How This Crisis in the Church Differs from Earlier Ones
The Church has faced many crises in its long history, and has always been able to face its enemies down, outlasting them, seeing them lose potency and pass into unimportance at the least, or even oblivion in their significance. But the present crisis has an ingredient that past crises did not bring against the Church — that being the ultimate contempt of irrelevance. Past enemies have been everything but indifferent regarding the community of believers founded by Christ on Peter, first Bishop of Rome. They have hated that Church; warred against it, slandered it, persecuted it, repudiated it. But today's enemies do something far more dangerous — they ignore it.
The Europe that was built out of the great ethnic peoples converted by missionaries of the Roman Church is today near extinction brought about by neglect, attendant not upon conscious resistance, but negative disregard. The teachings of the Catholic Church, its traditions that are one with its history and experience, have simply been set aside as insignificant for modern cultural, political, and social purposes.
And the ultimate in this contempt is the conscious decision not to provide the Church with any more sons and daughters, certainly no more priests, nuns, religious. The former Catholic peoples have shut their ears to the Church's echoing of God's command, "Increase and multiply." Today's reply, even from many of the heirs of the Church founded by God's only-begotten Son, is, "Enjoy, but don't share. Keep for ourselves what we've got."
In another area of life, indifference to the import of their ancestors' conversion to Rome has ended with treason against the cultural and social treasures that conversion brought. Twice within the past two generations or so, Catholic Spain has turned to systems of authority hostile and antithetical to any Catholic understandings. The earlier Spanish adventure into Leninism led to economic and political tyranny over rights granted by human dignity. The similar adventure in leftism today has led to an ignoble libertinism, a plunge back into paganism that the Iberian and Visigoth peoples escaped by their embrace of the religion of Roman missionaries.
That our present Pope had to plea during his recent visit to Spain for a resistance to leftist attacks on the traditional family is a sad commentary on the modern attempts to reverse the stalwart Christianity of the descendants of great saints Secundus, Caecilius, Euphrasius, Firminius, Marcellus and Nonia, Lawrence, Severus, Felix, Victor, Narcissius.
Other areas of once Catholic Europe — parts of the Netherlands, France, even Ireland — have similarly slipped into a nominal sort of Catholicism that grants no contemporary importance to the faith that studded all Europe with churches — many of them going today practically unused, and rapidly closing for lack of both priests and worshipers. The faith that once gentled, civilized, and ennobled the tribes that created the nations of Europe is little more than an often annoying antique now consigned to history's attic by today's Europeans.
I suppose some blame can be assigned to the 16th-century Reformation, particularly great politicians who used that movement to aggrandize their power at the expense of what they saw as papal rivalry in its exercise. Without the apostate kings, barons, and dukes, the Reformation would have withered away much quicker and more completely than it has in more recent centuries.
But more significant was the so-called Enlightenment and its companion in desolation, the French Revolution that discredited the Catholic faith among the poorly educated and the overly educated — the philosophes and their empirical cousins, the scientific technocrats. These elites quite some generations ago sold the idea that religious faith is akin to superstition, to be replaced totally by an authority which natural, human capability supposedly confers.
Supernatural authority was thus ousted as an enslaving myth; in its place was a utopian future pledged by rationalists and humanists. Thus, if we would in one word summarize the cause of the present crisis, with its essential ingredient being the irrelevance of the central edifice of Christianity — the Catholic Church — that word would be Liberalism.
Fr. George Rutler credits the great convert John Henry Newman with early detection of the ultimate result of the descent into Liberalism that would elevate each individual to what we might call Singular Importance. He quotes Cardinal Newman in his masterwork The Idea of A University, analyzing devotees of 19th-century Liberalism:
". . . They refer the whole world to their center, and measure all matters by their own rule, like the fisherman in the drama, whose eulogy of his diseased lord was, that 'he was so fond of fishing'."
Fr. Rutler adds his own bit of comment:
"Something like the fisherman was the radical feminist who recently wrote of an indulgent bishop: 'He affirmed me in my okay-ness'" (Beyond Modernity, p. 157).
