What Do We Do When Our Priest Is A Communist? (Part II)

   In my prior post, "What Do We Do When Our Priest Is A Communist? (Part I)" we saw that the true Church is not reducible to the people who occupy its offices at any particular point in time, not even to those in the highest positions of authority.  The true Church is the Mystical Body of Christ extending through time. We depend upon that Church for our salvation, and we can't abandon it because of the malfeasance of its temporary caretakers, whether they are priests, bishops, or even (if you can believe it) popes.

Bad popes: "Pope Formosus and Stephen VII"
by Jean-Paul Laurens, 1870

 At the same time, while the immorality and infidelity of bad clerics can't unmake the Church itself, it can do a lot of damage to members of the Church, and Church institutions, in particular times and places.  It can cause souls to be lost.  That was in fact the concern of the original comment that led to these posts.  A father was afraid that the bad example and erroneous teaching of certain prominent churchmen (including some at a decidedly higher pay grade than his parish priest) would damage the faith of his children, and that he might need to leave the Church for their protection . . . 

[click HERE to continue reading this post on Spes in Domino]

What Do We Do When Our Priest Is A Communist? (Part I)

"Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life" (John 6:68)

 

Is this your parish priest?

  We live in scary times.  It looks like our secular institutions in the West are collapsing, to be replaced by mob rule (which really means, as always, a tyranny of the elite who manipulate the mob).  More frightening still for Catholics, the institutional Church appears to be experiencing a parallel slide.  A commenter on my post about the Trappists and Icarians  expressed his unhappiness at attending Mass where, as he put it, the priest "preaches communism."  He was not just concerned, however, that many Catholic clerics, from parish priest on up, are abandoning the Faith for a poisonous brand of politics, but also, on a more practical level, that the Catholic Church itself was not a safe place for his children.

    The commenter raises some valid and important points, which deserve a better answer than I can give off the cuff in a social media combox . . . I was thinking about how to approach this topic Friday morning, when I received some timely help from the daily Mass readings.  . . . 

[click HERE to continue reading this post on Spes in Domino]

Hidden Law, Society and Catholic Teaching

(An earlier version of this post first appeared in March 2014. Please visit the linkup for Worth Revisiting Wednesday, hosted by Elizabeth Reardon at theologyisaverb.com, and Allison Gingras at reconciledtoyou.com)

An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure . . . 

Bl. Mother Theresa of Calcutta and St. John Paul II

     I’ve heard it said that once you need to pass a law prohibiting something, it’s too late.  In other words, it is better if less formal, more personal factors like family, religion, custom, etc. prepare people to want to do the right thing beforehand, rather than having the state or some other external authority come in to clean up the mess afterwards.  

     This seems to be the thesis of a discussion by columnist Jonah Goldberg about (among other things) what he refers to as “Hidden Law” [link].   He describes it as the intricate complex of customs, attitudes, prohibitions, licenses, etc., that arise from culture, family, and shared experience that shape, and are shaped by,  the vast majority of our interactions with each other.   It is not imposed (directly, anyway) by any official authority, particularly not the state, and is far more effective than any formal laws or statutes for maintaining an orderly and prosperous society.  Leftists are particularly prone to deny or try to override this law, but such recklessness is by no means limited to the left.  Goldberg is arguing (as I have in other places, here for instance, albeit using different language) that we disregard this Hidden Law at our peril.

The Dignity of the Human Person

    Jonah Goldberg is a secular commentator, and I do not share all his views or concerns.  I take serious issue in particular with a passage he quotes from Jonathan Rauch that uses assisted suicide as an example; I may be naïve, but I’m not convinced that there was a long tradition of doctors “helping people to die”, at least not in the sense he seems to mean.  Also there is a huge (decisive, in fact) difference between letting someone die and causing them to die (and let me add that letting them die by withholding food and water is in fact causing them to die). 

     Having said that, it’s very helpful to understand, in a particular way for Catholics, this idea of the Hidden Law.  It illuminates not only much of Catholic teaching, but also helps us to understand some important ways in which God interacts with His creation.  The concept of the Dignity of the Human Person, for instance, is inseparable from our gift of Free Will, and from our right to exercise it within appropriate bounds, which we see formulated in the importance of Conscience, in the Principle of Subsidiarity, the right to form associations such as labor unions and fraternal groups, and so on [link].  We can see that the Church has long recognized in the working out of all sorts of individual human decisions something very similar to what Goldberg means by Hidden Law (with the important addition, in the Catholic understanding, of the importance of God’s Grace).

