The Virus of Humanism

Tonight I want to speak about Humanism. Why? Because Humanism is the poison that is destroying the modern world, and this poison has infiltrated even within the Church, so it is important that you are aware of what is the enemy, what is the danger, so that you can recognize it when you see it.

Humanism is the worship of man instead of the worship of God, it is to put man as an absolute, as the center of reference of everything instead of putting God as The Absolute and the reference for everything. I would like first to have a short review of the history and then to develop the opposition between the spirit of man, humanism, and the spirit of Christ.

History of Humanism

Before the Renaissance

I could start the history of humanism with Adam and Eve, but I will spare you. The devil who wants the perdition of mankind from the very beginning presented an apple to Adam and Eve.This apple was but a symbol, a symbol of disobedience to God, not doing God's Will but man's will, and this is the basis of humanism.

I will start the history of humanism from the Renaissance. You know that God allowed the fall of the Roman Empire, which was at first a pagan empire, in order to re-establish the civil society on Catholic basis, on the basis on Our Lord Jesus Christ. That was the great accomplishment of all the holy bishops in the beginning of the Middle Ages. If you look at the history of the saints there were many holy bishops in the early Middle Ages. Just in my city, to take one example, there were sixteen canonized bishops, and of these sixteen more than twelve were in the first eight centuries. Thus the great accomplishment of the holy bishops at the beginning of the Middle Ages was to establish civil society on the basis of Our Lord Jesus Christ, to put Our Lord as the Foundation Stone of the whole civil life. And this brought out the great development of the Church in the Middle Ages and the great glory of the Church in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries; it led to an abuse because every good thing is, unfortunately, abused: at the end of the Middle Ages the fervour of the faith had diminished, and then crept in the Renaissance.

The Renaissance

What does that mean—Renaissance? It comes from a French word which means re-birth, rebirth of what? Re-birth of paganism, re-birth of the Roman pagan gods, of the Greek pagan gods, of all the culture before Our Lord Jesus Christ. It was to disregard all the Catholic culture that had developed after the coming of Our Lord Jesus Christ. Poets of the time speak of the pagan divinities in their poems and they exalt the same items that the pagans were exalting especially the worship of man and the worship of the human body like in Greece. I am sure you know the very famous Greek statue of the discus thrower. This was an ideal for the Greeks. Already in the Bible, in the Book of the Maccabees, when the Greek culture tried to creep into the Holy Land, the Maccabbes fought against it. The Spirit of God is not the spirit of the world. The Renaissance wanted to return to the spirit of the world. You find this worship of the human body in the paintings and in the sculpture of the Renaissance, even in the Vatican where you have too much emphasis given to the human body, while in the Middle Ages every painting or sculpture is very modest. So the Renaissance is the beginning of humanism; they came back to the pagan ideal of man. Humanism is not progress, but rather regress!

Protestantism

Departing from Our Lord Jesus Christ as the center of all and putting man as the center of all led to the refusal of the Church, as if the Church was an obstacle for man: that was the Protestant Reformation; they wanted man as the sole arbiter of the meaning of the Holy Scriptures. The basis of the Protestant Reformation is that anyone can read the Bible and can interpret it the way they want: man becomes the arbiter of the Word of God! This is not the Catholic way. We received from God not only His written Word but also its explanation by word of mouth through the Church.

Free Masons

Then when you refuse the Church you are led to refuse also Our Lord Jesus Christ. This is what you have in the philosophies of the eighteenth century. You heard of Rousseau, Voltaire, Diderot and other bad philosophers of the eighteen century: many of them were French, poor France! Their great idea was this: We do admit the existence of a god who would be the great architect of the universe, but that god would be so much above man that he does not know and does not care about what is happening here below. It is a god who does not know everything, it is a god who cannot take care of what he made. That is not the true God! But that is the idea of God pushed by the Freemasons. Why? Because they do not want of a God Who intervenes in human affairs, they want to do their will rather than God's Will. Now this is a direct refusal of Our Lord Jesus Christ. Indeed Who is Our Lord Jesus Christ? It is God Himself who comes on earth to take care of us and to tell us what to do, to show us the way to heaven. The Freemasons do not want this, they do not want of Our Lord Jesus Christ. Do not be deceived, when freemasons or other ungodly people say that they believe in God, their god is not an almighty God, is not an all-knowing God, it is a god who is indifferent to his creatures, it is a god who does not care, who does not love, this is not the true God, yet this is the idea of God promoted by the philosophers of the eighteenth century. It was these philosophers who developed the motto of the Freemasons which became unfortunately the motto of France: Liberty, Equality and Fraternity. These ideas are everywhere in the modern world. Everyone of these words is an ambiguous word used to promote the worship of man; Liberty, according to these philosophers, means man is freed from God; Equality means no man is above another, refusal of authority; Fraternity means the love of man for Man's sake, not the love of man for God's sake; it is the destruction of charity, the falsification of charity.

