with regards to the more blatant misunderstandings within Prof Nouveau's work, I must first (presumably these falsehoods are present due to religious ignorance on the part of Prof Nouveau) make it clear that the Church forbids contraception precisely because it believes the sexual act is holy and good. In respect for its sanctity, the Church upholds that it is sacrilegious and a perversion of nature to thwart the design of God by preventing the self-giving of man and woman in the form of Children from coming to be. It upholds that contraception is a a debasing of an act of love between man and woman into a mere exercise in mutual masturbation and empty pleasure. Furthermore the Church discerns temporally that widespread contraception only encourages promiscuity, the objectification of women as instruments of sexual pleasure, and the breakdown of the family through the increase in illegitimacy and general immorality and that all these things in paticular in the interests of the common good make contraception something that cannot be approved of in society.
On the other great and erroneous assumption of Prof Nouveau, let me clarify that the Catholic Church does not teach that man is inherently evil, for indeed the Church has always upheld scripture when it proclaims that God looked upon his creation and saw that it was good which self-evidently includes man. Rather the Catholic Church upholds that man is flawed and broken due to original sin, and thus inclined towards evil actions such as the kinds so clearly evident in war and in all injustice born from men. Nouveau tacitly accepts this position in expressing his understanding that the empirically false doctrine of human perfectibility, so cherished by the liberals, is an incapable foundation for building a good society.
In this light, and here I come to the argument of Dr Nouveau, the moralists, like the Church, promote the ideal of the common good. That is that the state and the society as a whole have an obligation to work for the greater good of all its members. Yet Nouveau in rejecting this principle states instead that that human solidarity is intrinsic to human nature. Yet it appears he confuses human solidarity, which is to say the corporate working of men together in society for the good of all, with empathy, which is the emotional connection of men to fellow men which is indeed intrinsic to human nature. Empathy does not however intrinsically imply that society works together for the good of all (as Nouveau assumes) and this is empirically provable, as the situation in Kongo and in the fortunately extirpated slaveocracies so eloquently attest. Furthermore empathy clearly does not ensure that men, inclined to evil as they are, will not subsume the good in favour of acting out evil (as we can see in war and all manner of social ills) through their own free will. Man is a free agent and has free will, and this is something that Nouveau implicitly appears to deny with his deterministic and reductionistic assumption that men being empathic therefore must always work to the good. It is also an assumption he rejects himself through his criticism of Moralism misguided though it is.
This same Moralism however, in understanding that man has free will and often chooses to work evil in his own interest instead of good in service to his fellows, recognises that the consideration of the common good is necessary as a founding paradigm within any social structure, be it the state or the Church, in order to avoid the human tendency towards tyranny, and ensure that the greatest good for the greatest number most often is achieved. But what does this common good entail in practice?
Nouveau here is correct in one detail, which is that the Church and moralism as a product of Catholic thinking sees the spiritual good of the human person, his holiness and salvation, as fundamentally superior to his temporal good. The salvation of mans soul is naturally of higher merit than purely temporal matters, for the souls fate is eternal, but the life on earth is merely fleeting. Yet he errs in saying that moralism is unconcerned or indifferent to this life. The gospels clearly exhort men to charity and to love of neighbour. The seeking of the good of man in this life therefore is in itself a spiritual good when it proceeds from virtue and love of God. Thus the moralist government seeks, in conformity with the gospels, to encourage charity on the part of society, it seeks to engage in all the corporal works of mercy and it aims to promote conditions conductive to the temporal good of its members economically and politically. This is empirically evident in the policies of Brazil, Colombia and the Papal States amongst various entities of a moralist (or Catholic) persuasion, which have all engaged in programs to promote the temporal wellbeing of their citizens. It is true that Moralism is indeed opposed to putting temporal concerns over spiritual ones as Prof. Nouveau says, but the professor is reductionistic in his determination by failing to realise that in christian teaching the material is fundamentally intertwined with the spiritual, and that ultimately the material serves a spiritual end in and of its self in the moralist mind.
Prof. Nouveau as such simply fails to understand his subject on its own terms. This we can see when he states that moralism rejects (or subjugates) natural rights in favour of dogmatic teaching. A proposition made absurd by the fact he fails to even define how a right is determined. Moralism does in fact uphold natural rights, but it determines what a right is by an objective criterion instead of on the latest whim or opinion (as the secular humanists do) where some new right is proclaimed whenever men seek to justify their actions without reference to anything higher than themselves and their own egos. To the moralist a right is only a right if it is manifest through natural law, that it is clearly discernable in nature! Therefore the moralist affirms such truths as the right to life, the right to a free conscience and the right to truth, which all men women and children posess and that on these truths society must be build. This is a position elegantly proclaimed by Paul VI in his
address to the continental nations in 1909
What is not a right however is anything contrary to nature or which harms the good, such as moral depravity, the subversion of society, the delusion that a man has license to do as he wilt. Indeed this is the definition implicitly held by all states by the very fact they have laws against such evils as murder and sodomy, including in liberal nations. This is so because it is fundamental to the human condition that the human person is not unbound by community or separated from his fellows, but rather exists in subjection to higher authorities and to a higher order of law that he is bound to obey for his good and for the good of all. Ergo he has a duty to the common good of which the Church and moralism speaks. The liberal secular humanists however, in relativistically making man the sole authority over himself deny this reality and promote a dictatorship of relativism which holds nothing for certain, and which is tyrannous precisely becaues it would deny the freedom of anyone to reject or oppose its advocates "Freedom" to indulge their own desires and cause self-harm to themselves and society.