"The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath" (Mark 2:27)

     One thing that comes through, both in Catholic teaching and the secular understanding of this unwritten law, is an emphasis on human individuals, not on things, institutions, or programs; it relies on people, properly prepared to conduct their own lives and to order their relations with each other.  I see a correspondence in the way God is revealed both in Sacred Scripture and in His Church.  God always seems to act through individual people, doing their human best (in most cases) under His guidance. In fact, he Bible is all about people, that is, individual persons, starting with Adam and Eve, through Noah, Abraham and the other Patriarchs, David and the other kings, Elijah and the prophets up through the God-Man himself, Jesus, with whom we are explicitly called to have a personal relationship.  Jesus (born of a woman, Mary) chooses to act through his Apostles, whose names are all carefully preserved, and whose authority has been personally handed on to their successors, the Bishops.  A constant feature of the formal passing on of authority from the earliest days has been the laying on of hands, one man physically touching another.  Furthermore, a very large part of Catholic practice has always been the Cult of the Saints, whose individual lives are held up for emulation and who are called upon, individually and by name, to intercede for us with the Father.  It amazes me how many people I know personally who have met Saint John Paul II or Blessed Mother Theresa (very often they have met both), and this in a church of one billion people.  Isn’t it interesting that the Catholic Church, probably both the largest and oldest existing Institution in the world, depends so much, and focuses so much, on individual human beings?

     It’s for this reason that I have become increasingly distrustful of a reliance on programs and structures, and of those who put their faith in man-made solutions rather than the action of God’s Grace working  through those who love him.  There is certainly a place for such things, but in a supporting role, not a leading one.  Jesus says: "The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath" (Mark 2:27).  If it's true that it's an inversion of right order to give a Divine Institution such as the Sabbath precedence over people, how much more so it must be of merely human institutions.

Evangelizing the Lukewarm?

(An earlier version of this Throwback was first published in May of last year)

 We can never tell when, or from where, we will find a valuable new discovery. I was at a staff retreat the other day, for instance, and I made an unexpected find.  I pulled a book (more or less at random) off the shelf in the retreat house library, a book called The Secularist Heresy: the Erosion of the Gospel in the Twentieth Century.  It was a 1980 reissue of an original first published in the 1950’s, written by an Anglican gentleman named Harry Blamires (a student of C.S.Lewis, it seems). I opened it up at somewhere in the middle and read the following thought-provoking passage:

Harry Blamires

     For the problem peculiar to our time is, not that large numbers of people are asking questions about life’s meaning and trembling uneasily on the brink of Christian self-committal, but that by far the largest section of our population is completely without interest in the religious issue at all.  They have not reached the stage of asking questions which the Christian apologist answers.  They have never truly recognized in themselves that deep discontent which only the peace of God can take away.  They have not arrived at that phase of uneasiness which is so often a fruitful time for the sowing of seeds.

Anyone who has tried to Evangelize in recent years knows that, if this was true sixty years ago, it is much more so today.  I’ve experienced it in teaching ninth grade religion in the Catholic high school in which I work, where I’ve seen first-hand what Blamires means when he says:

It may even be the case that, in our own age, the difference between the interested and the uninterested in the religious issue is more significant than the difference between believer and unbelievers.

Again, this sounds familiar.  I’ve found that I can carry on a discussion with the loud-mouth atheist student, and he will indeed listen to what I have to say.  Yes, it may be only because he wants to refute it, but he wants to refute it because at some level he wants to know the Truth; if he keeps searching, he may find it at some point.  The apathetic student is searching for nothing more than the end of the class period so he can go check his text messages; it’s hard to get any response out of him at all.  One begins to understand what Christ means when he says: "So, because you are lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold, I will spew you out of my mouth" (Rev. 3:16).
     How to catch the interest of the apathetic, then, is the big challenge.  Blamires warns us against relying on the “relevance” approach to get their attention.  The main theme of his book is what he calls the corruption of the Church by the secular world [N.B., by “The Church” Blamires means institutional Christianity collectively, not a particular church, and certainly not the Catholic Church], and  he argues that an undue emphasis on the relevance of the Christian message (as opposed to the truth of the Christian message) is a large part of the problem,  because in doing so we subordinate the infinite to the finite.   He goes on to say:

If the Christian Church is sapped of its doctrinal virility and institutional sturdiness, Christianity itself may be perverted by some into an instrument of social and civilizational decomposition that has nothing to do with its proper call to self-sacrificial encounter with the world of materialism and unbelief.