French Revolution

The step after that was the French Revolution and all the Revolutions in Europe which were the rejection of the Social Kingship of Our Lord Jesus Christ. Our Lord Jesus Christ was the basis of all the Catholic countries such as Hungary, France, Spain and Portugal, etc... All the laws of these countries were based on Our Lord Jesus Christ. It was so true that in France when King Henry IV, who was not Catholic, obtained the kingdom by right of succession, the people of Paris said: We do not want you as our King because the first law of our kingdom is the king must be Catholic; thus he had to convert to the Catholic Faith before he could reign. This shows how the social order was based on the Catholic Faith, that was true of France and also of many other countries in Europe. This is what the French Revolution wanted to destroy.

They went so far as to want to blot out every reminder of the name of God. To show you how foolish they were, they said a week of seven days comes from the creation, from the Bible, so they wanted to suppress it, and they made a week of ten days. They did not call it a week but rather a decade, so you have three decades per month and you had ten days per decade; now people did not like that because, among other more important reasons, people like to rest and instead of having fifty-two Sundays, days of rest, per year they had only thirty-six, and thus were not happy with that. Also the French Revolution suppressed a lot of Feast Days which were many in Catholic countries. On such feasts there was no work. They went even deeper: since every day of the month there is a saint, the French Revolution wanted to suppress all the saints, so they worshipped nature. So instead of having St Peter's day or St. John's day, you had Horses day, Cows' day, Asses' day, Tomatoes' day, Carrots' day! Yes, I'm not kidding, that is true! That shows how foolish people become when they refuse God.

Marxist Communism

But the French Revolution was not the utmost, there was still yet a further step in the destruction wrought by Humanism and that is Marxism and Communism. Marxism and Communism refuse even the human nature. But there is one thing we did not make, it is our own human nature. We did not make ourselves. We did not choose to have only two eyes or two hands. Sometimes teachers would like to have two more eyes on the back to see their students! Or mothers two more hands! God made us with one nose, two eyes, one mouth, etc... with a body and a soul! With our nature that comes from God comes the natural law. Communism rejects the natural law in many regards. One point that is very basic to the social order is private property; it belongs to the natural order that everyone can dispose of the fruit of his labor. Suppose someone has made a table, then he can dispose of the fruit of his labor, sell it or put it in his house or wherever. Communism rejects private property, everyone becomes the slave of the state, and the state becomes the law-maker who can make and undo even the natural law.

Modernism: Humanism in the Church

Then the next step was the infiltration of these ideas within the Church, Humanism found the only power able to resist it was the Holy Catholic Church. Therefore the devil set up his mind to destroy the Church, and since he could not attack it from outside he tried to attack it from inside, and that was the great crisis of Modernism at the end of last century and the beginning of this century.

Modernism wants to destroy the very root of the faith, making faith not a gift of God but the product of man. For the Catholic, faith is an infused virtue that we receive from God by which we adhere to the truth revealed by God, thus everything in Faith comes from God. But for the Modernist God disappears, faith becomes the fruit of religious feeling of everyone. Everything that will excite your religious feelings you will formulate it one way or another and you will make your own faith. That is the Modernist notion of faith. It does not make sense, yet that is what they think. So whether you believe in Buddha, in Vishnu, in Mohammed or in Jesus Christ, provided this belief stirs within yourself good religious feelings, it is fine for the modernist. So Modernism is the destruction of faith by putting man as the author of faith instead of putting God.

St. Pius X spoke very strongly against Modernism and won a great victory against it; this is why Pope Pius XII canonized him. Yet after his death little by little the virus of modernism spread everywhere in our days.

