Zac Vermeer on what WYD means for the Church and our liberal society.

The lead-up to World Youth Day has seen a predictable eruption of secularist hysteria across the nation’s letter pages. Every tired old anti-Catholic canard has been repeated ad nauseum. The Pope, we read, is the murderer of millions of AIDS victims (based on the risible assumption that those who cheerfully break the Church’s teachings on extra-marital sex, adultery or homosexuality are nonetheless scrupulous in their adherence to Humanae Vitae). Celibacy is evil (seemingly the one sexual choice that retains the power to shock and appall blasé moderns). “Misogyny! Homophobia! The Inquisition! The Renaissance Popes!” splutters letter after apoplectic letter.

What the complaint boils down to is that the Catholic Church has the temerity to continue to exist and to remain Catholic, after so many centuries of “progress”. Particularly disingenuous is the oft-repeated criticism (reminiscent of Judas’ po-faced hypocrisy when Our Lord’s feet were anointed with nard) that the money spent on the event should be have been given to the poor. On this reasoning, any expense or effort spent on transmitting the faith to new generations or on evangelizing is a wicked waste of resources. Of course, if this path were followed, the Church would be allowed to shrink into an infinitesimal rump in a couple of generations, and the poor of the world would be without the millions of Catholics whose charitable work is motivated by faith in the poor carpenter of Nazareth. The Catholic Church will not play the role assigned to religion by liberal modernity (and already being played to perfection by mainstream Anglicanism): to die a nice, quiet death by slowly assimilating into the liberal hedonism and relativism that is now the state religion of almost every Western country. She is determined to live, and to give life.

The official creed of Western society today is summed up in the words “tolerance” and “diversity”. The Catholic Church is branded as an enemy of liberal tolerance because she is supposedly intolerant towards homosexuals. Of course, in reality the Church offers them, and everyone, something far better than the cold, cynical indifference of modern liberalism, the motto of which is Rabelais’ “Fay ce que voudra”, “Do whatever you want”. It offers love, not the syrupy sentimentalism so often mistaken for it, but real love, the love which is the fire which Christ came to light upon the earth, the love which can be indifferent to no action of the beloved and always owes them the truth. Yet the protest that liberalism is neutral between worldviews and merely demands mutual tolerance between them fails to convince; one of the valid points of postmodernism is its demonstration of how tendentious this rhetoric of neutrality is. Our values-neutral state education system is only neutral to someone to whom the presuppositions of liberal secularism are incontestable. The bile directed against the Church by ‘tolerant’ progressives shows how their vaunted toleration does not extend to those whose viewpoint they define as irrational and intolerant. In any case, no one really likes being merely tolerated; the human heart desires affirmation and approval. To take again the example of homosexuality, what is now demanded is not mere tolerance but a direct affirmation of the positive goodness of homosexual relationships in the form of gay “marriage”. It will be interesting to see how much tolerance will be extended to religious groups that refuse to recognize such “marriages” in such areas as the provision of services and employment benefits; one can guess that it will be meager. Liberal tolerance then mutates into something oppressive and dictatorial. At World Youth Day, we must show that Catholic love is better and truer than liberal tolerance.

As for the other great source of self-congratulation in Western society, our ‘diversity’, it is obvious to anyone who actually thinks about the concept rather than merely emotes it that diversity is not to be celebrated tout court; there is good diversity and bad diversity. Strong Nazi and Communist movements, as were present in the dying days of the Weimar Republic, would make Australian politics more ideologically diverse, but not better. For any human society to endure peacefully there must be unity on fundamental questions.

In reality, however, our liberal society acknowledges the need for unity. It confines “diversity” to matters of taste in private life, while in the public arena the two political parties, big business and the universities have all coalesced around an official ideology that allows no dissent: a liberal individualism in which maximising each individual’s autonomous capacity for pleasure through economic growth and scientific development is the unassailable aim. Any other ethical or moral vision – for example, one based on the absolute sanctity of human life – is allowed no hearing; indeed, it is demonised as a dangerous heresy. Such is the mirage of liberal diversity. Even in private life, no one can fail to notice that our liberal world is actually one of the most homogenous that has ever existed. Millions labour away performing almost identical office routines, live in identical suburbs, shop in identical supermarkets, hold the same clichéd opinions propagated by the mass media.[1]  As George Grant, the Canadian philosopher, observed (in a North American context): "As for pluralism, differences in the technological state are able to exist only in private activities: how we eat; how we mate; how we practise ceremonies. Some like pizza, some like steaks; some like girls, some like boys; some like synagogue, some like the mass. But we all do it in churches, motels, restaurants indistinguishable from the Atlantic to the Pacific".[2] And globalization is spreading this homogeneity throughout the world, destroying the real diversity of cultures and languages at an unprecedented rate.

When we analyse them more closely, many of the objections to the Catholic Church we hear are based on outrage at the fact that it is not homogenous enough. The Catholic Church is attacked for being unable to ordain women to the priesthood. In the modern understanding of gender, each sex is to be allowed to do everything the other can do; no intrinsic difference of calling or character is to be recognized. But nothing could be more homogenising than this unisex mentality. The Catholic Church defends real diversity when it maintains the real difference between men and women, each equally vital to the Church and to humanity, yet called in different ways. Similarly, the Church’s hierarchical government is hated because it recognises the diversity of human callings and talents. Pope and bishop, priest and deacon, nun, laymen and laywoman each have their distinct roles which others cannot perform; each has their distinct dress and a distinct form of address. In contrast, pure egalitarianism reduces human society to a mass of indistinguishable and interchangeable units. The great difficultly of reconciling true diversity with equality was noted by Alexis de Tocqueville, who observed that egalitarian societies tend towards conformism and homogeneity. It is thanks to the wisdom of the Holy Spirit that the Catholic Church has a hierarchical structure to protect her from this fate, which at the same time recognising the intrinsic equality of human beings before the eyes of God, to whom a poor Ugandan schoolgirl may have more spiritual merit than any President (or even any Cardinal).