Carl E. Olson's Blog, page 294

CWR: "Getting ready for World Youth Day"

From the Catholic World Report blog:

[Editor's note: Fr. Matthew Gamber, S.J. will be blogging for CWR this week from World Youth Day in Madrid, where he is leading a group of 53 college-aged pilgrims from the United States.]

Fluorescent lime green is not usually a color associated with the Vatican or the papacy, but it is the color of the vests that 20,000 volunteers are wearing on the streets of Madrid this weekend, as they prepare to welcome His Holiness, Pope Benedict XVI and the hundreds of thousands of young pilgrims who are descending on the city in anticipation of World Youth Day 2011. It would be better to call it World Youth Week, since the festivities begin this Monday on the Feast of the Assumption and continue until the closing Mass on August 21 at a major airfield outside of Madrid, where two million pilgrims and locals are expected to participate. The volunteers are at the churches and parishes, down in the metro stations, at the bus stops, on street corners, and just about anywhere a young pilgrim might be who is lost, has questions, or just wants to talk to somebody about the thrill of being in Madrid for this most thrilling of weeks.

Continue reading at www.CatholicWorldReport.com.

Why the Assumption of Mary into heaven began in the Garden of Eden

The opening of a homily, "From Eden to Eternity", by Deacon Harold Burke-Sivers:

Today's magnificent solemnity of the Assumption of Mary into heaven began back in the Garden of Eden. In God's mind from all eternity, when He decided to create beings made in His image and likeness, and fill them with the gift of His life-giving love, it is within a woman's being--within her heart and soul--where His love first established a foundation and home. The spirituality of a woman is rooted in the fact that she is the heart of love and through her special and unique relationship with the Holy Spirit (as one who gives life), a woman is truly the example of what it means to be fully human.

Satan knew this. He realized that if the heart of love were destroyed, that if a wedge were driven between the intimate communion of love and life, everything else in creation would fall. So Satan approached the woman first, intent on destroying her heart and introducing sin and death into the world.

The method of demise Satan employed in the Garden of Eden is the same method he has used successfully century after century, and that he still uses to this day to perpetuate a culture of death: subjective truth. God bestowed free will upon the man and woman mindful of the fact that, in covenant relationship, life-giving communion that is freely given must also be freely accepted and reciprocated. Covenant relationship hinges upon our response to God's invitation to love: a response of complete trust in and obedience to the absolute truth of God's will. Satan lies to the woman convincing her that she need only trust in herself, that truth is whatever she decides it to be ("the tree [not God's truth!] was to be desired to make one wise") and, in deciding truth for herself, she "will be like God, knowing good and evil." Hence, the woman, in rejecting absolute truth, says "no" to God's invitation to covenant intimacy and the heart of love is shattered ("she took of its fruit and ate") while her husband stood by and did nothing.

Read the entire homily:

Lessons from the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary

The Solemnity of the Assumption, celebrated annually on August 15, presents a golden opportunity to reconsider the person of the Ever-Virgin Mary and her singular mission in the Church. We often contemplate the relationship between Mary and her Son; this reflection will focus on the relationship which Our Lady enjoys with the First Person of the Most Blessed Trinity.

Mary has been hailed as the "first-born" daughter of the Father. This reality is evident if one remembers that God--and in a specific way the Father--has created Mary, just as He has created us. She is "one of us" because she is fully human. We are children of the Almighty in a similar vein in which she is His daughter. As we rely on God for our very existence, so, too, does our Immaculate Mother.

What do the Father and His sinless daughter share? Venerable Pius IX (1846-1878), in his Apostolic Constitution Ineffabilis Deus (December 8, 1854) in which he once-and-for-all defined the truth of Our Lady's Immaculate Conception, wrote: "To her did the Father will to give His only-begotten Son--the Son Whom, equal to the Father and begotten by Him, the Father loves from His Heart--and to give this Son in such a way that He would be the one and the same common Son of God the Father and of the Blessed Virgin Mary."

The Father gave many overwhelming spiritual riches to Mary to strengthen her in her inspiring vocation as the Mother of His Son. Yet, He gave no greater gift than that of the Lord Jesus. Mary, in turn, imitated the Father in raising Jesus from before infancy to manhood. Jesus knew well the best of all gifts which His Mother faithfully imparted: the boundless love of His Beloved Father. Now, as the Son of Mary, Christ came to experience the love of His Mother which was patterned after that of His Father.

