🎶AND ALWAYS LET YOUR CONSCIENCE BE YOUR GUIDE🎶

In morality we are as sure as in mathematics. Whichcote

In last week's post, we mentioned how Tradistani kingpins misuse the sermon format to dupe their unsophisticated followers into believing malformed sede "clergy" are Catholic. Week in, week out, the laity are awash in a foul stream of syrupy platitudes or graphic pulpit-porn disingenuously represented as explaining the principles of the faith. Since the message comes from men more or less dressed like Latin-rite clergy, cultlings assume it's true.

That truckling assent affords the cult masters a singular immunity when adversaries array sound Catholic arguments against their reign of error: the weekly "sermons" have conditioned cult victims to dismiss anything in conflict with their Svengalis' self-interested rants. To the overly inquisitive, the so-called bishops, without substantiation, reflexively accuse "our enemies" of wicked misinterpretation, and that's that! The thoroughly programmed cultlings then automatically turn a deaf ear to the voice of authentic Catholic teaching.

Consequently, if you want to get through to cultists who can be salvaged — and, yes, Mr. and Mrs. Trad America, such specimens do exist (which explains Dannie's current crisis) — you must appeal to a religiously neutral ethical system: It's your only hope of bringing the dazed creatures to their senses. As we indicated last week, the Readers believe they've found such a model. In every way, it's compatible with Christian normative values, while its intuitiveness lets Everyman come immediately to an actionable conclusion about these ecclesiastical buccaneers.

The ethical principles we have in mind, at once both simple and profound, are from the pen of a great 20th-century scholar of Aristotle, the academic philosopher W. D. Ross.* He believed a moral theory should "fit the facts," which are the "convictions of thoughtful and well-educated people." Although he wrote from a secular perspective, he wasn't by any means a relativist. According to him,

The moral order...is just as much part of the fundamental nature of the universe (and...of any possible universe in which there are moral agents at all) as is the spatial or numerical structure expressed in the axioms of geometry or arithmetic.

At the center of Ross's thinking rests what he identified as seven distinct prima facie duties, i.e., entirely real and self-evident fundamental rules governing interpersonal relationships.  (N.B. He never asserted the list was complete or hierarchical. ) Here they are in their usual order along with brief definitions, although definitions are unnecessary — decent people already know what they mean, for these convictions have been their own since childhood:

1. Fidelity: We must keep our promises and honor our contracts, be honest and truthful, and not engage in deception.
2. Reparation: We must make up for injuries we have done to others.
3. Gratitude: We must be grateful to others for their benefactions, and we should strive to return favors for the previous favors others have done for us.
4. Non-injury (Non-malfeasance): We must not intentionally, negligently, or ignorantly harm others either physically or psychologically.
5. Beneficence: We must do good to others and nurture their health, happiness, security, wisdom, moral goodness, and well-being.
6. Self-Improvement: We must improve our own condition with respect to virtue and intelligence.
7. Justice: We must distribute both benefits and burdens fairly and, at the same time, prevent unjust distributions to the unworthy.

We think you'll agree the theory is simplicity itself: it's the common-sense, everyday morality a plain man or woman understands with ease. None of the numerous trespasses posted here or on other blogs could've occurred had traddie laymen lived by Ross's code. Indeed, his duties are so clear that cult "clergy" could never have claimed they alone possess the competence to decide their meaning or determine their application.

Under Ross's ethical model, it's obvious, therefore, that there'd be no room for the moral scourge of mental reservation, the "clergy's" disreputable license to lie. The "priest" who lost a lawsuit to a young woman he impregnated wouldn't have filed for bankruptcy to escape paying court-ordered damages.  (And if he did, a morally centered laity would never allow him to work in a traditional chapel again.) If a sede miscreant had let a layman buy him a winter coat on the promise of reimbursement, the "cleric," when reminded weeks later of his debt, could not have told the gentleman to pay himself back from the collection basket. When a chapel member bequeathed funds for the erection of a shrine, "priests" couldn't have delayed fulfilling the deceased's wishes until incensed chapel members prevailed in court. Furthermore, no kingpin would've dared tell one of the faithful that working for a competitor of a major cult benefactor was "taking bread out of my mouth": The man and his family would've been spared a ruinous, out-of-state move.

With Ross as his guide, no layman would've countenanced a "priest's" condoning the gruesome judicial murder of Terri Schiavo. Upon hearing the first reports from the distressed teachers at $GG $chool, all Gertries, not just the parents, would've intervened on behalf of defenseless children and secured the removal of "The Principal"; under no circumstances would that parasite have been able to continue to sponge off the chapel's resources for another eight or nine long years. Likewise, the generosity of the laity could never be abused by the cult masters' expensive trips abroad or sojourns at luxury desert spas. And most certainly, cynical "clergy" wouldn't have dared call such wasteful expenditures "apostolates" or "pilgrimages." Finally, after some 40 years, "priests" and "bishops" would know Latin inside out, so there'd be no perverse translations of infallible papal teaching on their websites.They also would've learned during those four decades to write academic English prose.

But you don't need to re-read PL's many pages exposing "clerical" bad behavior. (Most of you have enough disturbing memories of your own.) Nor need you give Jiminy Cricket a little whistle or scratch your head over the moral theologians' Scholastic idiom, which the cult masters smugly tell you means something different from what it plainly says. Just recall the transgressions you've witnessed or heard reported — the monstrous abuses that offended your sense of the right and the good — and then give Ross's seven principles a little once over.

It shouldn't take very long to feel moral outrage rising from your breast, provided you haven't been robbed of your conscience. In which case, if you still belong to a Tradistani cult but now are overcome with righteous indignation, you'll take your money and run.

STARVE THE BEAST. RESTORE DECENCY TO TRADWORLD.

* Sir William David Ross (1877-1971), an Oxford don and administrator, served as the general editor of the monumental Aristotle translation series (popularly called the "Oxford."). He not only translated some of the volumes in the series, notably the Nichomachean Ethics, but he also produced editions in Greek of important texts in the Aristotelian corpus.  Ross's commentary accompanying his revised Greek text of the Prior Analytics merits careful reading by every serious student of the assertoric syllogism.