Further Cosmic Adventures with John Paul

Continuing with yesterday's loose associations on the subject of John Paul, his recent beatification has raised objections from the usual suspects, largely under the pretext that he's only been offstage for six years, but also for purely political reasons.

There is an obvious precedent for this, in that the NHL wisely bypassed the standard waiting period and canonized Wayne Gretzky into the hockey Hall of Fame immediately after his retirement. And as evidenced by the photo of John Paul depicted a few paragraphs down, Gretzky wasn't the only King with an effective slapshot.

I just googled the subject, and it brought out the predictable complaints from predictable coroners of the Culture of Death.

For example, one Joe Lynaugh, from a self-styled Catholic poutfit named "Call to Action," whined that "This will just go down as another disappointment from a church that is unfortunately filled with disappointments these days."

Before I look it up, let's take bets on whether "Call to Action" is actually a Catholic group or a neo-Marxist front in holy guise. If I am wrong, I am prepared to eat this post.

Here is their website. Its motto is "Catholics Working Together For Justice and Equality." Okay. The question is, how?

Let's see: mostly through an insistence that marriage should be redefined, that it makes no difference to children's development if they have a mother and father or two fathers, that the Church needs to have priestesses just like any other pagan fertility cult, and that transgendered people make fine parents.

As anyone with a shred of common sense knows, it is not at all confusing for a child to wake up one day and discover that his father chopped off his penis and is now his mother. Indeed, it undoubtedly frees the child from rigid gender stereotypes, and encourages him to explore his own sexually ambiguous nature. You know, liberal "open-mindedness" and all that.

Why these people imagine they are Catholic, and why they don't just join or invent another denomination, is not explained. This is like joining the Democratic party because one values liberty, limited government, and a functioning educational system, or joining the Boy Scouts in order to scout boys.

Here is a more detailed statement on their objection to John Paul's beatification: his papacy "was a divisive and often painful experience for millions of Catholics worldwide." Awww. That makes me sad. Can't we just believe anything we want? Why must there be rules? Why a Pope? A creed? Indeed, why must there be reality at all? Doesn't it just get in the way of our desires?

Apparently, growing up under communism and fascism taught John Paul nothing about the left, for he inexplicably had a problem with "liberation, feminist and other theologies that support the poor, women and other marginalized groups."

Indeed, his rejection of these thinly veiled Marxist theologies that warp femininity and demonstrably victimize the poor and oppressed, "left many Catholics shocked by a papacy that would withhold its support of theologies and spirituality that sustained poor and oppressed people." Shocked I tell you!

If you don't believe them, here is a photograph of John Paul administering a much-needed smackdown to a communist tool in Nicaragua. This priest was employed as Minister of Culture in the Sandinista regime. If this doesn't prove that John Paul was anti-culture, then nothing does.

John Paul also failed to have an "open discussion of sexuality in the modern world that compromised sexual health access and agency for millions globally" (sic), whatever that means. What, Catholics are not allowed to avoid dangerous sexual practices or treat venereal diseases? This is new to me.

In reality, as summarized by Weigel, here are some of the powers and principalities that John Paul was up against:

--a modern world "dominated by the pleasure principle"
--"an intellectual environment in which the human capacity to know anything with certainty is denied"
--a struggle to affirm that universal truths -- including moral truths -- exist, and that we have a duty to know and conform ourselves to them
--the secular fundamentalist dogma that the person has no essence, and is but an "infinitely plastic" cultural construct
--a Marxian belief system that defines the human spirit out of existence and reduces history to the mechanical play of economic and political forces
--and a debased culture that identifies happiness with a deeply narcissistic celebration of self (even though the self doesn't really exist, which, in our view, leads to the implicit belief that one is not real unless seen by others, i.e., the lust for celebrity)

As we have discussed before, there is always a temptation to regard the present day as uniquely catastrophic, or wavering on the knife-edge between survival and apocalypse. However, just because people habitually believe this, it doesn't mean that it isn't sometimes true.

Christianity has a view of time and history that situates them in a vast cosmic narrative that proceeds from cosmogenesis to cosmotheosis, or from creation to sanctification. It is principally a spiritual adventure, not a mere shadow of material forces; furthermore, there are "pulse points," as it were, when the Spirit is more frisky.

One such pulse point is the Incarnation, which John Paul properly regarded as the axis of history, that toward which it is ultimately ordered. In his view, the present crisis was fundamentally a "crisis of ideas," not of class warfare, sociobiology, or any other inhuman reductionism. Obviously, any humanism that regards man as anything less than human is a false humanism, of which their name is legion.

Now, the most important idea of culture is its idea of what a human being is. In other words, in a way, everything follows from one's anthropology. Get that wrong and your life is doomed, i.e., drained of its objective meaning (and if that is all that happens, consider yourself lucky).

If a culture's notion of man is flawed, then one of two things follows. Either the culture in question will "give birth to destructive aspirations," and/or it will become "incapable of realizing its fondest hopes," irrespective of how "nobly" and humanistically they are expressed (Weigel). Good intentions, road to hell, unintended consequences, Murphy's Law, New Deal, Great Society, Change You Can Believe In, blah blah.

For example, places such as Cuba, China, North Korea, and the vast majority of the Muslim world are laboring under a deeply false understanding of what man is. Likewise, we should all be able to agree, illiberal leftist and conservative liberal alike, that our battle for civilization -- the culture war -- may be reduced without oversimplification to a dispute over the nature of man.

Clearly, we are dealing with two anthropologies that are absolutely irreconcilable. One embodies the traditional American view that man's life and liberty are rooted in the Creator and all this implies.

Conversely, the secular leftist view insists that man is but the residue of random Darwinian accidents, with no essential being and therefore no intrinsic rights or duties but a whole lotta gimme. In this world view, everything is necessarily relative, which makes its adherents all the more dangerous, for their metaphysic prevents them from seeing how authoritarian dogma creeps in through the back door -- such as the absolute right to kill one's unborn child, or the absolute duty for you to pay for the healthcare of irresponsible slackers.

For John Paul, our freedom has to be grounded in something real, without which its security is jeopardized. Obviously, secular leftism has no such secure basis, and "a humanism that cannot give an adequate account of its most cherished value, freedom, becomes self-cannibalizing" (ibid.)

Indeed, many so-called liberals -- who are really crypto-authoritarian leftists -- will openly profess that there is no such thing as free will, a nihilistic doctrine that -- ironically -- absolutely undermines man's intrinsic dignity and invites a host of human disasters, all engineered for our benefit by the People who Know Better how to run your life.

But "to be human is to be a moral agent" (ibid.). In other words, freedom is ineluctably tied in with good and evil, otherwise it is a kind of blind nothing floating atop an absolutely opaque nothingness.

But for us, the cosmos has a moral structure that descends from the top, since it did not, and could not have, come "from the bottom" on pain of immediately denying its own reality.

For John Paul, this means that the cosmos, history, and the individual human life are all situated in a structure that is inherently dramatic, an idea that we have discussed in the past, in the context of Balthasar's Theo-Drama (a quick search of "Theo-Drama" on this site yields a number of posts which I don't have time to review, but may be helpful). Everyone's life is a kind of dramatic journey from the "person-I-am" to the "person-I-ought to be," which ultimately comes down to incarnating Truth in this world (ibid.). The alternative is anon's starter.

In order to get the puck to where one ought to be, the great ones recognize that the future is now: