The Collapse of "Catholic" Higher Education in the USA

Several members of St. Blog's have recently called attention to this Spectator article by John R. Dunlap, Apr. 28:

.... Try this, for example, as a quick taste of the Augustinian worldview: The moral order is absolute, woven into the very fabric of creation. Personal sin, therefore, is never merely a private psychological event; owing to ignorance or stupidity or an idiotized upbringing, the sinner may be subjectively without blame, but the sin itself has objective consequences that claw at the well-being of the sinner and of others around him and of still others yet to be after him.

Imagine juggling such thoughts, day after day, with a class of bright 20-year-olds marinated all their lives in a culture of moral relativism. For most of them, the course seems to be their first encounter with the feebleness of their own culture. They don't necessarily buy into all of Augustine (predestination, anyone?), but they respect him, and they want to talk about these ideas they had never before heard of....

Dunlap proceeds to explain how this whole worldview was chucked in the late 1960s and early 1970s — chucked through deliberate inadvertence.

Read the documents of Vatican II. (There are numerous links in the right-hand column on the main weblog page where you can find these documents in any of numerous formats you may find to be pleasing to the eye.) You will find nothing in any of them that direct, implore, encourage, or even suggest that traditional Catholic theology and philosophy were to be chucked wholesale through deliberate inadvertence. In fact, you will find a plethora of references to the writings of previous popes, ecumenical councils, doctors and saints, and St. Thomas Aquinas in particular.

Wholesale abandonment of Catholic tradition did not happen because of the teachings of Vatican II, but in spite of them.

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Thu. 05/08/03 12:55:35 PM
Categorized as Religious.