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| A bored and meaningless life - detail of Romans during the Decadence. Couture 1847 |
I thought about how easily we are all brainwashed by our society and culture to stop thinking and assume by default that more money equals more success and more happiness, when ultimately happiness is really just about enjoying life.
His internet company had "a zany work culture that became a case study of how to build an effective and empathetic company that prioritized the happiness of employees and customers", according to Forbes, and his "best-selling gospel" on his management style was named Delivering Happiness.
Hsieh was wise enough to scream alarm at the mass brainwashing that individuals and businesses try in pursuit of self-interest, or that society as a whole conducts through mass media, social media and technology - remember, "the medium is the massage". The message is often whatever is fashionable among society's elite in academia, media and politics, picked up by the masses and accepted as the nature of things, the way things are. Parents are often surprised at the way their very young children express disturbing views they have somehow absorbed simply because those ideas are abroad in the community. An American example of how subtle but impactful the brainwashing can be is given in the "Non-binary Jesus" TikTok linked to on this blog a few days ago.
Everyone must take stock of where society's brainwashing is leading them as an individual and together. Unfortunately, Hsieh saw the problem but his typically American view of how to achieve happiness undermined the true solution to society's predicament. He needed to know that true happiness did not come from partying or increased amounts of nitrous oxide. Early on, a friend should have enlightened him to the meaning of Augustine's “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in You.” In that way, such a friend could have rescued Hsieh from deepening mental instability.
What has this got to do with Catholics? First, Catholics are part of the brainwashed population. Secondly, and linked to the first, Catholics, because of misunderstood Church teachings, often accept that no one will go to hell, because: God is love - He won't let anyone go to hell; as long as we live reasonably good lives all will be well; our conscience is on a par with the Church's teaching authority in understanding what is right and wrong; if I am happy, then that is what is right and good because God wants me to be happy. Prominent, too, is the "science tells me all I need to know" fiction. Finally, there's the "who has the right to tell me how to live?" mentality.
Yes, belief in God often remains, but not in how He wants us to live. His way, though it delivers peace and final satisfaction, is too hard a road to tread for all those with flaccid spiritual muscles, a grave lack of knowledge, and desires warped by society.
What is so serious about all the above beliefs, absorbed so willingly, is that they set the individual on the wrong moral path, putting them in danger of going to hell (in Church teaching it is mostly regarded as a place as well as a state). Crucially, there're no escape roads in this high-stakes journey. A person is either with God or against God; arriving in heaven or hell - Catholics included.
Let's go to an expert on this. I want to call Ralph Martin, the American Catholic seminary professor and author of two books on evangelisation (the sharing of the good news of God who reveals Himself), and on how the devil works to trap a person into accepting as their own, a belief system that, in reality, pits that person against God. Let's note here that there's nothing heroic to be a rebel in the devil's cause, as it flows simply from weakness and a spirit of decadence, though the devil may dress up such a belief system to make it appeal on the basis of its being a dramatic personal stand against all that is wrong.
Ralph Martin says this, referring to Acts 4:12:
Peter says there is no salvation through anyone else nor is there any other name under heaven given to the human race by which we are to be saved. This is an uncomfortable text for many people in our culture today but let's not explain it away. Rather we have to understand it and stick with it.
Martin delves into the Vatican II synod document on the Church called Lumen Gentium: Light of the Nations (1964), and particularly section 16, addressing first the issue of "practical universalism":
The way I would describe it was that many of our fellow Catholics have drifted into a mentality where this is how they look at the world today: broad and wide is the way that leads to heaven and almost everybody's going that way; narrow is the door that leads to hell and hardly anybody's going that way. Of course, hopefully most of you know what's wrong with this picture - it's directly the opposite of what Jesus himself says. In Matthew chapter 7 verses 13 and 14, Jesus says broad and wide is the way that leads to destruction and many are traveling that way; narrow is the door that leads to heaven. It's a difficult road and few there are who are finding it.
We know this isn't how God wants it to be. We know from first Thessalonians chapter 2 that God wills the whole human race to be saved and come to a knowledge of the truth. We also know there needs to be a response to the grace God gives to people for their salvation.
