The Catholic Weekly 12 July 2020

19 12, July, 2020 catholicweekly.com.au Jesus is asking of him at any given moment, will determine whether his papacy advanc- es the cause of the Gospel or frustrates the Church’s evan- gelical mission. “That is why the next pope needs, and deserves, the prayerful support of the entire Catholic world.” I have no idea when the next papal conclave will take place. Nor do I have a settled view of who the next pope should be, and still less on who he will be. My book is not about handicapping possible candidates for the papacy or profiling them. Rather, it’s an agenda for the Catholic future. Recent papal history suggests that certain qualities are needed in the Bishop of Rome at this turbulent period in history. Reflecting on those qualities helps everyone understand this Catholic moment and its demands more clearly. Over the past 30-some years, I have had the privi- lege of extensive conversa- tions with the popes of the last four decades. And during that time, I’ve also been priv- ileged to be in close contact with Catholics in many cir- cumstances throughout the world. Those privileges cre- Insidious PC denies reality Humility and radical disciples I n The Shoes of the Fisher- man , crusty old Cardinal Leone, canvassing votes for a surprise candidate just before the election of a new pope, is deeply moved by a quiet admonition from a Syrian cardinal named Ra- hamani: “Always you search for a man for the one neces- sary gift – the gift of cooper- ation with God. Even among good men this gift is rare. Most of us, you see, spend our lives trying to bend ourselves to the will of God, and even then we have often to be bent by a violent grace. The others, the rare ones, commit them- selves, as if by an instinctive act, to be tools in the hands of the Maker.” For some reason, I thought of Cardinal Rahamani while I was writing The Next Pope: The Office of Peter and a Church in Mission , which has just been published by Igna- tius Press. So perhaps the fic- tional cardinal’s words had some indirect influence on the ending of this small book’s reflection on Peter’s Chair and its role in the 21st-centu- ry Church: “The next pope must be, above all, a radically convert- ed disciple: a man formed in the depth of his being by the conviction that Jesus Christ is the incarnate Son of God, who reveals to the world the face of the merciful Father and the truth about humanity, its dignity, and its destiny. The intensity of the next pope’s relationship with the Lord Je- sus, and the wisdom of his discernment of what the Lord ated a debt, and it struck me earlier this year that one way to satisfy that debt would be to reflect on what Petrine, papal leadership might look like in the middle decades of this century by drawing on my experiences with Pope John Paul II, Pope Bene- dict XVI, Pope Francis, and a myriad of fellow-Catholics. The Next Pope begins with the premise that we are liv- ing in apostolic times – times that require every Catholic to be an evangelist – rather than Christendom times: times in which the ambient public cul- ture transmits the faith. The three popes I have known personally have all recognised this, each in his own fashion. That recognition must set the context for the next pope’s re- sponse to the Lord’s instruc- tion to Peter at the Last Sup- per: that Peter’s unique role among the apostles would be to “strengthen your brethren” (Luke 22:32). Petrine leadership in the Church of the New Evangeli- sation thus means empower- ing the people of the Church, in every state of life in the Church, to be the missionary disciples they were called to be at their baptism. How does a pope do that? He does it by means of an intense, ongoing dialogue with the Lord. He does it by putting Christ and the Gos- pel at the centre of his own preaching and teaching. He does it by safeguarding and explaining the truths of Cath- olic faith, so that the Church’s bishops, priests, religious, and laity are challenged to live the adventure of Cathol- icism in full. He does it by manifesting in his own life the joy of the Gospel and a willingness to suffer for the Gospel. He does it by under- taking essential reforms in the Church (and especial- ly in the Vatican), so that the Church is seen to live what it proclaims. All of that is explored in greater detail in The Next Pope , which I hope will pro- voke a useful conversation about the Catholic future. George Weigel is the Distin- guished Senior Fellow and William E. Simon Chair in Catholic Studies at the Ethics and Public Policy Centre in Washington O ne of the most suc- cessful strategies used by the cultur- al-left to radically reshape society in its utopian image is redefining language to suit its agenda. As noted by George Orwell “if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought”; allowing words to be altered to enforce politically correct group think. The word ‘gay’ is an obvi- ous example as activists have long since changed the mean- ing from being happy and carefree to describing homo- sexual men. Such has been the gay lob- by’s success that when school children sing the song Kooka- burra sits on the old gumtree the line “Gay your life must