The Rock Hard Objectivity of Catholicism

 The world is so full of a number of things, I'm sure we should all be as happy as kings.                     Robert Lewis Stevenson

You are Peter and upon this ROCK I shall build my Church.    Jesus Christ

At its core, and in every dimension and radiation, Catholicism is solid hard, durable, objective.

It flows from the facticity, the hard, historical, empirical reality of the Incarnation, Passion-Death-Resurrection, Ascension-and-Spirit-sending of the Singular Person, Jesus Christ.

It is stable, rooted, perpetual, hard, objective in:

- The apostolic office, the priesthood, the papacy, episcopacy, synods (but not "synodality").

- The canon of Scripture, teachings of the father and doctors, witness of martyrs and saints, ongoing magisterium, the Catechism.

-Stone and brick buildings, many hundreds and thousands of years old, including churches, chapels, cathedrals, monasteries, schools, convents, seminaries, cemeteries, rectories, and hermitages.

- The liturgical/sacramental economy: calendar, rituals, music, prayers, seasons, feasts and fasts, sacramentals, icons, devotions, relics, indulgences, pilgrimages.

- Vowed states of life: marriage, priesthood, religious life.

- Attention to the poor, homeless, marginalized, sick, rejected.

- The hidden anonymity of hermits, anchoresses, cloisters.

- Fidelity, to Tradition,  that is ever fresh, fecund, serendipitous, eventful.

- Unbounded heritage of beauty in art, music, architecture, and culture.

- Communion of the Church Triumphant (heaven), Suffering (purgatory), Militant (on earth.)

- Above all, the core, invincible, absolute objectivity is the indwelling, corporally, of the Trinity in every Eucharist and every single consecrated host in the world.

This objectivity all sits upon the mystery of Creation. All the marvelous, wondrous, enchanted objects that populate reality were first imagined by the Great Subjectivity: our Triune God. Each...every grain of sand, every galaxy, every dinosaur, every fetus...was already imagined, thought, and then created out of Love...extravagant, gratuitous, generous, free, intelligent, intentional, decisive, all-powerful Love.

Contrast Modernity and the progressive theologies that accommodate it:

- Formless, disenchanted, objectless, fluid, malleable, vacuous, futile, random, uprooted.

- Metaphysically nihilistic; epistemologically skeptical, relativistic, subjectivist, solipsistic. 

- Obsessed with sexual indulgence, oppressor/oppressed, technological manipulation, the "progressive arc of history."

- Reduction of science to measurement and motion (faux objectivity). Reduction of religion to feelings. (faux subjectivity).

- The entrapment of the sovereign, narcissistic, isolated Self in its own loneliness. 

As modernity and progressive religions continue on their dismal arc of isolation and despair, so will the durable Splendor of the Church shine more brilliantly, attracting to herself desirous, sensitive spirits.