Here are Martin's words of warning for Catholics, many of whom have the false understanding as above:
It's easy to drift into the kingdom of God and it's really hard to choose to go to hell and that's just not what either the gospel says or the Church actually teaches.
What the Church teaches on who is to be saved starts with what has been handed down from the beginning and preserved by the teaching authority given to the Church by Christ:
Go into the world and preach the good news to all creation. Whosoever believes and is baptized will be saved, but whoever does not believe will be condemned (Mark 16:16);
and
Jesus answered, "I tell you the truth, no one can enter the kingdom of God unless they are born of water and the Spirit" (John 3:5).
Therefore, we have two principles relating to who enters heaven to be face-to-face with God for ever. Lumen Gentium #14 states that the Church is necessary for salvation because of Christ's precept that all people should enter the Church (Mark 16:16) and because of the effectiveness of the Church’s means of grace for imparting and sustaining an authentically Christian life (Jn 3:5 and cf Abbott note to #47).
Lumen Gentium #14 makes very clear statements that should worry Catholics of the refusenik or the sliding kind:
Basing itself upon sacred Scripture and tradition, [the synod] teaches that the Church, now sojourning on earth as an exile, is necessary for salvation (#14).
Whosoever knowing that the Catholic Church was made necessary by God through Jesus Christ, would refuse to enter her or to refuse to remain in her could not be saved (#14).
They are not saved, however, who, though they are part of the body of the Church, do not persevere in charity [meaning love for the visible structure]. ...If they fail to respond to that grace [from Christ through the Church] in thought, word, and deed, not only will they not be saved but they will be the more severely judged (Luke 12:48) (#14).
Despite this very direct language of the Vatican II fathers, confusion quickly spread among Catholics over the teaching as to salvation especially of those who did not have any or only partial understanding of the Church's role in serving the good news of Christ. For this reason, Martin wrote his books to clarify matters, writing in urgency as well as sadness given the extreme danger of those following the way of the world instead of the way of the Lord.
He points out that some of the confusion over salvation starts through ignoring the stipulation as to who is to be saved given in a key statement of Vatican II:
Here's what Lumen Gentium 16 says, "Those who through no fault of their own do not know the gospel of Christ or his Church but who nevertheless seek God with a sincere heart and moved by grace try in their actions to do his will as they know it through the dictates of their conscience, these too may achieve eternal salvation."
From this statement we can discern three conditions for the salvation of those who do not belong to the Catholic Church:
First is that ignorance about Christ and the Church is not of a deliberate neglect of developing knowledge of that kind.
Second is that a person responds to the promptings of their heart whenever they discern that they are drawn to sources of information about God, or what is good, what is true and what is beautiful.
Third is that they respond to the grace of God by following their conscience on how to live.
Martin explains each, with a message for Catholics who do not take care of their religious belief:
The first [condition] is inculpable ignorance: people who, not because of their own fault, have not heard the gospel.
Now that implies it is possible to be culpably ignorant of the gospel.
Some of us have the common experience, for example, of inviting a friend to hear a talk. Say Scott Hahn comes to town or even Bishop Barron comes to town and we want a fallen away Catholic or lukewarm Catholic to come and hear more about the beauties of the faith and how great it is to be a Catholic, and they say no. ... Sometimes people know what they are going to hear and they don't want to challenge their worldview; they don't want to have to confront even sin or darkness or deception in their life.
Therefore, Catholics who do not give proper regard to their spiritual health are putting their salvation in jeopardy. Theirs is blameworthy ignorance.
Another example Martin gives is with people who verbally express their hatred for Christianity. One example I can think of is the person who has had some association with Christianity in the past, but has lately accepted in effect, or has begun to lead, a promiscuous lifestyle themselves and so give into the temptation, because the may need to have an abortion, to excoriate the Church for upholding the dignity of the unborn as human from conception.
Martin has advice on how to deal with such a person - love them:
We're never going to win anybody to Christ if we don't really love them and have a concern for their well-being. Maybe they're inculpably ignorant of Christianity but maybe they know exactly who Christ is and exactly what he teaches and they hate him and hate the Church.
This is becoming quite a common viewpoint in our culture. Our culture is quickly becoming not just post-Christian but anti-Christian and it is, I think, demonically inspired hatred for Christ in his Church. We can't presume that people who say they hate Christianity are inculpably ignorant. Only God knows somebody's culpability but we should be very concerned for everybody's salvation and not presume that everything’s okay.
