By Selwyn Duke

With the election of Pope Francis, there has been an almost
"catholic" attempt to determine if he is liberal or conservative. CBS
claims
he is a "staunch conservative" based on the fact that, as
correspondent Allen Pizzey put it, he "opposes abortion, supports
celibacy, and called gay adoption discrimination against children," not to
mention his opposition to faux marriage. Tingle Central's Chris Matthews said
that the new pontiff is economically "progressive," which, if we were
to be informed by actual
statistics, should mean he wouldn't give one red cent to anybody. But none
of these analysts will peg the pope because they're using the provisional to
understand a man defined by an institution based in the perpetual. And the
reality is this: the terms "liberal," "conservative," and
"moderate" are, in the truest sense, meaningless in Catholic circles.
And understanding why holds a lesson for all of us.

Republican Ohio senator Rob Portman recently announced that
he now supports faux marriage, and other self-proclaimed conservatives, such as
CNN News' Margaret Hoover, have long done so. On the other hand, conservative
Cliff Kincaid was recently scored by Michelle Malkin's site Twitchy for writing,
"There is no such thing as a 'gay conservative,' unless the term
'conservative' has lost all meaning," prompting Renew America's Bryan
Fischer to accuse
the Malkinites of "trying to redefine conservatism." But Kincaid gets
it close to right and Fischer is wrong.

Conservatism never had enduring meaning because it was never
truly defined in the first place.

Understand that all places and times — that is, all
modern times — have had their conservatives. Europe has its conservatives,
but their general attitude toward faux marriage ranges from support to blithe
indifference, and they don't trouble much over abortion. And conservatives in
the 1950s Soviet Union were communists when ours were staunchly anti-communist.
The lesson here? The only consistent definition of "conservative" is
"a desire to maintain the status quo." Thus, what the average
conservative is changes with the status quo.

This also means that as the status quo degrades, so will the
day's conservatism.

This is why G.K. Chesterton once said, "The business of
Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of the Conservatives is
to prevent the mistakes from being corrected."

Many conservatives bristle when I point this out. But it's
nothing personal; hey, you may be as principled as St. Thomas More. But facts
are facts, and they're illuminated by our American political history. Most all
liberal programs and social innovations — Social Security, Medicare, the
Department of Education, the principle that government may prohibit
unfashionable discrimination in business, and many others — were opposed at
their birth by their day's conservatives. Most are also supported by the
majority of our day's conservatives. What happened? It's called operating based
on ephemeral fashions and not timeless Truth.

Conservatives are the caboose to liberals' locomotive:
liberals propose all the changes; extract incremental compromise; and, getting
a slice here, a few crumbs there, and a morsel elsewhere, eventually have the
whole loaf. The result is that tradition is starved to death and fertilizes the
ground in which sprout the weeds of Wormwood.

And what will happen, barring some pattern-changing
civilizational upheaval, is obvious. As you principled old-guard types die
out, more malleable conservatives become further inured, and tomorrow's
conservatives are born and mature, faux marriage will be taken for granted as
it is in Sweden (US polls have already shifted on the issue), and ObamaCare
will be considered as necessary as the NHS is in Britain.

The problem is that conservatism is like liberalism in that
it reflects relativism. Conservatives are on one side of the political and
cultural spectrum as defenders of the status quo, though it's a role they
perform poorly; liberals are on the other side as the overthrowers of the
status quo.

And they meet in the left-of-center.

That spectrum's middle point then moves further away from
Truth as society's consensus views become increasingly corrupted. In other
words, the spectrum is fluid because it's determined by man's whims, and the
same is true of the definitions of the terms used to describe the positions on
it: liberal, conservative, and moderate.

Of course, many conservatives are not in bed with
relativism, though some have certainly fallen victim to that characteristic
cultural disease of modernity. But the point is that if you're not a relativist
— if you hold that your beliefs are eternally right and not just on the right —
you're closer to Catholicism than to any consistent notions about
"conservatism," whether you realize it or not.