     This dismal prophecy first published in the 1950's came to fruition with a swiftness and thoroughness in his own Anglican Church that shocked and saddened Blamires himself, as he admits in his introduction to the 1980 reprinting of his book.  Just a few years after its first publication we saw the same process at work in the Catholic Church: Pope John XXIII, with the best of intentions, “threw open the windows of the Church” to allow the Church to communicate the Gospel more effectively to the world; one does not have to be a Council-basher (which I am not) to notice that an awful lot of “the world” snuck back the other way through the open windows into the Church.  As John’s successor Paul VI famously said, “From some fissure the smoke of Satan has entered the temple of God.”  And of course we have seen that what some of us more prosaically call "dumbing down" the content of faith not only corrupts the Church, but, ironically, makes it even less attractive to both non-believers and believers alike, if church attendance in the Age of Relevance is any indication.

        That leaves us, of course, with the question, what do we do?  I confess I don’t have the answers,  and if I did I’d need more than a blog post to provide them.  I do know, however, that at a minimum we need to lead as faithful a Christian life as possible (and I suspect I’m not the only one who often falls short in this regard).  Christ tells us not to keep our lamp under a bushel (Matthew 5:15), but if we’re not clear and joyful examples of living the Faith our example does more harm than good.  But we need to do more than just be an example, we must “Always be prepared to make a defense to anyone who calls you to account for the hope that is in you” (1Peter 3:15).  Mother Theresa of Calcutta is credited with saying: “God has not called me to be successful; he has called me to be faithful.”  While I’m at it, how about the quote often attributed to St. Francis of Assisi: “Preach always, and when necessary use words”.  The point is, if we live a life of fidelity to the Gospel, people will notice, and not only because we’re doing something different, but because they’ll see the joy in our lives.  Then they’ll be willing to listen, at which point we need to be ready to speak.

     I had such an opportunity recently when a co-worker contemplating her 4^th marriage asked how I managed to stay married to the same woman for 28 years: here was someone who was ready to listen, because she saw in the longevity of my marriage something she really wanted.  Which gave me the opportunity to connect that desired result with the life of faith: "Unless the LORD builds the house, those who build it labor in vain" (Psalm 127:1).

     There are some books that tell you things you never knew; others crystalize and bring into focus things you already knew, but hadn't yet worked out in your mind.  Blamires' book, for me, falls into that second category, and is doubly valuable because we can see the working out of his thesis over the past sixty years.  I can thank the Lord for a fruitful retreat.

What's So Funny About Peace, Love and Ecumenism?

“I do not pray for these only, but also for those who believe in me through their word, that they may all be one; even as Thou, Father, art in Me, and I in Thee, that they also may be in Us, so that the world may believe that thou hast sent me.” (John 20:16-27)

     It is clear from the scripture passage above that Christ does not want his body (i.e., the Church) to be divided, and that the failure of “those who believe” in Him to be one is an impediment to evangelization. And yet the division of his Mystical Body into numerous different churches and communities is an ongoing scandal.  We might well wonder whether any sort of unity is really possible.  How could it come about?  What would it look like?

     As it happens, Pope Benedict XVI gave a talk on just this topic to a gathering of Protestant and Orthodox Christians in Cologne, Germany, nine years ago (story and full text here), drawing in part on St. John Paul II’s encyclical Ut Unum Sint [text here], in part on his own reflections.  Benedict warns his listeners (and us) that unity is something that we ourselves can’t make happen, but that “it it is the Lord who gives unity, that we do not create it, that it is he who gives it but that we must go to meet him.”  He does suggest that part of the answer lies in Christians of different communities uniting against common adversaries in the wider world:

Our divisions are contrary to the will of Jesus and they disappoint peoples' expectations. I think that we must work with new energy and dedication to bring a common witness into the context of these great ethical challenges of our time.  

At the same time he recognizes that there are real differences between different Christian traditions: he points out that, from the Catholic perspective, “This unity, we are convinced, indeed subsists in the Catholic Church, without the possibility of ever being lost”. Real unity can only be achieved within the Church established by Jesus Christ, and in accordance with the Truth handed on by Christ. At the same time, he recognizes that we Catholics cannot reasonably demand that Protestants, for instance, simply jettison their entire  experience of faith:

On the other hand, this unity does not mean what could be called ecumenism of the return: that is, to deny and to reject one's own faith history. Absolutely not! It does not mean uniformity in all expressions of theology and spirituality, in liturgical forms and in discipline.

This looks like something of an impasse: how can we do both of these things?  Well, we can’t. Pope Benedict goes on to say:

It is obvious that this dialogue can develop only in a context of sincere and committed spirituality. We cannot "bring about" unity by our powers alone. We can only obtain unity as a gift of the Holy Spirit. Consequently, spiritual ecumenism – prayer, conversion and the sanctification of life – constitutes the heart of the meeting and of the ecumenical movement (cf. “Unitatis Redintegratio”, n. 8; “Ut Unum Sint”, 15ff., 21, etc.). It could be said that the best form of ecumenism consists in living in accordance with the Gospel.   [italics mine]

Unity, then, will only come as a form of Grace, which we cannot create, but with which we must cooperate if is to be fruitful.  Our cooperation here, as in the rest of the Christian life, takes the form of fidelity, that is, “living in accordance with the Gospel.”      

