Chaitanya Jyothi Museum Opening, 2000

RAMANAM
In the Name of The Father, and of The Son and of The Holy Spirit, Amen.

Countrymen,

ORBIS NON SUFFICIT
SOLUS DEUS SUFFICIT

Moral authority derives from moral courage.  The churches lack moral authority because they lack moral courage.  They are storefronts for socialist political movements.  Can the churches regain moral authority, and if so, how?  By building moral courage.

That much is easy because it is syllogistic.  Perhaps if we examine how this lack of moral authority uccurred, we can see how to restore it by restoring moral courage.

Bonhoeffer asked how the church could thrive without being religious.  He meant, in a socialist (communist or fascist) political environment, which by definition is anti-Christian and anti-universal.

His answer, religionless Christianity (Religionsloses Christentum), has never really caught on because, I think, Bonhoeffer — through no fault of his own — did not (1) identify the point in history at which the churches lost moral authority and (2) sufficiently anticipate the power of habit (Clergy) and sentimentalism (Laity) to represent themselves to themselves as Christianity and religion.  Had he, I think he would have far more credited as Christian religion his personal activities, especially those against a socialist regime, than he did.  He is remembered more for his courageous personal opposition to political, moral and religious evil — a most religion-ful Christianity, did he but say it — than for his estimates of Christian stochastic, hermeneutical and practical structures inside a secular — that is to say, hostile — political environment.

The Thirty Years War is the point at which the churches lost moral authority.  The Crusades expressed the church’s moral authority.  The Thirty Years War destroyed it.

The evil was not war.  The evil was that war.  That vain, damned war.  Protestants wanted to reform the whole church, Roman Catholics wanted to extirpate the Reformation.  Neither could accomplish their goal because neither goal was legitimate.  The war destroyed half the population of Europe, especially of Germany.  It destroyed all the moral authority of the churches, Protestant and Roman Catholic.

Secular authority had to step in and stop the stalemated carnage.  Ever since, secular authority in the regions of the Latin Church (Protestant, Reformed, Anglican and Roman Catholic) has postured as moral authority superior to that of the Latin Church and demanded, more or less, loyalty by the Latin Church to itself.  That is the problem, the evil Bonhoeffer faced with his characterization of religionless Christianity.

The deed was done.  The churches have lacked moral authority since the Thirty Years War.  Moreover, one could argue, on moral and morale grounds, that the Thirty Years War brought on the Communist prefigurement, the French Revolution/Terror, because the churches, by creating that vain, damned Thirty Years War, lost their moral authority to seculars, humanists, the impious, the criminally insane.

What was lost by the churches, what specifically did they no longer have after 1645?  Lost was the high view of man, the view characterized, for example, by the High Middle Ages.  Lost was the can-do spirit of building, of optimism, self-confidence and self-satisfaction.  The churches could not inspire political, economic, moral or social development.  They sidelined themselves from those activities.  Nor could the churches inspire intellectual development such as in mathematics, medicine, engineering, theology, the empirical sciences, the fine and humane arts and the arts of war and law.  All authority among the churches to inspire those necessary activities was annihilated by the Thirty Years War.

And the churches’ most enormous loss was of inspiration to reform the great monastic foundations or create new ones.  No moral authority, no in-breathing of the Holy Spirit for the purpose of creation, preservation and consummation of the churches’ foundation: continuous monastic prayers of praise, supplication and intercession, ceaseless monastic singing to the Glory of God, uninterrupted monastic study of any and all subjects, incessant monastic light industry and persistent monastic engagement in agriculture.  After 1645, monastic foundations were for what today are denoted social service or welfare activities, little, time-sensitive — albeit commendable — commiserations and repairs.  Nothing grand and foundational like a Monte Casino or a Cîteaux, much less an Assisi or a Santa Sabina.  Protestant and Reformed family monastic foundations rigidified and their members began emigration to the New World across the Atlantic.

