Christ the King and Merriment -- Part II

God bless ye merry gentlemen, and merry ladies!

"What gave St. Francis his extraordinary personal power was this; that from the Pope to the beggar, from the sultan of Syria in his pavilion to the ragged robber crawling out of the wood, there was never a man who looked into those brown burning eyes without being certain that Francis Bernardone was really interested in him; in his own inner individual life from the cradle to the grave; that he himself was being valued and taken seriously, and not merely added to the spoils of some social policy or the names in some clerical document." ---- G.K. Chesterton in St. Francis of Assisi

With Christmas, everything is changed. All that we hold dear emanates from the babe of Bethlehem, including our cherished American belief that all men are created equal, enshrined in our founding and foundational document, the Declaration of Independence. The creche is the cradle of civilization. Christmas is the bedrock of all human rights, and it is more; it is also the beginning of brotherhood, of understanding and compassion, of universal acceptance.

"It is profoundly true to say that after that moment there could be no slaves," writes Chesterton in The Everlasting Man. "There could be and were people bearing that legal title, until the Church was strong enough to weed them out, but there could be no more of the pagan repose in the mere advantage to the state of keeping it a servile state. Individuals became important, in a sense in which no instruments can be important. A man could not be a means to an end, at any rate to any other man's end."

More than two millenia after the first Christmas, we tend to take for granted the mystery and the miracle of this holy day, a gift wrapped in swaddling clothes and laying in a manger. The almighty Creator has deigned to become the most helpless of creatures. The Infinite is an infant, true God and true man. "What child is this?...This, this is Christ the King!" The wonder and merriment of Christmas is a new dawn dispelling the darkness. The babe of Bethlehem, the son of Mary, is also the Son of God, radiating not only light, but warmth.

"For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life." (Jn3:16) Christ the King is also our most dear and affectionate Friend. He is passionately interested in each one of us, without exception; he values us, listens to us, and takes us seriously -- and he never gives up on us, never withdraws his magnificent mercy. This is what St. Francis of Assisi knew to his delight; this is what he imitated; and this is what inspired him, in 1223, to establish the first creche in celebration of Christmas.

Today in America there are those who want to bar the creche, the Nativity of Jesus, from the Public Square, to banish the babe of Bethlehem to the outer fringes of our towns, to obscurity, in effect to outlaw the public celebration Christmas. These are the Secularists, who have no use for God, and they are well on their way to pulling off a most cunning subterfuge, undermining the Constitution to make it meaningless, and ultimately remaking America into an ugly caricature of itself. By media deception, by academic indoctrination, by judicial decree, the Secularists are subverting our democracy and degrading our way of life by discarding the Christian principles that form the historic basis of America, that are essential and intrinsic to our very identity.

In a nation of Christian people, founded on Christian principles, only the Christians are left out. It is indeed a twisted trick. All voices are heard, all views tolerated, all religions respected, all cultures celebrated -- except for those of Christianity. By default, the de facto religion of our country is becoming more and more the self-righteous religion of Secularism, with its strict orthodoxy and strident intolerance. Already advanced in harassing Christians -- interrupting us from the national discourse, blocking us from the government, keeping us from the culture -- the Secularists are preparing to persecute us, making it a hate crime to oppose the beliefs and virtues of Secularism. In their rage against Christ the King and his followers, the Secularists would not only exclude the babe of Bethlehem, they would force him into exile.

Without Christ, however, the rational becomes irrational, the natural becomes unnatural, the human becomes inhuman. Compassion becomes killing, freedom becomes debauchery, and opportunity becomes greed. Without Christ, respect for the individual degenerates into selfishness, and the community disintegrates into callous indifference. Without Christ, marriage is not marriage, a family is not a family, and America is not America.

As Mark Shea writes, in a column tellingly entitled, "Worlds in Collision," (Crisis magazine; July/August 2002; www.CrisisMagazine.com): "The problem is this: On a purely empirical basis, there is nothing less obvious than the cherished American dogma, 'We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.' For in plain fact, nothing could be less self-evident. Some people are strong, others weak. Some are bright, others stupid. Some good-looking, some ugly. Some healthy, some sickly. Indeed, nothing about the inherent equality of all human beings was obvious to a thinker like Aristotle, precisely because Aristotle was simply going by 'hard, cold facts and observable evidence.' On the basis of these, he concluded that some people were 'natural slaves.'"

Or as Chesterton puts it, in What I Saw in America, 1922, "The Declaration of Independence dogmatically bases all rights on the fact that all men are created equal; and it is right; for if they were not created equal, they were certainly evolved unequal. There is no basis for democracy except in a dogma about the divine origin of man." (see the American Chesterton Society at www.chesterton.org)

Aristotle justified slavery by his belief that all men are not created equal, that some men are inferior to other men; and in this belief he was following the lead of Plato, whose proposed exceptionally brutal rules for the treatment of slaves, according to Rodney Stark in his 2003 book, For the Glory of God. "Plato did not believe that becoming a slave was simply a matter of bad luck;" writes Stark, "rather, in his view, nature creates a 'slavish people' lacking the mental capacity for virtue or culture, and fit only to serve. Because slaves have no souls, 'they have no human rights,' and masters can treat them as they will." As for Aristotle, he wrote, in Politics, what is the antithesis to Christmas: "From the hour of their birth, some are marked out for subjection, others for rule."

