ON 'THE SOCIAL DOCTRINE OF THE CHURCH'
Morals and Immortality:
The U.S. Crisis Now
by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.
November 17, 2004
There is a deliciously ironical aspect to EIR's receipt of the accompanying report by our Italian correspondent, Liliana Gorini. Since it was her ancestor who, quite literally, buried Guiseppe Mazzini, there is a certain exquisitely ironical appropriateness in her informing our English-speaking audience of the Vatican's release, by the Holy See's Press Office, of the 500-page "Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church." It is to be hoped that this excellent work might inform, and thus improve the future behavior of many presently still misguided U.S. citizens who voted against Democratic Presidential candidate John Kerry on the pretext of "moral" issues.
As Cardinal Renato Raffaele Martino reports, the composition just released was begun by Cardinal François-Xavier Nguyen van Thuan, a late dear friend of mine.[*] It is now published as the completion of work in which he was engaged at the time of his death, matters which, in part, I discussed with him on several visits during the years before his death. It were appropriate, on this occasion, that I confine myself here to a matter of morals which must be raised on account of the great flood of disgustingly self-righteous sheer hypocrisy shown by a large number of self-styled "moral" citizens in, specifically, the recent, Nov. 2 election in the state of Ohio.
Among the most notorious of the sundry pseudo-Christian cults which are echoed within the U.S. citizenry today, those which have proliferated so since times in ancient Imperial Rome, are those strains of Gnosticism which award reign in the real world to Satan, except on the rare occasions God the Creator might rudely intervene. For ancient and modern dupes of that and kindred varieties of pagan cult-traditions, morality is essentially a code of conduct adopted for the shrewdly politically cautious inhabitants of a domain ruled by Satan, a domain in which Jeanne d'Arc's or Rev. Martin Luther King's courageous confrontation with death, are popularly viewed as "mistakes" by our typical, cowardly, moralizing opportunists of today.
Typical of such lack of a true sense of immortality, is the behavior of the pastor who fancies himself a rooster servicing the hens of his flock, but points the finger of rage in thunderous pronouncements against what he alleges to know to be the sinful fornication among his parishioners. Or compare the behavior of those Ohio citizens who, like the hypocrites they were, did not blink with shame when they voted for a continuation of economic and related health-care policies which are the cause of vast increases in the deaths among our citizens and others. How could such preachers of such so-called morality lead anyone to immortality, when we know by their deeds, that they do not actually believe in it themselves?
In short, the essence of Christian morality in such matters is typified most efficiently by the Apostle Paul's famous I Corinthians 13, where the principle known to Plato's Socrates as agape (e.g., love, charity) is contrasted sharply with the behavior of those among our citizens who had just recently cast their vote for the perpetration of crimes against humanity, and implicitly God himself. The immortal soul, who knows that he or she is immortal, trusts immortality, as Jeanne d'Arc and the Rev. Martin Luther King did, and therefore does the deeds which even the future alone may harvest, because he or she is certain of that future. In contrast, these hypocrites, who often esteem themselves as sincere and patriotic as the cock-of-the-walk in the pulpit, care nothing for that anti-Locke Preamble of our Federal Constitution which places sovereignty, the general welfare, and posterity above all other law which might be tolerated by our republic.
The radically consistent offshoots of pro-Satanic Gnosticism, such as the preaching of traitor Aaron Burr's grandfather, the thundering Jonathan Edwards, are the model of reference to be considered when weighing the morality of those hypocritical American moralists who condone the teachings of Locke (human slavery as property), Mandeville (that the general good comes of private corruption, such as Enron), François Quesnay (for whose religion those persons employed on the estate were merely human cattle), and the plagiarist and hater of the U.S.A., Adam Smith, who copied the Gnostic dogmas of Locke, Mandeville, Quesnay, Smith, and, worst of them all, Jeremy Bentham, as that immoral dogma of "free trade" which has wrecked and ruined the U.S. economy and many other parts of the world over a period of more than three recent decades.
Actually, these poor believers in such Gnostic trash as "free trade" are not actually Christians. They do not believe that human beings have actual souls. They do not believe that they are accountable for those consequences of their having lived in a way which must have shamed their forebears, and will disgust their descendants. They take pride in the assumption that they are not "their brother's keepers," but, like the cow not yet herded to the slaughterhouse, they fancy themselves, foolishly, as men and women passionately, and also shrewdly aware of their immediate, sensual self-interest.
So, in these times, we have many Americans who are studiously indifferent to the kind of future they are bestowing upon even their own young-adult children. Their behavior attests, that they desire nothing as much as to dwell, themselves, in a fantasy-realm of ideological "comfort zones," in which they may overlook the consequences they will leave behind at the time of their deaths. Thus, we have the gambling mania spread among demoralized Americas of various generations today. They have no sense of personal immortality; therefore, why should they expect any? Therefore, how could they be Christians? Why should we be surprised, therefore, when we see how they behave, at the polls, or otherwise: as disgusting hypocrites?
I think back to the 1920s of my childhood. I think of hopefully of the waning of the religious fervors of the "Elmer Gantrys" then, disgusting hypocrises not unlike those which the Falwells and even worse peddle today. I recall, that with the economic realities of the 1929-1933, there was a crushing of the prevalent religious devotion to the rhetoric of Coolidge and Hoover by the simple fact of a rude confrontation with reality. I do not think theology improved much during the 1930s U.S.A., but at least the religious insanity simmered down considerably under the cold realities of the Great Depression and the warmth of the Roosevelt-led recovery of our nation. Unfortunately, there was no President Franklin Roosevelt in Germany, and we saw what turns such Gnostic varieties of religious fervor took under Hitler there.
We are not presently reliving past history, but we are facing the onrushing challenges which should warn us against the repeating the kinds of mistakes which have repeatedly led nations such as our own to periods of ruin in the experience of past generations.
In summary: there is a fundamental difference between the Christian, for example, who knows what the concept of immortality means for guiding one's own behavior and that of the nation, and those like the so-called "moralists" of Ohio and elsewhere, whose idea of morality is "going along to get along" within the mortal boundaries of what they accept in their practice as a Gnostic's Satan-run domain.
Cardinal van Thuan gave me his blessing personally a few hours before his demise. His latest work, delivered as Signora Gorini reports here, attests to my sense of my own immortality, as seen in his eyes, and as I saw his, in return, as he blessed me then. We who sense the reality of immortality, have a courage to act for good, a kind of courage which is lacking in those who have yet to come up to this standard of morality. How many among my readers could say much the same of themselves? Is that not a key to the real moral crisis of the U.S.A. today? The parts of the work released by Cardinal Martino of which I know, express that intention for those who will receive the message; on that account, it is, in addition to its principal virtue, also an ecumenical work, which merits the study by all, of whatever nominal profession or confession. However, to really understand it, you must find a sense of true immortality in yourself.
[*] See a review of Cardinal Thuan's book, by William F. Wertz, in EIR, Feb. 16, 2001.
