential contest exposes a yawning leadership vacuum within the American political system that no lesser candidate can possibly fill.
Copyright © 2016 Justin D. Soutar. All rights reserved.
(This article was originally published on the website Intellectual Conservative May 11, 2016 at http://intellectualconservative.com/the-political-rise-and-fall-of-dr-ben-carson/ )
More than two months ago in early March, following a slew of major defeats in the GOP primary elections, award-winning neurosurgeon, popular speaker, bestselling author and Tea Party candidate Dr. Benjamin S. Carson officially announced that he had decided to withdraw from the presidential race. For those millions of us citizens across America who had been his loyal and dedicated supporters for the previous several months and years, the sudden demise and fizzling out of Dr. Carson's remarkable presidential campaign came as a jarring and profoundly disappointing anticlimax. Carson's stunningly dramatic rise from relative obscurity to a leading presidential candidate in less than a year's time appeared to bode well for his chances of winning a substantial number of state primary elections--and thus a sufficient number of delegates to the upcoming Republican National Convention--to secure his adopted party's nomination for President of the United States in 2016.
Unfortunately, however, Dr. Carson's performance in the early Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Nevada primary election contests in February, as well as in the Super Tuesday primaries of March 1, failed to meet the expectations of his hardworking organizers and supporters, who had reasonably expected him to carry at least a handful of these critical early voting states. Instead, closely reflecting national polling data at the time, Ben Carson came in consistently third or fourth in each state's election returns behind Donald Trump, Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio. In the wake of Super Tuesday, with more than one fourth of the states having already voted, Carson had amassed a total of only about 60 delegates--not even one-twentieth of the total necessary to clinch the GOP nomination. Since the math and polling trends now rendered electoral victory extremely unlikely if not impossible, Carson's campaign team realized that it would be futile for him to continue to stay in the race. Calmly facing the unpleasant reality of defeat with his characteristic humility and wisdom, Carson acted prudently in bowing out of the primary election contest when he did.
Within two and a half years' time, Dr. Ben Carson's political star had climbed with extraordinary steadiness from the horizon to the zenith, where it shone with dazzling brilliance, and then suddenly it plunged toward the opposite horizon, disappearing from view entirely in a matter of weeks. What happened here? How did the previously little-known Dr. Carson so quickly achieve the status of a major presidential candidate, only to find himself leaving the race just as things were heating up?
Paradoxically, Dr. Carson had laid firm groundwork for his presidential run by building a solid reputation outside the political realm in the fields of medicine, education, business, and culture. He is probably best known for his trailblazing twenty-nine year career as the director of pediatric neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions, during which he performed more than 36,000 surgeries with an extremely low patient mortality rate, including the first-ever successful separation of twin boys joined at the back of the head. For his veritable encyclopedia of stunning achievements as a neurosurgeon, President George W. Bush awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2008. For a number of years, through the Carson Scholars Fund, Ben and his wife had been working to reform and improve America’s education system by setting up reading rooms in inner-city elementary schools across the country to encourage more kids to read books, stimulating better academic performance through a merit-based reward system, and offering scholarships to promising students from low-income families.
In addition to the significant business experience he accumulated as head of the multi-million-dollar pediatric neurosurgery division at Johns Hopkins for three decades, Dr. Carson had served on the corporate boards of a number of Fortune 500 companies, including Costco and Kellogg’s. Finally, Carson’s fascinating rise from a single-parent childhood of poverty in inner-city Detroit to a world-class neurosurgeon had won the respect and admiration of many Americans of different races and backgrounds who had read his popular autobiography Gifted Hands (1990) or seen the TV documentary of the same title (2009). More recently, Ben Carson’s influence on American culture was further strengthened by several other widely read books, including the number one New York Times bestsellers America the Beautiful (2012) and One Nation (2014); the latter sold an astonishing forty-two million copies in the ten weeks following its release, outselling Hillary Clinton’s simultaneously released autobiography Hard Choices three to one.
What initially catapulted Ben Carson into the political limelight was his brilliant, thoughtful, frank, courageous, and respectful off-the-cuff address at the 2013 National Prayer Breakfast attended by President Obama and Vice President Biden—a monumental discourse which deserves a place in the annals of conservative oratory alongside Barry Goldwater’s 1964 speech at the Republican National Convention and Ronald Reagan’s famous “Evil Empire” address of 1983. In this eloquent and well-balanced critique of contemporary America, delivered while he was still practicing neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins, Dr. Carson put ObamaCare, our nation's tax system, our national debt, and our moral decline into perspective and suggested some biblically-based, common-sense solutions to these problems. To those who heard him speak that February morning, it was obvious that Dr. Carson was endowed with a rare ability to discuss complex issues in simple terms that any layperson could easily understand. It was this highly accessible speech that introduced him to the nation as a great communicator with a solid grasp of America’s founding principles and ignited a national movement to draft Ben Carson into the 2016 presidential race.
From that time onward, as a popular speaker and author of multiple bestselling books, Dr. Carson became increasingly well-known within both the African–American community and the wider American cultural arena for his insightful and articulate reflections on what made our country great; for the simple stories he often used from his own experience to illustrate a point; for his intelligent and original opinions on how to resolve our national problems; and for his optimistic vision of America's future based on a return to our nation's founding principles. And his character traits of self-reliance, hard work, honesty and integrity, humility, courtesy, and compassion, combined with his devout Christian faith, traditional moral values, and record of exemplary achievement, made him a principled leader and a shining example of the American dream whose mass appeal transcended racial and political boundaries. In short, millions of Americans already knew, liked, and trusted Ben Carson for months and years before he ever became a presidential candidate.
The ironic thing is that, despite his authentic leadership credentials, Dr. Carson had never desired or intended to run for President of the United States. When the suggestion was first made to him immediately following the 2013 speech, he laughed it off as ridiculous. After all, he was a sixty-plus-year-old pediatric neurosurgeon on the verge of retirement and a registered Independent with no prior experience in politics. But his address at the National Prayer Breakfast had unwittingly prompted the establishment of a super PAC called the National Draft Ben Carson for President Committee under the leadership of conservative political activist John Philip Sousa IV—and once that ball got started rolling, it continued to steadily gain momentum. During the next two years, at the instigation of this committee, upwards of 500,000 Americans insistently clamored for Ben Carson to run for president on the Republican ticket, claiming that his leadership in the White House was desperately needed to straighten our country out. Finally, in May of 2015, the reticent Dr. Carson acquiesced to the will of the people and threw his hat into the presidential ring, entering an already crowded field of contenders for the GOP nomination.
At that time, national polls registered Ben Carson as the presidential choice of about 5 percent of Americans, so it wasn't surprising that the mainstream media initially paid him little attention. He was a classic longshot candidate for the White House, and most observers never seriously expected him to surge out of the bottom category into the top tier of likely presidential candidates. They were in for a surprise. Carson's entry into the race further elevated his public profile, stimulating his modest and already growing support base to expand at an accelerated tempo. Slowly but unmistakably, Ben Carson's national poll numbers started to climb out of the doldrums, leaving single digits behind within a few weeks. (During this time, he also made quite a splash as the surprise winner of the first televised Republican debate.) By the end of June, Dr. Carson had risen to 18 percent, making him the second most popular Republican candidate, and he continued to surge throughout the summer, steadily gaining on Donald Trump. In August, he was tied with Trump for the number one spot, and by early October, Carson had actually overtaken Trump to become the leading Republican presidential candidate in national polls--and despite the predictions of naysayers, he managed to hold that enviable position for the next two months straight.
If Ben Carson's five-month ascendancy from near-oblivion to the pinnacle of the GOP field and his two-month dominance of that field represented astonishing achievements and newsworthy events from the perspective of any reasonable observer, the reaction of the radically secularist mainstream media pundits on both sides of the political aisle was even more astonishing. With conspiratorial uniformity, they ignored Dr. Carson almost entirely. Despite their earlier casual dismissals and negative predictions, here he was leading in national polls, sharing the center of every debate stage with Mr. Trump, yet there was no serious discussion of why this was happening, no thoughtful commentary on this remarkable and unexpected development, no extensive interviews with Ben Carson on the major networks. Instead, we were saddled with a nearly total mainstream media blackout of Dr. Carson, while the lion's share of big media attention remained obsessively devoted to Trump, Bush and Christie. This incomprehensibly hypocritical and blatantly unfair treatment of Ben Carson on the part of America's media elite represented a prime example of biased and irresponsible journalism. Journalists bear a responsibility to the general public to convey and reflect upon the truth of what's actually going on, but in this case the Beltway journalists were obviously at pains to conceal the truth because it didn't mesh with their radically secularist agenda for our nation.
