This morning’s National Catholic Prayer Breakfast was outstanding. President Bush did indeed stop by, but the highlight of the morning was the keynote speech from Bishop Morlino of Madison, talking about a theme Pope Benedict XVI spoke on just before his election as pope: that of the “dictatorship of relativism”:
In a program that also included remarks by President George W. Bush, the Vatican’s representative in Washington and the priest who is supervising the reconstruction of Catholic schools in New Orleans, Bishop Morlino’s keynote address warned about the ‘dictatorship of relativism’ and described what he said are the ‘members of the junta’ and the enforcement mechanisms they employ in maintaining that dictatorship.
He said the mass media and ‘those who pander to polls’ keep society focused on relativism. They employ inconsistency between civil laws and practices and the use of language which hides the true meaning of certain activities to keep people from applying the moral standards of natural law to everyday life, he said.
If I can find a transcript, I’ll post a link. The speech was remarkable, and certainly provided an argument against the semantic turns provided by those who do everything possible to make themselves comfortable at all costs, even to the point of destroying human life and violating our rights as individual beings.
One of the key parts of the speech was his argument from natural law that no individual could “own” another human being. Drawing from the “founding documents of the nation”, Bishop Morlino argued that our unalienable rights translate accordingly; you may not own another human being, therefore you may not decide whether an embryo could be discarded, a life can be destroyed through abortion, etc.
It was an excellent attack on the semantics employed by relativism, and a tremendous defense of the natural law. I’ll do my best to find a transcript.