The time is full of opportunities to live and share the Faith

I suggested last month that recent developments, including Donald Trump’s victory, open up possibilities for the future. But unsettling established orthodoxies isn’t enough: there must be something better to replace them.

That brings us to the Catholic vision of the world. We are told to preach the word in and out of season, but now seems a particularly good time. People hear when they are ready to hear, and a great many people seem newly ready to hear something different. If so, arguments that have been made a thousand times without effect may hit the mark.

But what do we say and do specifically?

The most basic thing, of course, is to be Catholic ourselves. Non in dialectica complacuit Deo salvum facere populum suum—“it has not pleased God to save his people through argumentation.” Instead, it’s mostly personal example that humanly speaking leads people to the Faith.

“Personal example” includes our reasons for being Catholic. We should know why we ourselves are Catholic, what the Faith—rooted in the truth about Jesus Christ—means to us, and how we have responded to objections and difficulties we found troubling. That’s worth doing for a variety of reasons. One is that it enables us to engage with other people on a personal level with a lot of give and take.

But more impersonal argumentation also has its place. We’re rational beings, so our faith will be stronger if it aligns with our reason, and other people will be more receptive if misconceptions don’t stand in the way. Also, other people present their views on general topics, and sometimes persuade their fellows. Why shouldn’t we try to do the same?

One reason impersonal argumentation matters is that truth and reason matter. People won’t take Catholicism seriously if they think of it as a bunch of stories other people accept because they find them comforting or it’s what they were told as children. If that’s what they think, telling them your personal story isn’t likely to impress them much.

That brings us to apologetics, which demonstrates how reason supports the Faith. General apologetics is a demanding activity that most of us aren’t going to become competent in, but simply as a matter of understanding our own faith, most of us are likely to develop answers to some of the grosser falsehoods and distortions.

We should make use of them when issues come up, each in our own way. But the issues that affect other people’s opinion of Catholicism, and also force us to engage in explicit reasoning for our own purposes, are likely the background habits and assumptions we are all immersed in that make Catholicism seem wrong or irrelevant. Since we are social beings, these affect us as well as other people, and we need to explain to ourselves why the Catholic view is right. But to the extent we employ reason ourselves, we’ll be in a position to present it to other people.

An example is the view that value and truth are subjective: everyone has his own truth. This view is hard for people to shake today, but it makes no sense. Every person and institution treats certain points as simply right and true. It’s impossible to think and function in the world otherwise. The question is what those points should be. Once that situation is understood, discussions as to what’s good and what’s real can begin.

Another is the view that science and technology have all the answers, when they obviously don’t. No matter how highly someone rates these things, he needs to rely on other sources of knowledge. For example: should we trust particular scientists or scientific institutions when they tell us something? That can’t be settled by spectroscopic analysis. Good sense is needed, which always has an informal and personal aspect. And the whole scientific enterprise depends on honesty and good faith, which are moral qualities that require evaluation.

Then there is the related view that the social order is a sort of machine that can be dealt with technologically. Freedom, equality, prosperity, and safety define the good society, and if some people aren’t getting them social mechanisms can and should be adjusted so the problems go away.

Today, that view is considered simply rational, and it has greatly affected many Catholics. It’s the basis of much of what is called “social justice” Catholicism. But it is at odds with human dignity, since it deprives us of agency—it tells us that “society” rather than we ourselves make our lives. Beyond that, it simply doesn’t work. The world is far too complicated and unknowable and people far too unpredictable. We need constantly to remind ourselves and others of that.

A consequence of that view is downplaying personal morality. After all, if it is the system as a whole that determines our well-being, how can it be so important how we act individually? An example is the tendency of many people within the Church to view issues of sexual morality as “pelvic issues” of merely private concern that pale in comparison with truly important matters like social programs.

In fact, these issues are central to social justice. They have to do with fostering the most natural and basic of human institutions, the family. Failure to do so is an injustice to all those who depend on functional families—which means all of us. Unless we take that situation seriously we won’t have a society worth living in.

A final view constantly being pushed is the view that everyone can be what he chooses. The view that we have no agency, because the general social order determines everything important about our lives, somehow coexists with the view that each of us is a god who creates his own world. Both result from the modern retreat into technocratic fantasy: science makes us omnipotent individually and collectively, so a man can turn himself into a woman and a system of education can turn all young people into self-actualizing architects and rocket scientists.

In reality, choices are always limited by what is available, the necessities of social life, our own particular qualities, and—to some extent—pure chance. I can’t choose to be a Nobel Prize winner, wealthy heiress, or Assyrian nobleman.

It is true that we can choose what sort of life we will lead. Always and everywhere we can fulfill the moral law, love God and neighbor, and strive for the Good, Beautiful, and True. If our strength fails, God’s grace is always available. But reality intervenes: how many of us come close to any of that? As Pascal and others have noted, we are wretched as well as noble. That is why we need to avoid near occasions of sin, and pray not to be led into temptation.

To overcome our weaknesses, we need the help of other people. No man or family is an island. A way of life is intertwined with a social order, so a Catholic way of life goes with a Catholic setting.

Building a better world requires, among other things, rebuilding the Catholic world in all its dense particularity so that we can be better Catholics. We can transmit only what we know, and we can know something as basic and comprehensive as the Faith only by living it. It is far more difficult to do that in a pervasively anti-Catholic setting.

We the laity can’t create a Catholic setting by ourselves. We need shepherds who love the Faith and the faithful, are willing to risk criticism and incomprehension, and don’t think of themselves as managers or members of the helping professions, but as pastors responsible for passing on the Faith in its fullness, and protecting the flock from all forms of abuse—including attempts by influential churchmen to turn the Faith into something other than what it is.

So, building a better world is an open-ended task that calls on the whole of the Faith. There is plenty for all to do, and now is a time for renewed dedication. May we rise to the challenge and find ways to encourage each other!