iacobusm Faith and Culture

Why the Church is not a Granfalloon

     The word “community” must test well in focus groups. It pops up everywhere.  Pay attention to advertisements, and you’ll find that all sorts of people and businesses are claiming to be able to provide it to you. Just one example: I heard an ad on the radio last week from a local savings bank suggesting I go there for “community” – and here I thought the bank was just a place to keep my money.  

     I’m not the only one to notice how often the term community is tossed around. Casey Chalk had an article in Crisis this past week called “The Problem with Peloton and Other Faux Communities.” Peloton, apparently, is a self-proclaimed community in which one can commune online with other people around the world while pedalling a false bicycle that never actually goes anywhere . . . and the starting price is only $1,900.  Chalk contrasts the simulacrum of community offered by Peloton and other online entities (such as “Facebook, Twitter, and all the rest of these digital worlds [that] actually operate as ersatz communities that allow members to maintain a curated, if not fabricated image of themselves”) to the true communion offered by Jesus Christ in the Eucharist through His Church.

Kurt Vonnegut (Photograph by Santi Visalli / Getty)

     Chalk raises some very good points, but I’d like to expand the discussion a little.  His Crisis piece focuses on the falseness, the ersatzheit (if that’s a word), of online communities, but the problem is bigger than that. Some of you may be familiar with the Kurt Vonnegut novel Cat’s Cradle, for which Vonnegut created the word granfalloon.  A granfalloon is an apparent community in which the purported commonality between the members is illusory or meaningless.  The narrator of the story offers as examples: “the Communist Party, the Daughters of the American Revolution, the General Electric Company—and any nation, anytime, anywhere.”  Vonnegut himself in another place describes granfalloons as “a proud and meaningless association of human beings.”

     Let it be noted that Cat’s Cradle was published in 1963, several decades before there was any such thing as the internet.  All the same the term “granfalloon” took on a life of its own because people recognized that false communities were, to use the current expression, “a thing.”  A big thing.  It’s a fact that we have a powerful desire to join ourselves with other people, even if we need to invest an undeserved importance in meaningless commonalities such as geographical proximity, liking the same sports team, or riding a similar fake bike.  We are constantly looking for community, but it seems hard to find anything that really satisfies us.

     Vonnegut, a religious skeptic, was unable to offer any real alternative to the granfalloons.  He does stumble upon a part of the truth, however: his novel features a contrived religion, Bokononism, which was created expressly to take advantage of the relentless human drive for community. Bokononism itself is just another granfalloon, of course, and a particularly cynical one at that.  Religion, however, true religion at least, points us in the right direction.

     The key to the problem comes from the stylus of St. Augustine*:  “You made us for yourself, Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.” We don’t always recognize our desire for communion with our Maker for what is.  Perhaps more often, we are afraid of what it might require of us.  And so we try to satisfy it with other things, including (but not limited to) the Communist Party, the Daughters of the American Revolution, the General Electric Company—and any nation, anytime, anywhere.

     That’s not to say there’s no place for community: our Creator put that in our hearts too, but it’s a matter of priority.  Consider the following passage from the Gospel of Mark:

And one of the scribes came up and heard them disputing with one another, and seeing that he answered them well, asked him, “Which commandment is the first of all?”  Jesus answered, “The first is, ‘Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one;  and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.’  The second is this, ‘You shall love our neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.”  (Mark 12:28-31)

The love of God needs to take priority.  With our finite hearts and minds, however, we find it difficult to love the Infinite Creator of the Universe. That would seem to be one of the reasons the Second Person of the Trinity became Man. He is, as St. Paul tells us, “the image of the invisible God” (Col 1:15), He gives us a human face to love.  

     That does not mean that our desire for community with our fellow men and women is wrong.  Jesus tells us:

A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another; even as I have loved you, that you also love one another.  By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another. (John 13:34-35)

It’s just that our love for our fellow creatures doesn’t stop there: “Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me.” (Matthew 25:40).  We are called on to love God, together, through our love of each other.

Ad Orientem Mass (Youtube/Madison Diocese via ncronline.org)

     A wonderful living symbol of this communal love directed toward our Lord is the way we gather as a community for the sacrifice of the Mass. The image is clearer in the traditional ad orientem Mass, where the congregation together with the presiding priest communally addresses our praise to the Son, represented by the Sun rising in the East.  Pope Benedict has recommended that, in the case of ad populum Masses in which the priest faces the people, a crucifix be placed on the altar as a reminder that we are all there to direct our attention communally to our Lord, not to each other.

     The point is that the Church doesn’t exist as a community for the sake of the community itself, it exists to bring us into communion with the Trinitarian God. Even fundamentally good and essential communities such as the family can’t do that (“If any one comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple.” –Luke 14:26). Peloton, the Communist Party, and General Electric don’t even come close. Only the Church can offer communion with the Body of Christ.  That’s why the Church is the one community on this Earth that is not, in the end, a granfalloon.

*In last week’s post “Welcome to Mission Territory” I referred to a certain quote from John Adams as “one of my two favorite quotes.”  Well, this is the other, and by far the more profound of the two.

Feature image above: “The Catholic Mass” by Fyodor Bronnikov, 1869

iacobusm Faith and Culture

Welcome to Mission Territory

“When a man stops believing in God he doesn’t then believe in nothing, he believes anything.”

     You have probably run across the quote above, usually attributed to G.K. Chesterton.  While Chesterton never actually said it in quite those words, it does appear that he really did express this sentiment in a somewhat different form in several places (for more information, see this discussion on the website of The Apostolate of Common Sense).  More to the point, the events of the recent past have shown this observation by the  “The Prince of Paradox” to be tragically on target.

G. K. Chesterton

     In that regard, allow me to direct your attention to some other quotes (albeit somewhat less witty) that you have probably run across.  In the run up to last year’s election yard signs started popping up with a rainbow colored litany that ran something like this:

science is real

black lives matter

no human is illegal

love is love

women’s rights are human rights

kindness is everything

     The interesting thing is that, not only do none of these statements mean what they appear to mean, not a single one of them is even intended to mean what it appears to mean.  “Science is real”, for example, is declaration that if you disagree with a certain global climate theory, however much you ground your argument in data and scientific reasoning, you’ll be branded a “science denier” (and don’t you dare even bring up the lack of any scientific basis at all for the current vogue for genderism or other current enthusiasms).  “Love is love” means that intrinsically sterile homosexual relationships are exactly the same as the generative relationships between men and women. “Women’s rights are human rights” refers to the “right” of grown women to kill their unborn babies (including unborn women) if they find it convenient.  And of course, “kindness is everything” means that if you disagree with any of the above you are ipso facto a “hater”, and kinder folks have every right (indeed, the responsibility) to destroy your reputation and your livelihood.

     Again, don’t expect any effort to explain or justify the statements above: they’re not intended to form any sort of coherent argument; they’re not even intended as a coherent political program, although they are very much intended as a political statement.  The litany above is in fact a religious Creed, a statement of adherence to a political religion, the apotheosis of pure Will in the form of Government Power.

     So, what’s the connection between the Kindness Creed and the quote attributed to Chesterton? Let’s go back to the first clause of the initial quote: “When a man stops believing in God . . .” If you doubt that we in the United States no longer believe in God, consider the report just released by the Gallup organization: for the first time in American history, a majority do not formally belong to any religious body. In 2020 the figure had declined to 47%:

When we look at the generational breakdown, we can see that each successive generation is less religious than its predecessors.  This is not simply a matter of people becoming more religious as they age; in fact, the trend lines move in the other direction: every group actually becomes less religious over time, including those born before 1946.  The big story that the chart below shows is that, as decade follows decade, proportionally fewer Americans have any experience of religion at all:

     Now, people can believe in God, and even identify with a particular religious group, without the benefit of formal membership.  The Gallup report indicates that there are in fact a fairly sizable number of people who fall into this category:

The U.S. remains a religious nation, with more than seven in 10 affiliating with some type of organized religion.

. . . but there’s a big “however” coming:

However, far fewer, now less than half, have a formal membership with a specific house of worship. While it is possible that part of the decline seen in 2020 was temporary and related to the coronavirus pandemic, continued decline in future decades seems inevitable, given the much lower levels of religiosity and church membership among younger versus older generations of adults.

     I would take it a little further.  While it is certainly conceivable that someone could have a strong and meaningful faith in God without belonging to a church (or synagogue, mosque, etc.), joining with other believers in worship of God is the primary way in which that faith becomes a reality in our lives, rather than just an abstraction. People who never attend church are unlikely to have any experience of religion in their lives, and are correspondingly unlikely to be influenced by religious moral teachings and values.  

    In other words, the change noted in the graphs above is of enormous significance.  A generation or two ago the accepted wisdom of our society was taken directly from Christianity.  This is not to say that everyone lived perfectly in accord with Christian teachings, but that everybody’s attitudes and expectations were shaped by those teachings, even among the non-religious.  That is no longer the case, and we can see the results in, for instance, radically changed attitudes toward marriage, sexual morality, and so on. Christian morality used to be the default; no longer.

     What’s true of morality is true in other areas as well.  Fifteen years ago Arthur C. Brooks published a book called Who Really Cares, in which he explored in meticulous detail all the statistical data that demonstrated, contrary to popular impressions, that political conservatives give more time and money (a lot more) to charity than do liberals. Among the various factors that Brooks examined, one of the most prominent was the fact that statistics show that religious belief is a large determinant in personal charity.  Believers are much more charitable than non-believers, and so religious liberals, for example, give more of their time and treasure than non-religious conservatives do. The main reason why conservatives over all were more generous fifteen years ago when Brooks published his book is that religious liberals made up only 7% of the population. Conservatives were then and are now more generous givers largely because conservatives are much more religious.

     Or were.  Conservatives are still quite a bit more religious than liberals, but the data from Gallup cited above indicates that, along with everyone else, they are less religious than they used to be, and will be even less religious in the years to come. Expect less charity in our society, and more government.

“At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.”

-Justice Anthony Kennedy, Planned Parenthood v. Casey

  

   Which brings us to the second half of the Chestertonian paradox: “. . . he believes anything.”  The problem goes beyond charity and personal morality. We should expect all sorts of craziness to manifest itself in the years to come. That’s the significance of the Kindness Is Everything Litany.  When a critical mass of the population is no longer constrained by a belief in a Transcendent God, what is left to limit the human will? U. S. Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, in a moment of unintentional self-parody, authored the most famous formulation of the Creed of the Unconstrained Will in the 1992 Planned Parenthood v. Casey decision: “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.”  This quasi-mystical piece of fantasy (derisively called the “Sweet Mystery of Life Passage” by Justice Antonin Scalia) is now the closest thing we have to a dominant political philosophy in the West.  

     Politics can’t fix this. That’s not to say there isn’t an important role for politics in mitigating the damage: just this past week another Supreme Court Justice, Clarence Thomas, suggested in a concurrence that the protections our increasingly totalitarian big tech companies currently enjoy might be up for legal challenge.  We should take him up on that.  As I previously explained here, here, and here, however, the political issues are in fact a consequence of cultural and, prior to that, religious causes.

     So, yes, by all means, let’s keep fighting the political fight, but given the societal trends (and the Gallup data above is just the latest evidence), we can expect the political arena to become increasingly difficult. Long term we need to work on bringing our country back to Christ.  One of my two favorite quotes is this one from John Adams: “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” Well, we are no longer a moral or a religious people.  Welcome to mission territory: we have our work cut out for us.

Featured image above: “Francis Xavier” by Bartolomé Esteban Murillo  , c. 1670. St. Francis Xavier is a patron saint of missions.

iacobusm Faith and Culture

The Crisis of Fatherhood and the Litany of St. Joseph

     How odd St. Joseph, the human father of Jesus, must look to so many of us today.  We live in an age that distrusts the traditional features of fatherhood, and even denigrates them as “toxic masculinity.”  Small wonder that fatherhood itself is in steep decline.  According to the National Fatherhood Initiative, “19.7 million children in America—more than one in four—live without their biological dad in the home.” (“The Father Absence Crisis in America“)  That unprecedented figure is growing all the time, in spite of the fact that the decline of fatherhood has such devastating and clearly documented consequences: a four times greater likelihood of living in poverty; a greater likelihood of emotional and behavioral problems, infant mortality, crime and imprisonment, teen pregnancy, drug abuse, obesity, dropping out of school, and all the other problems that flow from those circumstances (see the article linked above for citations).

      As horrific as those consequences are, Christians know that there’s something even worse. The Church has always taught us that human fatherhood is merely a reflection: as Jesus himself puts it, “call no man your father on earth, for you have one Father, who is in heaven.” (Matthew 23:9) Human fathers are merely stewards, and our authority is not our own, nor do we exercise if for our own sake.  Granted, many of us abuse the authority God has entrusted to us, and none of us exercise it perfectly, but to reject fatherhood itself is to reject God.  It should come as no surprise that the decline of fatherhood has gone hand-in-hand with a decline in faith.  It’s hard to overstate the gravity of this last point. After all, as tragic as all the problems cited above are, they are temporary, we don’t take them with us when we leave this world.  If we lose our connection to God, however, the loss can be eternal.

“. . . call no man your father on earth, for you have one Father, who is in heaven.” (Matthew 23:9)

“The Vision of Ezekial” by Raphael, (1518)*

   

  The Crisis of Fatherhood points us in the direction of St. Joseph, the pinnacle of human fatherhood.   We can certainly use his help, now more than ever. One of the best ways to build our relationship with him is by praying the Litany of St. Joseph, a prayer given formal approval by Pope Pius X at the dawning of the twentieth century. It’s a prayer particularly suited to the strange and troubling times in which we live.

     Something St. Joseph’s Litany has in common with other especially powerful prayers such as the Our Father is that God uses the very words that we’re addressing to him to speak to us in return. Let’s look at how that works in the Our Father, the prayer Jesus taught his Apostles when they asked him how they should pray (Matthew 6:9-15 & Luke 11:2-4). In the first part, from “Our Father ” through “as it is in Heaven,” the words tell us something of the nature of our relationship to God: he is our Father, but at the same time above and beyond us, the final authority both in the eternal world and in this one.  Next, as we pray for our sustenance and the forgiveness of our sins, our words remind us that we are obligated to show the same mercy to others in turn: “as we forgive those who trespass against us.”  Finally, we acknowledge our attachment to sin (“lead us not into temptation”), and our reliance on God’s Grace in resisting it (“deliver us from evil”).

     We see something similar at work in the Litany of St. Joseph (I’ve posted the prayer in its entirety below if you want to refer to it).  We honor Joseph as the human father of God, but the litany that bears his name begins instead with an invocation to the Trinitarian God:

Lord, have mercy on us. Christ, have mercy on us. Lord, have mercy on us. Christ, hear us. Christ,

graciously hear us.

God the Father of Heaven, have mercy on us.

God, the Holy Ghost,

Holy Trinity, One God, have mercy on us.

    The fact that the prayer starts with our reliance on God and not with St. Joseph himself is a reminder that Joseph’s paternal authority, as we noted above, belongs not to himself but to Our Father in Heaven.

     The next invocation is, again, directed toward someone other than St. Joseph:  “Holy Mary, pray for us.” Joseph’s wife also takes precedence! This brings to mind the following passage from St. Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians: “Husbands, love your wives as Christ loved the Church and gave himself up for her” (Ephesians 5:25).  The purpose of our fatherhood is not to please ourselves, but to “give ourselves up” to our wives and families, as Jesus does for the Church, and just as Joseph did for Mary and Jesus.

     It’s only at this point that we address Joseph himself, first recalling his lineage (“Scion of David”), his role in Salvation History (“Spouse of the Mother of God . . . Foster-father of the Son of God”) and a long list of his virtues and attributes, all of which are given to him very explicitly for the purpose of protecting and serving (Head of the Holy Family . . . Most Chaste . . . Pillar of Families . . . Terror of Demons . . .).

        Then, after asking St. Joseph to pray for us, we turn our attention back to Christ under a title that highlights his sacrificial role, “Lamb of God”:

     Lamb of God, who takest away the sins of the world, spare us, O Lord.

     Lamb of God, who takest away the sins of the world, graciously hear us, O Lord.

     Lamb of God, who takest away the sins of the world, have mercy on us.

     Here the prayer reminds us that, as Christ sacrificed himself for us, and St. Joseph sacrificed himself for his wife and child, we fathers are also called to sacrifice ourselves on behalf of our own families.

“The Flight into Egypt” by Jacopo Bassano (1544)

     The last thing we see before the closing prayer of the litany is this verse and response:

     V. He made him lord over his house,

     R. And the ruler of all his possessions.

     This is an exact quote from Psalm 105:21, which itself refers back to Genesis 39:5: “So Joseph found favor in his sight and attended him, and he made him overseer of his house and put him in charge of all that he had.” This is not a reference to St. Joseph father of Jesus, who would not be born until centuries after these verses were written. These verses refer to Joseph son of Jacob, who was brought as a slave to Egypt. As it happens, there are many compelling connections between the two Josephs; the earlier Joseph is in fact what we call a type, a precursor of the Father of Jesus. The connection that most concerns us here is that Joseph the foreign-born slave is granted authority by the King of Egypt over his royal household, just as centuries later Joseph of Bethlehem is granted authority by the King of All Creation over his Holy Family.

     Our role as fathers today (and this includes all men, because all men are called to exercise Fatherhood in some way, even if we don’t preside over a household with children) follows the same pattern. Our family here on Earth is not really our own, it has been put temporarily under our care by the King of Kings (needless to say, we will be answerable to him for how we carry out the charge). As Catholic men we are also responsible (as is St. Joseph) for the protection of his larger family, the Church.

     It has become increasingly difficult to be just, chaste, prudent, etc., in a world where fatherhood has become more and more debased, and men are encouraged to behave like overgrown adolescents, or randy satyrs. Our society simply does not support fathers, and in fact seeks to undermine fatherhood itself. That’s why the closing prayer of the Litany of St. Joseph is so urgently suited to the needs of our times:

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.

I don’t post country music clips very often, but the song below by Randy Travis very powerfully connects the story of Joseph to the modern crisis of fatherhood. The Litany of St. Joseph is posted beneath the clip.

Litany of St. Joseph

Lord, have mercy on us. Christ, have mercy on us. Lord, have mercy on us. Christ, hear us. Christ,

graciously hear us.

God the Father of Heaven, have mercy on us.

God, the Holy Ghost,

Holy Trinity, One God, have mercy on us.

Holy Mary, pray for us.

Saint Joseph,

Illustrious Scion of David,

Light of Patriarchs,

Spouse of the Mother of God,

Chaste guardian of the Virgin,

Foster-father of the Son of God,

Watchful defender of Christ,

Head of the Holy Family,

Joseph most just,

Joseph most chaste,

Joseph most prudent,

Joseph most valiant,

Joseph most obedient,

Joseph most faithful,

Mirror of patience,

Lover of poverty,

Model of workmen,

Glory of home life,

Guardian of virgins,

Pillar of families,

Solace of the afflicted,

Hope of the sick,

Patron of the dying,

Terror of demons,

Protector of Holy Church, pray for us.

Lamb of God, who takest away the sins of the world, spare us, O Lord.

Lamb of God, who takest away the sins of the world, graciously hear us, O Lord.

Lamb of God, who takest away the sins of the world, have mercy on us.

V. He made him lord over his house,

R. And the ruler of all his possessions.

Let us pray.

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.

*By Raphael – Own work, J1m1mayers, 1 January 1518, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=63865341

iacobusm Faith and Culture

Don’t Be So Judgmental!

My, how times have changed.  We used to have the Seven Deadly Sins and the Sins That Cry Out to Heaven For Vengeance. Most of these don’t seem of much concern to most people any more, even in many institutions that claim to be Catholic; some are even treated almost as virtues. In their place is a larger and ever enlarging Index of Forbiddden -isms: transphobism, climate denialism, islamophobism, etc., with the Granddaddy of All, the Wickedest Capital Sin, being Judgmentalism  (unless you’re judging someone you’re accusing of judgmentalism . . . or one of the other isms . . . in which case it is positively a virtue).

“The Granddaddy of All, the Wickedest Capital Sin today, is Judgmentalism“

     I first published the Throwback piece below on November 21st, 2014.  Much has changed since then: I no longer teach in a Catholic school, for instance.  Anthony Esolen* likewise no longer teaches in the nominally Catholic college he has sometimes referred to as “St. Eustaby” (pronounced “Saint Used-To-Be”, as in used to be Catholic). By all reports he’s finding the environment and student body at Magdalen College in Warner, NH, much more attuned to the traditional Catholic understanding of God and His universe.  In the world outside, however,  things have travelled even further along the same grim trajectory . . .  

Athanasius Against the World

   I hesitate to use the now overworked term “perfect storm”, but the past few weeks I have felt like my world has been the nexus of a whole collection of angry weather systems.  I’ll share just a couple of the highlights, or better yet lowlights.  There was the recent Sunday when I found myself (not me individually, but me and people like me) berated from the pulpit for having the temerity to expect Catholic clergy to speak out in support of the Church’s moral teaching on issues such as abortion, marriage, serial adultery, etc.  We were told we should be more like the Pope, and welcome everyone with a wink and nod and just stick to talking about Jesus (too bad Pope Francis didn’t get the memo: see here).  Then there was a recent Friday afternoon, when I found myself trying to explain the Church’s teaching on human sexuality to a classroom full of fourteen-year-olds, to whom the idea that one need not indulge any and every sexual desire seemed novel and inexplicably bizarre. I began to feel a little bit like Athanasius Contra Mundum**, “Athanasius Against the World”.  Shouldn’t these kids have heard this somewhere before, or from someone, anyone, beyond their 9th grade religion teacher?  Even students from church-going families seemed unfamiliar with the idea that there is a real alternative to the self-righteous libertinism of the popular culture.  This particular group was not unique: I’ve been seeing it more and more over the years.

Athanasius Contra Mundum (Otto Bitschnau)

The Good Professor Says His Piece

     Coincidentally (perhaps?), when I arrived home that same day my lovely bride was eager to share with me an article by Anthony Esolen that had just come up on the Crisis Magazine website (“Who Will Rescue the Lost Sheep of the Lonely Revolution?”).  Apparently, Professor Esolen is also getting rather frustrated with trying to reach students who have grown up immersed in the grim propaganda of the sexual revolution. These young people either simply don’t know that there is another (more excellent) way, or they have heard the truth, but seeing no examples of anyone celebrating this truth or living it out, simply discount it.  He makes an impassioned plea to all purportedly Catholic adults, including, emphatically, those with teaching authority in the Church, to “man up”, as it were (my term, not his), and speak boldly for the sake our young people who are being left to wither on the vine:

Let me speak up for the young people who see the beauty of the moral law and the teachings of the Church, and who are blessed with noble aspirations, but who are given no help, none, from their listless parents, their listless churches, their crude and cynical classmates, their corrupted schools. These youths and maidens in a healthier time would be youths and maidens indeed, and when they married they would become the heart of any parish. Do we expect heroic sanctity from them? Their very friendliness will work against them. They will fall. Do you care? Many of these will eventually “shack up,” and some will leave dead children in the wake of their friendliness. Where are you? You say that they should not kill the children they have begotten, and you are right about that. So why are you shrugging and turning aside from the very habits that bring children into the world outside of the haven of marriage?

The Self-Help Guy Agrees

Esolen makes a number of important points, particularly that our culture is toxic, that its moral corruption has very real material consequences, and, most damning, that we have largely abandoned our young people to it.  Some years ago the late self-help author Stephen Covey pointed out (in only somewhat less emotional language) that raising morally sound and emotionally healthy children has become much more difficult in our current environment:

In the past, it was easier to successfully raise a family ‘out-side-in’ because society was an ally, a resource.  People were surrounded by role models, examples, media reinforcement, and family-friendly laws and support systems that sustained marriage and helped create strong families. Even when there were problems within the family, there was still this powerful reinforcement of the whole idea of successful marriage and family life . . .  

(Stephen Covey, The7 Habits of Highly Effective Families, p. 15)

That is no longer the case. In fact, society now actively subverts parents’ efforts to raise their children: it is, as Covey puts it, “family-fatal”. He marshals an impressive array of statistics (he cites sources for all of these in his book) to support his assertion:  

  • Illegitimate birth rates have increased more than 400 percent.
  • The percentage of families headed by a single parent has more than tripled.
  • The divorce rate has more than doubled. Many project that about half of all new marriages will end in divorce.
  • Teenage suicide has increased almost 300 percent.
  • Scholastic Aptitude Test scores among all students have dropped 73 points.
  • The number one health problem for American women today is domestic violence, four million women are beaten each year by their partners.
  • One fourth of all adolescents contract a sexually transmitted disease before they graduate from high school.
  • Since 1940 the top disciplinary problems in public schools have changed from chewing gum and running in the halls to teen pregnancy, rape, and assault. (Stephen Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Families, p. 16)

     Covey’s book was published in 1997; I guarantee that these statistics have not changed for the better in the intervening 17 years [now 24 years].  And these are only some of the more obvious bad consequences of what Esolen calls the “Lonely Revolution”.

Who Needs Those Goofy Rules Anyway?

     If you’d like something more recent, here’s an item from last week, an article from the Catholic News Agency called “Agree to Disagree: Why Young Catholics Pose a Unique Challenge For the Church.”  It seems that a recent study commissioned by the U.S. bishops has found that young Catholics, even those who consider themselves devout, feel free to ignore “’goofy’ rules” that they don’t like:

If any Church teachings conflict with their own perceptions, young people simply “tune out” the teachings.

“They agree to disagree with the Church,” [Archbishop Thoma Wenski] said.

Furthermore, young Catholics are sensitive to language that could imply judgment. “For them, language like ‘hate the sin love the sinner’ means ‘hate the sinner’,” Archbishop Wenski said.

     The last sentence gives the game away, even if the article does not explicitly say which particular “goofy” rules are at issue: the conflation of the sin with the sinner, in conjunction with the damning charge of “judgmentalism”, is a preferred tactic that the storm troopers of the Sexual Revolution often employ to lead good Christians into error.  The Church, on the other hand, guided by the old legal maxim Qui bene distinguit, bene docet, “he who distinguishes well, teaches well”, has always understood that not only is “hating the sin” not the same as “hating the sinner”, but in fact that if we love the sinner we must hate the sin. Notice, by the way, that docet, “teach”, comes from the same root as doctrine: doctrine is the sacred teaching of the Church.  If those responsible for teaching doctrine don’t teach, then those under their tutelage will be left to the teaching of the World, which, as we have seen, non distinguit, “does not distinguish”, and in fact intentionally fails to do so in order to deceive. Is it any wonder, then, that our young people also non distinguunt? The Church is supposed to be a Sign of Contradiction (Luke 2:34), but if all she offers is a Nod and a Wink, then how is any distinction possible between her teaching and what the Conventional Wisdom has on offer?  Do we not then give tacit assent?

     Where’s That in The Bible?

     The underlying problem is not a new one.  Let’s go back a little into the past, to the Book of the Prophet Ezekial:

If I say to the wicked, ‘You shall surely die,’ and you give him no warning, nor speak to warn the wicked from his wicked way, in order to save his life, that wicked man shall die in his iniquity; but his blood I will require at your hand. But if you warn the wicked, and he does not turn from his wickedness, or from his wicked way, he shall die in his iniquity; but you will have saved your life.  (Ezekial 3:18-19)

“. . . that wicked man shall die in his iniquity; but his blood I will require at your hand.” -Ezekial 3:18

Ezekial, by Michelangelo

All of us baptized Christians have a prophetic office, and the warning addressed to Ezekial above applies to all of us, as the Letter of James tells us:

My brethren, if any one among you wanders from the truth and some one brings him back, let him know that whoever brings back a sinner from the error of his way will save his soul from death and will cover a multitude of sins. (James 5:19-20)

When it comes to guiding the young, our Lord himself puts the matter even more starkly:

Whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better to have a great millstone fastened round his neck and to be drowned in the depth of the sea. (Matthew 18:6)

Avoiding unpleasant Truths, it seems, is not an option.

Go And Sin No More

     To return to the homilist with whom I began this little excursus, he’s correct that we need to model the love of Jesus, but we do that when we speak the Truth in love (Ephesians 4:15).  When we distinguish between the sin and the sinner, we can show that we hate the sin because of our love for the sinner, because we understand the harm it is doing him.  I recently tuned in to a Catholic radio station just in time to hear a host ending his show by saying: “The worst thing you can do for somebody is to allow him to wallow in sin.”  That’s exactly right: it is more loving to warn a person about sin, with all its painful consequences, than to leave them ignorant of something that’s destroying them.  And if we’re going to talk about Jesus, should we not mention that he suffered and died for the express purpose of saving us from sin?

     I’m not saying we should be mean, or accusatory, or call people names.  We do, however,  need to recognize, as Anthony Esolen points out, that the currently popular sexual sins are not simply harmless “peccadilloes”: they destroy families and ruin people’s lives, and put people in danger of being lost forever.  Jesus saved the woman caught in adultery from stoning, but he also told her: “Go and sin no more” (John 8:11).  We all, and particularly those of us appointed as teachers, should be prepared to say the same.

*Dr. Esolen, by the way, has another excellent article in Crisis Magazine today: “The Church and the Barbarians“

**St. Athanasius of Alexandria (AD 296-373) was known as Athanasius Contra Mundum, “Athanasius Against the World” because he vigorously defended orthodox Trinitarian belief against the Arian heresy, in opposition to most of his fellow bishops and a series of Roman emperors.

iacobusm Faith and Culture

Steyn, Spong, Kempton, and The Passion Of The Christ 2021

Where were you on February 25th, 2004?  Well, we might not remember the exact date, but most of us (except the youngsters) will remember the event.  On this date seventeen years ago Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ was released. That year Ash Wednesday fell on the 25th of February, and Gibson intentionally timed the release of his film, a cinematic depiction of the last 24 hours of the human life of Jesus, to coincide with the beginning of Lent.

