Legislation, objective morality and the natural law

John Allen (The Word from Rome, 2/13/04 edition) alerts us to a timely discussion at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith about natural law that is relevant to Rick's question and Michael's response below. Pope John Paul II is certainly right to point out not merely that natural law is in crisis, but especially that "Today, in consequence of the crisis of metaphysics, a truth written in the heart of every human being is no longer recognized in many sectors of opinion. This results, on the one hand, in the diffusion among believers of a morality with a fideistic character, and on the other, legislation comes to lack an objective reference, so that it’s based solely on social consensus, making it more difficult to reach a common ethical foundation for all humanity." Although I agree with Michael that Barnett is mistaken in failing to recognize how legislation ought to be oriented toward the objective truth of things, that response alone is an insufficient assertion in today's social context because mass culture is dominated by an understanting of reason that is so corrupted that we are made incapable of judging with conviction that morality can be objectively reasonable at all. Even some of my most seriously Catholic students sometimes have a hard time understanding what the reasonable basis of the natural law is. It is symptomatic of the deep inculcation of a mentality that separates faith from reason -- rather than being necessary to an open and intelligent judgment of reality, religion is ghettoized, reason is pulverized and morality becomes a function of the conventions of the powerful. There can be no natural law where man is the measure of all reality.