by Br. Alexis Bugnolo
G. K. Chesterton wrote a series of stories, in which the protagonist, a Catholic priest, named Father Brown, solved various and sundry mysteries that were inexplicable to his contemporaries. In his short stories, Chesterton, who was himself a convert to the Catholic Faith, colored the narrative with social commentary and apologetic insights to explain how the Catholic Faith makes one see reality differently and in a better and more rational manner.
The fundamental principle of Chesterton’s Catholic epistemology, you might call it, was expressed in his short story, called, The Oracle of the Dog, which he published in 1923:
It’s the first effect of not believing in God that you lose your common sense.
I think we are seeing this right now in the Corona Panic, because if you survey all the world or Church leaders who are panicking the most they are those with the least Christian faith.
The cause of this lost of common sense, comes from the intervention of the will to prevent a rational examination which leads to the consideration that there must be a God and He must exist, for else, nothing else makes sense.
Chesterton rebuked the mindset which allowed the will to trump right reason in his Father Brown story, entitled, The Miracle of the Moon Crescent, which he published in 1924.
You hard-shelled materialists were all balanced on the very edge of belief — of belief in almost anything.
Emile Cammaerts, in his study of G. K. Chesterton, published in 1937, entitled, The Laughing Prophet, gave birth to the common maxim of Chesterton, which he never wrote, but which succinctly summarized the import of his observations of faux religiosity in the atheistic materialists of his day, thus:
The first effect of not believing in God is to believe in anything.
You can read the curious story of how her summation of Chesterton came to be held as a genuine quote from his writings, at Chesterton.org, in their article, When a man ceases to worship God.
While, I do not ascribe to the mythology of Modernism which holds that man has a need for God, rising from his sentiments, which seeks or demands that he put his trust in something greater than himself, I do agree with the observation of the Scholastics that God has so ordered this world and so made man, that it is innate in our very nature to be able to recognize that all things come from God and lead back to God. For this reason, the minds and brains of men are so structured spiritually and physically, as to seek subordination to what is greater, higher, truer, more principle and more powerful.
The result, then, is that a man at reason’s counsel admits that there must be a God and that He should be obeyed and adored, because He is the First Cause and the Last End of all things, and because man of himself is nothing in comparison to Him, in anything, since He is the source of all order, beauty, goodness, perfection, and truth.
But the atheist, especially the materialistic atheist, insists with a malicious will, that such considerations must be rejected and avoided. He has spiritually accepted the mindset of a demon who thinks liberty consists in rebellion and who deceives himself into thinking that he is something even when compared to the Creator of all.
This is madness. It is madness even if at the beginning it does not manifest itself as insanity. But in decision making it will manifest itself as such, because it has divorced thought from its liberty to assent to truth, and that is intellectually the same thing as self-lobotomization or mental suicide.
When such godless and proud men become the leaders of nations and churches, only disaster can result. Because not having any religion, they are disposed and eager to make anything else but God the object of that innate inclination of every man to subordinate himself.
The leaders of the world, gripped by Corona Panic, have established a new world religion. It is a religion of fear mongering, and not the preaching of the Good News. It is the devotion of panic in the unknown, instead of the devotion of confidence in God the Creator. It expresses itself in mindless loyalty to the unproven dictates of persons without any medical or scientific credentials to speak, in place of humble religious submission to those whom Christ Jesus entrusted with the munus to teach, govern and sanctify.
Having participated in, or tacitly consented to, the removal of Pope Benedict XVI, Christ’s only true vicar on Earth, they have thus fallen into a terrible and dark religion of fear and panic. That is both a consequence of their negligence and a punishment for it.
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CREDITS: The Featured Image is a screensaver by Quote Fancy, which offers a variety of artistic layouts for this saying of G K Chesterton, which is fr.om his book, The Man who knew too much, published in 1935, p. 65.
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