David Carlin: Catholic young people have generally abandoned the ancient teaching of their religion as to the sinfulness of homosexual practice.

A few weeks ago my wife and I spent an afternoon with some old friends, a retired couple who had just come back from their winter home in Florida.  The wife of this couple told us a story from her childhood that reminded me of the glory days of American Catholicism.

She grew up in a small town in Massachusetts, not far from Fall River. She went to a Catholic school in the 1950s. The nuns told their students about the Church’s early martyrs, saintly Christians who, rather than renounce their faith, consented to being killed by hungry lions in the Flavian Amphitheater. These martyrs immediately went to Heaven, where they met Jesus and commenced to enjoy eternal bliss. The blood of martyrs is the seed of the Church.

This was in the 1950s, at the height of the Cold War. And so the nuns, not content with giving edifying history lessons, reminded their charges that the need for Christian heroism had not vanished with the conversion of Rome to Christianity. The nuns gave their pupils a thought-provoking hypothetical.  Let’s suppose the Communists take over America, and let’s further suppose they confront you and other Catholic school-kids with the horrible option: “Renounce your faith or be shot dead.”

What will you boys and girls do?  You know what the right thing would be.  But will you have the courage to do the right thing when the moment arrives?  Will your faith be strong enough?

Our friend told us that this question provoked a great deal of anxiety in her child’s soul. Would she have the courage needed to become a martyr?  Or would her courage fail her?  Would her faith not be strong enough?  The question tormented her.

After weeks of mental suffering, she finally ended the torment by resolving: “When the moment comes, I will save my life by renouncing the faith.”  After making that decision, her mental torment vanished.

Well, the Commies never took over Massachusetts.  (Of course, some of my conservative friends will dispute that.)  Our friend remains a church-going Catholic to this day.  My guess is that God has long since forgiven her for her moment of weakness.

A hundred years ago the de-Christianization of Russia advanced with the help of guns pointed at Christian heads. But the present-day de-Christianization of America advances nonviolently. No guns are used, only persuasion and seduction.

For example, June was “Pride Month” – a month during which the nation, with something very close to unanimity, celebrated the goodness of all of the following: homosexuality and homosexual practice (both male and female), bisexuality, transgenderism, queerness (whatever that means), and a potentially unlimited number of other deviations from the traditional Christian idea of sexual propriety.

At least it seemed to be a virtually unanimous celebration of LGBTQ+.  I heard few if any dissenting voices (apart from the voice in my own head).  Major business corporations celebrated, TV networks celebrated, colleges and universities celebrated, the mainstream media celebrated, Silicon Valley celebrated, the NBA celebrated, major league baseball celebrated, and, perhaps most notable of all, President Biden (America’s second Catholic president) celebrated.  U.S. embassies around the world displayed the rainbow flag, and every big city in America had a PRIDE parade.  (I myself have seen two of these parades, one in Cleveland, the other in Louisville.  I confess that they entertained me even while they offended my moral conscience.  “This is bad,” I said to myself, “but it’s fun.”)

Just as Communism and Nazism were non-theistic “religions,” so LGBTQ-ism has become something of a non-theistic religion, providing meaning and purpose to the lives of many Americans (and not just Americans). What’s more, it is a missionary religion; it seeks converts, just as Christianity and Islam seek converts.

How does it win these converts?  In two ways.

In one way, by seduction. If a teenage kid has his or her first sexual experiences with a somewhat older person of the same sex, and if he/finds these experiences intensely pleasurable, there is a good chance that he/she will become addicted to such homosexual experiences – much the way young persons who “experiment” with strong opiates often become drug addicts.  This addiction to homosexual sex is especially likely if the young person has an antecedent leaning in that direction.

Hence, even though the official position of the LGBTQ+ movement is that gays and lesbians are not sexually interested in underage boys and girls, the fact is that many homosexuals are sexually interested in underage kids, and many act on that interest. A frequent theme of homosexual fiction is early same-sex experience. Many kids become addicted to this unnatural love and pretending they don’t know what really happened. They convince themselves that they were “born that way.”

The other mode of winning converts (and this is perhaps the more important mode) is by way of persuasion.  And so the LGBTQ+ movement has for some years now promoted a tremendous propaganda campaign urging, not just toleration, but strong approval of the conduct symbolized by the letters LGBTQ.  And not just approval, but strong disapproval of anybody who dissents, condemning such dissenters as moral reprobates.

