Another brief citation from Fr. Rutler's book The Seven Wonders of the World (Ignatius, 1993), this about moral education......or lack thereof.
When moral acts are only subjective functions and moral truths are only objective perceptions, moral laws at best will be attempts to coordinate multiple opinions. [Ed.: see the upcoming State-level battles over abortion.] When that happens, opinion polls and legislatures and State courts replace the Church as moral teacher. Our generation has seen the collapse of the criminal misinformation of Marxism, but, in the practical atheism of any materialist culture, Etienne Gilson's caution is profound: "If we do not want to awaken some morning on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain, then we ought all to be interested in not letting the liberal State believe that it can indefinitely persist in educating children in view of nothing." The Berlin Wall has fallen, but the fictitious Wall of Separation between Church and State still is conjured as an excuse for education in moral slavery."
Moral slavery follows from practical atheism, sweetened by the taste of false prosperity--the spoonful of sugar to make the poison go down.
O tempora, O mores!
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