Returning therefore to the reality that man is bound to community and to an authority above the self. Moralist states in percieving that alcohol, tobacco and contraceptives harm the good of the whole society and the individual, due to promoting ill-health, idleness and violence, and of course the previously mentioned vices with regards to contraception, and understanding that men do not have a "right" to harm society or themselves and that they are morally bound to the community (for drunkennes, and addiction harm the same), have rightly forbidden these things in order that men may not be enslaved to such drugs, but rather liberated. For moralism seeks the liberation of men from wordliness and selfishness, in order that their minds may be free to contemplate higher things and that they may be unhindered in their duty to serve the good. To the moralist, men and women have a right to good health and to be free to use their intellects unshackled from the slavery of dangerous addiction, and have no right at all to harm the community, it thus forbids these things in recognition of these rights, which come with corresponding duty to the collective (for rights inherently are linked with duty).
So too, moralism upholds that the state has obligations, both to the good of its citizens as mentioned and also to proclaim and support the truth. Moralist states, in having a duty to the truth, have rightly chosen to make the Catholic religion the religion of state and established Catholic education in their lands, so that men may know of the Catholic religion, which is the one true faith. However contrary to Nouveau's thesis this is not contradictory to the God-given right to a free conscience, for man, having free will remains free to choose his path once the truth is recieved. They recieve the truth through education, and yet they remain free to reject if they so wish without punishment from the state. Hardly an atrocity nor coercion, and indeed one would think a praiseworthy thing. Yet Nouveau would have men reject it in ignorance of what it truly teaches out of his own militant atheism, whereas the Church and the moralist would teach men about religion so that they may freely choose whether to follow the faith with full knowledge, understanding that men have the right to know the truth as fully as possible, and the right to reject it if they choose to do so.
He claims however that this recognition of religion, this upholding of truth is coercive (for he himself denies that the Catholic faith is true), yet if we look into his thesis' example (the Thacker case) we can see his methodological error in that he fails to realise that Thackers eviction was not a matter of religion, but rather of subversion against the State. Thacker proposed violation of Chilean laws, and the legitimacy of the government and so was expelled as a foreign agent precisely because he was harmful to society and worked against the common good, which he has no right to do even as he posseses a right to believe as he does.
Just as his analysis is riddled with methodological errors, so too does his criticism of moralism generally fall short of describing it as it is, as compared to what he wishes it to be for his own ideological purposes of promoting atheistic secularism. He does so incidentally in a way that is both confused and logically unsound. He proclaims for example that moralism is utopianistic, without actually explaining or pointing out what the (nonexistent) utopian teleological outcome of moralism he supposes exists actually is. He also artificially constructs moralist doctrine that does not exist. For example he states completely a priori without evidence, that moralism believes that democracy is a good form of government so long as it elects moralist leaders. This is of course false (what he references is the idea that it would ideal in a democracy for a moralist party to be always elected, which is precisely the position of the proletarists and the liberals and every other group about themselves, and is not a statement on the running of a democracy itself as a systemic means of choosing a government), as moralism upholds that democracy is but one form of forming a government not inherently better than others, and that if this form is used it should be upheld and accepted that moralists may not always obtain power. This position is held clearly by the governments of Brazil and Chile, the latter of whom in the last election freely allowed opposition parties to run and stated its conviction to step down if they lost the election.
Nouveau also states that moralism believes in freedom of religion, which is a falsehood that likely has emerged from his own secularism and presumptions. Moralism does not ideologically believe in freedom of religion (for all men are morally obliged towards truth and the true religion) but rather believes in freedom of conscience (that men while morally obliged towards truth are free to reject it). This means that moralism upholds that man should be free to believe what he will in his own intellect, but that he does not have a right to practice error or any religion he wishes without restraint, (for error has no intrinsic rights, only men do). Practice of cults other than the true faith is merely tolerated out of respect for the liberty of men to their own conscience and agency when that cult causes no harm to society or the common good. He then continues to proclaim that moralism is against minorities, using examples such as tobacco addicts, and protestants, ignoring the addicts right to be free of mind-slaving addiction, and the protestants right to the truth (while retaining his freedom of will to reject that truth), and failing to all the same to explain why minorities have intrinsic rights beyond those universal in nature to all human beings, a product of his own relativistic assumption which has rights proceed from human opinion.
From all this, it becomes clear therefore that Nouveaus analysis is deeply confused and divorced from the reality of moralism. Yet aside from this it also reflect much of the error that exists within secular humanism (for Catholicism is truly humanistic) itself. This I shall now address
