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Catholic Mass, Doctrine, and Moral Teaching -- Don't do without them --
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Q&A Question: Instead of the situation “comedies,” I’ve been spending more time watching science and history programs on TV. I was hoping to spend my time more constructively, but I cant help feeling that even these programs are hurtful to my faith. Why do educated people on television seem to be so anti-Christian? Who puts these people on the Public Television? Answer: Interesting, isn’t it that those same “educated people” who think the Constitution prohibits any mention of God, think that it calls for the Federal Government to spend taxpayer dollars to subsidize the arts and humanities, and to actively discredit religion? Of course the Constitution of these United States calls for no such things—but that rarely stops a congressional appropriation. For many centuries, higher education was synonymous with Catholic and Christian education. The universities at Salerno, Bologna, Paris, and Oxford were all founded roughly eight-hundred years ago by the Catholic clergy and nobility; Popes, bishops, emperors, and kings chartered at least eighty-one European Catholic universities prior to the rise of Protestantism.[i] In 1636, well before American Independence, the Puritan Massachusetts Bay Colony founded Harvard College "To advance Learning and perpetuate it to Posterity; dreading to leave an illiterate Ministry to the Churches."[ii] “Let every student be plainly instructed and earnestly pressed to consider well the main truth of his life and studies is to know God and Jesus Christ which is eternal life....”[iii] In 1787, John Carroll, the first bishop of the United States (at Baltimore) issued the charter for the Catholic College that is now Georgetown University.[iv] Since the Reformation, Christianity has been more and more excluded from the official life of cities and nations. In recent years—beginning even before Vatican II and the disastrous loss of teaching vocations—the Christian character of many colleges and universities has suffered tremendously. Some modern universities were founded as secular institutions, some Catholic institutions have become secular institutions, and some remain Catholic in little more than their names. (It is significant to note that hospitals and medical research facilities have taken the same turn, accompanying a down turn in medical morality.) Secularized academia is used as a tool to promote the interests of those powerful or wealthy enough to control it. Court battles are won and lost based on who hires the better psychiatrist. Politicians on either side of the aisle find no difficulty at all in finding “scientific experts” to support whatever position they like on a variety of concerns from nuclear power through species endangerment, to pollution, global cooling (or warming), and over (or under) population. History—at least what passes for popular history, intended for the masses—has long suffered the charge that it is “written by the victors.” And while we would like to think of scientists as being like the Curries, Pasteur, Einstein, and Marcus Welby—and some still are—the likes of Jack Kevorkian and Josef Mengele are just not up to replacing them.
For years Social Darwinism sought to promote the idea that one race had achieved a higher degree of “evolution” than other races. The idea that racial purity lead to social or genetic superiority has been around a long time, and was fostered in academic circles long before being adopted as a policy of the Nazi Reich. Hitler’s ideas about eliminating “defective people” from the race have taken hold of modern medicine in many of the “civilized” countries. The people who re‑wrote Russian history each time there was a change in the Soviet regime were ostensibly historians, just as the biologists who taught the Communist Party approved theory of Lysenkoism (see inset) were ostensibly scientists. Shortly after the destruction of the three buildings at the World Trade Center, as the government was trying to convince us that “Islam is a religion of peace,” the local “educational” TV station ran a documentary, interviewing a goodly number of people who appeared to be western scholars (i.e. most appeared not to be Arabs, and this, stereotypically, freed them of any bias in favor of Islam). Mohammed was portrayed as a prosperous merchant, with no mention that his prosperity came by marriage to an older woman, the first of his nine wives, and no mention of his earlier career as a camel train robber. Moslem invasions of Christian countries were called “Islamic progress,” while Christian attempts to free the conquered lands were “violent invasions.” Viewers who watch television expecting to be told what to think (as in the pre- and post-game shows and the nightly news) came away “knowing” that Christians have been oppressing Moslems for the past thirteen-hundred years. What prompted the writing of this article was a PBS show reported by one of our parishioners during which a Professor Richard Dawkins thoroughly “debunked” Christianity. Dawkins has written several books—the ones in our public library are not very profound. By way of illustration, in his recent book, A Devil’s Chaplain, Dawkins mocks the generally accepted Scientific Method; the process of proposing a theory, or “hypothesis,” and refining that theory by making its experimental demonstration available for refutation or confirmation by the scientific community. Unhappy with the reality that natural science never rises to the level of truth, but always remains theory waiting to be refuted or improved upon, Dawkins pronounces that there are things that are “simply true.”