Business as usual is untenable

One thing keeps rattling around in my head as I travel around Rome and chat with various folks: the sense that there is a “business as usual” air about the election of the next pope. There is, of course, an air of excitement and expectation, as is always the case when the drama of a papal election looms on the horizon. But, overall, the mood is calm, with little in the way of alarmist histrionics. I was talking in a bookstore yesterday with a charming elderly religious sister who has lived in Rome for 40 years. She summed up her attitude toward the conclave, and that of her fellow sisters, as marked by a simple curiosity rather than any sense of apocalyptic dread should the wrong person be elected.

I know that this encounter provides only anecdotal evidence for my claim and is a one-case induction to a rather sweeping generality. But it did confirm for me that my impressions of a “business as usual” mentality as the conclave approaches are largely accurate. The cardinals are in town doing the same pre-conclave cardinal-type things that they have always done, and the Sistine Chapel is being prepared for the big event. And the usual pre-conclave media speculation about the leading candidates is predictably following the same boilerplate narrative of ecclesial factions in the argot of secular political analysis.

Business as usual. And perhaps that is as it should be. After all, the ecclesial status quo is to be preferred over revolutionary chaos, and we have the words of our Lord who promised that the gates of Hell will not prevail against the Church. So why worry? There is also the principle of ex opere operate, which assures us that no matter our sins or the sins of priests, the sacraments will always be valid because their integrity is vouchsafed by Christ. Popes come and popes go, our sins will wax and wane will-nilly in various ways, but the sacraments guarantee that the Church will remain in its essence One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic.

So I repeat, why worry?

Beware of a cultivated mediocrity

I think, however, that we should worry. And I think that the “business as usual”, maintain-the-status quo, mentality is precisely the problem. Not because I fear that the theological orientations of the next pope will not be to my liking. Rather, it is because I see the Church drifting toward a cultivated mediocrity. It is a mediocrity that distorts the legitimate spiritual principle that one can be holy, even doing very ordinary things, into the notion that it is holy to be ordinary. And, therefore, those in the Church who are calling us to a more radical living out of the evangelical counsels, the Sermon on the Mount, and the corporal and spiritual works of mercy—precisely as our standard and ordinary vocation!—are elitist, Jansenist rigorists.

The desire for “normalcy” in a “business as usual” tonality can itself become a kind of idolatrous worshipping of a false and deceptive “peace” masking what is, in reality, a simple de facto atheism of practice. It is easy to be irenic and “calm” when you do not think that something is at stake. Just as mere “kindness”, as C. S Lewis notes in The Problem of Pain, when divorced from the moral good, can be a veiled form of contempt. This is so because it treats other people as of such little importance that you do not think helping them to lead full lives of integrity is worth it in the end, as nothing of importance is ultimately at stake.

It is easy, for example, to believe that all religions are equal and are corresponding paths to God when, in fact, your real opinion is that all religions are equal because they are all equally trivial. And that the “path to God” is at best a dubious proposition leading to the default posture of a runaway agnostic apophaticism.

Likewise, in the Church, where our “business as usual” mentality and its reliance on ex opere operato and the promised guarantee that Hell will not prevail can be cleverly turned around by demonic agency into complacency, presumption, and the “falsification of the good.” And if the air of normalcy and the “business as usual” mentality that we see all around us is caused by the trivialization and dumbing down of the kerygma, the falsification of the moral good into its opposite, and the call to holiness as a call to non-judgmental mediocrity, then we have crossed the Rubicon into an idolatrous self-deception.

In this regard, I have long been of the view that there are only two kinds of bishops and cardinals in the Church: those who understand the idolatrous crisis of de facto practical atheism within the Church and those who do not see this crisis at all. A young Joseph Ratzinger noted this same thing in 1958 in his bombshell essay “The New Pagans and the Church”. He asserted that the Church in the West was filled with ordinary Catholics who were so “ordinary” that they differed little to not at all from their secular contemporaries and were thus in reality crypto-pagans and not Christians at all.

If you think, “Wow, who are you to judge?” I respond by asking: “Who do I have to be?” Has moral and theological adjudication of truth from falsehood now been reduced to the sin of “judgmentalism”? Are we now to remain mute in the face of moral evil lest we be accused of a haughty and arrogant moralism? Has the tyranny of “the normal and the ordinary” reached the level of what Dorothy Day called the “oppressiveness of everydayness”?

I think it has. Day also faced the charge of being a “rigorist” who did not understand the limitations of “normal people” living in “normal life”. And has that not been all too often the plight of saints like Francis of Assisi, whose form of life was deemed at first to be a suspicious fanaticism?

Humility in the light of our calling

I am reminded of ancient Israel and how often God’s chosen people treated their election as a magical reality of automatic, birthright divine favor. They had their own version of ex opere operato and “business as usual” religiosity. They often assumed that as long as there was a Davidic king on the throne and as long as Temple sacrifices were ongoing and “done properly”, all would be well.

