Amoris Laetitia in 2026 and the deeper crisis of faith today

The anticipated meeting in Rome to revisit and possibly reassess Amoris Laetitia is now over. And whatever Pope Leo wishes to do with its deliberations will now be on hold as he recovers from surgery, which, I pray, is without complications. Many pundits have focused on the question of divorce and remarriage, which is both understandable and necessary. There are indeed profound pastoral sensitivities in play regarding those Catholics who find themselves in difficult marital circumstances and who subsequently choose to remarry outside of the Church.

Along these lines, Pope Leo spoke in his opening remarks of the need for the Church to be pastorally sensitive to the spiritual “fragility” of so many married Catholics. I endorse and share that concern, up to and including the concern to deal with Catholics who find themselves in “irregular” marriages.

However, when we speak of “fragility,” it is first necessary to describe it properly in order to properly adjudicate its causes. And so we must also correctly identify the differing kinds and levels of fragility.

The deeper crisis

I worry that the focus on hot-button issues like divorce and remarriage will obscure the deeper crisis, which is to say the deeper “fragility”. It is a fragility far more corrosive than any particular prudential issue and is deeply constitutive of our true pastoral condition as a Church. The elephant in the living room is not the question of Eucharistic reception for those Catholics in “difficult” liminal situations, but the growing crisis of marriage as such. The number of Catholics seeking the sacrament of marriage has plummeted in the West, and this trend is even now metastasizing into those parts of the Church once thought to be mostly immune from such trends. Furthermore, it is increasingly a global phenomenon.

This marriage crisis is itself a symptom of a deeper malaise. We see evidence of this in how Mass attendance has also fallen worldwide, as have baptisms. We also see fertility rates dropping precipitously in putatively “staunchly Catholic” countries such as Poland and the Philippines. (For an excellent summary, see the excellent article in The National Catholic Register by Abby Strelow.) This process is largely the result of an emerging global digital culture that is highly “Western” in its ideological grounding, which posits the “nihil” as the only foundational reality, and further holds that all that magically proceeds from this abyss of nothingness is merely the effulgence of a fungible epiphenomenal world of endlessly shape-shifting forms.

A sacramental worldview that views itself as the epiphanic eruption of eternity into time and the elevation of the latter into the former cannot co-exist with the apotheosis of the nihil.

The crisis of divorce, therefore, is downstream of this deeper crisis within our understanding of the importance of marriage in the first place, and indeed of the deepening crisis regarding the entire edifice of Catholic sacramental life. This deeper crisis, this very real “fragility”, is yet one more example of the deep inroads of modern secularity and of bourgeois liberalism into the very hearts and souls of hundreds of millions of Catholics.

It is precisely what a young Joseph Ratzinger warned us about in his 1958 bombshell article: “The New Pagans and the Church”. What Ratzinger understood was that the Church had failed in establishing its own distinctive sacramental culture in the hearts of most Catholics, who, in the absence of a truly sacramental/covenantal worldview, had succumbed to the allure of an unstable amalgam of ill-assorted ideological fragments at the center of which stood what Eugene McCarraher has called “The Enchantments of Mammon”.

As Ratzinger also noted on numerous occasions, what we are facing is a deep crisis of faith caused by the hollowing out of our souls by the reductive naturalism and anti-supernaturalism of modernity, creating within us a kind of practical de facto atheism. This, in turn, greatly attenuates the human religious instinct for God to the point that we no longer have the inner spiritual senses required to even thirst for God as we ought. The very “question of God” is, as I often say, “nullified” at its root as a danger to the social hygiene and made to appear as a remnant of a benighted pre-scientific era of superstition and rank bigotry.

Rejecting the bourgeois cult of well-being

And even if we do not subscribe consciously to such a view, it is the dust that is in the air we breathe. It is the spiritual black lung of modernity within us all, whether we like it or not. In order to combat it, we must openly resist it by avoiding going down into the secularist mineshaft. But how do we do that? For many Catholics, this seems like an impossible task. How do we avoid the bourgeois cult of well-being? How do we avoid the rejection of divine ultimacy and its replacement with the vapid penultimate of a thousand distractions that act as fragmentation bombs in the soul?

