A new study released by the Pew Research Center indicates that 29% of Americans now self-identify as having no religious affiliation of any kind. And only 63% of Americans identify as Christians, which is 12% lower than just a decade ago. This is just the latest indication of a trend in America toward greater secularity that has been fermenting in the wort of “The American Way of Life” for about a century or so. The situation in Europe is even worse as a broad and deep secularism has supplanted Christianity among the historic populations of old Europe even as Islam rises exponentially due to immigration.
Decline and boredom
What are we to make of this? We can start by acknowledging that this is nothing new. The recognition of ecclesial decline in the West is now as old as Cardinal Newman’s sermons on the dangers posed to the faith by modern liberalism. Along these lines, I have always been partial to the literary diagnosis of this same disease in the novels of George Bernanos. The reality of what we face was powerfully encapsulated in the opening page of his masterful 1936 novel The Diary of a Country Priest, where the young curé of Ambricourt, the saintly hero of the story, says, :
Mine is a parish like all the rest. They are all alike. … My parish is bored stiff; no other word for it. Like so many others! We can see them being eaten up by boredom, and we can’t do anything about it. Someday perhaps we shall catch it ourselves—become aware of the cancerous growth within us. You can keep going a long time with that in you.
“Boredom” is a slippery term that can mean anything from the normal emotional fatigue that sets in when one is engaged in the drab duties of daily life up to the deep existential acedia of one who has simply grown world weary and has become jaded to life itself. But I would submit that it is one of the two main reasons why millions have abandoned the faith. The other reason is the cultural memory of ecclesial evils. More on that in a bit.
The boredom that Bernanos is referencing is of a unique kind that is peculiar to Catholic communities that have incrementally and silently abandoned faith in the sacraments as encounters with Christ. That faith has been replaced with a secular simulacrum wherein the outward form of the sacraments remains, while the inner life has been hollowed out and replaced with the banal ideology of a deeply channelized, and profoundly intolerant, cult of self-fulfillment and material well-being. We see this everywhere in today’s anodyne, suburbanized Catholicism now made safe for the culture of the cul-de-sac. Even most of our churches built since 1958 look like those cul-de-sacs: round, self-referential, and aesthetically drab in their cookie-cutter, concrete brutalist minimalism, they inspire nothing and spiritually provoke even less. Designed for liturgies which seem designed to induce an anesthetized somnambulance, their wide doors of modern aluminum and tempered glass have become the exit turnstiles of no return.
Bernanos saw this malaise of boredom long ago. What he was pointing to is a moribund Catholicism that has gone to seed, like a dandelion long past its fruitful floriation and which has dispersed its seeds into the buffeting winds. What remains may still be outwardly green but it now has no discernible purpose. And soon its greenery will be dead even if the roots remain. Thus, there is also an air of putrescence about this modern and bored Catholicism, with a lingering stench that is the telltale signature of dead things decomposing, in spite of the deodorizing bureaucratic apparatus chanceries try to blanket-over the rotting corpse. As Nicholas Berdyaev noted, the spirit of bureaucracy is the deepest inner voice of the modern soul and bespeaks a fundamental orientation to “control through management techniques” that is the Mark of the Beast.
This boredom in the Church is the result of a Church which, as the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben points out, has abandoned its eschatological “messianic time” of expectation of a supernatural inbreaking, with the purely immanent and horizontalist “time” of a de facto atheism in practice. It is a Church which bores because it is a Church that no longer communicates it actually really believes in anything. It is a Church that has embraced modernity’s worldview of pure immanence with a globalist ethic.
Ecclesial sins, compromised witness
And then there is the reality of ecclesial sins which, despite numerous “apology tours” by various popes and prelates, remain deeply entrenched in the popular consciousness since none of the prevailing vices that caused these sins in the first place have been exorcised from the Church and now seem more regnant than ever but in a different guise. Certain images from the Church’s past have a staying power in modern consciousness that we simply cannot casually dismiss through a cheap apologetics that is itself a sanitized, tendentious, caricature of the Church. Those sins and failures remain stubbornly embedded in the modern mind, rightly or wrongly, owing to the deep incongruity these images create between who the Church says she is and how she actually behaves.