The corrupt mainstream media elite and the corrupt Washington political establishment--which, for convenience, may be treated as a single entity, since the same mega-corporate interests essentially run both entities and they share the same radically secularist agenda--couldn't tolerate the mere idea of an honest and principled citizen statesman like Ben Carson getting into the White House. If that were to happen, the deeply entrenched political corruption that buttresses and sustains their jealously guarded power and influence would be pulled like a rug from beneath their feet and the power of the federal government would revert from these usurpers back to its rightful owners, i.e., we the people. So these cunning and worldly-wise media moguls had to figure out some way to derail Ben Carson's astoundingly successful grassroots presidential campaign in order to prevent him from winning the Republican nomination. They knew they wouldn't be able to smear his reputation with any dirt from his past because there isn't any dirt in his past to dig up. They had attempted to spread some lies about him, but that didn't work very well because most people already knew the truth about him, and those who didn't discovered it soon enough. They tried to find some juicy errors or omissions in Carson's income tax returns--a huge potential "gotcha"--but that search came up empty. And they knew that his political campaign (unlike their good pal Hillary Clinton's) was being run entirely in accordance with federal election law, so they couldn't shut him down legally or call that into question.
Consequently, the mainstream media executives settled on a strategy of deliberately ignoring Ben Carson and relentlessly focusing their primary attention on their own favorite GOP candidates, Donald Trump, Jeb Bush, and Chris Christie. This approach extended to the Republican debates, where despite his high poll rankings and central position on the stage, Dr. Carson was generally given far less time to speak than the mainstream media darlings. As the months passed, this strategy of marginalization proved effective. Not seeing or hearing much of their candidate on TV, millions of less fanatical Carson supporters gradually became discouraged and drifted into the more visible and noisier Trump, Cruz, and Rubio camps. By the end of 2015, Carson had slipped to second place in national polls; he was at third place this past January, and had sunk to fourth place by the time actual voting began in early February.
Yet even with this perceptible decline in nationwide support precipitated by the big media boycott, Carson might still have won the Iowa caucus on February 1 had a despicable last-minute dirty trick not been pulled off by a rival and less principled GOP campaign team. Just hours before voting began, a false rumor that Carson had dropped out of the race was deliberately circulated by the Ted Cruz presidential campaign, deceiving who knows how many thousands of Carson supporters into casting their ballots for Cruz instead. Spreading this lie about Carson enabled Cruz to steal victory in the Iowa primary election. Although he would not withdraw from the race for another month, it's apparent in retrospect that the Ben Carson presidential campaign was essentially finished at that point. Dr. Carson already had enough of a challenge trying to win state primary elections with official campaign and super PAC funding limited to grassroots donations and the heavy media bias against him, but when a dishonest tactic by a fellow candidate on opening day was thrown into the mix, the stage was unfortunately set for his presidential campaign to flounder beyond reasonable hope of recovery.
Although history indicated that Carson didn't necessarily have to win Iowa to win the Republican nomination this summer, and so technically his chances were still pretty good, it was critical that he score victories in at least some of the other early voting states to give him a realistic shot at winning his adopted party's nomination. But with the deck stacked against him, he lost one state after another, and his chances of making it to the GOP convention as a presidential finalist correspondingly dwindled. Regrettably, Dr. Carson's campaign never recovered from the major damage it sustained in Iowa.
So in essence, Ben Carson rose to political prominence on the strength of his credentials as a principled citizen statesman, but he failed to clinch the Republican nomination because the corrupt mainstream media and D.C. political establishment conspired to do him in. Shame on them. However, there is more to the story than that. While many of us ordinary Americans do profess traditional religious and moral values, we have nonetheless almost unconsciously allowed the propaganda being constantly cranked out by the radically secularist mainstream media machine to influence our thinking and shape our political loyalties. As a result of this, we have gradually abandoned a humble, honest, great, wise, selfless, moral, principled, civil, commonsense citizen statesman candidate--Ben Carson, a true populist--in favor of an arrogant, dishonest, petty, foolish, self-seeking, immoral, unscrupulous, rude, and ridiculous establishment politician--Donald Trump, a fake populist. Shame on us. Apparently, we’ve allowed ourselves to become so intoxicated by the mainstream media propaganda that we are unable to clearly distinguish between a counterfeit and the real deal. Unlike Carson, who truly represented "we the people," Trump is a charlatan who merely pretends to represent us, while in reality he represents himself and his bank accounts and the Washington political establishment he craves to join. Unlike Carson, Trump is a shameless braggart and a rabble-rousing demagogue who cannot be safely trusted to govern this nation in accordance with the principles of the Founders. Yet this clanging cymbal is seemingly trusted by more than two-fifths of the American populace.
If, at the end of the day, we the people are really on the side of the corrupt media and political establishment, what does that say about us? It says, for one thing, that we are a gullible bunch, easily bamboozled into believing exactly what the establishment wants us to believe. This lack of discernment and critical thinking would have horrified the Founders, who regarded an intelligent and well-educated citizenry as indispensable to the continued health and wellbeing of the American republic. While Carson intuitively held, as he put it in one of the debates last autumn, that "the American people are not stupid" (his emphasis), he was clearly overestimating our intelligence. Yes, we are stupid. Just as a certain crowd, at the instigation of certain religious leaders, preferred the release of a convicted murderer over the innocent Son of God himself, so we, under the influence of our own media and political elite, would rather elect an assertive, blustering, corrupt, and ambitious worldly real estate mogul as President of the United States than a meek, quiet-spoken, ethical, and trustworthy Christian doctor, philanthropist, speaker and writer. We prefer Trump to Carson. We prefer vice to virtue. And because of that, we’ve cavalierly passed up our first real chance to nominate and elect a truly great president since the days of Ronald Reagan, leaving America vulnerable to the capricious whims of a corrupt, immoral, and tyrannical Trump or Clinton presidency and ensuring continued national decline for at least another four years.
During the past two months, I've been asking myself why God permitted Ben Carson to achieve such remarkable early success as a presidential candidate if he knew that his campaign was ultimately doomed to failure. I had sincerely believed that God was raising up Dr. Carson to be our next president, and I was also convinced--as I still am--that he was the only presidential candidate who would have healed and united our broken and wounded nation and restored America to greatness. Apparently, for some strange combination of reasons, God willed that Ben Carson emerge for a brief span of time as a prominent national figure in the political arena, but did not will him to be our next president. Perhaps one of those reasons is that God wanted to expose the interior nastiness and rottenness of our radically secularist mainstream media and political establishment and to show us how easily we good folks are awed, taken in, and deceived by the gleaming exterior of that omnipresent establishment. On the positive side, I would also suggest that God willed to clearly show us, through the beautiful witness of Dr. Carson's words and actions, the path we must tread as a nation if we wish to reclaim our former greatness in the years to come. There may be other reasons as well. At any rate, I continue to trust that God, in his infinite wisdom and providence, has a plan for this beleaguered country of ours, and that Carson's tragic political demise—which guarantees a continued absence of principled leadership in the White House, at least in the near term—is somehow a part of that mysterious plan.
With his amazing roller-coaster ten-month sojourn in presidential politics now behind him, the inimitable soft-spoken conservative genius Dr. Ben Carson is back where he prefers to be, living the quieter life of a private citizen, albeit a much better known one now. He may have lost his one and only bid for the presidency, but unlike his fellow contenders for that high office, at least he had his priorities straight: he would rather lose an election than lose his soul. He will undoubtedly spend his remaining years on this earth continuing to serve his beloved country in any way he can. He will remain and be remembered as a great American physician and speaker and writer and philanthropist, a tireless defender of Constitutional government and a fervent champion of liberty and justice for all, respected for his character and values and renowned for his abilities and accomplishments.
Although he never wanted to run for President of the United States, Dr. Carson did it on behalf of “we the people”, out of genuine love for us and genuine concern for our country, offering a noble and splendid example of both Christian servant leadership and authentic patriotism. For months on end during the height of his popularity, he calmly yet firmly stood his ground and steadfastly weathered the storm of unjustified political and media hostility and prejudice and indifference that beat mercilessly upon him, without becoming bitter or retaliating against his enemies. For that example of selfless service and that tranquil steadfastness in the face of adversity, he deserves our sincere admiration and our humble gratitude.
Unlike any of the other leading presidential candidates, Ben Carson was a true Christian gentleman and a true patriot, and his absence leaves our current political arena acutely impoverished. At a time of constantly deepening national crisis, Dr. Carson's definitive departure from the 2016 presidential contest exposes a yawning leadership vacuum within the American political system that no lesser candidate can possibly fill.
Copyright © 2016 Justin D. Soutar. All rights reserved.
Monday, September 21, 2015
Pope Francis in America: Hope Amidst Crisis
by Justin Soutar
The long-anticipated visit of Pope Francis to the United States takes place at a critical juncture in the history of our nation. America is in profound crisis in many respects, and the symptoms of this crisis are painfully evident throughout our society and culture.
