Why Does The Catholic Church Have to Interfere with Free Thinking?

In my opinion free thinkers are the most intellectually bound of all human beings. They will not admit to any reality which might impinge on their dogmas, whether those dogmas concern population, the climate, ecology, energy, God or whatever. They will never admit that they are wrong. This attitude is so ingrained in them that it is as if the walk through the world in galoshes and a raincoat, wearing a ski mask and blinders. It seems as if no amount of falling can convince them to change their ways.

They only be helped by the grace of God and by the truth of the Holy Catholic Church.

written by Laura Weston, widow of Deacon Michael Weston.

One of the things about Christ, about the Catholic Church particularly, is that Christ brought to us truth. Pure unabashed truth. And the depository of the truth is within the Catholic Church. And we have, historically, like I said, even back in the times of St. Paul you can read some of his letters where he is dealing with heresies, gnosticism particularly. And it goes through heresies through many forms, it all comes back to, “Who do you say that I am?”, wholly human, wholly divine. Which that within the divine there is no error, so you’re dealing with the truth.

So you get a situation where you say… Jeff says to himself, “ I believe in Christ but his divinity really appeals to me and if I am more like Christ in his divinity, I become more knowledgeable, I become more spiritual, I become more divine.

Gnositicsm. It is also in many, many of the other heresies.

So you basically have a situation where someone can say, “I am going to be more like Christ. I am going to become better.” And one of the things that you do is, if Jeff is better than everybody else, then the commandments of Christ of loving God and loving neighbor become different. You love God, but you kind of love him more on an equality basis. You go, “Hey, you and me God.” I’m special. I’m really spiritual. I’m really smart. And the commandment of loving thy neighbor becomes, “Oh yes, you may kiss my finger. I deign to love you because I am special and you will get the wonderful grace of touching me.”

Incredible heresies. But underneath that heresy, is a tendency of humanity, just like Jeff, to believe in the inherent perfectibility of humanity. We have within us the belief that we, each of us, can become perfect. Jeff can become divine, because he is so smart, because he is so handsome, whatever. And he can become better and better.

This is a thought that carries through… it carries through with Martin Luther, John Calvin, that whole group of people, the Wesleys and everybody else.

But you come into a period of time, in France particularly… well, lets go back a little bit farther. A lot of what is said in the early American fathers basically is a tendency toward that very thing. “In order to form a more perfect union.” That there are things that we on earth can do to create something that is perfect. We see that coming again in some radical writings that were Voltaire, and Rousseau in the French Revolution period of time. And you see the tremendous reaction to the Catholic Church at that period of time. There are martyrs coming out of the French Revolution. A lot of them Catholic martyrs having their heads chopped off at the guillotine.

So you get that period of time, and believe it or not, I am not just wandering. Then you get into the 19th century. In the 19th century the industrial revolution is really going fast, and there are all sorts of things, because of different intellectual structures and different abilities, for example, to measure things, to see with microscopes or telescopes, to measure temperature and everything else. The scope of human knowledge is expanding in the physical world.

There is a tendency at that point to first, believe, and you see this in some of the Jules Verne novels, he kinda makes fun of it, that we see that we are now, and it even is today, but to a lesser degree because they keep on discovering new thing. Wow! We are so smart as human beings, we can come to understand the universe. We can understand how it all works.

Now this is an area where I am excluding the engineers because the engineers are saying, “I am measuring it. How do I react with the world, measuring it, to make it work better as opposed to someone who is a fuzzy headed scientist, who says, “Oh! Now I understand the universe.” The quest for universal truth.

So you have this happening in the 19th century, particularly in Germany where it starts flowering. And then you get people like Robert. Robert is a very bright man. He knows Jeff. He is learning all of these things that Jeff is learning in the physical world. He really thinks Jeff is special. And he listens to Jeff and he goes, “That’s pretty good! Why cannot we apply that to the philosophical and physical world? How come that doesn’t apply to theology? And Robert, being a very bright person says, “It does apply to theology, and therefore using the human mind in the way they use science, and apply it to things such as philosophy and theology, those various things, you can come closer to the truth, the reality of what it is to be human and the relationship with the divine.

