By JUDE DOUGHERTY
As I write in the midst of the Wuhan epidemic scare, the secular media have carried numerous stories of people being comforted by religious faith. We read of couples and families being drawn closer by their common faith as they face the epidemic.
The tone of most of these articles is condescending. One may expect such treatment, given that from a secular perspective, religion is irrational, a fetish. If it helps get you get through a troubling period, so much for its supporting value.
The denigration of religion in its modern form may date to Voltaire and to the Jacobians in the period of the French Revolution. In the twentieth century, we find Marx declaring religion to be the opium of the people, Sigmund Freud treating it as a psychotic illusion in need of treatment, and John Dewey teaching that not even biblical religion can be accepted uncritically, even as a moral guide.
The solace of prayer cannot be denied. Catholics are constantly reminded of their obligation to prayer, but not for its therapeutic value. A notable example is found in the apostolate of Fr. Patrick Peyton. Confronted with the decline of religious belief in what was formerly a Christian country, he launched a Family Rosary Crusade devoted to promoting devotion to our Lady through the daily recitation of the rosary.
Fr. Peyton, with the aid of influential friends, launched a crusade of prayer that dramatically confronted the atheism that he thought was weakening the culture of the country. The Mutual Broadcasting System (MBS) carried his radio addresses. Some may remember those addresses which commanded audiences of thousands. His best-known quotes are: “The family that prays together stays together”; “A world at prayer is a world at peace”; “Who knows what has been wrought by daily prayer.”
Fr. Peyton in the mid-decades of the last century rallied people by the hundreds of thousands in New York, San Francisco, and Rio de Janeiro. Five hundred thousand were said to have attended a rally in Sao Paulo. The MBS enabled Fr. Peyton to interview prominent figures in support of his Rosary Crusade, as diverse as President Truman, Bing Crosby, and Lucille Ball. But that is a different story, not to be told here.
I could begin with ancient notions of God and how the gods were approached in Greek and Roman times, but there is no better tutor than Thomas Aquinas, so I went directly to St. Thomas. And where does he begin, but right where I decided not to go. He finds support for what he is about to say in Aristotle, Cicero, Macrobius, and Augustine.
In II-II Questions 79-80 of the Summa Theologiae, Thomas examines the virtue of justice at length. Religion is a species of justices, but a special virtue. Other virtues are concerned with passions. Every virtue is a theological, intellectual, or moral virtue. First, it belongs to justice to establish equality in our relationship with others. A person establishes equality of justice by doing good to the other. Annexed to justice, we have gratitude which consists in recollecting the friendship and kindliness shown to us by others, and in desiring to pay them back,
The essential feature of justice is rendering another his due. Whatsoever is directed toward an end takes its goodness from the end. We pay honor and reverence toward God, not for His sake but for ours. The human mind is ordered to be united with God, but it needs to be guided by the sensible world. Wherefore, in divine worship it is necessary to make use of corporeal things that the mind may be aroused thereby. Quoting Aristotle, he says, it is not possible to make one’s parents an equal return to what is due them. Thomas will say, so too with the worship of Almighty God. Drawing upon Cicero, he notes that religion entails piety, observance, gratitude, and other acts.
Over five articles, in Question 81, Thomas inches toward a definition of justice and then applies it to God, neighbor, and community. In the first article of Question 81 he identifies four meanings of the term “religion,” but in each case, he says, it denotes a bonding to the One God.
“For it is He to whom we ought to be bound as to our unfailing principle; to whom also our choice should be absolutely directed to our last end; and to whom we neglect by sin and should recover by believing in Him and confessing our faith.” Elsewhere he says religion would seem to take its name from reading those things which pertain to the worship of God. Within the same Question he provides this insight: “God is the object of faith, not only because we believe in God, but because we Believe God.”
Religion has two kinds of acts. “Some acts are proper and immediate, for instance sacrifice and adoration. There are other acts which it produces through the medium of the virtues which it commands, for instance, to visit the fatherless and widow, and to keep oneself unspotted from the world.”
Not since John Henry Newman, perhaps, has anyone written more clearly on the subject of faith and belief than Josef Pieper in his Faith, Hope, Love. I close with his words: “The believer — in the strict sense of the word — accepts the given matter as real and true on the testimony of someone else. That is the essence of the concept of ‘belief.’ The reason for believing something is that one believes someone.”
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