The Era of First Principles

About a year ago, I wrote an article entitled Pope Benedict’s Back-to-Basics Strategy. In it, I explored the pope’s well-placed desire to summon Catholics back to the fundamentals of the faith; namely, the Real Presence, the irreplaceable role of the liturgy and the Sacraments in the life of the Church and finally, the importance of prayer in the day-to-day life of every Christian. The best way to move forward is to start with a crystal-clear knowledge of what we believe as Catholics. I also traced the disturbing currents of the past thirty years that have witnessed the emergence of various “Cafeteria Catholic” movements. The leaders of such campaigns cast themselves as righteous revolutionaries, standing up to the antiquated, oppressive and patriarchal customs of a bygone era. Subsequently, the Church became fettered by the confining and myopic prism of a power struggle between the soi-disant hidebound Bishops and the enlightened, progressive faithful.

Scholars and academics have spilled buckets of ink analyzing the root causes of this movement. The ideology of revolution, so popular in the sixties, always took as its starting point the need for liberation from an oppressive extant order. Authentic change, real progress, was impossible so long as the yoke of this or that institution remained. The Church, like many other visible organizational bodies in the world, fell prey to this cause.


But it’s not just the pope who is calling for a renewal of first principles. Recently, much media attention has focused on the candidacy of Fred Thompson. The former senator from Tennessee has surged in the polls to a statistical dead-heat with front-runner Rudy Giuliani. Thompson is hoping to fill a void in the Republican field for an authentic conservative, someone who understands and has a profound reverence for age-old American traditions and customs. Early speeches have touched on the need to return to what he bills as the nation’s “first principles.” There are two overriding tenets of Thompson’s “first principles” approach to governing: First, authentic rights are derived from God and not the federal government. The second touches on the importance of federalism, which holds that the powers of government are to be divided, not only between the Executive, Legislative and Judicial branches, but also between the federal and state governments. The remarkable success of Thompson’s inchoate campaign signals to a strong desire on the part of many Americans to return to the basics of our constitutional arrangement. There is widespread recognition that our political leaders in Washington have wandered far off the path of right governance. The arrogance of the federal government and the virtual omnipotence of the court system are only the most glaring of many deficiencies in our present state of affairs. Fred Thompson has set out to realign the mast of our nation’s political priorities, placing them in agreement with the ingenious wisdom of our original constitutional order.

I believe we are entering into what I call an Era of First Principles. For the past several years, Pope Benedict has hammered home a message of Catholic essentials. He has a well-known fondness for the writings of Saint Augustine and the early Church Fathers. He believes that, by returning to their simple, unvarnished message we can discover much about being Catholic in the modern world. The hackneyed rhetoric of revolution has run its course and the ideology of bogus Church “reform” is, Deo Gratias, in its final and long-overdue death throes. But how have Catholics responded to Benedict’s proposal? Well, for starters, his weekly audiences regularly garner larger crowds than those of Pope John Paul II, which certainly says something. Following a similar vein, in the political arena Fred Thompson has grounded his entire campaign on a harkening back to America’s time-tested first principles. Elite, deeply entrenched Washington politicos have jumped the track of constitutional propriety for too long. It’s an exciting time to be Catholic and to be an American. It may very well be that the emerging Era of First Principles will turn out to be another Era of Good Feeling.

Here's the link to the article I wrote on Pope Benedict XVI:
http://www.catholicherald.com/articles/06articles/berry0713.htm