     In his closing, Pope Benedict describes what that fidelity looks like:

I see good reason in this context for optimism in the fact that today a kind of "network" of spiritual links is developing between Catholics and Christians from the different Churches and Ecclesial Communities: each individual commits himself to prayer, to the examination of his own life, to the purification of memory, to the openness of charity.  

Prayer, first of all, which is calling upon God’s help and submitting to his will; examination of life and purification of memory, in order to remove obstacles emanating from pride, resentment, or decisive emotional attachments, and third, as a sort of summation (just where St. Paul puts it in 1 Corinthians 13:13), charity, love.  All must be done in a spirit of love toward our separated brethren in Christ.

Russell Moore

     This decade-old talk by the now Pope Emeritus came to mind when I ran across an interview the other day that Kathryn Lopez conducted with Russell Moore [here], president of the Southern Baptist Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission.  Moore had just returned from the Vatican where he had spoken at a conference on men, women, family, complementarity and various other related unfashionable topics.  There are some interesting connections between his comments and some of the points Benedict made in his talk.

     First of all, when Lopez asks “What was the ecumenical dynamic like”, Moore answers: “Well, this wasn’t one of those ‘let’s pretend we all agree on everything’ ecumenical gatherings, and that’s one of the reasons it was so productive.” He goes on to explain that

Jewish leaders  . . .  Mormons and Taoists and Buddhists spoke from their perspective, without pretending to be part of some generic “faith-based community.” The pope was Catholic. This was one of the few such gatherings I’ve attended where theology was taken seriously, both in our agreements and in our differences. Probably more important than the actual sessions, though, were the coffee breaks and the meals, where we had deep conversations about things that mattered. By the end of the week, I think many of us learned to love one another more.

What stands out for me here (aside from the encouraging endorsement of Pope Francis’s Catholicity: more on that below) is, first of all, the fidelity of all the participants to their own traditions.  Without such fidelity, there can be no authenticity, and without authenticity there can be no love.  And of course as Christians we recognize the importance of personal relationships: do we not come to know God through the person of the Man Jesus Christ?  Notice also, for Moore as for Benedict, the key thing is Love, which can only happen between persons, not institutions.

     Moore’s comments on the Catholic Church are of interest as well, particularly in light of Pope Benedict’s talk.  When asked why “it is important for the Catholic Church to lead on these things”, he answers

For most of our history, English and American Baptist Christians thought the greatest threat to religious liberty would come from the Roman Catholic Church. Now we find that some of our greatest allies on religious freedom are Roman Catholics. The threat to our religious liberties comes from a different papacy than we thought — that of a secularizing statism that seeks to pave over consciences with government power.

This would seem to be an example of what Benedict meant by bringing “common witness into the context of these great ethical challenges of our time.”   Of Pope Francis in particular Moore says:

I was especially cheered by his comments on marriage, especially given the media confusion just weeks earlier over the synod deliberations on the family. Pope Francis made it clear that he believes male/female complementarity is essential to marriage and that this cannot be undone or erased by modern ideologies. He also made clear that he believes that every child has the right to both a mother and a father.

It’s worth noting that the Baptist leader not only welcomes papal leadership in the cultural struggle, but seems as disappointed as many of us Catholics about the confusion emanating from the recent Synod on the Family.

     There is much else that is of interest in Lopez’s interview with Russell Moore, more than I can discuss here, but I’ll look at one last thing.  In response to a question about Christmas, Moore makes the following observations:

. . . the Christmas season ought to drive us to the biblical text, which is not all tinsel and garlands. Instead, the Christmas narrative is set in the context of spiritual warfare, of a light that is shining out of darkness.

For several years, I’ve been convinced that the model we most need in this day is that of Joseph of Nazareth. In a day when fathers are seen as expendable, we should look at Joseph, who sacrificed his own future for his wife and child. In a world filled with orphans in need of families, we should look at the example of this adopting father who poured out himself to become a father to one who was of no biological relation to him.

The Holy Family

It’s refreshing to hear a prominent Baptist speaking of St. Joseph in this way; he sounds almost Catholic (and in fact I have made similar observations myself: here for instance).  

     Of course, I’m not saying that we are seeing the end of the Reformation era divisions in the Church, or even the beginning of the end (to paraphrase Winston Churchill), but such signs of the thawing of emotional barriers, and the working of the Power of Love, are reason for Hope.  I propose that during this Advent, the Season of Hope, we make special intercession to St. Joseph, Foster-father of the Son of God,  Watchful defender of Christ,  Head of the Holy Family (and hence for the entire Christian Family), for the healing of the divisions in his Son’s Mystical Body.