be” is altered to “Fun your life must be”. ‘Rainbow’ provides anoth- er example where the word and the symbol have long been co-opted by the cultur- al-left to refer to a broad range of environmental, neo-Marx- ist and LGBTIQ+ activists grouped under the heading ‘Rainbow Alliance’. The way the word ‘gender’ has been redefined represents one of the more egregious ex- amples of language control. According to The Short- er Oxford English Dictionary the word is a grammatical term used to denote whether “nouns are masculine, fem- inine or neuter according to whether the objects they de- note are male, female or of neither sex”. Based on the research car- ried out by the psychologist John Money while at John Hopkins University during the 1950s the word was radically redefined to refer to an indi- vidual’s sexual identity. Instead of biology and God’s law determining whether a person was female or male, Money introduced the description of gender on the basis sexuality was a fluid and dynamic social construct. Money’s obituary in The New York Times describes this ground-breaking research as follows “He was the first sci- entist to provide a language to describe the psychological dimensions of human sexu- al identity: no such language had existed before”. Such has been the success of transgender activists in their campaign to normalise gender dysphoria that instead of chromosomes determin- ing a person’s sexuality the prevailing orthodoxy is that there is nothing fixed or ab- solute. The Safe Schools Coa- lition booklet All of Us , found on the Commonwealth Gov- ernment’s Student Wellbe- ing Hub, defines “sexual di- versity as a continuum” and tells students gender identity “does not necessarily relate to the sex a person is assigned at birth”. The booklet Safe Schools do Better , erroneously arguing 15.7 per cent of students are same sex attracted, intersex or gender diverse or trans when the figure is closer to approx- imately 5 per cent, suggests a “personmay identify as nei- ther male nor female, or as both”. As highlighted in George Orwell’s novel 1984 language determines howwe think and act and controlling language is a key strategy employed by totalitarian regimes to ma- nipulate people and enforce groupthink. In Orwell’s dystopian nov- el what is described as ‘New- speak’ leads to a situation where “thoughtcrime” is im- possible as “there will be no words in which to express it”. The slogan “War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength” best illustrates how Big Brother subjugates citizens by radically altering themean- ing of words and, as a result, controlling their ability to think rationally and independently. Such is the insidious evil of distorting language and im- posing group think that Or- well writes “The implied ob- jective of this line of thought is a nightmare world in which the Leader, or some ruling clique, controls not only the future but the past … If he says that two and two are five —well, two and two are five. This prospect frightens me much more than bombs”. Universities and govern- ment bureaucracies instead of defending rationality and rea- son have long since become champions of cultural-left language control and group think. University Diversity Tool- kits tell staff to use gender neutral pronouns, to describe the early convict settlement as an invasion and that it is wrong to describe pre-Euro- pean Aboriginal culture as primitive. The Victorian Department of Health and Human Ser- vices organises days where staff are told gender specific nouns like man and wom- an or pronouns like she and he are heteronormative, ho- mophobic and transphobic. While the cultural-left’s use of politically correct language is widespread and now dom- inates public and private dis- course there is nothing new in using language to persuade and convince. What is described as rhet- oric has been evident since the time of the ancient Greek philosophers and sophists and includes devices such as using emotive language and euphemisms and shifting the meaning of words to suit one’s purpose and shut down debate. Where the cultural-left’s use of language is dangerous and insidious is that it is cal- culated to dominate and con- trol and to overthrow what is seen as an unjust, inequitable society riven with white su- premacism, structural racism, sexism and transphobia. And anyone who disagrees is condemned and vilified as Eurocentric, misogynist, het- eronormative, xenophobic and worst of all Christian. So much for reasoned debate. Dr Kevin Donnelly is a Senior Research Fellow at the Australian Catholic University and author of ‘A Politically Correct Dictio- nary and Guide’ (available at kevindonnelly.com.au) Blueprint for radical discipleship. IMAGE: IGNATIUS.COM Kevin Donnelly Columnist George Weigel Columnist The next pope must be, above all, a radical- ly converted disciple: a man formed in the depth of his being by the con- viction that Jesus Christ is the incarnate Son of God, who reveals to the world the face of the merciful Father and the truth about hu- manity, its dignity, and its destiny.” Political correctness: controlling language is controlling people, as Geroge Orwell so remarkably understood. COMMENT