And into the seat of moral authority, in both Old and New Worlds, moved secular authorities, immediately in the Old World, within a century in the New World.  Or so they claimed.  Their moral authority was their view that man and history could be fostered and built.  Details were less profound and invigorating than they were when the Latin Church, in the High Middle Ages, held that view of man and history as well as the moral authority to promote and implement it.  At least, however, the secular authorities said, “We can build.” and, by stopping the damned Thirty Years War, had moral authority to promote and implement the outlook.

The several national Enlightenments of the 17th and 18th Centuries embodied the moral authority of seculars to forge consequences of a high view of man and history.  They got to it with vigor and, by some, vengeance.  Results are widely known today and, though less and less so, appreciated.

[Socialists — Communist and Fascist — and their blood-brothers in Arabia Deserta — Wahhabists and Salafists — are allergic to a high view of man and history.  Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab commenced his puritanical mission to counter the threat, as he saw it, to Islam’s sovereign territory (Middle East) and march (into Europe) by Enlightenment views of man and history.  The defeat of Caliphism at Vienna in 1683 shook Moslems in their roots.  Wahhab decided it happened because Moslems are not pure enough Moslems and have to get a whole lot purer before Allah will remedy the defeat at Vienna.  Well, things got a whole lot worse for Wahhab after he died.  Napoleon and then Nelson landed in Egypt, the Moslem heart, and moved up the Levant, the Moslem torso.  They have been there ever since, doing to Moslems whatever they wished to do.  Wahhab was right: moral authority in secular hands — the Enlightenment — is an existential threat to Caliphist totalitarianism.  However, so is moral authority in religious hands, and that Wahhab did not grasp because the Thirty Years War had removed moral authority from religious hands in the Latin Church.  He never experienced what moral authority in religious hands can do.  On a culture-wide scale, neither has anyone since 1645.]

Now, can the churches regain moral authority, and if so, how?

They can and here is how:

1. 1. renounce associations with political and governmental entities and their domestic and foreign activities and goals
   2. renounce separations of theology and ecclesiology
   3. renounce federal, state and local favored tax status
   4. renounce half or more of physical plant and consolidate congregations
   5. renounce pacifism as a moral objective
   6. renounce sentimentalism as moral content
   7. support the professions: teaching, medicine, arms, law
   8. support the vocations: finance, construction, industry, labor
   9. support Holy Crusade against Caliphism and Globalism (Fascist and Communist)
   10. support monastic establishments for prayer, singing, study, light industry and agriculture
   11. support historico-theological education the way secular authority supports military education
   12. support married clergy and clean clergy

The Latin Church requires purification, discipline, training.  Seriously undergoing that, alone, would build moral authority in the churches.  It would be easier to undergo voluntarily than at the instance of the beheading knife.  Moral courage builds moral authority.

The Church calls Holy Crusade against Caliphism and Socialism (Fascist and Communist).

Update 1: A Prayer Of Intercession

Update 2: A Breviary Of Adwaitha Hermitage

Update 3: Prayerbook For A Common Faith

Update 4: La Messe Sur La Monde / Mass On The World (1991) / La Messe Sur La Monde / Mass On The World (2007)

Update 5: On 04 February 2015, the 274th anniversary of the birth of Andrzej Tadeusz Bonawentura Kościuszko, Don Surber wrote appreciatively of General Kościuszko.  Theological Geography has honored the great Pole and American of Polish descent in several posts.  A friend of Theological Geography, Dr. Marek Jan Chodakiewicz, sent these bits of color in the picture of General Kościuszko:

Kosciuszko freed his serfs before he came to the U.S.  So I doubt his reflex to help black slaves erupted suddenly because of the South.

The Kosciuszkos were from Merekowszczyzna outside of Minsk.  That was about 500 miles away from Mscislaw (Mstislav), outside of which my family sat at the time.

Update 6: How about a RICO suit at Tom Steyer?

Update 7: Americans helping Kurds.

Update 8: See also morchidat  in Morocco.