O God, who in Thine ineffable providence didst vouchsafe to choose blessed Joseph to be the spouse of Thy most holy Mother: grant, we beseech Thee, that we may have him for an intercessor in heaven, whom we venerate as our protector on earth. Who livest and reignest world without end. Amen. 

Blessed Pope Paul VI Is Proved Right Yet Again

     Finally, careful consideration should be given to the danger of this power [i.e., contraception] passing into the hands of those public authorities who care little for the precepts of the moral law. Who will blame a government which in its attempt to resolve the problems affecting an entire country resorts to the same measures as are regarded as lawful by married people in the solution of a particular family difficulty? Who will prevent public authorities from favoring those contraceptive methods which they consider more effective? Should they regard this as necessary, they may even impose their use on everyone. (Bl. Paul VI, Humanae Vitae 17)

    Outrageous, but hardly surprising. As Pia Di Solenni reports [here], the World Health Organization (WHO) and UNICEF, the international aid group created by the United Nations, have been giving women in Kenya tetanus vaccine secretly laced with the HCG hormone, which causes infertility and miscarriages.  Di Solenni includes the text of a statement by the Catholic Bishops of Kenya detailing: the Kenyan government’s refusal to cooperate with the Bishops’ inquiries about the immunization program; their own clandestine efforts to acquire a few vials of the vaccine, all of which tested positive for the hormone; the “attempts to intimidate and blackmail medical professionals who have corroborated information about the vaccine, with threats of disciplinary action.” She also excerpts a portion of a statement by matercare.org that confirms the Bishops’ findings, and also reveals that the tetanus campaign in Kenya “is targeted at girls and women between the ages of 14-49 (child bearing age)” and involves giving five doses six months apart, which is not required for tetanus, but is necessary for the sterilization hormone.  The statement also reveals that WHO/UNICEF has previously done exactly the same thing in Mexico, Nicaragua, and the Phillipines.

     Sin loves company.  It’s not content to sit quietly by itself, but seeks to implicate others in its corruption.  And so we see now the working out of Pope Paul’s prediction: having freed ourselves from the burden of Christian morality, we determined first that contraception was Good for married people; next, if it’s good for them, well then, it must be good for everyone.  If it’s good for everyone, it must also be good for brown-skinned people living in poor countries, even if they don’t want it.  If they don’t want what’s good for them, then we more enlightened folks (having freed ourselves from the burden of Christian morality) have not just the right but an obligation to force it on them. 

     So it goes when we allow such power to pass “into the hands of those authorities who care little for the precepts of the moral law”.  The problem is, such authorities and, come to think of it, individuals, tend to create their own precepts, their own “moral law”, but it is untethered to God’s law, which is the only law perfectly attuned to the true good of humanity.  Thus Henri de Lubac, S.J., famously said: “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”. 

     Catholics have long believed that our personal sins affect not only ourselves, but our neighbors, the Church, and the rest of the World.  We have usually taken these effects to be more spiritual in nature, but we can see that it is true in a very practical material sense as well. When we reject God and his precepts, we reenact the rebellion of Satan and the Fall of Adam and Eve.  And as we see here, even private sins can eventually become Public Policy.

     Now, going to confession and resolving to avoid further sin will not directly or immediately help the exploited women of Kenya: that requires exposing the wrongdoing and working to change the policies that allow it.  In the long run, however, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.  If we want a more decent and moral world, we all (myself included  - mea culpa!) need to become more decent and moral people.  And we can only do that with God’s help.

    

Blessed Paul VI, the Synod, and Pope Francis

     I set out to write a post on Blessed Paul VI; I ended up saying as much about the synod at which he was beatified, and the Pope who presided over both synod and beatification, as I did about Pope Paul himself.  I'll address Blessed Paul more directly in the near future.

     Cardinal Giovanni Battista Montini is reported to have said at the time that St. John XXIII didn't realize what a "hornet's nest" he was stirring up in calling the Second Vatican Council.  A few short years later, Montini,  as Pope Paul VI, found himself presiding over that very hornet's nest.  He faced the Herculean task of trying to preserve the unity of the Church in the face of the forces that had been unleashed, both during the council and in the years that followed. Pope Paul's approach seemed to be based on the maxim (often erroneously attributed to St. Augustine): "Unity in essential things, liberty in doubtful things, charity in all things".  Pope John had quoted it in his first encyclical,  Ad Petri Cathedram [here], and Pope Paul took it to heart.  He allowed everyone to have his say when possible, which tended to create the appearance (and, quite frankly, often the reality) of disarray in the Church.  Where he judged it necessary, on the other hand, he firmly restated the traditional teaching: on priestly celibacy [here], for instance, the all-male clergy [here], and most famously, human sexuality in his most well-known encyclical, Humanae Vitae [here]. As a rule he refrained from condemnations, denunciations, and other seemingly uncharitable gestures.