We have a crisis of leadership in Washington, where corrupt politicians continue to sacrifice the common good to the interests of a greedy few while threatening and bullying their principled colleagues into submission. We have a crisis of personal responsibility, in which people make excuses for their faults, rationalize away their sins and evil habits, and blame other people and circumstances for their problems. We have a socioeconomic crisis characterized by a yawning gap between rich and poor Americans, a high poverty rate and the near-total disappearance of a healthy middle class. We have a fiscal crisis with ever-increasing government spending fueling a runaway national debt, aided and abetted by a highly secretive and largely unaccountable Federal Reserve. We have a crisis of education, in which growing numbers of American citizens know little or nothing about the early history and development of our nation, the religious and moral values of the Founders, or the principles and philosophy undergirding our Constitution. We have a crisis of human life, in which abortion remains legal and subsidized by federal tax dollars while assisted suicide and euthanasia are being pushed at the state level. We have a crisis of religious liberty and moral conscience rights, in which millions of Americans are being forbidden to publicly practice their religion and compelled by federal mandate or judicial fiat to do what they know is wrong under penalty of heavy fines or jail time. We have a crisis of marriage and family life characterized by low marriage and birth rates and high divorce rates, widespread addiction to pornography, millions of out-of-wedlock pregnancies and single-parent households, and immoral homosexual relationships legally glorified as "marriages". We have a crisis of truth in which the public is deliberately misinformed about critical domestic, foreign, and environmental issues by a consumerist-driven mainstream media in order to advance the private interests of a handful of Fortune 500 business executives, while personal opinion and virtual reality have become substitutes for objective truth. And we have a crisis of love, in which many people relentlessly pursue their own interests and follow their own selfish desires in the name of "love" with little or no concern for the good of the other person or the wider community.
All of these various crises our nation is experiencing can be said to flow from two in particular: a crisis of faith in God and a crisis of moral values. America is losing her way because she has tossed her religious and moral compass overboard, recklessly abandoning faith and trust in God and foolishly refusing the sure guidance of His Law. She is being gradually transformed from a Christian country into a radically secularist one, with moral relativism replacing traditional Judeo-Christian moral norms grounded in natural law. Religion and morality, the two great pillars of the foundation on which our nation was built, are crumbling. Thanks to her own insanity and stupidity, America is now drifting into dangerous waters and risking the possibility of shipwreck.
It is in this dark and uncertain time in our nation's history that God, in His infinite mercy, sends us the brilliant light of His humble servant Pope Francis with the challenging and prophetic message of the Gospel of Jesus Christ--a message of truth and love, a message of faith and hope, a message of repentance and conversion, a message of mercy and forgiveness, a message of personal responsibility, of respect for human rights, of peace and justice, of care for the common good, of the beauty of marriage and family life according to God's plan. The word of this Gospel message, conveyed by both word and example, will carry within it the power to revive our dying nation and restore our former greatness--but this power will only be activated if we the people of the United States listen carefully to the message, accept it in its fullness, take it to heart, and follow it faithfully in our daily lives. Let us pray that America will be receptive to this powerful, life-giving message and take it to heart so that it can rescue her from the path of self-destruction and lead her on towards a better future.
Copyright 2015 Justin D. Soutar. All rights reserved.
The long-anticipated visit of Pope Francis to the United States takes place at a critical juncture in the history of our nation. America is in profound crisis in many respects, and the symptoms of this crisis are painfully evident throughout our society and culture.
We have a crisis of leadership in Washington, where corrupt politicians continue to sacrifice the common good to the interests of a greedy few while threatening and bullying their principled colleagues into submission. We have a crisis of personal responsibility, in which people make excuses for their faults, rationalize away their sins and evil habits, and blame other people and circumstances for their problems. We have a socioeconomic crisis characterized by a yawning gap between rich and poor Americans, a high poverty rate and the near-total disappearance of a healthy middle class. We have a fiscal crisis with ever-increasing government spending fueling a runaway national debt, aided and abetted by a highly secretive and largely unaccountable Federal Reserve. We have a crisis of education, in which growing numbers of American citizens know little or nothing about the early history and development of our nation, the religious and moral values of the Founders, or the principles and philosophy undergirding our Constitution. We have a crisis of human life, in which abortion remains legal and subsidized by federal tax dollars while assisted suicide and euthanasia are being pushed at the state level. We have a crisis of religious liberty and moral conscience rights, in which millions of Americans are being forbidden to publicly practice their religion and compelled by federal mandate or judicial fiat to do what they know is wrong under penalty of heavy fines or jail time. We have a crisis of marriage and family life characterized by low marriage and birth rates and high divorce rates, widespread addiction to pornography, millions of out-of-wedlock pregnancies and single-parent households, and immoral homosexual relationships legally glorified as "marriages". We have a crisis of truth in which the public is deliberately misinformed about critical domestic, foreign, and environmental issues by a consumerist-driven mainstream media in order to advance the private interests of a handful of Fortune 500 business executives, while personal opinion and virtual reality have become substitutes for objective truth. And we have a crisis of love, in which many people relentlessly pursue their own interests and follow their own selfish desires in the name of "love" with little or no concern for the good of the other person or the wider community.
All of these various crises our nation is experiencing can be said to flow from two in particular: a crisis of faith in God and a crisis of moral values. America is losing her way because she has tossed her religious and moral compass overboard, recklessly abandoning faith and trust in God and foolishly refusing the sure guidance of His Law. She is being gradually transformed from a Christian country into a radically secularist one, with moral relativism replacing traditional Judeo-Christian moral norms grounded in natural law. Religion and morality, the two great pillars of the foundation on which our nation was built, are crumbling. Thanks to her own insanity and stupidity, America is now drifting into dangerous waters and risking the possibility of shipwreck.
It is in this dark and uncertain time in our nation's history that God, in His infinite mercy, sends us the brilliant light of His humble servant Pope Francis with the challenging and prophetic message of the Gospel of Jesus Christ--a message of truth and love, a message of faith and hope, a message of repentance and conversion, a message of mercy and forgiveness, a message of personal responsibility, of respect for human rights, of peace and justice, of care for the common good, of the beauty of marriage and family life according to God's plan. The word of this Gospel message, conveyed by both word and example, will carry within it the power to revive our dying nation and restore our former greatness--but this power will only be activated if we the people of the United States listen carefully to the message, accept it in its fullness, take it to heart, and follow it faithfully in our daily lives. Let us pray that America will be receptive to this powerful, life-giving message and take it to heart so that it can rescue her from the path of self-destruction and lead her on towards a better future.
Copyright 2015 Justin D. Soutar. All rights reserved.
Thursday, August 13, 2015
Synod on the Family: Perception v. Reality
by Justin Soutar
(Note: This article previously appeared on the website Catholic Online June 16, 2015 at http://www.catholic.org/news/blog/story.php?id=61153
and on the website Catholic365 July 1, 2015 at http://www.catholic365.com/article/1783/synod-on-the-family-perception-v-reality.html )
In recent months, some devout and well-meaning Catholics have been organizing and sending petitions to Pope Francis urging him not to change the Church's teachings on marriage and the family during the Ordinary Synod of Bishops on the Family scheduled for this coming October. Most, if not all, of these petitioners are basically good, faithful Catholics who sincerely try to believe everything the Church teaches and strive to practice their faith with admirable consistency. At a time when the Church is under enormous and constantly growing pressure from an increasingly secularist world society to change her teachings on morality, human life and sexuality, marriage and the nuclear family, these loyal sons and daughters of the Church are full of concern that their Holy Mother will cave in to the wishes of her enemies—or, that she is in fact already beginning to do so, as evidenced by the controversial midterm report issued by the Extraordinary Synod last fall. These apparently rock-solid Catholics see themselves as faithful defenders of the one true Church of Christ against the malignant forces of heresy and radical secularism. Their goal is to ensure that the Church of our time will continue to faithfully adhere to and proclaim her 2,000-year-old doctrines on marriage and family life in all their splendor and integrity.
False Assumptions
But these otherwise praiseworthy and well-intentioned Catholics appear to have overlooked the fact that they have grounded their seemingly noble campaign on a few blatantly false assumptions. One of these assumptions is that the Bishop of Rome has the ability to make changes to the Church's teachings as he sees fit. If that were true, the teachings would have been changed many times by 265 Popes throughout the last 2,000 years, and the deposit of faith would never have survived intact to our own day. As Catholics, we believe that the office of the Successor of Peter is protected in a special way by the charism of infallibility, which means that the Pope is incapable of erring when teaching the whole Church on a matter of faith or morality. Pope Francis can no more change any part of the Church's doctrine than could Pope Benedict XVI, or Saint John Paul II, or any of the other Popes preceding them.
Another false assumption undergirding this petition campaign is that Pope Francis himself, in his heart of hearts, is intending to change Church teachings on marriage and family life to accommodate modern viewpoints, or is at least considering doing so under pressure from a handful of heterodox bishops, clergy, and laity. Nonsense. Anyone who really knows this man knows better than to even think such a thought. From his earliest days as a Jesuit priest right up to the present, and often amid difficult and hostile circumstances, Bergoglio's spoken and written words demonstrate an unswerving commitment to Catholic orthodoxy. Anyone who reads his homilies, letters, addresses, interviews, and other public statements as priest, bishop, Archbishop and Pope can verify his record as a faithful son of the Church in that regard. There is no talk whatsoever of changing any part of Catholic doctrine to better suit modern tastes. On the contrary, Bergoglio's clear affirmations of traditional Church teaching on all manner of topics is both refreshing and reassuring.
But the worst assumptions of all by these Catholic petitioners are 1) that the Church herself has the ability to change some of her teachings, and 2) that she is actually going to do this at the upcoming Ordinary Synod on the Family, that it will be a “heretical” Synod. Both these fears are groundless. To begin with, the Church cannot change any of her teachings any more than the Pope can do so. As Catholics, we believe that the charism of infallibility is bestowed not only on the visible Head of the Church on earth, i.e. the Pope, but on the Church herself as a whole as well. We believe that the Holy Spirit protects the Church from teaching error. Specifically, the Church is infallible when the Pope, and the bishops united with him, declare that such and such a doctrine of faith or morality is to be definitively held by all the faithful.
An Advisory Body
Secondly, it should be pointed out that the primary task of the Synod of Bishops—a relatively new institution in the Church which was created by Blessed Paul VI following the Second Vatican Council—is to advise the Pope on matters of Church governance and discipline, and thereby to assist His Holiness in applying Church doctrine to current pastoral situations throughout the universal Church. The purpose of the Synod is to foster greater collegiality within the Church by facilitating more effective collaboration between the Pope and the bishops in the governance of the Church. By means of the Synod, bishops from every part of the Catholic world in union with Rome freely and frankly communicate to the pontiff the problems and concerns of their particular Churches, along with their discussions and opinions on such problems and concerns, related to a certain theme chosen by the Holy Father (i.e., “The Pastoral Challenges of the Family in the Context of Evangelization”). The Pope listens to all of this feedback and, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, uses it to make wise and sound decisions for the future of the Church.
The Holy Father then communicates his decisions to the bishops and the whole Church by means of a written document called a post-synodal Apostolic Exhortation, in which he “confirms his brothers” (cf. Luke 22:32) in their faith and issues binding pastoral guidelines. Such an infallible papal document is the only text having anything to do with a Synod that carries official magisterial teaching and decision-making authority for the whole Church. As a representative institution, the Synod of Bishops is first and foremost an advisory body to the Holy See; it has no decision-making authority or magisterial teaching authority apart from the Successor of Peter. Thus, the idea that a Synod can alter Church doctrine is contrary to the fundamental nature of the Synod itself as an advisory organ. Every few years, the Pope calls his brother bishops to meet with him in the Vatican for a few weeks to hear what they have to say. The bishops do not go to Rome to help the Pope change Church teaching, which he can’t do anyway—and even if they were to try to abuse the Synod to that end, their efforts would come to nothing thanks to the charism of infallibility.
Unofficial Documents
Upsetting and misleading as some of its statements were, the highly controversial 2014 Synod midterm report issued last October was not an official teaching document of the Magisterium and was never intended to be treated as such. It was nothing more than an inaccurate and heavily biased summary of the bishops' discussions up to that point that reflected a heretical agenda by certain groups of people who are attempting to manipulate the Church's internal affairs in order to advance their own agenda. Such attempts to influence the Church to change certain of her teachings have been made by rebellious bishops, priests, and laypeople on numerous occasions over the course of 2,000 years—most recently in the decades following the Second Vatican Council—but none have ever proven successful. In each case, what actually happened was that those bishops, priests, and laity who pridefully rejected certain Church doctrines found themselves ipso facto estranged from their Holy Mother—i.e., instead of changing Church teaching to suit their own ideas, they found that they had voluntarily renounced their membership in the one, holy, Catholic, and apostolic Church and were now marked for all time as heretics and schismatics.
Although not an official teaching document itself, the final report of the 2014 Extraordinary Synod clearly reaffirmed traditional Church doctrines on marriage and family life and the incompatibility of certain lifestyles with Catholic moral teaching, thus offering considerable reassurance to the troubled and confused faithful that the Synod on the Family is indeed on track to fulfill its mission. Even the three most controversial paragraphs in the document, nos. 52, 53, and 55, did not attack Catholic doctrine or indicate that the norms regarding reception of Holy Communion are about to be changed in any significant way; nos. 52 and 53 merely called for close theological examination of sacramental and spiritual Communion in regard to those who are divorced and remarried. It does not necessarily follow that there will be any change in the current discipline. Pope Francis will certainly listen to and consider the recommendations he is given by theologians who are commissioned to study the subject, but it is he who will make the final decision for the whole Church under the guidance of the Holy Spirit. Following the Second Vatican Council, many Catholic theological experts urged Paul VI to approve the use of artificial contraception by Catholic married couples. The pontiff proceeded to write and publish his magnificent encyclical Humanae Vitae, which explicitly reaffirmed unchangeable Church teaching on the matter, and the rest is history.
Myth v. Reality
Catholic doctrine cannot change; that much is clear. Church discipline and pastoral practice, on the other hand, is subject to a certain degree of flexibility in order to suit the needs of different times; therefore, it has gone through various, necessary, and occasionally even significant revisions over the past two millennia, usually as a result of Church councils and for purposes of reform. This legitimate mutability of discipline has some people very worried at present. One of the chief fears of the good Catholics referred to above is that, as a result of the upcoming Synod, traditional Church teachings on marriage, family life, and mortal sin will be severely undermined by the official approval of new pastoral practices that directly contradict the teaching. But, as with the other false assumptions discussed above, it is simply not possible for this to occur. Official Church discipline must always reflect official Church doctrine; it cannot be altered to the point where it flies in the face of Church teaching. The discipline can only change within the narrow limits set by canon law. For example, a Catholic who is conscious of being in the state of mortal sin has always been forbidden to partake of Holy Communion until he or she receives the Sacrament of Penance. That norm cannot and will not be changed by Pope Francis or the upcoming Synod.
On the other hand, however, as a result of fallen human nature, the implementation of ecclesiastical discipline is not always a straightforward affair. As with Church doctrine, so also with Church discipline throughout history certain bishops, priests, and laypeople have attempted to substitute their own preferences for what the Church says, based on some excuse or other. This is exactly what happened with the Second Vatican Council, when all manner of heretical notions and illicit practices were justified under the vague mantle of "the spirit of Vatican II." Although the teachings of the Council itself were entirely orthodox and the liturgical, pastoral and disciplinary changes it introduced were fully in accord with those teachings, the general public perception of the Council was a far cry from the reality of what the Council Fathers officially said and did. As a result of this unfortunate discrepancy between the myth and the facts of Vatican II, the post-Conciliar period was marked by a great deal of confusion and difficulty for the Catholic Church. Heretical ideas proliferated among the hierarchy, clergy and laity; liturgical experimentation knew no bounds; millions left the Church, no longer recognizing their beloved Mother; small groups of schismatic traditionalists claimed to be the remnant of the “true faithful.” Blessed Paul VI, who had brought the Council to a successful conclusion, famously lamented that “the smoke of Satan has entered the Church.” At least for a time, the Bride of Christ appeared to have lost her way.
Here we must acknowledge that there is in fact a certain real danger for the Church at the present moment in her history. This danger is that—just as happened with the Second Vatican Council--certain bishops, priests, and laypeople will view the Synod on the Family through the colored lenses of their personal whims and wishes, and as a result will end up saying and doing anything they please using "the spirit of the Synod" as a cover. Unfortunately, those in the secular news media, which is increasingly hostile to the Church, have already embedded in the public mind their own grossly inaccurate portrayal of the 2014 Extraordinary Synod as the first clear step by the Church hierarchy toward a radical transformation of Catholic doctrine and discipline on the subjects of marriage and family life. By projecting this false and misleading image of the Synod on the Family—which is the brainchild of Pope Francis and has nothing whatsoever to do with changing Church teachings—unscrupulous journalists are raising vain expectations among the Church's enemies, including heretical dissenters, of official doctrinal and disciplinary changes that cannot and will not take place, while providing fresh fodder for schismatic traditionalist conspiracy theorists who claim that the Church is “going heretical” and that they are the sole remaining guardians of orthodox doctrine.
Reasons for the Synod
Given the considerable risks involved, one may ask why Pope Francis has called this Synod on the Family—an unusual double Synod at that—and what he hopes to accomplish by it. As someone who grew up in a closely-knit Italian family in Argentina, Francis understands the critical importance of the traditional nuclear family in God's plan for human society in general and for the Church in particular. He is painfully aware that this traditional family unit, the basic cell of society, is under tremendous attack and facing many difficult challenges in our increasingly secularized contemporary world. He realizes that the Church has a duty to reaffirm the truth of her beautiful teachings on marriage and family life and to examine how these timeless teachings should be applied to Catholic families and family members within the context of the present situation. Thus, Pope Francis has called this Synod primarily for pastoral reasons, in order to reassure modern Catholic families that the Church is there to offer them meaningful help and sound guidance in addressing the challenges they currently face.
As to what he hopes to accomplish through this Synod, clearly Pope Francis wants to strengthen intact Catholic families in order to help them more fully live out their beautiful witness of God's plan for marriage and family life in an increasingly individualist and radically secularist environment. At the same time, Francis wants the Church to more effectively reach out to the hundreds of millions of Catholics who are in mortally sinful "irregular situations"--e.g., drug addicts, those who are cohabitating, married couples who use artificial contraception, the divorced and remarried, those in homosexual relationships, those who no longer practice their faith, and so forth—in order to invite them to experience the Lord's mercy by repenting of their sins and returning to full communion with the Catholic Church. In this regard, Pope Francis simply wants the Church to do what Christ would do, which is to seek out sinners and call them to repentance and conversion—to go in search of the lost sheep that have strayed from the fold. Francis correctly perceives that the modern Church has grown a bit lax in this area, with many of her shepherds preferring to stay comfortably inside the fold with the "good sheep" while ignoring and forgetting about those wayward sheep in the wilderness who are in danger of being lost forever. Thus Francis, an experienced and genuine pastor, wants Church leaders to step outside of their comfortable offices and their comfort zones, to reach out to the peripheries of their parishes and dioceses and invite the lost sheep to return home.
