The Lake Garda Statement
Regarding the “Catholic” Apotheosis of Luther
Final Session of the 24th Annual Roman
Forum Summer Symposium
Feast of Saints Cyril and Methodius
July 7th, 2016
Our civilization is so sick that even
the best efforts to prop up its few tottering remnants manifest the pathetic
illness that has step by step brought the entire structure crumbling down. The
disease in question is a willful, prideful, irrational, and ignorant obsession
with “freedom”. But this is a malady that gained its initial effective entry
into Christendom in union with the concept of the natural world as the realm of
“total depravity”.
It is crucially important that we
recognize both the ultimate responsibility of this willful liberty for the
destruction of our Christian and Classical culture as well as the role played
by the idea that “incarnated” it historically in our midst. This is so for two
reasons. The first is in order that we may attempt seriously to rid ourselves
of their monstrous influence over our own minds, souls, and bodies. The second
is because a massive attempt to masquerade the truth regarding their real
character and practical alliance is being mounted in conjunction with the five
hundredth anniversary of Martin Luther’s devastating appearance on the public
scene in 1517—and this for the sake of maintaining their nefarious impact upon
believers and delivering the Faith its coup
de grace as a meaningful social force.
1517 is not the source of our woe—any more, for that matter, than was 1962 with the
opening of Second Vatican Council. In both cases spiritual, intellectual,
political, and social diseases that had already long hovered about the Camp of
the Saints had by those dates finally coalesced, and were ready for injection
into the lymphatic system of Catholic Christendom as one “mega malady”.
All of these disorders ultimately
reflected a revulsion over the need for the individual and his entire
environment to be corrected, perfected, and transformed under the Kingship of
Christ: with the aid of faith, grace, and reason on the one hand, and social
authority, both supernatural and natural, on
the other. Anyone in 1516 looking for a simple explanation for why he should reject such aids thus had
available to him an embarrassment of errors from a myriad of sources indicating
that he could do so; and that relying
upon his own unguided feelings and will was the pathway to pleasing God.
Nevertheless, the conflicted mind of
the Late Middle Ages clearly needed a figure with the talent and rhetorical venom
of a Luther effectively to inject this mega malady into Christendom. Christian
man was too aware of the reality of sin to leap directly into an adulation of individual willfulness. Luther’s
concept of the total depravity of the individual and the world in which he
lived gave Everyman the apparently pious excuse for succumbing to the obsession
with liberty that was required. After all, a recognition of man’s total
depravity seemed to foster such a humble recognition of each believer’s
personal need to rely solely on God’s grace to save him; of his need to affirm
that “freedom” from “enslavement” to the “despotism” of a Law built upon both Faith
and Reason that permitted escape from a “hopeless” and ultimately spiritually “arrogant”
attempt to bend his individual, lifelong workaday thoughts and actions into
conformity with the commands of Christ.
It proved to be quite easy over the
course of a couple of generations for this negative
definition of “liberty”—a “freedom” from
the supernatural and natural Law—to be transformed, in the Enlightenment, into
the means for a positive new and
redemptive order of things. In short, it did not take long for the freedom of
depraved man in depraved nature from the
restraints of a supposedly impossible Law—in the name of an openness to
unmerited grace—to be seen as the providential tool for molding unbridled human
thoughts and actions into the building blocks of a new Age of Gold. In other
words, the more that a freedom from
restraints actually ensured that the sinful
passions of mankind were all released in order to allow flawed individuals to became truly
totally depraved, the more that same depravity was now looked upon as
something intrinsically good, and even pleasing in the eyes of God.
Unfortunately, this logical but sick development of “freedom” has not assured
the “dignity of man”. Rather, it has led to nothing other than the triumph of
the strongest irrational and materialist wills.
Sad to say, it seems absolutely certain
that many of our ecclesiastical leaders are turning 2016-2017 into a year-long
paean to the errors of Martin Luther and what the great English Church
Historian, Philip Hughes, tells us lay behind them for centuries: “all those
anti-intellectualist, anti-institutional forces”; “all the crude, backwoods,
obscurantist theories bred of the degrading pride that comes with chosen
ignorance; the pride of men ignorant because unable to be wise except through
the wisdom of others”. (A History of the Church, Sheed & Ward, 1949,
III, 529).
In face of this chorus of undeserved praise,
it is our duty as loyal Catholics is to do three things:
First of all, to steel ourselves against
the contradictory and tragically self-destructive lies that this adulation of
Luther and Company’s irrational and willful principles—what Hughes calls their
“five hundred year fling” (Ibid.)—actually
fosters in practice.
Secondly, to hammer home to others the anti-Catholic
and unnatural misery, both spiritual and purely human, that such errors have inevitably
caused.
And, finally, to beseech our Holy
Father—the successor to St. Peter as well as to the great popes of a vibrant
and seriously Catholic Reformation
that fought against the horrors emerging from 1517—to abandon this misguided
attempt to masquerade what Luther and his “freedom” wrought. For what they truly wrought was ultimately nothing other
than what Richard Gawthrop identifies as that “Promethean lust for material
power that serves as the deepest common drive behind all modern Western
cultures”. (Pietism
and the Making of Eighteenth Century Prussia,
Cambridge, 1993, p. 284).
Saints
Cyril and Methodius, pray for us!
John C. Rao, D.Phil. (Oxon)
Director, The Roman Forum
Rev. Richard A. Munkelt, Ph.D.
Board Member, The Roman Forum
Prof. Dr. Thomas Heinrich Stark
Faculty Member, The Roman Forum
Christopher A. Ferrara, Esq.
President, American Catholic Lawyers Association
Michael J. Matt
Editor,
The Remnant
