Cocksure or losing heart? Confidence, despair, and prayer

By Dr. Jeff Mirus ( bio - articles - email ) | Sep 23, 2022

I first heard the expression “I may be wrong, but I’m never in doubt” used by a referee in a sporting event, but it is apparently attributed to Dan Peña, “The Trillion Dollar Man”, who actually seems to spend most of his time wondering if he can convince somebody else that he or she has what it takes to become a billionaire. Mr. Dan is even older than I am by a few years, and he is rapidly running out of time to make himself or others richer materially. I don’t know him. But he is reported to be a Catholic, and if he hasn’t made shrewd spiritual investments, then he needs to adopt new strategies that produce eternal dividends.

Turning more appropriately to myself, I seem to make it a point never to be in doubt until after I’ve lapsed in charity or otherwise said or done something stupid. I’ve also found that the stupidest things I do are not only naturally but spiritually stupid. This happens in part because, while I admit an infinitesimally small theoretical possibility that I may be wrong, I am in the moment never in doubt. I suspect there is a lot of that going around today among Catholics who are hanging on by their fingernails, and I’d like to explore (without any doubt, of course) one important reason that this attitude and its pitfalls are so widespread.

For myself and most of my readers, the problem does not arise from the comfort of a perfect alignment with the dominant culture. People driven by conformity with the dominant culture prove, by that very fact, that they do not think independently about much of anything, nor do they do any soul-searching. As long as their goal is keeping afloat on the shifting tides of human affairs, and as long as they have short memories about any previous certainties they have discarded, then they can live (so it would seem) secure in the knowledge that they are always on the right side of history. If such persons have some Catholic connection (perhaps they were baptized, or they are Catholic “professionals”, or they enjoy a certain religious sensibility and wish to help the Church catch up with the spirituality of the best and the brightest today), they will always consider themselves right without any self-deprecating interior reflection at all.

But for those of us who regard Catholicism as the supreme corrective to diabolical ways of thinking and deadly temptations, some painful self-reflection or self-examination is likely to intrude on our certainties from time to time simply because we want to ensure that it is not ourselves but Christ who is the source of these certainties. In fact, if we do not experience such moments, it is a good sign that we have not “put on Christ” as fully and as thoroughly as we imagine.

Moreover, if one of the unnoticed temptations that makes life sweet to us is the assurance of being among the counter-cultural few who get things right, can anyone wonder at the surreptitious relief we find in that? For are we not all but forced to take solace in our own personal rectitude when we are surrounded on all sides by the constant, loud and unrelenting rejection of Christian ways of thinking—when, in fact, there so often seems to be no sure voice except the one in our own head? To put it mildly, sincere Christians today find themselves between a rock and a hard place. In the West, this “squeeze play” is not primarily one of physical martyrdom, but it is surely one of spiritual martyrdom, and a martyrdom of accommodation. And to escape this ever so slightly, we tend to take encouragement either from a relatively small group of like-minded Catholics or from the self-assurance of our own rectitude.

I do. I believe it was Chesterton who once wrote that only a dead dog floats downstream.

Surrounded by cowardice and betrayal

By training I am an historian, and I fear that most serious Catholics today do not realize how worldly the Catholic Church (in her members) always is, and how secularized in the contemporary sense she had already become in the course of the last few centuries before our own time—perhaps priding herself on survival, institutional growth, and the assumption that Western culture itself had not really degenerated into a wholesale rejection of Christ so much as a channeling of Christ into a cacophony of voices which, therefore, had lost their claim on the common good and the body politic. In any case, most people reading this essay will have been born or at least raised to adulthood in the first flush of the West’s wholesale public rejection of Christ. When I was a boy in the 1950s, it was still generally expected in our culture that people would give evidence of basic religious pieties, at least attending some church. By the end of the 1960s, these public pieties had been almost completely swept away by secularist cant, and the rest, as we like to say, is history—or perhaps more accurately the rejection of history.

During the long pontificate of Pope St. John Paul II there was a very strong sense that the counter-cultural few were backed by Rome and renewal would come with the turn of the millennium. We had a painful but very hopeful period of about 45 years, beginning slowly and fitfully perhaps with Pope St. Paul VI’s promulgation of Humanae vitae in 1968 and accelerating throughout the pontificate of John Paul II, in which all but the most alienated faithful lay people strongly felt that Rome, at least, had their back (if not always liturgically for some, nonetheless morally and doctrinally). This continued during the pontificate of Benedict XVI who, after JPII had inspired a major revival of priestly vocations and priestly zeal, actually did more than his predecessor in the matter of removing wayward bishops.

