And I would add: largely the fruit of Marxist philosophy. For Marx combined the dialectical method of Hegel with the evolutionary materialism of Feuerbach to create what he referred to as the scientific explanation of reality. Fr. Vincent Miceli explains:
"Marx accepted Hegel's postulate that at the heart of reality works the principle of contradiction. But, unlike Hegel, he claimed that the sole reality working itself into full self-consciousness is matter, not idea. According to this scientific method there is only one reality - matter - evolving in a dialectic of metaphysical hostility, the blind forces of which develop into plant, animal and man. Through a pepetual conflict of these forces and by a law of inexorable necessity man himself evolves from economic, political exploitative communities into the masses, the dictatorship of the proletariat, the Marxist state and achieves his final synthesis in the classless society...
In maintaining that matter is blind and exists alone with evolutionary forces, that society is merely a higher, more complicated form of matter, formed ineluctably by the necessary laws of nature, Marxism degrades the intrinsic sociality of man. It reduces man to being a mere external accretion added to matter by the determinism of the historical process. Thus atheistic, anticreationistic, Marxism denies God as a transcendent, eternal body and soul. It rejects the survival of the soul after death and the hope of eternal life. Thus the whole world of spirits is swept away by its radical materialism."
What does this have to do with morality?
It was Engels who said that, "The old metaphysics ..accepted things as finished objects...this dialectical philosophy dissolves all conceptions of final, absolute truth and of absolute states of humanity corresponding to it. For it [dialectical philosophy] nothing is final, absolute, sacred. It reveals the transitory character of everything and in everything: nothing can endure before it except the uninterrupted process of becoming and of passing away, of endless ascendency from the lower to the higher. And dialectical philosophy is nothing more than the mere reflection of this process in the thinking brain."
Marxist ethics, therefore, is a moral relativism. It holds that nothing is final, absolute or sacred. It holds that man himself is in a state of constant flux and therefore ethical values must also be in constant flux. Which is why Lenin wrote, "In what sense do we repudiate ethics or morality? In the sense that they were preached by the bourgeoisie, who declared that ethics were God's commandments. We, of course, say that we do not believe in God...We repudiate all morality that is taken outside of human, class concepts...We say that our morality is entirely subordinated to the interests of the class struggle of the proletariat."
This Marxist ethics has infected certain segments of the Church.
When I think of the damage done to the Church in countries like the United States, I just pray. It is nauseating and just plain sad.
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