Opposition between Humanism and Catholicism;
the spirit of the world and the spirit of Christ

It is important to realize the opposition between the Catholic spirit and the spirit of humanism. Let us examine a few areas in which this opposition manifests itself today.

Ultimate goal: God or Man?

The ultimate goal and first principle of life for any good Catholic is God, and the more one takes seriously his Catholic life the more this first principle and ultimate goal imbues every one of his actions. Now for a humanist, the first principle and the ultimate goal of his life is Man, the glory of Man, the promotion of Man, the emancipation of Man (or of Woman!) These are two fundamentally different principles. "One cannot serve two masters," said Our Lord, one cannot serve God and man!

The Grace of God

One very important application of this is the humanist attitude towards "grace." Humanism is a kind of naturalism. Naturalism is to consider in man only the human nature and to refuse to consider anything above the human nature. In the catechism you learn that God gave us His Grace, and the Grace of God is supernatural, is above our nature. It has two aspects, one aspect is to heal our nature and the second aspect is to elevate our nature above the capabilities of the human nature. The grace that heals and the grace that elevates. Humanism rejects both!

The first aspect of Grace is that it heals our nature and thus requires the acknowledgment of sin and the wound in our nature. All that comes from God must return to God: an intellectual creature returns to God His gifts by giving praise and glory to God. The Gift of God to mankind is His Son: "God so loved the world that He gave His only-begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him may not perish but may have life everlasting." Now our Lord came as Saviour: to refuse to acknowledge our sins and our need of a Saviour is to refuse our Lord; if a sick person, after being healed by a good doctor, claims that he was not sick in the first place, he certainly neither honors the doctor nor shows him any gratitude, but rather turns him into the ridicule of having healed a healthy person! In the same way, to refuse to acknowledge our sinfulness is to deny that our Lord came as our Saviour, this is to deny Him!

Now humanism refuses to acknowledge that there is anything that is called sin. Humanism refuses to acknowledge that there is any wrong in human nature. Man is born good, every child is born good. According to humanism, if a child is bad it is only because the civil society has made him bad. You know of Rousseau's book called Emile, it is the story of a little boy who grows up according to the principles of Rousseau, out in the wild, he can do what he likes. Every parent knows that children have not goodness infused; it is just pure Utopia, it is just not true. Every child is born with the wound of original sin and has a certain tendency to evil. This is healed by the grace of God, first the guilt is cleansed at baptism, and then the wound little by little, if one if faithful to the grace of God, is healed. Without the grace of God it is not possible to heal it.

You can notice often in the modern world that people do not want to speak of sin. When I came back from Europe, from the 40th anniversary of the Bishop, I was on the plane and there was someone beside me and we began to talk. She was a psychologist, taking care of difficult children, children with mental problems and the like. I said: "You must have found that children from broken families have more problems than children from good families, and that divorce and abortion makes mental problems among the children" and she said: "We do not look at it that way. When we speak to a child we do not speak of things that are good and evil, no, we speak of things that are nice and not nice." There is no good and evil, there is only nice and not nice, but is not what is nice, good? No, they do not want to use the name 'good'; no reference to good and evil, no reference to virtue and vice, no reference to sin and the like in modern education. You find the same thing in courts, when someone has done something bad, "Oh, he must be mentally disturbed". There are people who are pernicious, who have a bad will; but according to humanism, if someone has done something bad it is only because he is mentally disturbed. The refusal of the penalty of death comes from the same spirit: they do not consider the gravity of the crime, of the sin; they just weep over the punishment. You find the same thing in the Church, many people do not go to Confession any longer. Why? because there is no sin; if there is no sin mere is no need to go to Confession. All this is humanism, the refusal to acknowledge that our nature needs to be healed by the grace of God.