Blessed Paul VI at the closing ceremony of the Second Vatican Council        

       Pope Paul is now Blessed Paul VI, having been beatified last weekend at the conclusion of the Extraordinary Synod on the Family.  Speaking of which, one can't help but agree with the numerous commentators who have observed that this synod was not just Extraordinary, but extraordinary.  There's no need for me to recap all the hijinx that took place; let it suffice to say that such public disarray in the upper reaches of the Church has not been seen the pontificate of, yes, Paul VI.

          There are some interesting connections here.  There has been a lot of speculation as to Pope Francis's position on the controverted issues and controversial maneuvering at the synod.  He gave Cardinal Kasper the opportunity to run with his long-time project of loosening up the rules preventing divorced Catholics who have remarried without annulment from receiving communion, and appointed administrators for the synod who finagled to make that and other liberalizing proposals seem much more agreeable to the assembled fathers than they actually were; he also put more traditionally-minded prelates such as South African Cardinal Napier in a position to counter the machinations of Kasper and his crew.  As the synod unfolded, the Pope appeared to have no public reaction to the actions of the liberalizing faction in the first week, nor to the successful revolt of the others in the second.  He very consciously took an evenhanded approach in his final address, mixing some "pox on both your houses" rhetoric with a call for unity in arriving at the truth.

          What does this have to do with the beatification of Paul VI?  Clearly, raising up the author of Humanae Vitae as the culmination of a synod on the family sends a pretty strong message that Pope Francis is not going to soften Church teaching in this area (as I previously suggested here).  I wonder if he isn't also looking to Blessed Pope Paul as a model for how to approach the question of Church Unity.  It may seem to him that, despite the fact that a whole lot of people weren't happy, Paul's light touch largely succeeded in holding the Church together.  The one significant exception, of course, was Archbishop Lefebvre and his followers, now embodied in the Society of Pius X - to whom Pope Francis seems to be making some very charitable overtures for reconciliation [here].  Like Blessed Paul VI, Francis seems to be aiming for a style more pleasing to the "progressives", while maintaining (on doctrinal matters, anyway) a more traditional substance.*

*. . . I haven't forgotten about the post-Vatican II reform of the liturgy: I'll get to that in another post.

To Be In, But Not Of, The World

Shaw’s Thesis

Russell Shaw

      Everyone wants to know what Pope Francis is really up to.  Is he the warm and fuzzy fulfillment of the “Spirit of Vatican II”?  Is he really another John Paul II or Benedict XVI in “progressive” clothing?  Who knows?  Russell Shaw comes up with as plausible an answer as any – really, better than most.  The Pope, he says, wants “to reshape the Catholic Church as a Missionary Church” (“Wanted: An American Missionary Church – Soon” here at The Catholic Thing).  Shaw cites Francis’ apostolic exhortation Evangelii Gaudium, in which the Pope says:

All of us are called to take part in this new missionary “going forth.” Each Christian and every community must discern the path that the Lord points out, but all of us are asked to obey his call to go forth from our own comfort zone in order to reach all “the peripheries in need of the light of the Gospel” [20]

“This”, Shaw tells us, “should be taken seriously”.  But he also adds that “taking up the challenge of being a Missionary Church would be a far more demanding – and exhilarating – project than this one-dimensional version of Francis and the Church” (he’s referring to the fluffy, easy-going, “who am I to judge?” image of the Pope popular with progressive types both in the Church and in the secular media).

     I don’t doubt that Shaw is correct that Pope Francis intends to encourage a more missionary ethos in the Church; it is also true that putting this ethos into practice is no easy task.  The Pope, quite properly, has presented a general direction; he has not dictated a concrete program or detailed plan, which leaves room for Catholic commentators like Mr. Shaw (and me - and you, if you’d like) to toss out our own ideas. 

The Assimilated Church and the Fortress Church

     Shaw turns his discussion at this point to the Church in the United States (although this discussion can apply to westernized countries in general).  Here is how he characterizes the issue:

Taking him seriously also could be a matter of survival, or something close to it.  Certainly, unless American Catholicism remakes itself as a Missionary Church, actively engaged in outreach to the world, it could become a rapidly, and irreversibly, shrinking ecclesiastical entity.