Fr. Rutler is considerably prophetic in this book, for example, when he writes about Newman:
. . . He could detect the rudiments of a new thing cruel in its vapidity: a society little offended by heresy and schism because it has little commitment to truth and unity, disposed to collectivism because it cannot comprehend universality. This was his intimation of what would come to be called the post-Christian age by moderns whose confidence, is at this very moment, being shattered by somewhat more reflective thinkers who are coming to call themselves postmodern" (Rutler, p. 158).
Unfortunately, no matter how many "reflective thinkers" we are lucky to come up with, they cannot have much impact. The philosophic condition Newman recognized, the cultural rush to complete individualistic autonomy, has reached the point where religion and arguments in its favor by great thinkers like Newman, Chesterton, and Fr. Rutler himself are simply brushed aside like flies annoying picnickers.
Today's picnic with its self-indulgence of all sorts by the revelers recognizes religion at most as an annoyance, but certainly not anything that should be allowed to interfere with the revelry. The vision of empty churches in Europe has only helped to determine the children and grandchildren of Catholics to conclude there is nothing at all of significance to the faith that built them. In America with its ongoing grand picnic, the result is social Catholics concluding there is no need for building places to worship, since they have learned a new idea that religion consists solely of socializing.
The poet-thinker Paul Claudel wrote some things appropriate for contemplation in this moment of climatic clash between religious faith and modern, ennui regarding it. "The nonbeliever," wrote Claudel (I Believe in God), "by whatever name he is called, carries with him the curse of isolation. He is parallel to everything. Is there nothing more hopelessly lonely than the parallel position?"
Unfortunately, more and more today choose the parallel position. In a sense the misapplication of democracy (majority rule) puts everyone in a parallel position — either with the majority or the minority. Democracy applied to truth destroys truth's absolute character, and in fact thereby destroys truth itself. Truth becomes what those of your parallel track accept. Thus nothing is true for longer than the instant the latest poll is counted. This is contributing to the swamp in which a Church claiming possession of immutable, absolute revealed Truth is considered irrelevant. It is beyond the interest of those convinced that truth is whatever the individual wants it to be. Those believing that must consider even what God reveals to be subject to their taste or distaste for it.
Claudel puts it this way:
"A man who is outside the Church soon becomes isolated. He has no longer any landmarks and he does not know where he is going. He suffers from the terrible curse of no longer being able to help anyone. All ties are broken, save those which hold him fast."
One of those ties, of course, is that which keeps him from seeking any truth, any reality outside himself. In that condition he is unable to recognize the significance of anything not of his own taste. Unfortunately, this is the state of more and more people of our time — more and more whose ancestors, perhaps even their closest progenitors, their own fathers and mothers, were loyal to the truth. They have made parallelism to this age their only dedication with its sight and hearing blind and deaf to Peter's confession of love and faith spoken to Jesus Himself.
I know of nothing more touching to suggest to them than the following words of Claudel, even knowing as I do they will find them irrelevant:
"Once I saw a young priest weeping all alone, weeping his heart out in his deserted church. But what of the Vicar of Jesus Christ, the Pastor of the universe; must not he too sometimes weep, shed tears of blood, dash his forehead against the sacred steps of the ecumenical altar? The world is so wicked, and above all, deaf! So horribly heedless, so stupid, so appallingly deaf!"The red lamp burning before the tabernacle is the Pope — Jesus Christ in the Pope, alone under the eye of God, watching, listening, looking, understanding, working, and praying."
The terrible tragedy is (specifically because Claudel has so correctly analyzed the condition of the world at this moment) that even his grand words written now will have no effect on many of this generation's time. It takes some understanding of the faith that inspired Claudel to appreciate his attempt to communicate that faith. And we are past the time of such understanding.
Does this leave us with no consolation, then — Catholic believers, I mean? No, thank God, there remains His grace, powerful enough to cure both blindness and deafness, as Christ showed in His lifetime. Some saw those miracles and still did not believe, much as this modern world refuses to believe. But still the recipients of the miracles did see and did hear — and believed.
"Dear Christ, who had compassion on even the dead, giving them life again — please do so for our age!"
© Wanderer Printing Co.
This item 7136 digitally provided courtesy of CatholicCulture.org
