By CHRISTOPHER MANION
This past November, Archbishop José Gómez of Los Angeles, president of the USCCB, gave a video address the Congress of Catholics and Public Life in Madrid. His topic: “The Rise of New Secular Ideologies and Movements for Social Change in the United States and the Implications for the Church.” His remarks focused on “the wider context of the global movement of secularization and de-Christianization and the impact of the pandemic.”
His bold condemnation of the “spirit of the age” in the Western World was simply stunning.
“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,” he said.
“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.”
Is this the same archbishop who presides over the USCCB, whose bureaucracy has for years been in the thrall of the very mentality he is criticizing?
He continues:
“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.”
As a result, “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.”
His listeners have discussed the “cancel culture” and “political correctness” during their meeting, he observes. “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.”
Spot on. The “cancelers” are targeting the fundamental truths so clearly and beautifully expressed in Humanae Vitae.
“In your society and mine, the ‘space’ that the Church and believing Christians are permitted to occupy is shrinking….Holding certain Christian beliefs is said to be a threat to the freedoms, and even to the safety, of other groups in our societies.”
In the past two years, Gómez observes, “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 [Who “prepared” them? We wonder, what is this enemy’s name?]. This pandemic did not change our societies as much as it accelerated trends and directions that were already at work.”
Correct. The Left has seized on Rahm Emanuel’s “never let a crisis go to waste” and doubled down on its efforts to control our lives, brand the majority of Americans as terrorists and extremists, close down our churches as “nonessential,” and sundered the limits imposed by the Constitution, all to guarantee their permanent post-pandemic power.
The Perils Of
Secular Religions
Gómez goes on to “offer a ‘spiritual interpretation’ of [these] new social justice and political identity movements.” He called them “America’s New Political Religions.”
Echoing political philosopher Eric Voegelin, who branded Germany’s National Socialism as an “Ersatz Religion” eighty years ago, Gómez says that “the best way for the Church to understand the new social justice movements is to understand them as pseudo-religions, and even replacements and rivals to traditional Christian beliefs.”
“With the breakdown of the Judeo-Christian 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.”
These systems have various names: “social justice,” “wokeness,” “identity politics,” “intersectionality,” “successor ideology” — but they all “claim to offer what religion provides,” he says.
The archbishop’s Spanish listeners must have been scratching their heads as they watched the president of the USCCB describing the ideological contamination that has infested America’s elites, including a significant portion of its Catholic hierarchy, for the past 50 years.
He continues:
“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’.”
“What we might call the ‘woke’ story goes something like this,” he says:
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.
No doubt that we can recognize in these movements certain elements of liberation theology, they seem to be coming from the same Marxist cultural vision.
The Hispanic President of the USCCB is condemning the Marxist errors of liberation theology — including America’s version of it. Remarkable.
In Defense Of The Human — And The Divine
“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.”
He likens some of these errors to those occurring in “the heresies that we find in Church history,” he writes, mentioning the Manichees, the Pelagians, and the Arians.
Continuing: “These movements are Utopian. They seem to really believe that we can create a kind of ‘heaven on earth,’ a perfectly just society, through our own political efforts.”
“Again my friends, my point is this: I believe that it is important for the Church to understand and engage these new movements — not on social or political terms, but as dangerous substitutes for true religion.”
Is the archbishop condemning “social justice” as a political religion, even though many of its advocates call it “Catholic”?
“In fact,” he continues, “as we are witnessing in my country, these strictly secular movements are causing new forms of social division, discrimination, intolerance, and injustice.”
“What is to be done? My answer is simple. We need to proclaim Jesus Christ. We should not be intimidated by these new religions of social justice and political identity. The Gospel remains the most powerful force for social change that the world has ever seen.”
“The world does not need a new secular religion to replace Christianity. It needs you and me to be better witnesses. Better Christians. Let us begin by forgiving, loving, sacrificing for others, putting away spiritual poisons like resentment and envy.”
“That does not mean we remain passive in the face of social injustice. Never! But we do need to insist that fraternity cannot be built through animosity or division. True religion does not seek to harm or humiliate, to ruin livelihoods or reputations. True religion offers a path for even the worst sinners to find redemption.”
Archbishop Gómez’s remarks have received little attention since November. Indeed, many undoubtedly pray that they will be quickly forgotten. But his analysis pulls back the curtain powerfully and profoundly on the intellectual and religious errors that infect our own times. We are grateful to His Excellency and in coming weeks we will be prayerfully examining his remarks in this space.
Powered by WPtouch Mobile Suite for WordPress