“Never again can the Christian community allow itself to be infected by the idea that one culture is superior to others…”
—Pope Francis in Canada last July 22, in an irresponsible statement that is now being circulated and quoted in furtherance of ethical relativism.
Running across this quote has already ruined my weekend. Pope Francis has made a lot of dumb statements in his tenure, and dumb things do a lot of damage when coming from the mouths of those who carry great influence and power, and who are invested with moral authority. That is why they should be careful. Francis isn’t careful, which makes him an irresponsible and reckless Pope.
“Never again can the Christian community allow itself to be infected by the idea that one culture is superior to others” was the first part of a sentence that concluded with “or that it is legitimate to employ ways of coercing others.” He was in the midst of a grovel tour in Canada, self-flagellating for the still ongoing Catholic Church sexual predator scandal as well as allegations of Catholic Church abuse of indigenous peoples in North America. I guess he got carried away, because the “all cultures are equal” claim is absurd and dangerous, as well as factually wrong.
I have been confronting that fallacy since I started teaching ethics. Ethics involves values, and culture is how a nation, a religion, a state, a city, an institution, a family or any organizations decides how things should be, including what is right and what is wrong. The obvious rebuttal of the Pope’s fatuous generalization is Nazi Germany, but one doesn’t have to go to the extremes. Superior cultures succeed, in the sense that they achieve happiness and success for a majority of those within that culture. Inferior cultures fail, either because they are too rigid and cannot adjust to new conditions (the Native American cultures would fall into this category), or because they retard happiness and success for a substantial majority of their adherents. The culture of much of Africa is hopelessly corrupt, crippling a continent that has the natural and human resources to be a vital economic force for its population. The culture of Communism is inferior and destructive, though committed leftists refuse to admit it.
On the other side of the ledger, values traditionally promoted by modern Western civilization, such as religious freedom, tolerance, humanism, and monogamy, have marked out the route to community success and individual happiness. It is bizarrely controversial to say so out loud today, but the unique culture of the United States of America has been one of the main reasons this is the most affluent and successful—and desirable— nations on earth.
What Pope Francis was trying to say, but didn’t have the integrity to say clearly, was that the Roman Catholic Church is in no position to claim a superior culture when that culture allows priests to diddle little boys for centuries. Instead, he decided to deny the importance of culture entirely. His statement was recently quoted with approval in the “Joint Statement of the Dicasteries for Culture and Education and for Promoting Integral Human Development on the “Doctrine of Discovery” of March 30 of this year, a document that is part of the Catholic Church falling into line with the “diversity/equity/inclusion” fad. All cultures should be respected, the declaration claims.
That’s nonsense. Nobody has the right to force a cultural change in a community, but that does not mean that toxic, backwards, unethical or flawed cultures should be respected. Some cultures must be criticized and exposed as well as actively opposed to prevent their adverse influence on healthier cultures.
After the British colonial powers banned the Hindu practice of burning a widow alive on her husband’s funeral pyre, Hindu priests complained to British governor Charles James Napier that the custom, known as sati, was their right and, in their culture, right and just. Napier replied,
“Be it so. This burning of widows is your custom; prepare the funeral pile. But my nation has also a custom. When men burn women alive we hang them, and confiscate all their property. My carpenters shall therefore erect gibbets on which to hang all concerned when the widow is consumed. Let us all act according to national customs.”
Was the British culture that condemned burning widows not superior to the Hindu culture that demanded it? Pope Francis’s statement literally says no, and is thus both irresponsible and stupid. There can be no ethics in a world where he is right.
Ethics Alarms 
If His Popeness really believes this drivel, then he needs to go back to the Vatican and begin a going-out-of-business sale, reminding the last one leaving the building to turn out the lights.
On another note, whether we admit it or not, there is a “Sir Charles Napier moment” looming ahead in dealing with the growing Islamic culture in the United States. The problem is there aren’t many (any?) Sir Charles Napiers in sight in the US today. Heck, we don’t even punish the folks who brazenly violate our borders and then illegally remain here. Keep feeding the tiger, morons.
In that vein: https://pjmedia.com/columns/raymond-ibrahim/2023/05/26/bedlam-at-city-council-somali-culture-takes-minneapolis-by-storm-n1698384
Scroll through the Twitter comments and you’ll come to:
Look What Trump Supporters Are Doing To This Poor Target
From the “community” that brought us Ilan Omar. Let’s hear it for diversity and inclusion. That’s sure as hell diverse.
Just started a job at a big corporation. Went through all the HR PowerPoints. It included the usual talking points. The one thing that saved the whole thing is that they Start with the best applicants and don’t exclude based on the DIE, they are color and culture blind as long as you can do the job. They actually are devoted to trying to succeed using doing your best without being dogmatic and unreasonable.
Paco’s a Commie.
Well, aside from the atheism, of course. But I’ve long thought there was a lot of overlap between communism and Catholicism, as we see often enough when pater communitatis pontificates.
