Written in Stone / Fr P J Gannon

Who Said This? “The Ten Commandments are . . . unsuited and inadequate to modern needs.”

The answer is the Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw (Man and Superman) — but it could have been any number of modern-day skeptics.

The once “shocking” views of such skeptics are now held by countless millions and sustained by unceasing propaganda from Hollywood, public schools, the government, and the pervasive media. The result? A widespread moral meltdown, unprecedented in human history, whose catastrophic consequences are just beginning to be felt and fully understood. 

The good news is there is hope. But the hour is even later than when Fr. P. J. Gannon spelled out our stark choices some sixty-five years ago:

“Humanity has really two courses open to it — to get back to clear thinking and right moral principles, or to continue its perilous drift toward the abyss.” 

Those “right moral principles” derive from the very Decalogue spurned by elites, past and present, argues Fr. Gannon, who was one of Ireland's foremost preachers and delivered these essays as sermons to packed Dublin churches in the 1930s. He shows how the Commandments, as interpreted by the Catholic Church, provide solid answers to a wide range of moral and social questions and why the widespread flouting of any one of them brings disastrous results for the whole of society. Fr. Gannon explores critical, compelling topics, including:

• Why modern morality makes sin virtuous and virtues sinful

• Why non-Christian “spirituality” soon collapses into atheism

• Why true liberty cannot and does not exist outside Christian tradition

• How to form youth in authenticCatholic teaching in the midst of a spiritual maelstrom

• When revolution is justified — and when it is not 

• How societies that exalt unfettered personal freedom inevitably degenerate into tyrannies

• Can a soldier take his own life to prevent vital information from falling into enemy hands?

• Can a woman jump from a high window to escape a pursuing attacker?

• How modern conventions of speech have muddied the distinction between love and lust

• Why the communal ownership practiced by religious communities cannot be the basis of society in general

• Why every act of dishonesty is at the expense of the poor — whether the sinner is rich or not