The Most Dangerous News

This is the most dangerous statement I've seen so far in stories about the new pope:

William Donohue, president of the Catholic League, applauded the selection.

"The new pope, like his predecessor, understands the grave danger that awaits a society wherein each individual makes up his own morality," he said in New York, The A.P. reported. "It may not sell in the U.S., but it is nonetheless true that a society that refuses to acknowledge that morality is a social attribute, not an individual one, is bound to culturally implode."

http://tinyurl.com/eyuor

The only way to keep individuals from "making up" their own morality is government coercion. This is why theocracies are dictatorships.

Of course, individuals don't "make up" moralities, they perceive them in the facts of reality. The thing which enables them to do this is the human mind's capacity for Reason. Of course it is possible for a given individual to ignore reality and actually make something up, but this is not morality, but only the evasion of it. Mr. Donohue, though, is implying that this is the only alternative to "morality as a social attribute". His statement is meant to distract from the fact that morality is actually an attribute of the individual, not society, and blanks out the facts of human rationality and volition - and the facts that those are attributes of the individual - in order to do so.

What Mr. Donohue is trying to distract you from and avoid naming is only everything that makes human beings human.