USA - In this new capacity the government conceives itself as being subject to nothing—not to the Constitution, amendments, reason, or natural law. It will not be put quite this way, but that is the effect. This is what we elected

“Where Are The Catholics?”

James V. Schall, S.J.

Is Christianity the measure of modernity or 

is modernity the measure of Christianity?

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Many writers and voices have pointed out that the present administration is by all odds the most anti-Catholic regime in this country’s history. That did not prevent some 50 percent of Catholics from voting for it. But that may be a clue about the problem. Often the leaders of those measures and decrees most against officially stated Catholic positions are formulated and carried out by those who are Catholics. Several other writers have argued that so long as these high-profile Catholics carry out anti-Catholic policies and remain in apparently good standing in the Church, many Catholics will conclude that, whatever the noise about these issues, it must be all right to be a Catholic and take positions contrary to what the bishops and Church seem to hold.

Why Catholics do not defend themselves against such attacks on their religion and their place in public life has long puzzled many sympathetic citizens. Part of the reason is that the current attacks—which revolve around marriage and family life and the proper order of one’s interior moral life—are not attacks against the faith as such. They are about what we can and should figure out from reason and natural law. Catholics are involved here not primarily because they are Catholics but because they are human beings. These issues are not what we usually call “religious” issues. It is true that, in many ways, the Church is the last public defender of the natural law and of reason itself in these areas, but that is because revelation does not replace but agrees with and heals reason when it goes wrong in its own order.

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