The Speed of Change in the Republic of Rights

Crisis Magazine ^ | 4/13/12 | Fr. James V. Schall, S.J.

[marshmallow]

“I grew up in Kansas. When I began my book Render Unto Caesar in 2006, I had in my mind the America I always knew—or thought I knew. But that America, I admit, has been passing for fifty years, and probably longer.”
—Charles Chaput, September 2010

The Catholic thinkers, in the past century or so, argued that the Church’s tenets and principles are basically compatible with the intellectual framework of the Founding Fathers. Indeed, contrariwise, they argued that the American Founders discovered their basic principles, knowingly or not, from the Catholic tradition. One can dispute this assumption. Many of the founding principles, on further examination, were modern in origin even though they could look like holdovers from the earlier traditions of ethics, law, and metaphysics. Moreover, the present understanding of American culture has little to do either with the founding fathers or classical tradition.

Nothing is more volatile than the word “rights” and basing one’s political philosophy on its shifting premises. The intellectual “justification” for current and increasing attacks on the Church, insofar as they have any substance, is founded on this charge: the Church is against human “rights.” The word’s modern usage is from Hobbes, not Aquinas. It means that, because of individual autonomy, for whatever I need or want, I have a “right.” Since everyone else has the same “right,” yet disparate “rights” conflict, government is set up to adjudicate who gets what. The government’s own criterion for enforcing this or that “right” is based on the same principle: whatever it decides is law. The failure to notice the dangers of such an understanding of “rights” is coming home to haunt us.

Many writers and thinkers are struck by the rapidity with which the Catholic Church itself, from being relatively comfortable in Zion, has suddenly come under fire............

[Mmmike]

Bump.