In this context, the Synod on the Family is meant to help rebuild a worldly and weak Church, first by strengthening good Catholic families that are “inside the fold,” and secondly by healing and repairing many of those wounded and damaged Catholic families that are “lost in the wilderness”—the latter to be accomplished primarily by inviting many individual grave sinners to repentance and conversion. Altering Church doctrines on marriage, family life, and sin will not be part of this equation; nor will the basic norms currently in force regarding the proper reception of Holy Communion see any significant change. So regardless of unfortunate misunderstandings and misperceptions that swirl around the Synod on the Family generated by media pundits, heretics, and schismatics, and regardless of serious problems that may arise with its implementation, it is the opinion of this author that the Synod itself—like the Second Vatican Council—is the fruit of a genuine inspiration of the Holy Spirit, who “leads us into all truth” (cf. John 16:13), who protects the Church from teaching error, and who in every age is the real Protagonist of needed reform and renewal within the Mystical Body of Christ.
Opposing Viewpoints
As a result of last year’s Extraordinary Synod on the Family, Pope Francis is keenly aware of two opposing viewpoints within the Church today: there are some who correctly understand and heartily support his Christ-like mission to have the Church reach out more effectively to sinners, and there are others—misled by the mainstream media and their own irrational fears of doctrinal changes—who reject this courageous initiative for seemingly laudable reasons, preferring to take shelter within the secure confines of the Church they have always known and which they are afraid to lose. Francis himself neatly summed up this dichotomy and the merciful mission of the Church in his homily to newly created Cardinals on February 15, 2015:
A Divine Institution
So while the petition drive currently underway to Pope Francis may in one respect be considered a hopeful sign of certain lay Catholics' fidelity to Church doctrine, it is a wholly unnecessary, quite useless, and ultimately misguided endeavor. If the Church were exclusively a human institution, built on the sand of fallible human ideas and protected and defended by human effort alone, their grave concerns about her future would indeed be fully justified. The Church, however, although comprised of weak and sinful human members, is fundamentally a divine institution, built by Christ Himself on the Rock of Peter, and we have His word that the gates of Hell will not prevail against it (cf. Matt. 16:18). The fundamental problem with these otherwise good Catholics who are pleading with Pope Francis not to change Church doctrine on marriage and family life is that they do not really fully believe that the Holy Spirit protects the Church from teaching error, nor do they really fully trust that God is in command of His own institution. Because of this reprehensible lack of faith and trust, at the root of which is the original sin of pride, these Catholic fundamentalists run the risk of refusing to obediently submit to the magisterial teaching authority that God Himself has established and guaranteed, and instead taking it upon themselves to decide what the Church should do and teach. They share this lack of faith and trust in common with schismatic traditionalists, and in fact are just one step away from joining their ranks.
These worried and fearful Catholics would do well to reread certain parts of the Catechism of the Catholic Church and rediscover the basic truth that the Church ultimately belongs not to us, but to the Lord. As Pope Benedict XVI candidly declared not so long ago in his final General Audience address of February 27, 2013, at a time when many Catholics were filled with grave concern for the Church’s future: “I have felt like Saint Peter with the Apostles in the boat on the Sea of Galilee:…there were also moments when the waters were rough and the winds against us, as throughout the Church’s history, and the Lord seemed to be sleeping. But I have always known that the Lord is in that boat, and I have always known that the barque of the Church is not mine but his. Nor does the Lord let it sink; it is He who guides it.” We should also recall the oft-repeated words of Saint John Paul II, the simple words of Christ Himself: “Do not be afraid!” This is not a time for illogical fears and useless anxiety, but rather a time for renewed faith and lively hope. Instead of wringing our hands anxiously about what may happen to our Holy Mother the Church in the near future, let us take this wonderful opportunity of the Synod on the Family to renew our faith and trust in God, who will continue to protect His Church and guide her safely through the storms of temporary difficulties to the glory of eternal life.
Copyright © 2015 Justin D. Soutar. All rights reserved.
(Note: This article previously appeared on the website Catholic Online June 16, 2015 at http://www.catholic.org/news/blog/story.php?id=61153
and on the website Catholic365 July 1, 2015 at http://www.catholic365.com/article/1783/synod-on-the-family-perception-v-reality.html )
In recent months, some devout and well-meaning Catholics have been organizing and sending petitions to Pope Francis urging him not to change the Church's teachings on marriage and the family during the Ordinary Synod of Bishops on the Family scheduled for this coming October. Most, if not all, of these petitioners are basically good, faithful Catholics who sincerely try to believe everything the Church teaches and strive to practice their faith with admirable consistency. At a time when the Church is under enormous and constantly growing pressure from an increasingly secularist world society to change her teachings on morality, human life and sexuality, marriage and the nuclear family, these loyal sons and daughters of the Church are full of concern that their Holy Mother will cave in to the wishes of her enemies—or, that she is in fact already beginning to do so, as evidenced by the controversial midterm report issued by the Extraordinary Synod last fall. These apparently rock-solid Catholics see themselves as faithful defenders of the one true Church of Christ against the malignant forces of heresy and radical secularism. Their goal is to ensure that the Church of our time will continue to faithfully adhere to and proclaim her 2,000-year-old doctrines on marriage and family life in all their splendor and integrity.
False Assumptions
But these otherwise praiseworthy and well-intentioned Catholics appear to have overlooked the fact that they have grounded their seemingly noble campaign on a few blatantly false assumptions. One of these assumptions is that the Bishop of Rome has the ability to make changes to the Church's teachings as he sees fit. If that were true, the teachings would have been changed many times by 265 Popes throughout the last 2,000 years, and the deposit of faith would never have survived intact to our own day. As Catholics, we believe that the office of the Successor of Peter is protected in a special way by the charism of infallibility, which means that the Pope is incapable of erring when teaching the whole Church on a matter of faith or morality. Pope Francis can no more change any part of the Church's doctrine than could Pope Benedict XVI, or Saint John Paul II, or any of the other Popes preceding them.
Another false assumption undergirding this petition campaign is that Pope Francis himself, in his heart of hearts, is intending to change Church teachings on marriage and family life to accommodate modern viewpoints, or is at least considering doing so under pressure from a handful of heterodox bishops, clergy, and laity. Nonsense. Anyone who really knows this man knows better than to even think such a thought. From his earliest days as a Jesuit priest right up to the present, and often amid difficult and hostile circumstances, Bergoglio's spoken and written words demonstrate an unswerving commitment to Catholic orthodoxy. Anyone who reads his homilies, letters, addresses, interviews, and other public statements as priest, bishop, Archbishop and Pope can verify his record as a faithful son of the Church in that regard. There is no talk whatsoever of changing any part of Catholic doctrine to better suit modern tastes. On the contrary, Bergoglio's clear affirmations of traditional Church teaching on all manner of topics is both refreshing and reassuring.
But the worst assumptions of all by these Catholic petitioners are 1) that the Church herself has the ability to change some of her teachings, and 2) that she is actually going to do this at the upcoming Ordinary Synod on the Family, that it will be a “heretical” Synod. Both these fears are groundless. To begin with, the Church cannot change any of her teachings any more than the Pope can do so. As Catholics, we believe that the charism of infallibility is bestowed not only on the visible Head of the Church on earth, i.e. the Pope, but on the Church herself as a whole as well. We believe that the Holy Spirit protects the Church from teaching error. Specifically, the Church is infallible when the Pope, and the bishops united with him, declare that such and such a doctrine of faith or morality is to be definitively held by all the faithful.
An Advisory Body
Secondly, it should be pointed out that the primary task of the Synod of Bishops—a relatively new institution in the Church which was created by Blessed Paul VI following the Second Vatican Council—is to advise the Pope on matters of Church governance and discipline, and thereby to assist His Holiness in applying Church doctrine to current pastoral situations throughout the universal Church. The purpose of the Synod is to foster greater collegiality within the Church by facilitating more effective collaboration between the Pope and the bishops in the governance of the Church. By means of the Synod, bishops from every part of the Catholic world in union with Rome freely and frankly communicate to the pontiff the problems and concerns of their particular Churches, along with their discussions and opinions on such problems and concerns, related to a certain theme chosen by the Holy Father (i.e., “The Pastoral Challenges of the Family in the Context of Evangelization”). The Pope listens to all of this feedback and, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, uses it to make wise and sound decisions for the future of the Church.
The Holy Father then communicates his decisions to the bishops and the whole Church by means of a written document called a post-synodal Apostolic Exhortation, in which he “confirms his brothers” (cf. Luke 22:32) in their faith and issues binding pastoral guidelines. Such an infallible papal document is the only text having anything to do with a Synod that carries official magisterial teaching and decision-making authority for the whole Church. As a representative institution, the Synod of Bishops is first and foremost an advisory body to the Holy See; it has no decision-making authority or magisterial teaching authority apart from the Successor of Peter. Thus, the idea that a Synod can alter Church doctrine is contrary to the fundamental nature of the Synod itself as an advisory organ. Every few years, the Pope calls his brother bishops to meet with him in the Vatican for a few weeks to hear what they have to say. The bishops do not go to Rome to help the Pope change Church teaching, which he can’t do anyway—and even if they were to try to abuse the Synod to that end, their efforts would come to nothing thanks to the charism of infallibility.
