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Review by Dr Pravin Thevathasan
by Fr. Vincent Miceli, S.J. Sophia Institute Press This is another great work by Fr Miceli. In this work he covers atheists from Nietzsche and Marx to Camus and Sartre. Some names included might come as a surprise: Bultmann, Tillich, John Robinson and Harvey Cox, for example. The author says that the Anglican Bishop Robinson had a genuine desire to Christianise the secular. He only succeeded in secularising Christianity. While Bultmann treated the Gospel miracles as myths, Robinson went further. Like Tillich, he insisted that man must rinse his being "absolutely clean of every vestige of traditional, supernatural theology." The very word "God" must be thrown out for he is nothing more than Tillich's "ground of being." Where does this lead us? Miceli responds: "A world that points upward at nothing beyond itself is in reality a world plunged into the void of the absolutely absurd." I was interested to read that the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, an atheist at the time, responded: "What is striking about Dr Robinson...is that he is an atheist." In his desire to adapt God to the mentality of contemporary man, Robinson had made an idol of modernity. He had created a new god, a new theology, a new morality and a new gospel. Sadly, so many Catholic theologians are following the way of Robinson. As I read what Fr Miceli, a Jesuit at the time, had to say about Robinson, I could not help but think of what the head of the Jesuits had to say about the Gospels and his personal scepticism as "no one had a recorder" to record the words of Jesus. I fear that the atheists have infiltrated the Catholic Church. Everything that Fr Miceli has written here proclaims that this is so. The adulterous Bertrand Russell wanted widespread sex outside of marriage. Joseph Fletcher said that there is no such thing as intrinsically evil acts: it all depends on the situation. Our Catholic leaders are following the Pied Pipers of atheism. "Any morality that depends on the whims of the masses, the spirit of the times...is always a threat to freedom." Moral relativism will always lead to slavery. These very wise words from the great Fr Miceli is surely what this book is about.
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