Nobody is shocked, for example, when it turns out that there are sexual abuses happening in a brothel. However, it is shocking when those same abuses, among others, happen within a Church that makes the kind of claims for herself that the Catholic Church does. The Church, therefore, cannot easily shed the searing cultural memories of Inquisitions, burned heretics and witches, forbidden books, concordats with brutal dictatorships for the sake of ecclesial social privilege, clerical sexual abuse and financial corruption, Vatican resistance to modern democracy and the freedom of religion, and a myriad of lesser sins rooted in concupiscence which, though venal, only add to the public perception of a Church whose claims for herself cannot be taken seriously.
Furthermore, the Church can invoke “ex opere operato” all she wants and can appeal to her Divine origin, which guarantees that in some real and mysterious way she will always be the Body and the Bride of Christ, but it will all mean nothing to the denizens of our time and space since it will come across as a hollow posturing at best, and at worst will appear as the wild gesticulations of an attention-starved, aging movie star whose former glory has faded into a pathetic nostalgia. If holiness in the Church is always a palimpsest hidden under an overlay of a pornocratic corruption, it is hard to see how an average person can be expected to do the work required to restore the original image hidden under centuries of varnished overlays of mendacity and debauchery.
Caught between the boredom induced by a “Church on the move!” and the perceived preposterousness of the Church’s claims for herself, our culture and our Church opts for the construction of superficial compromises.
Saints living in the threshold
The way out of this mess is difficult to see and I have no insights to offer that are different or superior to those offered by many others. I therefore double-down on my repeated theme of sanctity in a deep cruciform, Christological form as the most profound answer that can be given. Therefore, what we need are modern saints—but saints who can live within what Romano Guardini called the “threshold” between heaven and earth. It is that realm of the “in between” (metaxis) spoken of by various modern thinkers, from Eric Voegelin to William Desmond. But, in this case, it includes as well the ability from within an eschatological prolepsis of heaven to also empathetically “participate” in the antechamber of hell that so many today are experiencing. The modern saint is thus called upon to bring heaven into that hell in order to conquer it from within and to thereby transform it. The saint therefore cannot live “above” or “beside” or “underneath” this desolation, but must live through it to get beyond it and into the resurrection out of death that only Christ can bring.
This kind of sanctity is no different than all others, in the sense that it is more art than science. Here we need to help of the poets and of literary giants like Bernanos. Because the Church’s decline is in large measure related to the decimation of a deeply spiritual form of imagination. We have failed to imagine that the truest source of our dismal cultural situation is a specific refusal of the theodramatics that undergirds our existence and defines the meaning of our existence and the meaning of history.
It is a refusal of the very category of spiritual “decision” as something critically determinative to any concept of a meaningful life and as something deeply consequential for purposeful happiness. The question of existential spiritual decision as the defining moment of any life in a constitutive way is dismissed as meaningless and even dangerous, and the God who proposes it to us as a provocation is nullified by explaining it away as nothing more than a dyspeptic epiphenomenal fantasy generated in the heat of repressed anxiety and sexual desire. This is what we have failed to imagine and thus failed to see.
