Getting to Know Some Modern Monsters

When the American novelist Walker Percy was asked by an interviewer why he had become a Catholic, he famously answered, “What else is there?” He was too intelligent and analytical to be merely flippant. He knew that other religions and philosophies, although they might contain elements of truth and wisdom, could not answer to the human thirst for a wholeness of vision that addresses all the exigencies and vagaries of mortal existence and that they often contain errors and the seeds of aberrant behaviors. Not to mention that some are, by nature, virulently anti-Catholic.

In his latest book, Modern Monsters: Political Ideologues and Their War against the Catholic Church, George Marlin shines a bright light on the dark corners of anti-Catholicism that have characterized the thinking of five centuries of influential religionists, philosophers, activists, and politicians.  As the title suggests, this is not a book looking to promote ecumenical dialogue or build bridges across the aisle that separates disputing parties.  It’s a diagnostician’s examination of what ails the modern world, how it came to be so ill, and implicitly what it needs to be cured.

With copious quotes from primary and secondary sources – which alone make the book worth reading – Marlin sketches vivid portraits of more than a dozen prominent thinkers whose ideas and rabid anti-Catholicism have shaped our culture, mostly for the worse.  Whether he’s writing about Martin Luther or Machiavelli, or closer to our own time, Nazis, fascists, and communists, we find illustrated again and again what Pope Pius XI pointed to in his 1937 encyclical Mit brennender Sorge:

Whoever exalts race, or the people, or the state, or a particular form of state, or depositories of power, or any other fundamental value of the human community – however necessary and honorable be their function in worldly things – whoever raises these above their standard value and divinizes them to the idolatrous level distorts and perverts an order of the world planned and created by God: he is far from the true faith in God and from concepts of life which that faith upholds.

Further documented is the nearly megalomaniacal self-assurance of the purveyors of such idolatrous notions who believed that implementation of them would lead to a world far superior to the one we know, if not to an earthly paradise. In short, most of the individuals covered by Marlin turn out to be utopians, who, finding resistance to their utopian vision, morph into totalitarians intent on destroying whoever and whatever stands in the way of the realization of their dreamed-of more perfect society.

This accounts for their invariable hostility to the Catholic Church, ever ready to fight the tendency of ideologues to reduce the individual to a mere means to an end or a cog in the machine and, with perfect realism, also to assert that no individual or group is capable of creating heaven in this fallen world.

From beginning to end, Marlin is dealing with those who, absolutely assured of their vision of how to perfect the world, will brook no opposition to the implementation of their plans.  How could they?  They have usurped the role of God, only without God’s mercy and love.  All who oppose them must be eliminated by whatever means necessary.  Their arrogance is breathtaking.

Martin Luther, who understood the Bible as none before.

Machiavelli, the first to see the true nature of politics.

Thomas Hobbes, who would replace the Catholic Church with a scientifically founded Commonwealth Church.

The Enlightenment ideologues, who saw through all that came before, laying the foundation for the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror.

Jean Jacques Rousseau, who asserted the natural goodness of man and the inherent evil of civilization.

The 19th-century liberals, who thought man perfectible through scientific and purely rational means.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, who believed he had discovered the secret to unlocking the code of history.

Auguste Comte, who presumed to found a new Church of Humanity.

Karl Marx, who combined Hegel’s dialectic with Comte’s materialism, inspiring the rise of atheistic communism and the slaughter of millions.

The European fascists, who worshiped the state with themselves conveniently ensconced at its head.

Hitler and the Nazis, who worshiped their blood and their race, all others being sub-human and consequently expendable.

Twentieth-century social justice revolutionaries, who brought us the sexual revolution, critical race theory, and critical gender theory.

All infected with titanic egotism, certain of their own rectitude, intolerant of any opposition; all perfectly comfortable with the elimination in one way or another of those who oppose them, their grand end justifying the most abhorrent means.

George Marlin’s book is not a happy read.  Specialists in one or another of his subjects may take exception to some of his characterizations and conclusions.  But his overarching theme of open hostility to Catholicism in those whose lives and thinking he examines is hard to gainsay and should, at the very least, be an opening to an important discussion.

Alas, the woke and other contemporary ideologues seem little interested in such a discussion.  They are like the queen in Snow White, unhappy and hate-filled with anyone or anything that would dare to suggest that they are not the fairest of them all.  So much the worse for them.  So much the worse for our society.

I’d say of Marlin’s book, read it and weep, but I don’t want to discourage anyone from getting into it.  So let me end on a hopeful note by quoting as Marlin does, the great Catholic historian, Christopher Dawson:

Inevitably in the course of history, there are times when [the Church’s] spiritual energy is temporarily weakened or obscured . . . .But always a time comes when she renews her strength and once more puts her inherent divine energy in the conversion of new peoples and the transformation of old cultures.

May George Marlin’s book contribute to the coming of that time soon.