     It’s hard to overstate the impact the film made at the time.  It remained the largest grossing non – English Language film of all time (all the dialogue was in Aramaic and Latin) until 2017, when it was overtaken by something called Wolf Warrior 2 (your guess is as good as mine).  It sparked quite a bit of controversy, as well as some substantial discussion, about antisemitism and violence in films, and about the meaning of the suffering, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.  The film was also credited with bringing many Christians back to a closer embrace of their faith, and with bringing some non-Christians to conversion.

     In 2014 critic Mark Steyn marked the tenth anniversary of the release of The Passion of the Christ with an update of his original review from 2004, which he has apparently continued to update since.  Reading Steyn’s resurrected review helped me pull together various stray thoughts in my mind, which resulted in a blog post I called “Steyn, Spong, Kempton, And The Passion of the Christ”.  I suppose if Steyn could republish his piece ten years later, I can repost mine after seven (it is Throwback Thursday, after all).  More to the point, the issues raised are still as relevant, if not more so, as they were seven years ago.  My (only slightly updated) post is below:

Sometimes there is a certain event that perfectly crystallizes important social trends: such was Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ. We may forget ten years later [now 17] the magnitude of the film’s impact.  Last week Mark Steyn marked its ten year anniversary with an updated review [here].  While I disagree with some of his points (more on this below), Steyn does a good job of capturing the movie’s social and spiritual significance, while at the same time recognizing some of its artistic weaknesses.  His most incisive observation is that the controversy sparked by the movie was “not between Christians and Jews, but between believing Christians and the broader post-Christian culture, a term that covers a large swathe of the media to your average Anglican vicar.”  There’s a lot packed in to that brief quote, including a recognition of the sad reality that a very large part of that “post-Christian culture” is made up of people who claim to be (and very often think that they are) “believing Christians”.  Among protestants the two groups break down to some degree along denominational lines, although even the most “progressive” churches have some members who adhere to a more traditional Christian belief and practice; in the Catholic Church we’re all thrown in together, which tends to keep things lively.

Jim Caveziel as Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane; Satan (Rosalinda Celentano) in the background.

     One of those devout, traditional Christians in a denomination that was much less so was the late left-wing journalist and commentator Murray Kempton, who was an Episcopalian.  I remember reading one of his columns at least a decade before The Passion came out in which he was comparing Catholic Cardinal O’Connor, then Archbishop of New York, to Episcopalian bishop John Shelby Spong of Newark, New Jersey.  As I recall, Kempton had less than kind words for co-religionist Spong, who had made himself a darling of the cultural elite by publicly doubting the Resurrection and by dismissing orthodox Christian morality. At the same time, the columnist lavished high praise on the Catholic Cardinal, with whom he doubtless disagreed on many points, but whose determination to teach without apology the faith as received from the Apostles was undeniable.  I don’t recall the Kempton’s exact words from a distance of more than twenty years, but I have retained a very clear recollection of his assertion that a man who could not affirm the most essential Christian doctrine had no business being a bishop.  To Murray Kempton, it was a matter of integrity: be what you are!

     Murray Kempton and Cardinal O’Connor are no longer with us, but John Shelby Spong, it seems, lives on.  The now-retired Episcopal bishop was a major focus in an article published in the Washington Post on Holy Saturday [2014] which assures us that “The Gospel Story Of Jesus’ Resurrection Is A Source Of Deep Rifts In The Christian Religion”.  You may wonder exactly what “Christian Religion” they’re talking about.  After all, belief in the Resurrection is, and always has been, the absolute minimum requirement for being a Christian. St. Paul says that if Christ didn’t rise from the dead we are the most pitiful of men (1 Cor. 15:19) – and he had never even met Bishop Spong. The Resurrection has always marked the rift between “The Christian Religion” and everyone else: on one side you’re a Christian, on the other you’re not. In any case, Easter has become an annual occasion for the secular press to celebrate self-proclaimed Christians who deny the divinity of Christ, or the latest hyped-up claim that such-and-such archaeological discovery “proves” that Jesus had brothers, children, wives, etc. Why should they care?  Because the Church and believing Christians are all that stand between them and the “progressive” program of re-making the world in the image of whatever passing notion appeals to them at the time.

Mel Gibson’s Satan: he, she, it – who knows?

     Which brings me back to Steyn’s review of The Passion of the Christ. One of his criticisms  with which I disagree is his take on Gibson’s Satan.  Steyn dismisses him (Her? It?) as “a cross between Nosferatu and Jessica Lange in All That Jazz”.  I don’t actually disagree with that description, but where Steyn sees it as a misstep, I found the creepy androgyny of Gibson’s Evil One (played in the film by actress Rosalinda Celentano) to be a particularly astute touch, especially for a 21st century audience.  Non Serviam! “I will not serve!” is the essence of Satan; Lucifer’s refusal to be what God made him to be lies at the heart of his fall.  His refusal here to be either male or female is a brilliant counterpoint to the creation story in Genesis: “Male and female he created them (Genesis 5:2)”. It also, of course, aptly reflects the refusal by so many in our world today to accept this basic truth about human nature, not just in our sexual relationships but even in our very bodies. Which, in turn, brings us back to  Integrity, which is, after all, about much more than telling the truth: it is about being a fully integrated whole, about truly being who you are.

     This is where Steyn, Spong, Kempton and The Passion of the Christ all come together.  While The Passion was a big hit among the believing crowd, there are nevertheless any number of reasons why a devout Christian might not like the film.  Its effect, however, has been to cast a bright light on the growing divide between enduring Christian belief and the Spirit of an Age that more and more is succumbing to what Cardinal Ratzinger, just before he became Pope Benedict XVI, called “the dictatorship of relativism”, an age in which integrity has been conquered by ideology. The late, great Richard John Neuhaus used to say that “When orthodoxy becomes optional, sooner or later it will be proscribed.”  In the decade [now seventeen years] since the release of The Passion of the Christ, the wisdom of those words has become ever clearer.  St. Ignatius of Loyola describes two armies facing each other, Christ’s and Satan’s; there’s no middle ground. Eventually, we all have to be who we truly are, and choose our Master, our Commander: which one will it be, Christ or Satan?

iacobusm Faith and Culture

St. Valentine, Patron of Agape

A Cloud of Witnesses


The Letter to the Hebrews tells us that we live out our life of faith here on earth in view of a “cloud of witnesses” (Hebrews 12:1), which is to say our holy predecessors. They watch over us from before the Throne of God, where they cheer us on and intercede on our behalf.  At the time the letter was written, all these witnesses were holy men and women from Old Testament times, but that cloud has been expanding constantly over the centuries since to include countless Christian Saints. They are truly our witnesses before God, and also our examples, heroes who show us the path to follow.

Communion of Saints
(Baptistry, Padua, by Jose Ruiz Ribeiro)

Speaking for myself, one of the unintended rewards of dabbling in bloggery over the past few years is that, in researching and writing blog posts on many of these saints, I’ve come to know them so much better. I’ve come to a deeper appreciation of famous heroes of the faith whom I thought I already knew, such as St. Joseph and St. Therese of Lisieux. I’ve also come to know many more obscure saints, some of whom I had never heard of before: St. Peregrinus and St. Mellitus are just two examples. Today, however, we have the curious case of a saint who somehow manages to fall into both of these categories. He is universally “known”, at least insofar as his name is a household word, even among non-Catholics, and in fact among non-Christians.  At the same time, a great many people don’t even know they’re speaking the name of a Christian saint, and those who do know it know almost nothing about the man himself, or even whether he was one man, or two.

A Shadowy Saint

     I am speaking, of course, of St. Valentine, whose traditional feast day is February 14th.  There can be no doubt that such a saint existed: the archaeological evidence includes a church dedicated to him at a very early date, and Pope St. Gelasius I added him to the liturgical calendar as a martyr in the year 496.  His celebration was removed, however, in the reform of the General Roman Calendar in 1969 (although he is still acknowledged as a legitimate saint) because there is very little trustworthy information about him beyond the bare fact that he gave his life as a martyr for the faith in the time of the Emperor Claudius Gothicus, most likely in the year 269 A.D.

