Our cultural, religious crisis is the failure to see the FORM. A profound spiritual/moral blindness!
Form is the interior, active, unifying principle of a reality. It is a spiritual interiority that makes the thing what it is: the "tree-ness" of the tree; the "cat-ness" of the cat; the soul of the human being.
Embryo from its conception is a living, growing human person. What else could it be? As it grows and absorbs nutrients it's path of growth is guided by its form or soul. It is destined to be a full person. The pro-abortion movement is a failure or refusal to see the form; it sees waste material that can be destroyed and discarded.
Masculinity/Femininity are the binary forms intended by God in our creation by which we bond with each other in marriage and open ourselves to new persons. This binary gender idea is announced to us in the very beginning of the Bible as God's plan. In the LGBTQ and "trans" movements these primary, created forms are denied and replaced by an alphabet soup of subjective, cultural, constructed or fabricated "forms" that are not real but ideological myths.
Eucharist, for the Catholic, is actually the body and blood of Christ. Just like your nose is your body, so this is the body of Christ. Most Protestants do not believe this; they see here a symbol, a reminder, a memorial of Christ, like the picture a man has on his desk of his family. Some believe in "the real presence" but not in transubstantiation. It is not actually Christ's body, but it is temporarily a temple in which Christ abides to come to us. That is not Catholic belief.
This past week Fr. Thomas Reese S.J. wrote that he believes in the Real Presence but not in transubstantiation because he does not believe in "substantial forms." He does not see in the Eucharist the actual body of Christ. But this is defined Catholic belief by the Council of Trent. For the Catholic, after the consecration of the mass, we are not dealing with bread and wine, but with the actual body and blood of Christ. The materials become "trans-formed" so that the appearance remains but the form or substance or essence is different. That is why we are so reverent: we are silent; we genuflect; we protect and revere; we adore; we visit Church; we cross ourselves when passing a Church. Fr. Reese and many progressive Catholics do not see the FORM: they do not see the reality here.
Marriage, as a sacrament, is a form, it is a indissoluble bond between a man and a woman. If it is a valid form it cannot be broken, not by any human agent, not even the pope. If a couple divorce and remarry civilly, they remain bonded to each other until the death of one of them. This is invisible, it is spiritual, it is real. This is sheer nonsense to most people in our society as they cannot see the form.
Lethal Force is not only allowed but required to be used by the state to protect innocent life and the common good and deter real violence. It is used in warfare, police work and capital punishment. It should not be used unless necessary. It is a prudential decision. There is a widespread, but not complete, consensus in the Church and the West that our society no longer requires use of the death penalty. However as a form capital punishment is not intrinsically evil; its moral status depends upon practical circumstances, intentions and consequences. Pope Francis wrote in the Catholic Catechism that it is "never allowable." This is a mistake in "form": it is not only allowable but obligatory if circumstances require it for the protection of innocent life.
Intrinsically Evil acts are those which are evil in their very form, cannot ever be done, whatever the good intentions or circumstances. These include: intentional killing of the innocent, torture, blasphemy, sacrilege, adultery, fornication, prostitution, etc. There are other obviously "wrong" acts which are not evil in form and may be required in some circumstances with proper intentions: stealing (from the rich to feed the starving), lying (to protect Jews hiding from Nazis).
Our Catholic tradition believes (with St. Thomas Aquinas) that the forms of reality were intended and created by God and that we are endowed with intelligence to see these forms. This is realism. Our progressive, elite, woke culture does not believe in Creation, or forms, or the dignity of human intelligence in knowing the Real. What does it believe in?
A materialism in which reality is just microscopic atoms which combine in random fashion without interior form, beauty, goodness of purpose. A scientism that believes only what can be measured numerically and disparages moral, religious, and aesthetic knowing as just emotions. A subjectivity in which the individual can determine his own truth. A Darwinism that all life comes from the random mechanism of natural selection without any guiding intelligence or purpose. A Marxism in which the powerful (white, rich, males, heterosexuals, privileged) are always oppressing the others. A sexual jungle which pulls that iconic mystery from the safety, holiness, wholesomeness, intimacy and fruitfulness of marriage and family. Theirs is a drab, sterile, hopeless, futile world, without forms, full of incoherent, senseless feelings.
By contrast, what do we Catholics believe? In an extravagantly generous, loving, expansive, three-person-communal, eventful God who shares with us His splendor, goodness and truth in a Creation radiant with forms in all their preciousness and wonder, here on earth now and forever in heaven!
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