CATHOLIC CATECHISM

by HFH Reuvers



EVERYBODY HAS SOME GOD

Some parents want to educate their children in a 'neutral' way, without indoctrination. This is not possible. Children will always assimilate whatever you show them. When you say God doesn't exist, but science is 'everything', this very science will become the God of their childhood.
Of course, there are many more 'idols' than 'science'. To mention just a few: honor, riches, sport, health. A man may be so obsessed by money that he will commit suicide because of a Wall Street crash. A man may be so obsessively trying to perform in sport that he wants to crush his adversaries and risk his own health. For example, you can earn so much money in cycling that some cycle racers don't mind to have their life last a few years shorter to be able to win right now. Other people overdo when striving after a good health, if they forget all other values.
An old idol that still demands many human sacrifices, is 'the fatherland'. Ask the Serbian, Basque or Irish nationalists what I mean. You may find this kind of people in Flanders, too.

In Doctor Zhivago we meet a communist who doesn't mind a few deaths to reach his goal: Strelnikov. He wasn't the only one: Mao and Stalin didn't mind a few corpses, either. The revolutionaries in South-America keep the tradition of Che Guevara and Fidel Castro alife. Yet, the 'dictatorship of the proletariat' is only an idea, an exaggeration, so an idol. You can only effectuate it at the cost of individual freedom and private initiative. However, when we fight communism we may also overdo: like the American senator Joe McCarthy did in the sixties, when hunting all alleged communists.

If a homophile puts away from himself the denial of his nature during his childhood, he may begin to adhere to the idolatry of 'gay lifestyle', with all corresponding ceremonies like 'gay pride parades'. On the other hand, certain forms of Catholic fundamentalism may denounce all utterances of homosexuality, or even call worthless each marriage that wasn't celebrated in church as a Roman Catholic sacrament.
Fundamentalism can be an idolatry, too, both with Moslems and with Christians or Jews.
But people who aren't sufficiently aware of God, don't always fall in a clear form of idolatry. Belief in God may stay latently alife.


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