St. Valentine Baptizing St. Lucilla
by Jacopo Bassano

     The legends attached to his name are indeed inconsistent, but there are some common threads among them. Some stories involve Valentine miraculously curing a young girl of blindness.  The girl is either the daughter of a Roman judge named Asterius, who consequently converts to Christianity with his whole 44-person household, or of the jailer who is holding Valentine; here, the saint closes his final letter to the young lady he cured in a way that has become familiar to the recipients of countless Valentine’s cards over the years: “Your Valentine.” Other stories depict Valentine as a bishop who secretly performs Christian weddings, a crime at the time, for which he is arrested.  All accounts agree that he refused to renounce Christianity, and died a martyr for the Faith.

True Love

    We can see in St. Valentine’s affectionate farewell to the girl he cured, and in his connection to marriage, the germ of his later reputation as a “saint of love”.  It has been suggested that his feast day was offered by the Church as a chaste alternative to the Lupercalia, an old pagan fertility feast that took place on February 15th.  It is true that Pope Gelasius I, the same pontiff who instituted St. Valentine’s day, also harshly criticized Christians who still observed Lupercalia, and formally abolished its observance.  While the circumstances suggest a connection between the two acts, there is no documentary evidence that he specifically intended to replace the pagan feast on the 15th with the saint’s day on the 14th. Another boost to St. Valentine’s reputation seems to have come in the Middle Ages, when it was a commonly held belief that birds paired up in mid February, around the time of his feast day.

Pope St. Gelasius elevated Feast of St. Valentine, suppressed Lupercalia.

     Whatever its origins, we can see that his reputation has grown over the centuries to such an extent that it has take on a life of its own, with increasingly less overt connection to the saint himself.  Stroll through the seasonal section of any retailer at this time of year and you will be assaulted by a wave of pink, emblazoned with messages about “Valentines Day” – most of which have long since lost the prefix “Saint”.  The celebrations aimed at schoolchildren, at least, tend to be mostly innocent, albeit desanctified. The pop-cultural messages directed at those beyond grade school, however, have strayed far from anything St. Valentine would have understood as “love”, to something he would have recognized as an almost Lupercalian eros. Adults are invited to see “Valentines” Day as a time to celebrate sexual love, with very little mention of marriage. In recent years we have also seen the phenomenon known as “V Day” (here even the saint’s name is gone), which curiously employs a perverse and degrading theatrical performance (modesty prevents me from going into detail) toward the otherwise laudable goal of ending violence against girls and women.

Agape vs. Eros

     The state of our society today is every bit as bad as what Pope Gelasius faced in the 5th century, perhaps worse.  We would do well to look back the original stories of St. Valentine, whether or not they meet the exacting standards of modern historians,  to see what they tell us about love and marriage.  St. Valentine was a champion of Christian marriage, to the point of giving up his life for it.  Not only that, his fond farewell to the young woman he had cured was an expression of respect, affection, and of concern for another, an act of self-giving, not the self-directed taking of lust.  St. Valentine is a patron saint of transcendent love, of agape, not eros.

     That, I think, is the Christian take on this wonderful saint.  I started out by talking about the saints as both intercessors and heroes. Here is a saint who gave his life to bring men and women together in the loving bond of Christian marriage, and whose last thought as he faced his own death was directed toward comforting another.  What better image to offer in response to the self-indulgent, dehumanizing sexuality that is so prevalent today? In an age that so thoroughly and tragically misunderstands the meaning of love and marriage, we should put the “Saint” back in front of Valentine and hold him up as an Icon of True Love, the Patron of Agape.

iacobusm Advent and Christmas, Faith and Culture, The Church

A Smaller, Purer Church?

Fr. Ratzinger Speaks 

“It seems a good time to take a break from all the culture war stuff.”  So I said in the introduction to my last post.  The Lord knows we could all use a break, and yet the hits keep on coming, don’t they? Well, as that witty old atheist Leon Trotsky might have said, “You may not be interested in the Culture War, but the Culture War is interested in you”.  The forces pushing culture war don’t seem to feel the need for a break at all, and they’re coming right at us.

     But the Culture War, you might recall, is only one front in the larger war.  In some earlier posts (here and here) I used the image of a pyramid to illustrate the different levels upon which our society is built, with politics the top (and least important), with culture underlying politics, and religion as the bottom level, the basis for the whole structure. I’ve touched previously on the political and cultural fronts of the war (which is, at root, a spiritual conflict); today we’re going to look at the religious front.

     Let’s start with one of the more famous non-doctrinal statements of Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, going back to long before he became pope, or even a bishop: that the Church of the future would be a “smaller, purer Church”.  While there’s no record of him ever saying it in exactly those words, that does fairly accurately sum up a number of statements Joseph Ratzinger made over the years. The earliest and perhaps most famous instance was in a Christmas Day address on German radio in 1969, when the future Pope Benedict XVI was simply Fr. Ratzinger, a theology professor at the University of Tübingen in Germany.

“From the crisis of today the Church of tomorrow will emerge — a Church that has lost much.“

   

 

The Crisis of Today and the Church of Tomorrow

We’d be mistaken if we thought that Fr. Ratzinger was advocating a smaller, purer Church, or suggesting we’d be better off if we jettisoned members who don’t live up to a certain standard of purity.  Nor was his address a “prophecy” in the Biblical sense, although the past half century has shown it to be prophetic in the more colloquial sense, in that it accurately foretold what was to come (this was the sense I meant in a previous piece several years ago called “Fr. Ratzinger’s Prophecy”).  In reality, all Fr. Ratzinger was doing was looking at social trends, the “signs of the times” (see Matthew 16:3). He saw a society in which Christian belief was becoming less important with, as a consequence, progressively less social advantage to membership. As the advantage diminished and eventually disappeared, the less committed members would move out, and on to something else:

From the crisis of today the Church of tomorrow will emerge — a Church that has lost much. She will become small and will have to start afresh more or less from the beginning. She will no longer be able to inhabit many of the edifices she built in prosperity. As the number of her adherents diminishes, so it will lose many of her social privileges. In contrast to an earlier age, it will be seen much more as a voluntary society, entered only by free decision . . .

Most of us would probably agree, half a century later, that Fr. Ratzinger was on to something. As for the Church becoming purer, he says:

The Church will be a more spiritual Church, not presuming upon a political mandate, flirting as little with the Left as with the Right. It will be hard going for the Church, for the process of crystallization and clarification will cost her much valuable energy. It will make her poor and cause her to become the Church of the meek. The process will be all the more arduous, for sectarian narrow-mindedness as well as pompous self-will will have to be shed.

Signs of the Decline

Hard going, indeed: I suspect we’re still only beginning to see how hard it’s going to be.  But let’s go back to the first part here, the “smaller Church”.  Social science data gives us a more tangible idea of what the decline in Christianity looks like.  The Pew Research Center has been measuring religious practice and attitudes for the past several decades.  The decline in Christian belief and practice is very real, as a report published by the Pew Center a little over a year ago shows (In U.S., Decline of Christianity Continues at Rapid Pace  ).  There’s not space to go into all the details here, but you can get the main idea from two of its numerous graphs.

