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These paragraphs are drawn from the article Faithless in Public Education by Anthony Esolen in the Crisis Magazine accessible here. The article locates itself in America and the Catholic faith; but the sentiment expressed bears almost universal relevance.
Man must worship; man must obey; he is homo religiosus, whether he likes it or not. The throne will not remain empty. So then, what is the impostor that takes the place of Lady Faith?
Is it the bitch, Politics? Maybe so. My time in school coincided with the resignation of a President, the near defeat of his successor in the primaries, and a teetering general election that resulted in a two-percent victory by the challenger over the incumbent. I do not recall a single political lecture or demonstration in all that time. We had, you might say, better things to do, or things more appropriate for our youth and our station in life. Or perhpas the teachers understood their place.
Our Catholic faith is a realm of mystery and of clearly shining truth; nothing is too humble for it, and nothing too highly exalted. In the sight of God -- of whose holiness even the most rascally among us must have been fitfully aware -- all human considerations take on the whole palette of reality. The man who gives a cup of cold water to someone who is thirsty is suddenly more glorious than the professional humanitarian, with all his pomp and glamour. It is a realm wherein we just might learn patience, because we know how little we know; and instead of painting all things with the bald and blaring colors of a political banner, we ask God to teach us more and more, to see things as he would have us see them, and that, though it may be a humbling exercise, is never humiliating.
Politics by contrast is eminently a realm of enmity, hatred, ruthlessness, and vainglory. It is Orwell's Two Minutes Hate, instead of noon prayer. Politics disappoints; it must, because man is and always will be a sinner. When that idol disappoints, we turn not against it but against our enemies; we will pardon a man who changes his wife, but never a man who changes his party. Our nation is mired in a chronic civil war, because the great concern that might unite us, a knowledge that we are all proceeding to the grave and to judgement before a just God, has been smothered, and there is nothing left for us but to scramble for the perks of the world and hate those who are more successful at it than we are. And to the extent that this sad atomism of the world assumes an intellectual being, to the extent that it becomes a regnant Ideology, to that extent do we justify our hatred and make it into a political virtue. You are "saved" if you follow the right slogan
Imagine, then, being immersed in this bath of hatred, all day long, every day. I am not saying that the teachers are all wicked, or that hatred is uppermost in anyone's mind all the time, though the word "hate" has become astonishingly common. I am saying that it is in the air, inescapable: hatred of the west for its sins, hatred of the west for its virtues, hatred of men, hatred of women who did not hate men as they ought to have been hated, hatred of religious people for taking their religion seriously, hatred of people who do not hate whom they ought to hate and who therefore vote the wrong way, hatred of the past for not being the present, hatred of the present for not being the future, hatred of all the imperfections of this world for being what they are, and in the darkest souls, hatred of God, for being who he is.
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