Liberalism



Dear Editor,

Erik Rush in his article “You Always Hurt…,” about teachers seducing teenagers under their power, fails to inform readers through the light of Catholic faith and reason about the issue.

Rush describes the perceptions he had of his community's sexual mores and also his own attitudes while he was growing up writing, “There were indeed a few teachers I had during my teen years upon whom I would have pounced in a New York minute,” but he does not explain how he had a change of heart later in his life and how he came to realize that adult-child sexual relationship were wrong. He asserts that he would not want to seduce young girls today although “They’re so delectable that they can barely keep their hands off of each other,” simply because he has decided on his own, without mention of Catholic teaching or philosophy that “I just don't want to be the kind of person who causes that kind of emotional damages to another human being.” Does he look to anything to conform his conscience to the truth of the moral? Rush doesn't seem to realize that a discussion about Christian ethics or relativism is much more relevant to this topic than his own narrow view.

Rush points to an unnamed “high-profile social commentator” who disagrees with his position that liberalism is causing sexual transgressions. Does he have the name of an authority, non-secular is preferable, who would agree with him? Liberalism can be a very good thing. Take for instance liberal education in college where classes are taken across a wide variety of academic disciplines including theology, philosophy and history. The best liberal arts schools foster this broad learning. Liberalism or any other reasoning without root in Christian principles or revelation is another thing altogether.

Unfortunately, Rush entirely ignores Christianity and its role in confronting sexual transgressions in his article.

Mary Honan

Boston, MA

Dear Ms. Honan,

Thank you for your letter. You are correct that Erik Rush’s commentary did not take into account, nor was it based on Catholic teaching. I have no reason even to assume that he is Catholic. However, the burden of his argument was that too early sexualization of young teens may play a role in those people becoming adults whose sexual predilections later in life run to youths placed in their charge. That is an insightful analysis, quite in harmony with what the Church has long taught about need to protect the innocence of youths. Many other articles we have featured on CE have addressed the Church’s teaching on sexual matters, our late pope’s teaching on the Theology of the Body, and related topics. I think you will find our coverage of these topics very thorough if you spend some time perusing our archives. We cannot cover all angles of a subject in every article and not every article we publish has to be explicitly “Catholic,” as long as it does not contradict Catholic understanding.

As for Rush’s use of the term “liberalism,” you are correct that there is positive definition of the term. As a CE editor I frequently change instances of the appearance of “liberal” in articles to “progressive” in order to maintain the distinction. However, it is also true that in this context most readers will understand exactly what he is talking about — modern progressivism that has co-opted to itself the term “liberal,” even though its bottom line is not human freedom, but the tyranny of relativism that our Holy Father has spoken about. (This is an issue I myself addressed in an article on CE some time ago. I have placed the pertinent excerpt in a post script.)

As for the questions you asked about his own moral reasoning and his source, he will have to address those matters.

Thank you for being a careful and thoughtful reader, and for your support of Catholic Exchange,

Mrs. Mary Kochan

Senior Editor, Catholic Exchange

P.S. This is the very deceptive thing about the labels “liberal” and “conservative.” The conservative movement in this country was formed to preserve the “liberal” principles that were under attack by the totalitarianism and modernism that several of our popes warned about. In fact, it is Catholics who began the conservative movement in this country, the watershed event being the publication of William F. Buckley's God and Man at Yale in 1950. This book alerted Americans to the fact that the great institutions of learning that their forefathers had established to provide a liberal education (i.e. an education for freedom) to future generations of Americans had been taken over by atheists, Marxists and secularists — enemies of freedom. In response a movement formed to “conserve” these liberal ideals. Hence, the conservatives are the true liberals.

The side favoring greater government control, apologizing for their own bourgeois origins, doting on Stalin, were called “progressives” (and still are among themselves). But when liberals began calling themselves “conservatives,” the progressives co-opted the term “liberal” to themselves. Those who identify themselves as “liberals” today are really the old “progressives,” well infected with Marxist utopianism of which eugenics and abortion have always been part and parcel. You see, the words “liberal” and “conservative” must be placed in the context of what the liberation is supposed to be from and what it is that is being conserved in order to have any meaning.



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