Readers of my blog (Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3) will know that I've been trying to get to grips with what Pope Francis has been saying, and how Catholics attached to the Church's traditions can best respond to it. We need both a conceptual and a rhetorical framework for responding to a critique which is coming from an unexpected direction.
Unexpected, but not unprecedented. We have, in fact, been here before, and I was very struck by the relevance of a chapter in Dietrich von Hildebrand's book Trojan Horse in the City of God. This was published in 1967 (I have the slightly revised 1993 edition), with a Foreword by John, Cardinal O'Connor. I offer an extended quotation here; I've had the whole chapter (10 pages of the book) retyped and you can download it here. I think Pope Francis would like it too.
Hildebrand was one of the founders of the Traditional movement, and specifically of the Roman Forum, directed by Dr John Rao, which continues the work of education he thought so important. They are currently appealing for funds; go over there and have a look.
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Another example is the tendency to
substitute for real faith a mere loyalty to the Church as an organization with
rules for its members. Instead of being aware of the awful privilege of
assisting at Holy Mass, many Catholics go to church on Sunday just as they
fulfill profane duties out of loyalty to the country or to an institution to
which they belong. That is, they perform this task because they just happen to
be Catholics. Here, indeed, the letter has replaced the spirit. This
substitution of loyalty for holy obedience and grateful love indicates the loss
of a true understanding of the nature of the Church. It suggests that the
Church is a merely human institution.
I
remember how often, during the first persecutions of the Jews from 1933 to
1936, Catholics could be heard saying that as long as Hitler did not attack the
Church, he could not be called an enemy of the Church. These persons did not
understand that the Church was attacked each time God was offended by an
injustice. They had become blind to the universality of the Church. They had
forgotten the words of Pope Benedict XV who said that he was the father of all,
whether they wanted to accept it or not, whether they knew it or not. They had
forgotten that St. Ambrose refused to let the Emperor Theodosius into church
because he had killed six thousand innocent persons in Samos. St. Ambrose did
not ask whether those murdered innocents were Catholics or not.
The
consideration of the Church as a state or, even worse, as a political party
could indeed be called a Catholic ghetto mentality. This outlook fails to see
that unlike all natural institutions, the Church has no other interests than
those of God.
Bureaucratic attitudes stifle faith
Still
another example of dried-up religion is a phenomenon one could well call employeeism. Instead of emanating a
spirit of holy unction, of loving zeal for the glorification of God and for
guiding the faithful to Christ, priests have sometimes behaved as if they were
employees of the Church. The way they say Mass suggests the performance of a
professional duty. Their contact with the faithful is similar to that of an
organization official dealing with clients.
In
contrast to the priest who leads an immoral life or who is immersed in worldly
preoccupations—a danger widespread in the Renaissance—these employee-priests
who have taken the letter for the spirit do not have a bad conscience. They
feel themselves to be very correct and loyal. This makes their attitude, though
not sinful as the other is, very dangerous to the life of the Church. They not
only tend to reduce their own religious life to correctness and loyalty; they
also influence the faithful to take such an approach.
...
Organizations can never replace
personal commitment
A
widespread symptom of a formalistic or legalistic religion is overestimation of
organization. Full personal commitment, as well as immediate contact from
person to person, is being more and more replaced by organizations. The
efficiency or organizations in the life of civilization—in activities of a
social, practical order—has created the illusion that this more mechanized,
impersonal way of dealing with problems is just what religious life needs. And
yet, in religion everything depends upon personal contact.
A
typical example of this illusion is the way many interpreted the original idea
of Catholic Action as set forth by Pope Pius XI in his Encyclical Pax Christi in Regno Christi. The Pope called
for penetration of the entire life of the layman by the spirit of Christ and
for a new participation of laymen in the apostolate. This sublime call to full
personal commitment was interpreted by many as a summons to mere organizational
activity—as if the main task was to establish a headquarters for all Catholic
associations.
...
Religious naturalism leads to
formalism and legalism
The
cause of formalism and legalism consists precisely in approaching supernatural
truth through natural categories. Even though the supernatural was stressed in
the abstract, those responsible for ossification in the Church retained a way
of thinking and acting that was secular. The moment they left the abstract
plane, their approach to religion breathed only a secular atmosphere which
could not sustain authentic Christian revelation. Absent was the breath of
Christ, the epiphany of God; absent was the perfume of holiness, the splendor
of the supernatural, all so gloriously present in the saints and homines religiosi to whom we have
referred. This lack drains life from religion, creates a Catholic ghetto, and
deprives the message of Christ of its irresistible power.
Revitalization requires emphasis on
the supernatural
It
is against the background of a legalistic and formalistic conception of
religion, then, that we must see the appeal of Vatican II for a vivification of
our religion. Father Lombardi wrote of this even before the Council started.
One of the things he said the Council should achieve was to make the bishops
less administrators than fathers of their dioceses.
