By Msgr. Charles Fink

But first a note from Robert Royal: Friends: Many people these days think that the evil in the world is some sort of anomaly, rather than - as Sacred Scripture shows - a constant feature in a fallen world. As today's review of a new book makes clear, current incarnations of evil have ideological as well as spiritual sources. This page appears daily, precisely to make clear distinctions about good and evil, truth and error. We think this is a responsibility that everyone needs to shoulder every day. We're doing that. Will you help? You know how. Just click the button and select one of the many ways that you can be part of the work of The Catholic Thing.

Now for today's column...

When the American novelist Walker Percy was asked by an interviewer why he had become a Catholic, he famously answered, "What else is there?" He was too intelligent and analytical to be merely flippant. He knew that other religions and philosophies, although they might contain elements of truth and wisdom, could not answer to the human thirst for a wholeness of vision that addresses all the exigencies and vagaries of mortal existence and that they often contain errors and the seeds of aberrant behaviors. Not to mention that some are, by nature, virulently anti-Catholic.

In his latest book, Modern Monsters: Political Ideologues and Their War against the Catholic Church, George Marlin shines a bright light on the dark corners of anti-Catholicism that have characterized the thinking of five centuries of influential religionists, philosophers, activists, and politicians. As the title suggests, this is not a book looking to promote ecumenical dialogue or build bridges across the aisle that separates disputing parties. It's a diagnostician's examination of what ails the modern world, how it came to be so ill, and implicitly what it needs to be cured.

With copious quotes from primary and secondary sources - which alone make the book worth reading - Marlin sketches vivid portraits of more than a dozen prominent thinkers whose ideas and rabid anti-Catholicism have shaped our culture, mostly for the worse. Whether he's writing about Martin Luther or Machiavelli, or closer to our own time, Nazis, fascists, and communists, we find illustrated again and again what Pope Pius XI pointed to 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.

Further documented is the nearly megalomaniacal self-assurance of the purveyors of such idolatrous notions who believed that implementation of them would lead to a world far superior to the one we know, if not to an earthly paradise. In short, most of the individuals covered by Marlin turn out to be utopians, who, finding resistance to their utopian vision, morph into totalitarians intent on destroying whoever and whatever stands in the way of the realization of their dreamed-of more perfect society.

This accounts for their invariable hostility to the Catholic Church, ever ready to fight the tendency of ideologues to reduce the individual to a mere means to an end or a cog in the machine and, with perfect realism, also to assert that no individual or group is capable of creating heaven in this fallen world.

From beginning to end, Marlin is dealing with those who, absolutely assured of their vision of how to perfect the world, will brook no opposition to the implementation of their plans. How could they? They have usurped the role of God, only without God's mercy and love. All who oppose them must be eliminated by whatever means necessary....