For example, we are told incessantly by the modern ecclesial lords of accompaniment that we must speak in a language that people can understand. But how cliché that sounds; how anodyne and boilerplate. We are told that we must “meet people where they are today”. But “where” is that exactly? What does that even mean? What if the person of today, existentially speaking, is nowhere? The pastoral problem we face in modern culture, after all, is that aggressive secularity, at its core, removes all binding addresses. We can knock on the doors but nobody is ever “home”. Nobody actually “lives” there anymore. We live not so much in a culture as in an anti-culture, which dissolves the ties that bind. Hans Urs von Balthasar noted the ambiguity we face in this regard with deep spiritual precision:
The slogan is much bruited about these days that we should try to meet modern man “where he is”. … So severe is this situation that most teachers of religion ask, with equal justice, just who these ruins are whom we should try to “meet” (against their will!) “where they are”. A missionary … has it relatively easy: he encounters a perhaps primitive anima naturaliter christiana. … But where is the famous “point of contact” with the anima technica vacua? I for one certainly do not know. Some table-rapping, a séance or two, some dabbling in Zen meditation, a smattering of liberation theology: enough. (Epilogue, 10-11)
What Balthasar is affirming here is that there is very little in the way of a “point of contact” between the Gospel and a vision of life grounded in a vacuous technocratic and soulless paradigm. We must choose and the refusal to choose is a choice–a choice for the non-meaning of the very proposition and a choice for the nullification of the God who proposes it. It is a choice to drift with the culture of the anima technica vacua or the culture of Christ’s Kingdom.
Christ or nothing
Put into eschatological categories, what we are confronting in the world today is a theodramatic confrontation wherein there is an increasingly visible prolepsis of heaven and hell playing out in a conflict in the souls of every one of us. And its resolution can only come about Christologically, since only Christ can be that “point of contact”. This much modernity has laid bare and made increasingly clear.
It is Christ or it is nothing. And it is in the threshold between Christ and nothing that the saint must live since Christ is the bridge that alone can cross that threshold.
This then is the true “accompaniment” that we need today to combat the decline all around us. The accompaniment of one who, in Christ, can bring a foretaste of heaven into the domain of those in the grips of Hell’s shadow. We can lament the decline we see, or we can chase after those who are fleeing, like the shepherd in search of lost sheep. And by “chase” I mean the pursuit of friendship in a high spiritual tonality. We must be able to live in the “in between” and to bridge it in Christ. This is the time of the poets who speak the language of paradox but in the concrete singularity of real things. Long gone are the Baroque Romantics. What a pity. But perhaps our own era may yet generate a new form of the sanctified romantic. For only such saints can make Christianity weird again.
Here is where I find Pope Francis to be both unbelievably attuned to the need for the Church to move out of itself and into the metaxu of engagement with our world (the Church as field hospital), but also unbelievably obtuse as to what this means or how it is to proceed. His response seems to hinge on emphasizing the path of empathy with those, because of sin, who are in the prolepsis of hell, but without bringing along heaven as a restorative remedy. He has lost the Christological point of contact and has opted instead for the mythology of modern globalism and moral latitudinarianism as the “true empathy”.
As such, this papacy represents to me one of the greatest missed opportunities in the modern Church. What could have been a papacy of energized lay sanctity for the sake of the world out of the heart of the Church became instead a papacy fixated on a quasi-Marcionite theology that pits the angry God of doctrines and commandments against the “kind” God of antinomian love.
And that is a shame. It is a shame because it gets the diagnosis correct, but not the prescription.
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Dr. Chapp concludes that Pope Francis is both “attuned” to the crying need for engagement, and “unbelievably obtuse as to what this means or how it is to proceed.” Two useful quotes:
FIRST, Chapp mentions Berdyaev….As for what is “obtuse,” does Berdyaev expose the obtuse backside of “time is greater than space” (Evangelii Gaudium, 2013)? Rather than a plausible appeal for patience as Francis possibly imagines, is what we really have in actual practice the subordination of permanent truth to the mythical arc of historical?
Berdyaev: “…Christian eschatology appeared to be a ‘tactless’ and ‘indelicate’ thing, which affronts reason and demands the impossible [e.g., “moral perfection”]. This poses in an acute [!] form the problem of the relation between eschatology and history. But the philosophical problem of history is first of all a problem of time. The deification of history is the deification of historical time” (“Slavery and Freedom,” 1944, p. 257).
SECOND, now the homosexual lifestyle ANNEXES first the state, then society, and now even the Church–in the blessing of irregular “couples” under Fiducia Supplicans!
But, does the underlying loneliness, disintegration and despair have a real answer in Miquel de Unamuno? In front [!] of tactless and indelicate reason and faith, he positions HOPE:
“…To believe in God is to long for His existence and, further, it is to act as if He existed; it is to live by this longing and to make it the inner spring of our action. This longing or hunger for divinity begets hope [!], [only then] hope begets faith, and [then] faith and hope beget charity. Of this divine longing is born our sense of beauty, of finality, of goodness” (“The Tragic Sense of Life,” 1954, pp. 184-5).
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So, now, the AWKWARD PROBLEM is that our inborn “capacity for God” is actually another way of saying “natural law.” And the morality of natural law is jettisoned by our deification of time….Even the hope of Veritatis Splendor is obsolesced by what Francis correctly calls our “throwaway culture.”
So long as one living in satisfactory truthfulness and sincerty (proto holiness) while in any or no organization of sinners (all living in this world) fails to glimpse the treasure, Kingdom of God, no saints are borne. As the surge of population in a sense reveal, the best paradise they could imagine is this world and they grow in their sinfulness to get a better share of it, and the consequent rapid progress materialised by the Merciful Father whitout even revealing His hands behind. It is hightime those leaders in faith to raise their notion of God’s power from that of Sadduces not to that of early church, out of time, but to ‘this’ time. That is, without truely become economically poor for living a ‘man of word’ (sincerty), or truely suffering (life become hellish) because of the laws made for sinners to make this world a paradise, no one would enter into His Kingdom.
This is one of the best interpretations of the times that I have read since reading Mgsr Shea’s From Christendom to Apostolic Mission. Thank you!
This was going well, very well, until we got to the condescending anti-Francis section at the end. Francis proclaims Christ every day. Christ is the centre, always the centre, in his addresses. And what Francis says about joy, the importance of the joy of living in the Person of Christ, and the damage that the old clericalism has done and the new clericalism is doing is so rich and varied.
But you say: “He has lost the Christological point of contact and has opted instead for the mythology of modern globalism and moral latitudinarianism as the “true empathy””
Gosh! I’m sorry but I marvel at the olympian self-estimation that allows a person to say things like this with such confidence. The audacity!
Good point. Readers should read the biography of the Pope by Mark Shriver to get a bit of understanding of where the Pope has been and where he is trying to go. Reading it can be a bit humbling.
A man who abuses and disowns the moral content of the Sermon on the Mount as easily as Francis should be questioned whether his frequent invocations of the name of Our Savior are so many props to alien philosophies by a man who passionately praises atheists and the tyrannies of mass murder they institute.
Boredom.
Yes, I think that sums it up rather well.
it sure helps if the Laity have THEIR OWN PLACE…it’s the narthax, the Vestibule, the dormant place proper to the Laity…where all the ministries of the Laity are present in a catatonic state….
It should be a place a good deal lower considering the seething venomous anti-Catholic bigotry and willful ignorance so many of the Catholic laity harbor with a great deal of pride.
Anyone who desires to grow up and serve God, can do so easily enough. There is nothing to stop them. If they believe there is, they are lying to themselves.
When reading the early Fathers we become jolted spiritually, and intellectually by what seems a different Church. Not doctrinally, rather by intensity. Reading the great intellectuals von Balthasar, and not to scandalize, some of recent beloved we’re drawn into that world of ideas, pristine, ethereal, but inducing to boredom. Intellectualism is its finest form nevertheless is behind Bernanos’ boredom that in time disintegrates us within.
My former bishop, gone to his reward, had advised at a time of crisis that I needed a challenge. At the time I thought he was addressing me in particular. Although since I’m convinced it references us all. Why are we “bored stiff” if not that we’ve been fed the stuff of boredom. I appreciate Larry Chapp and understand the difference between us. Pope Francis is addressed at the conclusion of this article and responsible for the continuance of disinterest in faith practice. Certainly he’s not wholly responsible. Although it can be said that a religion that currently perceives the sinner as a wounded warrior requiring emotional salve, rather than the hard, unmitigated truth does both disservice, and removes the challenge our faith requires.