This is the deeper “fragility” that we face. And it is an undermining, not just this or that “sacramental practice”, but of the very legitimacy of the entire sacramental concept at its root.

This is why millions of Catholics no longer see the relevance of the sacraments, or of the Church as such, beyond a kind of vague sense that God is something desirable. There is a sense that even though God probably does not exist, he damn well ought to. Which fills the soul with a kind of despairing resentment and a spiritual cynicism that makes old-fashioned acedia seem like child’s play in comparison.

This is the toxin that we must resist no matter the cost. It is what von Balthasar called our “Ernstfall” moment of decisional crisis. Here is what the undervalued Christopher Dawson had to say on this topic seventy years ago in The Dynamics of World History:

Today Christians are faced with a no less heavy responsibility. There is always a temptation for religion to ally itself with the existing order, and if we today ally ourselves with the bourgeois because the enemies of the bourgeois are often also the enemies of the Church, we shall be repeating the mistake that the Gallican prelates made in the time of Louis XVIII. The Christian Church is the organ of the spirit, the predestined channel through which the salvific energy of divine love flows out and transforms humanity. But it depends on the Christians of a particular generation, both individually and corporately, whether this source of spiritual energy is brought into contact with the life of humanity and the needs of contemporary society. We can hoard our treasure, we can bury our talent in the ground like the man in the parable who thought that his master was an austere man and who feared to take risks. Or, on the other hand, we can choose the difficult and hazardous way of creative spiritual activity, which is the way of the saints. If the age of the martyrs has not yet come, the age of a limited, self-protective, bourgeois religion is over. For the kingdom of heaven suffers violence and the violent take it by force.”

This insight, it seems to me, is even more timely today than it was during Dawson’s era and the processes of putrefaction that he saw at work in the Church of his time. It has exponentially progressed in our own time, as the Church in the West continues to abase itself on the altar of sentimentality, offering itself ever more to the Molochs of modern capitalism, militarism, eroticism, consumerism, and therapeutic moralism.

On both the “Right” and the “Left”, the Church in both America and Europe is defaced with the graffiti of our vulgar cultural preoccupations and seems no longer to have the spiritual resources to even desire something more Christ-centered. In earlier eras, reform was possible despite corruption and spiritual laxity, because people still knew where and what the “center” was: the Christ presented in the gospels. Today, we doubt the legitimacy of even having a center, viewing the very notion of a center as lacking in “inclusion”, which is merely code for “we want our bourgeois comforts and conceits.” And so we see that we are not so opposed to “centers” after all. Mammon suffers no rivals.

George Bernanos, in his masterful novel The Diary of a Country Priest, begins his narrative with the following words from the Curé d’ Ambricourt:

My 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 grown world-weary and jaded about life itself. But the boredom that Bernanos is referencing is a unique kind, peculiar to Catholic communities that have incrementally and silently abandoned faith in the sacraments as encounters with Christ and replaced that faith with a secular simulacrum wherein the outward form of the sacraments remains. But the inner life has been hollowed out and replaced with the banal ideology of a deeply channelized and profoundly intolerant bourgeois cult of self-fulfillment.

No middle path exists

What Bernanos is pointing to is a moribund Catholicism that has gone to seed, like a dandelion long past its fruitful floriation and 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 beige, bourgeois Catholicism, with a lingering stench that is the telltale signature of dead things decomposing, in spite of the deodorizing bureaucratic apparatus chanceries try to sprinkle over the rotting corpse. And as Nicholas Berdyaev also notes, the spirit of bureaucracy is the deepest inner voice of the bourgeois soul; it bespeaks a fundamental orientation aimed to “control through management techniques,” which is the soul of modernity.

