Nice Guys and Good People
It is quite some time now since I started toying with the idea of an article about an incident that happened to me in Rome in the 1980s. But for one reason or another I kept putting off doing anything about it. However, after reading Dr. Alice von Hildebrand's splendid article on "Nature and Supernature" in The Wanderer (January 24, 2008), I have at last been stimulated into putting my fingers to the keyboard because the incident I mentioned so well illustrates some of the consequences of not having an adequate knowledge of the difference between the natural and supernatural orders and how they are related.
The incident took place in the Via della Conciliazione, the wide street leading from the Tiber to St. Peter's. I was walking with a Jesuit friend and some distance ahead, fortunately far enough to be out of earshot, was a bishop.
"Who's that?" I asked.
"Bishop So-and-so," my friend replied. "He's a terrible heretic." Then there was a slight pause, before he added, "He's a nice guy all the same."
"Father, I said sharply. "That's irrelevant, his being a nice guy, I mean."
Why did I think it irrelevant? Isn't it better that even a heretical bishop should be a nice guy rather than a nasty one?
For his own good, possibly Yes. But for the common good of the Church, I would definitely say No (assuming the man in question was in fact unreliable in regard to faith and morals) because for many of the faithful his nice-guyness will make his heresies more acceptable.
This state of affairs can also work the other way around. For a long time now we have become accustomed to hearing certain members of the clergy defending illegitimate demands by the laity for this or that aspect of the Church's teaching to be changed or watered down on the grounds that the lay people in question are "good people" or even "some of our best people." Since "some of our best people" want it, what they want must be dogmatically all right or in the process of becoming so.
What, exactly, does "best people" mean in this context?
When it does not, regrettably, carry the implication of our richer or more influential sheep, it usually means reasonably well-educated people with good manners and pleasant personalities, at least in the normal course of things.
That all this is a most deplorable state of affairs, I'm sure most of my readers will agree, but what makes Dr. von Hildebrand's article so particularly interesting is the way in which it highlights the cause. Large numbers of the faithful are no longer able to distinguish between the natural and supernatural virtues and their relative importance.
Natural virtues — things like politeness, cleanliness, or orderliness — (all the things "our best people" have in abundance) are certainly good in themselves. But not only are they vastly lower in rank than supernatural virtues like faith, hope, and charity, there is often very little personal merit in them if we have been brought up by good parents or have never been tested by some serious setback. If that has been our good fortune, and we are not sufficiently aware of how much we owe to grace, it is easy, not only to think that we are better than we are, but to think our natural virtues are a kind of permanent part of us like the faculties of sight and hearing.
This shows itself, I think, in the way we react when we hear of some particularly horrible crime. "How is it possible?" we say to ourselves. "It is inconceivable." We admit we are capable of sinning, but we cannot imagine ourselves doing anything of that sort. It is simply not part of the way we are. But that, I believe, is a misconception, and I think I am right in saying it is the Church's belief too. While it is of course right and understandable to be horrified by any serious evil, we should not be led into thinking that in no circumstances could we have been brought to commit such an evil ourselves.
I remember reading how the Cure d'Ars told a fellow priest that he once asked God to show him what he would have been like without His grace. He was so appalled by what he saw that he warned the other priest never to make such a request himself. God often, it seems, gives these insights to holy people to help keep them humble the nearer they get to Him.
We do not, of course, like Luther, believe that human nature is totally corrupt. It is full of good and beautiful God-given qualities, as we see every day. But we should not underestimate the extent to which our present state, if we have no serious unconfessed sins on our conscience, is dependent on grace; how much grace is needed to help us keep even the natural virtues, which we owe so much to our upbringing, in good trim.
Taking all this into account, one could in a sense say that our "nice-guy" clergy and "best" lay people have been undermining each other's faith by their over-appreciation of, or reliance on, the natural in contrast to the supernatural virtues. This also, I think, shows itself in the widespread tendency, with which we have all become so familiar, to resort to natural rather than supernatural means for trying to attract the faithful back into church or reactivate their fading religious fervor.
A few years after the incident I have described, the relationship between the natural and supernatural virtues was illustrated for me from a rather different angle.
I was again in Rome when the same Jesuit friend invited me to have lunch with him and a member of one of the pontifical commissions. During the meal the latter, who had been chatting about some of the people who came to see him and their problems, suddenly said, with a mischievous look, "And I have to add that the conservatives are often less agreeable and more difficult to deal with than the liberals."
I was more than nettled. Not that I classify myself as a "conservative." But I was conscious of being so labeled. "Father," I said hotly, "of course they're more agreeable. They aren't in the business of having to defend or stand up for anything. They only want mitigations and relaxations. In their situation it's easy to be agreeable."
I soothed myself interiorly by recalling a saying of Belloc that in any serious fight it is difficult not to get carried away and give a blow or two below the belt, but that he trusted God would make allowances for this. Nevertheless I was conscious of a certain discomfort.
The supernatural virtue of faith certainly requires us to defend the Church's doctrine valiantly, but, as we all know, there are better and worse ways of doing it. Firmness has to be exercised with charity. But charity is easier to exercise if it starts from a good grounding in natural virtues like patience and politeness. The supernatural virtues must always have pride of place, but in normal circumstances their effectiveness can be weakened or impaired without support from below. As we were all once taught "grace builds on nature." I suppose this was the lesson I eventually drew from this second incident.
But to return to the first point and its implications, what we are obviously suffering from, as has often been said over the last 40 years or more, is a big dose of Pelagianism. Pelagianism not only tends to weaken our awareness of the importance of the supernatural order and our need for grace, but as a consequence acts as a strong disincentive to the life of prayer. If we are by nature such nice guys and good people (even when we dissent from authentic Church teachings), we can get along on our own most of the time, thank you. There's no need to bother God all that much.
I am not suggesting these are clearly formulated ideas or even fully recognized ones. They are more on the subliminal level. They seep up into the consciousness from below without the holder being fully aware of their presence. But they can affect words and behavior all the same, and as we have all experienced, in a radical way.
This item 8198 digitally provided courtesy of CatholicCulture.org
