The institutions are slowly being marched back through
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The institutions of western civilization and culture are established as an automatic outcropping of natural virtue.
Underlying natural virtue is the reality that it is the path to supernatural virtue – without which no person can be saved. The supernatural virtues of faith, hope and charity are impossible to be lived without first embracing natural virtues.
In between natural and supernatural virtues are the four cardinal virtues – Prudence, Justice, Fortitude and Temperance – and on these four pivot all the natural virtues. (The word ‘cardinal’ means hinge.)
The cardinal virtues find their expression in the embrace and living out of natural virtues – kindness, patience, compassion, benevolence and so forth.
So what does all this have to do with the cultural institutions? In short – everything.
The institutions of western civilizations came into existence as a tangible expression of Catholic teaching and belief in Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior. The institutions are the living, breathing expression of the gospel in civic life. They are a blueprint for the fulfillment of the second greatest commandment – Love Thy Neighbor.
They are grounded in the millennia-old realization that man is created in the Image and Likeness of God, which endows him with a dignity that demands a respect which may not be trampled on.
It is the job of the institutions to both teach about this dignity and enforce it tangibly. Permeating all of this is Catholic theology – that man is destined for eternal life as so ordained by God, and whatever obstacles that impede that destiny must be removed (or at least mitigated to the highest degree possible.)
So for 1,500 years – emerging from the ashes of the Roman Empire – the Church, through good times and bad, good leaders and bad, fashioned a civilization built on a Christian anthropology of man.
The institutions were formed to teach and uphold and promote this truth.
When Communism emerged as a legitimate enemy to this world worldview in the late 19th and early 20th centuries – it became clear that the goal of world domination could not be accomplished unless these institutions – dedicated to their Christian foundations – were dismantled or overrun.
For all his wicked-mindedness, Antonio Gramsci, who founded the Italian Communist Party in 1921, understood intuitively that Communism’s goal of world domination could not be achieved unless these institutions were vanquished philosophically.
In other countries, violent overthrow of the political system and cultural institutions was carried out. The United States, however, posed a unique challenge owing to the relative social stability which could not be exploited.
So a different tactic had to be employed – a long march through the institutions – a term coined by a German student protestor in the 1960s, but whose underlying principle had been captured and expressed by Gramsci some forty years earlier.
So the effort on US shores began in earnest in the early half of the 20th century, and accelerated in the second half.
By the time the 21st century dawned, the work of Communism was nearly complete – a work of lies, deception and corruption aimed at erasing Christian anthropology from the social and political landscape.
Laws were passed, classes taught, media propagandized, entertainment perverted, and religion largely silenced (too often willingly so – looking at you, US Catholic hierarchy.) Virtue of all sorts – natural, cardinal and supernatural – were ignored, even legislated against, and roundly mocked in classrooms and movies.
But what the Communists fight against, and try to destroy, is ultimate truth, and only goes more or less dormant – it cannot be killed in the large.
Yes, in any given individual, the virtues can cease to exist, but the virtues in and of themselves have an enduring quality because they derive from the eternal God.
What we are witnessing in the burgeoning recapturing of the culture is the resurrection of the natural virtues. As a result – a long march back through the institutions is now occurring.
The first one to begin being recaptured is the media. The natural virtue of fairness is re-asserting itself. Fairness is based on truth and justice, one of the four cardinal virtues.
That fairness dictates and justice reinforces; that since man is created in the image and likeness of God (who IS Truth), that man has a right to the truth; that those who run the cultural institution of the media owe people the truth – not propaganda.
There is a price to be paid for jettisoning Christian anthropology because our source, as well as our destiny, is imprinted in our souls by God, for God.
So – after years of lies and deception, the old media is beginning to fade away. Comcast has put MSNBC up for sale. CNN is about to take a wood chipper to its staff. The Communist owner of the LA Times, as well as that of The Washington Post, have acknowledged the reality that they are no longer relevant and must face reality if they are to remain a viable business operation.
They denied not only temporal reality – largely through millions of lies – but most important, spiritual reality. They did score some serious wins along the way to their own demise, true. But their demise was written in the stars from the moment they made war against The One who put those stars in place.
The work of recapturing the institution of the media has only begun, and is nowhere near accomplished – but it must begin, and so it has.
Trump has now turned his guns directly to the next major cultural institution to recapture – the educational establishment – which has polluted the minds of millions and millions of American young people – many of whom are no longer young, but middle-aged as well as voters. But again, the work must begin somewhere, and so it has.
It took the Communists close to 100 years to get to this point; recapturing the institutions of the culture will not happen in short order – and it will take more determination to reassert Christian anthropology than the Communists had to almost dismantle it. So let the war of recapturing commence.
Gary Michael Voris holds a graduate degree, Cum Laude, from the Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas in Rome. Voris earned multiple awards for 40+ years of news media experience for writing, producing, and investigative work from the Associated Press, Detroit Press Club, Michigan Broadcasters Association, as well as four news Emmys in multiple categories. He graduated from the University of Notre Dame in 1983 with an undergraduate major in Communications and a minor in History.
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