Joining the LGBTQ+ movement in this propaganda campaign have been major corporations, colleges and universities, public schools, Hollywood, the entertainment industry generally, the mainstream media, liberal churches and synagogues, and the Democratic Party. As a result of all this, it’s now relatively fashionable (“cool”) among many young persons to “identify” as something other than strictly heterosexual, and it is almost universally un-cool to disapprove of such deviations.

Catholic young people have generally abandoned the ancient teaching of their religion as to the sinfulness of homosexual practice – and since these young people are more or less logical, this renunciation of one part of the faith will eventually lead to the renunciation of the entire faith.

American Catholicism, I fear, is like that building in Miami.  It’s on the verge of collapse.  Without a shot being fired.  Without lions.  No blood of martyrs.

COLUMN BY

David Carlin

David Carlin is a retired professor of sociology and philosophy at the Community College of Rhode Island, and the author of The Decline and Fall of the Catholic Church in America.

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EDITORS NOTE: This The Catholic Thing column is republished with permission. © 2021 The Catholic Thing. All rights reserved. For reprint rights, write to: info@frinstitute.org. The Catholic Thing is a forum for intelligent Catholic commentary. Opinions expressed by writers are solely their own.

The role Catholics played in America’s formative struggles is often overlooked.

America’s “sweet land of liberty” of “pilgrims’ pride” and Plymouth Rock has historically had a Protestant-majority understanding of “our father’s God.” But Catholics also revered this “author of liberty.”

These “noble free” made leading contributions to “freedom’s holy light” in the American Revolution, as Catholic author Dan LeRoy reveals in an important new book, Liberty’s Lions: The Catholic Revolutionaries Who Established America.

Catholics were a small minority in colonial America. “Common estimates suggest between 1.2 and 1.6 percent of colonists were Catholic,” LeRoy notes.  “In a nation of 2.5 million people, that amounted to between 30,000 and 40,000 Catholics.”

Nonetheless, LeRoy documents that this tiny minority attracted “vehement anti-Catholicism” amid a Protestant majority shaped by Britain’s wars of religion and empire. Take the example of Maryland.

Founded in 1634 under a charter given by the Anglican king Charles I to the Catholic Lord Baltimore, the colony “was an experiment in religious tolerance.” Given a mixed Catholic-Protestant population, the Maryland assembly in 1649 passed the Act Concerning Religion, or Toleration Act, in 1649. This “guaranteed freedom of conscience to all Christians, the first legal promise of tolerance in American or British history.”

Yet the Protestant tide ultimately turned against Catholics even in Maryland in 1704 with laws like the Act to Prevent the Growth of Popery. The legislation forbade “priests from offering Mass or baptizing anyone who is not Catholic—i.e., conversions are forbidden. ‘Papists’ are barred from teaching—even their own children,’” LeRoy writes. In 1718, Catholics also lost voting rights.

Catholics’ taste of freedom in Maryland nevertheless made a lasting impact. The Toleration Act had briefly guaranteed Catholics freedoms they had not legally enjoyed in Britain. “It forever put Maryland on a separate path from the Crown,” LeRoy observes. “One day, that path would lead to revolution—not just in Maryland, but throughout the colonies.”

In Maryland, the center of American colonial Catholicism, LeRoy focuses on the patriots of the Carroll family, particularly Charles Carroll who “[f]or many years was the most prominent and influential Catholic in America. He was certainly the richest—possibly the richest man in the colonies, period,” and “the only Catholic to sign the Declaration of Independence.”

On July 4, 1776, this document proclaimed that “all men are created equal,” yet Carroll “usually owned between three hundred and four hundred slaves, who worked on his plantations and in the family ironworks in Baltimore,” LeRoy notes. Like other Founding Fathers, Carroll embodied America’s original sin of slavery, which also was a “particular, and particularly shameful, failing of Catholics,” a flagrant violation of Catholic Magisterium teaching on human dignity. LeRoy observes:

The history of American Catholicism, which is rooted in places such as Maryland and Louisiana, is inextricably tied to slavery. From the Jesuit plantations to the estates of the landed gentry, slaves played a major role in advancing the fortunes of Catholics in the South.

Like other Founding Fathers, Carroll’s conscience struggled with slavery. “As a Maryland legislator, Carroll made multiple, unsuccessful attempts to gradually emancipate all slaves in the state,” LeRoy notes. Additionally, Carroll’s “record as a slave owner is relatively humane and consistent with his ideals,” but he still left largely unfulfilled his various proposals to use his enormous wealth to free his slaves.