There’s a lot of overlap between EARLY Catholicism and communism. When Christianity was an unpopular minority that had to stick together to survive then it made sense for them to work on the principle that everyone contribute what he could and receive what he needed, while staying out of involvement with the state. Then came the Battle of the Milvian Bridge, Constantine, and Christianity becoming a religion of the majority. Once that happened, the concept of this communitarian approach did not vanish, but continued only in the monasteries and nunneries. A few small groups like the Catholic Workers keep the idea alive in the world, but they ARE not much more than just spiritualized communists.
If one culture is no better than another why should one culture be forced to support another equal culture.
Pope Francis was always pretty far left, as a Jesuit priest and bishop in a nation that has frequently flirted with tyranny of both left and right. Unfortunately, he’s the last man at the table when the bill for centuries of priestly misbehavior has arrived. He knows there’s no way around this without the church’s moral authority, or what remains of it, taking a big hit. He sees a chance to shore it up by embracing wokeness, the great moral reset of the 21st century. However, to do that the church must essentially stop being the church and become the opposite of itself.
It’s one thing for a person to do a complete 180 degree turn, although apparently it is only a good thing when right turns to left, while the other is a moral fall. However, for an institution that backed western European moral superiority for 1200 years, including 8 crusades to the holy land, the reconquest of Spain and Portugal from the Muslims, the Teutonic order’s crusade against the last pagan bastions in the Baltic, the Swedes pushing the Christian religion on the Finns at the point of a sword, the crusade against Catharists in southern France, the Inquisition, THEN the great conquest of the Western Hemisphere and more, it’s quite another matter. One does not simply say that was all one giant mistake, nor that everyone who’s come before today is not just misguided, not just bad, but irredeemable, and that if you don’t jump on the woke wagon you are irredeemable too. How do you think that’s going to play with we conservatives, who’ve repeatedly stuck our necks out for the church on sexuality, on abortion, on all those other social issues that it’s said are so important for decades and even centuries? Do you think we are going to be perfectly all right with being discarded as soon as we became inexpedient? I didn’t think so.
The idea that all cultures are equally moral is part laziness, part cowardice, and all bad. Western Europe and its successors in the Americas are by no means perfect. But to say that the culture that wrote the Constitution and the Bill of Rights and made something other than force the basis for society is no better than the Mandarin Chinese, who bound women’s feet to make them unnaturally tiny and castrated government officials in large numbers (by cutting EVERYTHING off with one sweep of the knife), or Mogul India, which burned widows in their husbands’ funeral pyres and ruled by a rigid caste system no one was ever able to break free of on pain of loss of salvation, or Aztec Mexico, which cut out hearts for human sacrifices? Does that make even the smallest amount of sense?
Great comment, Steve.
As near as I can remember, when I grew up in the church in the ‘fifties and ‘sixties, the church’s object was to save souls. The government was there to run lots of things and protect religious freedom. Give unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and unto God what is God’s. Now, the church, like the rest of organized religion, has sold out and become a temporal organization like any other whose primary objective is to get the government to redistribute wealth. Here on earth! A hopelessly futile project fully beyond the church’s scope. Dumb. And hence my assertion Frank is a Commie. Maybe better, a Marxist. Among plenty Marxist Jesuits everywhere, but particularly Argentina. I bet there’s a Che T-shirt somewhere in his apartment at the Vatican.
“It is bizarrely controversial to say so out loud today, but the unique culture of the United States of America has been one of the main reasons this is the most affluent and successful—and desirable— nations on earth.”
Even more than just that – the massive increase in affluence across the globe – EVEN in places that are still way behind the rest – is because of the unique culture of the USA. When World War 2 completely WRECKED the developed world (except the United States) – everywhere was set back – Europe and its periphery because of the destruction – the rest of the world because it wasn’t even remotely developed or developing.
The United States ALONE had the population, military might, economic strength, and cultural self-confidence to *tyrannically* dominate the majority of the world. If the USA was an Old World country, that’s exactly what it would have done.
Only it didn’t. Our culture didn’t want to run the world like an Empire. No. We used our military might to secure the sea-lanes and the globe entered the only time in its history where virtually unfettered trade allowed places across the planet to have access to things from the other side of the planet for dirt cheap prices. Commerce reigned in a way unimaginable.
Countries that ordinarily had to focus unbelievable percentages of their own energy and wealth on preparing to defend from or attack their neighbors now could reallocate those resources to trade and making their own people more comfortable and healthy because the United States stood ready to guarantee the peace.
There’s a backlash here by the way – much of the rest of the world, especially Europeans, who wildly benefited from *our* devotion to peace and war only against those who threaten sea-lanes, simultaneously resented us – primarily because we, the new kids on the block, completely humiliated their cultures with our magnanimity. And the backlash is always justified by turning our generous offer of peaceful commerce into an “America is Tyrannically Imposing Its Will Again” argument anytime we had to break up a local despot or regional aggressor that threatened post WW2 order.