5 Anti Catholic Features of our Post Modernist Culture

Allow me to summarize insights from Archbishop of Philadelphia, Charles J. Chaput, ‘Strangers in a Strange Land: Living the Catholic Faith in a Post-Christian World’, 2017.

There are five major features of contemporary American culture: the social sciences, anti-liberal education, the role of government, a secularized student population, and a ubiquitous malice wrapped up in a language of tolerance and rights. 

Firstly, sociologists and psychologists have become a new priestly class, no longer communicating as objective scientists but rather serving to sustain bureaucratic authority of the secular state. A vehicle for social control, secular psychology and neo-Marxist sociology are their tools preaching a new morality helping to maintain their control. [of course, after the anarchy they promote]

Secondly, it contradicts the notion of education as a purpose for enlarging the human spirit and soul, fostering the love of things other than self and forming mature adults.  Post modernist culture and ideology on the other hand serves toward the blind trust of technology. This is the foundation of progressive intellectual conformism: cogs in the bureaucratic government and economic machine.  Technology becomes both the motivating and controlling force of the culture.

Administrative power thus becomes the third feature, the bureaucratic state. Bigger government is offered as the solution to all problems as maintained by the likes of Hillary and overtly anti Catholic Bernie, probably in line with his former idealized Soviet society.  19th century Sociologist, Max Weber was the pioneer in the theoretical understanding of the bureaucratic proclivity, expansion and control.  The above leaders today help fulfill that bureaucratic purpose.  Mission of the deep state.  

Fourthly, it has been recognized that university life is probably the most secularizing influence in our culture. A concrete and articulate moral system seems to have disappeared, along with the development of a robust fear of the future.   The need to get things under control hurries the concomitant belief in big government and political correctness as the solution.  Wokeness resembles Maoism and the Cambodian Khmner Rouge in their quest to erase traditional morality and history altogether.  

Finally, the so-called progressive culture of our universities and media erases dissent and humiliates those thinking outside their box. They rewrite history, silence different views and suggest a more enlightened world view. Just ask this culture of themselves – we are wonderful and liberal progressives, so they say, yet all wrapped up in their own malice and deliberate spite.  The enlightened light of Lucifer, I’d say.    

Nowhere in this postmodern ideology is anything resembling Christian view of natural law and dignity.  This is exacerbated by the call for the breakdown of the nuclear family by various left-wing sectors.  Combined with the preference of entitlement over responsibility, current trends fly in the face of our Catholic social justice traditions and beliefs.

Source: Baglino, Michael J.  You Only Live Thrice.  Kearney, NE: Morris Publishers. 2022.