Read the entire essay:

Mary, an icon of creation and icon of the Church, totally glorified and deified

From the essay, "Mary in Byzantine Doctrine and Devotion", by Brother John M. Samaha, S.M.:

Eschatological Perspective

As icon of creation and icon of the Church, Mary is also "the dawn of the mysterious day," the foretaste of the Kingdom of God, the presence of realized eschatology mentioned by theologians. The one who is "virgin after childbearing" is also "alive after death," states the Kontakion of the Feast of the Dormition. Faith tells us that even before the common resurrection and the consummation of all things in Christ, Mary is fully alive, beyond the destruction and separation of death. The Christian East has never rationalized this mystery.

In the East, knowledge of God is not the result of logical arguments presented by theology. Only in worship can human beings obtain knowledge of God. Such knowledge is nonrational; it is contemplative and mystical.

Mary's total unity with Christ destroyed her death. In her, a part of this world is totally glorified and deified, making her the "dawn of the mysterious day of the Kingdom."

Maternal Perspective

Mary was associated in all the mysteries of her Son's life on earth. She stood at the foot of the cross, and a sword of sorrow pierced her heart. Her crucified Son made her our Mother. Each Wednesday and Friday the Byzantine liturgy remembers her mystery of suffering and compassion in the moving stavrotheotokia, Byzantine counterparts of the Latin Stabat Mater Dolorosa. The experience of Mary's protection and intercession is another dimension of Byzantine Mariology.

Mary is identified with all suffering and human tragedy. In this regard she is the icon of the Church as Mother. This theme is emphatically expressed in the feast of the Protection of the Virgin, and in the endless flow of paraliturgical Marian prayers and writings previously mentioned.

The role of theology in Eastern Christianity differs from that in Western Christianity. In the West, theology is symbolized and encoded in liturgical action. In the East, theology flows from liturgy and is subject to it. Theological discussion is always dependent on liturgy, and can be understood and experienced only in the context of the worship of the Church.

Mariology is not an independent and free-standing element in the rich tradition of the Byzantine Church or in any other of the Eastern Christian Churches. It is not studied in itself. Rather, Mariology—doctrine and devotion—is an essential element of Christian cosmology, Christology, soteriology, ecclesiology, and eschatology. It is not an object of faith, but its fruit. Mary is not a nota ecclesiae, but the self-revelation of the Church. Mariology is not a doctrine, but the life and fragrance of Christian doctrine in us. 

Read the entire essay on Ignatius Insight:

"For myself, I have never doubted the doctrine of the Assumption...

... since I heard it preached forty-four years ago, in an Anglican church over at Plymouth. You see, we get it all wrong about body and soul, simply because our minds are dominated by matter. We think it the most natural thing in the world that soul and body should be separated after death; that the body should remain on earth and the soul go to heaven, once it is purged and assoiled. But it isn't a natural thing at all; soul and body were made for one another, and the temporary divorce between them is something out of the way, something extraordinary, occasioned by the Fall. In our blessed Lady, not born under the star of that defeat, human nature was perfectly integrated; body and soul belonged to one another, as one day, please God, yours and mine will.

Long ago, in those fields of Bethlehem, Ruth had gleaned in the footsteps of her beloved; and he, secretly, had given charge to the reapers to drop handfuls of corn on purpose, so that she might fill her bosom the sooner. So he, whose reapers are the angels, would leave for his blessed Mother a special portion of those graces that were to enrich mankind. The child-bearing which brought, to us others, redemption from the fault of our first parents should bring, to her, exemption; the empty tomb, which assures us that our bodies will rise at the judgment, was for her the earnest of an immediate resurrection; Christ the first-fruits, and who should glean them, but she? For that, heaven is the richer, earth the poorer. We can go to Lourdes, and offer adoration in the place where her feet stood; we cannot press with our lips some precious reliquary containing the hand that swaddled Christ. In a world so dominated by matter, in which matter itself seems to carry the seeds of its own destruction, there is no material object left that can link our destinies with hers.

That is from Monsignor Ronald Knox's essay, "The Assumption", from the collection, Pastoral and Occasional Sermons. Read the entire essay on Ignatius Insight:

"His heroic love is a shining example of successful presence of God...

