Should the Catholic Church Secede from the Union?

Robert A. Herrera

Over one hundred thirty years ago the Southern States seceded from 
the federal union.  The two major sections of the nation came to 
the realization that a co-existence which had become laborious and 
conflictive was an impossible task.  Two contradictory way of 
being could not flourish under one flag.  The United States, with 
the destruction of the Confederacy, lost a vigorous and gifted 
people as well as a rich source of autochtonous culture.  Today's 
tarted-up South is barely a shadow of the Confederacy which, after 
the military debacle, expired from anemia when, to use Mencken's 
apposite phrase, it ceased to be fertilized from above.

There were many notions common to Southern political thinkers 
which, had they been seriously considered, might have helped us 
avoid the shoals on which the American Republic is presently 
foundering.  The notions that unlimited freedom and equality are 
noxious, that government becomes despotic and absolute to the 
proportion that the people become debased and corrupt, should 
certainly be included among the most important.  On the same level 
perhaps is Calhoun's admonition against identifying the numerical 
majority with the "people," and many other sage insights.  
Unfortunately, at this critical moment of American history an 
exercise in nostalgia, while pleasantly decadent, simply is 
pointless.  These speculations succumbed with the Confederacy and 
remain, at best, grand antiques of a bygone era.

Although the analogy is forced, one may ask whether there is a 
similar situation in evidence today.  The estrangement between the 
American Republic, or at least American public opinion, and the 
more traditional segment of American Catholicism, seems to 
reproduce the older conflict on another dimension.  In spite of 
its tilt towards radical democracy and episodes of egalitarian 
fervor, American Catholicism nevertheless is moving further away 
from a public orthodoxy which has found it to be definitely not 
clubable.  It's epileptic attempts at accommodation, its 
enthusiasm for the icons of the day, even its endorsements of 
certain popular fads and shibboleths, have only served to add a 
measure of silliness to what was always considered to be an 
unsavory intruder.  The efforts of many clergy and laity to shed 
their spots and become ecumenically pure have scarcely met with 
success.  Catholicism remains a raw and unsettling presence whose 
chances of wholehearted acceptance by the American people at large 
is negligible.

On the other hand, viewed from the perspective of Catholic 
orthodoxy, American society has during the past half-century 
become far less acceptable.  It seems to thrive on perversion, a 
frank distortion of the normative in morality, thought, and 
language which has surfaced as a new-speak rooted in a new-think 
of major proportions.  Chesterton once stated that the 
revolutionary triad of <Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite>, were 
secularized Christian virtues gone wild.  Todays "good things" can 
also be viewed as perversions of better things:  abortion of life, 
eroticism of sex, ethnic hubris of justice, political correctness 
of freedom, and multiculturalism of education.  In back of all 
these manifestations of contemporary perversity, at their ground 
and pushing them forward, is a secularized, distorted, version of 
the theological virtue of charity, which demands the abolition of 
rule, limit, and hierarchy in the service of a monolithic 
egalitarianism.

A few decades ago, in a book written in more optimistic times, 
Cardinal Jean Danielou attempted to fix the role of the secular 
state vis-a-vis Christianity and the drama of salvation.1  He 
indicated that the principal task of the political order is to 
constitute a society in which men can fulfill themselves by living 
a satisfactory material, fraternal, and spiritual life.  As Church 
and State have complimentary functions, the Cardinal urged that 
Christians should "struggle to bring the earthly city into 
conformity with its charter,"2 viz., that it should fulfill its 
duty of structuring a society open to the promptings of grace.  By 
doing so, Christians work for the betterment of both the secular 
and the spiritual orders.

In spite of his generally optimistic tone, Danielou entertains the 
possibility _ in line with the history of Church-State relations 
beginning perhaps with the Renaissance _ of a monolithic 
secularism closed to spiritual imperatives.  This, he suggests, 
would make the survival of the Christian people qua Christian 
problematic and even threaten the survival of civilization itself.  
Looking at our contemporary panorama a good case can be made that 
we are approaching such a perilous situation.  The political 
scaffolding which Cardinal Danielou envisioned as providing access 
to the heavenly city is, if not completely gutted, at least in a 
state of serious disrepair.