It
is difficult to understand how the vivification of religion can be sought in a
secularization of religion, as the progressive Catholics advocate. If religion
is to penetrate our lives, the primary requisite is that it be itself authentic
religion. The first step toward vivification, therefore, is to replace mere
learning with a discovery of the glory of Christian faith. The Church must be
recognized as the Mystical Body of Christ and profane loyalty must be replaced
with holy obedience and the ardent love of the Church. Moreover, instead of
concentrating exclusively and maliciously on the narrowness and legalism that
have appeared in the Church over the last centuries, one should rather call
attention to the host of saints and great religious personalities which
blossomed during this period. They are the pattern of true vitality, the very opposite
of the inhabitants of a Catholic ghetto. Their example reveals how to overcome
the arid, formalistic, legalistic tendencies that ossify religion. To think of
a Don Bosco, a Lacordaire, or a Newman is to discern the path leading to true
vivification.
True
vivification requires that the supernatural spirit of Christ be fully thrown
into relief. This means eliminating any blurring of the distinction between the
natural and the supernatural. Yet the progressive Catholics opt for more
blurring. They believe that vivification can come to pass through
secularization. They want to increase the thrust of natural categories. They
thus advocate a cure that was the very cause of the formalism of religious life
in the past. In calling for a full and deliberate secularization, they
recommend worldly activism and bohemian freedom. They forget that what was
wrong with the dried-up, formalistic approach that stressed the letter over the
spirit was precisely that the Holy Spirit was screened out by abstraction and by
too great a concession to purely natural methods.
Secularization suffocates religion
The
victory of Christ in every domain of life is the real end. Yet we bury the
Christian faith and Christian life when we attempt to overcome the sterility of
legalistic religion by turning from the spirit of Christ to the saeculum, by substituting for the holy
fire of Christ a secular enthusiasm, by forgetting the supernatural vitality of
the saints and embracing the nervous, hectic, profane preoccupations of the
modern world.
It
is easy to feel oneself alive and free if one forgets about the unum necessarium, the one thing
necessary, and directs all one’s powers toward secular endeavors. It is easy to
feel oneself bursting with energy if, for example, the clearance of slums
concerns one more than transformation in Christ. What the progressives call
“leaving the Catholic ghetto” is in reality giving up the Catholic and keeping
the ghetto. They would replace the universal Church with the ghetto of
secularism, with imprisonment in a stifling immanentism, with isolation in a world that sits in umbra mortis, in the shadow of death.[2] To achieve a unity of
religion and life by adapting religion to the saeculum does not result in a union of religion with our daily
life, but reduces religion to the pursuit of purely mundane goals.[3]
It must certainly be admitted that priests have, at times, scandalized
people because of their religious mediocrity. Oftentimes, they were harmless
bourgeois whose personalities never breathed a religious atmosphere. Sometimes
they were filled with suspicion against every sort of élan. They oversimplified all questions. They were incapable of
understanding the message of God contained in great art and in other great
natural works of man.
These
were regrettable features, indeed, of the practical life of the Church. But the
way to overcome them is certainly not to encourage priests to fall into another
extreme by abandoning their former narrowness for indiscriminate ravings about
secular crudities or for a taste insensitive to vulgarity. This is to flee from
one mediocrity to another. The progressives tend to believe that narrowness is
the only kind of mediocrity. They forget that being blind to those things which
are antagonistic to true greatness and true culture and lavishing enthusiasm on
shallow worldliness are expressions of a more blatant mediocrity and are even
more incompatible with religion.[4]
The
fallacy in the progressivist approach is obvious. If we assert that religion
should permeate our lives, the implication is that we should break through to
the realization of the primary vocation, the very meaning of our lives, which
is our re-creation in Christ. We should then no longer be exclusively absorbed
by the immanent logic of our professional lives or by everyday preoccupations,
but should see them and all things in the light of Christ. Indeed, the echo of
our self-donation to Christ should resound through all the scenes of our lives.
Efficiency is not holiness
It is the very opposite of uniting
true religion with everyday life to believe that all that is demanded from a
Christian is to fulfill the duties prescribed by the logic of his secular life.
This would mean the absorption of religion by secular activities, so that we
would be satisfied that in fulfilling the requirements of these we were doing
everything that God could ask of us. In reality this is to avoid the
confrontation with Christ. Those who act in this way are Christians in name
only. The decisive question for the vivification of religion today is whether
through the light of Christ our everyday lives will become deeply changed and
adapted to Him, or whether the Christian religion is to be adapted to the
immanent logic of mundane concerns.
The
mistaken approach to uniting the Christian religion with the whole of our life
promotes efficiency over holiness. We have dealt with this confusion in The New Tower of Babel.[5] This error, which marks
the proposals of Daniel Callahan and others, betrays the loss of the sensus supranaturalis. The quality of holiness and the self-revelation of
God in Christ are simply not seen or, if seen, misunderstood and downgraded.
The ideal of these progressive reformers seems to be that instead of aiming at
a transformation in Christ and being a witness to the Christian revelation, a
Catholic should be as little as possible distinguishable from a humanitarian
philanthropist.
[2] Ps. 22:4 (RSV = Ps. 23:4).
[3] In reading Daniel Callahan, for
example, one gets the impression that the clearance of slums should have
precedence over redemption.
[4] We are thinking of the attempt to
introduce jazz or rock and roll into religious services.
[5] Chicago: Franciscan Herald Press, 1977.
