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How We Build It
Presented to:
Christ the King Banquet
Christ the King Festivities of the New Christendom
Bishop Fabian Bruskewitz, S.T.D.
November 18, 2000
I am deeply honored indeed to be asked to give this talk to all of you gathered here for the 2000 Christ the King Festivities, who are interested in and participants in the building of a New Christendom. I am happy to present my ideas in response to the question and the assertion, "How we build it", depending in great measure upon the inspiring words and teaching of our present Holy Father, Pope John Paul II, over more than two decades.
There are a variety of factors, in my view, that are necessary either as a preliminary groundİbreaking activity, or as an actual accumulation of appropriate construction material that a New Christendom might be erected.
I personally have had the great privilege of hearing Pope Paul VI speak often about a new civilization of love, and I think, that the two, a New Christendom and a new civilization of love, certainly can be a dual name for the same reality. The building project to construct a New Christendom requires first, a renewed and deepened understanding on the part of those working in this project of the spiritual dimension of humanity, and this understanding must then, be extended in the largest way possible to the larger portion of humanity which has no interest in, or concern about, the construction of the New Christendom.
The second undertaking must be a grasp of the supernatural order on the part of those involved in the project, its gratuitous nature, and how Christ must, if there is to be a Christendom, stand at the center of each human being's personal history as well as the history of the human race on the planet.
The third necessity, in my view, is a strengthened and renewed sense of docility, particularly to the Church and to those who have been entrusted with the custody of Divine Revelation within that Church.
The fourth need is to place into the proper perspective the relationship of freedom and truth and the interplay between those two vital qualities.
Finally, I would like to speak about a series of obstacles that are likely to impede the success of those who are undertaking to build a New Christendom.
First then, to speak about the spiritual dimension of humanity is, in some ways, extraordinarily difficult today. Both the information and entertainment media, as well as the predominant philosophical and ideological outlook, tend to see humanity as a purposeless and goal-less product of a biological evolution. This being done in a blind and materialistic way has no known future: man is nothing more than one of the higher primates who is existing for no discernable reason. Therefore, pleasure, the acquisition of power and possessions are able in this perspective to be the ultimate goals of a human person, and as a result, the whole spiritual dimension is seriously diminished. Beauty, Goodness, and Truth are not essential qualities of man's being, and, as a matter of fact, are considered by many people today as simply evolving qualities which, in a relativistic perspective can be changed 180 degrees. Therefore, what is true or good or beautiful today can be considered bad, or ugly, or false tomorrow. Without a spiritual dimension in one's ideological perspective, it is impossible to see any such thing as objective truth, or moral absolutes. The rational part of the definition of a human being as a rational animal is open, without understanding the intellect as a dimension, along with free will of the spiritual nature of a human being to be nothing more than an externally stimulated piece of meaningless brain matter.
Even people who agree about the existence of an immortal soul, will sometimes have grave doubts about what they agree to, and will have, of course, a distorted perspective of what the spiritual realities really are. We, who profess in our Creed every Sunday that we believe in a God, Who not only created visible things, but also invisible, must insist and prove with every logical tool at our command, that that which is material is only an horizon which is the limit of our vision, and that if we have that vision which is given to us by our human reason, and even more so by our faith, we can see an invisible world that is every bit as real as external and materialistic reality grasped by the perspective of our senses.
To build a new Christendom also requires, I believe, an understanding of a supernatural order, and this requires that we place Christ in the center of all of Divine Revelation: the center of Sacred Scripture, the center of Sacred Tradition, and consequently, the center of each life, and the center of the human enterprise. The Church as the extension of Christ in time and place as His Bride and His Body, shares this centrality. To understand the supernatural order in its gratuitous aspects and to understand the supernatural order as beyond the capacity of human beings to grasp, it is necessary to accept with the appropriate obedience of faith, that which revelation tells us, principally the story of the creation, the elevation, and the fall of the human race in its primordial stages, and consequent upon that, the realities of sin and grace, and most important, the reality of Redemption.