One of the more consoling aspects of the Christian interpretation 
of history is that both complete novelty and the monotonous 
repetition of the same are excluded from its repertoire.  The 
biblical account of creation shattered the eternal universe of the 
Greek philosophers burdened with its endless cycles.  Biblical 
thought also suggested a correspondence between events, their 
causes, and events which are to come.  This permits us to search 
for epochs analogous to our own with the hope that the unfolding 
of events and proximate causes recorded there can provide us with 
a key to interpret the present.  Each epoch, except perhaps the 
happiest or most vacant, has its own peculiar bard who can be 
called to the witness stand.

Jonathan Swift wrote his acerbic <Tale of a Tub>3 nearly three 
centuries ago in a society unlike our own in most things except 
evil.  He savaged contemporary customs and institutions _ a 
rainbow coalition of aberrations _ with gusto, free from self-
deception and the cosmetic imperative.  Dean Swift possessed a 
good nose for the depravity of his age, in its frauds and 
mountebanks assuming the guise of respectability.  The "Author" is 
a reflection of his world, the <tubbian world>, a man who is 
writing a treatise on <Nothing> while collecting data for a work 
to be called <A Modest Defense of the Proceedings of the Rabble in 
all Ages.>  Like Sartre and other intellectuals of our century, 
the "Author" enjoys melding speculative esoterica to progressive 
ideology.

He is obsessed with externals to the point of suggesting that man 
is essentially a <microcoat,> a suit of clothes.  As man is what 
he wears, the external shell suffices for his well-being.  The 
Tubbian world puts its highest value on happiness, an 
unexceptional aspiration.  But this is not the objective goal of 
human life as in the Aristotelian tradition but "the perpetual 
possession of being well deceived."4  Swift's "modern" _ much the 
same as our politically correct drudge _ cuts himself off from the 
past, becomes captive to his imagination, and lives only through 
the medium of constantly changing facades or "suits of clothes."  
Both embrace the fad of the moment and fall victim to the quack 
nostrums of the day.  Both are victimized by "concerned citizens" 
using the universal improvement of mankind as appetizing bait for 
the incurably naive.  More pathetic still, both victimizer and 
victim are locked in intimate solidarity, their delicate moral 
antennae twitching in unison.

Swift was convinced that the acclaimed "marvels" of the tubbian 
world were ultimately caused by insanity, sheer madness.  He gives 
precious examples of the convoluted reasoning which leads to the 
perversion of the intellect.  Attentive to subtle and perverse 
turns he moves from the premiss, "words are but winds" to the 
conclusion that "the gift of belching is the noblest act of a 
rational creature,"5 setting the pattern for ideological apologia 
up to the present.  Several of our own political leaders are not 
very different from Swift's "Phanatic Preacher," characterized by 
a deadly mixture of inward light and a head full of maggots.6  The 
current proliferation of minorities of all types bears comparison 
with the plethora of schools in his Academy of Wits.

The tubbian world pullulates with citizens obsessed by the urge to 
pontificate, philosophize, build castles in the air.  With an 
insight which is no less than prescient, Swift indicates that the 
mountebank's stage is the "great seminary" _ the preparatory 
school _ which leads to both the clergyman's pulpit and the 
gallows of the highwayman.7  Today the stage has been replaced by 
the media, equally serviceable, which also takes its inspiration 
from the lowest forms of entertainment.  Contemporary man has 
learned to his dismay that these castles in the air forged by the 
media can return to plague him.  McLuhan pointed to the 
idiosyncratic character of electronic media.  Plato made it clear 
in the <Gorgias> that sophistry and its equivalents are 
politically and socially noxious.

Swift deftly fingered the deepest root of the horrors of the 
tubbian world, the ancient satanic lust for autonomy.  When human 
reason attempts to break loose from God _ to "liberate" itself _ 
it is transformed into unreason, into insanity.  The very 
absurdity of this world, its uprootedness and whimsical nature, 
measures the distance which man has moved away from God.  It is 
appropriate that the high point of <A Tale of a Tub> is a section 
on insanity in which Swift proposes the thesis of a Bedlam 
coextensive with the human race.  This is perhaps the best 
solution for the "slaughter-bench" of human history, really only a 
few steps away from the Christian doctrine of original sin.