Congratulations Larry. You are producing the most cogent cultural analysis available today. I think you are right that the solution is a new generation of saints who can live in the midst of this pain and chaos. This will not be a quick and easy victory. It will take 200 years of mudwrestling in the cultural wasteland that is the modern west to achieve victory.
I wonder if there is a correlation between boredom and the lessening of physical work, or on the other hand between spiritual lethargy and the satisfaction of a job well done? Perhaps parishioners could become more holy and Christ centered if they banded together serving the needy. Our parish recently formed a St. Vincent dePaul group and are now serving over 200 meals a week to the hungry and at the same time the Church is showing more signs of spiritual growth. Sacrifice grows sanctity.
Dr. Chapp concludes that Pope Francis is both “attuned” to the crying need for engagement, and “unbelievably obtuse as to what this means or how it is to proceed.”
Two useful quotes: Berdyaev on historicism and Unamuno on hope:
FIRST, Chapp mentions Berdyaev….As for what is “obtuse,” does Berdyaev expose the obtuse backside of “time is greater than space” (Evangelii Gaudium, 2013)? Rather than a plausible appeal for patience (as Francis imagines), what we really have in actual practice is the subordination of permanent truth to the fluid arc of historical. Yes?
Berdyaev: “…Christian eschatology appeared to be a ‘tactless’ and ‘indelicate’ thing, which affronts reason and demands the impossible [e.g., “moral perfection”]. This poses in an acute [!] form the problem of the relation between eschatology and history. But the philosophical problem of history is first of all a problem of time. The deification of history is the DEIFICATION OF HISTORICAL TIME” (“Slavery and Freedom,” 1944, p. 257).
SECOND, now does the homosexual lifestyle ANNEX first the state and then society, and now even the Church–in the blessing of irregular “couples” under Fiducia Supplicans?
Does the underlying loneliness and despair have a real answer from Miquel de Unamuno? Instead of rejecting supposedly “tactless and indelicate” Reason & Faith, he goes first to HOPE:
“…To believe in God is to long for His existence and, further, it is to act as if He existed; it is to live by this longing and to make it the inner spring of our action. This longing or hunger for divinity begets HOPE [!], [only then] hope begets faith, and [then] faith and hope beget charity. Of this divine longing is born our sense of beauty, of finality, of goodness” (“The Tragic Sense of Life,” 1954, pp. 184-5).
___________________________________
So, now, the AWKWARD PROBLEM is that our inborn “capacity for God” and hope is actually another way of saying “natural law.” But, the morality of Natural Law is jettisoned by our “deification of time”….
Even the hopeful “Veritatis Splendor” is obsolesced by Laudato Si’s “throwaway culture”.
Personal feelings and affiliations aside, if we examine Christ’s message in the context of the Bible, Christ was “NOT” a social advocate. He preached the personal salvation of souls. He called on His followers to become aware of their sinfulness, to accept their sinfulness, to repent of their sinfulness, and to commit to a conversion away from sinfulness.
Christ called upon His followers, His church to lead humanity away from sinfulness and toward a personal “I-Thou” relationship with God their Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer. (Martin Buber)
The false focus on unilateral forgiveness without repentance and conversion is in direct opposition to Christ’s message and dooms mankind to a continuation of its systemic efforts to remove God from our lives and delete his moral and spiritual laws from our daily lives. (“Thy kingdom Come, Thy Will be done on earth as it is Heaven.”
God’s Word and God’s Law, Values, and Morality must be the focal point toward which the church leads humanity and “NOT’ the world leading the church to politically correct, socially acceptable, and “feel good” values and behaviors.
Iconoclast anti intellectualism is the answer to our woes inasmuch we must think and think deeply. Berdyaev’s “control through management techniques that is the Mark of the Beast” is insightful yet symptomatic. Our pitfall is when we fall into inertia and shift the focus from practice.
The pulpit is the primary instrument to reach the Church at large. Within Catholicism practicing or otherwise a slim number have read Berdyaev or von Balthasar, intellectualism at its best, the best perhaps Ratzinger. Although our beloved hero loved the piano and petting cats. There certainly is a place for that in the Church, nonetheless he wasn’t a preacher, an Athanasius. Most priests go through the basics, generally indoctrinated with aphorisms. Pulpit preaching turned from fire to the dispensation of bromides for the weary. Somehow that fire which drove the gallant faith witness of the Apostles and early Fathers must be reignited.
