By Robert Royal
A doctor who came to one of my lectures recently told me of a problem within the medical profession: with some noble exceptions, the general practitioners know less and less about almost everything, and the specialists know more and more about almost nothing. (He's a specialist himself.) I don't know if this is broadly true in medicine. I do know that it seems to describe a great deal about what goes on in the modern world.
For instance, Sigmund Freud was once believed to have finally exposed the truth about the depths of the human psyche. From what I hear, it seems that psychiatrists and psychologists have mostly moved on - to what, it's difficult to say, other than endless talking and psychoactive drugs. Yet whatever else you might say about Freud, at least he approached things through (relatively) human pathways: ancient mythologies like Oedipus, and solid Latin terms like ego, id, and superego. He probably would have laughed himself silly over terms like "sex assigned at birth," which is accepted now even by the American Medical Association.
But Freud, who wrote influential tomes like The Future of an Illusion (i.e., religion) and Civilization and Its Discontents (everyday sadness), was almost blind to the rise of the greatest evil of his time: Nazism. He only survived by fleeing from Vienna to England just before the Anschluss, the annexation of Austria by Germany. His awakening came too late to save his sisters, all in their eighties; one died in Auschwitz, another at Theresienstadt, and two at Treblinka. Even then, the master of the human psyche didn't really take the full measure of the most obvious, real-world evil in his day. He wrote a letter from the safety of London saying that he expected the Catholic Church would sort out the Nazi problem.
If only. To our shame, the Church at first tried to work with Hitler, but quickly found out that was a deadly illusion. One heroic figure, Franz Jägerstätter, refused all collaboration, even the Nazi subsidies he could have received for his children, as a poor farmer and parish sexton. He was executed, of course. Pope Benedict declared him a martyr and beatified him in 2007. It's worth watching A Hidden Life, Terrence Malik's film about him.
In the event, it was the Allied and Soviet armies that "resolved" Austrian Nazism. And thereby hangs a tale.
When we are told by Church authorities (including Pope Leo, I'm sorry to say) that "war never solves anything" (contrary to a millennium-and-a-half of just-war and tradition) or that the death penalty is "inadmissible" (Pope Francis, also departing from traditional wisdom), or are invited to believe that "social justice," or politics in general is our primary task, despite St. Augustine's warnings about the City of Man, we should beware. Because we're building Towers of Babel out of "expertise" and departing from the fuller and more modest wisdom of a long tradition.
Most people today, even many Catholics, think of tradition as a shackle on human freedom from which we must be liberated. There are always plausible reasons advanced why this is so. But single persons - even whole generations - are just a small part of the accumulated wisdom of the human race. It's through the experience of many generations in many circumstances that we indeed are liberated - from the partial and narrow views that exist at any given historical moment.
It's good to focus on Jesus, who liberates us from sin and death. But accepting that crucial truth will lead us into others. Pope Benedict was fond of quoting Hegel's remark that "Reason has a wax nose and may be turned in any direction." There were reasons given for Nazism and Communism in their day, and there are reasons today offered for "sex assigned at birth" - bad reasons that need to be confronted by right reason.
Despite some of his own occasional wobbliness on the tradition, Pope Leo has recently offered a kind of perennial wisdom to guide us through the current madhouse. Speak...