On the contrary, when you look at the lives of all the saints, you notice that all the saints have acknowledged their sins. St. Augustine wrote his Confessions. I was just reading the autobiography of St Margaret Mary, the nun of the 17th century who had the apparitions of the Sacred Heart which were the start of the devotion of the First Fridays. The book I am reading is printed in the late seventies and there is a Preface from the Assistant Bishop of Autun; he says at the beginning, "When one reads this book one may be a little bit upset and surprised at the tone of the book; one must remember that she lived before Vatican II (sic!)". When you read the book it is beautiful, but she certainly had not the spirit of Vatican III She insists on her sinfulness, even though from what one can gather from the book, she did not offend much our Lord: since the age of four, the good Lord was attracting her heart so much that she already made the vow of virginity: when she was four years old she already wanted to be entirely given to Our Lord Jesus Christ. That shows how much God filled her with graces from the tenderest years; she was faithful to these graces (even though without the perfection that she ought), but she insists on her sinfulness. She had a step-mother who was very harsh, very bad, and she was like a little slave in the house, and she says: "Oh, I do not criticize her, she was the instrument of God to exercise His justice on me." This is truly the feelings of a saint. My point is that the spirit of the saints is to acknowledge their sinfulness and to magnify the mercy of God for them. The spirit of humanism is to be upset when you read the life of a saint who acknowledges his sinfulness!

The next aspect of grace is grace elevates our nature above itself, and this is manifested especially in the Church by the preference given by the Church to Contemplative Orders. Any Order that would promote and profess a more contemplative life and a higher perfection was given preference by the Church in so much that, if someone belonging to an active Order wanted to move to a Contemplative Order, he would be given permission from the Church to quit his first Order and enter a more perfect Order. But if someone belonged to a Contemplative Order and wanted to get out and join an active Order, the Church would not give the permission, (in the past at least, before the Second Vatican Council), because contemplation is a higher state.

This influence of humanism in the Church in noticeable in that, after the Second Vatican Council, every Order was asked to update its Rules; many Contemplative Orders have been asked to go out in the world; many Carmelite Convents have been asked to go out to visit the sick or to teach catechism or other things which are good in themselves but which were not their vocation. They had a higher vocation, a purely contemplative vocation. However since the world, since humanism does not understand it, because it was a vocation entirely for God and apparently not for man—they were helping their neighbors only by their prayers and sacrifices, which the world does not understand—so they were asked to go out into the world to serve man. It is good in itself to teach catechism, it is good in itself to visit the sick, but a purely contemplative vocation, a life of prayer and sacrifice is higher; humanism does not understand that, and so they said: "Go to the world!"

True and False Liberty

Another opposition between the Catholic spirit and the humanist spirit is in the notion of liberty. Our Lord said: The truth shall make you free; and St. Paul says: Where there is the spirit of God there there is liberty, so the Church claims to give true liberty to man. Yet humanism says: No, if you go to the Church you will be a slave, the law of God is a chain, etc... Humanism preaches liberty. Who gives the true liberty?

To solve this question it is very important for you to have a good understanding of what is liberty, what is true liberty and what is false liberty. In order to understand that you have to look at the creation of God. Everything that God has made is subject to the law of God, nothing can escape the law of God. Look at the material creation, the physical creation, there is not one planet that can say: I am tired of turning around the sun for so many years, I want to go my own way; it does not work. There is not one drop of rain that can say: I do not want to fall down from the clouds, I would like to go up from the soil; it does not work. (As vapor, it can go up, but not as a drop of water: even though the wind may blow it up, it will eventually fall). Every material creature follows the law that God has set for it. Even the smallest particles in the atoms follow the law that God has set for it, there is not one particle in the whole universe that does not follow perfectly the law that God has set for it. In science, man wonders at the beauty and order of creation; even man does not know perfectly these laws, yet he discovers laws which existed before he discovered them! Every material creatures follows the law of God. It is the same thing for spiritual beings, there is not one man, not one angel who can escape the law of God. Indeed either you do what God commands and you will be rewarded according to the law of God, or you do not do what God commands and you will be punished still according to the law of God; thus you cannot escape. Whether you do one thing or the other you are still under God, you cannot escape Him.

What is the great difference between material things and spiritual things? It is in this: material things follow the law of God out of necessity, they cannot do otherwise; spiritual things are to follow the law of God out of love. Angels and men have been created by God in order that they follow the law of God out of love. That is the great difference, and that is the true freedom; true freedom is to do what God wants you to do out of love.

Let us show this another way. Everything is subject to the Will of God, nothing can escape the Will of God, and what God wants always happens. Since the Will of God always happens, if you want what God wants then your will will always be fulfilled and you will be truly free; on the contrary the more you depart from the Will of God the more you will find things happen against your will. What God wants always happens, so God is perfectly happy, perfectly free because He does always what He wants, everything He wants, happens and everything happens according to His Will. The more we conform our will to His Will, the more this will be true for us also, but the more we depart from His Will the more we shall have to suffer things that happen against our will.