... in the human drama of hatred, suffering and death."

That was a brief remark made today about St. Maximilian Kolbe by Pope Benedict XVI in his Angelus address. I knew that today was Kolbe's feast day, but hadn't realized (being rather bad with numbers and dates) that it was also the 70th anniversary of his heroic martyrdom. The Jewish Virtual Library site provides this overview of Kolbe's death:

During the Second World War he provided shelter to refugees from Greater Poland, including 2,000 Jews whom he hid from Nazi persecution in his friary in Niepokalanów. He was also active as a radio amateur, with Polish call letters SP3RN, vilifying Nazi activities through his reports.

On February 17, 1941 he was arrested by the German Gestapo and imprisoned in the Pawiak prison, and on May 25 was transferred to Auschwitz I as prisoner #16670.

In July 1941 a man from Kolbe's barracks vanished, prompting SS-Hauptsturmführer Karl Fritzsch, the deputy camp commander, to pick 10 men from the same barracks to be starved to death in Block 13 (notorious for torture), in order to deter further escape attempts. (The man who had disappeared was later found drowned in the camp latrine.) One of the selected men, Franciszek Gajowniczek, cried out, lamenting his family, and Kolbe volunteered to take his place.

During the time in the cell he led the men in songs and prayer. After three weeks of dehydration and starvation, only Kolbe and three others were still alive. Finally he was murdered with an injection of carbolic acid.

Father Kolbe was beatified as a confessor by Pope Paul VI in 1971 and was canonized by Pope John Paul II on October 10, 1982 in the presence of Franciszek Gajowniczek. Upon canonization, the Pope declared St. Maximilian Kolbe not a confessor, but a martyr.

Last year I posted the following passage about St. Maximilian from the Epilogue of Suffering of Love: Christ's Descent into the Hell of Human Hopelessness (Ignatius Press, 2006), by Regis Martin, professor of theology at Franciscan University of Steubenville; I think it is worth posting again:

But what exactly did he do, this ministering angel of a man who restores, magically as it were, the faith of children? This Roman Catholic priest who, loving God more than himself, is thus able—and free!—to love everyone in God? In one word, Kolbe substitutes himself for another. At the eleventh hour, he takes the place of a grieving husband and father whom the SS have randomly chosen, along with nine or so others, to die in a bunker deprived of food and water. Protracted starvation: a horrible way to die.

"What does this Polish pig want?" demanded the SS officer, wearing the dreaded death's head insignia of the Gestapo, when the slight figure of Father Kolbe came forward dressed in his prison garb—the very insignia of man's humiliation, beneath which, in Kolbe's case, shines the unseen holiness of Almighty God. "I am a Catholic priest", he replied. "I want to die for that man. I am old; he has a wife and children." Incredulous, the officer nevertheless permits the substitution, providing thereby the sacramental working out of what Charles Williams, citing Saint Paul, was so wont to call the Great Web of Exchange. Kolbe and the others are then led away to die. A fortnight's agony later, all but four have died and of these only Kolbe remains conscious. Gestapo patience at last having worn thin, an injection of phenol is administered and now Kolbe too is dead. It is August 14, 1941, the vigil of the Feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Mother, the Woman clothed with the sun and the moon and the stars, who long before had promised young Maximilian the twin crowns of purity and martyrdom for God. This same Woman, who had herself been schooled in suffering and sorrow, indeed whose mute and anguished consent to her Son's immolation on Calvary became the deepest kenosis of faith in all history, to recall the moving text of Pope John Paul II's encyclical.

Nearly forty years later Poland's Pope would visit that bunker and before a vast crowd declare how "victory through faith and love was won by Maximilian Kolbe in this place, which was built for the negation of faith, and to trample radically not only on love but on all signs of human dignity, of humanity: a place built on hatred and contempt for man in the name of a crazed ideology." And quoting 1 John 5:4, he concluded: "For whatsoever is born of God overcometh the world, and this is the victory that with faith overcometh the world." So the Pope reminded the world when, in 1979, he went to Auschwitz to speak of Father Kolbe's victory, of its profound source in the love and the faith of God, and of its continuing relevance to the world.

