Dr. Peter Kreeft - The Church's Temptations

Dr. Peter Kreeft – “The Church’s Temptations”
In pursuit of the truth – cinops be gone – Thursday, February 5, 2009

Excerpts from Peter Kreeft, Ph.D. How to NOT to Win the Culture War “Envoy Magazine,” V. 8.3.

First of all, politicization: We have persuaded Americans to treat their religion as a kind of politics and their politics as a kind of religion. In the People’s Republic of Massachusetts, the Catholic Church used to be known as the Democratic Party at prayer.

The second Principle is Happytalk: Let them always talk up the achievements, the successes, the progress that the Church has made in last forty years. Insist that they insist that the Church in America is healthy even though the statistics are devastating.

The Third principle is Organizationalism: The Church must be seen as an organization, not an organism; an earthly business, not a supernatural mystery. They must all be persuaded to be Marthas, not Mary; to worry about organizations, programs, committees, various activisms, numbers, and of course success. They must come to reverse Mother Teresa’s most famous maxim about God not putting them into this world to be successful but to be faithful.

The fourth Principle I call Neo-worship, the worship of the new, the fashionable. Let them substitute “new” for “true” and tell the truth with the clock. After all, “What’s new?” is easily answered by the holy writ of their newspapers, while Pilate’s question, “What is true?” can trail off safely into skeptical space – even when it literally is addressed to the face of Truth Himself standing right there in front of him!

Fifth, have them believe that Egalitarianism is the highest wisdom everywhere, even regarding the thing they are the most passionate about, sex. The Enemy invented this dangerous thing, of course, and made men and women superior and inferior to each other: men superior to women at being men and women superior to men at being women.

A sixth principle is Yuppiedom, or hedonism. Make them all shoppers instead of saints: soft, spoiled, self-indulgent consumerists utterly addicted to the comforts of this world and utterly unwilling and, eventually unable, to practice sacrifice and embrace suffering. In other words, continue to undermine the one virtue that is absolutely necessary to practice any other virtue at all, namely courage. Give them Christ without the Cross.

Seventh, be sure they are less Catholic and more Protestant than Protestants; that they spiritualize and psychologize everything, even the Sacraments, even the Incarnation and Resurrection. Keep them on the road to Gnosticism, the worship of spirituality instead of God. Spirituality is our religion after all… Don’t let them be moral absolutists. Persuade them that the worse thing in the world is not sin or damnation but fanaticism. Let that be the new F – word. Don’t let them remember that all the saints in history were moral absolutists.
George H. Kubeck