Professor Bloom's recent critique of American society and 
education follows in the tradition of <A Tale of a Tub> albeit on 
a minor key.  It is ironic that Dean Swift's major adversaries _ 
modernists, rationalists, deists, the Royal Society _ are hardly 
the villains of <The Closing of the American Mind.>8  Professor 
Bloom blames the present catastrophic state of affairs on the 
German philosophy of the past century or so as interpreted by the 
American mind.  He absolves those who are probably the real 
culprits _ Rousseau and the Enlightenment _ and places the French 
Revolution, the seedbed of future horrors, in the same category as 
its English and American analogs.  All three, in Bloom's opinion, 
were fought for freedom and equality!  Nietzsche was not far off 
target when he called "preachers of equality" tarantulas and 
dealers in hidden revenge.  Yet, Bloom may have had second 
thoughts.  This is suggested by his remark that Rousseau removed 
the "floor" which Hobbes and Locke had hoped to find, and "man has 
tumbled into . . . the basement, which now appears to be 
bottomless."9

Professor Bloom is not as insightful a critic of the American 
scene as Santayana and Mencken were or as is Russell Kirk.10  
Nevertheless, he is gifted with the sharp but limited vision 
generated by indignation; a liberal academic shocked into the 
realization that the Brave New World he had furthered and perhaps 
eagerly awaited is in truth a nightmare.  Bloom attacks many 
contemporary depravities: it's relativism, inflamed sensitivity, 
and uprootedness.  He marks the decay of the family, the 
emasculation of religion, the loss of books, and the foibles of an 
anomic student body.  More important, he points to the creation of 
"a new language of morality" in which good and evil are reduced to 
subjective emotion and aberrations provided with justifications.11

Centering on academic life, Professor Bloom views most students as 
"flat-souled," devoid of tradition, and most faculty as pandering 
to the passions of the masses while collaborating in their fondest 
dreams.  Public opinion, kept at bay in the past now imposes 
itself dictatorially, and brings venerable but shopworn notions 
such as equality, freedom, and peace, to radical new life 
pulsating with destructive passion.  The curriculum has been 
trashed, the humanities in disarray, the classics relegated to 
cob-webbed corners of library vaults.  Professor Bloom's account 
is dismal.

Bloom could have noted the short distance which separates 
Rousseau's <Confessions> from Freud's <Civilization and Its 
Discontents>, the similarity between their complementary though 
often conflicting theses.  Rousseau initiated a radical re-
evaluation of morals which effected a violent break with the past, 
its traditions, customs, and usages.  He was later followed by 
Nietzsche and Freud.  Rousseau was the first to turn humanity on 
its head, place the superior functions in the lower belly, and 
replace the intellect by the proddings of sensitivity.  The 
Rousseauan man is very near to the Tyrannical Man of the 
<Republic> who does what the average man dreams.  Before Professor 
Bloom, Edmund Burke had observed that philosophers were at least 
in part responsible for the deviations of youth:  "in order to 
insinuate their polluted atheism into young minds. . . . [they] . 
. . systematically flatter all their passions, natural and 
unnatural."12

The contemporary world is nominalistic with a vengeance.  It 
lavishes, through the media, an inordinate amount of attention on 
the individual viewed as an isolated atom, the result of several 
centuries of social distillation.  We are flooded with an ocean of 
trivia concerning the most banal aspects of life.  Quite rightly, 
Marx blamed Capitalism for creating a world in which the worker 
felt truly human only when exercising his lower functions.  
Ironically, today this not only seems to be the rule but the 
desideratum of even Marxist-inspired groups.  Lacking the bonds 
necessary to anneal passing generations into a single atemporal 
community, the higher things are reduced either to gilt-edged 
fraud or mere whim.  These are obvious symptoms of decadence and 
it would be difficult to deny that we are standing at the end 
point of a spiral of decay.  The socio-political aspect of this 
decline was described by Plato in the <Republic>, and in more 
recent times, by J. B. Vico.  The theme was then taken up and 
embroidered by Nietzsche, Spengler, and Ortega, to name only the 
most prominent.  More than a theme it became a pervading 
atmosphere.

