The arts, once a rich cultural expression boasting the proverbial “moral of the story,” are corrupt!
“Foul deeds will rise, though all the earth o’erwhelm them, to men’s eyes,” wrote William Shakespeare against Elizabethan era political corruption, and it seems nothing has changed. Is cultural progress, as the modern leftists have failed to re-define it, really the positive, progressive development of posterity inspired by the past—a better distinction in my mind might be classical liberalism—or is culture a product of the French revolution’s individualism, and its apathy towards attaining, as a collective, the virtue of fortitude? Artistic mediums today present more as depraved and vindictively licentious artistic displays, not beautiful creations, creations that should be supernatural in effort. To understand this divide, we must look to the past. “The West has long been endangered by this aversion to the questions which underlie its rationality and can only suffer great harm thereby,” said Pope Benedict XVI in his Regensburg Address. For this reason, I argue that Catholic society is a secular society, and vice versa, and that there is no exception to this premise if the classics we study today did indeed shape modern education. But this does not mean Western culture—Catholic culture specifically—cannot be attacked.
De-Hellenization and Freemasonic influences began the destruction of the Mass of the Ages, which further became the newest cultural milieu in which turn-of-the-century modernists exchanged moral virtues for big funding via the femme fatale: feminism, essentially stripping culture and the Church of its history—arts education being the worst offender. To Catholics, the Fatima secrets of the early 20th century, which to many were the catalyst for World War II, brought with them warnings of hatred for true religion, the French Revolution’s individualism hangover, and the fusion of Freemasonic idealism with modern fraternal-ecumenism in Catholic Christian education notwithstanding. Hitler’s disdain for both Jews and Catholics reinforced these tragedies, which essentially saw the world rejecting God after 1945. The recent Democratic National Convention, their active promotion of genocide against the unborn in real-time—a diabolical prospect—or even the pagan ceremonies of the 2024 Olympics, comes as no surprise given the godlessness emphasized after World War II.
So, considering world events, what is the individual’s obligation to preserve morality in a collective culture, both in secular education and in sacred contexts? Do even agnostics and atheists have a duty to recognize these universal truths in a moral way since they exist as part of the natural law, and since morality—alongside most secular laws—was essentially codified by the Jewish law and fulfilled by Christ and the Catholic Church? To me, these issues are deeply interconnected; secular frailties exist because of weak religious men, and vice versa, creating a butterfly effect of sorts, which greatly increases disbelief in morality, which is God.
If a person endeavors to be virtuous today, he is considered out of touch. Meanwhile, our churches, schools, and institutions—private and public alike—funnel dirty government money for personal gain and pronouns. Because of moral relativism and the “you-do-you” mentality, morality itself has become a subjective pursuit. Where there is no belief in hell, anarchy reigns supreme.
Plato, a pagan—but a great thinker—believed that distinctions matter, though in a different sense than we might understand pronoun usage today. In his commentary the Republic, he details his assessment of proper cultural relations between men and women: “[M]en and women are to have a common way of life such as we have described—common education, common children; and they are to watch over the citizens in common, whether abiding in the city or going out to war … and always and in all things … in so doing, they will do what is best and will not violate but preserve the natural relation of the sexes.”
Today, people have disregarded the spiritual essence of their sexuality, rooted in natural law, with the legalization of gay marriage and the spiritual sterility brought about by Feminism. The men of the Catholic Church have become lukewarm in addressing this issue, contributing to a continuing butterfly effect and further poisoning secular man’s intelligence. But how do you control people? You make them dumb. You make them believe something that is not true.
Recently, despite the Pope’s better judgment, the Vatican released a new declaration titled Fiducia Supplicans. This document is nothing short of a political mess and, unlike other pre-Vatican II papal declarations on doctrine, it is arguably heretical—though this authority, I concede, is the magisterium’s alone. Pope Francis has criticized overly liberal American universities, many of which promote the LGBTQ+ agenda, and those like the University of Idaho, which do not, are often targeted by disgruntled students. The Pope himself has remarked that “[these universities] forget that they have to form men and women, [as] people of integrity.” Yet, Fiducia Supplicans seems to grant these sacred and secular institutions full license to engage in sinful practices, contradicting the religiosity that the clergy should uphold. The document appears forced and indicative of Freemasonic coerciveness.
Like the pagan Plato, Shakespear, a Catholic, understood the reality of corrupt men in high places. Peter Lake, in his book, How Shakespear Put Politics on the Stage: Power and Succession in the History Plays, alludes to organizational corruption in his commentary on Shakespeare’s Julius Ceasar, and I cannot help but make this connection with the current ecclesiastical corruption. “Ceasar … [is] a textbook example of how a great man,” perhaps a Papal figure, “could be worked on by one of his creatures, his susceptibility exploited to bring him, in this case at least, to his ruin.”
