Deicide: The Ultimate Fraud
By DEACON JAMES H. TONER
“Since these people did not see fit to acknowledge God, He abandoned them to their depraved way of thinking and to all types of vile behavior” (Romans 1:28).
- + + With broken hearts and with more than a little anger, we survey the Church’s wreckage and chaos, and we ask, lugubriously, why did all this happen, and how did all this happen, and who permitted or caused all this to happen? We send our righteous slings and arrows this way and that, never certain about the chief villain or the primary target.
Of course, we know the broad sources of the evil: the world, the flesh, and the Devil. We know that “evil is not an abstraction, but refers to a person, Satan, the Evil One, the angel who opposes God” (CCC, n. 2851; cf. n. 1707), “prowling about the world, seeking the ruin of souls.” And we know that all love is disordered which apotheosizes the power, profit, and pleasure of this world (1 John 2:16), or lionizes the things and thoughts of this world, for that way lie concupiscence, covetousness, and idolatry (James 4:4; Wisdom 14:27; Hebrews 13:14).
St. Thomas Aquinas taught us well: “Agere sequitur esse” — “Doing follows being.” For well or ill, we learn “things.” Then we repeatedly do what we are; and we are what we repeatedly do. This is not merely Aristotelian; it is Sinatran as well: do-be-do-be-do. Evil thoughts lead to evil deeds, which engenders morally diseased character, and the cycle begins anew, atrophying the mind and measures of the “ethically challenged.”
This underscores the importance of the teaching of St. Irenaeus: “Our way of thinking is attuned to the Eucharist, and the Eucharist in turns confirms our way of thinking” (CCC, n. 1327). So we hope. So we pray.
But the moral and mental disorders of the world, the flesh, and the devil — the suzerains of our day — emanate from a common pollution, one that St. Paul warned us about: “The god of this age has blinded the minds of unbelievers, so that they cannot see the light of the Gospel that displays the glory of Christ, who is the image of God” (2 Cor. 4:4).
As Wisdom teaches: “We all know that people can be so fascinated by evil that they cannot recognize what is good even when they are looking right at it” (4:12; cf. 2:21, 13:1).
The failure to know, love, and serve God results in the crucifixion of truth, goodness, and beauty and their replacement by fraud. That word, I know, seems, well, too “mild” to refer to the wellspring of evil. But fraud, the dictionary tells us, is “a person or thing intended to deceive others, typically by unjustifiably claiming or being credited with accomplishments or qualities.”
Broadly understood, fraud is at the heart of many of our theological crises — and crises, also, in medicine, education, the law, and the arts. Every vocation, profession, or trade has its cardinal principles. Priests save souls; doctors heal bodies; teachers educate; lawyers counsel and represent clients; artists inspire and entertain.
Beyond the foundational reasons for the existence of the profession, there may be legitimate difference of opinion about the means and methods used in pursuit of the traditional ends of that profession. Teachers, for instance, might disagree about the value or kinds of testing they prefer, and physicians might debate the best regimen to follow in order to alleviate suffering.
The commonality of massive fraud is a key event of recent history. The very nature and purpose of vocations, professions, and trades are under siege. Some priests are social justice warriors; some doctors kill babies; some teachers offer morally warped lessons; some lawyers repudiate justice; some artists deal in raw filth. Thus the primordial reason for the existence of these pursuits and professions is not merely abandoned but betrayed. What is practiced or produced, then, is sheer fraud.
We are left with a corps of hucksters, swindlers, and knaves who have substituted making money, or gaining popularity or prestige, or promoting evil for the honorable principles, purposes, and practices of their profession. St. Paul, by vivid contrast, teaches: “For the appeal we make does not spring from error or impure motives, nor are we trying to trick you” (1 Thess. 2:3).
The parade of professions is much too often a grotesque masquerade. The practitioners have embraced the blandishments of a fallen and secular world, rejecting the historical and moral raisons d’etre for their vocations. They are fraudulently motivated, for they worship and fear, not God, but the idols of the day; they are frauds because they substitute their own tawdry goals for the natural law; and they commit fraud because they give us — their parishioners, their patients, or their pupils — the stones of nihilism and death instead of the bread of belief and life.
These frauds have driven our Lord from our lives. They have disparaged or denied all that is holy because holiness is intolerable to them (cf. Wisdom 2). There is, for these frauds, no superior and transcendent moral code, for there is no transcendent and superior Being.
There is, they think, no point or purpose to Christianity, for it impedes the charade and bids the orgy stop. “If Christianity goes,” T.S. Eliot told us, “the whole of our culture goes. Then you must start painfully again. . . . You must pass through many centuries of barbarism.” Already in 1948, Eliot had prophesied that “more and more [we are] abandoning the study of those subjects by which the essentials of our culture…are transmitted; [we are] destroying our ancient edifices to make ready the ground upon which the barbarian nomads of the future will encamp in their mechanized caravans.”
Fifty-seven years after Eliot’s death, the full future of the fraud he descried is aggressively here.
“Take care, brethren, lest there be in any of you an evil, unbelieving heart, leading you to fall away from the living God,” warned the author of Hebrews (3:12; 12:25). But, once again, we have committed deicide, for we have killed God, fraudulently replacing Him with masquerading monsters who offer us poisoned candy instead of Holy Communion. The tragedy is that we look forward to the fraudulent, and morally lethal, treat — failing to understand that deicide is suicide.