G. K. Chesterton once said something to the effect that if everybody would just sit down, be quiet and think, the whole world would become Catholic. But the world won’t sit down, won’t be quiet and won’t think. No wonder the world is in a mess; it has not turned Catholic; and the Catholics are, instead, becoming worldly.
Pope Benedict has repeatedly echoed the same thing, especially at Regensburg. Even Pope John Paul II’s “Fides et Ratio” said the same thing.
God created man with a mind, an intellect. And He filled this intellect with ideas (an entity separate from the intellect) containing His truths. God wanted to make sure that we get the right idea about God and His truths. But our intellect has to read these truths, by an act of thinking, in order to know them. In fact the first act of thought is for the intellect to acknowledge these truths. These God-given innate ideas, accessible to the intellect by thinking, are the margins within which the natural truths of the Catholic Religion are enclosed. Therefore it should be natural for all to be Catholic.
Think of these innate God- given ideas as in the form of a pyramid. At the top of the pyramid are the preambles of faith. The base could be the whole summa theologica of St. Thomas. It is a matter of reflecting on the preambles to know the Summa. After all, where else could St. Thomas have gotten his Summa if not by reflection on the preambles of faith. God gives the preambles; but we have to extract the entire Summa from them through reflection.
The Catholic faith is founded on the natural. Faith begins with the assent of the natural mind on natural truths before it rises to the supernatural theological virtue of Faith, making man a Catholic. All men are born with the natural truths of the Catholic Church (called natural theology); so why did they fail to reflect on them?
Man is a rational animal. He is part spiritual and part animal. The pagans knew this. So they portrayed men as centaurs and women as mermaids. He thinks and wills. Call this the faculties of the soul. His animal side is the seat of his instincts or concupiscence. This latter is what prevents man from thinking!
We cannot serve two master, since we will love one and hate the other. If we hate our selfish selves (concupiscence) we would love to think and love what we are thinking. If we love ourselves (our concupiscence) we would hate to think, thus preventing us from becoming naturally Catholics.
When man acknowledges the God-given innate ideas in him, he knows the truth. When his free will accepts the truth, he knows he loves the truth. God is both truth and good. So man, by nature, even from his conception, possesses what it takes to be a Catholic who knows and loves God, thus becoming a saint, as Chesteron has observed: “If all man would just sit down, be quiet and think, they would all become Catholics” and we may add “become saints.”
This is the goal of Fides et Ratio and all the declarations of the Church on the importance of reason for the act of faith. It is what Pope Benedict XVI was hoping to accomplish in his Regensburg address and which he reminded the Diplomatic corps in his “State of the World” address of 2006. THINK, and we will solve all the problems of the world (without saying why….”because we will all become Catholic.”)