The Lone Star Catholic (Austin, Tex.), Vol. 49, No. 17, Ed. 1 Sunday, August 21, 1960 Page: 1 of 24
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VOL. XLIX, NO. 17
AUGUST, 21, 1960
2
Where reasoning ends
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REV. CHARLES W. PARIS
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/WHY NO DIVORCE
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Truth is one . . and many
beliefs, some contradictory,
cannot be defended as such
REV. JOHN A O’BRIEN, Ph.D.
The University of Notre Dame
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many beliefs including contradictions—be de-
fended as truth? '
God, who is One, who is Truth itself, cannot
be responsible for one (Continued on page 4)
The “new” religion . . . rejects the mind’s
ability to understand anything that cannot be
seen, felt, tasted, heard or smelled.
Any study of the human mind will show'
that it is designed to search out truth. Scientists,
researches and intellectuals never stop investi-
gating, studying and experimenting until they
have found the one answer which fully explains
the object of their study, whether it be the nature
of the atom, a cure for a disease or how to build a
better -mousetrap.
When men of science have established the
truth of a theory, all other scientists discard
erroneous theories and accept the proved fact. In
this they testify that truth is one, not many.
But if truth is one, how can many different
beliefs concerning the nature of God—even worse,
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man’s reason is the norm for knowing such a
Being?
In the physical world, man is the highest
order of being. Under him are the other beings-
possessing senses—all the animals, insects and
fishes; the vegetable world;—trees and plants; and
the mineral world—things which exist but have
no life, such as rock, earth and ore. Man through-
out the ages has admitted that he cannot, with
his reason, fully understand the natures and the
laws of these lower creatures, yet despite this ad-
mission of the intellectual limitation, when faced
by a similar difficulty in the order above himself
—God—he makes his inability to totally compre-
hend the grounds for rejecting even the possi-
bility of any objective knowledge.
This is like a dog who expects fully to un-
derstand his master before taking orders from
him. For a dog to demand perfect understanding
of his master before taking commands is similar
to a man’s expecting perfect understanding of
God before accepting His revealed truths or His
commandments.
Briefly, as man is supernatural (above na-
ture) to the dog, and because of this is the dog’s
master, so God is supernatural to man, who is
His subject.
This is the central question in examining
the liberal religions: if the mind of man is the
foundation7 on which this religion is built, then
how rational is it to admit inexplainable mys-
teries in the very nature of man and in the
creatures lower than man, while denying the ex-
istence of mysteries in the higher order, which
. they admit when they profess the existence of
God.
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a civil contract but also a sacra-
ment instituted by Christ. This
conception immediately removes
the marriage of Christians from
the exclusive jurisdiction of the
civil authority and places it, at
least in its religious aspect,
under that of Christ and His
Church.
Why does the Church for-
bid divorce? The answer is
simple: because Christ forbade
it. As the institution founded by
our Divine Savior and com-
manded to teach His doctrines,
the (Continued on page 8)
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IsN’T it cruel to deny' a di-
vorce to people when they are
not satisfied with their present
partners and want to try mar-
riage with others? Why refuse
divorce to a wife whose husband
is a drunkard? Why not admit
there are unusual circumstances
which justify divorce?
Such are the questions
which non-Catholics often ask.
With the spectacle of one out of
every four or five marriages
ending in the divorce courts, and
with many of their own minis-
ters marrying couples who have
been divorced one or more times,
non-Catholics wonder why the
Catholic Church remains so ada-
mant in refusing divorce.
In order to present the fun-
damental grounds for the
Church’s unswerving opposition
to divorce it is necessary first of
all to point out that the Church
regards the union of ‘two Chris-
tians, that is, two baptized
people, as constituting not only
SHORTLY before graduation from college
not long ago, a young man took a look at reli-
gions today and concluded logically that a person
must either be a Catholic or nothing.
He had gone through the same religious ex-
periences as many of his contemporaries—from
traditional Protestantism to agnosticism to a
modern “liberal” church—but unlike many of
them, he made a logical survey of his direction.
He saw the liberal religion for what it is; an asser-
tion that one cannot really know truth. He appre-
hended liberal religion as a sort of “canonized”
agnosticism-.
More and more today, modern intellectuals
are finding their religious homes either in Cathol-
icism or in a total rejection of traditional reli-
gion in its form of dogma and the Supernatural
relationship between God and man. In rejecting
traditional religion, these people do not become
atheists—that would not be “intellectual.” They
admit the need to profess a religion, and see the
social need of belonging to a church. They become
a contradiction in terms—believing agnostics.
The “liberal” churches to which these people
turn profess no dogmatic creed. If they have any
common denominator, it would be belief in a
being called God.
Even here there is no agreement or binding
dogma. Asked what their members believe about
God, these churches might answer as one of their
publications does, “they are free to believe what-
ever persuades them.”
No theology, no universal body of beliefs can
follow from this. Each member forms his own
personal creed. What is truth to him can never
be measured by any yardstick but his own mind.
It’s like believing 16 inches make a foot merely
because one wants to believe it.
Another casualty of such a belief is morality.
Human behavior can no longer be judged by the
moral law, simply because there can be no moral
law in such a religion. Just as each liberal church
member forms his own picture or idea of God, so
each member forms his own code of conduct,
based on what is here and now useful to him.
The core of this religion is the free mind of
its members. This explains its rapid growth in
our materialistic atmosphere. The “new” reli-
gion limits the scope of man’s intellect to things
of the physical world, and rejects the mind’s abil-
ity to understand anything that cannot be seen,
felt, tasted, heard or smelled.
Since supernatural things are above man’s
nature and thus outside the realm of the physical
. world, the liberal religions discard them as un-
knowable.
With the supernatural ruled out, the mind
of man alone, or reason, becomes supreme in the
profession of the liberal faith. The human mind
becomes its own God and only what that mind
can understand and find pleasing and useful is
accepted as truth. Although unable to cause or
explain itself or surrounding realities, neverthe-
less the mind is enthroned as judge of all reality.
Having set rational power of the mind as the
- ceiling of human attainment, anything “super-
natural” in religion becomes unthinkable. Mys-
teries such as the Trinity, the Eucharist and
Grace are ruled out as “unreal.” Christ’s divinity,
Original Sin, the Redemption, Heaven and Hell
are meaningless. The basis of religion /is not
revelation by God, the Bible or a teaching author-
ity, but books of all religions, books that are not
religious at all, and the myth and fancy of
imagination.
How rational can such.a religion be?
HEN the liberal religion admits belief in
God, it admits belief in a being above human
nature, or supernatural. But if we can say there
is a being above man’s nature, how can we say
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Francis, Dale. The Lone Star Catholic (Austin, Tex.), Vol. 49, No. 17, Ed. 1 Sunday, August 21, 1960, newspaper, August 21, 1960; Austin, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth1528580/m1/1/: accessed July 17, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting St. Edward’s University.