The arts, once a rich cultural expression boasting the proverbial “moral of the story,” are corrupt!
“Foul deeds will rise, though all the earth o’erwhelm them, to men’s eyes,” wrote William Shakespeare against Elizabethan era political corruption, and it seems nothing has changed. Is cultural progress, as the modern leftists have failed to re-define it, really the positive, progressive development of posterity inspired by the past—a better distinction in my mind might be classical liberalism—or is culture a product of the French revolution’s individualism, and its apathy towards attaining, as a collective, the virtue of fortitude? Artistic mediums today present more as depraved and vindictively licentious artistic displays, not beautiful creations, creations that should be supernatural in effort. To understand this divide, we must look to the past. “The West has long been endangered by this aversion to the questions which underlie its rationality and can only suffer great harm thereby,” said Pope Benedict XVI in his Regensburg Address. For this reason, I argue that Catholic society is a secular society, and vice versa, and that there is no exception to this premise if the classics we study today did indeed shape modern education. But this does not mean Western culture—Catholic culture specifically—cannot be attacked.
De-Hellenization and Freemasonic influences began the destruction of the Mass of the Ages, which further became the newest cultural milieu in which turn-of-the-century modernists exchanged moral virtues for big funding via the femme fatale: feminism, essentially stripping culture and the Church of its history—arts education being the worst offender. To Catholics, the Fatima secrets of the early 20th century, which to many were the catalyst for World War II, brought with them warnings of hatred for true religion, the French Revolution’s individualism hangover, and the fusion of Freemasonic idealism with modern fraternal-ecumenism in Catholic Christian education notwithstanding. Hitler’s disdain for both Jews and Catholics reinforced these tragedies, which essentially saw the world rejecting God after 1945. The recent Democratic National Convention, their active promotion of genocide against the unborn in real-time—a diabolical prospect—or even the pagan ceremonies of the 2024 Olympics, comes as no surprise given the godlessness emphasized after World War II.
So, considering world events, what is the individual’s obligation to preserve morality in a collective culture, both in secular education and in sacred contexts? Do even agnostics and atheists have a duty to recognize these universal truths in a moral way since they exist as part of the natural law, and since morality—alongside most secular laws—was essentially codified by the Jewish law and fulfilled by Christ and the Catholic Church? To me, these issues are deeply interconnected; secular frailties exist because of weak religious men, and vice versa, creating a butterfly effect of sorts, which greatly increases disbelief in morality, which is God.
If a person endeavors to be virtuous today, he is considered out of touch. Meanwhile, our churches, schools, and institutions—private and public alike—funnel dirty government money for personal gain and pronouns. Because of moral relativism and the “you-do-you” mentality, morality itself has become a subjective pursuit. Where there is no belief in hell, anarchy reigns supreme.
Plato, a pagan—but a great thinker—believed that distinctions matter, though in a different sense than we might understand pronoun usage today. In his commentary the Republic, he details his assessment of proper cultural relations between men and women: “[M]en and women are to have a common way of life such as we have described—common education, common children; and they are to watch over the citizens in common, whether abiding in the city or going out to war … and always and in all things … in so doing, they will do what is best and will not violate but preserve the natural relation of the sexes.”
Today, people have disregarded the spiritual essence of their sexuality, rooted in natural law, with the legalization of gay marriage and the spiritual sterility brought about by Feminism. The men of the Catholic Church have become lukewarm in addressing this issue, contributing to a continuing butterfly effect and further poisoning secular man’s intelligence. But how do you control people? You make them dumb. You make them believe something that is not true.
Recently, despite the Pope’s better judgment, the Vatican released a new declaration titled Fiducia Supplicans. This document is nothing short of a political mess and, unlike other pre-Vatican II papal declarations on doctrine, it is arguably heretical—though this authority, I concede, is the magisterium’s alone. Pope Francis has criticized overly liberal American universities, many of which promote the LGBTQ+ agenda, and those like the University of Idaho, which do not, are often targeted by disgruntled students. The Pope himself has remarked that “[these universities] forget that they have to form men and women, [as] people of integrity.” Yet, Fiducia Supplicans seems to grant these sacred and secular institutions full license to engage in sinful practices, contradicting the religiosity that the clergy should uphold. The document appears forced and indicative of Freemasonic coerciveness.
