Fish Do Not Realize They Are Wet — Nor Do Most American Catholics Realize They Are Liberal

There’s an old saying that goes something like “a fish does not realize he is wet”. This metaphor has aptly been used to explain the relationship between American Catholics and Liberalism. It is true. How else to explain the enormous difficulty of telling a man that his whole culture, education and environment is saturated with a poisonous ideology that does not readily announce itself. In America, keep in mind, the paradigm is ostensibly split between “Liberals” and “Conservatives”,1 and “Democrats” and “Republicans”, yet all of whom share the same, fundamental principles: namely the skepticism of authority, the primacy of the individual good over the common good, the exaltation of human liberty beyond its proper limits, the denial of the supremacy of the natural law and finally, the decoupling of society from the Church and revealed religion.>As in the example of the fish, who has no frame of reference for being “dry”, the American Catholic often has little — or perhaps none — experience with sound (read orthodox) political philosophy, which is intrinsically anti-Liberal. The remedy, of course, is to introduce our good-willed Americans to the stark opposition between Catholic doctrine and liberal principles, which has only been made worse by the ongoing crisis in the Church caused by the Second Vatican Council.

Originally published in The Journal of American Reform. Read original article