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Viewpoints
22 CATHOLIC NEWS HERALD
catholicnewsherald.com | November 19, 2021
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Archbishop José Gomez
As secular ideologies rise, proclaim the Gospel’s true path to liberation
My friends, I am sorry that I cannot be with you in person. But I am honored by your invitation to address this distinguished Congress.
You have asked me to address a serious, sensitive and complicated topic – the rise of new secular ideologies and movements for social change in the United States and the implications for the Church. And of course, I think we all understand that what the Church is facing in the United States is also happening in your country and in the countries throughout Europe, in different degrees and in different ways.
With that understanding, I want to offer my reflections today in three parts.
First, I want to talk about the wider context of the global movement of secularization and de-Christianization and the impact of the pandemic.
Second, I want to offer a “spiritual interpretation” of the new social justice and political identity movements in America.
Finally, I want to suggest some evangelical priorities for the Church as we confront the realities of the present moment.
So let’s begin.
SECULARIZATION AND DE-CHRISTIANIZATION
I think we all know that while there are unique conditions in the United States, similar broad patterns of aggressive secularization have long been at work in Spain and elsewhere in Europe.
An elite leadership class has risen in our countries that has little interest in religion and no real attachments to the nations they live in or to local traditions or cultures. This group, which is in charge in corporations, governments, universities, the media, and in the cultural and professional establishments, wants to establish what we might call a global civilization, built on a consumer economy and guided by science, technology, humanitarian values and technocratic ideas about organizing society.
In this elite worldview, there is no need for old-fashioned belief systems and religions. In fact, as they see it, religion, especially Christianity, only gets in the way of the society they hope to build.
That is important to remember. In practice, as our popes have pointed out, secularization means “deChristianization.” For years now, there has been a deliberate effort in Europe and America to erase the Christian roots of society and to suppress any remaining Christian influences.
In your program for this Congress, you allude to “cancel culture” and “political correctness.” And we recognize that often what is being canceled and corrected are perspectives rooted in Christian beliefs – about human life and the human person, about marriage, the family, and more.
In your society and mine, the “space” that the Church and believing Christians are permitted to occupy is shrinking. Church institutions and Christian-owned businesses are increasingly challenged and harassed. The same is true for Christians working in education, health care, government and other sectors. Holding certain Christian beliefs is said to be a threat to the freedoms, and even to the safety, of other groups in our societies.
One more point of context. We all noticed the dramatic social changes in our societies with the coming of the coronavirus and the way our government authorities responded to the pandemic.
I think history will look back and see that this pandemic did not change our societies
as much as it accelerated trends and directions that were already at work. Social changes that might have taken decades to play out are now moving more rapidly in the wake of this disease and our societies’ responses.
That is certainly true in the United States.
The new social movements and ideologies that we are talking about today were being seeded and prepared for many years in our universities and cultural institutions. But with the tension and fear caused by the pandemic and social isolation, and with the killing of an unarmed black man by a white policeman and the protests that followed in our cities, these movements were fully unleashed in our society.
This context is important in understanding our situation in the United States. The name George Floyd is now known worldwide. But that is because for many people in my country, myself included, his tragedy became a stark reminder that racial and economic inequality are still deeply embedded in our society.
We need to keep this reality of inequality in mind. Because these movements that we are talking about are part of a wider discussion – a discussion that is absolutely essential – about how to build an American society that expands opportunities for everyone, no matter what color their skin is or where they came from, or their economic status.
AMERICA’S NEW POLITICAL RELIGIONS
I believe the best way for the Church to understand the new social justice movements is to understand them as pseudo-religions, even as replacements and rivals to traditional Christian beliefs.
With the breakdown of the JudeoChristian worldview and the rise of secularism, political belief systems based on social justice or personal identity have come to fill the space that Christian belief and practice once occupied.
Whatever we call these movements – “social justice,” “wokeness,” “identity politics,” “intersectionality,” “successor ideology” – they claim to offer what religion provides.
They provide people with an explanation for events and conditions in the world. They offer a sense of meaning, a purpose for living, and the feeling of belonging to a
community.
Even more than that, like Christianity, these new movements tell their own “story of salvation.”
To explain what I mean, let me try to briefly compare the Christian story with what we might call the “woke” story or the “social justice” story.
The Christian story, in its simplest form, goes something like this:
We are created in the image of God and called to a blessed life in union with Him and with our neighbors. Human life has a God-given “telos,” an intention and direction. Through our sin, we are alienated from God and from one another, and we live in the shadow of our own death.
By the mercy of God and His love for each of us, we are saved through the dying and rising of Jesus Christ. Jesus reconciles us to God and our neighbors, gives us the grace to be transformed in His image, and calls us to follow Him in faith, loving God and our neighbor, working to build His Kingdom on earth, all in confident hope that we will have eternal life with Him in the world to come.
That’s the Christian story. And now more than ever, the Church and every Catholic needs to know this story and proclaim it in all its beauty and truth.
We need to do that, because there is another story out there today – a rival “salvation” narrative that we hear being told in the media and in our institutions by the new social justice movements. What we might call the “woke” story goes something like this:
We cannot know where we came from, but we are aware that we have interests in common with those who share our skin color or our position in society. We are also painfully aware that our group is suffering and alienated, through no fault of our own. The cause of our unhappiness is that we are victims of oppression by other groups in society. We are liberated and find redemption through our constant struggle against our oppressors, by waging a battle for political and cultural power in the name of creating a society of equity.
Clearly, this is a powerful and attractive narrative for millions of people in American society and in societies across the West. In fact, many of America’s leading corporations, universities and even public schools are actively promoting and teaching this vision.
This story draws its strength from the simplicity of its explanations – the world is divided into innocents and victims, allies and adversaries.