And then Benedict resigned, and Francis has been at least very widely perceived to have turned on those who had been not only holding the doctrinal and moral fort, as it were, but creating a more vibrantly evangelical Church, winning converts even among Protestant ministers and strengthening the confidence of the Catholic faithful. Has there been any group which this pope has deliberately discouraged other than those who, valuing Catholic Tradition, are vocal in defense of everything the Church teaches?

In asking this I don’t mean simply that Francis has been very hard on those who thought the previous Latin Mass was a far superior rite. I personally have never been a fan of the liturgy wars. But Francis has also consistently criticized those concerned about the dilution and even rejection of Catholic faith and morals, a secularizing distortion of the truth which has not only remained in the universities but surged again in the dioceses and parishes of various regions. Moreover, he has consistently praised Catholics who have skirted the very edge of Christian moral acceptability, and who have given pastoral approval to those who have chosen lifestyles clearly contrary to the teachings of Christ and the apostles, as testified not only throughout the New Testament but throughout Catholic history.

As I write, the rot seems too often to be spreading with papal approval, a dreadful recent case in point being the current trajectory of the Pontifical Academy for Life, which was established precisely to more intelligently counter secularist moral trends. And, as you might expect, the infidelity and confusion in a huge proportion of nominally Catholic institutions continue to mirror that massive celebration of unchastity which plagues all civilizations that lapse from Judaism, Christianity or natural law ethics into paganism.

One hardly knows what to say

Now, I could be wrong around the edges of these very broad strokes with which I have sketched the contemporary crisis in the Church, but I am not in any doubt, and most Catholics who accept everything the Church teaches are not in any doubt either. Response tactics differ, of course: Some become convinced that they were wrong to think the Church to be protected from ultimate error by Jesus Christ Himself, and so they drift away. Others view the controversy in very narrow terms, refusing to accept any virtue or truth in their critics or to recognize any vice or deficiency of understanding in themselves. Still others turn differences in emphasis and tactics into points of doctrinal division. But the reality at the heart of this is the very serious feeling of abandonment among those who take seriously the need to accept, defend and teach all the truths held by the Catholic Church, precisely because every truth is intimately related to the very integrity of Jesus Christ Himself, the eternal Word through Whom all things came to be.

We stumble at times over slight differences in the best way to express the truths of the Faith, even occasionally forgetting in our arguments that there are mysteries here that cannot be exhausted by human words, and which admit of perfectly legitimate presentations with differing emphases and connections. We can get hung up, as it were, on particular styles of expression, confusing a particular arrangement of words with the substance of a mystery, which always transcends the words which we must employ to clarify our own thoughts.

But, in most cases at least, we can recognize when verbal gymnastics are being employed to denigrate or deny one or more of the realities expressed through the Church’s moral teaching, doctrine or dogma. We can recognize when not-so-subtle “rephrasings” of the truth obscure rather than clarify something essential, allowing those who deny what is essential to claim an essentially false Catholic justification. We rightly discern that something is very wrong when false statements about explicit Church teachings go uncorrected and our own attempts at correction go unsupported by Catholic authorities. At the same time, of course, we often differ about the best tactics to employ in the ongoing battle, or how clearly we can display anger or disgust with the current situation without sliding into rash judgment or foolish pride.

I have even noticed in myself that I can become annoyed just because some other committed Catholic does not completely accept my framing of a particular argument (about which, as I said, I may be wrong but am never in doubt). It is remotely possible that my argument here will generate a case in point....

But far more importantly, I have heard recently from several courageously dedicated Catholics who feel assaulted by the temptation to give up the struggle, or even the temptation to despair, because so much of the news in the Church and the once-Christian world today is bad news—again and again, bad news ad nauseum. Moreover, what is even more discouraging is that such bad news so frequently fails to prompt any truthful response from those in authority, let alone any appropriate correction when the bad news comes from within the Church herself.

It should not exactly surprise us that the Church is in a muddle, for she admits and acknowledges always a greater or lesser degree of muddlement in her members, and some of the most muddled achieve high positions in her administration. Her Christic ministry requires a membership of sinners. But the more we recognize the muddle, the more it can challenge our own spiritual stability and growth. Let us, then, pray for each other constantly. I need your prayers more than I can say. And though I am sure you are as rarely in doubt as I am, I’ll take the bet that you need mine as well.