Corrado Gnerre
Dear friend, I am writing to you because I have a question that I cannot resolve by myself. I am a practicing Catholic and I am convinced that Christianity must also pay attention to what happens in the life of men and therefore also make an attempt to improve the material conditions of life. But – I must confess – that it seems very strange to me to see men of the Church pour so much energy to take sides on questionable practical problems, including the issue of waste. Yet in recent times there has been much talk of a Church that should be as “spiritual” as possible.
Dear …, I want to answer your question by reminding you of what Benedict XVI said to the Roman Curia on December 21, a few years ago: “(the bishops must not) give in to the temptation to take politics personally and transform themselves from pastors into political leaders.” So, I take a cue from these words.
In the so-called post-conciliar period, much has been theorized and written against the so-called post-Constantinian Church, accusing it of having compromised itself too much with political power. The whole nouvelle theologie, daughter of theological modernism, has invoked and supported a sort of “pneumatism” of the Church. The Church – it is said over and over again – must be as “spiritual” as possible: it must not compromise itself with power, nor must it have worldly aspirations. In short, dear …, with these affirmations we wanted to attack the notion of so-called social kingship of Christ, that is the kingship of Jesus not only over souls and families, but also over rulers and states and therefore the obligation on the part of not only of souls but also of rulers and states to worship Him. I take this opportunity to remind you that there are two reasons for the rejection of the concept of Christ’s social kingship. The first is remote and pertains to the more specifically theological dimension. The second is close and concerns the dimension of the theology of history.
The remote reason refers to a kind of Gnosticization of Christianity. Gnosis implies the belief that man is a sort of “divine spark” imprisoned in a body. Man would be of the same nature as God, so man himself would have the duty to detach himself from the things of the world. But be careful: this is not necessarily a detachment in the sense of non-use. Not at all: the Gnostic can very well “enjoy” earthly goods, but it is important that he retains the intellectual conviction of their inconsistency and therefore of the fact that they cannot constitute values for the purpose of salvation. The authentically Catholic doctrine of the social kingship of Christ, on the other hand, is based on the principle that Christ can and must reign not only over spiritual realities but also over material ones, because these still have the dignity of creatures.
The proximate reason for the refusal by modernist theology of the principle of the social kingship of Christ pertains – as I have already said – to the theology of history. This is the influence of Masonic relativist thought according to which we must aspire to the realization of a world government based on “politically correct,” therefore on the conviction of the sovereignty of relative and nothingness. Catholicism, with the pretension of affirming the existence of an absolute truth (Jesus Christ) and of a single saving reality (the Church), can be allowed to the limit if reduced to the private dimension, but certainly not if it pretends to be translated into civilization.
Now, dear …, all this produces a great contradiction that is under everyone’s eyes … and also – as you said – under yours. Traditional Catholicism (that is, perennial Catholicism) on the one hand rightly aspires to the translation of the Faith into political judgment, and always aims at the realization of the value of the Societas Christiana and considers political action as an expression of the act of faith in things temporal; on the other hand it continually preserved its fundamental vocation which is to lead men to eternal salvation, pointing to mortal sin as the most serious tragedy and promoting the fundamental message which is to direct man to the Life of Grace and to conquer Paradise. Modernist Catholicism, on the other hand, expresses itself in the opposite. On the one hand it affirms that no Christian civilization should be thought of, on the other hand it overshadows the supernatural perspective and eternal salvation, placing the problems of the world before these, or even the utopian realization of a perfect society.
And so, dear …, we have the paradox that in the same environments in which it is stated that the Church should totally spiritualize itself, we focus primarily (and very often exclusively) on deeply material problems, such as: foreign debt, unemployment, to what extent migratory flows should be governed … to even get to the very important (so to speak!) problem of separate waste collection; forgetting that the only thing that matters is the conquest of Paradise: “Do not be afraid of those who kill the body and then cannot do anything else. Instead I will show you who you must fear: fear him who, after killing, has the power to throw into hell.” (Luke 12: 4-5)
(From La buona battaglia. Apologetica cattolica in domande e risposte, 2019©Chorabooks. Translated by Aurelio Porfiri. Used with permission of the publisher. All rights reserved)(Photo: São Paulo Zoo, Brazil. Wikimedia Commons/Mike Peel, www.mikepeel.net)
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