Unofficial Documents
Upsetting and misleading as some of its statements were, the highly controversial 2014 Synod midterm report issued last October was not an official teaching document of the Magisterium and was never intended to be treated as such. It was nothing more than an inaccurate and heavily biased summary of the bishops' discussions up to that point that reflected a heretical agenda by certain groups of people who are attempting to manipulate the Church's internal affairs in order to advance their own agenda. Such attempts to influence the Church to change certain of her teachings have been made by rebellious bishops, priests, and laypeople on numerous occasions over the course of 2,000 years—most recently in the decades following the Second Vatican Council—but none have ever proven successful. In each case, what actually happened was that those bishops, priests, and laity who pridefully rejected certain Church doctrines found themselves ipso facto estranged from their Holy Mother—i.e., instead of changing Church teaching to suit their own ideas, they found that they had voluntarily renounced their membership in the one, holy, Catholic, and apostolic Church and were now marked for all time as heretics and schismatics.
Although not an official teaching document itself, the final report of the 2014 Extraordinary Synod clearly reaffirmed traditional Church doctrines on marriage and family life and the incompatibility of certain lifestyles with Catholic moral teaching, thus offering considerable reassurance to the troubled and confused faithful that the Synod on the Family is indeed on track to fulfill its mission. Even the three most controversial paragraphs in the document, nos. 52, 53, and 55, did not attack Catholic doctrine or indicate that the norms regarding reception of Holy Communion are about to be changed in any significant way; nos. 52 and 53 merely called for close theological examination of sacramental and spiritual Communion in regard to those who are divorced and remarried. It does not necessarily follow that there will be any change in the current discipline. Pope Francis will certainly listen to and consider the recommendations he is given by theologians who are commissioned to study the subject, but it is he who will make the final decision for the whole Church under the guidance of the Holy Spirit. Following the Second Vatican Council, many Catholic theological experts urged Paul VI to approve the use of artificial contraception by Catholic married couples. The pontiff proceeded to write and publish his magnificent encyclical Humanae Vitae, which explicitly reaffirmed unchangeable Church teaching on the matter, and the rest is history.
Myth v. Reality
Catholic doctrine cannot change; that much is clear. Church discipline and pastoral practice, on the other hand, is subject to a certain degree of flexibility in order to suit the needs of different times; therefore, it has gone through various, necessary, and occasionally even significant revisions over the past two millennia, usually as a result of Church councils and for purposes of reform. This legitimate mutability of discipline has some people very worried at present. One of the chief fears of the good Catholics referred to above is that, as a result of the upcoming Synod, traditional Church teachings on marriage, family life, and mortal sin will be severely undermined by the official approval of new pastoral practices that directly contradict the teaching. But, as with the other false assumptions discussed above, it is simply not possible for this to occur. Official Church discipline must always reflect official Church doctrine; it cannot be altered to the point where it flies in the face of Church teaching. The discipline can only change within the narrow limits set by canon law. For example, a Catholic who is conscious of being in the state of mortal sin has always been forbidden to partake of Holy Communion until he or she receives the Sacrament of Penance. That norm cannot and will not be changed by Pope Francis or the upcoming Synod.
On the other hand, however, as a result of fallen human nature, the implementation of ecclesiastical discipline is not always a straightforward affair. As with Church doctrine, so also with Church discipline throughout history certain bishops, priests, and laypeople have attempted to substitute their own preferences for what the Church says, based on some excuse or other. This is exactly what happened with the Second Vatican Council, when all manner of heretical notions and illicit practices were justified under the vague mantle of "the spirit of Vatican II." Although the teachings of the Council itself were entirely orthodox and the liturgical, pastoral and disciplinary changes it introduced were fully in accord with those teachings, the general public perception of the Council was a far cry from the reality of what the Council Fathers officially said and did. As a result of this unfortunate discrepancy between the myth and the facts of Vatican II, the post-Conciliar period was marked by a great deal of confusion and difficulty for the Catholic Church. Heretical ideas proliferated among the hierarchy, clergy and laity; liturgical experimentation knew no bounds; millions left the Church, no longer recognizing their beloved Mother; small groups of schismatic traditionalists claimed to be the remnant of the “true faithful.” Blessed Paul VI, who had brought the Council to a successful conclusion, famously lamented that “the smoke of Satan has entered the Church.” At least for a time, the Bride of Christ appeared to have lost her way.
Here we must acknowledge that there is in fact a certain real danger for the Church at the present moment in her history. This danger is that—just as happened with the Second Vatican Council--certain bishops, priests, and laypeople will view the Synod on the Family through the colored lenses of their personal whims and wishes, and as a result will end up saying and doing anything they please using "the spirit of the Synod" as a cover. Unfortunately, those in the secular news media, which is increasingly hostile to the Church, have already embedded in the public mind their own grossly inaccurate portrayal of the 2014 Extraordinary Synod as the first clear step by the Church hierarchy toward a radical transformation of Catholic doctrine and discipline on the subjects of marriage and family life. By projecting this false and misleading image of the Synod on the Family—which is the brainchild of Pope Francis and has nothing whatsoever to do with changing Church teachings—unscrupulous journalists are raising vain expectations among the Church's enemies, including heretical dissenters, of official doctrinal and disciplinary changes that cannot and will not take place, while providing fresh fodder for schismatic traditionalist conspiracy theorists who claim that the Church is “going heretical” and that they are the sole remaining guardians of orthodox doctrine.
Reasons for the Synod
Given the considerable risks involved, one may ask why Pope Francis has called this Synod on the Family—an unusual double Synod at that—and what he hopes to accomplish by it. As someone who grew up in a closely-knit Italian family in Argentina, Francis understands the critical importance of the traditional nuclear family in God's plan for human society in general and for the Church in particular. He is painfully aware that this traditional family unit, the basic cell of society, is under tremendous attack and facing many difficult challenges in our increasingly secularized contemporary world. He realizes that the Church has a duty to reaffirm the truth of her beautiful teachings on marriage and family life and to examine how these timeless teachings should be applied to Catholic families and family members within the context of the present situation. Thus, Pope Francis has called this Synod primarily for pastoral reasons, in order to reassure modern Catholic families that the Church is there to offer them meaningful help and sound guidance in addressing the challenges they currently face.
As to what he hopes to accomplish through this Synod, clearly Pope Francis wants to strengthen intact Catholic families in order to help them more fully live out their beautiful witness of God's plan for marriage and family life in an increasingly individualist and radically secularist environment. At the same time, Francis wants the Church to more effectively reach out to the hundreds of millions of Catholics who are in mortally sinful "irregular situations"--e.g., drug addicts, those who are cohabitating, married couples who use artificial contraception, the divorced and remarried, those in homosexual relationships, those who no longer practice their faith, and so forth—in order to invite them to experience the Lord's mercy by repenting of their sins and returning to full communion with the Catholic Church. In this regard, Pope Francis simply wants the Church to do what Christ would do, which is to seek out sinners and call them to repentance and conversion—to go in search of the lost sheep that have strayed from the fold. Francis correctly perceives that the modern Church has grown a bit lax in this area, with many of her shepherds preferring to stay comfortably inside the fold with the "good sheep" while ignoring and forgetting about those wayward sheep in the wilderness who are in danger of being lost forever. Thus Francis, an experienced and genuine pastor, wants Church leaders to step outside of their comfortable offices and their comfort zones, to reach out to the peripheries of their parishes and dioceses and invite the lost sheep to return home.
In this context, the Synod on the Family is meant to help rebuild a worldly and weak Church, first by strengthening good Catholic families that are “inside the fold,” and secondly by healing and repairing many of those wounded and damaged Catholic families that are “lost in the wilderness”—the latter to be accomplished primarily by inviting many individual grave sinners to repentance and conversion. Altering Church doctrines on marriage, family life, and sin will not be part of this equation; nor will the basic norms currently in force regarding the proper reception of Holy Communion see any significant change. So regardless of unfortunate misunderstandings and misperceptions that swirl around the Synod on the Family generated by media pundits, heretics, and schismatics, and regardless of serious problems that may arise with its implementation, it is the opinion of this author that the Synod itself—like the Second Vatican Council—is the fruit of a genuine inspiration of the Holy Spirit, who “leads us into all truth” (cf. John 16:13), who protects the Church from teaching error, and who in every age is the real Protagonist of needed reform and renewal within the Mystical Body of Christ.
Opposing Viewpoints
As a result of last year’s Extraordinary Synod on the Family, Pope Francis is keenly aware of two opposing viewpoints within the Church today: there are some who correctly understand and heartily support his Christ-like mission to have the Church reach out more effectively to sinners, and there are others—misled by the mainstream media and their own irrational fears of doctrinal changes—who reject this courageous initiative for seemingly laudable reasons, preferring to take shelter within the secure confines of the Church they have always known and which they are afraid to lose. Francis himself neatly summed up this dichotomy and the merciful mission of the Church in his homily to newly created Cardinals on February 15, 2015:
There are two ways of thinking and of having faith: we
can fear to lose the saved and we can want to save the lost. Even today it can
happen that we stand at the crossroads of these two ways of thinking. The
thinking of the doctors of the law, which would remove the danger by casting
out the diseased person, and the thinking of God, who in his mercy embraces and
accepts by reinstating him and turning evil into good, condemnation into
salvation and exclusion into proclamation....