But it must be understood in all its fullness as a victory for all, for both Jew and Christian alike; otherwise the whole expiatory point of Kolbe's substitution is lost. The victory of the one cannot be denied the other, for the act of exchange is for the other. United thus in the same school of suffering, wedded as one by the one Christ, Jew and Christian stand together as joint beneficiaries of the priestly heroism of Kolbe precisely because, behind it, there stands the universal, infinitely efficacious priestly sacrifice of the Son of God, broken on his Cross to become the bread for the world. Spiritually, then, as Pius XI would tirelessly point out to a world about to witness wholesale liquidations of God's people, spiritually we are all Semites. 

Related on Ignatius Insight:

• The Cross and The Holocaust | Regis Martin | From the Prologue to Suffering of Love: Christ's Descent into the Hell of Human Hopelessness
• Chapter 1 of Priestblock 25487: A Memoir of Dachau | Fr. Jean Bernard
• St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross | Ignatius Insight
• Forget Not Love: The Passion of Maximilian Kolbe: The Passion of Maximilian Kolbe, by Andre Frossard
• Maximilian: Saint of Auschwitz (DVD), by Leonardo Defilippis

Lost sheep, silver spoons, and "the mother of the Gentiles"

A Scriptural Reflection on the Readings for Sunday, August 14, 2011 | Carl E. Olson

Readings:
• Isa 56:1, 6-7
• Ps 67:2-3, 5, 6, 8
• Rom 11:13-15, 29-32
• Mt 15:21-28

Those raised in privilege and wealth are said to have been "born with a silver spoon in their mouth." Money and status can certainly be an advantage when it comes to one's career, education, and relationships. But there are no spiritual silver spoons. Our social connections, incomes, and talents cannot put us in right relationship with God.

This fact should be obvious to us. But human nature, fallen and proud, is tempted to rely on temporal advantages when it comes to eternal realities.

One of the great challenges Jesus faced was the deeply rooted belief, held by many of his fellow Jews, that because they were Jewish, they had it made—that is, they were right with God, while Gentiles were not. Contact with Gentiles, or pagans—who did not worship the one true God—was kept to a minimum; too much contact could result in physical and spiritual impurity. "The Jews are extremely loyal toward one another," observed the first-century Roman historian Tacitus (ca. 56-ca. 117), "and always ready to show compassion, but toward every other people they feel only hate and enmity" (The Histories, 5.5). The enmity was so strong that Gentiles were sometimes called "dogs."

Jesus did not, of course, downplay the false beliefs and immoral actions of pagans. Rather, he pointed out that they also were invited to enter into a saving covenant with Yahweh, the God of all men. As today's reading from the prophet Isaiah demonstrates, this was not a new idea: "for my house shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples." But it was not a popular idea due, in part, to the brutal mistreatment Jews sometimes endured at the hands of certain Gentiles. Yet it was also due to spiritual blindness and an unwillingness to accept the words of the prophets. 

Matthew's Gospel, written for a Jewish audience, described how and why Jesus, after meeting stiff resistance from his fellow Jews, began preaching to Gentiles. Today's Gospel is a dramatic example of how Jesus bridged the great chasm between the two groups.

Having had yet another clash with the Pharisees, who he described as "blind guides" (Matt 15:14), Jesus left Galilee and went into pagan territory on the Phoenician coast, which is modern-day Lebanon. At the same time, a Canaanite woman came to meet him. We don't know how she knew of Jesus, which makes her greeting all the more audacious and remarkable: "Have pity on me, Lord, Son of David!"

In speaking so boldly to a Jewish man, she trampled upon the social norms of the day. But her boldness seemed, at first, to be counter-productive. Jesus ignored her. Or did he? Is it not true that God sometimes seems to be silent and to ignore us? Jesus' lack of response was, it appears, meant to do two things: elicit her remarkable public statement of faith and show his disciples what is most important in the Kingdom of God.

"This woman," wrote Epiphanus the Latin, a late fifth-century Christian commentator, "is the mother of the Gentiles, and she knew Christ through faith." Confronted with divine silence, she did not waver, but pleaded a second time, "Lord, help me." Then, having been rebuffed by the standard Jewish perspective of the time, she demonstrated profound humility and faith, readily accepting the label of a dog. "Faith accepts what work does not merit," remarked Epiphanus, "and through faith the Gentiles were made children out of dogs."