The seriousness of the disease cannot be ignored.  We are today 
under attack from a multiplicity of enthusiasms, fads, and sects, 
which present an extensive range of solutions for an equally 
extensive range of problems.  We are at the mercy of an 
unprincipled media and victimized by social unrest.  No doubt we 
have fallen into Professor Bloom's "floorless basement."  
Religion, morality, and authentic culture have been all but 
discarded, education savaged, all at the mercy of the masses and 
ideology.  Multiculturalism is the sign of ultimate decay, the 
latest and most noxious form of self-deception.

The masses and the academics are partially to blame.  The cultural 
void presented by the masses attracts the creative hubris of the 
professors:  why not turn the world into a gigantic red school 
house?  Though both are falling victim to the lure of correct 
opinion _ today's public orthodoxy _ it should be added in their 
defense that several of the most outstanding thinkers of our 
century also succumbed to the siren-song of mass ideology.  It now 
seems that Heidegger's infatuation with National Socialism was 
more than a passing flirtation.  Sartre's commitment to Marxism 
was deep and constant, though the works dedicated to the cause 
lack the imagination and insight he customarily displayed.  
Perhaps philosophical innovation and the consequent eclipse of the 
objective order led eventually to the success of mass ideologies 
which appeal to the instinctual and irrational.

The Catholic Church has suffered extensively from these 
depredations, at times in spite of itself.  Catholics in the 
United States have been in the unfortunate position _ perhaps 
because of their largely immigrant background _ of having been 
considered subpar at least socially and intellectually by the 
elites.  The "great awakening" subsequent to Vatican II only 
served to confirm this negative opinion.  The burgeoning of 
"Christians come of age" in the Church both startled and amused 
the American public and caused immeasurable harm to all concerned, 
above all to the Church at large.  Unfortunately, the laity were 
only following the example of distinguished prelates, clerics, and 
the general trend of Catholic higher education.  A bizarre 
combination of intellectual hubris, religious masochism, and a 
strong distaste for tradition, produced an orgy of bad taste which 
has perdured, in a variety of forms, to this day.  Mencken has 
again been vindicated for pointing to "the libido for the ugly" as 
a characteristic of the American people.

The Catholic Church can no longer be considered a conservative 
force able to use its prestige to uphold the fragile edifice of 
society.  Things have changed since Tocqueville noted the 
conservative effect of Catholicism on American life and Babbitt 
suggested that the day might arrive in which the Catholic Church 
would become the only effective instrument for preserving 
civilization.  This change of direction is especially significant 
as the radical democratic ideology which inspired Catholicism's 
turn to the left derives its strength from its Christian origin, 
to which it stands as malevolent double.

Contemporary society has experienced the strength of this 
malevolent double and is in the process of succumbing to its 
attraction.  It is reflected in the progressive withdrawal from 
the normative we are presently experiencing which is <pari passu> 
withdrawal from orthodox Christianity.  Unfortunately, most 
Catholics _ if polls are to be trusted _ appear to endorse the 
latest abominations.  Abortion, homosexuality, rampaging 
eroticism, permissiveness, secularism, do not encounter any mass 
Catholic opposition.  At best they are given a hearing and talked 
to death, in line with the promptings of the media.  But if 
everything is talkable it follows that nothing is sacred.  The 
vacuous chatter of the brothal becomes the norm.  Eternal verities 
are placed on the same level as trivia and moral truths reduced to 
the level of mere values subject to individual caprice.

