A recent poll in the New York Times found that a significant
majority self professed Catholics claim that the Catholic Church is "out
of touch" with the world (1). The
complaint is hardly a new one as modern man demands that the Church be in touch
with his needs, wants, and desires. He
wants contraception, divorce, same-sex marriage. He wants to be his own standard of truth and
his own yardstick. The Church, the
complaint runs, should get out of the dark ages and get with the times.
The complaint is hardly new.
The Church has been out of touch with the world before and she will be
again. Ancient Rome, for instance,
commonly practiced infanticide. The pater familias had the power of life and
death over his family and he exercised it; hence infant girls in particular were
being exposed in remarkable numbers.
Opposing this infanticide, as well as divorce and adultery, the Church
was "out of touch" with the world.
Later too, the Church opposed slavery in a world that demanded it. The Church was out of touch; slavery was an
economic "necessity." This did
not stop Pope Paul III from forbidding it as he wrote,
We…noting that the Indians
themselves indeed are true men…by our Apostolic Authority decree and declare by
these present letters that the same Indians and all other peoples—even though
they are outside the faith…should not be deprived of their liberty or their
other possessions…and are not to be
reduced to slavery, and that whatever happens to the contrary is to be
considered null and void (2).
The Church in
both cases was out of touch with the world, and thank God it was.
If the Church has been out of touch with the world, this is hardly
surprising. God Himself, when he walked
the Earth, was out of touch with the world.
When the world demanded it let it stone the woman caught in adultery, He
told the man without sin to cast the first stone. When He ate with tax collectors and sinners,
healed the sick on the Sabbath, and forbade divorce, He was out of touch with
the world. And so the world crucified Him, for it could
not stand a God who was not in touch with the spirit of the world.
If the Church is out of touch with the spirit of the world,
it is because it is in touch with the Spirit of God, Who also was "out of
touch" with the world. For this
reason, Fulton Sheen wrote,
Look for
the Church that is hated by the world, as Christ was hated by the world. Look
for the Church which is accused of being behind the times, as Our Lord was
accused of being ignorant and never having learned... Look for the Church which is rejected
by the world as Our Lord was rejected by men... and the suspicion will grow, that if
the Church is unpopular with the spirit of the world, then it is unworldly, and
if it is unworldly, it is other-worldly... and therefore is divine (3).
Elsewhere Fulton Sheen warned against the man would marry
himself to the spirit of the age for, he said, "to marry the spirit of the
age, is to be a widow in the next."
The Church, though, is not married to the spirit of the age but to God
and she will never be a widow. Nor will she simply "go with the flow." Chesterton
wrote that "a dead thing can go with the stream, but only a
living thing can go against it." Civilizations,
cultures, and empires have risen and fallen; even Rome lasted a thousand years,
but fell in the end; so too all the rest, one dead thing after another, in
touch with the world, going with the flow, swept off in the stream. But through it, the Church remains, writing
the epitaph of one civilization after another, out of touch with a passing
world, because she is in touch with an eternal one.
If the Church is out of touch with the world, it is only
because the world is out of touch with God; so much the worse for the world.
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