If a person were to accept the spiritual dimension of humanity and to understand and accept the existence of the supernatural order, it follows as a logical consequence that such a person must then live a life of profound humility which virtue must include a docility to the teaching authority of the Church which Christ founded. So in addition to the first two points of the spiritual dimension and the supernatural order, I would include the necessity of being docile as the central point in the construction of the New Christendom. Docility to the Church does not mean an abdication of our own understanding, reasonable and logical conclusions, nor does it mean any repudiation of our learning derived from experience. Most important, I think, it is necessary to emphasize that it does not mean any retreat from what the Second Vatican Council appropriately called, the lay vocation which is the sanctification of the temporal order. As a matter of fact, docility to the Church, her teaching authority or Magisterium, must be understood in that perspective. It is not the duty of priests or bishops or religious to sanctify the temporal order; that is, the order of family life, politics, social interactions, labor, management, commerce, industry, agriculture, the secular professions, and the like. It is lay people who have not only the right, but the obligation to bring Christ into those parts of human endeavor. It is the duty, of course, of the clerical order and religious communities to animate, inspire, and to touch with the supernatural dimension of human life on our planet, every aspect of profane and secular undertakings. However, it is lay people who must be leaders in this great work of sanctifying the temporal order. And done then, in a spirit of docility, but in a spirit that does not allow docility to be a cloak for inertia or sloth or cowardice.
The successful construction of a New Christendom that will not be subjected to easy foundational or structural undermining, requires also, in my view, a particular understanding of the relationship of freedom and truth. In our country, and because we are in the United States the predominant superpower of the world, freedom is always understood as a paramount value. Our soldiers are said to struggle and fight, sometimes die, to preserve our freedom. Unfortunately, however, in our country and in other parts of the world, freedom is mistakenly understood to be an ability to do whatever one desires or wants. That is not freedom. Freedom is certain liberty from some kinds of external coercion, but we are never truly "liberated" from that which is the truth. If we attempt to unhinge ourselves from the truth, then we are in effect forfeiting freedom and entering a situation of slavery.
Slavery can be of
different varieties. There are those who are slaves to intellectual error. A
child who thinks that 7+7=15, is not free. That child is a slave to an error,
and because of that slavery, that child's entire mathematical enterprise will
be a journey down the road to greater and greater error. In another
perspective, many people today who believe they are free, are actually enslaved.
They are slaves to hormones, to a vast variety of manipulative procedures many
of them unconsciously chaining them without their even knowing it. People can
also be slaves to fashion, to public opinion, the opinions of others, and the
like. If the point I mentioned of an understanding of
the supernatural order is taken into account. It can be easily seen, how
perduring effects of original sin, even after that sin is eliminated, allows the
effects, namely concupiscence to remain in human hearts, and so human beings can
become slaves to some very base urges that distort and confuse the idea of true
liberty and genuine freedom.
In many of his encyclical letters, Pope John Paul II, our Holy Father, has spoken quite eloquently of how freedom without truth is a serious distortion as is truth without freedom. This misunderstanding can loom as one of the serious impediments to an appropriate construction of a New Christendom. They who are engaged in this construction must always understand the value of freedom and the value of truth and their relationship to one another. Such people must also accept certain epistimological premises; namely, that there is such a thing as truth, that truth is attainable, and that once attained it must be rejoiced in and shared with others, and that if our passions form our fetters, (to use the words of Edmund Burke) we are destined not to be free. Addictions are not only narcotics and certain kinds of beverages and activities, but addictions can also be of a subtle and invisible type that chain and enslave human beings in countless ways.
