By PAUL KRAUSE
In the midst of chaos and our increasingly graceless and loveless world we must always be on guard — especially from our own clerics — of the promotion of the false gospel of social justice. A recent Catholic school newsletter I read quoted a cleric, “God’s grace calls us not only to win back our whole selves for God, but to win back our whole world for God.” So far so good. Until the end, “We cannot separate personal conversion from structural social reform.”
That this comes in a Catholic school newsletter shouldn’t be surprising. Since the Catholic educational establishment rebelled against God’s Law and Church Truth after the promulgation of Humanae Vitae, most Catholic schools have become repositories of de facto schism and heresy. Private conscience and uprooted liberty have become the rallying cries against dogmatic moral truth. Jesuitical sophistry permeates contemporary Catholic education.
As many late in life conservatives and traditionalists acknowledge, their decades in Catholic education left them nothing more than a watered-down social gospel that amounted to help the poor and support higher taxes. In a single swoop an entire generation, now generations, of Catholics have no substantive foundation in the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic faith. Catholic schools are now ground zero for the socialization of the next generation to embrace this pseudo-creed of implicit socialism and docile progressivism.
This, too, shouldn’t be a surprise. Since the days of Plato, and then visibly seen in a radical manifestation through Rousseau, the French Revolutionaries, and John Dewey to today, education has been seen as an essential tool for instructing the young in what to believe and think.
Education, in the modern model, subtly indoctrinates students what to believe and how to behave based on the prevailing ideological zeitgeist.
So it is that many Catholic schools feed a creed of social justice, implicit socialism, and acceptance of social progressivism, into its students who are stripped of their spine in service of the gospel of nice.
The newsletter goes on to paraphrase the cleric that our faith leads to a “firm dedication” to be courageous in the face of “structural inequality” and to never “profit whatsoever from clearly unjust structures.”
Put in other words, the message is that we must be resolutely revolutionary in our opposition to free markets and capitalism and march to help actualize the managerial utopia envisioned by Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Ilhan Omar.
The false gospel of social justice is seductive because Catholics are not raised in their faith and they look to their teachers and mentors, principals and school clerics, to give them the truth of the Catholic faith. Instead, as is so frequent, they receive this watered-down theologized socialism with its veiled language of “love” and “Christ” sprinkled with holy water. After 12, 16, even 20 years of Catholic education, these new “warriors for Christ” enter the world virtually indistinguishable from an atheistic Jacobin or Bolshevik. But they do it in the name of Christ, so it must be okay.
Insofar as social structures should be reformed, they should be realigned to the moral law of God and not the prevailing liberal, Marxist, and atheistic ideal. Christ, as He commands His Apostles before the Ascension, tells them to “teach ye all nations; baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost” and to teach “them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you.”
Christ, of course, taught His disciples to observe the moral law of God. Yet for all the calls for social activism and structural reform from Catholics nowadays, who really believes that call means for us to reform abortion laws, transgender laws, and the sodomite mockery of marriage? But that’s precisely what the true social reform of laws and institutions ought to entail for disciples burning with the passion and love for Christ.
St. Gregory Nazianzus is illustrative in the real call that emanates from God’s love. In explaining the doctrine of the Holy Spirit’s impact on history, Gregory reveals the redemptive movement of God’s call in history. Firstly, we were called into existence by the Word of God, revealed to us in the account of creation and our original existence prior to the Fall. Then, as Gregory says, after the Fall we witness “two shakings of the Earth” through God’s salvific hand and our relationship to these “shakings.”
The first shaking, he points out, is our calling out of idolatry. Gregory highlights that this is the prevailing spirit of the Old Testament. Noah and his family are called out of the dark idolatry that had overwhelmed the world and his salvation and journey prefigure our own. Abraham is called out of idolatry, not to reform the social structures of idolatrous Ur Kasdim, but to become the father of a nation who will refrain from falling into the idolatry from which he was liberated.
The Israelites are liberated from the idolatry and slavery of Egypt. Routinely throughout the prophetic books, the Prophets call the people of Israel out of the idolatry in which they find themselves. The sacred history of the Old Testament, as we see, is a call out of the various idolatries that enslave us.
This calling out of idolatry reaches its climax with the Incarnation, death, and Ascension of Christ. This entails the call to conversion, repentance, and ascension as Gregory says. Christ goes before us but, as Gregory notes, in doing so Christ calls us to follow Him in His ascent to the Father. He leads the way and we follow.
The Great Commission, then, invites the nations and the peoples of the world to heed this calling and ascend through the transformative power of the Spirit. This final calling out of the world and ascension into Paradise is what Gregory calls the third and final shaking, “The Gospel also tells of the third ‘shaking,’ the change from this present state of things to what lies unmoved, unshaken, beyond.”
The true Gospel reveals these callings out of sin and idolatry, rebirth and the new life, and ascension to the Father in the path blazed by Christ. Our love and service for others is not to simply mend their material wounds as the contemporary cult of mercy reductively implies and entails; it is also to bring others with us in the pilgrimage on high.
Christ, we are told regularly, never rejected anybody. Sort of. It is true that Christ sought out all sinners. But as Christ forgave them He also commanded them to “sin no more.”
In light of the real Gospel, illuminated to us both by Tradition and Scripture (properly and systematically understood), we start to see the emptiness of the idol we must be called out of: the idol of social justice which currently enslaves us. Once called out of this idolatry we can proceed to be called up to heavenly things and conform to the ways of God and the Law of God. Here we always have Christ as our example, indeed, we must be united in Christ in this conversion to the Good, True, and Beautiful and ascend with Him to the inexhaustive abode of the celestial city of love.
That is the true Gospel, not the liberalized social justice gospel often preached today.
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