It’s now late
summer, which seems to lead to a slower pace here at Principium et Finis. One post I didn’t get to publish was a
tangent inspired by Fr. C. John McCloskey’s review [here]
of Rodney Stark’s book The Rise of Christianity.
I’m not going to
summarize here what Fr. McCloskey says – I encourage you to read his review (I
myself intend to read Stark’s book at the earliest opportunity). I will only say that Fr. McCloskey sees important
lessons for us today in the experience of the Early Church, and specifically
recommends the rediscovery of the Corporal and Spiritual Works of Mercy.
I was struck,
however, by this passage from Fr. McCloskey’s article:
Adding to the dynamism of early
Christianity, as a result of the social stigma of being a Christian and the
danger of persecution and even martyrdom left Christianity largely free of what
Stark refers to as the “free riders,” those who want to reap the benefits of
religion without sharing in its sacrifices and commitments. Perhaps we could say that among the first Christians
during the first several centuries of the Faith, there was considerably more
wheat than chaff.
I have touched on this same idea, if indirectly, a number of times; here, for instance, in a post about the (relatively) young
Joseph Ratzinger (now Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI) saying that the church in the
future would become smaller but more faithful, and here, earlier this week, in discussing Russell Shaw’s idea
of the “Assimilated Church”. It was to
this, first of all, that Fr. Ratzinger was referring: the fact that as the
social advantages of public identification with the Church declined, and as the
disadvantages grew, only the truly committed would remain. We’ve seen that begin to play out since he first
predicted it over four decades ago. Russell Shaw described the Assimilated
Church as a Church that “will have been homogenized into the values of American
secular culture and become part of it”.
A Church, in other words, of Stark’s “free riders”, which is a Church without much of a future. The
decline in religious observance that we’ve seen over the past half century has
been in large part due to the departure
of “free riders” who no longer feel
that there are compelling social reasons to remain.
It is not true, as is sometimes
said, that man cannot organize the world without God. What is true is that, without God, he can
only organize it against man.
It’s beginning to look like Fr. de Lubac’s insight is as true of today’s “soft”
totalitarianism as it was of the “hard” totalitarianism of the last century. The mission of Christ’s Church is more urgent
than ever.
Other posts for the week:
Monday: The Haydn revival continues with
Tuesday: I generally like Russell Shaw’s work, but he’s
missing a lot of what’s happening in the “emerging Catholic subculture”:
Thursday: We look at Vespers, or Evening Prayer in my
latest post on the Liturgy of the Hours for laypeople:
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