Myths and Lies

The term “myth” in the dictionary (Oxford) has two definitions. 

1. a traditional story concerning the early history of a people or explaining a natural or social phenomenon, and typically involving supernatural beings or events.
2. a widely held but false belief.

I’m inclined to think that when it comes to anti-Catholicism, we can combine the two and describe it as “a widely held but false belief explaining a natural or social phenomenon.” By this, I mean that in defending a movement opposed to the Church, proponents of the movement must retroactively justify the opposition. Because actual history does not provide such a justification, these proponents must invent one that explains it. Thus we wind up with a bizarre claim that the original form of Christianity was “corrupted” or “driven underground” by the Catholic Church early on through “error” and “innovation.”

Under this tactic, the teachings of the Church are turned into a huge straw man that Catholics have never believed while the actual corruption is transformed into something that was openly supported and blessed by the Church instead of the abberation it was actually seen as. The absence of technology before a certain point is transformed into a conspiracy. Cause and effect is assumed when it needs to be proven (post hoc fallacy).

Thus abuse in the matter of indulgences (for example Tetzel or how the use of charitable donations could be misunderstood as buying and selling) was transformed into an invention of the Church interfering with the relation between God and man. The fact of widespread illiteracy (those who were literate in that time did know Latin) and no printing press before the 15th century became the Church “withholding” the Bible from the laity.

Under this myth, aberration is portrayed as “normal.” There’s the case of how monks and priests were supposed to be stupid and uneducated. Yet the former clergy who began Protestantism were highly educated as monks and priests and they were not self-taught. Who taught the Reformers about Scripture in the first place? Luther didn’t find the Bible hidden in a storeroom. He was assigned to teach it by his superior in the Augustinian order!

I could go on and on, and the anti-Catholics undoubtedly will. But the point is that the Church corrected her corruption, while holding firm to her teachings. The Church made them clearer against misunderstanding, yes. Reduced opportunity for abuse, yes. Made uniform standards, yes. But the teachings were never repudiated. In fact, men like Luther, Zwingli, Knox, etc., misrepresented what the Church taught, whether knowingly or out of their own misunderstanding. (I leave it for God to judge).

As I’ve said in similar articles, this is not a “Protestant bashing” article. Rather I take this historical issue of misunderstanding or misrepresentating the Church (which continues among anti-Catholics), and apply it to the “widely held but false belief explaining a natural or social phenomenon” that Catholics use to attack changes in discipline which they dislike. 

Take the case of First Things, issue 249 (January, 2015). In an article arguing that the Church was compromising with the sexual revolution, the author wrote:

By renouncing the discipline of the Friday fast after Vatican II, the Church abandoned the stomach—after which collapsed an entire social system of Friday-focused marketplace and restaurant businesses that was organized around the Church’s claim upon the body. The same goes for the Church’s provision of Saturday-evening Masses. This decision relaxed Christianity’s claim to “own” our bodies on Sunday. 

I find his comments to be the Catholic equivalent of the anti-Catholic propaganda. St. Paul VI did not renounce the Friday fast. Rather, he recognized that penance needed to be... penitential. In the Apostolic Constitution, Paenitimini, he wrote:

The Church, however, invites all Christians without distinction to respond to the divine precept of penitence by some voluntary act, apart from the renunciation imposed by the burdens of everyday life.

To recall and urge all the faithful to the observance of the divine precept of penitence, the Apostolic See intends to reorganize penitential discipline with practices more suited to our times. It is up to the bishops—gathered in their episcopal conferences—to establish the norms which, in their pastoral solicitude and prudence, and with the direct knowledge they have of local conditions, they consider the most opportune and efficacious.

It’s the person having lobster on Friday, not the Church, abandoning the stomach. The diabetic who can’t abstain from meat isn’t abandoning the stomach by replacing it with another penance. Likewise, with the vigil Mass, Ven. Pius XII established the Vigil to benefit the person who has to work or travel on Sunday. One can abuse the intent, but the Church “relaxed” nothing.

We can point to other myths. Consider the claim that the Ordinary Form of the Mass was designed by Protestants (explicitly denied by those involved)... a myth aimed at justifying disobedience to the Church and rejecting the legitimate exercise of the magisterium. Consider the “Pope Francis allowing divorced/remarried to receive the Eucharist” when his point was determining whether all elements of a mortal sin was present instead of assuming they were. For that matter, consider all the (continuing) claims that the Pope is changing Church teaching on homosexuality, even though he consistently teaches against it. Or that he intends to force through female deacons even though he has said, “I can’t do a decree of a sacramental nature without having the theological, historical foundation for it.”

I can go on, and like the anti-Catholics, these people will.

When it comes to the anti-Catholic, the anti-Vatican II, or the anti-Francis myths, we have to ask ourselves this: Do those who spread them know they are false? If they do, they commit calumny. If they don’t, they commit rash judgment. Both are sins. The former is deliberate. In that case, the person spreading the myth knowingly participates in a lie. The latter is a failure to investigate the justness of a claim before assuming guilt and spreading unjust gossip. Their culpability, I leave for God to judge. But He has forbade false witness.