A secular society is not immune to the errors of the Church. Both the Church and secular schools are closely connected in Arizona education. Arizona’s higher education institutions, already criticized for pervasive anti-Jewish and anti-Catholic sentiments, are now under scrutiny for questionable financial practices. The renaming of the Fred Fox School of Music due to supposed legal battles over the director’s endowment smells still of something rotting “in the state of Denmark.” Most concerning, however, is the link between these Arizona schools, their suspected fraud, and Casa Alitas, a questionable, politically motivated organization whose function is unclear regarding the safety of Arizona citizens and border security. Recent Catholic artwork displayed in Tucson Catholic schools reflects this agenda, depicting biblically inaccurate scenes of the Holy Family’s travels, influenced by “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) coercion. These murals highlight the ignorance and willful apathy of our spiritual leaders regarding both the physical safety of Arizonans and the religious education of our youth. The pope and the USCCB urge Catholics not to politicize the faith, though it seems this artwork is an agenda, and the Church is using artwork to promote false education.
Catholic culture is deeply connected to secular culture and its education, albeit politically—which is contrary to the role of Christ’s Catholic Church. Still, some clergy have hope in American secular institutions. Luka Adamo in his article, “Postliberal Lessons from Robert Cardinal Sarah’s D.C. Visit,” reflects on how Cardinal Sarah pushes back on the rhetoric coming from Rome. Cardinal Sarah hopes that the “United States is not like Europe,” and that this Catholic renaissance “must shine through all of America’s institutions,” Adamo paraphrases. “If Catholics in this country can be a sign of contradiction to your culture, the Holy Spirit will do great things through you” says Sarah. Though not a Catholic, Governor Kay Ivey’s recent bill, SB 129, limiting DEI in Alabama educational institutions, inspires the hope US Americans receive from Cardinal Sarah’s sentiments, and she believes St. Mary’s Catholic school will be helpful in her CHOOSE Act initiatives which gives parents more control over their children’s education. Arizona’s parents however, fear Katy Hobbs’s more liberal approach to parental guided learning, as she emphasizes public schooling where DEI runs rampant.
When I attend Mass, I often liken the altar to a sort of holy stage and cannot fathom how a clergyman could re-enact the Crucifixion, knowing his participation in such diabolically political rings. Shakespeare must have known the answers to these grievances, which he wrote into his plays, and it seems they are evidence of the evil within men since Genesis. Likewise, the modern agnostic philosopher, an Anglican of sorts, Roger Scruton, in his article titled “Music and Morality,” offers an interesting perspective on Plato and his thought on how a moral culture is the linchpin of a moral society. Plato implies that moral fortitude is established through art and politics. Scruton relays: “‘The ways of poverty and music are not changed anywhere without changes in the most important laws of the city.’ So wrote Plato in the Republic … Plato is famous for having given what is perhaps the first theory of character in music,” writes Scruton. Character refers here to the moral efficacy of music personified, as if to say music and art both play a humanistic role in how people understand, relate to, and fortify posterity. Sadly, the music of the modern church has also fallen to the 1960s Woodstock appeal.
Further, Aristotle declares in his work Metaphysics (1011b25): “To say of what is that it is not, or of what is not that it is, is false, while to say of what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not, is true,” which is to say that taking evil for good, and good for evil is decidedly a bad proposition.
Plato, Aristotle, Shakespeare, and in modernity, Scruton all seem to agree, to some degree, that culture has failed not because of culture but because of people. I would say the same for the Catholic Church. What is certain is that many Catholic men, clergy included, have stopped searching for God. For those of us who continue to search for God, the once-excommunicated Archbishop Lefebvre offers us some hope, saying, “If one day they shall excommunicate us because we remain faithful to these theses, we shall consider ourselves excommunicated,” though the primacy of the Holy See seems lost. Instead, we lift our glasses to Shakespeare, as the devil takes the world stage, and say, “An unweeded garden that grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature possess it merely … something is rotten in the state of Denmark!”
The moral of this story is: always search for truth, at any cost, for if we truly accept these theses, rooted in the past and for our posterity, we remain confident that the gates of hell shall not prevail against the will of God on Earth.
Image of Saint Agnes School in Detroit, Michigan by Thomas Hawk on Flickr
This article was originally published in The www.mindingthecampus.org
