Dec 14 Sat
What is Relativism?
Relativism is the rejection of objective moral truths, leading to significant consequences for ethical understanding and practice.
Pope Francis highlights that relativism, under the guise of tolerance, ultimately allows those in power to define moral values according to their interests, which can result in laws being perceived as arbitrary impositions rather than reflections of objective truth.
The Church emphasizes the existence of objective moral norms that are valid for everyone, countering the notion that morality is merely a subjective result of individual conscience or cultural evolution.
Furthermore, the Church teaches that true freedom is found in submission to truth; a culture that loses sight of this relationship between truth, good, and freedom risks moral disorientation.
Thus, the Church's teachings present a clear opposition to relativism, advocating for recognizing objective moral truths as foundational for genuine human freedom and ethical behavior.
Already, at the beginning of the last century, some proposed that the Church’s doctrinal expression of sacred revelation was stifling and should yield to the fresh formulations of each age.
For some, nowadays, the call to sanctity is displaced by the ‘call to action’. Incidentally, this was the name of an experiment of the late 1970s, that eventually was cast into the landfill of failed experiments.
The Church’s traditional firmament of piety and devotion is replaced by political fervor; and humble submission to the will of God collapses before a careful attention to the Self.
Thus, relativism reigns supreme. They cast the Church’s doctrinal and spiritual tradition aside as outdated and harmful. Just as the Jacobins erased history with the adoption of a new calendar, some desire to have the Church’s beginning be 1965.
The problem with relativism is that in due course today’s relativism falls victim to relativism. When truth disappears, so does the firmness of any position. Even false ones. All are eventually cast into the devouring fires of the Relativist Moloch.
Disingenuously, Rousseau put it succinctly: “Sometimes men must be forced to be free.”
Contrast this with the elegant formulation of the great Thomist Garrigou-Lagrange:
“The Church is intolerant in principle, because she believes; but is tolerant in practice, because she loves. The enemies of the Church are tolerant in principle, because they do not believe; but are intolerant in practice, because they do not love.”
It shouldn’t surprise us that the relativists’ methods are arbitrary and crushing. Since they have long left the bright uplands of virtue and doctrine, their weapons leave behind the delicacy of those instruments that once were the arsenal of Mother Church. They passionately argue that these are a ‘paternalism’ of a dead past.
Closer to the truth, it is one of the most ancient terms for the Church, beginning with St. Cyprian in the third century: “No one can have God as their Father, who does not have the Church as their mother.”