Like the pagan Plato, Shakespear, a Catholic, understood the reality of corrupt men in high places. Peter Lake, in his book, How Shakespear Put Politics on the Stage: Power and Succession in the History Plays, alludes to organizational corruption in his commentary on Shakespeare’s Julius Ceasar, and I cannot help but make this connection with the current ecclesiastical corruption. “Ceasar … [is] a textbook example of how a great man,” perhaps a Papal figure, “could be worked on by one of his creatures, his susceptibility exploited to bring him, in this case at least, to his ruin.”
A secular society is not immune to the errors of the Church. Both the Church and secular schools are closely connected in Arizona education. Arizona’s higher education institutions, already criticized for pervasive anti-Jewish and anti-Catholic sentiments, are now under scrutiny for questionable financial practices. The renaming of the Fred Fox School of Music due to supposed legal battles over the director’s endowment smells still of something rotting “in the state of Denmark.” Most concerning, however, is the link between these Arizona schools, their suspected fraud, and Casa Alitas, a questionable, politically motivated organization whose function is unclear regarding the safety of Arizona citizens and border security. Recent Catholic artwork displayed in Tucson Catholic schools reflects this agenda, depicting biblically inaccurate scenes of the Holy Family’s travels, influenced by “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) coercion. These murals highlight the ignorance and willful apathy of our spiritual leaders regarding both the physical safety of Arizonans and the religious education of our youth. The pope and the USCCB urge Catholics not to politicize the faith, though it seems this artwork is an agenda, and the Church is using artwork to promote false education.
Catholic culture is deeply connected to secular culture and its education, albeit politically—which is contrary to the role of Christ’s Catholic Church. Still, some clergy have hope in American secular institutions. Luka Adamo in his article, “Postliberal Lessons from Robert Cardinal Sarah’s D.C. Visit,” reflects on how Cardinal Sarah pushes back on the rhetoric coming from Rome. Cardinal Sarah hopes that the “United States is not like Europe,” and that this Catholic renaissance “must shine through all of America’s institutions,” Adamo paraphrases. “If Catholics in this country can be a sign of contradiction to your culture, the Holy Spirit will do great things through you” says Sarah. Though not a Catholic, Governor Kay Ivey’s recent bill, SB 129, limiting DEI in Alabama educational institutions, inspires the hope US Americans receive from Cardinal Sarah’s sentiments, and she believes St. Mary’s Catholic school will be helpful in her CHOOSE Act initiatives which gives parents more control over their children’s education. Arizona’s parents however, fear Katy Hobbs’s more liberal approach to parental guided learning, as she emphasizes public schooling where DEI runs rampant.
When I attend Mass, I often liken the altar to a sort of holy stage and cannot fathom how a clergyman could re-enact the Crucifixion, knowing his participation in such diabolically political rings. Shakespeare must have known the answers to these grievances, which he wrote into his plays, and it seems they are evidence of the evil within men since Genesis. Likewise, the modern agnostic philosopher, an Anglican of sorts, Roger Scruton, in his article titled “Music and Morality,” offers an interesting perspective on Plato and his thought on how a moral culture is the linchpin of a moral society. Plato implies that moral fortitude is established through art and politics. Scruton relays: “‘The ways of poverty and music are not changed anywhere without changes in the most important laws of the city.’ So wrote Plato in the Republic … Plato is famous for having given what is perhaps the first theory of character in music,” writes Scruton. Character refers here to the moral efficacy of music personified, as if to say music and art both play a humanistic role in how people understand, relate to, and fortify posterity. Sadly, the music of the modern church has also fallen to the 1960s Woodstock appeal.
Further, Aristotle declares in his work Metaphysics (1011b25): “To say of what is that it is not, or of what is not that it is, is false, while to say of what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not, is true,” which is to say that taking evil for good, and good for evil is decidedly a bad proposition.
Plato, Aristotle, Shakespeare, and in modernity, Scruton all seem to agree, to some degree, that culture has failed not because of culture but because of people. I would say the same for the Catholic Church. What is certain is that many Catholic men, clergy included, have stopped searching for God. For those of us who continue to search for God, the once-excommunicated Archbishop Lefebvre offers us some hope, saying, “If one day they shall excommunicate us because we remain faithful to these theses, we shall consider ourselves excommunicated,” though the primacy of the Holy See seems lost. Instead, we lift our glasses to Shakespeare, as the devil takes the world stage, and say, “An unweeded garden that grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature possess it merely … something is rotten in the state of Denmark!”
