A 2015
Pew survey reported that the total number of Catholics in the United States
dropped by 3 million since 2007, now comprising about 20 percent - or one-fifth
- of the total population. Catholicism is losing more members than it gains at
a higher rate than any other denomination – a recent development which the
radical progressives at Salon celebrate.
Why is this an issue that should worry Americans and the Western world at large?
One key reason is
that the fastest-growing religion in
the country and around the world is Islam – something Salon radicals also no
doubt celebrate. But the fundamentalist brand of Islam that is once again on
the rise is antithetical, indeed openly hostile, to the values of Western
civilization, and for many centuries Catholicism as a central component of
European identity was a bulwark against its spread. But for various reasons the
West has lost confidence in its cultural identity and moral authority in recent
decades, and the result has been submission to decadence, to cultural Marxism,
and to Islam. If we are to reverse a civilization in rapid decline, we must undertake
a resurgence of Western exceptionalism with a militant Christian ethos at its
core.
For Catholics who
have backslid or grown apathetic, that means waking up to what is at stake, and
then making a renewed commitment to understanding and manifesting the tenets of
their own religion, a religion that has been steered toward emasculation, socialism,
and interfaith suicide by the radical left. For non-Catholics as well – even
atheists – it means acknowledging how crucial a revivified Christianity is to a
defense of Western civilization, and educating themselves about the myths and
realities of Catholicism.
Enter John
Zmirak’s timely book, The Politically Incorrect Guide to
Catholicism, published by Regnery. Zmirak is an editor, teacher, screenwriter,
political columnist, and the author of the popular Bad Catholic's Guides and The
Race to Save Our Century: Five Core Principles to Promote Peace, Freedom, and a
Culture of Life. His work has appeared in First Things, The
Weekly Standard, USA Today, and FrontPage Magazine, among
other venues.
The book’s cover declares
Catholicism to be “the most politically incorrect institution in the world!”
and features a trinity of grinning nuns with guns – itself politically
incorrect enough to trigger leftists who prefer a less militant, more social
justice-oriented, and submissive Christianity. The cover also features such
triggering bullet points as:
- Catholic teaching favors gun rights, capitalism, and a strong defense
- Catholic “social teaching” isn’t liberal, it’s conservative
- Catholic doctrine doesn’t require open borders
and perhaps most politically incorrect and offensive:
- The Crusades are something to be proud of
In fact, Zmirak
notes, among the good things the Church has brought to the world are the
university, the hospital, the world’s greatest art, modern science, the
strongest check in history on the power of the state, and overall a new and
improved Western civilization in the wake of the fall of the Roman Empire. In
our culture’s rush to inflate Islam’s reputation by crediting Muslims with
inventing everything from algebra to the astrolabe, Catholicism’s actual
achievements by comparison are world-beating.
The Guide’s
dozen chapters cover such topics as where the Church stands on birth control
and abortion, the limits of papal authority, the free market, immigration,
amnesty, socialism, progressivism, sex, science, self-defense and capital
punishment, and yes, the scandal of “priestly pederasts,” which the author does
not whitewash.
Zmirak addresses
the fragmentation of the Catholic Church which began with the Second Vatican
Council in 1960 and remains to this day, exacerbated by the issue of birth
control. He covers the impact of secular modernity on the Church, and the
“explosion and radicalization of progressive dissent” which embraced a social
justice agenda and which has resulted in many Catholics taking positions “on
economics, welfare policy, and defense that [a]re a virtual mirror image of the
Democratic Party platform.”
This explains, the
author notes, how “politicians like Nancy Pelosi and Joseph Biden can support
partial-birth abortion, same-sex marriage, and legal mandates that nuns such as
the Little Sisters of the Poor distribute the ‘morning-after’ abortion pill –
and still go to Holy Communion. They haven’t abandoned the Church. They are in
fact its progressive vanguard…”
As for the
Crusades and the Catholic “just war” doctrine, Zmirak points out that the
Church “has never taught that pacifism is the appropriate response to conflict.”
True, there are strict requirements for legitimate defense, but “Christian
pacifism would leave Christian nations defenseless from conquest and
persecution at the hands of aggressive non-Christians.” If non-resistance to
violence were practiced consistently, he adds, “it would mean that we’d have no
police either, and that parents should not defend their helpless children from
murder or rape.” The Crusades, which today are condemned as evidence of “a
hideous, anti-Christian endeavor for which the Church should never stop apologizing
– and which Muslims are justified in resenting to this day,” were in fact, in
large part, “a heroic if doomed attempt to liberate conquered nations from the
yoke of intolerant Islam.”
Zmirak concludes
the book with a call to arms: “There can be no truce, no respite, no surrender.
As the price of calling ourselves Christians, we must make our case for natural
law, religious and economic liberty, the sanctity of life, and the truth about
sex year in and year out, regardless of the vagaries of particular candidates
and party platforms.”
He notes that he
collaborated with Whole Life program founder Jason Jones to identify the five
“Ideologies of Evil” that made the twentieth century the bloodiest in human
history:
- Racism and nationalism
- Total war against civilian populations
- Utopian collectivism
- Radical individualism
- Utilitarian hedonism
In opposition to
those evils, Zmirak and Jones list fundamental Catholic principles “that must
animate any decent politics”:
- The sanctity of each human being as an image of God
- The reality of a transcendent moral order that is above all man-made laws
- The need for a free society that protects fundamental rights
- The virtues of a humane economy that allows humans to flourish
- The duty of solidarity among every member of the human family
There is so much
more to The Politically Incorrect Guide
to Catholicism than this brief review may suggest.
The book is dense with information (including thirty pages of endnotes), but
it is entertaining as well as enlightening for
both believers and non-believers. It also provides a
wealth of other sources for further investigation, in frequent sidebars called
“Books You’re Not Supposed to Read.” In this time of rising Islamophilia and
openly anti-Christian bias among our cultural elites, John Zmirak’s book
itself is one you’re not supposed to read, but
definitely should.
From FrontPage Mag, 2/11/18
