“Just as it did in issuing Amoris Laetitiae in 2016, the Vatican here is undermining fundamental doctrines of the entire Jewish-Christian tradition and shredding the foundations of Natural Law — the moral code the Creator wrote on the heart of every rational human being.”
Unsplash/Chris Czermak & The StreamYou might not have read the Book of Maccabees. (Catholics and Orthodox regard it as canonical while Protestants and Jews mostly consider it simply an inspiring, accurate history of God’s people enduring corruption and persecution.)
But the Lutheran George Frederick Handel thought the story important enough to compose a beautiful oratorio retelling it, Judas Maccabeus. The Jewish holiday of Channukah has its origins in the events recounted in Maccabees — commemorating the rededication of the Temple after pagans had profaned it.
Maccabees is certainly worth a read for Christians today trying to navigate a path between an overbearing, increasingly intolerant secular culture and Church leaders who dither, waver, or even seem to be on the side of the Enemy. (I’m focusing here on my own Roman Catholic Church, but as you read this, think of all the rainbow-flagged, “affirming” pastors and churches in your own tradition, some of which you might once have trusted.)
Those Oiled, Muscular Seductive Greeks
In Maccabees, we see the plight of the Jewish people under foreign occupation — this time not the cruel Assyrians or the tolerant Persians, but the glittering, sophisticated, and above all seductive Greeks. After Alexander the Great destroyed the Persian Empire in 323 B.C., fought his way to India, then died at age 33, his generals split up the new empire he’d founded among themselves, squabbling over its component parts for the next century. The section that included ancient Palestine was the Seleucid Empire.
Its rulers prided themselves on the artistic, philosophical, and cultural inheritance of Greece, whose civilization Alexander’s armies had spread throughout Central Asia and the Near East. Wherever they ruled, these Hellenistic kings established academies and gymnasia (athletic/cultural centers) — and set up temples to the Greek pagan gods. The goal was to gradually assimilate all the natives to the “higher” civilization, making them easier to govern. It was a form of colonialism.
After a few decades of relatively tolerant rule over the Jews, Seleucid rulers decided it was time to force these subjects, too, to fall into line. They started encouraging pagan worship, bribing and corrupting the Jewish high priests, then finally just picking their own, collaborationist priests — whose job it was to keep the Jews in line while gradually Hellenizing and paganizing them.
They discouraged circumcision and urged Jews to take part in the scandalous, naked athletics that Greeks saw as central to their culture. If Jews worshiped false, Hellenic gods and Seleucid governors profaned the Temple by sacrificing pigs to Zeus, these priests’ reaction was the same as Pope Francis’s more recent response to homosexual practice: “Who am I to judge?”
Many Jews went along, eager to shed their provincial, eccentric heritage and join the prestigious global culture of their richer, more powerful rulers. But some Jews remained faithful and found leaders in the Maccabee family, a band of zealous brothers captained by the gifted warlord Judas. That family led a series of violent guerrilla campaigns against one of the most powerful kingdoms on earth.
Though Judas would perish in combat and his brother Jonathan would be murdered, the faction of faithful Jews eventually triumphed and established an independent, religiously faithful Jewish kingdom once again. That would last until 37 B.C., when Jews fell under the domination of their one-time allies, the empire of Rome.
A Very Bad Version of Moses
All Christians face a Maccabees moment right now, but Catholics face it in a very pointed way: We actually have a high priest (pontifex maximus) in Pope Francis. Given his authority to teach and rule, his status is even higher than the chief priest’s in Jerusalem’s Temple: According to Catholic tradition, a pope stands almost in the same role that Moses did to the Israelites, as the trustworthy interpreter of divine revelation to the faithful.
Our current Moses isn’t handing down God’s commandments, alas. As Jules Gomes reported here a few days ago, Pope Francis’s doctrine cop, Cardinal Victor Manuel Fernández, prefect of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith (Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger’s old job), has blown up a key Christian doctrine: God’s creation of human beings as men and women.
Up till now, the Catholic church has firmly and without wavering denounced the hormonal disruptions and surgical mutilations promoted by our psychological establishment to “treat” gender dysphoria by remaking the body to match the mind’s sad delusions. Now Fernández has ruled that there are exceptions to this teaching in cases of “strong dysphorias that can lead to an unbearable existence or even suicide.”
Here Fernández is simply repeating a favorite talking point of the transgender industry: that the grotesque procedures necessary to torture a male body to look female, or vice versa, are often the only alternative to suicide. Research has proved this claim false again and again, but don’t expect that to matter. Claiming that resistance to transgenderism threatens the livesof those who suffer dysphoria is key to winning a highly political battle. Fernández is on the Enemy’s side in that battle — and evidently Francis is as well.
Morality via Sob Stories
Keep in mind that current Catholic teaching (for the moment) does not allow exceptions to the ban on contraception. Even married couples dealing with medical issues that make pregnancy dangerous may not use birth control. Likewise, Fernández has seconded Francis’s claim that capital punishment is always wrong, no matter the situation (and no matter what the Bible says.) But a Catholic doctor may perform a sex-change operation, if the sob story offered is heart-wrenching enough.
This apostasy by the Vatican’s highest authority on doctrine (apart from the pope) carries many grave implications.
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