When your foundation is cracked

You’ve got to repair it and stabilize the house, obviously.

Not so obvious to a stubborn Europe Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI have passionately implored to recall the continent’s Christian roots and heritage while building a unified community safe from cracking up under the inclement atmosphere of (the dictatorship of) relativism.

Talk about climate change.

Now Benedict is warning South American bishops….Brazilian in this case….about the deceit of Marxist theology. Its lesson extends far beyond those borders. 

Pope Benedict XVI has decried the “long painful night of violence and oppression” that was the communist rule in Germany, and, in the same week, commemorated the suppression of Marxist-inspired Liberation Theology pushed by many Catholic churchmen in Latin America in recent decades.

In an address to the Catholic bishops of Brazil visiting Rome, Pope Benedict recalled the 25th anniversary of the document “Libertatis nuntius” by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which condemned Marxist Liberation Theology trends.

Pope Benedict said in his address on Saturday that the “visible consequences” of the “deceitful principles” of Liberation Theology in the Church in Brazil have been “rebellion, division, dissent, offense, anarchy [that] are still being felt, creating amidst your diocesan communities great pain and a grave loss of living strength.”

Furthermore…

at a concert at the Sistine Chapel on Friday evening, the pope addressed communism, saying, “Under the communist dictatorship there was no action that would have been regarded as evil and always immoral in itself. Whatever served the objectives of the party was good – however inhuman it might be.”

The concert was sponsored by the German president to mark 60 years since the founding of the Federal Republic of Germany and the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Key reminder here, not just of the burst of freedom at the fall of the Berlin Wall, but of what was overthrown.

“Many at the time experienced the events of Nov. 9, 1989, as the unexpected dawn of freedom, after a long and painful night of violence and oppression by a totalitarian system that, at the very end, led to a nihilism, an emptying of souls,” the Pope said.

And a reminder of what a strong foundation is. 

Pope Benedict lauded Germany’s Basic Law, founded in 1949, saying it gives “priority to human dignity, to respect marriage and the family as the foundation of every society and to have regard and profound respect for what is sacred to others.”

Fortuitous timing, coming across this article. Last night I attended an Acton Institute event in Chicago, a panel discussion and ‘open mic’ engagement about the financial crisis, the impact on urban life, health care, and the trends of interventionism by government over the past year. Current events and timeless truths. Like the primacy of human dignity in all systems of social constructs and governance.

“Man is man’s greatest resource, and if left free, can produce a superfluity of wealth that can sustain the world,” said Fr. Robert Sirico, Acton’s president. “This requires virtues like humility and prudence and morality, none of which can be acquired through bureaucrats….The presupposition that all of society can be viewed with one ‘eye view’, one persepective, is a delusion, because there’s no one gathering of czars or cabinet members that can know the complex realities of the human person and human relationships.”

Benedict brought up Marx in Rome in those comments above. Sirico brought up Marx in this discussion for the same reason….the failure of his worldview to recognize the primacy of human dignity and the importance of the family as the building block – the foundation – of a free and virtuous society.

And, added panelist Dr. P.J. Hill, “we can’t sustain a society with the current rates of breakdown of the family.”

That’s where hope and change starts, participants agreed, with the individual “fearfully and wonderfully made by God”, “accountability for who you are and stewardship over what you’ve been given,” (said urban minister Rudy Carrasco) and at core, the family. “The family,” Sirico stated, “is prior to the state, not dependent on it.”

And speaking of the ultimate importance of human dignity, family and religious freedom…..the Manhattan Declaration now has over a quarter of a million signers. And it’s growing.