Again, the inherent perfectibility of humanity. That’s where you get Marx, and Hegel, Nietzsche and all of these philosophers who just drove me crazy reading them in college. They go, “Here we are!”

But because the thought processes have corollaries, if in fact you can analyze from a scientific perspective the theology, you go to Jeff and Jeff says, “I can measure the physical world and tell you what the truths are.”

Robert says, “Yeah. I can do this exact same thing.”

Robert goes to Jeff and says, “Is there such a thing as a miracle?” Jeff says, “Of course not! They don’t exist.” Robert says, “Good, now I know I have proof because Jeff is so smart that there are no miracles.”

Robert sits in his office and starts thinking. He says, “If there are no miracles then all we have is a story about Jesus. And if we really want to know who Jesus was, the first thing you do is remove all the miracles from the gospel, and then you can come to an understand of Jesus. He isn’t wholly human. He isn’t wholly divine at the same time. He is wholly human.” Ah! Heresy!

You start writing about the consequences of what does that mean. And in our situation, that brings us to Pius X. Pius X is looking at it because they are now having people like Robert saying, “We need to do scientific exploration of theology, and look at how we are coming out when we are approaching the Bible and particularly the New Testament from a scientific approach. This is coming up with some incredibly goofy ideas which again, are all heresy.

And what Pius X did and said, “Whoa, whoa, whoa. Wait a minute guys. I am in favor of Bible study. I want Bible study. I want to encourage it, but there are certain fundamental things that exist that you can’t go to. Those things by their vary nature are wrong, and if you believe them and take into your consideration of Jesus Christ, the Holy Catholic Church and the Bible, you are going to come to error. You’re going to get it wrong. And he issued the decree against Modernism which deals with exactly what I was talking about. He would take a premise where so many people would go, “Well that sounds really…. Oh, that’s really good!”

The premise, and I didn’t read it last night, in the morning it was too early, didn’t stick in my head. But the premise that, through scientific research, man can come to the truth of the physical world, he would respond, “No! Because man is not divine in himself and the physical world is part of what God created, and you cannot consider and come to an understanding of it without the consideration of the involvement of God.”

He simply went down these things. He said, “If you think about it in the context of faith, you understand these are wrong and they are leading us totally astray.

That’s what the decree on Modernism was, and he did, as the Church did later in the 1950’s, well 1960’s primarily. They came in and went into Catholic institutions. Because Robert is a great Catholic theologian who believes what Jeff is talking about, and has gotten al lot of the ideas that Jeff has and has put them in theological terms, what Pius X did is say, “Robert, to call yourself a Catholic theologian, you have to take a oath in which you disavow the following matters of Modernism. That was big deal. It was a big deal back then. It was a big deal in the sixties where the Church was coming in and saying, “We are the depository of the faith and if you believe all these things, you cannot call yourself a Catholic theologian.

‘Robert, we know you. We know you have tenure at the school. We are going to take away the right for you to call yourself a Catholic theologian. But, in recognition of your great ability, we have a daycare that the university runs for the students and the faculty, and we will allow you to teach at the daycare, but you are not to teach anything Catholic, because you are no longer a Catholic theologian.

You can imagine even now the reaction of people to the Church saying, “You can’t call yourself what you want to call yourself.” And that is a great reason why the Decree on Modernism is so reacted to. Because the Church is taking it upon themself to say we are the depository of the faith and you cannot believe these things and call yourself Catholic, especially in the role of being a teacher of Catholicism.

And that has been a controversy that exists. Richard McBrien up at Notre Dame, he has been on the edge of that for years, but it is a significant issue. And it all comes down to the issues of, “Who do you say I am and does Jesus, and does the Holy Catholic Church have the truth. That’s all this decree on Modernism is about. And the answer from the perspective of a Catholic is, “Yes He has the truth and yes, the Catholic Church has the truth.

August 19, 2019