Conflicts over freedom and slavery concerned not just America, but the wider world, in which most allies of the American Revolution were Catholic. LeRoy in his extensive analysis of the revolution’s often underappreciated international dimensions delves deep into the biographies of famous foreigners like the French general, the Marquis de Lafayette. He “had been deeply moved by the plight of the slaves he saw in America and bought a plantation in Cayenne, French Guiana, with the goal of freeing its slaves,” LeRoy notes.

Poles like Casimir Pulaski, who revolutionized the American cavalry, similarly fought for American freedom while losing their own homeland to European empires. Like Lafayette, Thaddeus Kościuszko, whose engineering brilliance shone at the decisive 1777 Battle of Saratoga, could not forget the slaves in the United States after securing its independence. He wanted to use backpay owed him by the new American government to free as many slaves as possible of Thomas Jefferson, the declaration’s lead author.

One of America’s greatest allies, Marshal Jean-Baptiste Donatien de Vimeur, the Comte de Rochambeau, almost became a priest before, at age 15, his older brother died, leaving Rochambeau to carry on the family’s military legacy.

This commander of the expeditionary force France dispatched to America after France entered the war against Britain in 1778 “had been training faithfully for the priesthood since he was six,” LeRoy writes. “After turning his sights from the priesthood to the battlefield, Rochambeau assembled a distinguished thirty-year military career” and became an “international hero.”

Rochambeau’s religious training showed, LeRoy notes, for “while many upper-class Frenchmen, like Lafayette, paid only lip service to Catholicism, Rochambeau apparently took his faith far more seriously. …

“Like George Washington, he made it a point to insist on regular church services for his men. Both men believed this was important not only for instilling discipline but also as a way of ensuring God’s favor,” LeRoy adds. Moreover, Rochambeau’s “simple but effective principles—troops needed to be both well-trained and well-supplied—won him the loyalty of his men, who affectionately called him ‘Papa.’”

Washington’s behavior both as wartime commander and president reflected the outlook of this Anglican on faith in a free society. “Washington believed government could, and sometimes should, support religion—if there was a legitimate civic reason to do so,” namely the “need for encouraging moral behavior,” LeRoy notes. Washington’s “latitudinarianism” brooked no prejudice, as demonstrated by his prohibition among his soldiers of Pope’s Night, where pope effigies were burned in the American version of England’s Guy Fawkes Day. “Catholics would remember well Washington’s leadership,” LeRoy observes, for Washington “welcomed troops of all races and faiths.”

The same principle yielded enormous dividends when George Rogers Clark led a small militia force to take Illinois from the British in 1778-1779. Britain had won the territory from France at the conclusion of the Seven Years War in 1763, and reports indicated to Clark that the region’s few French settlers had little love for the British.

After taking Kaskaskia in what is now Illinois on July 5, 1778, Clark told Father Pierre Gibault, a Montreal-born priest who served frontier Catholic communities, that the “United States makes no war on any man’s religion.” Thus assured, the French Catholics followed Gibault in pledging allegiance to America and gave Clark a largely bloodless victory.

LeRoy’s broad cast of characters bring to life the significant yet often overlooked role that Catholics played in America’s formative struggles. On his pages overlapping conflicts between Catholics and Protestants, blacks and whites, slaves and masters, play out as patriots fight for freedom in America and Europe while rival empires intrigue.

Yet, miraculously, a mustard seed of freedom took root and grew in American soil, which makes LeRoy’s book all the more worthwhile to read.

Andrew E. Harrod

Andrew E. Harrod is an independent researcher and writer who has published over 500 articles online and in print.  His writings have appeared at the American Spectator, American Thinker, Breitbart, the… More by Andrew E. Harrod

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Robert Royal: If a civil public square is to exist for us, especially now, it will take a rediscovered gratitude for the foundations that made American life exceptional in human history.

On the Fourth of July (even “as celebrated” on the 5th, as today), we all ought to be grateful for the freedoms of our American Revolution, imperfect though our history has been. Those freedoms have a certain shape: religion, speech, property, assembly, equality before the law, the right to bear arms – the stuff of the first Constitutional amendments and of older high-school civics classes. They made this country great, and can again.

The Founders were no fools, however, and warned frequently, lest “liberty” degenerate into “license.” Given human nature, that has happened over time, and to no small degree. But recently we’ve witnessed a shift to something much more subtle and radical. It’s not only ideologies like Critical Race Theory (CRT). We’ve replaced the old focal points of liberty – personal integrity, faith, family, community – with a trinity of postmodern substitutes: race, class, and gender.