The Church’s way, from the time of the Council of Jerusalem, has always been the way of Jesus, the way of mercy and reinstatement. This does not mean underestimating the dangers of letting wolves into the fold, but welcoming the repentant prodigal son; healing the wounds of sin with courage and determination; rolling up our sleeves and not standing by and watching passively the suffering of the world. The way of the Church is not to condemn anyone for eternity; to pour out the balm of God’s mercy on all those who ask for it with a sincere heart. The way of the Church is precisely to leave her four walls behind and to go out in search of those who are distant, those essentially on the ‘outskirts’ of life. It is to adopt fully God’s own approach, to follow the Master who said: ‘Those who are well have no need of the physician, but those who are sick; I have come to call, not the righteous but sinners’ (Lk 5:31-32).
The Church’s way, from the time of the Council of Jerusalem, has always been the way of Jesus, the way of mercy and reinstatement. This does not mean underestimating the dangers of letting wolves into the fold, but welcoming the repentant prodigal son; healing the wounds of sin with courage and determination; rolling up our sleeves and not standing by and watching passively the suffering of the world. The way of the Church is not to condemn anyone for eternity; to pour out the balm of God’s mercy on all those who ask for it with a sincere heart. The way of the Church is precisely to leave her four walls behind and to go out in search of those who are distant, those essentially on the ‘outskirts’ of life. It is to adopt fully God’s own approach, to follow the Master who said: ‘Those who are well have no need of the physician, but those who are sick; I have come to call, not the righteous but sinners’ (Lk 5:31-32).
A Divine Institution
So while the petition drive currently underway to Pope Francis may in one respect be considered a hopeful sign of certain lay Catholics' fidelity to Church doctrine, it is a wholly unnecessary, quite useless, and ultimately misguided endeavor. If the Church were exclusively a human institution, built on the sand of fallible human ideas and protected and defended by human effort alone, their grave concerns about her future would indeed be fully justified. The Church, however, although comprised of weak and sinful human members, is fundamentally a divine institution, built by Christ Himself on the Rock of Peter, and we have His word that the gates of Hell will not prevail against it (cf. Matt. 16:18). The fundamental problem with these otherwise good Catholics who are pleading with Pope Francis not to change Church doctrine on marriage and family life is that they do not really fully believe that the Holy Spirit protects the Church from teaching error, nor do they really fully trust that God is in command of His own institution. Because of this reprehensible lack of faith and trust, at the root of which is the original sin of pride, these Catholic fundamentalists run the risk of refusing to obediently submit to the magisterial teaching authority that God Himself has established and guaranteed, and instead taking it upon themselves to decide what the Church should do and teach. They share this lack of faith and trust in common with schismatic traditionalists, and in fact are just one step away from joining their ranks.
These worried and fearful Catholics would do well to reread certain parts of the Catechism of the Catholic Church and rediscover the basic truth that the Church ultimately belongs not to us, but to the Lord. As Pope Benedict XVI candidly declared not so long ago in his final General Audience address of February 27, 2013, at a time when many Catholics were filled with grave concern for the Church’s future: “I have felt like Saint Peter with the Apostles in the boat on the Sea of Galilee:…there were also moments when the waters were rough and the winds against us, as throughout the Church’s history, and the Lord seemed to be sleeping. But I have always known that the Lord is in that boat, and I have always known that the barque of the Church is not mine but his. Nor does the Lord let it sink; it is He who guides it.” We should also recall the oft-repeated words of Saint John Paul II, the simple words of Christ Himself: “Do not be afraid!” This is not a time for illogical fears and useless anxiety, but rather a time for renewed faith and lively hope. Instead of wringing our hands anxiously about what may happen to our Holy Mother the Church in the near future, let us take this wonderful opportunity of the Synod on the Family to renew our faith and trust in God, who will continue to protect His Church and guide her safely through the storms of temporary difficulties to the glory of eternal life.
Copyright © 2015 Justin D. Soutar. All rights reserved.
Friday, January 30, 2015
Article Heritage Series #4: Islam v. Radical Secularism: Which Is the Greater Enemy?
My apologies to all the readers! I'm long overdue to give you another installment of my "Article Heritage" series, which was originally intended to be a quarterly affair. I can't believe nine months have gone by since I posted my third installment last April. But then again, I was rather focused on the "ElectionWatch 2014" series from May onward, as well as writing and publishing other articles and music, and I was also spending some time revising my book on Mother Teresa (which still is yet to be published). You get the idea: I've been a pretty busy guy.
So now that I've caught up on things a bit, it's time to take a look at another article from my early days as a writer. This one, entitled "Islam v. Radical Secularism: Which Is the Greater Enemy?", goes back almost to the very beginning, having been originally composed in late 2005 while I was engrossed in research for my book America's Back-Door Enemy. It was published on a now-defunct website called Traditional Catholic Reflections & Reports in January 2007, and it also appeared in the November 2007 issue of the Ethical Spectacle (it's still there at http://www.spectacle.org/1107/justin.html ). This essay was very controversial at the time of its writing and publication, (and still would be today in certain quarters,) but its topic and thesis are still quite pertinent and true. In this piece, I used history, logic, and Catholic moral teaching to build a convincing case that the radical secularism within our own culture poses a much greater threat to American national security than does foreign "Islamic" extremism. My thinking on this subject is still very much the same, and I shudder to think what would happen if our country were to return to that Orwellian kind of foreign policy which plays on people's fears of terrorism to justify all sorts of wrongdoing and which--as I clearly demonstrate in my above-mentioned book--is driven by corporate greed and lust for power.
So here it is:
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Iran America
So now that I've caught up on things a bit, it's time to take a look at another article from my early days as a writer. This one, entitled "Islam v. Radical Secularism: Which Is the Greater Enemy?", goes back almost to the very beginning, having been originally composed in late 2005 while I was engrossed in research for my book America's Back-Door Enemy. It was published on a now-defunct website called Traditional Catholic Reflections & Reports in January 2007, and it also appeared in the November 2007 issue of the Ethical Spectacle (it's still there at http://www.spectacle.org/1107/justin.html ). This essay was very controversial at the time of its writing and publication, (and still would be today in certain quarters,) but its topic and thesis are still quite pertinent and true. In this piece, I used history, logic, and Catholic moral teaching to build a convincing case that the radical secularism within our own culture poses a much greater threat to American national security than does foreign "Islamic" extremism. My thinking on this subject is still very much the same, and I shudder to think what would happen if our country were to return to that Orwellian kind of foreign policy which plays on people's fears of terrorism to justify all sorts of wrongdoing and which--as I clearly demonstrate in my above-mentioned book--is driven by corporate greed and lust for power.
So here it is:
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Islam v. Radical Secularism:
Which Is the Greater Enemy?
By Justin Soutar
December 2, 2005 (Revised November 9, 2006; January 2, 2007; and July 23, 2007)
Ever since the dreadful terrorist attacks of 9/11, neoconservatives have made dire predictions about the looming threat of Islam. At all levels of American public life from government officials to university professors to respected magazine editors to radio talk show hosts, from Catholics and non-Catholics alike, we hear the same ominous warnings. The underlying fear is that, if the Muslim world continues growing in numbers and religious fervor, it will eventually be poised to annihilate our Judeo-Christian Western civilization. Those who subscribe to this analysis point triumphantly to repeated violent reactions by fanatics to real and perceived insults against the Islamic faith, as well as to the long-running terrorist conflagrations in Israel and Iraq, as proof of what they have warned us about for five years—that Islam is the greatest enemy of the US
But this view contains two serious flaws. First, it muddies the water with fallacious generalizations that cover up and distort reality. Second, it leaves too many important facts crying out for explanation, the most remarkable of which is the near-universal, deeply rooted Muslim hatred for the evil of Western radical secularism.
Muslims: Image v. Reality
Why do Muslims hate the West? According to conservatives and neoconservatives, they hate the fundamental ideas of Christianity, democracy, and freedom that America
First of all, contrary to what the US Africa . In addition, those “Muslim” individuals who deliberately assist terrorists in performing their acts could constitute a worldwide number as high as ten million. But all these numbers still add up to barely one percent of all self-proclaimed Muslims worldwide. So even though most Muslims are Sunnis and thus vulnerable to extremism, only a mere handful can be called terrorists. The vast masses of those who call themselves Mohammed’s followers, together with most imams and other religious leaders, are upright, peaceful people who condemn atrocities against innocent civilians. Yet they have been demonized “evildoers” as though the majority were terrorists! As Muslims grow in numbers and gradually anchor their presence in all the Western countries, neoconservative commentators are quick to sound the alarm that “Islam” is a greater threat than Adolf Hitler. However, given that terrorists remain a small, deviant, heretical “Islamic” movement, “Islam” itself should not be considered the main problem.
