Some critics of the Church since the Enlightenment state that the teachers and Popes did not address the modern issues of politics, science and modernism. This is a misunderstanding of the times and the teachings. Since the publication of Marx and Engels, the Church has been on the offensive, not the defensive regarding teaching concerning the effects of tyrannies, the materialists dialectic and the supposed war between the classes. All the popes since 1848 have addressed these ideologies. The problem has been in the implementation at the local levels of the clarity of the Teaching Magisterium.
Why? Many priests fell into error and carried those errors into the pulpit for the last two-hundred years. Many priests and even bishops themselves were and are communists and push for that version of a world-view, based on materialism, rather the the spiritual message of the Kingdom of God.
As laity, it is our duty to take care of our brothers and sisters in poverty or troubles.
Gramsci was clear that the Church was the only institution to understand what he and other revolutionaries wanted in the culture wars and the destruction of Western civilization, itself created largely by Christendom.
Here is one of his quotations. Gramsci understood that both Faith and Reason were held together in the Catholic Church, that Revelation and the Teaching Magisterium provided a cohesive block against the fragmentation of society.
The strength of religions, and of the Catholic Church in particular, has lain, and still lies, in the fact that they feel very strongly the need for the doctrinal unity of the whole mass of the faithful and strive to ensure that the higher intellectual stratum does not get separated from the lower. The Roman church has always been the most vigorous in the struggle to prevent the “official” formation of two religions, one for the “intellectuals” and the other for the “simple souls” … That the Church has to face up to a problem of the “simple” means precisely that there has been a split in the community of the faithful. This split cannot be healed by raising the simple to the level of the intellectuals .... but only by imposing an iron discipline on the intellectuals so that they do not exceed certain limits of differentiation and so render the split catastrophic and irreparable.
Catholic intellectuals, including the laity, have a duty to combat the lies of the ideologies which have almost overcome the concepts of freedom and individualism. Our definition of the individual is not that of the socialist. We are unique creatures, each one having a purpose, not to be subsumed by the bloated government.
Those who are the enemy delight in the fragmentation of society, and society is built on natural, moral law and not the laws of men. This is the key to the strength of the Church...that we have recognized that man-made structures are doomed to tyranny and/or chaos.
Tyranny will come to America and chaos to Europe for the purposeful loss of the culture wars has occurred.
That Gramsci only saw the discipline of the Church as evil, rather than a guideline of the Holy Spirit intended to persevere Truth mirrors his own lack of Faith and Reason.
The man or woman who will not bend to God, will not bend to the Church. Humility in scholarship is key.
We are on the edge, as most people will choose material comfort over truth. This is the sad decline of the human spirit. The remnant Church holds the real intellectual unity of a society, which Gramsci wanted through his groups of intellectuals at all levels.
Of course, this burgeoning of intellectual life has not happen, and in fact, societies are less intellectual now than in the recent past. Atheism makes one closed to the entire spiritual world, and therefore, the world of creativity and newness.
There has been a split in the Church, but not the one mentioned in the above quotation. The real split is between those who see the Spirit working in the Church and those who want to make the Church into their own image and likeness, into their own ideological institution. Hence, the liberal intellectuals have sold out to the Gramscian ideal of "intellectualism" but separated from the soul.
This state in a person or government is suicide. The intellectual gifts are connected to the spirit of man and woman, to the soul, to prayer and illumination.
Gramsci's material mind-set could not imagine an institution which is actually empowered by GOD HIMSELF. That the Trinity dwells in each baptized Catholic and that there is insight and intellectual freedom partly defines us as made in the image and likeness of God.
Gramsci wanted men and women to be made in his image and likeness--and that is the primal sin of the angels; I will not serve.
Without the Holy Spirit and the individual free spirit of men and women, the intellect dies.
We are in that stage of Western Civilization. At the end of the year, we can only look forward to making ourselves and our families strong against the Gale of Stupidity and Barbarism which will engulf some reading this in their lifetime.