Why, you might ask, did the Supreme Court in Fulton have to get involved a few weeks ago in a Catholic adoption agency’s following its own moral principles instead of bowing to LGBT dogma? After all, religious liberty appears in the First Amendment. It’s because many people now have been indoctrinated into thinking that sexual self-assertion is more fundamental than religious liberty, i.e., than beliefs about our duties to the Creator.

Or that a “woman’s right to choose” is more sacred than human life. Viewed clearly, such pretensions are implausible, to say the least. Their widespread acceptance reveals how powerful and pervasive the indoctrination has been while most of us were not paying attention.

Even some Christians, including quite a few religious, priests, bishops, and cardinals, seem to believe that God’s mercy means basically indulging human wishes. They’ve all but erased the specific indications in the Gospels of just why God needs to be merciful towards us. You get the impression that many people now, if they could go back in time, would tell Jesus not to bother with all those hard sayings and that Crucifixion thing. God already forgives everyone anyway. No need to go to all that trouble.

I’ve been trying for decades to follow efforts to establish a basis for our rights other than the straightforward words of the Declaration:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness .—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.[Emphasis added.]

John Adams famously explained later: “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” Even Jefferson, least orthodox among the Founders, said: “no nation has ever yet existed or been governed without religion. Nor can be.”

Modern and postmodern philosophers have been quite intrepid in seeking a credible alternative to such plain statements. But they haven’t found one. Because there isn’t one. Our president said the other day that you have rights simply by being born. True in a way, but only in societies firmly under the sacred canopy of the Bible, where we are all made in the image and likeness and God, and therefore get such respect. That wasn’t true of the Middle Eastern Empires surrounding ancient Israel, or the Greco-Roman culture into which early Christianity was born.

As real Christianity recedes, the old pagan ways of dealing with commoners, unwanted pregnancies, the elderly, and the incapacitated are clearly reasserting themselves.

Tom Holland, a non-believer and author of the powerful book Dominion, has rightly said of our civilization: “When we condemn what Charlemagne’s soldiers did to the Saxons, or what the Spanish Conquistadors did in the New World, or what English slavers did when they were taking people from Africa to the New World – when we see that, by our standards, these are all crimes, we are judging them as Christians would. Earlier civilisations would have seen nothing wrong with this behaviour.”

In the 1960s, Fr. John Courtney Murray could argue that, though the natural law element in America’s self-understanding was incomplete, the words of the Declaration quoted above express important principles, especially in modern times: there are truths, we can know them, and we – we Americans – hold them – i.e., we’re committed to them.

More recently, Patrick Deneen, Michael Hanby, and others have argued that the Founding was fundamentally flawed and, therefore, our decline into the current chaos was basically inevitable. Our sometime contributor Robert Reilly in America on Trial has offered a powerful rebuttal.

That debate is worth having, particularly at this moment, when the poet’s words were never truer:

                  we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

But so is the effort to make the America we have work, whatever its flaws. There’s even a place for debating race, class, and gender (in the proper sense of how men and women relate). The problem with ideologies like Critical Race Theory is not only that they view social complexity through a single lens – whatever their intentions – but as Tom Holland discovered, they don’t appreciate their debt to Christian and American traditions. And the dangers – to CRT theorists as much as anyone else – in attacking the very foundations of our moral and social life. Earlier civil rights leaders like the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. knew better.

I’ve been on the road lately in unfamiliar places. I found a great deal of the old America still lives: basic friendliness, respect between races, help for someone lost. Troubled cities dominate the news and our thinking. But the older, basic liberties are still instinctive for most Americans.

If a civil public square is to exist for us, especially now, it will take a rediscovered gratitude for the foundations that made life here exceptional in human history – and, for ever more of us, reasonably good.

COLUMN BY

Robert Royal

Dr. Robert Royal is editor-in-chief of The Catholic Thing, president of the Faith & Reason Institute in Washington, D.C., and currently serves as the St. John Henry Newman Visiting Chair in Catholic Studies at Thomas More College. His most recent books are Columbus and the Crisis of the West and A Deeper Vision: The Catholic Intellectual Tradition in the Twentieth Century.

EDITORS NOTE: This The Catholic Thing column is republished with permission. © 2021 The Catholic Thing. All rights reserved. For reprint rights, write to: info@frinstitute.org. The Catholic Thing is a forum for intelligent Catholic commentary. Opinions expressed by writers are solely their own.