But perhaps a growing, resurgent, radical branch of Islam teaches hatred of Christianity and the West? In the context of the current wave of Muslim terrorism, neoconservatives remind us of the Muslim threat to Europe which the Crusaders had to drive back in the first part of the second millennium. But neoconservatives fail to point out the sharp differences between the Crusader Era and today’s situation. To begin with, the earlier centuries of Islam, when the great dynastic empires stretched across the Middle East , were the time of conquering the world for Islam. Catholics from Palestine to Europe refused to commit apostasy, making it necessary for them to take up arms to defend their religious freedom and civilization. Generally, the Turks were undeniably aggressive and could not be negotiated with. But Islam today does not have an empire. And the few terrorists, by their very nature, are eager to negotiate because terrorism is a weapon of negotiation used to wring demands out of an inflexible government. It is the systematic failure to achieve the right to a redress of grievances that drives “Muslim” terrorism, especially in Iraq
A second difference between that time and today is that the Turks were military warriors in the vast armies of the Seljuk Empire, whereas a tiny fraction of modern Muslims are bands of civilian terrorists. Neoconservatives totally ignore the difference in terms of both numerical representation and status. First, the Muslim armies officially represented the colonialist ambitions of an empire—which is by definition a colonizer—in contrast to terrorists, whose acts of murder are condemned by 90 percent of Muslims. Secondly, these were real wars between nations. The European Catholic nations declared wars of liberation to protect the Holy Land . A Muslim empire declared war on European states. But Muslim terrorists are engaged in a broad international campaign to force America , Israel
Terrorism and Extremism
It needs to be emphasized that terrorists are civilians and criminals under international law. Since they do not belong to the armed forces of any nation, terrorists lack the power to declare war. In that respect, terrorism is simply a crime like any other--and the US
It is a common historical and factual error to compare the formidable Islamic aggression of one thousand years ago with the modern rise in terrorist incidents. Such comparisons only confuse the issue in the minds of many Americans. However, one tenuous argument remains for neoconservatives worried that “Islam” is the enemy: that unbeknownst to most Muslims, traditional Islamic doctrine actually teaches violence against Jews and Christians, and that we are witnessing a frightening “resurgence” of this doctrine. But no religion teaches violence. In all the three great monotheistic religions, a comprehensive body of teaching is set forth like a stained-glass window, and each individual doctrine or passage of scripture must be interpreted within the context of the whole picture. Extremists take a single passage or teaching out of context and give it undue importance to suit their own purposes; they do not submit to the whole body of teaching and thus cannot properly be called members of that religion.
There does exist a great deal of disunity, disagreement, and conflict within Islam. “Islamic” extremists themselves are torn by dissention, of which a major example would be how Osama bin Laden’s deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri thinks bin Laden has too much concern for the lives of noncombatants. But as Pope Benedict XVI reasoned in his famous address at the University of Regensburg in Germany last September, irrational acts such as the murder of innocent civilians are incompatible with the nature of God and thus with religion.
Once upon a time, Saint Francis of Assisi
A Clash of Values and Rights
Additional facts contradicting the “evil Muslim” notion and begging for explanation come (quite ironically) from the very people responsible for crimes of terrorism. Far from dedicating their whole lives to evil, “Islamic” terrorists demonstrate certain upright qualities. They adhere passionately to a set of moral guidelines based on the Ten Commandments. While we all know that Muslim terrorists appear deeply committed to worship of God, this is not a pretense; their misguided religious sincerity is evident. This truthfulness carries over into their explanations for their attacks—as is well known, they often state that such and such an attack is in retaliation for a crime committed against their people. Moreover, the rest of the world quickly realizes who the culprit might be because terrorist organizations boldly claim responsibility for their attacks.
Most of the dozens of terrorist groups currently operating in Iraq maintain that their frequent strikes against police, Shiite Muslims, Kurds, and Western soldiers are in retaliation for American mistreatment of Iraq as well as for Shiite and Kurdish cooperation with the US vis-Ã -vis Sunni Muslims—accusations which unfortunately contain more than a grain of truth. Contrary to the myth of a “gradual transition of power”, US forces are running Iraq , allowing profit-crazed Western mega-corporations to freely exploit the nation and plunder Iraq
Furthermore, a wealth of psychological profiles compiled on numerous “Islamic” terrorists reveals that they share a deep and abiding love for their families. The principle of honor and respect for their parents is never questioned. Finally, the most apparent virtue manifested by Muslim terrorists is their moral cleanliness—they are scrupulous in avoiding occasions of sin, and they rightly reproach America as immoral and hypocritical because of our bad magazines, books and music which have saturated the Middle Eastern culture. Not only is the radical secularism of our Western culture alien to the Middle East ; it is loathed precisely because of the religious and moral values that Muslims and terrorists alike hold dear.
Instead of merely using religion as a cover for malicious evil, “Islamic” terrorism springs from deep convictions and is not ill-intentioned. So notwithstanding their undeniable crimes against civilian lives, terrorists do have consciences and moral values--they are not animals or demons as neoconservatives often seem to imagine.
But now we discover yet another problem crying out for explanation. If the vast majority of Muslims are peaceful and disapprove of terrorist attacks, then why did millions of people across Afghanistan , Iran , Iraq , and Syria
So the reason large numbers of Muslims peacefully demonstrated for Osama bin Laden was to express their anti-Americanism and support for his message to attack US troops on duty in the Middle East —conduct which is morally and legally justified. [Note to current readers: I do NOT approve of the killing of American troops stationed overseas. I was simply making a distinction between killing innocent people, which is never justified, and killing a military aggressor, which is. Our foreign policy must respect the sovereignty of other countries in accordance with international law. Therefore, I believe that most, if not all, US troops currently stationed in the Middle East and on other foreign lands overseas should be withdrawn to US soil and employed in the more useful task of guarding our coastlines and borders.] According to Muslim natives of the Middle East , bin Laden enjoys the status of a father figure among them. His tremendous backing can only be explained by the negative effects of American foreign policy in the region. This recurring phenomenon of overwhelming popular allegiance to anti-American leaders from Ayatollah Khomeini in 1979 to bin Laden in the 2000s is where the neoconservative logic breaks down. Should fifty million anti-American Iranians, or the hundreds of millions who quietly profess bin Laden’s anti-Americanism, be called terrorists or freedom fighters?
American Foreign Policy
Anti-Americanism is so popular, especially among Muslims in the Middle East, because the United States has mistreated them—and helped Israel Palestine , subjected nearly one million Palestinians to exile and murder, and imposed on the Holy Land a Western-style state which has stripped Palestinians of their inalienable rights. During the Cold War, the US devoted substantial military and economic aid to Israel US , which has unjustly exploited the Middle East ’s wealth and political systems.
But the economic dimension of American and Israeli foreign policy alone does not explain Muslim resentment, nor does it explain the Muslim world’s hearty detestation for the entire West. Most neoconservatives (a notable exception being Dinesh D’Souza) have equally ignored the cultural dimension. They forget that, in the minds of pious foreign Muslims, radical secularism has replaced Christianity as the defining Western cultural trait. Throughout the United States, Europe, and Western-oriented countries of the Middle East, the evils of abortion, contraception, euthanasia, greed, unlimited gambling, drunkenness, nightclubs, dirty magazines, offensive clothing fashions, bad movies, and satanic music proliferate.
Even worse is the fact that the cultural and economic dimensions are intertwined, with one reinforcing the other: Western big businesses accumulate billions of dollars by deliberately exploiting human weaknesses through the spread of cultural filth.
The flood of wickedness that the US, Israel and Europe have dumped on our Middle Eastern allies has kindled the extremely flammable fires of Islamic righteous indignation. Moreover, the negative effects of the Western cultural dark side do not remain confined inside the borders of these Western and Westernized countries. Its poison has spilled across national lines and wreaked a great deal more damage than most Americans, regardless of political affiliation, will ever fully understand or appreciate.
Examination of Conscience
The West needs to wake up and learn a lesson before it is too late. In contemporary American foreign policy, military adventurism, cultural imperialism, unfettered capitalism and immorality go together. In the Western world as a whole, society is coming apart at the seams as radical individualism becomes the chief god. The evil of radical secularism, foisted on the Middle East through Israel and its allies and vigorously promoted in Europe , has provoked a tremendous surge of anti-Western sentiment and hatred. The evil and emptiness of modern Western culture has caused the younger Arab generation to turn to God and their familiar religion for comfort and strength, just as we did after 9/11, bringing about a massive Muslim religious revival. Finally, the combination of two false “freedoms”—unfettered capitalism and immorality—has incited, fueled and sustained the recurrent waves of “Muslim” terrorism which the West is now suffering.
Catholics and neoconservatives should refrain from denouncing “Islam” and especially Muslims collectively as evil and the most serious enemy of America
Arthur Goldschmidt, a prominent Jewish Middle East historian, wisely reflected: “Someday, perhaps, practicing Muslims, Christians, and Jews will settle their differences—even the Arab-Israeli conflict—in order to wage war on their common enemies: secularism, hedonism, positivism and the various ideologies that have arisen in modern times.” The motto “United we stand, divided we fall” is more true now than ever before. United and standing together, the Western and Muslim worlds must wage war on radical secularism—or both will fall.
Copyright © 2006, 2007 by Justin Soutar. All rights reserved.
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