The elections are just around the corner (Austrian National Council elections as well as the US Presidential elections). But let’s start from the beginning. Marx said that religion is opium for the people. It puts us to sleep, makes us simply accept the structures of power and oppression. It makes us blind and paralyzed to our actual mission and purpose of breaking out of these structures or destroying them. A typical neognostic phenomenon.

The mainstream religion that has replaced Christianity in the Western world is neognostic in its basic orientation. This is the subject of our current sermon series. As in the past, the gnosis of our day is not a firmly forged faith, but rather a collection of different schools of thought that share a basic narrative that is religious in nature, dogmatically advocated and not questioned – even if it presents itself as scientific and critical. And because precisely the basic religious-dogmatic structure is denied, there is no critical examination of oneself in order to avoid a certain fanaticism or ideological gravity.

The old Gnosis, for example the more than 20 Gnostic sects cataloged by St. Irenaeus of Lyon in the 2nd century in his “Adversus Haereses”, saw the material world as the cause of all evil. We had to break out of it. According to the motto: body bad, spirit good. The neognostic of our time would not see the material world as the fundamental problem, but rather the nature of the world and the various power structures – be they sociological, political, economic or psychological. These must be destroyed. The imbalance in the world definitely has nothing to do with me, with my involvement in the world’s state of guilt.

The gnosis of then and now is essentially a denial of sin and guilt. It sees no intrinsic limit in man himself that stands in the way of perpetual progress. It presupposes that the progress we see in the field of technology will naturally also take place in morality, politics, sociology, and so on. Gnosticism is also atheistic at its core because it is a religion of self-redemption and – in Christian disguise – does not always deny heaven, but directs all its power towards this world. I and we solve ALL of humanity’s problems and even, as is the dream in some forms of transhumanism, the “problem” of mortality. That is why it has strong utopian tendencies.

Gnosticism may very well undermine the Christian faith, even camouflaging itself in Christian vocabulary and outward appearances. Christians of our time. We are all shaped by the world we live in, which no longer thinks in Christian terms, but in Gnostic terms. For example, we can simply assume that things should be always getting better and ourselves better off. And we are shocked, discouraged and frustrated when that doesn’t happen. We can have an expectation of ourselves, our children or family that is utopian – and be completely undone because 5 minutes after our last confession we were doing exactly the same thing again.

And in the realm of politics, the Christian infected by Gnosticism can see it as the panacea. As Msgr. James P. Shea explains in “The Religion of the Day”, this is a necessary consequence of gnosis, since according to it, salvation consists precisely in the transformation of external power structures. Politics is then “no longer a secondary (though not unimportant) arena of human endeavor, a place where compromise will often be necessary to preserve the common good and social harmony.” (Shea) And, as Shea further points out, Politics then becomes the actual arena of religious struggle, it is THE means to get the structures of oppression under control and create a better world.

The Christian, on the other hand, is very much committed to the social improvement of our world and to political issues. The Christian will struggle for a society where justice and love prevail. But what Christians will not do, or should not do, as Msgr. Shea reminds us, is to “place their hopes on fixing the world by human means alone” or replacing the world as it is with a “better functional model„. The Christian will be wary of this. He should know that moral progress can also very quickly become regression (see, for example, the last century). The Christian knows that politics CANNOT get to the root of human evil, that the sources of salvation for these evils are to be sought in completely different spheres and that politics will ultimately bring us neither decline nor salvation. He is aware that “the ultimate fate of the visible world is dependent on much higher, invisible realities.” (ibid)

When religion is leavened by politics, it is toxic. “Marx said religion is the opium for the people, I say politics is heroin for religion.” (Fulton Sheen) An example from the USA: The early Church, for example, had great clarity around four issues: 1. no abortion, no euthanasia. 2. sex belongs in a relationship between one man and one woman within marriage. 3. equality of all people, regardless of race or whether male or female. 4. the preferential decision to care for the poor and marginalized. The first two issues sound very “Republican”. The other two taste very much of “Democrats”. And that becomes a real problem in congregations when members allow themselves to be divided along political preferences instead of knowing that they are Christians and brothers and sisters first and political party members second. When they let the gospel be permeated by their political preferences instead of their political preferences being permeated by the gospel.

As a church leader, I will always react very nervously if a political event is advertised on our media channels or if the impression is created that the John Paul II. Center is of one party or another. I very much hope that there are and will be people among us who are politically engaged and committed to the common good. As an important sign of Christian lay people who are aware of their responsibility for the world and their call to infuse worldly matters with the spirit of the Gospel. At the same time, I hope that we as a church understand that politics, as important as it may be, is not the primary arena of religious struggle, that our goals as a church are not political at all and do not want to be, that it is good that the salvation for which we struggle and long, is not to be hoped for from politics, that it is the Lord who saves, heals and redeems us and that the greatest impact and the true turns of history are to be expected and introduced by the saints, regardless of whether that is the guy that cleans the streets or the country’s president.

God bless!

Fr. George LC