Burke, ND, and Epistemology

St. George and the Dragon. 1868 - Sir Edward Burne-Jones, PRB

With this, I will now say that Fr. Jenkins, president of the University of Notre Dame, is in a peck of trouble. Not only is he out on a limb with the saw in his own hand half way through it - the limb, not his hand - but he has created a public scandal that qualifies as a mortal sin insofar that it has divided the faithful (and so-so faithful).

Our Lord himself had grave promises about such sin:

"Things that cause sin will inevitably occur, but woe to the person through whom they occur. It would be better for him if a millstone were put around his neck and he be thrown into the sea than for him to cause one of these little ones to sin."
- Luke 17,1b-2

Rest assured. There is judgment, there is eternal consequence to our decisions and actions; regardless of the functional atheists who call themselves Christians and jettison all the faith and morals that Mother Church guards and protects till the end of time.

What we can be assured of from their kind is more outrage, damage, and pushing of the squirm-line in actions like this or this.

You see, quite simply, without a reliable source of epistemological certainty, "truth" is whatever or whomever has the greatest power with which to determine the terms of discourse.

That the Catholic Church has strode through history this long, outlasting all earthly governments (you really can't call China unchanging, now) during her tenure; that the Catholic Church has done, is doing, and will do so much good in the world compared to all other mere human institutions (think of the 20th century utopian projects of Stalin, et al. I'll live with the Inquisition and I vote for the Crusades - we were there centuries before the Muslims); that the Catholic Church is the keeper of faith and morals discarded and rejected bit by bit by all other christianities - and I am indelibly happy to be in full communion with Mother Church.

Notre Dame needs to put up or shut up. Academia does not set the terms of discourse. The Church does.