The first graph shows that in the twelve years from 2007-2019 the number of Americans who identify as Christian has declined from 77% or 78%, depending on the which survey you look at, to 71% in 2014 and 65% in 2019.  At the same time, the so-called “Nones”, Americans who have no religious affiliation increased from 16% or 17% to 23% in 2014 and 26% in 2019:

The second graph is even more sobering, because it strongly suggests  the decline will only get worse.  We see every succeeding generation less Christian and more disconnected.  The Millennial Generation comprising those Americans born between 1981-1996 is the first in American history in which less than half identify as Christian:

  Now, it’s likely that many of those Millennials will “find religion” as they get older.  That’s not unusual.  In order even to catch up with the not-terribly-religious Generation X, however, they would need to go through a Great Awakening greater than anything this country has ever seen. We can also be sure that some who now consider themselves Christian will fall away later in life.  Given all that, it’s not unreasonable to project that, a generation or two down the road, Christians will be in the minority in the United States.

Those Who Lap Like Dogs

     So, how are we to square this sobering prognosis with Christ’s promise that the Gates of Hell would not prevail against His Church (Matthew 16:18)? Well, first of all, Christ’s Church is not the same as our local churches.  Large stretches of the Middle East and North Africa that used to be solidly Christian are now peopled overwhelmingly by Muslims; we have no guarantee that the Church in the United States will survive.  We also have no guarantee that individual souls will be saved; even victorious armies suffer casualties, sometimes heavy ones.

     At the same time, a trend is only a trend as long as it keeps going in the same direction. Consider the story of Gideon, in the Book of Judges.  Gideon was bringing out his army to face the Midianites when he heard the voice of God:

The Lord said to Gideon, “The people with you are too many for me to give the Midianites into their hand, lest Israel vaunt themselves against me, saying, ‘My own hand has delivered me.’ Now therefore proclaim in the ears of the people, saying, ‘Whoever is fearful and trembling, let him return home.’” And Gideon tested them; twenty-two thousand returned, and ten thousand remained. (Judges 7:2-3)

That, however, wasn’t enough:

And the Lord said to Gideon, “The people are still too many; take them down to the water and I will test them for you there; and he of whom I say to you, ‘This man shall go with you,’ shall go with you; and any of whom I say to you, ‘This man shall not go with you,’ shall not go.”  So he brought the people down to the water; and the Lord said to Gideon, “Every one that laps the water with his tongue, as a dog laps, you shall set by himself; likewise every one that kneels down to drink.”  And the number of those that lapped, putting their hands to their mouths, was three hundred men; but all the rest of the people knelt down to drink water.  And the Lord said to Gideon, “With the three hundred men that lapped I will deliver you, and give the Midianites into your hand . . . (Judges 7:4-7)

“Gideon Overcoming the Midianites” by Peter Paul Rubens (c. 1625-1630)

And of course The Lord did deliver Midian into the hands of Gideon, but not as we might expect.  While Gideon and his three hundred blew trumpets, broke jars, waved torches, and shouted, among the Midianites “the Lord set every man’s sword against his fellow and against all the army; and the army fled as far as Beth-shittah toward Zererah” (Judges 7:22).  It couldn’t have been clearer to Gideon and his followers that they didn’t defeat Midian through their own prowess: they themselves were rescued from Midian by the God in Whom they trusted.

Hope in The Lord

     The story of Gideon should give us hope. It is clear we have just about come to that place Fr. Ratzinger foresaw when membership in the Church would no longer confer social advantages; it may even be that we are entering an era when being a Christian is an actual detriment (there are some places, such as academia, where it already is). The fearful and trembling are on their way home, and soon, perhaps, we’ll be down to the three hundred who lap like dogs.  What happens then? Let’s go back to Fr. Ratzinger:

     But when the trial of this sifting is past, a great power will flow from a more spiritualized and simplified Church. Men in a totally planned world will find themselves unspeakably lonely. If they have completely lost sight of God, they will feel the whole horror of their poverty. Then they will discover the little flock of believers as something wholly new. They will discover it as a hope that is meant for them, an answer for which they have always been searching in secret.

   This is where the story of Christ’s Church diverges from the story of Gideon. Gideon and his army chased down the confused and frightened Midianites with the sword; the reduced and purified Church will, instead, offer them a beacon of hope. The remaining Christians will truly need to be the salt that gives savor to a godless world, and the light to “shine before men, that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven.” (Matthew 5:16). Ratzinger accordingly predicts:

 It may well no longer be the dominant social power to the extent that she was until recently; but it will enjoy a fresh blossoming and be seen as man’s home, where he will find life and hope beyond death.

     There is reason for Hope amid the gloom.  Christ’s Church may need to suffer as Jesus himself did on the Cross, but there’s no Resurrection without the Crucifixion.  As St. Peter reminds us:

In this you rejoice, though now for a little while you may have to suffer various trials, so that the genuineness of your faith, more precious than gold which though perishable is tested by fire, may redound to praise and glory and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ. (1 Peter 1:6-7)

iacobusm Faith and Culture

“Art” For A Degraded Age

Warning: the post below deals with material inappropriate for small children, for adults with artistic taste, or for anyone with a sense of decency.

     I first published this throwback in 2015 on the Feast of the Triumph of the Cross, September 14th. This is what my lovely bride refers to as a “screed”, that is to say, a full-bore culture war rant.  I tend not to write so many of these lately: I generally aim for more measured tones, but I think this fits with the theme I’ve been developing here about the importance of culture in providing fertile soil for faith to flourish. This piece just takes a more, well, negative approach (that is, it focuses on what not to do). After all, some things really ought to criticized.  So, buckle up. here goes . . .

  The other day I heard a commentator on Catholic radio say that the Church has always “considered church buildings to be arguments”, where not just the paintings and statues, but the architecture and use of space itself teach us what it is to be part of an ordered universe with God at its head.  This is a theme  I’ve broached a few times myself in terms of church architecture, and more broadly in regard to the arts in general. Catholicism has always understood that art and the arts not only play an important role in shaping our understanding of our world and our place in it, but can also teach us about our place in the world beyond this one.

     Today I want to take a quick look at one recent example of a very different argument in the architecture, an instance of where, as a society, we’re going in the wrong direction. The ugly little building pictured to the left, designed by Atelier Van Lieshout for the Ruhrtriennale Festival in Bochum, Germany, is supposed to resemble two people engaged in the sexual act.

According to Rookje Meijerjink, a publicist for Atelier Van Lieshout, many people are delighted by it.  The Daily Mirror (full article here) quotes her as saying:

The response by both professionals, press and the general public has been very positive, the installation has featured in a large number of renowned Dutch and German newspapers, magazines and television stations, and has gathered a lot of attention online.

With all due respect to the professionals, press, public, etc., I’m afraid I can’t agree: I contend that the building is ugly, degrading, and anti-human. The very fact that people can speak publicly of such a thing as anything other than pornographic junk, or better yet, the fact that they even allowed it to be put up at all, is a sad commentary on the sorry state of a once Christian culture.

     It’s defenders, of course, roll out the usual quasi-intellectual artspeak gobbledygook in an attempt to make this eyesore seem like a respectable artistic creation.  The Daily Mirror tells us that it “is intended to show the power of humanity over the natural world, and our disrupted relationship with nature”. Uh-huh. Ms. Meijerink assures us that:  

The artwork pays tribute to the ingenuity, the sophistication and the capacities of humankind, to the power of organisation, and to the use of this power to dominate, domesticate the natural environment.

Indeed.  It looks more to me like something a perverted pre-adolescent might make out of lego blocks, which I suppose is in keeping with the infantilism of much that passes as “art” these days. Specifically, while it is obviously intended to resemble a sexual act, the participants don’t really look like human beings.  The crude, block-like design of the structure is suggestive of people, but could just as easily be robots, animals, or any combination of the above.