As a guide to my two previous comments Larry Chapp articulates in his particular genre what I’m trying to say, “Perhaps our own era may yet generate a new form of the sanctified romantic. For only such saints can make Christianity weird again”.
Every day of my life, someone has called me weird, even those who love me, but I am far removed from a saint. Nonetheless, as a former non-believer, I fell in love with the paradoxes of Christ and those of every Christian apologist since, including those I find here.
Baker, And you can be a saint only when you finish solving all the paradoxes, because that is the way God tells you that the God you conceived now is not yet true, though could be quiet close. So improve your pace of discovery, all the way to the Truth, failing which your time will be up and His sentence, death ensues for remaining in sin.
The paradoxes I refer to are obvious in a meaning I do not dispute. I know why Our Lord and His apologists are ironic. Truth cuts across the grain of the vanity we incur from our sins. I am well aware of the lies everyone tells themselves when they sin. I do not need to be condescendingly informed about a matter I have already observed tens of thousands of times in my life, a matter I made clear enough in my first comment.
A further explanation on the issue of openness toward the homosexual individual. A priest is required to hold fast to the faith he represents and the condemnation of homosexual behavior. Charity nevertheless is intrinsic to the meaning of priesthood. I was asked elsewhere what can we do to reach out? However, it’s another matter to bless a known, or apparent homosexual based on charity when division of person from behavior as commended by FS is impossible. Otherwise, a priest may and should remain approachable by his demeanor, and in instances where applicable to let it be known that he indeed loves the sinner not the sin. A tenet held by Catholics and, perhaps most Protestants. As such we enhance opportunities for the homosexual to approach us for consultation and hopeful conversion of manners.
We can meet what Pope Francis requests without complying to a formula that engenders both confusion for the faithful and a sense of positive sanction of the homosexual’s behavior. A commenter was critical of this approach, that a gay person would have to carry a sign and so forth, which is untrue. It’s quite manifest in many instances. When not, the blessing is not an issue.
I didn’t catch where elsewhere you asked about reaching out. It occurs to me when the Church proclaims truth the reaching out remains simple as it should be for the priest and everyone else; no need for anything over-elaborated, he just does what naturally is called for. With mixed messaging requiring things to be affect-complicated the priest needs some better senses to steer through what is happening where “reaching out” can already be something overdone. What do you think Fr.?
What you say about reaching out seems fine with me. I was asked about reaching out by someone [see Cardinal Zen: Fiducia Supplicans ‘creates confusion’; suggests Fernández should resign].
Yes I have now looked at the comments referenced thank you.
I believe, so much is thrown away in the discourse at large, the way its being framed. One can only imagine that experiences such as your own, really happen. One has to believe in what is imagined! and in mentioned accounts.
Even most of our churches built since 1958 look like those cul-de-sacs: round, self-referential, and aesthetically drab in their cookie-cutter, concrete brutalist minimalism, they inspire nothing and spiritually provoke even less.
Why then during the halcyon days of the Communio Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI wasn’t anything done about this? The JPII era produced some of the worst architectural eye sores ever made by man (Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels, Jubilee Church). Is Dr. Chapp going to just handwave this off as being the product of secularism?
Pizza Hut architecture is just one of the many signs of abandoning a sense of the sacred necessitating the pursuit of purity, which is the heart of this malaise Mr. Chapp speaks of.
Sin denial is a long, tortuous, and dirty process in the life of an individual, and therefore, it’s also one of the strongest forces for social bonding. Part of the process of sin denial involves the search for likeminded sinners to make systematic deception less burdensome and more plausible. Denial turns to group-think; group-think becomes cultural, cultural movements becomes ideological. Grand scale ideologies that allow personal deniability for evil, entrenched sufficiently become a pretext for explaining and projecting an explanation for evil in the world on people of another sort, another race, another nation, a basis for war.