To make a New Christendom then, means a strong dedication and devotion to truth. This involves, then, for those who are in this project, the determination to seek truth in its fullness, as hat which is revealed to us by the teachings of Jesus Christ, and beyond that to see the truth in its fullness in the very person of Christ Himself. This Divine Person, with both a human and a divine nature, declared that He was the Truth. He told Pontius Pilate, despite Pilate's sarcastic question, that this is why He was born and came into the world, to bear witness to the Truth. If people with a worldly outlook claim they are searching for the truth, the construction of a New Christendom will depend on the eloquent ability of those in the project to proclaim that Christ, then, is what they are looking for, and that He and His teaching occupy the center stage which goes by the name of Truth. In his encyclical letter, Faith and Reason, the Holy Father wrote the following, "In the encyclical letter, The Splendor of Truth, I wrote that many of the problems of the contemporary world stem from a crisis of truth. I noted that once the idea of a universal truth bout the good, noble life of reason is lost, inevitably the notion of conscience also changes. Conscience is no longer considered in its prime reality, as an act of a person's intelligence, the function of which is to apply the universal knowledge of the good in a specific situation, and thus, to express a judgment about the right conduct to be chosen here and now. Instead, there is a tendency to grant to the individual conscience the prerogative of independently determining the criteria of good and evil, and then acting accordingly. Such an outlook is quite congenial to an individualist ethic, wherein each individual is faced with his own truth, different from the truth of others."
Those who are constructing an engineering project, a bridge, a large building, etc, must continually take into account, those elements which may be confronted by this object; wind velocity, seismic situation of the place of location, and similar considerations. Therefore, those who are in the construction of a New Christendom should, I think, take into take into very clear account the impediments and obstacles, orat least, the opposition that might be confronted.
In the encyclical, Faith and Reason (Fides et Ratio), the Pope lists four major impediments which serve as a warning to those engaged in the construction of a New Christendom. To a proper understanding of the relationship of faith and reason, as well as the relationship of philosophy to theology. "The first," he says, "goes by name of eclecticism, by which," he says, "is meant the approach of those who would in research teaching and argumentation, even in theology, tend to use individual ideas drawn from different philosophies without concern for their internal coherence, their place within a system, or their historical context. They, therefore, run the risk of being unable to distinguish the part of truth of a given doctrine, from elements of it which may be erroneous or ill-suited to the task at hand. An extreme form of eclecticism appears also in the rhetorical misuse of philosophical terms. Such manipulation does not help in the search for truth, nor does it train reason to formulate arguments, serious and scientifically."
I think the example I like to use which was offered to me some time ago by anold farmer who said it is always useful to remember that rat poison is 90% good,wholesome, and nourishing food; it is the 10% of the arsenic in the mixture that does the killing. We have, I think, to understand that in relationship to the new declaration of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith which has been completely and totallysupported quite vocally by our Holy Father, called the Lord Jesus, Dominus Jesus. Inspeaking about the uniqueness of Jesus as the only Means of salvation and of the Church which is His extension in time and place.
The Pope next speaks about something called historicism which he says is often hidden in eclecticism. This is a thought-pattern which implicitly, at least, denies the enduring validity of truth, and, therefore, is a type of relativism, saying that what is true in one period may not be true in another. Occasionally, historicism can be motivated by a desire to use recent opinions in philosophical language and findings of modern science, as well as inventions of modern technology to reach people with the truth. But the inherent danger, of course, is that there will be a kind of supercilious and overweening pride which makes it appear that one period in history, namely our own, is superior to others in regard to the grasp of truth, and in regard to the supernatural reality of salvation.
Another obstacle which the Pope points out, and which I would certainly say is serious danger to the construction of the New Christendom, is what he calls scientism.. He says, "This is the philosophical notion which refuses to admit the validity of forms of knowledge other than those of the positive sciences, and it relegates religious, theological, ethical, and aesthetic knowledge to the realm of mere fantasy. In the past the past this idea emerged in positivism and neo-positivism."