Jesus' response was equally surprising, for his acclamation—"O woman, great is your faith!"—was filled with respect and affection. By saying, "Let is be done for you as you wish," he acknowledged the purity of her faith and intentions, something he could not do for the Pharisees, despite their education, position, and power. As he stated later, "Whoever exalts himself will be humbled; but whoever humbles himself will be exalted" (Matt 23:13). The Canaanite woman, humble is spirit, had no need for silver spoons, being blessed beyond measure with divine love and communion with God.

(This "Opening the Word" column originally appeared in the August 17, 2008, edition of Our Sunday Visitor newspaper.)

Brumley & Olson Talk Faith, Culture, and Books

Brumley & Olson Talk Faith, Culture, and Books | Mark Brumley & Carl E. Olson | August 12, 2011 | Ignatius Insight

Mark Brumley, President of Ignatius Press, and Carl E. Olson, editor of Ignatius Insight, talk about the recent "Catholics In The Next America" Conference sponsored by the Napa Institute and discuss several of the new Ignatius Press titles being published this fall and winter.

Listen to mp3 audio file (53:00):










• RIGHT CLICK to download mp3 audio file (25 megs)

• See a full listing of new Fall/Winter 2011 books from Ignatius Press

"As a young man, Chesterton flirted with socialism..."

... but he soon realized that it was mostly a reactionary idea. The rise of socialism and its attendant evils was a reaction against industrial capitalism and its attendant evils. The danger of fighting injustice is that if the battle is misguided, even a victory is a defeat. Good motives can have bad results. This is the point Chesterton makes when he talks about how the "virtues wander wildly"5 when they are isolated from each other and wandering alone. In a broken society where we have this seemingly endless battle between the left and right, the virtues on either side are doing war with each other: truth that is pitiless and pity that is untruthful.

The conservatives and the liberals have successfully reduced meaningful debate to name-calling. We use catchwords as a substitute for thinking. We know things only by their labels, and we have "not only no comprehension but no curiosity touching their substance or what they are made of."6

It is interesting, it is fitting, that the philosophy which Chesterton embraced as the only real alternative to socialism and capitalism (as well as to liberalism and conservatism) goes by a name that is utterly awkward and misunderstood. As a label it is so useless it cannot even be used as a form of abuse. Its uselessness as a label demands that it be discussed. To say the name immediately requires explanation, and the explanation immediately provokes debate. The troublesome title is "Distributism." It has to do with property. It has to do with justice. And it has to do with everything else.
...

There is more to Distributism than economics. That is because there is more to economics than economics. Distributism is not just an economic idea. It is an integral part of a complete way of thinking. But in a fragmented world we not only resist a complete way of thinking, we do not even recognize it. It is too big to be seen. In the age of specialization we tend to grasp only small and narrow ideas. We don't even want to discuss a true Theory of Everything, unless it is invented by a specialist and addresses only that specialist's "everything." In reality, everything is too complicated a category because it contains, well, everything. But the glory of a great philosophy or a great religion is not that it is simple but that it is complicated. It should be complicated because the world is complicated. Its problems are complicated.

The solution to those problems must also be complicated. It takes a complicated key to fit a complicated lock. But we want simple solutions. We don't want to work hard. We don't want to think hard. We want other people to do both our work and our thinking for us. We call in the specialists. And we call this state of utter dependency "freedom." We think we are free simply because we seem free to move about.

Those are excepts from the essay, "G. K. Chesterton's Distributism", by Dale Ahlquist on The Distributist Review site. In addition to being the President of the American Chesterton Society, Dale is the author and editor of several books about Chesterton, including the soon-to-be-published collection, In Defense Of Sanity: The Best Essays of G.K. Chesterton, due out this November. Also see:

• Chesterton and Orthodoxy | Carl E. Olson and Dale Ahlquist
• Seeing With the Eyes of G.K. Chesterton | Dale Ahlquist
• Recovering The Lost Art of Common Sense | Dale Ahlquist
• Common Sense Apostle & Cigar Smoking Mystic | Dale Ahlquist

As for works by Chesterton published by Ignatius Press, see:

• Ignatius Press Books about G. K. Chesterton
• Books by G. K. Chesterton

The totalitarian temptation and the redefinition of marriage

In just a few paragraphs, George Weigel summarizes matters as they now stand with marriage and the State in the U.S., with an eye toward the big picture:

And that brings us to the totalitarian temptation. As analysts running the gamut from Hannah Arendt to Leszek Kolakowski understood, modern totalitarian systems were, at bottom, attempts to remake reality by redefining reality and remaking human beings in the process. Coercive state power was essential to this process, because reality doesn't yield easily to remaking, and neither do people. In the lands Communism tried to remake, the human instinct for justice—justice that is rooted in reality rather than ephemeral opinion—was too strong to change the way tastemakers change fashions in the arts. Men and women had to be coerced into accepting, however sullenly, the Communist New Order, which was a new metaphysical, epistemological, and moral order—a New Order of reality, a new set of "truths," and a new way of living "in harmony with society," as late-bureaucratic Communist claptrap had it.

The twenty-first-century state's attempt to redefine marriage is just such an attempt to redefine reality—in this case, a reality that existed before the state, for marriage as the union of a man and a woman ordered to mutual love and procreation is a human reality that existed before the state. And a just state is obliged to recognize, not redefine, it.

Moreover, marriage and the families that are built around marriage constitute one of the basic elements of civil society, that free space of free associations whose boundaries the just state must respect. If the twenty-first-century democratic state attempts to redefine something it has neither the capacity nor the authority to refine, it can only do so coercively. That redefinition, and its legal enforcement, is a grave encroachment into civil society.

If the state can redefine marriage and enforce that redefinition, it can do so with the doctor-patient relationship, the lawyer-client relationship, the parent-child relationship, the confessor-penitent relationship, and virtually every other relationship that is woven into the texture of civil society. In doing so, the state does serious damage to the democratic project. Concurrently, it reduces what it tries to substitute for reality to farce.

Read the entire essay, "It Ain't Homophobia" (August 9, 2011). I'll harken back here to my 2009 Ignatius Insight interview with James Kalb, author of the excellent book, The Tyranny of Liberalism (ISI, 2008); near the end of that interview, Kalb said the following:

Ignatius Insight: What can be done, first, to better recognize the effects and goals of liberalism, and, secondly, to live a life as free as possible from the poisons of liberalism?

James Kalb: The basic point is that freedom and equality aren't ultimate goals. When they're presented that way something's being hidden.

Freedom is freedom to do something, and equality is equality with regard to some concern. If people wanted freedom simply as such they'd go crazy, because freedoms conflict and they wouldn't know which to choose. Freedom to marry requires constraints that define marriage and give it its significance and function. Without them, you can't be free to marry.

The same applies to equality. If you want people to be equal in some way, some people must decide and enforce what that requires. Those people won't be equal to the rest of us.

So freedom and equality have to be part of a larger scheme of life to make sense at all, and it's that larger scheme we should be looking at. To understand liberalism you have to understand the scheme of life its version of freedom and equality goes with.

Basically, present-day liberalism wants freedom and equality with regard to career, consumption, and private hobbies and indulgences. It offers us a world that promotes a life centered on those things and treats it as normal, justified, valuable, and praiseworthy.

The result is that other ways of life lose out. For example, the freedom to choose a normal family life suffers. People want to marry and stay married, and they want to raise their children in a setting that helps them grow up as they should. They want marriages and families that work and turn out well. That's an absolutely fundamental human desire, but social statistics and everyday experience show that liberalism severely interferes with the ability to satisfy it. Why call that situation freedom?

Liberals understand that kind of point in connection with economics. They'll tell you that economic freedom is fraudulent when it's freedom to starve. Unless the social order makes goods available that are worth choosing, freedom to choose whatever happens to be on offer isn't worth much. That point gets lost in connection with lifestyle freedoms. What good are they when they create a situation in which short of moral heroism there aren't any lifestyles on offer worth choosing?

Still, we're stuck with liberalism right now. As things are, to live a life as free as possible from its poisons probably does require moral heroism. Certainly it means a break with the usual middle-class lifestyle. I can't give a lot of useful advice to moral heroes, but it seems likely that a better way of life today will require things like homeschooling and other forms of intentional separation. We need settings in which a different pattern of life can be established. We all do the best we can, though.

I'd add that we all need to work together to build settings in which a normal good life is possible and indeed likely in the normal course of events. That, I think, is what Catholic social action should be about.