There was a reason why Jesus had to remind his Pharisaical critics that God could raise up children of Abraham from the very stones upon which they stood (Mt 3:9, Lk 3:8). It would seem that his Judean contemporaries had not learned the lessons of history. Despite a millennium long succession of empires conquering and humbling Israel/Judah, they persisted in their magical thinking, up to and including the apostles, as we see with Peter who could not fathom the thought of a suffering Messiah and who, to prevent that from happening, was “packing heat” in the Garden of Gethsemane.

The Notre Dame theologian John Betz, in an important article in The New Ressourcement journal (Fall 2024), makes this same point and states:

In this respect, as a sober warning, we would do well to recall the fate of Israel, which similarly missed the point of its election. To be sure, what Israel was given was holy, but Israel did not see that its Law and divinely instituted traditions were not given for Israel alone … but for something incomparably greater – to wit, that through its Messiah it might become a “light to the nations” and salvation might “reach to the end of the earth.” … But the point of recalling Israel’s failure is not to say that the Church is any better. On the contrary, our point here is that the Church is subject to the same temptation: proudly to assume that it possesses the fullness of truth for itself and to forget that is must kenotically go forth from itself, even die to itself, for the sake of the world’s redemption. (p 554)

As with Israel, so too now with the Church. The ex opere operato nature of the sacraments is indeed true, and we do indeed have the promise of Christ concerning the gates of Hell not prevailing. But those are baseline realities having more to do with God’s steadfast love and mercy than with our own living them out. Our sins and mediocrities have consequences, and the pedagogy of Revelation in the Old Covenant is not pertinent to Israel alone.

We are not neo-Marcionites and even if the covenant between God and his Church is bridal and unbreakable, the Church, as with Israel, can become an adulterous whore and a cesspool of iniquity.

Indeed, is not the principle of ex opere operato the exact opposite of all triumphalist ecclesial self-narratives? Is it not born out of the painful memory of traitorous and cowardly bishops who, in the face of persecution, wilted but then, once the danger had passed, sought reinstatement to their offices? The faithful needed reassurance that the sacraments were still valid, no matter how morally execrable its priests and bishops had too often become.

Seen in this light, ex opere operato is more of a manifestation of God’s steadfast love for his people than it is a statement of triumphalist glory. And it is certainly not some kind of magical guarantee that the Church cannot fall into a bilious wretchedness and/or a level of administrative, governing incompetence that would make even the worst apparatchiks in history blush.

We cannot carry on as usual

And this brings me back to the conclave. We must not overlook the pedagogy of Revelation in the New Covenant, where we see that even though Cephas was gifted with an insight from God concerning the messianic status of Jesus, he still failed to understand what this meant. And, minutes after being given the new title/name “Peter” he is being called “Satan” by Jesus for denying that the Messiah would need to suffer.

Has this not been the entire history of the Church? Has she not been at her worst when she abandons the way of the Cross, the Beatitudes, and a kenotic form of existence? And is she not at her best in her saints who exemplify those things?

Once again, Betz puts this perfectly:

And this is not to mention the scandals of the clergy that have turned thousands, if not millions, of people away from Christ and his Church. But was there any serious mourning? Were there any serious calls for repentance? Did anyone ever call for sackcloth and ashes? Did we not, for the most part, just carry on as usual as if nothing happened, as if the Church could not be as sick as her members and in need of strong medicines? Are we so certain that the Church is holy and that the gates of hell shall not prevail against her that we think she cannot grievously err in her morals and tempt God, precisely the way that Israel did and for which it was, at times, abandoned to its enemies? (p 556. Emphasis added)

Betz then concludes:

We might say that the Church at large (and not just its individual members) needs to stop carrying on as usual, take stock of its moribund condition, and recognize that it, too, needs the Physician in order that, from something like a deathbed confession, God might heal it and renew it – and renew it not just for its own sake but for the life of the world. (p  557. Emphasis added)

As the cardinals assemble next week to choose a new pope, I hope they have an awareness of the crisis at hand. I hope they understand that the peculiar contours of our current crisis have taken on the form of an “anti-crisis crisis”. In other words, that a “business as usual” glossing over of the Church’s moribund mediocrities requires a Potemkin Village charade and projection of a fictional quotidian normalcy and healthfulness. And that there is a holographic fakeness to the entire enterprise that seeks only to “save the appearances”.

I am not a prophet, but I imagine that the biggest frustration of the classical prophets of Israel was sensing deeply the judgment that was coming, but when they announced this to their contemporaries were condemned as fanatics and alarmists. As Jesus said, judgment will come upon the complacent suddenly and surprisingly, as in the days of Noah.

But I am more haunted these days by another statement from our Lord, especially as the cardinals assemble to decide the immediate future of the Church: “When the Son of man comes, will he find faith on the earth?” (Lk 18:8).