Whether the reader is hostile to the Catholic Church or a member, we have an obligation to speak honestly and make sure what we hear is true before spreading it. If we refuse to meet that obligation, we will have to answer for it.

Thoughts on the Ideology of "Progress"

Some people have a bad habit of praising things they like as “progress” and treating things in opposition to their likes as opposition to progress. Using such labels, it becomes easy to praise or vilify things via the poisoning the well fallacy. Define an idea as “progress,” and label opposition as opposition to “progress.” Portray that opposition to “progress” as “intolerance” and you can portray your opponents as bigots. Regardless of how well they refute the claims of “progress,” society paints them as “bigoted” before they open their mouths. Hence the religious freedom bills which are called “homophobic” on the grounds that they insist on the right to refuse participating in something they call morally wrong. Since “bigotry” is the only moral wrong in today’s society, labeling a person as a “bigot,” the person who opposes what is approved of by society can be ostracized, fired, sued, fined or jailed for daring to disagree.

The problem is, the term “progress” confuses technical progress with the improvement of society in general. We assume that things are better now than in the past, both because technology improves the quality of life, but because we see that a previous moral flaw in society has been eliminated and assume that the present is always better than the past. So people point to medieval concepts of punishment and the American legacy of slavery and segregation and argue that because we don’t do those things now, we have made progress in all areas and the past has nothing to teach us—except perhaps to serve as a bad example.

I believe this is a false view on how to look on things. Technical progress doesn’t mean moral progress. Hitler’s Germany and Stalinist Russia are proof of that. It is a mistake to think of “Past behavior = BAD and Current behavior = GOOD.” What is really the case is that every era (including ours) embraces vicious customs which promote immoral and unjust behavior. In one era, it was burning at the stake; in another era, it was slavery; currently it is abortion, euthanasia, same sex “marriage,” and children born out of wedlock (among others). In the era which is caught up in it, people see nothing wrong with the vice and tend to be hostile to those who oppose it.

Benedict XVI, before he was Pope, wrote about the problem with this assumption, showing that we now have problems that result from problems we did not even have in past centuries:

I recall a debate I had with some friends in Ernst Bloch’s house. Our conversation chanced to hit on the problem of drugs, which at that time—in the late 1960s—was just beginning to arise. We wondered how this temptation could spread so suddenly now, and why, for example, it had apparently not existed at all in the Middle Ages. All were agreed in rejecting as insufficient the answer that at that period the areas where drugs were cultivated were too far away. Phenomena like the appearance of drugs are not to be explained by means of such external conditions; they come from deeper needs or lacks, while dealing with the concrete problems of procurement follows later. I ventured the hypothesis that obviously in the Middle Ages the emptiness of the soul, which drugs are an attempt to fill, did not exist: the thirst of the soul, of the inner man, found an answer that made drugs unnecessary. I can still recall the speechless indignation with which Mrs. Bloch reacted to this proposed solution. On the basis of dialectical materialism’s image of history, she found the idea almost criminal that past ages could have been superior to our own in not wholly inessential matters; it was impossible that the masses could have lived with greater happiness and inner harmony in the Middle Ages—a period of oppression and religious prejudices—than in our age, which has already made some degree of progress along the path of liberation: this would entail the collapse of the entire logic of “liberation”. But how, then, is one to explain what has happened? The question remained unanswered that evening.

 

 Joseph Ratzinger, A Turning Point for Europe?: The Church in the Modern World: Assessment and Forecast, trans. Brian McNeil, Second Edition (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1994), 24–25.

He raises a good point. The person who believes in the ideology of “progress,” cannot accept that the past could have done anything better than the present and cannot admit that the present has flaws because it abandoned values from the past. Drug addiction is a modern problem with causes rooted in modern times because these times cannot provide for something it has lost.

The fact of the matter is the 20th century, which was touted as the century of progress, was the bloodiest and cruelest in history. Germany murdered six million Jews specifically because of what they were and victimized other groups as well. The Russian purges killed millions (something people denied until the collapse of the Soviet Union), the Chinese Cultural Revolution killed millions, Pol Pot killed over a million. In contrast, the Spanish Inquisition killed maybe a thousand people—over a period of 400 years. If mistreatment and suffering is the opposite of progress, then the “century of progress” was very regressive indeed.

I’m not saying that the era ought to be judged by the number of people killed of course. The point is we need to avoid the post hoc fallacy equating time with improved moral knowledge and assuming we have less evil in our time than in past centuries, and we need to stop thinking that opposition to the vicious customs of our era is opposition to progress. In this context, “Progress” is nothing more than an ideological label used to portray opponents of that ideology as being against progress and being worthy of our ire.

If we want to truly become enlightened as a society, we need to stop evaluating ideas with a calendar and start evaluating them on the basis of whether the assumptions are true, and if the assumptions are false, to reject those ideas.

Propaganda and lies: The Lie that Will Never Die

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Propaganda and lies: The Lie that Will Never Die

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