Therefore, a person's choice of the wide road, the road that is socially engineered through cultural brainwashing, one that is personally attractive because it seems so easy, is also putting their salvation in jeopardy. A Catholic friend must try to guide that person through their slough of falsehood.
Martin continues:
The second condition is that people who are inculpably ignorant of the gospel are seeking God with a sincere heart.
One of the things that Jesus said in Matthew 24 was that when he returns people are going to be buying and selling, eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage right up to the last day, just like it was in Noah’s day.... Jesus isn't saying that because evil was so great the flood destroyed them. He talked about the condition of people and their indifference. They're going on with business as usual concerned only with the things of this world, yet the Lord expects people to want to know who he is and to sincerely seek him.
What's the basis for this? Romans chapter 1 say God has revealed himself to everybody on the face of the earth and that everybody, by looking at the creation, can deduce that there's a creator and needs to have a desire to know what the will of the Creator is, what the purpose is for creating us and what human life is all about.
We need to be sincerely seeking God, wanting to know who he is. Obviously, ...there's a lot of people who aren't sincerely seeking God, who are indifferent just as Jesus talks about in Matthew 24.
Matthew chapter 24 largely deals with Christ's second coming, and concludes with the parable of the absent master and the servant left in charge who is wicked and beats his underlings and turns to the company of drunkards: "The master will come on a day when he does not expect...He will cut [this servant] to pieces and assign him a place with the hypocrites, where there will be weeping and the gnashing of teeth". Jesus paints a gruesome picture of punishment for a reason. It is not apocalyptic hyperbole.
The third condition is, moved by grace, a person tries in their actions to do his will as they know it through the dictates of their conscience.
Now our conscience has been called “the aboriginal vicar of Christ”, meaning that when we respond to what our conscience is telling us as to what is right or wrong we're responding to Christ himself.
[But] conscience can often be corrupted. We can have bad consciences and what our conscience is telling us isn't the voice of Christ. We can rationalize our behavior; we can be brainwashed [as by the mentality of society around us and by customs within a family]. In so many ways our conscience can't be a reliable guide to the truth. Therefore, we need to recover our true conscience.
We recover our conscience, that is, form our conscience afresh, by prudently using the data of experience, applying the advice of competent people and whatever can be gained by educating ourselves from reliable sources, and by the help of the Holy Spirit, as the Catechism the Catholic Church says.
A complicating factor in all this is “we're living in a culture where, more and more, nobody's responsible, everybody's sincerely doing what they think is right, which isn't the case at all". Martin says:
One of the things that the catechism says in section 1860 is no one is deemed to be ignorant of the principles of the moral law which are written in [everyone’s] conscience. … Every-body knows that in some way, before maybe their conscience has been deformed, that it’s wrong to kill people, that it's wrong to steal, it's wrong to commit adultery.
Scripture is telling us, and the Church is telling us in Lumen Gentium 16, it's wrong not to be seeking God. So these are pretty stiff requirements, and it’s not to be presumed that everybody who doesn't know Christ is cooperating with the mysterious grace he gives to be known even when his name is not known.
Through our experience of love or truth or beauty we can be receiving grace from Christ and if we yield to that grace we can have salvation affected in our life. ...There isn't a middle stage of participating in salvation - we're either saved or not saved, and so these rays of light, these aspects of truth that we find in religious philosophies or other religions can be a doorway for us to receive grace and light that God is giving us.
But there's an important footnote in Lumen Gentium 16 and it refers to the letter of the Holy Office to the Archbishop of Boston concerning the Father Feeney case, and what that basically says is not just any kind of metaphysical faith "Oh yeah, I believe in God" that saves us; it's not just any kind of good will and principles of morality that saves us, but what saves us is a response to grace.
There needs to be supernatural faith, faith that's born in us by saying yes to a light that God's giving us, which implies in it a surrender to the one who has enlightened us. So it’s a surrender to God, which births supernatural faith in our soul. We also need to have supernatural charity. Without supernatural faith or supernatural charity we can't be saved.