[v] He further makes the mistake of taking a few simple observations and equating their truth with what he claims to be the “simple truth” of much more complex theories. While “the sun is hot” may be pretty well indisputable among reasonable people, the possession of double helix DNA is not quite so clearly a proof that “people, chimps, octopus, and kangaroos have shared ancestors.” It would be at least as reasonable to theorize that this consistent universal genetic coding structure refutes the evolutionists’ notion that life is a matter of random chance—the uniformity of the genetic code suggests a single Code Maker rather than some chance products of the primordial oceans. By training, Dawkins is a zoologist, turned ethologist. (Ethologists study how animals inherit the behavioral programs of their parents.) He is not a “hard” scientist (e.g. a physicist or a mathematician) from whom one would expect greater logical precision; he is certainly not trained in philosophy. He seems not to understand the essential concepts of the philosophy of science or the ways in which different disciplines may perceive the same subject matter. His scientific morality seems to be based on purely material and utilitarian considerations—all DNA is equal, only the situations define the ethics. But his publicists assure us that “Dr. Richard Dawkins is the Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University.” Therein lies the problem, for Oxford is a prestigious university, and most television viewers are quite ready to accept what its professors say as truth—and who better to help them understand scientific truth than “the Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science” at Oxford? Oxford University has a very impressive list of alumni and Nobel laureates.[vi] Included are Saint Thomas Moore, and John Henry Cardinal Newman. But like its many counterparts, Oxford is no longer the Catholic institution of its founding. (Bill Clinton is now on the Alumni list.) Money plays a large part in this, for universities consume it in large quantities—buildings, research facilities, and the salaries of the highly educated do not come cheap—vast material plant must be maintained and continually improved. Alumni contributions and benefactors’ donations are always in demand. And the larger donors tend to be listened to by university policy makers. Important donors like international elitist Cecil Rhodes, and the globalist financial dynasty of the Rothschilds have been sustaining Oxford and guiding its policy for many years. In December 1995 the governing body at Oxford observed that:
It turns out that Dr. Simonyi is an important figure at Microsoft, which in turn is run by Bill Gates, who has richly endowed the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Their website lists a number of initiatives, some good and some bad.[viii] There is a strong tie to United Nations “reproductive health” programs. There were $60 million donated to prevent sexually active women from getting HIV.[ix] One smiling website picture is captioned “Melinda French Gates visits with commercial sex workers in Kolkata, India.”[x] Bill Gates has pledged $400,000 toward the $3 billion California plans to spend in experimentation on human embryonic cells.[xi] It should not surprise anyone that Prof. Richard Dawkins provides a “scientific” justification for the actions of the Gates Foundation. Human life, for the secularist, is just like animal life; they both have the same DNA. While Professor Dawkins ridicules religion in his attempt to spread his secular “ethics,” not all scientists are anti-religious. Douglas Hayhoe, Ph.D., Instructional Leader in Secondary Science, Toronto District School Board wrote:
Educated people are not, of necessity, anti-religious. That 40% of scientists goes up significantly if one adds in believers in an impersonal God like Albert Einstein, or the quantum theorists who associate their physics with eastern religious beliefs. Yet there is a great deal of money being spent by the global elite to discredit Christianity in favor of their “one-world religion,” and its secular morality. One ought not adopt any point of view merely because it is espoused by professors, scientists, actors, politicians, or those wearing a Roman collar. TV, even the “educational” kind, can be a great waste of time. God is the only one who can be trusted to simply reveal truth, all others must be judged according to the standard of His truth, and the judgment must be on the basis of what they say, not who or what they are.
NOTES: [i] Cf. Catholic Encyclopedia, s.v. “Universities” http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/15188a.htm [iii] Vincent Carroll & David Shiflett, Christianity on Trial (San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2002), p. 155. [v] Page 16-17. |
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