But this narrative is also attractive because it responds to real human needs and suffering. People are hurting; they do feel discriminated against and excluded from opportunities in society.
We should never forget this. Many of those who subscribe to these new movements and belief systems are motivated by noble intentions. They want to change conditions in society that deny men and women their rights and opportunities for a good life.
Of course, we all want to build a society that provides equality, freedom and dignity for every person. But we can only build a just society on the foundation of the truth about God and human nature.
This has been the constant teaching of our Church and her popes for nearly two centuries.
Emeritus Pope Benedict XVI warned that the eclipse of God leads to the eclipse of the human person. Again and again he told us: When we forget God, we no longer see the image of God in our neighbor.
Pope Francis makes the same point powerfully in “Fratelli Tutti”: Unless we believe that God is our Father, there is no reason for us to treat others as our brothers and sisters.
That is precisely the problem here.
Today’s critical theories and ideologies are profoundly atheistic. They deny the soul, the spiritual, transcendent dimension of human nature, or they think that it is irrelevant to human happiness. They reduce what it means to be human to essentially physical qualities – the color of our skin, our sex, our notions of gender, our ethnic background or our position in society.
No doubt we can recognize in these movements certain elements of liberation theology. They seem to be coming from the same Marxist cultural vision. Also, these movements resemble some of the heresies that we find in Church history.
Like the early Manicheans, these movements see the world as a struggle between the forces of good and the forces of evil. Like the Gnostics, they reject creation and the body. They seem to believe that human beings can become whatever we decide to make of ourselves.
These movements are also Pelagian, believing that redemption can be
Deacon Matthew Newsome
Captured by beauty bigger than this world
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty – that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” I first read these final words of John Keats’ poem “Ode on a Grecian Urn” in middle school. At the time I was keeping a journal of inspiring quotations, and I promptly added these lines to its pages. It’s the only quote from that journal I still remember today.
Looking back, I believe those words stayed with me because I discovered in them a religious truth, even though I was not religious at the time. The equation of truth and beauty struck me as profoundly true and therefore also profoundly beautiful. It meant there must be something beautiful about anything true, even a “harsh” truth. Likewise, there must be some truth expressed by anything beautiful. What attracts us to a sunset, a sonata, a sonnet or a lover’s sigh is more than a matter of mere aesthetics. Beauty means something.
Keats’ bold assertion is that the equation of beauty and truth is the sum and summit of knowledge; all we can know and all we need to know. Lest we think it impossible to express such sufficient wisdom in three simple words, consider that we hope to spend eternity contemplating the truth and beauty of the three words “God is love” (1 Jn 4:8).
I’ve been thinking about beauty a lot lately, especially while driving along the winding mountain roads of western North Carolina. There is a lot of beauty in an Appalachian autumn, and therefore a lot of truth. As we pray for the souls of the departed during the month of November, the fall colors remind us that God can make even death into something beautiful.
Though I’ve lived in the mountains my entire adult life, I’m still struck every day by their beauty. That’s been especially true this past year as I’ve unexpectedly taken up painting. When my wife and I escaped to the Outer Banks last January for a few child-free days, she brought along a small set of watercolors to provide us with a relaxing afternoon distraction.
I had not dabbled in visual arts since I was a teenager, but I found myself having such a delightful time as we painted our beach scenes that I’ve tried to paint at least a little each day since then. It helps me to relax, but even more than that, it has helped me to rediscover just how much beauty there is in the world.
A painting is a representation, not a replication. The goal is not to capture every small detail of your subject, but to express certain aspects in order to reflect its beauty. When you paint, you make choices to draw out a certain line, bring out certain colors or focus on a particular shape. If you want your final work to be attractive, you naturally make these choices with an eye toward the beautiful. This trains your eye to notice the beauty in whatever you are looking at, be it a person’s face, a cloud formation, a river bank or a vase of dying flowers. When you look at the world in this way, you discover there is beauty in everything.
Beauty is a poignant reminder of the truth and goodness of God. Truth, goodness and beauty are the three transcendental aspects of the divine (and the three things all sane people value most in this world). They seem distinct to us, but in God they are the same thing. Keats is correct: Beauty is truth (and goodness). It’s like when a single beam of light is split into different colors by a prism. Truth, goodness and beauty are the colors of God’s light shining on the world, and each attracts us in a different way. Truth appeals to our mind and goodness appeals to our heart, but beauty appeals directly to our soul.
“Beauty is what we notice first,” writes Catholic philosopher Peter Kreeft in his book “Wisdom of the Heart.” “It is the ambassador of truth and goodness.”
Kreeft says, “Beauty is to God what sunlight is to the sun. Beauty is God’s shining. It acts on us, not we on it.”
Art, regardless of medium, is an attempt to capture this shining of God upon creation. One reason artists often seem tragic is because this is an impossible task. You cannot capture beauty. It captures us. Beauty is bigger than this world and bigger than ourselves. This is why an encounter with beauty, whether in a sunset or a baby’s laugh, makes us forget ourselves for a while. It’s also why beauty breaks our heart even as it fills us with joy – because that joy is from another world that we haven’t arrived at yet. It’s an appetizer that leaves us hungry for more.
That God made everything good and true doesn’t surprise us. It logically follows from His nature. It would be impossible for God to create anything false or evil. But beauty surprises us every time. Beauty is less necessary even though it’s no less divine. God didn’t have to make everything beautiful – but He did, as His promise of a greater world to come.
That’s why, while God’s truth is the object of our faith and God’s goodness the object of our love, God’s beauty is the object of our hope – hope that God’s Providence, His divine plan for you, me and all creation is not only true and good, but also beautiful.
Deo gratias.
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