In his new book, The Tyranny of Clichés: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas, author Jonah Goldberg delivers a more full-throated defense of Catholicism than students are likely to get in many Jesuit universities. “As a fairly secular Jew I cannot and will not speak to the theological questions, in part because I do not want to, but mostly because I do not have to,” Goldberg writes. “The core problem with those who glibly invoke one cliché after another about the evils of organized religion and Catholicism is that they betray the progressive tendency to look back on the last two thousand years and see the Catholic Church—and Christianity generally—as holding back humanity from progress, reason and enlightenment.”
“They fault the Church for not knowing what could not have been known yet and for being too slow to accept new discoveries that only seem obvious to us with the benefit of hindsight. It’s an odd attack from people who boast of their skepticism and yet condemn the Church for being rationally skeptical about scientific breakthroughs.”
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