David Quinn
You cannot keep pretending that the individual is the basic unit of society to the detriment of the family or communities, writes David Quinn
Power always defeats itself in the end. This, to me, is almost a law of nature. Look through history and you see this ‘law’ play itself out again and again as empires collapse and established orders grow old or are overthrown.
It is also true that power can be defeated. That’s another law. But what I mean by ‘power always defeats itself in the end’, is that power has an inbuilt tendency to overreach, or rather those with power have that tendency. They can’t resist it. It’s human nature.
The Church has done it at various points through history, including recently in Ireland. After we gained Independence in 1922, we gave the Church huge power and it was happy to take it. What happened? It overreached. It became authoritarian and created a backlash that we are still living with today. This hasn’t played itself out fully yet. We saw that when Pope Francis came here last year. He is a popular pope, and yet an awful lot of the old anger burst to the surface yet again, and his visit was largely overshadowed by that.
In fact, in the Vatican some people believe that only two of the visits Pope Francis has made to other countries can be considered failures (even if qualified failures); the ones to Ireland and Chile. In both cases the abuse scandals had done huge damage to the authority of the Church.
Trust
It’s easy enough to let the situation of the Church in Ireland drag you down. But you have to fight that feeling in yourself and take the long view. God tells us that we don’t know how all this will play out over time. Only he knows that, and we have to trust him. It can take lifetimes for something to play itself out and for God to act decisively in history.
When Joseph’s family fled famine and sought refuge in Egypt, eventually becoming slaves, God waited 200 years before bringing them out of Egypt and then they spent another 40 years in the desert while he prepared them to found a new nation, purging and forging them in the process, giving them a new law to live by.
But 240 years is a long time. It must have seemed to the Israelites that their fate was sealed. Did they even have leadership in that time? Their liberator, Moses, was raised as an Egyptian, within the royal family. He was not a slave. The liberator of the Israelites was one of them and not one of them at the same time.
We now live in a time when secular liberalism is triumphant and almost totally dominant”
God brought success out of failure, and that happens time and again. It is the same pattern for the Church. This is what St John Henry Newman meant when he said: “The rule of God’s Providence [is] that we should succeed by failure.”
We now live in a time when secular liberalism is triumphant and almost totally dominant. Virtually all resistance to it has collapsed, in Ireland at least. It has only to want something for it to be done. The passage of an abortion law has now led to demands for euthanasia. Unless the medical profession rises up against that, it will pass in the next few years. The media will focus on a few tragic personal stories and the Oireachtas will fall into line and vote through a law. A referendum is not needed at all this time.
If the present secular, liberal moment cannot be defeated by any ideological rival currently on the field, what might do it? The answer is that it will eventually defeat itself, by overextension.
For example, it has become ridiculously intolerant of other points of view, quickly denouncing them as ‘bigoted’ and now moving towards reforming the law so that it is easier to find people guilty of hate crimes. The formal and informal policing of speech by political correctness is already annoying a lot of people.
Immigration past a certain point can begin to erode societal cohesion”
Liberalism also has an in-built individualism that will eventually create a backlash. You cannot keep pretending that the individual is the basic unit of society to the detriment of the family or communities like Churches or nations. People have a yearning to belong as well as to be free and we are currently overemphasising personal freedom at the expense of communities of belonging which create obligations, like families create obligations.
The present liberal movement might also over-extend in the direction of environmentalism, immigration and also gender ideology.
At a certain point, green policies will become extremely expensive. People such as farmers or Bord na Mona workers begin to lose their jobs. Retrofitting your house or buying an electric car costs a lot of money. So might carbon taxes ultimately.
Immigration past a certain point can begin to erode societal cohesion because you shouldn’t allow people into a country faster than you can integrate them.
As for gender ideology, a lot of parents might not like it if schools teach their children that their bodies and the gender they say they are, are two different things; in other words that you might have a girl’s body and really be a boy, or vice versa. That is a very radical and far-reaching belief.
The lack of real resistance on most of these fronts means that liberalism will push and push, overreach and then begin to recede. This is a certainty. No moral consensus lasts forever. Power always defeats itself.