     The alternatives to a missionary Church for American Catholics are two and only two: the Assimilated Church and the Fortress Church.

Shaw goes on to explain that

In the Assimilated Church, most Catholics will have been homogenized into the values of American secular culture and become parts of it.  Indeed, many American Catholics already have chosen this option . . .

The Fortress Church, on the other hand,

Is fundamentally different.  If this is to be the future, Catholics will have largely withdrawn – psychologically, spiritually, and even physically – from contact with secular culture, raising the ecclesiastical ramparts against its influence as they retreat.  The Fortress Church is already disturbingly evident in some elements of the new Catholic subculture that’s begun to emerge.  It is a survival tactic born of desperation.

By contrast, while American Catholicism as Missionary Church will also be committed to opposing secular values incompatible with the faith, it will work hard to preach the Gospel, attract adherents, and, where, possible, evangelize the culture itself.

This is where Mr. Shaw takes a wrong turn.  I agree with what he says about the Assimilated Church - one might argue that many, maybe most, American Catholics are there already.  It seems to me that in the case of the Fortress Church, however, he’s putting up a straw man.  I don’t doubt that such a thing is a possibility, a fortress mentality may well take hold in the case of some individuals or in isolated pockets of the Church, but what I’ve seen of the “emerging Catholic subculture” looks nothing like what Mr. Shaw is describing above.

The Valley Forge Gambit

     It’s hard for me to be specific here, because Shaw does not say what, specifically, he finds so alarming in that “subculture”.  I’m supposing that he means things such as homeschooling, doing away with television, attending the Extraordinary Form of the Mass and other apparent “retreats” from the societal norm. These things, however, don’t necessarily mean closing oneself off from the larger world.  In fact, just such measures may be necessary if one is to be an effective missionary to the world, which includes both Assimilated Catholics and non-Catholics alike.

     A historical analogy may help illustrate my point.  In 1776 George Washington led his large and enthusiastic but largely untrained army against a combined force of British regulars and Hessian mercenaries at the Battle of Brooklyn [here].  His inexperienced Continental Army was simply not prepared for the shock of its encounter with professional soldiers, and collapsed in a disastrous rout. After Washington was subsequently driven from New York, he withdrew his army to the relative protection of Valley Forge, Pennsylvania. Had Washington and his army stayed in Valley Forge, of course, the war would eventually have been lost.   Instead, temporarily safe from enemy attack his army was able to reform, refit (at least after Congress voted the funds) and receive solid military training under the supervision Friedrich Von Steuben, a European soldier who had served as an officer in Frederick the Great’s Prussian Army.  As a result, a much better prepared Continental Army met the British two years later at the Battle of Monmouth [here] and fought them to a standstill, and but for the inept leadership of one of Washington’s subordinates, General Charles Lee, might have won a decisive victory.  As it was, the British withdrew leaving Washington in possession of the battlefield.

Von Steuben drilling American troops at Valley Forge 

     This, I suggest, is a better analogy for what is happening among many American Catholics than Shaw’s fortress.  The culture at large has become toxic: anti-family, anti-morality . . . anti-God.  It is dangerous to immerse ourselves in it, deadly to allow our children to be formed by it.  We need to equip ourselves properly before going out into such a world, or else we’ll fare no better than the Continental Army did in the Battle of Brooklyn. In fact, we may be more likely to be converted by the world than we are to convert it.  We need some space and time in a healthier atmosphere, away from the temptations and onslaughts of the secular world.  We need to train ourselves in our faith, both its meaning and its practice.  We need our own Valley Forge, and perhaps the spiritual equivalent of a Von Steuben, before we can be that Missionary Church that Pope Francis is calling us to be.  And that's what the subculture that Shaw sees emerging is all about.

Did Someone Say “Clericalism”?

     Russell Shaw, who has been a fine observer of and commenter upon the Catholic scene in the United States for a long time, has got this one wrong because he only sees part of the picture.  He believes that our biggest problem is “clericalism” (!) in the form of a “passivity” that assumes that the ordained clergy will do all the heavy lifting:

Thus a plan of action designed for execution only or mainly by Church professionals won’t do the job.  Unfortunately, this is what we’re all too likely to get from the clericalized  cadres of today’s American Catholicism, indoctrinated as they are in the merits of lay ministry and cut off from the experience of a robust lay apostolate directed to engagement with the world.

