The peasants of Autun

By ( articles ) | May 04, 2004

Priests, C.S. Lewis wrote somewhere, are those men whom we set apart to minister to us as people who will live forever -- forever, that is, in heaven or in hell. The sole reason for the existence of the clergy is to aid us in avoiding damnation and in attaining heaven. Often priestly work will include temporal remedies -- Jesus was surely acting as a priest in healing the blind and sick -- but temporal hardships are of themselves not impediments to salvation, and authentic pastoral work begins where temporal remedies leave off.

In the past fifty years, the possibility of damnation has all but disappeared from the clerical vocabulary, leaving behind a vacuum in which few bishops can explain to themselves -- much less to others -- why the Faith is important. A gathering of bishops calls to mind (for most of us) the picture of fleshy men in a conference room at the Omni Shoreham, with plastic name-tags pinned to their lapels, peering apprehensively over their half-glasses at their programs while Sister Sharon Euart leads them in morning prayer. Managers by training, socialists by conviction, they are clearly ill at ease with the "spiritual side" of the job, and it was pathetically typical that Bishop Gregory, when obliged to defend the existence of the Church, could find nothing more persuasive than her role as a provider of social services and community-building initiatives.

In broad terms, at this moment in history, those of us who believe in hell are governed by bishops who don't. This is analogous to being treated by a doctor who thinks death is a fable and disease an illusion of the patient. If we pester him long enough for penicillin, he'll give it to us as a placebo, but his heart's not in it. By the same token, bishops can get quite animated about battered women or water quality or even Bolivian debt relief, but when the conversation turns to sanctifying grace their eyes glaze over, their lips part, and they start blowing bubbles with their spit. With very few exceptions, they're just not interested in religion.

Let's be fair. Why should a bishop -- I mean a bishop who thinks there's no such thing as damnation -- be interested in religion any more than an employee of Disney's Magic Kingdom is interested in magic? If heaven is assured for everyone, if all trains are ultimately headed to the same station, your aim is to make the journey as comfortable as possible, working to keep doctrines as fuzzy and as few as the passengers will let you get by with. And when bad things occur en route, such as ministers' misbehaving with children, you don't worry about souls being lost; the name of the game is reconciliation: "Now, now, my little man, let's see that smile again!"

The Church has passed this way before, many times, and unbelieving bishops wax and wane like locusts. We've had it worse. I comfort myself with thoughts of 18th century France, when Talleyrand, the atheist Bishop of Autun, only bothered to visit his diocese once in his tenure, spending the rest of his time in Paris in a life of Clintonesque dissoluteness. Today, as then, faithful and devoted bishops are scarce but not lacking entirely, and our job is to make of the others the best use that we can, remembering that "the unworthiness of the minister hindereth not the effect of the sacrament."

Did God love the peasants of Autun less than other Catholics, such that He wanted to imperil their salvation? No -- but upright, devout, truth-telling bishops were not a gift He chose to give them. This gift has been withheld from us also, and as a consequence we have a difficult path to walk, neither giving in to discouragement nor becoming party to the lie that the rot is less serious than it appears. We have the promise, not that we'll succeed, but that we won't walk alone.