Where the Rubber Hits the Road

Fr. Dwight Longenecker Morality without Religion?  Fr. Dwight Longenecker Can you be a moral person without religion? Yes and no. It all depends on what you mean by 'moral' and what you mean by 'religion'. What most people mean by 'moral' in our society is "Try to be a nice person. Be normal. Have relatively good manners. Don't do any of the big bad ones like killing someone or stealing or being a pervert. Be involved in a good cause of some sort--like the soup kitchen or saving the Amazonian rain forest." Morality for the post Christian masses doesn't really have anything to do with a set moral code or particular rules to follow. It is more a sense of 'feeling that you are a moral person'. Part of this feeling 'moral' is tolerance of everyone else and outrage at hypocritical Christian type people who try to force their version of 'morality' on others. So can you be 'moral' in this way without be...

Posted by Fr Longenecker at Monday, November 23, 2009 After analyzing the modernism in the Anglican Church it was pointed out that there's plenty of modernism in the Catholic Church too. True enough, and because blog posts should be short and punchy, I left this issue for another day. It is true that all the problems I outlined in the post on Modernism in the Anglican Church are present in the Catholic Church. In many ways the effects have been even more devastating. At least the Anglicans with their good taste have preserved beautiful liturgy, architecture and sacred music in the midst of the modernism. Many Catholics have been even more gung ho on the dumbing down of Christianity, the vulgarization of the liturgy, art and architecture that is the philosophical offspring of modernism. The moral crisis among Catholic clergy which has caused so much pain and scandal is the direct effect of mixing clerical celibacy (which modernists simply cannot understand) with modernism and t...