The Church and morality.

‘Science’ whatever that might mean, cannot explain innate morality or good deeds.  Our entire legal system and cultural determination of morality, what is right, what is wrong, what can and cannot be done was entirely shaped and formed by the Church.  The bedrock of our civilisation and morality is the Christian claim that all life is sacred, and every person uniquely created in the image of God.  Further, every person has a mind and soul, and the soul lives on after death.  Therefore, what you do in this life does matter.

Catholics waged a social war against suicide, poverty, slavery, infanticide, polygamy, bigamy, sexual perversion, gladiatorial contests, and the pagan abandonment of the weak and sick.  All ancient civilisations neglected the dispossessed and marginalised.  Children were sacrificed to Baal and various other ‘gods’.  Women were reduced in the main to sex slaves or baby production units (see Islam).  The widower was often stoned to death for being a burden to the village.  The leper and sick ignored or isolated until they died.  Such was ‘classical civilisation’ so lauded by atheists and Christophobes.

Seneca, the 1rst century BC philosopher killed by Nero commented, “We drown children who at birth are weakly and abnormal.”  How civilised.  Today of course we murder millions of babies every year under the banner of ‘abortion’, far more than the pagan Romans, Greeks, Celts, Britons, Saxons, and other paganisms destroyed.  Yet we call ourselves ‘modern’, living in the age of ‘science’.  We are barbarians who have forgotten the Church’s ethos and morality.

In the City of God, Saint Augustine rightly dismisses the rationale to allow and even encourage suicide:  “..greatness of spirit is not the right term to apply to one who has killed himself because he has lacked the strength to endure hardships…the stupid opinion of the mob; we rightly ascribe greatness to spirit that has the strength to endure a life of misery…”  Today we murder old people calling it ‘mercy killing’ or ‘euthanasia’.  We are now murdering people who are poor, depressed or suffering from various mental afflictions.  We are no better than the pre-civilised pagan societies who dispensed with the weak and wounded en-masse. 

Christ told his followers that they would be persecuted.  He asked them if they would have the strength of character and mind to suffer through such persecution.  He did not tell them to run or hide.  He adjured them to stand and to eventually be murdered for their faith.  Through this suffering they would come closer to God.  Indeed, a common theme in Catholic history is that suffering and pain are essential to understand divine truth.

Even on war, the Church advocated a ‘just war’ only policy, first enunciated in detail by Saint Augustine.  There must be a defensive and moral aspect to war.  War can only be justified as a response to an aggressor who imposes suffering and injustice.  Revenge, expansion, the lust for slaves or gold, and material exploitation are all condemned by the Church as immoral acts which can never justify war.  Saint Thomas Acquinas wrote: “In order for a war to be just…a just cause is required, namely those who attacked, should be attacked because they deserve it on account of some fault…the belligerents should have a rightful intention, so that they intend the advancement of good, or the avoidance of evil…”

Spanish scholastics in the 16^th century expounded on Acquinas’ viewpoint, establishing nascent international law and demanding that the enslavement, destruction and land appropriation of the Ameri-Indians by nominally Christian men, be declared illegal and stopped. 

Only in Church doctrine do we find strictures against sexuality immorality.   In the early Church women were predominate because of the Church’s belief that adultery, so widespread in the ancient world, was a sin which had to be applied equally for men as well as women.  The abuse of women in the ancient world is hard to underestimate and comprehend.  It was the Church who supported the equal rights of women, and it was the Church who declared that marriage was a contract that could not be broken, and that infidelity within a marriage was not to be tolerated.  This benefitted women.  Our own ‘modern’ views of women and their ‘rights’ are based on Church doctrine.  Where in world history outside of Christendom do we find women running abbey’s, farms, hospitals, convents, colleges, and orphanages?