During the 1950s, the twin pillars of worldwide
anti-communism were Dwight Eisenhower's America and the Roman Catholic
Church of Pope Pius XII.
During the 1980s, the last decade of the Cold War, Ronald Reagan and the
Polish Pope, John Paul II, were the pillars of resistance.
When Pope Francis arrives in Washington today, the country he enters
will be a very different one from Eisenhower's America or Reagan's
America. And Catholics will be welcoming a new kind of Pope.
In America 2015, homosexuality, abortion on demand, and same-sex
marriage — shameful crimes in Ike's America, mortal sins in the
catechism of Pius XII — have become constitutional rights.
These represent the values that define Barack Obama's America, the
values our officials defend at the United Nations, the values we preach
to the world.
What Ike's America saw as decadence, Obama's America calls progress. And
among its noisiest celebrants are our Catholic vice president, Joe
Biden, and the Catholic leader of the Democratic Party in the House,
former Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
Since Eisenhower's time, Christianity, the faith that created the West,
has been purged from American public life. The Bible, prayer, and all
Christian art, books and symbols have been expunged from the public
schools as they were in Cuba when Fidel Castro took power.
Our cradle faith cannot be taught in our public schools.
America is a different country today, a secular and post-Christian
nation on its way to becoming anti-Christian. Some feel like strangers
in their own land. And from the standpoint of traditional Catholicism,
American culture is an open sewer. A vast volume of the traffic on the
Internet is pornography.
Ironically, as all this unfolds in what was once "God's country,"
Vladimir Putin seeks to re-establish Eastern Orthodox Christianity as
the basis of morality and law in Russia. And one reads in The Wall
Street Journal on Monday that Xi Jinping is trying to reintroduce his
Chinese communist comrades to the teachings of Confucianism.
The world is turned upside down. Every civilization seems to recognize
the necessity of faith except for the West, which has lost its faith and
is shrinking and dying for lack of it.
In a New York Times article this month, "Are Western Values Losing Their
Sway?" Steven Erlanger writes: "In its rejection of Western liberal
values of sexual equality and choice, conservative Russia finds common
cause with many in Africa and with the religious teachings of Islam, the
Vatican, fundamentalist Protestants and Orthodox Jews."
Yet what Erlanger describes as "conservative Russia" does seem to share
values with America, only it is the America of 1955, another country
from the America of 2015. Which raises a question: Does moral truth
change?
Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote, "The best test of truth is the
power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the
market."
But is this true? A decade after his beer hall putsch failed in Munich,
Adolf Hitler's Nazi party won the largest number of Germans ever to vote
in a democratic election. He had succeeded in the marketplace of ideas.
Did that democratic ratification make Hitler's ideas true? Or does
truth exist independent of the marketplace?
Secular America, which has purged Christianity, preaches a new gospel to
the world: liberal democracy as the salvation of mankind.
Yet, did not Winston Churchill, icon of the democracy worshippers, tell
us that "the best argument against democracy is a five-minute
conversation with the average voter"?
The Catholic Church, too, faces a growing crisis of moral consistency
and credibility. The church of Pius XII and John Paul II taught that the
truths of the Ten Commandments brought down from Sinai and the truths
of the Sermon on the Mount are eternal.
Those Popes also taught that a valid marriage is indissoluble, that
homosexuality is unnatural and immoral, that abortion is the killing of
the innocent unborn, an abomination.
Yet one reads regularly of discussions inside the Vatican to alter what
is infallible church teaching on these doctrines to make the church more
appealing to those who have rejected them.
As the Pope arrives in America, some Catholics are calling for an
acceptance of contraception, the ordination of women and a new
acceptance of homosexuality. Yet the Episcopalians, who have embraced
all these "reforms" and more, appear to be going the way of James
Fenimore Cooper's Mohicans.
In Cuba, Pope Francis declined to address the repression of the Castro
brothers. Will he also avoid America's moral crisis to chatter on about
income inequality and climate change and find common ground with Obama?
What has come out of the Vatican in the past two years is moral
confusion. Yet as Philadelphia Archbishop Charles Chaput reminds us,
"confusion is of the devil." It is also trifling with schism.
Having emerged victorious in the 70-year ideological struggle against
one of the greatest enemies that mankind has ever known,
Marxism-Leninism, are the United States and the Catholic Church heading
for the same desuetude and disintegration?
Patrick Buchanan has been a senior adviser to
three presidents, a two-time candidate for the Republican
presidential nomination, and was the presidential nominee of the
Reform Party in 2000. He also was the founding member of NBC’s "The McLaughlin Group," and CNN’s "Capital Gang" and "Crossfire."
His latest book is "The Greatest Comeback: How Richard Nixon
Rose From Defeat to Create the New Majority." For more of his
reports, Go Here Now.