The moral of this story is: always search for truth, at any cost, for if we truly accept these theses, rooted in the past and for our posterity, we remain confident that the gates of hell shall not prevail against the will of God on Earth.
Image of Saint Agnes School in Detroit, Michigan by Thomas Hawk on Flickr
First, as to Shakespeare, I’ve heard speculation that he was gay, and/or a woman passing as a man in the gender-identified society of that time. I’ve also heard esoteric discussions of how the shape of his stage was different from what we once thought it to be — whatever…
As a Congregationalist, I see the Church of England as essentially being Catholic — it has a similar hierarchy with a King rather than a Pope at the head — I don’t recognize either as anything other than a man. We have an annual meeting where, by majority vote, we hire (and sometimes fire) our minister. (The then town of Northamption, MA voted to fire Johnathan Edwards because of teenagers committing suicide, something that historians often neglect to mention, but I digress.)
And yes, town. Prior to 1855, to be a town in Massachusetts (and much of New England), you had to be able to convince the General Court (legislature) that you (a) had the tax base to support a minister and (b) had found one willing to move to your town and be your municipal minister. Yes, municipal minister — the town property taxpayers were responsible for building the town’s church and hiring (and sometimes firing) the town’s minister — although the most contentious item on the town meeting agenda was usually his firewood allotment, how many cords of firewood he would be given to heat both the church and the parsonage, his house.
The other big difference with the Catholic Church is the belief that everyone has to be able to read the Bible for himself or herself and this is why public education started in Massachusetts started with the Old Deluder Satan Law of 1647.
As to your theology, I need to point out that Jesus was an Observant Jew, and that the Last Supper was a Passover Seder. Jesus’ issue with the money changers in the outer temple wasn’t that they were conducting business in the outer temple (which was perfectly acceptable and routinely done) but that they were cheating people in violation of Jewish law and that the Jewish authorities weren’t doing anything about it.
Abraham would have considered himself a Jew had the term existed at the time.
Martin Luther considered himself a devout Catholic — skimming over a lot of the details, his issue was that the Pope wasn’t. The Pope was selling indulgences, forgiveness for sins not yet committed (something Pope Pius V banned in 1567), and how is there a scintilla of repentance in that?!? And look at what the indulgences were funding — St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome — which objectively could be viewed as a “graven image.”
Look at the Catholic practice of “Stations of the Cross” — it involves praying to a series of images depicting Jesus Christ on the day of his Crucifixion — can you not see how someone *could* conclude that this constitutes worshiping a graven image? (NB: I’m not saying “agree” but can you not see how a devout monk might come to this conclusion?)
And this difference of perspective led to wars and bloodshed and a whole lot of quite un-Christian stuff all around. One doesn’t have to look to the troubled Irish isle for examples, the examples of un-Christian behavior in this country range from what was done to John Bapst in 1854 to how Catholics discriminate against Protestants in Massachusetts today.
” I would also say America is a great nation because of Catholics.”
And I would say that America is a great nation because of religious men and women, including Catholics. (You do know that Maryland was one of the original thirteen, right?) I’m not going to put it as well as John Paul II did, but we really need to end this bigotry. I’m not saying my side was innocent — if you haven’t seen it — https://library.osu.edu/site/thomasnast/the-american-river-ganges/
And that literally was over which translation of the Bible would be read in public schools — and I argue that we *both* lost as neither is read in public schools today. Wouldn’t it have been better to compromise and rotate between translations, even if we both cringed on Fridays when it was the hip-slang translation being read?
Wouldn’t it be better to teach children the Ten Commandments and agree to disagree as to which order they should be in? Does it really matter which one has what number?
Seeking religious purity, my Puritan forebears hung Quakers on the Boston Common. That was wrong — and I argue that those seeking Catholic purity are equally wrong. We’re all Christians — and it isn’t like the Old Deluder Satan isn’t doing a fairly good job of deluding. We have more things to worry about than which is the *true* Church of Christ…
And you gotta admit, the Old English of the King James Bible is kinda cool…
“Today, people have disregarded the spiritual essence of their sexuality, rooted in natural law, with the legalization of gay marriage and the spiritual sterility brought about by Feminism. The men of the Catholic Church have become lukewarm in addressing this issue, contributing to a continuing butterfly effect and further poisoning secular man’s intelligence. But how do you control people? You make them dumb. You make them believe something that is not true.”