Today the Catholic is obliged to follow, as best he may, the 
authentic Christian vocation of being a sign of contradiction, 
swimming against the current of the "<mundus>" in whatever form it 
may assume.  He is forced in conscience to be an anachronism in a 
world in which God is absent.  This is a difficult task, more so 
as "ecumenism" and "dialogue," understood in the most banal sense, 
have become social if not religious imperatives.  The Catholic 
should opt for the normative against the abnormal, orthodoxy 
against novelty, tradition against fad.  The role of education is 
of paramount importance in providing an effective antidote to the 
historical aphasia which prevails by re-connecting the student to 
his religious and national past.  It should be evident that the 
only alternative to the often maligned academic Ivory Tower is the 
Tower of Babel and after having experienced the second we should 
opt for the first.  To follow in the steps of contemporary America 
is to condemn orthodox Christianity to death by trivialization.

The American Catholic dream of melding orthodoxy and progressive 
democracy has proven to be specious, an impossible dream.  Those 
who still adhere to this phantasy are as distant from reality as 
is the silly Don of the Broadway stage from Cervantes' superb 
Quixote.  Like those Catholics who followed the star of the French 
Revolution these progressive Christians will enjoy a brief moment 
of notoriety followed by oblivion.  The guillotine, after all, had 
the merit of cutting chatter as well as heads.  This earlier 
transvaluation of values produced Robespierre and The Terror 
although like the present crisis, it began with impossible dreams 
and noble sentiments.  The contemporary heirs to Robespierre _ 
equally assured of their moral rectitude _ are headed in the same 
direction and will eventually pay the maximum penalty for dealing 
in false coin.

America has provided a home in which Catholicism has flourished.  
Unfortunately, material success is often deadly to spiritual 
enterprises.  The present difficulties are the result of success 
not of failure.  There is little doubt that American Catholics 
will continue to cooperate with the national enterprise and be, as 
they always have been, as American as any and more American than 
most.  At the same time Catholics are obliged to remain faithful 
to the deposit of faith which the present generation has received 
and has the awesome responsibility of passing on to the future.

It is fortunate that at this point the religious and the political 
seem to coincide.  The turn towards a radically democratic society 
_ levelling and egalitarian _ strengthens those submerged 
pantheistic urges which surface as hostility against Christianity 
and the Church.  But also, as American thinkers from Fisher Ames 
to Irving Babbit have noted, it endangers our civic liberties and 
the structures which make them possible.  Because of this, 
although a declaration of war would be premature, strategy 
dictates that siege artillery be rapidly installed within range of 
the secular Fort Sumter.

ENDNOTES

1 Jean Danielou, <Prayer as a Political Problem>, ed. & trans. J. 
R. Kirwan (New York:  Sheed & Ward, 1967).

2 Ibid., pp. 27ff.; 121ff.

3 <A Tale of a Tub.  Jonathan Swift:  A Selection of His Works> 
(New York:  The Odyssey Press, 1965).

4 Ibid., pp. 414, 350.

5 Ibid., pp. 401-404.

6 Ibid., p. 339, note 6.

7 Ibid., p. 337ff.

8 Allan Bloom, <The Closing of the American Mind> (New York:  
Simon & Schuster, 1987), pp. 55, 147-148, 188-323.

9 Ibid., pp. 176-177.

10 Refer to George Santayana, <Character and Opinion in the United 
States> (New York:  George Braziller, 1955); H. L. Mencken, <Notes 
on Democracy> (New York:  Knopf, 1926); Russell Kirk, <Enemies of 
Permanent Things> (New Rochelle:  Arlington House, 1969).

11 Bloom, <op. cit.>, p. 141.

12 Burke to Chevalier de Revarol (1791).  Cited by Kirk, <The 
Conservative Mind> (South Bend:  Gateway, 1978), p. 29, note.

Robert A. Herrera holds a Ph.D. from the Graduate Faculty of the 
New School for Social Research.  He is Professor of Philosophy at 
Seton Hall University in South Orange, New Jersey and is a member 
of <Faith & Reason>'s editorial board.

This article was taken from the Fall 1992 issue of "Faith & Reason". Subscriptions available from Christendom Press, 2101 Shenandoah Shores Road, Ft. Royal, VA 22630, 703-636-2900, Fax 703-636-1655. Published quarterly at $20.00 per year.

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