Here lies the law of Prayer. This is a law of love. St Thomas says: our prayers are not efficacious, by the law of justice because God does not owe us anything; they are effication rather by a certain law of friendship according to which, if we do His Will, He will do our will. But if we do not do His Will, then who are we to request that He does our will? Many people complain and say: If God is good, there would not be so much suffering in the world. Do they do the Will of God? If they do not do His Will then why do they complain that He does not do their will. Let us condemn our own selves before we criticize God! There is a great justice and friendship here. Thus if you want that your will happens, do the Will of God and He will do your will!!! You will be truly free! But if you do not do His Will He will not do your will; and do not deceive yourselves, He is the one Who will have the last say!

Therefore this is the true liberty, when we do the Will of God out of love. That is what St. Paul means when he says: Where there is the Spirit of God there is liberty. The Spirit of God is a spirit of love, when we do the Will of God out of love, there is true liberty. In the same way, St. Paul says that the law is not for the just, but for the unjust (I Tim 1:9); St. Augustine comments and says that the just man is not under the law, but lives with the Law: he accomplishes it out of love, the Law is for him a friend who shows him the Way to Heaven; Jesus Christ becomes his living Law. On the contrary, the unjust would like to do his own will rather that God's Will, and finds the Law against him; the Law becomes a burden under which he groans!

Now, the liberty of Humanism is completely different. It is the refusal of anything above man. If man is an absolute, there anything above him opposes this supremacy of Man, claimed by Humanism. The logical consequence of this is that nothing is acceptable for man, unless he chooses to accept it: no authority is good unless everyone accepts it; no law can be imposed on man without his free acceptation, no dogmas either, etc... From this poisonous root, you have "Religious Freedom", freedom of conscience and other false freedoms condemned by the Popes in the past, especially Leo XIII (Libertas).

From the same root, you have also the false idea that power comes from the people. This is not true. St. Paul says that "all power comes from God"; our Lord said to Pilate that he would have no power over Him unless he had received it from above. This is true in a kingdom, in a aristocracy and even in a democracy. This is true in the Church and also in the civil society. When someone receives the power in a legitimate way, either as heir of a throne, or as legitimately elected, such as a Pope by the Cardinals, or a President of the United States by the people, he receives power from God, not from those who elected him. The power of the Pope does not come from the Cardinals, but from God. The Cardinals merely choose the person who will be invested by this power. In the same way, the president of the United States receives his power from God and not from the people; they merely choose the person to whom God will give this power. Thus all power comes from God. It is evident that the first authority, the most natural authority, that of parents over their children is not chosen: who has ever chosen his parents? They have authority over their children not because their children would have accepted them as parents—who would ever say such an insanity?—they have authority over their children from God Who gave them these children!

From this false idea that power comes from the people flows the wrong conception of "Collegiality:" the Pope cannot command without the agreement of the bishops; the bishop in his diocese cannot command without the agreement of his priestly council; the priest in his parish cannot command without the agreement of his parish council. This was not so at the time of our Blessed Lord and of the Apostles! The Church has never taught this "Collegiality:" before!

From this false notion of freedom comes civil and moral revolutions, chaos, as we see in our days. When you do not follow the Laws of God and refuse everything above man, what happens? You get into a lot of trouble! Because there is something above man, and you refuse the order of things, you make up for yourself a world that is unreal, and you constantly stumble on the real world.

Let us take an example, with all the modern immoralities: they invented all kinds of contraceptions and were proud to free themselves from the Natural Law; but they fell into a lot of diseases and sicknesses that come out of all these abominations. Many mental sicknesses come from abortion, AIDS is clearly a chastisement for a pervert life! At the root of it there is the departure from the law of God. The only solution for these poor people is to return to our Lord from the depth of their heart.

Also, when you depart from the law of God then you fall under the law of your passions. St. Paul says: "I feel in my members a law that is against the law of my spirit", and there is a fight! If you refuse the Law of God then you follow the other law. St Peter says: "If one commits sin he is the slave of sin" and that is what you see in the world, people who are slaves of sin, they are not free.

Conclusion Next Month "Human Rights"