The work of a New Christendom, to inculcate into humanity an understanding of the spiritual dimension of the human race, and to bring to others an acceptance of theexistence of the supernatural order with its accompanying docility to the Magisterium of the Church, and with its clarity in discerning the relationship of truth and freedom will be utterly frustrated if scientism is allowed to take the question of the meaning of human life and place it in the realm of the irrational and the imaginary. From a moral point of view, of course, which is very acutely discussed today, scientism will also teach that whatever is possible is therefore moral to do, and as a consequence, particularly in medical technology and in matters pertaining to life issues, and to the ante-road to life, that is to say, sexual morality, scientism constitutes a particularly grave danger.
The Pope then goes on to talk about pragmatism which in making choices preclude theoretical considerations or judgments based on ethical principles. With special relevance to our own situation, the Pope says, "In particular, there is growing support for a concept of democracy which is not grounded upon any reference to unchanging values, whether or not a line of action is admissible is decided by the vote of a parliamentary majority. The consequences of this are clear. In practice the great moral decisions of humanity are subordinated to the decisions taken one after another by institutions or agencies. Moreover, anthropology itself, is severely compromised by one dimensional vision of a human being, a vision which excludes the great ethical dilemmas, the existential analysis of the meaning of suffering and sacrifice, of life and death."
Finally the Pope points out that unless these impediments and obstacles are overcome, our human race faces the dreadful philosophical outlook of nihilism. I think that the Columbine massacres are an illustration of what will be the consequence of nihilism. This is why, particularly, I see a dreadful and awesome urgency in the work of constructing a New Christendom, so that we are not overtaken by the negation of allobjective truth, and to the circumstances which would reduce the human family, as the Pope points out, to either a destructive will to power or a tragic solitude without any hope.
If then we are to
build a New Christendom, and we are to do this by means of placing into human
conscientiousness a renewed understanding of the spiritual dimension of
humanity, an acceptance in the obedience of faith of the supernatural order with
Christ as the center of all human history and each individual person's history
with a humble grasp and practice of docility to the Church which speaks in the
name of Christ Who said, "He who hears you, hears Me", with the ability to
confront and overcome the obstacles and impediments that make the construction
of a New Christendom morecomplicated, and to live personally and to bring into
the lives of others a correct understanding of the interaction and relationship
of freedom and truth, it will be necessary for the construction crew to have in
their possession the gifts of the Holy
Spirit: In our time in a special way, the gift of Fortitude, valor and courage
are particularly needed because of the inevitable misunderstanding of the
intentions of those who see the importance of the common good, of those who
question the utter andabsolute autonomy of each individual, and those who are
daring enough to struggle against the spirit of the times which is so alien and
foreign to Christ and His truth, and the Spirit of Wisdom to see things from
God's perspective and to be able to understand that it a person who is truly
wise, accepts and welcomes truth and lives by its precepts.
I often like to tell the story of the priest who happened upon three men in the middle ages who were all doing the same task. He asked the first what he was doing and he said, "I am cutting stone." He asked the second what he was doing and he answered, "I am earning 3 ducats a day." He asked the third who replied, "I am building a cathedral." I think we must ask ourselves as we go about our everyday business, what exactly we are doing, and do we see what we are doing in this work of constructing a New Christendom as constructing a cathedral of lasting and nobel beauty for God's glory and the salvation of souls.
Finally, it is vital that we look on our enterprise in its true and integral perspective, which is to say, something that is ultimately of God, and only in a secondary and instrumental way our doing. The psalmist's words are particularly vital for all of us ever to keep in mind, "Unless the Lord builds the house, those who build it, labor in vain. Unless the Lord guards the city, those who guard it, guard it in vain." Prayer and the eloquence of our own personal convictions will sometimes be able to accomplish far more than our own feeble efforts could do. St. John the Baptist says in the Gospel that God can make children of Abraham out of the stones, and He certainly can do whatever He is pleased to accomplish. It should be our prayer that He makes us a little less unworthy to be the channels of His grace and the instruments of His pleasure. As was said with great vehemence and great eloquence at the beginning of the great movement we call the Crusades, "God wills it!" May this, then, be what inspires our labor and our work to build a New Christendom, and to ascertain how this is to be built. God wills it!
Thank you.