     Also, while I don’t believe that it’s really possible to express the true beauty of the marital embrace in a work of representative art (for a variety of reasons both moral and esthetic), this creation doesn’t even try. Everything from the not-quite-human crudeness of the forms to the functional rather than intimate postures of the figures seems to be an intentional mockery of anything that could be called “love making” in favor of “mating”,  or perhaps other words too uncouth to reproduce in this space. In short, rather than showing “the power of humanity over the natural world”, it is showing humanity subjugated by unthinking animal passions.

The “open arms” of St. Peter’s Basilica

     Those aren’t the only reasons why this structure so perfectly captures the spirit of its age.  It isn’t hidden in a private gallery, or in some xxx domain on the internet where the prurient-minded must intentionally seek it out: it is huge, public, and in-your-face, where no man, woman , or child could possibly miss it. One can’t help but be impressed (granted, in a somewhat nauseated way) by how this one piece of . . . um . . . “art” . . . so perfectly incorporates within itself so many of the most toxic features of the current popular culture: the celebration of ugliness over beauty, a pornification of human sexuality that insists on infusing it into everything while at the same time turning it into something no more exalted than bestial rutting, and the aggressive insistence that everyone, willing or not, must wallow together in the filth. What a contrast between this nasty little piece of work and the sweeping colonnades of St. Peter’s Basilica, which are meant to represent loving arms open to embrace the whole world with the love of Christ.  

     Now, I know that it’s tempting to dismiss the whole thing as a puerile, harmless prank.  I disagree.  Sure, this one piece of ugliness, which will probably soon come down anyway (the show of which it is a part is scheduled to close in a couple of weeks) is not the end of civilization as we have known it.  But it’s not just one piece; it is one more piece, one more bit of degradation, pushing the boundaries of the acceptable just a little beyond the last thing that was “no big deal”, one more step toward cultural oblivion. And there will be something else, just a little more “transgressive”, after this, and another, and another.  The Devil is in the details, and he has nothing else to do with his time; he’ll keep on pushing, forever if given the chance.  

     That’s why the “culture wars” shouldn’t be dismissed as a distraction, or a waste of time: they have become the front lines in the eternal combat between the armies of Christ and those of Satan.  We know our General will win in the end, but there are still plenty of battles, and souls, we can lose along the way if we refuse to fight.

iacobusm Faith and Culture, Faith and Politics

Religion, Culture, & Politics

    How important should politics be to a serious Christian? What is the importance of culture? I hit a bit of a hot button last week in my introductory post on this blog when I wrote:

I promise to try not to get too caught up in the specifics of politics.  Politics is like the horse in Psalm 33:  “The war horse is vain hope for victory, and by its great might it cannot save” (Psalm 33:17).

“The war horse is vain hope for victory, and by its great might it cannot save” (Psalm 33:17).

    One commenter took me to task for downplaying the importance of politics, pointing out (correctly) that, in its beginning, Naziism presented a primarily political problem; if German Christians both Catholic and Protestant had understood that their faith obliged them to oppose Hitler and the Nazis in the political sphere, enormous evils might have been averted. She’s right – and yes, Christians should have worked to stop Naziism at the political level before it metastasized into the full-blown horror of the Third Reich.

     I agree that we should be involved in politics – and as I pointed out to the commenter above, I started this blog in the first place at least in part as a political act, a rejection of the Twitters & Googles and all their works and empty promises, and in particular their giant thumbs on the scales of our political discourse.  We need to understand politics in its proper place, however, as a means to an end, not as an end in itself. I’d like to explore that idea in a little more detail here.

    Let’s start in my wild and crazy undergraduate days, when I thought it would be interesting to take a course called “Theory of Communism”.  Much of it turned out to be not-so-interesting, particularly some of the assigned reading, which contained what must have been the most tedious prose I ever had the misfortune to read (who knew world revolution could be so dull?).

figure 1

     I did take away a few things, though.  One thing that stuck with me was a diagram the professor put on the board one day.  It looked like a pyramid made of three steps (figure 1). On the bottom and largest step he wrote “economics”, on the middle step “culture”, and he labeled the smallest step, the one on the top, “politics”.  The pyramid was a graphic illustration of the Marxist concept of how society is structured: the economy forms the basis for society, and the foundation (and source) of the culture, the second step, that rests on top of it; the political system is founded on top of the other two.  

     While it is itself a product of the economic system, the culture helps to preserve that system, and the political system serves to protect the two lower layers from which it procedes.  Given this concept, we can see why the Marxists believe that simply changing the economic system will lead to a new kind of society, and even a New Man . . . a change, granted, achieved with a helpful nudge here and there from the propaganda power of a properly revolutionized culture and state power taken into the hands of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat.

figure 2

     This pyramid came back to my mind a couple decades later when I read George Weigel’s biography of Pope St. John Paul II.  John Paul knew that the Marxist understanding of  human society was all wrong.  The economic system is a product of the culture, not the other way around, and culture’s true foundation is religion. If John Paul II had felt inclined to use a pyramid diagram as my college propfessor did, it would look something like figure 2. At any rate, he believed that, if he reconnected the Polish people with their religious heritage, they would embrace their true culture. Then, a more authentic, human politics would become possible, and the Communist police state would wither away.  Events proved that he was right, and the Marxists were wrong.

Figure 3

     Now let’s take it a step further, because the second pyramid is not quite complete.  Religion has one thing in common with politics: it’s not an end in itself.  The word religion is believed to derive from the Latin religare, which means to bind back, i.e., to reconnect.  And to whom or what does it bind us back? To God, of course. God is the ultimate foundation of everything.  The Marxists aren’t wrong that the upper layers of society are a product of the lower layers, and that they serve to preserve and protect the layers that lie below.  They are wrong about which layers are dependent upon which, and being atheists they deny the existence of the most important layer of all. If St. John Paul was right, and it appears that he was, our conclusion should be that the end of a healthy politics is to protect a healthy culture, which in turn provides fertile ground for sound religious institutions, which then serve to bind us back us to Our Lord.  Notice that politics does not bring us salvation: it merely helps create conditions conducive to those institutions that can lead us in the direction of our true Savior.

     So what does all that have to do with us here and now?  Let’s go back to the second pyramid, which contains the three layers within our control. For two thousand years, our culture and politics have rested on the foundation of religion, most tangibly present in the Catholic Church (and in varying degrees in other Christian communities as well).  While the upper levels are dependent on the lower, they can protect those layers beneath . . . or actually harm them.  It’s undeniable that religion has been crumbling, and as it does, culture and politics and economics follow suit.  But remember, the influences go both ways: weakened cultural and political institutions fail to do their job of protecting the  the base, and religion is further damaged.  I sometimes picture an actual step pyramid in my mind, with pieces of the upper levels falling off and smashing parts of the lower levels as they collapse on top of it.

     So, yes, politics is important, but its role is mostly defensive: it can protect the cultural and religious institutions that it rests upon, or if it is neglected or abused it can damage or even destroy them.  Politics itself can help order our material existence in the short term, and protect life and property, but it can’t create human happiness.  Attempts to use politics to achieve utopia have always resulted in bloody failure. Marxism in practice, for example, has always tried to use political power to force the changes that it seeks in the cultural and economic spheres, with incalculable loss in human life and societal destruction.

     For us, even if we win the political battles we see in front of us (and I agree that they need to be fought), the victory will only be temporary if the culture is eroding beneath us, and our religious foundation is collapsing under that.  While I don’t agree with Rod Dreher that the culture war is already lost, we are losing it, and losing badly. We must  fight the political battles for justice in the short term (as in, for instance, the fight to protect innocent life), but the long term battle will be won or lost at a more foundational level.

There’s more that could be said on this topic, but this post is already running too long. We’ll come back to it next week – I welcome your thoughts in the meanwhile.

(See my follow-up post: “In the World But Not Of It”)