Memorial of Saint Teresa of Jesus, Virgin and Doctor of the Church

Lectionary: 468

For what can be known about God is evident to them, because God made it evident to them.

Ever since the creation of the world, his invisible attributes of eternal power and divinity have been able to be understood and perceived in what he has made. As a result, they have no excuse;

for although they knew God they did not accord him glory as God or give him thanks.

As I understand the traditional Roman Catholic teaching about Natural Law is based on this passage in Romans 2. We have supposed that anyone-anywhere who simply reflects on ordinary human experience will agree to certain universal principles. Just as two and two make four, and what goes up must come down, so it's obvious that a mother loves her child and a husband prefers one wife until death do them part.

Formed by his Jewish religion and instructed in Hellenic philosophy, Saint Paul assumed that God made natural law evident to every thoughtful person. If many illiterate slaves of the empire believed in the panoply of Roman, Greek and barbarian gods, no well-educated free citizen would buy that nonsense. Every reasonable person had to agree there is only one God, who is creator and father of all.

In the following centuries, as a new civilization emerged from the ruins of the Roman Empire, and "everyone" was instructed by western European traditions and customs, it wasn't hard to agree with the idea of "natural law." It was a vital part of the intellectual infrastructure of laws, religion, and culture.

I am not familiar with contemporary thought in the Catholic Church about the natural law. I know that many dioceses and Catholic universities sponsor serious ethical discussions concerning health care, economics, war and peace, and sexual issues. Questions come up in everyday conversations and there are few obvious answers.

Not very long ago, influenced by the Enlightenment and an apparently universal acceptance of the scientific method, "everyone" agreed that facts are true. The work of science is to discover facts and to fit them like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle into hypotheses which, ripened, become reliable theories. However, the true scientist always knew their theories might collapse under the weight of facts yet to be discovered.

More recently, some philosophers challenge the hegemony of facts, saying they are only cultural artifacts and there is no universal truth. What is unquestionably true for an aging American Catholic priest might not be true for a Chinese Buddhist, a Utah Mormon, or even for an Appalachian Baptist.

The conversation was difficult until recently when it suddenly evolved into an existential crisis. The American tobacco industry led the way, followed by Russian propaganda, in disputing scientific research with counterclaims.

We are now too familiar with fake news and alternative facts. Even the President of the United States can challenge universally acknowledged scientific facts and not be consigned to a madhouse. In fact he finds millions of supporters, many with deep pockets, who support him. Truth and Natural Law have apparently degenerated into commodities to be used, bought, sold, exposed, hidden, reshaped, remolded, or denied by commercial, political interests.

In 1919, as the First World War was ending and nations prepared for the Second, the Irish poet W.B. Yeats described our present crisis in his poem, The Second Coming,

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

The poet wondered what rough beast slouches toward Bethlehem to be born.

The Church's traditional teaching about Natural Law meets stiff resistance today. If there is a universal truth that every nation might accept, before which kings will fall down as they cast their golden crowns on the glassy sea, we will not know it in our lifetime. Nor should we expect the intelligentsia and literati  to see the wisdom of the cross. They will continue to resist the God who reveals the Truth to us. As Saint Paul said to the Corinthians, an unlearned, rough-and-tumble crew:

...we speak God’s wisdom, mysterious, hidden, which God predetermined before the ages for our glory and which none of the rulers of this age knew; for if they had known it, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory.

Clearly we should not expect truth from power-hungry Republicans or Democrats, from socialists or capitalists; they have only agendas. Rather, we wait on the Father of Jesus to reveal divine truth and how to live it in this troubled world.