At least the men who lived before the coming of Christ the King, before Christmas, may well have been doing the best that they could to follow truth and goodness and beauty, like the Wise Men who followed the star to Bethlehem. Chesterton writes of these three philosophers, men of science and reason who rejoiced when they found Jesus, and fell down and worshipped him, "They would stand for the same human ideal if their names had really been Confucius or Pythagoras or Plato."

What of the men of the so-called Enlightenment, in the 1600s and 1700s, most of whom favored the revival of slavery? They were the ideological heirs to the secular humanists of the Renaissance (as opposed to the Catholic humanists, such as St. Thomas More); in turn they are the ideological ancestors to the Secularists of today. With unrestrained confidence in the power of human reason, the "Enlightenment" revolted against Christ the King and ultimately usurped his throne in the French Revolution of 1789, a violent overthrow that was only partially reversed, with massive repercussions down to our own day. The virulent strain of secularism so pervasive in the "Enlightenment," with frequent outbreaks of anti-Christianity, has been transmitted with tenacity to the Secularists of our day.

"It would please many contemporary scholars if the moral arguments for abolition had been a product of the 'Enlightenment,'" writes Stark. The truth is, however, "a virtual Who's Who of 'Enlightenment' figures fully accepted slavery. Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) and John Locke (1632-1704) 'openly sanctioned human bondage' -- Locke invested in the Atlantic slave trade. Voltaire (1694-1778) wrote a nasty comment concerning Christians profiting from slavery, but he supported the slave trade and believed in the inferiority of Africans."

Another supporter of slavery was Edmund Burke, "who dismissed abolitionists as religious fanatics." Though some of the figures of the Enlightenment did oppose slavery, "most accepted slavery as a normal part of the human condition," writes Stark. "It was not philosophers or secular intellectuals who assembled the moral indictment of slavery, but the very people they held in such contempt: men and women having intense Christian faith, who opposed slavery because it was a sin."

Slavery is, according to the French historian, Regine Pernoud, "perhaps the most profound temptation of humanity." In about the year 400, in the waning days of the Roman Empire, a devout Catholic woman named Melania the Younger, who had inherited vast estates in the province of north Africa, and her husband, Pinian, both of them saints (Feast day: December 31), gave this spacious land to their slaves, numbering more than one thousand, along with their freedom. "In the movement for the liberation of slaves," writes Pernoud, "Melania's influence was concrete and certain."

So it was that, by faith in Christ the King, the immense mountain of slavery was gradually thrown into the sea changes of history by the collective actions of Catholics over several centuries -- this voluntary movement aided by Church councils that, according to Pernoud, "never ceased to enact measures to make the fate of slaves more human and gradually to have them recognized as human beings." And so it is a historical fact, though one that is almost always overlooked by the experts, that this momentous achievement of ending slavery was accomplished during the days of Christendom, which are dismissively termed the "Middle Ages" by some detractors of the Catholic Church, and derisively termed the "Dark Ages" by others even more antagonistic.

"Therefore," writes Pernoud, "we have to conclude that during this reputedly brutal period perhaps the greatest change in social history occurred: the slave, who had been a thing, became a person...." (see her books: Those Terrible Middle Ages!: Debunking the Myths (1977) and Women in the Days of the Cathedrals (1989) -- both republished by Ignatius Press: www.ignatius.com)

It is also a historical fact that slavery returned as Christendom began to deteriorate due to defections from Christ the King, with the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. The ages of faith condemned slavery; the ages of reason condoned it. Even when Catholics were complicit in the return of slavery, it was over the clear objections of the popes; influenced by their secular neighbors, the children of the Church had come to think that they were too sophisticated to listen to the Holy Father.

Pernoud writes that this amazing emancipation of the slave in the days of Christendom has been little noted by historians, and that the reversion to slavery during the Renaissance should have caught their attention, prompting them to inquire as to why the slave had disappeared in the first place. The institution of slavery, she writes, "could not long survive the spread of the gospel." Conversely, the abolition of slavery, it seems, could not long survive the neglect of the gospel.

The Declaration of Independence is half right: It is true that all men are created equal, but this truth is not self-evident. The equality of man, that is of all men and women, is a revelation of Christ the King. It is a gift of Christmas. Christ the King says that his kingdom is not of this world, and that he has come to bear witness to the truth. He grants to us a generous measure of autonomy in governing ourselves, but he will not cede to us authority regarding the truths of human rights. He knows that if our rights are not guaranteed by God, it is only a matter of time before they are taken away by man, whether by the whim of a cruel dictator or the mood of a democratic majority.