The Catholic position is not conservative or liberal, but
superior, and you don't have to be Catholic to understand that this is not a
claim born of sectarian chauvinism. The Church does not define itself based on
a given society's political and cultural spectrum, but based on Absolute Truth,
which she recognizes to be transcendent, eternal, and unchanging. You may
disagree with her conception of Truth, perhaps even profoundly, yet believing
that Truth exists is the only rational position.

This relates to a conversion experience I had a long, long
time ago. I realized that if there wasn't something deeper than the political,
deeper than the cultural even — if man's opinions were all there is — then
my "conservative" views were essentially meaningless. Sure, I liked
them as I liked chocolate ice cream, but if they were just flavors of the day, how
could I credibly say they were any better than liberal ones? To thus boast
there had to a transcendent yardstick for judging such things. There had to be
Truth.

This is the understanding of Catholicism as well, which, as
Chesterton also
said, "talks as if it were the truth; as if it were a real messenger
refusing to tamper with a real message." Liberalism will tamper, and
conservatism will, in the least, yield to the tampering. This is because while
William F. Buckley said that a conservative's role was to "stand athwart
history, yelling Stop…," at what should we stop? Where is the
destination? We can be a caboose making ourselves heavier and harder to pull,
but at the end of the day we're not striving for a definite destination;
instead, we always behave as if there is no destination, but happiness perhaps
lies in continual movement down that road to we know not where. And without an
unchanging, eternal vision of our terminus, that will be our eternal error.

The Church has just such a vision. You may love it or you
may hate it, but one thing you won't do is change it. And this is why virtually
all the Church's secular critics, and even most of her secular fans, cannot
understand her. They know of a world determined by man and his majority vote, a
place where money and lobbying and protesting bend wills. But the Church bends
to only one immutable will. This is why it's so silly when journalists run
headlines such as the Huffington Post's "Pope Francis Against [sic] Gay
Marriage, Gay Adoption." It may as well be thought newsworthy that he
upholds "Thou shalt do no murder" or that he breathes air and ingests
food. What the secular left finds so shockingly politically incorrect about the
Church involves definitive teaching, which means that it has a basis in Truth,
cannot change, and must be obeyed by peons and popes alike.

Note that this doesn't mean a given prelate can't have what
we call liberal or conservative instincts, and I have my reservations about
Pope Francis, with his being a South American Jesuit. But the point is that
when the media anxiously wait for a "liberal" pope that will deliver
the Church to evil, they don't realize that while such a man could exercise
liberal tendencies, he could only do so outside the context of definitive
teaching on faith and dogma. There is no "amendment process" for the
commandments and their corollaries.

So while many in the media are trying to agitate against the
Church, their relativistic understanding would preclude their covering her
properly even if they wanted to. They're used to a world of provisional
beliefs, such as liberalism and conservatism, which lack defined doctrine or
even an institution that could credibly render such and thus are defined only
by their adherents. This is much as how we learned the ways of ducks not by
consulting a Duck bible or catechism, but by observing their behavior.

But the Church doesn't quack like a duck. She has a magisterium
(teaching office) that has set certain doctrines in stone, and a Catholic's
relationship with respect to them is neither conservative nor liberal. The
relevant terms are orthodox and heterodox or, to use a less fashionable word,
heretical.

This may offend modernistic ears, but it's the only way to
not quack like a duck — and end up quacking differently in every time and
place. The terms conservative and liberal are relatively new; in saner ages,
there was no right and left, only right and wrong. That is the mindset we must
recapture today, and it's why I long ago stopped
calling myself a conservative. Why be devoted to conserving the decades-old
victories of heretics — or as some today call them, liberals? Why be on
the right side of the political spectrum when even that is well to the side of
Truth? And there is only Truth…and everything else.

And everything else is nothing at all.

                        
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