A more recent expression of similar thoughts can be found in an essay, "Government, Natural Law, and the Modern State" (Aug. 8, 2011) by Jeff Mirus of CatholicCulture.org, in which he comments on the importance of natural law in face of amoral statism:

It would be impossible to create a culture which did not reflect such [natural law] principles to some significant degree. But it is possible for a government deliberately to foster a culture which denies the force of the natural law so that it can more easily justify its choices against it. I am quite sure that anyone reading these words has direct experience of that sort of culture, and that sort of government. It is the culture of the modern State.

This, of course, is immensely convenient to those who wish to reshape society in their own image. As with Humpty Dumpty's use of words, the law "means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less," and certainly not less. It is bad enough when human law fails to reflect the law of nature; but it is far worse—a fearsome thing indeed—when human law fails to reflect the law of nature deliberately. The modern State has gradually evolved into a direct opponent of the natural law, conceiving itself as an all-encompassing sovereign entity, its own ultimate justification for everything it does.

This problem is so endemic to the modern State that, were modern culture to be converted, I am convinced that something very different from the modern State would have to evolve in its place. That is why I see the financial troubles of modern states as opportunities; that's the idea with which I began a week ago. The State now tends to represent modern opposition to reality, with huge resources to expend on both indoctrination and direct social engineering. Thus, the weakening of the hold of the modern State, for any reason, would make it significantly easier to recover meaning in the post-modern world.

And guess what? Before you ask what your bishops have often rightly told you to ask, consider this: Even the poorest of the poor, so often used as an excuse for Statism in our time, cannot be helped significantly until we recover the real meaning of life. It is a complex issue, but the modern State now stands almost uniformly as a major obstacle to this critical task.

For more about some basic truths about marriage as taught by the Catholic Church, see the section, "The Value of Marriage", in the Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church:

215. The family has its foundation in the free choice of the spouses to unite themselves in marriage, in respect for the meaning and values of this institution that does not depend on man but on God himself: "For the good of the spouses and their offspring as well as of society, this sacred bond no longer depends on human decision alone. For God himself is the author of marriage and has endowed it with various benefits and purposes"[473]. Therefore, the institution of marriage — "intimate partnership of life and love ... established by the Creator and endowed by him with its own proper laws" [474] — is not the result of human conventions or of legislative prescriptions but acquires its stability from divine disposition[475]. It is an institution born, even in the eyes of society, "from the human act by which the partners mutually surrender themselves to each other"[476], and is founded on the very nature of that conjugal love which, as a total and exclusive gift of person to person, entails a definitive commitment expressed by mutual, irrevocable and public consent[477]. This commitment means that the relationships among family members are marked also by a sense of justice and, therefore, by respect for mutual rights and duties.

216. No power can abolish the natural right to marriage or modify its traits and purpose. Marriage in fact is endowed with its own proper, innate and permanent characteristics. Notwithstanding the numerous changes that have taken place in the course of the centuries in the various cultures and in different social structures and spiritual attitudes, in every culture there exists a certain sense of the dignity of the marriage union, although this is not evident everywhere with the same clarity[478]. This dignity must be respected in its specific characteristics and must be safeguarded against any attempt to undermine it. Society cannot freely legislate with regard to the marriage bond by which the two spouses promise each other fidelity, assistance and acceptance of children, but it is authorized to regulate its civil effects.

Read the entire section. More about natural law, marriage, and statism on Ignatius Insight:

• What We All Know--And Why We Can't Not Know That We Know It | An Interview with J. Budziszewski
• The Scandal of Natural Law | Interview with J. Budziszewski
• Pope Benedict XVI On Natural Law | Fr. James V. Schall, S.J.
• The Mystery of Marriage | Jorge Cardinal Medina Estévez
• Entering Marriage with Eyes Wide Open | Edward Peters
• Human Sexuality and the Catholic Church | Donald P. Asci
• Who Is Married? | Edward Peters
• Marriage and the Family in Casti Connubii and Humanae Vitae | Reverend Michael Hull, S.T.D.
• Male and Female He Created Them | Cardinal Estevez
• The State Which Would Provide Everything | Fr. James V. Schall, S.J.
• Rerum Novarum and Seven Principles of Catholic Social Doctrine | Barbara Lanari
• What Is Catholic Social Teaching? | Mark Brumley