A man prays during Ash Wednesday Mass at St. Andrew's Church in the Manhattan borough of New York March 5. (CNS photo/Carlo Allegri, Reuters)
The
Church is not part of the State. Nor is she simply a part of civil
society set up by her members to advance their public and private goals.
She is an independent society established by God to be a light to the
world. As such, she has her own principles of existence, authority, and
action.
Her mission does not normally imply direct involvement in
politics. Catholics may campaign for social and political causes that
they believe promote good ends, just as they may run businesses in
accordance with Catholic principles. The main political contribution of
the Church, though, is the view of man and the good life for which she
stands.
Nonetheless, proposing that view calls for practical
action that has social effects. The Church won’t be listened to unless
she embodies something the world needs. To convert others we must first
convert ourselves. For that reason evangelization must begin with the
self-evangelization of the Christian community. That is a practical and
social effort, and it means the leaders of the Church are fundamentally
pastors, not philosophers, pundits, philanthropists, or outreach
coordinators. The Apostle Paul preached the Gospel to the gentiles
through half the Roman world, but his letters have to do with the
promotion of Christian life within the Church.
The single most
important practical goal of the Church is for Christians to thrive as
Christians. The primary way that comes about, of course, is for them to
love God and neighbor and live accordingly, and for their pastors to
show them how to do so by word, sacrament, and example. There is more to
it than that, though. We don’t become good simply by deciding to do so,
and even the best words, sacraments, and examples are not enough for
most of us. We respond to our total environment, and most of us need all
the help we can get.
So we are likely to do better in a setting
that is as Catholic as possible. That is especially so in times like the
present, when secular society is comprehensively organized and
pervasively anti-Catholic. Evil communications corrupt good manners. If
Catholics go home from Mass and spend the rest of their time awash in
pop culture and studying or working in settings that trivialize
religious concerns and enforce perverse conceptions of right and wrong,
the strong will no doubt survive. Not all of us are strong, though, and
sink-or-swim cannot be the right approach for the Church to take toward
her members.
In addition to the Church as a divine institution, we
need a Catholic social world that includes the Church as an institution
but also extends to the ordinary affairs of life. In a previous column
I called that world “Christendom,” and emphasized that when it’s not
established as a matter of law we still need it as a system of habits,
institutions, and attachments to which we are loyal and by which we can
more readily live a Catholic life.
The Church must engage the
world while remaining in some sense unworldly, so Christendom—the social
world in which Catholics carry on their lives as Catholics—is an
in-between sort of affair. It is far from watertight, since it accepts
secular arrangements such as markets, modern science, and legitimate
government authority. Further, it reflects the imperfections of
Catholics. Even saints are not perfect, and the Church includes people
who are far from saintly. The leaven of the Kingdom doesn’t work
instantaneously among those who have begun to accept it, so the Church
must maintain a place for those who are not specially holy or even
specially serious.
Mediocre Catholics—who are most of
us—contribute to the Church and to Christendom through what is Catholic
in them and their aspiration for better things. A drama needs extras and
spear carriers as well as heroes, and by their numbers they can help
make a Catholic social environment a real though imperfect reality. For
the sake of such people the Church must support a way of life that
attracts them, leads them to stick with it and support it, and puts them
in a web of influences that points toward God rather than the gods of
the city.
At present that way of life and web of influences is in
disarray, and needs to be pulled together. Many points are obvious. We
need schools that are thoroughly Catholic in orientation. If
sink-or-swim is bad for ordinary Catholics, it is a thousand times worse
for Catholic children. We also need more universities, publications,
and other cultural institutions that are authentically Catholic. The
assumptions on which mainstream intellectual and cultural life are now
based make networks of independent institutions necessary for Catholic
thought and culture to maintain itself.
In recent decades Catholic
institutions have tended to assimilate to the society around them. That
trend is part of the current disarray. There are some Catholic
homeschoolers who would like to send their children to the Catholic
school across the street but can’t in good conscience because the
education on offer is not actually Catholic. That tendency needs to
reverse, and it seems likely to do so in the coming years, at least for
the institutions that continue to matter. The reasons are intellectual,
cultural, and educational as well as specifically religious.
Before
the Second Vatican Council many people complained about the narrowness
of the Catholic ghetto. The idea seemed to be that the life of the world
was going on much more outside the Church than within her, and the
Church should throw open her doors and windows and go where the action
is. The attempt to apply that strategy may not have improved Catholic
intellectual and cultural life, which to all appearances has gone
downhill, but the secular culture has gone downhill even more. That’s no
surprise: rejecting natural law, adopting a pragmatic attitude toward
truth, and making choice the highest good is not a recipe for true or productive thought about the world.
The conversion of Saint Augustine came at a time when the exhaustion of
classical culture had made the Church the natural home for intellectual
activity. If we are right that the Church has a better grip on reality
than secular culture, the same seems likely to happen again.
We
also need to make it possible to carry on the activities that claim most
people’s energies in a more Catholic setting. For most people the
greater part of social engagement takes the form of gainful employment.
So we need to find and develop work environments that are not at odds
with the Faith, either by reason of the employer’s purposes and
activities or the view of man inculcated. That will have its
complications. Anti-discrimination laws make it impossible to give an
ordinary business of any size a specifically Catholic identity, for
example by preferring employees who are committed to Catholic
principles, or even preferring natural law understandings of human
relations. Catholic business would have to be small and informal,
perhaps taking the form of networks of independent contractors.
Catholics
engage society in other ways, of course, and those should also be put
on as Catholic a footing as possible. Charitable activity is an obvious
example. In recent times Catholic charitable efforts have emphasized
cooperation with government and other non-Catholic actors. The
usefulness of that approach is doubtful when government is committed to
an anti-Catholic conception of life that inevitably determines the
orientation and operation of health and welfare programs in which it is
involved.
And finally, Catholics need to engage in political
action to defend the Church and Christendom. Government is now inclined
to allow the institutional Church some degree of freedom, but to promote
social goals such as unity and inclusion in a way that suppresses
Christendom as a system of social life. Fighting that tendency will have
to be the main focus of Catholic political efforts in the coming years
if the Church and Catholic life are to thrive.
In spite of
difficulties, the outlook is bright for Christendom, even from a human
standpoint, because there is such a need for it. Life must go on, and
people carry on as best they can. The rejection of natural law means
that secular culture is becoming not only anti-Catholic but anti-reason
and anti-human. It’s becoming less and less livable, and if we can offer
an alternative that is more adequate to human needs and aspirations
there will be takers. Doing so is the social challenge for the Church in
the coming years.
