A pivotal moment—for both State and Church

By Dr. Jeff Mirus ( bio - articles - email ) | Feb 28, 2025

Shifting thoughts go with shifts in leadership in shifty times. The expectation of stability, at this moment, is a thing of the past. And that is remarkably true just now for both Church and State. For example, much of R. R. Reno’s commentary in the March issue of First Things had to do with Donald Trump’s signaling of the end of an American-dominated globalism (which has in any case been eroding over the past couple of decades). For Americans, then, the State is retrenching, which also means that America’s allies must pay closer attention to reality. And of course Pope Francis’ serious illness raises all kinds of speculation—and, indeed, hope—that the Church too will soon enter a new era.

The appropriate hope for both, I think, is that we might begin a period rooted far more firmly in the essences of what both State and Church are supposed to be. By this I mean it is time for the State to attempt to maximize the common good within its own borders, without either smothering its citizens under bureaucratic control or continuously undercutting them by looking for cheap profits throughout the world. And it is time for the Church to maximize opportunities for the spiritual good of her members without…well, without either smothering her “citizens” under bureaucratic control (for this, read never-ending review projects like “synodality”) or continuously diluting their faith by looking for cheap profits throughout the world (through constant references to lowest common denominator issues like the brotherhood of man and earthly ecology).

In both cases, quite apart from the inherent difficulties of world dominance, it is also true that a fixation on worldly acceptability is a dead end.

Hiding the light (or squandering the good)

Whenever particular nations seek to be dominant throughout the whole world, one of two things seems to be the case: Either they are looking for domestic wealth and power, in which case their distant “possessions” suffer exploitation, or they are looking for sources of cheaper production, in which case their own people suffer through the outsourcing of work and the loss of jobs at home. In the second case, it is only a slight exaggeration to observe that the rich become jet-setting tycoons and the poor become…opioid addicts.

In a somewhat similar manner, when the Church seeks to be “influential” throughout the whole World, she cheapens all of her Goods in an effort to win human respect, which is another case of the executives impoverishing their subordinates in order to grow “rich”. Note that this is a very different process from sending out missionaries to experience privations and persecutions in preaching the Gospel, which enriches all parties spiritually. It is always the quest for power, the dream for influence without sacrificial witness, which causes the problem. In the Church, this is simply and depressingly natural.

Sadly, the most “natural” way for the Church to avoid sacrifice is to deal in contemporary human jargon which is not necessarily opposed to the gospel, such as “human dignity”, or to dignify human jargon with ecclesiastical names (again, think of the abuse of the term synodality), or to emphasize the inclusion of persons far more strongly than the exclusion of sin. Have not even many Catholic leaders found quite a few ways to redefine the word “love” so that it is no longer so clearly dependent upon the Way, the Truth and the Life?

In any case, as with the inauguration of a new President, so too with the prospect for a new Pope, we hope for a repudiation of the excesses of the past, and for a more strictly-defined understanding of the Good in civil life along with a clearer articulation of the Gospel of Christ in the Church.

A season of hope

No change in this world is ever perfect. But we have witnessed a remarkable, if not seismic, shift in American politics, though obviously our electorate is still broadly split, and the difference between good and evil is not clearly defined. As is always the case in secular human affairs, this is going to bring new problems, but we can still hope that it will also restore sanity to our understanding of the common good in at least some respects. At the same time, we may also be on the verge of a change of leadership for the Church. The effects of such a change are almost never predictable, but we ought at least to hope for a clearer and more consistent articulation of the fundamental truth that there can be no Catholicism without Christ, and no Christ without the Cross.

We desperately need a clearer emphasis across the board on both the truth about the human person and the difference between sin and virtue, especially with respect to the use of our own bodies; and this can come only through an emphasis on the difference between virtue and vice as articulated by God in both the Natural Law and the Deposit of Faith. At an even deeper level, the Church must recover the force of Our Lord’s initial and most fundamental message and begin again to preach it as forcefully as He did: “The Kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe the Gospel” (Mark 1:15).

What happens to the leadership of the Church is, of course, far more important for eternity than what happens to the leadership of the United States. And I can guarantee that there are still the same two sides to the coin: Just as no political leader is perfect in every respect, so neither is any pope—and this is true even should both be canonized. But the parallels of institutional need in both the nation and the Church are very clear in that we have just gone through a period of particularly bad leadership in both.

Of course, we do not know yet when we shall have a change in the leadership of the Church nor what sort of leadership this might prove to be. But for Americans, at least, it is a remarkable coincidence that the moral leadership of both the President and the Pope has been so pathetically skewed in recent years by the unnatural flaws in our contemporary Western culture that the need for a fundamental shift in both realms is unusually urgent.

Decision time

We are, I admit, more likely to get such a fundamental shift in the Church than in the State. Western culture grew out of the best rational tradition of Greek Philosophy and Roman Law coupled with the Gospel as proclaimed by the Catholic Church. It has long since become clear that, without deep faith in and through that same Church, this classic and theoretically moral Western culture cannot be preserved. The last two centuries have been dominated not by Faith but by ideology, and so not by the Church but by “isms”. It seems quite clear that without the aid of grace, even human reason cannot be long preserved.

Perhaps this is true simply because, without the aid of grace, we humans cannot be honest—neither with others nor with ourselves. Therefore, the new evangelization for which we so recently hoped must once again become the first priority. Not the fragmentary “Come, let us reason together”, the siren-song of earthly leadership, but rather the full declaration of the Lord:

Come now, let us reason together, says the LORD: though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they are red like crimson, they shall become like wool. If you are willing and obedient….

But…how the faithful city has become a harlot, she that was full of justice! Righteousness lodged in her, but now murderers. Your silver has become dross, your wine mixed with water….

Ah, I will vent my wrath on my enemies, and avenge myself on my foes…. But rebels and sinners shall be destroyed together, and those who forsake the LORD shall be consumed. For you shall be ashamed of the oaks in which you delighted; and you shall blush for the gardens which you have chosen. [Is. 1:18-29]

The one necessity

What, then, is needed? What is “the one thing needful” that Martha’s sister Mary chose when she chose the “better part” (Lk 10:42)? It is listening to Christ, and at least figuratively sitting at His feet in the Church He founded. And within that Church, it means a fresh reception of the Gospel, leading to the interior reform and renewal which the Gospel demands. Moreover, it is no paradox that only by this means can the Church ever be useful to civil society, to the State.

Such an evangelization cannot be manufactured out of environmental stewardship or fraternal love or endless synodal discussion, nor even out of purely private devotion, nor out of anything that we might reasonably (though usually erroneously) expect to be arguable based on “common sense”. There is never much value in lowest-common-denominator platitudes; the whole history of life on earth demonstrates not only that these are inadequate but that they have never been even firmly grasped without grace. Nor is there any room left for Catholic triumphalism—another worldly invention, about which even Pope Francis appears to be quite correct.

But there is always room for sacrificial service to the Gospel, which has ever been the only route to the Triumph of the Cross. That Triumph really can become dominant in the daily life of the Church, and sometimes it can also express itself partially through secular politics. My point is that both Church and State are in flux, that both Church and State are in desperate need of renewal—and that both natural platitudes and endless human consultation are useless. Only Christ endures, and only Christ saves.