It’s not just the men of the Catholic Church, and one of the most important things that St. John Paul II did was to clarify that it is the people of faith versus those without it, and I’m reminded of Paul Harvey’s 1965 radio address: “If I were the Devil” — the full text of which is below, but the audio version is better: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jnPE8u5ONls
What amazes me is that Harvey wrote that in 1965, back when America was still sane — and I’d loved to see his response to a US Supreme Court Justice stating that she didn’t know what a “woman” was — and the genuine “war on boys” didn’t start until about 1975.
But all of this is really is, at its most basic, a war on the traditional American male. He no longer is the head of his household — households no longer really exist — and children are largely born and raised independently of him. Oh, yes, the government would like to make him subsidize the child, but the entire principle of Johnson’s Great Society is that a woman makes out better without him present in HER home.
This is the real problem with gay marriage — much as a driver’s license is a license to operate a motor vehicle, a marriage “license” is a “license” to create children. Before modern society with our microwave ovens and on-line shopping, a pregnant or nursing woman was largely helpless. She couldn’t split wood, she couldn’t hunt game, or even pull buckets of water out of the well. She needed someone to protect and provide for her, and that is what marriage was about, a promise that her husband would. It was also a promise that the two of them would protect and provide for the children produced — and at least in Protestant weddings, the church congregation also promised that they also would help the young family. In an era before government handouts, people did — when a shelf collapsed and my Great Aunt lost all of the stuff she had “canned” in glass jars for the winter, the community arrived and helped her out with stuff they had put by for their winter use.
And marriage also was an obligation of the children to look after their aged parents.
This is what Paul Harvey means by “Our Father, who Art in Washington…”
I could go on at length, but I think the biggest question is if society exists of FAMILIES with the family relating to the government, or does society consist of INDIVIDUALS, each of whom relate directly to the government, independent of any family unit?
And if we should consider DEI and Social Justice to be a religion, legally similar to all other religions in terms of the establishment clause, I think we should.
We are living in a second era of Reconstruction and I think it is time for men to stand up and say “no mas!”
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“If I were the devil … If I were the Prince of Darkness, I’d want to engulf the whole world in darkness. And I’d have a third of its real estate, and four-fifths of its population, but I wouldn’t be happy until I had seized the ripest apple on the tree — Thee. So I’d set about however necessary to take over the United States. I’d subvert the churches first — I’d begin with a campaign of whispers. With the wisdom of a serpent, I would whisper to you as I whispered to Eve: ‘Do as you please.’
“To the young, I would whisper that ‘The Bible is a myth.’ I would convince them that man created God instead of the other way around. I would confide that what’s bad is good, and what’s good is ‘square.’ And the old, I would teach to pray, after me, ‘Our Father, which art in Washington…’
“And then I’d get organized. I’d educate authors in how to make lurid literature exciting, so that anything else would appear dull and uninteresting. I’d threaten TV with dirtier movies and vice versa. I’d pedal narcotics to whom I could. I’d sell alcohol to ladies and gentlemen of distinction. I’d tranquilize the rest with pills.
“If I were the devil I’d soon have families that war with themselves, churches at war with themselves, and nations at war with themselves; until each in its turn was consumed. And with promises of higher ratings I’d have mesmerizing media fanning the flames. If I were the devil I would encourage schools to refine young intellects, but neglect to discipline emotions — just let those run wild, until before you knew it, you’d have to have drug sniffing dogs and metal detectors at every schoolhouse door.
“Within a decade I’d have prisons overflowing, I’d have judges promoting pornography — soon I could evict God from the courthouse, then from the schoolhouse, and then from the houses of Congress. And in His own churches I would substitute psychology for religion, and deify science. I would lure priests and pastors into misusing boys and girls, and church money. If I were the devil I’d make the symbols of Easter an egg and the symbol of Christmas a bottle.
“If I were the devil I’d take from those who have, and give to those who want until I had killed the incentive of the ambitious.