The more educated a civilization becomes, the more resources it generates for creating mythologies of determinist explanations of evil behavior. We don’t only commit sociology to explain criminals. We use it to excuse our sins. Most clerics could care less that confession lines have dried up, but will provide sociobabble explanations if you asked.
Francis, during his most irritatingly successful battles against humility, demonstrates an Orwellian refusal to give any thought at all to the permanent imperfectability of the human condition implicit in original sin, and the manner in which all evil is traceable to the corruptions of individual souls, just as Jesus said it is. How easily an ordained life isolated from observing the practical consequences of daily temptations can forget how easy it is to commit dozens of venial sins on a bad day. It doesn’t even have to start as a bad hair day or a hit the thumb with a hammer day.
On more grave matter, Francis can’t even connect the sex revolution with abortion.
Picture a man or woman who hungers and thirsts to break out of this boredom and nihilism and wonders if the Catholic church might be a place to do so. On arrival they find “putrescence, stench, decomposition,” the very same boredom they are eager to flee. Few expectations, even fewer challenges, for after all, it is ‘known’ that human beings are too fragile for these. Hard to overstate the loss and damage caused by leaving these men and women outside the gates to go it alone.
The “greater secularity” and “ecclesial decline” in the West is not due to any form of boredom directly. Although boredom is indeed a symptom of the pervasive idolatry in the Church, which is what directly leads to the “greater secularity” and “ecclesial decline” in the West.
How is the Church idolatrous? The Old Testament is a record of God’s interaction with humanity in order to bring the gentiles out of polytheism and into the worship of the One true God. This was already an ancient project when the foretold Christ finally arrived. Thousands of years of preparation would have been for naught had the infant Church engaged in idolatry by rendering unto Caesar that which belongs only to the One true God. In their case Caesar was demanding worship, but had Caesar demanded of the Christians anything else that belonged only to God, they would have refused. After all, Christ had commanded them to render unto Caesar that which belongs to Caesar, and unto God that which belongs to God.
After enduring centuries of persecution and martyrdom for the sake of God’s ancient project, the Christians finally saw the Roman Empire reject polytheism and embrace Christian monotheism.
Much of contemporary Christianity, including the Catholic clergy, seem to have lost sight of God’s project, much less maintained heroic loyalty to it as the Early Church did.
Contemporary Christianity, by its silence and complacency, if not direct complicity in it, has rendered unto Caesar authority over innocent human life that belongs to God alone. That is idolatry. The state simply has no authority whatsoever to legalize the murder of innocent humanity. (We thought that had been settled at the Nuremberg trials.)
This pervasive idolatry, of course, has led to greater “secularity” and “ecclesial decline” in the West.
If we do not restore the fierce loyalty of the Early Church to God’s plan this idolatry will end in the death of Christianity in the West.
Wow!! All of the words in this article, and no naming nor mentioning of God our Father!! The receiving of God our Father’s Love and loving Him in return …. the knowing Him in Father/child relationship through His Son led of and by the Holy Spirit, is what is missing in our Church.
Do read John 12: 44-49 ……
“44But Jesus cried and said: He that believeth in me doth not believe in me, but in him that sent me. 45And he that seeth me, seeth him that sent me. 46I am come, a light into the world, that whosoever believeth in me may not remain in darkness. 47And if any man hear my words and keep them not, I do not judge him for I came not to judge the world, but to save the world. 48He that despiseth me and receiveth not my words hath one that judgeth him. The word that I have spoken, the same shall judge him in the last day. 49For I have not spoken of myself: but the Father who sent me, he gave me commandment what I should say and what I should speak. 50And I know that his commandment is life everlasting. The things therefore that I speak, even as the Father said unto me, so do I speak.”
And John 16: 25-28 “25These things I have spoken to you in proverbs. The hour cometh when I will no longer speak to you in proverbs, but will shew you plainly of the Father. 26In that day, you shall ask in my name: and I say not to you that I will ask the Father for you. 27For the Father himself loveth you, because you have loved me and have believed that I came out from God. 28I came forth from the Father and am come into the world: again I leave the world and I go to the Father.”
