Vive L'Eglise Catholique!

The five conservative Supreme Court justices--Scalia, Thomas, Alito, Roberts, and Kennedy--are all Catholics, so it should be enough to show that Catholicism culturally is an intellectual religion with an emphasis on learning and knowledge, unlike a certain Revolution liberals are celebrating today. These days conservative Catholics are some of the staunchest defenders of our liberty, freedom, and traditions from liberal postmodern assault, which is a main reason for the anti-Catholic bias in mainstream academia and pop culture.

Conservative Catholics these days are also defenders of traditional learning and our classical heritage. Just as Catholic monasteries steadfastly preserved classical texts from the onslaught of barbarians during the early Middle Ages, contemporary conservative Catholics are preserving the traditional focus on learning from the onslaught of the modern day postmodern barbarians, as this news story about eight students from Christendom College receiving honors on the National Greek exam demonstrates:

The faculty of the Classical and Early Christian Studies department take great satisfaction in seeing young scholars mature who are equipped to use intelligently the sacred and secular patrimony of our civilization memorialized in Latin and Greek,” Department Head Dr. Edward Strickland said. “As recently as last year, the Holy Father declared, ‘Quite rightly Our Predecessors have considered knowledge of Latin of great importance for those who deal with ecclesiastical and liberal studies to be able to make fully their own the tremendously rich teaching of these disciplines. Therefore, we urge those scholars zealously to endeavor that as many as possible have access to this treasure and obtain the excellent knowledge that it has to bestow.’”
At Christendom, in addition to Classical and Early Christian Studies (CECS), the Theology and Philosophy departments require their students to have adequate mastery of Latin or Greek. Students who study classical languages have been shown to consistently score highest on the GRE and find it to be especially useful for such professions as law, insurance, medicine, fictional or technical writing, library science, or management: careers that demand high literacy and/or a technical vocabulary.

There has been a pervasive myth since the French Enlightenment era and the liberal Protestant German scientific ascendancy in the late 1800s that the Catholic Church and the Middle Ages were barbaric times, unconcerned with science and erudition. This idea is patently false, as can be proven through historical records and also through common sense observation of today's trends:

Who are some of the staunchest defenders of liberty, learning, and true science? Conservative Catholics, as well as conservative Jews and Evangelicals. Flannery O'Connor jokingly stated (with truth) that Southern evangelicals are much more Catholic intellectually than they would ever care to realize; we can see this these days in the alliance between conservative Catholics and Evangelicals in defending our nations liberties and traditions.

Who are some of the most barbaric defenders of false science (e.g. global warming), barbaric militants against tradition (does the phrase "dead white males" ring a bell?), and barbaric proponents of narrow-minded bigotry (intolerant multiculturalism, i.e. stating that minorities cannot embrace the heritage of the West)? Liberals.

It is important to note that when American Catholics, Protestants, and Jews move away from conservative ideology, they are rejecting their American and Western heritage for the following ideas that have no roots in our great tradition: liberalism, multiculturalism, socialism, communism, and postmodernism. Christians and Jews should, by definition, be conservatives. It is important to preserve and safeguard our traditions. Rejecting liberalism should be a key component.

On this Bastille Day, let us celebrate that we are heirs to our great American heritage, which, because it embraced tradition, did not have a Revolution, and eschew the destructive ideals of the French and Russian Revolutions, which attempted to supplant tradition. Vive les Etats-Unis and l'Eglise Catholique!