Update 9: Related: It’s Not Easy Going Green

Update 10: Why The American Church Should Go Off The Grid

Update 11: France’s Catholic Revolution

Update 12: What About Syrian Christian Refugees?

Update 13: Professor Roberto de Mattei: Resistance And Fidelity To The Church In Times Of Crisis

Update 14: But the churches are NOT ethical authorities: Of Money And Morals

Update 15: Over the past two years the increasingly skeptical citizenry of the United States and Europe has been treated to a stream of op-eds and television appearances lamenting the looming collapse of the liberal world order, to be accompanied by a surge of illiberalism, nationalism, and fringe politics. Rarely, however, does such hand-wringing stray beyond shopworn comparisons of the “complex interdependence” of the glorious past and the parochialism and narrow-mindedness of the current era. In truth, we are not witnessing a dramatic systemic change driven by conniving external forces, but a meltdown of political authority in the West caused by the relatively straightforward indolence of its political class. Our troubles are less about liberalism’s decline or the ascendancy of left or right politics. Simply put, the citizenry in the West has been frustrated for decades with its elites’ inability to deliver workable solutions to the problems of slow growth, deindustrialization, immigration, and the overall decline of self-confidence across the West.

The legitimacy, and hence stability, of the international system rests to a degree on the ability of the leading powers to deliver at home—or, simply put, to govern. The increasing volatility of international politics is in part a byproduct of systemic dysfunction across the West at the level of domestic politics. Americans and Europeans alike are running out of patience with the governing class. In Europe, the government’s inability to control mass migration or develop effective solutions to domestic terrorism are two important drivers of the growing public discontent. In the United States the middle and working classes have been frustrated for decades with the government’s inability to remedy de-industrialization, urban decay, and declining economic opportunity.

Glenn Reynolds comments: And in both places, as the “elite” has grown demonstrably less competent and honest, it has also grown visibly more contemptuous of the people it purports to govern. That contempt is, I think, the most poisonous part of the whole equation.

My essays on the question of authority are here.

Update 16: Ron Dreher: Trump Can’t Save American Christianity

Update 17: The Reformation is over.  Protestants won.  So why are we still here?

Update 18: Back to Canossa, only now it is the Pope standing bare-headed in the snow begging forgiveness from the ChiComs.

Update 19: Bishop Marcelo Sánchez Sorondo: ‘China is the best implementer of Catholic social doctrine,’

Update 20: This British Vicar has figured it out: Christian Life In Exile

Update 21: Archbishop of Canterbury get it right about Islam and law in Latin Culture.  Also here.

Update 22: After ISIS Destroys, The Christians Return

Update 23: Relevant stats

Update 24: How Far Should Churches Go to Appeal to Men?

Most successful way to appeal to both men and women: Male only church leadership.

Men love to belong to male dominated organizations.  On the other hand, women love to belong to male dominated organizations.  Don’t believe me?  Have you ever thought it was odd that women always want to belong to men’s business organizations, men’s career fields, men’s social clubs, men’s athletic clubs, etc., but men avoid women’s organizations.

I once attended a large and rapidly growing conservative Lutheran congregation which had a male-only leadership.  I was astounded by two things.  First, board and congregational meetings were more calm, to the point and productive than any church meetings I have ever been to.  In three years, I never heard someone said, “Well, I feel . . .”  Second, it had the strongest bunch of women I have ever known in any church I’ve ever attended.  Having men in visible, public leadership roles and the women in deeply influential, behind the scenes roles worked very well for that congregation.

I suspect the church’s acquiescence to feminism in the sixties and seventies badly damaged it.  As men fled the church, the church did not become larger.  It did not even get more women members because as the men left, the women follow them out the door.  The more women want to be in charge, the more men leave.  The more men leave, the more the women leave because an organization is only valuable to them if there are lots of men in it.  It’s deeply ironic, isn’t it?

Update 25: The Babylon Bee: Episcopalians Confused By Strange Book Trump Brought To Church

AUM NAMAH SHIVAYA