“The following meditations proceed from two assumptions. First, the Church is and remains obliged to make the reign of Christ the King present in every aspect of human life—the school, the concert hall, the legislature, the lab, the home, and the mall. Where modernity pretends to offer a creed more universal than the Church’s, whether this be through the language of rights, of tolerance, or of inevitable progress, those pretensions need to be exposed; they need to be ridiculed for the idolatry they are. . . . The second assumption is this: if Catholicism is ever again to shape Western culture, then the Church in the West must learn anew how to master and and muster the resources of its own tradition” (xxvi).

“The Faith defines and so limits thought through its dogmas, its institutions, its traditions, but these the Faith also liberates. By imposing limits faith frees thought and action from futility and can render them divine. In the following chapters I aim to explore and defend that claim” (xxii).

“religion remains as a trophy to modernity’s own universality, its own benign tolerance” (xxv).

This is anti-liberal not in the American, neoconservative, right-wing, George Weigel/Robert Sirico way, but in the Catholic, Augustinian Thomist, no-wing, Tracey Rowland/Adian Nichols way.

Creed, Sacraments, Morality, Prayer-two chapters each.

Faith: faith and reason, scripture, tradition, relation, historical critical method, etc.

Creed: “What is at stake in the West’s cultural crisis is not, for instance, the correct balance between a mother’s right to privacy and her child’s right to life. What is at stake, rather, is whether ma must take into account the God of Jesus Christ in the ordering of society. This is the only fundamental question for the social philosophy of the future” (52).

History of modernity, humanism, etc.

Liturgy: “If you no longer see yourself as the servant of a tradition, but as its master, no longer believe that the rubrics veil a mystery, that the soul requires truth tb wrapped in the garment of beauty, then reasonably you are likely to treat the Mass more as a gathering of friends than as a sacrifice of God” (77).

“Since liturgy, out immersion in the web of sacramental signs, transforms faith, every action that disturbs cult produces an equal and often disastrous effect on culture. Revive cult, and culture will eventually follow” (69).

History of liturgical movement, real meaning of active participation, worship most important work of Church

Sacraments: Appeal to good and true are compromise, not beauty. “Our skepticism and our cynicism have left many in our culture cold to the apologist and even to the missionary of charity, but not to the artist.”

Liturgy must be enchanted. Critique: Throw out all modern art? Nothing to learn from it? Charles Taylor better.

“In out contemporary schizophrenia, reason is indeed granted mastery over nature; but at a cost. Science has to admit the incomprehensibility of the mind, and the mind, for its part, gives up the right to travel outside own head. The net result is that science is reductive and our art irrational” (106).

Architecture and liturgy.

Virtue: happiness, not mere duty—no Kant!

Reditus now, not exitus as before. Conscience, virtues, problems—Nietzschean values authenticity, subjectivism, therapeutic ethics, relativism—but, he throws out the good with the bad. Can we just go back? Need to understand genealogy, but also see the good in it, Walsh, Taylor, etc.

Law:

Dante, synthesis of Biblical and classical ethics, hell (pleasure and pain), purgatory, four cardinal virtues, theological virtues, conscience, natural law, structure of penance, 7 vices and 7 virtues, the mean, all stemming from love. “Simply by looking at the poem’s structure we learn four lessons central to the Catholic moral vision: (1) the pedagogical value of pleasure and pain; (2) the witness of conscience to the natural law; (3) the doctrine of the mean; (4) and the primacy of love. Because virtue presupposes natural law, there can be no Christianity apart from love” (166-167).

Family:

School of prayer, many statistics on its break up and destruction. Attacks against family: Marxist, eugenicist, gender theory, contraception, abortion. Problem—big families? OKAY, but in the nuclear family without extended family? Need distinctions here!

Prayer:

Hope, contemplation vs praxis (Bacon) errors against hope, utopia, economicism: “In an age in which enlightened opinion generally favors abortion, euthanasia, and the cloning of body parts, it turns out that believing in life after death supplies one of the sturdier defenses for the conviction that there should be life before death too” (210). Religious life.

Conclusion

Crisis of Faith after VII. Modernity as Christian heresy. Tryng to outdo Christians in goodness. Based upon nothing though. Modern secular humanism is only possible after Christendom. Even good of modernity are distorted—rights, separation of church and state.

Solution? “Let us end abortion; have more children; teach them Latin; and build better churches. These correspond to the most pressing social, educational, political, and liturgical needs of the Church in the West” (236).