Again, Catholics who have thrown the riches of the Church on to a scrapheap in their lives, while maintaining that they're okay because they still believe there is a God, need to reconsider, as Martin points out:
So it isn't just "Oh yeah, I believe in God" but it's a personal response to a light that we're receiving. We may not know where it's coming from, we may not know the name of Jesus, but we're saying yes to something deep in our soul that God is giving us that does take away original sin, or it can.
Lumen Gentium 16's last three sentences are our guide for understanding how we are to stay on the right path with a properly formed conscience:
"But very often, deceived by the evil one, human beings have become foolish in their thinking and have exchanged the truth of God for a lie and worshipped the creature rather than the creator (Romans 1:21, 25) or else living and dying in this world without God they're exposed to ultimate despair. Therefore, to procure the glory of God and the salvation of all these."
This statement adds to Martin's urgency:
So whose salvation is the Church concerned about here? People who haven't heard the gospel, but maybe they're not sincerely seeking God, maybe they're not really living according to the light of their conscience but they're living according to the brainwashing of the culture or the rationalizations of their own disordered desires from original sin. So these people the Church is concerned about as to their salvation.
Now what's being said here is that we're not living in a neutral environment, that all of us have been deeply impacted by original sin - believers and unbelievers, Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims, Christians, atheists - we've all been deeply impacted by original sin and have disordered desires and a tendency to do things that aren't right, and a weakened will and we're all susceptible to the deceits of the devil and we know that the devil is like a roaring lion seeking whom he can to devour.
All day long he's firing fiery darts into the soul of every person on the face of the earth and if we don't have the explicit help of Christ and the Church, the explicit help of knowing exactly what God's will is what we must do to be saved that we find in sacred scripture, the tradition of the Church and the magisterium; if we don't have that, it's so easy to be deceived, it's so easy to give in to disordered desires, it's so easy to believe the lies of the devil.
The original Latin [of Lumen Gentium] says, "very often", yes “very often” people are deceived by the evil one and so give into disordered desires. So it's urgent that we preach the gospel.
Sometimes people say “wouldn't people be better off if they don't hear the gospel, then they won't be culpable for the response they make or the lack of response they make?”
No, not at all. People who haven't heard the gospel are in tremendous danger. It's a fact as the Church says here: "Very often they become deceived by the evil one and exchange the truth of God for a lie and become foolish in their thinking."
That is sure true of the environment that we're living in today. So we should take every opportunity through prayer, through fasting, through personal witness, through invitations, through sharing books, inviting people to watch YouTube videos, to invite them to faith because they're in tremendous danger.
Even though it's possible for people to be saved without hearing the gospel it's very difficult and people are far better off to explicitly come to faith in Jesus Christ and life in the Church.
Two things I ask of you, O Lord; do not refuse me before I die: Keep falsehood and lies far from me; give me neither poverty nor riches, but give me only my daily bread. Otherwise, I may have too much and disown you and say, `Who is the Lord?' Or I may become poor and steal, and so dishonor the name of my God (Proverbs 30:7).
and how a person has used "the seed", the gift of God, who is the sower:
Now listen to the explanation of the parable about the farmer planting seeds: The seed that fell on the footpath represents those who hear the message about the Kingdom and don’t understand it. Then the evil one comes and snatches away the seed that was planted in their hearts. The seed on the rocky soil represents those who hear the message and immediately receive it with joy. But since they don’t have deep roots, they don’t last long. They fall away as soon as they have problems or are persecuted for believing God’s word. The seed that fell among the thorns represents those who hear God’s word, but all too quickly the message is crowded out by the worries of this life and the lure of wealth, so no fruit is produced. The seed that fell on good soil represents those who truly hear and understand God’s word and produce a harvest of thirty, sixty, or even a hundred times as much as had been planted! (Matthew 13:18-23 NLT).
In conclusion, like all kindred pilgrims who count on God’s mercy and inexhaustible patience, Catholics have to evangelize and pray for family and friends that they will all enter into everlasting fellowship with God. Second, we have to beware of the brainwashing within society or culture. Feel the urgency!
Ω Go here as Ralph Martin expresses concern about Catholic confusion on who is saved.
Ω Have a look at my Peace and Mind newsletter on Substack. Subscribe there - It's free! - to be notified of all postings.
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