With all due respect to Mr. Shaw, he seems completely unaware of the new ecclesial movements (Opus Dei, Communion and Liberation, Focolare, etc.), composed mostly of lay people, and most of which have an explicit goal of better equipping the laity to witness to Christ “out in the world”.  He makes no mention of a whole Apologetics Industry that includes Catholic television, radio, print publications, and more online resources than can be listed here.  None of these resources, created and staffed overwhelmingly by lay persons, existed fifty years ago at the time of the Second Vatican Council.  I regularly listen to one Catholic radio program that at least once a week has programs restricted to calls from non-Catholics, or from Atheists, or pro-abortion or pro-gay marriage callers – and they never seem to run out of such callers.  That’s hardly a fortress mentality.  And it’s worth pointing out that homeschooled students tend to be more socially involved than the population as a whole, both as teens and adults (see here and here).

What Do You Want First, The Good News Or The Bad News?

     Am I saying that all is well, and that the Church in the United States is the picture of spiritual health?  No, indeed.  The statistics that Mr. Shaw cites to illustrate the decline of the Church are real and sobering:

According to the Official Catholic Directory, from 1998 tom 2013 the annual number of Catholic marriages dropped from 289,000 to 164,000; infant baptisms from just over 1 million to 763,000; enrollment in Catholic elementary and secondary schools from 2.7 million to barely 2 million; and enrollment in non-school religious education from 4.3 million to 3.4 million.

The logical end point of assimilation is to become so assimilated that one ceases to be Catholic altogether.  At the same time, there’s a growing core of lay Catholics who are committed to living a truly Christ-centered life, and who are likewise committed to bringing the faith in its fullness to both their fallen-away brethren and to the wider world.  They fit very nicely, in fact, Russell Shaw’s description of the Missionary Church: “committed to opposing secular values incompatible with the faith, [working] hard to preach the Gospel, attract adherents, and, where, possible, evangelize the culture itself.”

There lies the future of Catholicism.

Good News: The Pope Is Catholic

     The Synod on the Family scheduled to convene in Rome this coming October is generating a lot of interest, much more so than such events  generally do outside of official circles.  In the wider Catholic world there are three main groups that are paying close attention.  The first is the  “progressives” who believe that Pope Francis is really one of them, and are convinced that the synod will liberalize Church practice and, who knows, maybe even doctrine in the area of sexuality and marriage (there has been a lot of loose talk about lifting the restriction on divorced and remarried Catholics receiving communion, for instance).  The second group is composed of those of a more traditional bent who are nonetheless afraid that the first group is right both in its assessment of the current pontiff and in its expectations for the synod.  Finally there are those orthodox Catholics who trust that the Pope is himself orthodox (despite some poorly thought-out comments in interviews with the popular press), and expect that the synod will do little harm, and might, possibly, do something toward improving the Church’s poor performance in communicating its teaching on marriage, family, and sexuality over the last few decades.

     Last Thursday the Vatican released an Instrumentum Laboris, a document setting out the agenda for the synod, called The Pastoral Challenges of the Family in the Context of Evangelization (a good commentary on the document from Lifesitenews is here, the official text here). This document will please the last of the three groups listed above, reassure the second, and cause anxiety for the first.  Drawing on the results of a world-wide survey of Catholics, the document reaches two very interesting conclusions.  First: “The People of God’s knowledge of conciliar and post-conciliar documents on the Magisterium of the family seems to be rather wanting” and that their teachings “do not seem to have taken a foothold in the faithful’s mentality.” In fact, “many Christians, for various reasons, are found to be unaware of the very existence of this teaching.”  Second, the instrumentum notes that many respondents found the clergy in many cases “are not sufficiently familiar with the documentation on marriage and the family”, that “the clergy sometimes feel so unsuited and ill- prepared to treat issues regarding sexuality, fertility and procreation that they often choose to remain silent.”  Not only that “Some responses also voice a certain dissatisfaction with some members of the clergy who appear indifferent to some moral teachings.”

     There’s nothing terribly earth-shattering here; most of us have probably made many of these same observations (I myself did just last week in my post on St. John Fisher, here).  There are two reasons, however, to find this document encouraging.  First, it suggests that the planned focus of the upcoming synod is not to water down Church teaching, as many liberalizers hope, but to improve the effectiveness Church’s teaching; the final result may well come out differently, but this is a hopeful sign.  Also, it appears that the Pope who is overseeing the process is, in fact, Catholic (who would have guessed?), a Catholic who believes in the Church’s doctrine on marriage and sexuality, and is serious about teaching it.

     One could easily miss this last point if all you read about Pope Francis is the popular press.  There are some more knowledgeable commentators (such as the inimitable Fr. Z) who have been claiming the Pope for the Church all along, and now even some some of the players on the other side are coming to the same realization; consider, for instance, this recent story from the left-wing Salon: “Pope Francis’ new clothes: Why his progressive image is white smoke and mirrors – Don’t buy his populist rhetoric.  The new pope is every bit the sexist homophobe as his predecessors.” He must be doing something right.