And what do you bet I could get whole states to promote gambling as the way to get rich? I would caution against extremes and hard work in Patriotism, in moral conduct. I would convince the young that marriage is old-fashioned, that swinging is more fun, that what you see on the TV is the way to be. And thus, I could undress you in public, and I could lure you into bed with diseases for which there is no cure. In other words, if I were the devil I’d just keep right on doing what he’s doing.”
“…the French revolution’s individualism…”
The French Revolution is noted for the *collective* values of “Liberty, Fraternity, and Equity.” It’s the AMERICAN Revolution that is noted for its *individualistic* values of “Life, Liberty, and Property.”
It is the Western CHRISTIAN Enlightenment, not the Catholic Enlightenment, and while the art and music was largely Catholic because of differing interpretations of Exodus 20:4 (“thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image”), the Protestants were very much involved in ways the author neglects to mention.. John Locke, arguably the father of modern (small “l”) liberalism was a Puritan — the Puritans essentially becoming the Congregationalist (Protestants) of today.
And the issue between Freemasonry and Catholicism is the irreconcilable difference between the Masonic promise to never reveal the secrets of Freemasonry and the Catholic promise to reveal everything to a Priest in the confines of the confessional. The end result of this was that Catholics belonged to the Knights of Columbus while Protestants belonged to the Masons.
Hitler had issues with the Catholic Church and not Catholicism — Hitler, like all despots, feared any organization that could be used to challenge his authority, and Hitler also wanted the state (i.e. the Nazi Party) doing all of the charitable stuff that the Catholic Church was doing, e.g. schools and hospitals. If you understand despotic rule, you will understand why he would inevitably have conflicts with the Catholic Church as an organization.
It would have been a diversion of resources and further strained his already complicated relationship with Mussolini, but Hitler had the military resources to level the Vatican if he’d wanted to. And the fact is that he didn’t.
Now we have 500 years of quite unChristian behavior by both Catholics and Protestants but the bottom line that both faiths are Christian and after 500 years of fratricide, are now starting to realize that. Yes, Vatican II eliminated the Latin Mass, but it was Martin Luther who translated the Latin Bible into German, with the Bible already having been translated from other languages into Latin.
Shakespeare was baptized Church of England. He may have been a hidden Catholic as some historians suspect, but officially he was a Protestant — and as the evidence consists of a now-lost document found in an attic, well the evidence is not all that clear either way.
And I don’t understand what difference it makes.
Hi Dr. Ed.
Yes, from the surface, it looks like Shakespeare was a Protestant in appearance, but his life is so contested. Many of the people surrounding him were Catholics, probably in hiding. I would argue the Church of England would still be Catholic if it were not for its wretched kings, and I would also say America is a great nation because of Catholics. But I digress. It was also a time when Protestantism was in vogue for fear of one’s death, being associated with the Catholic Church, the true church of Christ (not unlike today’s America, save the guillotine). The Catholic Herald has some opinions on this which are very convincing. I am ok being wrong for what it’s worth, but I’m more convinced now he was a Catholic after some extra research outside the mainstream. I’m arguing here, in my opinion, Shakespeare very easily could have been a Catholic, and it’s noteworthy to say that everybody really is (or was) a Catholic (even Abraham I would say though yes I understand his seat in the Old Testament). And yes, the Revolution’s collectivism turned individualistic as a remedy for the post Revolution’s social failures, I think. The Revolution’s collectivism is not like the Catholic collective perspective. It more often works against the Catholic Church. It evolved, in my view, into selfish intent which is the reason for the degradation of modern society, the loss of God in the collective. This ultimately leaves us to fend for ourselves so there is nothing else to adopt but individualism. The American Revolution came with similar sentiments given its Protestant bent, heresy and all, though we Americans have managed to hold onto some freedom and we are grateful for at least, the attempt. Those freedoms are rooted in a Catholic context. Inevitably though, the greatest country in the world is slowly loosing it’s collective unity because of religious confusion, and socialism not to mention the new revolution: LGBTQ+.
Why does it matter? Well, if you believe in God, I guess it matters completely, but if you do not, sure none of my words, or conjectures hold any credence, anyway. I like to think I am not the supreme intelligence, which in itself is a very individualistic take on my own existence. And if there is a God in our souls, and we ignore this, this becomes of the utmost importance, otherwise we are vying for hell. I think that is why it matters.
But, you don’t have to like my opinions – even if they sit slightly against what the majority speculates.