In the place of Tradition, now destroyed, secularity has given us … nothing. Indeed, it has given us an inverted spirituality that celebrates the “nothing”—the “nihil”—as liberative. This is because the formal “neutrality” of the choosing self is the only absolute in our pursuit of bourgeois well-being. The only “sin” left in our moral lexicon is “intolerance” to the needs of this autonomous freedom. The modern believer is in a situation in which our culture is not simply “unchristian” but pointedly and decidedly post-Christian.

Therefore, to persevere in the Faith one cannot presume the support of the broader culture or even, sadly, of the Church in many situations, especially wherever that Church is also infected with the same virus of aimless mediocrity and the same spirit of the obliterating worship of the Nihil. The serious believer is now thrown back upon his or her own inner resources. Thankfully, the sacraments are still efficacious despite spiritual mediocrities in the Church, pockets of serious Catholicism remain in almost every parish, and the Church still abounds in resources available to believers from the deep treasury of her past.

Nevertheless, the path forward for the believer can only be the arduous path of personal holiness, since the crushing weight of the modern world is indeed powerful. A lukewarm compromise between bourgeois existence and “spirituality” tailored to that existence will not weather the coming storm. And we will not weather the storm if we remain in a domesticated region of stasis, since in the spiritual life, one is either trending upward toward God or downward toward the libido dominandi.

In short, there is no “middle path” of compromised Christianity. By “compromised,” I don’t mean that the Church has sinners within it or even that it has many, many “big sinners” within it. I mean rather that the Church has been gripped in many ways by a foreign spirit that says you can have Christianity without the cross, without a cruciform structure to our lives, and that we can be “good Christians” even as we structure our lives around various forms of bourgeois “security”.

The Church will survive. It is not our Church but Christ’s Church. However, the beige, bourgeois Church seems unconquerable at the moment. And I don’t want to be trite or glib here, ending with some Pollyanna hope that is the opposite of the theological virtue of hope. We are living in a Golgotha moment that is an excruciating trial that seems to have no end on the horizon.

In fact, it would seem that things will only get worse for the foreseeable future. Our Lord endured a descent into Hell, and we are not to be spared such a dark night of the soul as we follow in our Lord’s path of kenotic oblation. Christ assured us of victory if we endure (cf. 2 Tim 2:12). But he also assured us that the path to glory for anyone who is his true follower is first the path of Calvary. He is indeed Risen, but he is so as the risen and crucified Lord who is in eternity and for eternity, the “Lamb who was slain” (Rev 13:8).

The hour is late

It would appear that, unlike previous eras of the Church, our lot is to have this dynamic laid bare and made raw. Therefore, a stark and clarifying—indeed “purgative”—choice is being presented to us as a bracing gift of the Spirit: embrace the path of suffering for others in the run of grace or embrace the path of Mammon and success. The middle ground is gone and the halfway house of beige Catholicism is being exposed more and more as the spiritual equivalent of the meth den on the corner.

I wonder if such things were discussed at the recent meeting in Rome on Amoris Laetitia. Do our episcopal shepherds, as they come together to “listen synodally” to the “witness” of “synodal people” who are engaged in doing synodal things for our newly minted synodal Church in a synodal world of exciting de-centered pluralisms, have the sense that the deeper crisis we face is untouched by such silliness?

And that, in fact, treating the Church as an endless debating club where everything is open to constant relitigation with no doctrinal “double jeopardy” attached, is the equivalent of throwing gasoline on the ideological embers of modernity latent within the Church?

By all means, let us come together and work on real pastoral solutions to topical issues, such as how to deal with the divorced and civilly remarried, and to do so in a manner that respects the pastoral law of gradualism. But we must also not ignore the deeper crisis at hand, which is the ultimate root cause of so much else. What is so worrisome is that so few seem to even see that there is a crisis in the Church that is downstream of our civilizational crisis.

As evidence, see the insanity of the Church in Germany, which continues to assert that the “synodal path forward” must be an ever-increasing alliance between Catholicism and the secular worshiping of the nihil. Such is the road to ruin, and the hour is late.