Modern Monsters: Political Ideologies and Their War against the Catholic Church

Modern Monsters: Political Ideologues and Their War against the Catholic Church:
George Marlin (St. Augustine’s Press, $45.50, 227 pages)

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George Marlin, chairman of Aid to the Church in Need-USA, has written an accessible examination of a dozen or so intellectuals whose ideas have, in his estimation, greatly harmed society by attacking the Catholic Church and the Christian view of human dignity. Some of the authors are predictable (Karl Marx and Jean-Jacques Rousseau), while others might be more contentious (Martin Luther). Those theologians and philosophers, as well as Machievalli, Hobbes, Locke, Voltaire, Hume, Hegel, Comte, Gramsci, and early 20th century fascism and Nazism are included. Marlin quotes Pope Pius XI, who wrote in his 1937 encyclical Mit brennender Sorge, “Whoever exalts race, or the people, or the state, or a particular form of state, or depositories of power, or any other fundamental value of the human community – however necessary and honorable be their function in worldly things – whoever raises these above their standard value and divinizes them to the idolatrous level distorts and perverts an order of the world planned and created by God: he is far from the true faith in God and from concepts of life which that faith upholds.” In his sketches of each thinker, Marlin shows how their utopianism leads them to muddied thinking about human anthropology and political arrangements, and they end up denying the implications of imago Dei, that mankind is made in the image of God, and the repercussions that has for the sanctity of human life, dignity, and liberty. The false freedoms of earthly philosophers leads, inevitably, to being a slave of human passions, most especially those unleashed by the Sexual Revolution. Rousseau’s vision of the natural goodness of man or the Enlightenment philosophers’ view that man was perfectible through the correct amount of rational or scientific improvement, were erroneous anthropologies. Machiavelli and Hobbes made political power an end unto itself, broken from the goal of the common good. Marx inspired communism- and fascism-inspired state-worship. 21st century social justice seeks to destroy the distinctiveness of unique individuals. The book is an excellent intellectual history of how we got to where we are in 2026 – a long road that has taken centuries – but the inclusion of Luther and the equation of Catholicism with Western civilization will likely limit the audience for this important book as all Christians should understand the intellectual trajectory that led to rampant individualism.

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