Jesus is always talking about our Father. See Him and Mary Magdalen right after His Resurrection where Jesus pointedly says that “17Jesus saith to her: Do not touch me: for I am not yet ascended to my Father. But go to my brethren and say to them: I ascend to my Father and to your Father, to my God and to your God. 18Mary Magdalen cometh and telleth the disciples: I have seen the Lord; and these things he said to me.” John 20: 17-18.
Teach God oir Father as Jesus did, and all will come round with great holy excitement to all when they come to know and believe God our Father loves the because they love Jesus and believe “27For the Father himself loveth you, because you have loved me and have believed that I came out from God. 28I came forth from the Father and am come into the world: again I leave the world and I go to the Father.” John 16: 27-28. Knowing Father’s loving us is a Joy beyond measure!!
God bless, C-Marie
I think that the Trinitiarian/sonship reality is implicit in many ways in Dr. Chapp’s insistence on a Christo-centric understanding of holiness and witness. Occasional pieces need not be creedal.
Creedalness: undue insistence upon traditional statements of belief.
That which I wrote was not undue insistence upon traditional statements of belief, but rather a plea to the hierarchy and to all authors and teachers of Catholicism to share from their personal experience, God our Father’s great desire to Father us and for us to receive His Love for each of us, and for us each to love Him with our whole heart, as Jesus did and does. And, in order to be an “inbetween” saint, knowing God our Father as Jesus taught, is a must.
God bless, C-Marie
In our midst are good and holy bishops and priests like Bishop Athanasius Schneider and Bishop Joseph Strickland, and Father Gerald Murray and Father Richard Heilman, but of course, these holy men act like perennially good and holy bishops and priests, and not just the kind of Post Vatican II bishops and priests that Dr. Chapp prefers.
The same can be said for many good and holy members of the laity who are thankful to be part of the perennial Church and the wisdom emanating from all 2000 years of its existence; not just the last 60 or so.
Over the past several weeks, Dr. Chapp has lamented this problem with the Church and that problem with the Church, but he continues to overlook (or simply deny) the fact that the ongoing diminishing of the goodness and wisdom of the perennial Church of our Lord by the Vatican II “spirit” uber alles crowd is right at the center of many of his lamentations.
Only if all 2000 years of the Church are fully embraced by sincere Catholics in much greater numbers can there be an increase in holiness and saintliness as well as a basic increase in simple Catholic goodness. Without this full embrace of Christ, Dr. Chapp will continue to cry out while looking for things in all the wrong places.
Larry, Larry, thou art troubled about many things, but only one thing is necessary.
This article resonates with me. I am a cradle catholic who strayed for some time. I came back for Christ and myself, not for the clearly outrageous behavior from the top and other areas of the hierarchical church. I do not blame people for leaving the Church. The Church is much more than the people who manage the Church. The Church is our connection to Jesus Christ. But it seems that the usual thinking of people today is to view the Church like any secular organization in which the living beings who head the Church are like CEOs and nothing more. The Church is our guide and strength in this life and the way to our salvation with Christ.
Christ or nothing
Thank you for this Larry! Keep blowing on the coals!
When I was a young assistant professor of social science and religion at Hofstra University, I was groping, But every since I was a child in my Protestant Sunday school days I believed every word of Holy Scripture and still do. I remember what an Orthodox priest said to me at some function: “Save yourself and those around you will be saved.” I have written books, had various careers, done post-doctoral works in Epistemology and Social Scientific inquiry, but never lost the gift of faith in Jesus Christ as my Lord and Saviour. I got no inner peace until I became a Catholic, and my wife and 4 children followed. Neither I nor they care what the world teaches or thinks. We all go to mass, we all believe we are receiving the precious Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity of Jesus Christ. We are all devoted to Our Blessed Mother of God. We are not perfect, we are sinners, but we love and trust God and our neighbors even those who could care less about us.