Is the Church "Out of Touch"?

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.   

(1) http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/06/us/poll-shows-disconnect-between-us-catholics-and-church.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

(2) http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2003/julyweb-only/7-14-53.0.html?start=2

(3) http://www.radioreplies.info/vol-1-preface.php

The Adventure of Monogamy

The great English essayist and possibly best prose writer of the twentieth century, G. K. Chesterton once remarked to a man who claimed that Christianity had been tried and found wanting that, on the contrary, “it had been found difficult and left untried.”  He might have been speaking of any number of aspects of Christianity, whether belief in the Incarnation and crucifixion, a stumbling block to the Jews and foolishness to the gentiles or idea that the humble and poor are blessed rather than the rich and proud.  To some significant extent, I rather suspect that he was speaking in large part about Christian beliefs on human sexuality.  

In no age have Christian sexual teachings been popular.  It is sometimes claimed today that Jesus gave commands that kept with the spirit of his time, but do not fit with ours.  This is nonsense.  Jesus’ concept of human sexuality was no more popular in his age then than today.  He rejected divorce in an age that demanded it with the same vehemence with which modern society does.  He and apostles always assumed that marriage was between  a man and a women, even Paul writing to a pagan Roman society that was no more sympathetic to Christian sexual teaching than pagan modern society (Rom 1:26-27).

The strange thing about modern distaste for Church teaching on monogamy is that in demanding monogamy without divorce, the Church, as C.S. Lewis, remarked in Mere Christianity, does not demand people do something utterly foreign to them.  The Church did not force Romeo to promise Juliet eternal constancy and love, he did that one his own.  Songs, poems, love stories, both modern and ancient, are full of promises of eternal love and fidelity.  Songs promise that “I will love you forever;” they never promise, “I will love you until next Tuesday.”  For all the commonness of modern divorce and promiscuity, man cannot easily escape at least the ideal of fidelity.  The Church does not impose this ideal, it simply demands that man keep it.  

At the lowest level, keeping this promise of fidelity is a matter of integrity.  When a man does what his conscience tells him that he ought do, promise his love forever, he makes an oath that it is a simple matter of honesty and integrity to keep.  Robert Bolt’s Thomas More, in A Man for All Seasons, on being asked why he would not take an oath to save his life, replied that he would not take an oath that he could not keep.  He explained that “when a man takes an oath, he takes his own self into his hands, like water, and if he opens his fingers, he needn’t hope to find himself again.”

Keeping to one woman (or man), though, is not simply a matter of honesty or integrity, but adventure.   As Chesterton remarked, there is simply no fun in taking an oath that I cannot be kept to.  There is no adventure in keeping an promise only when it is easy to do so, or following a road only until the trail darkens.  What adventure would it have been in Lord of the Rings had Fordo turned back at the first sound of a black rider’s footsteps or if Hector fled when the first Greek ships approached Troy?  What if St. Francis gave up at his first hunger pangs?   What if Christ turned back to Galilee at the first shrieking devil?

This comes to the final point.  Frodo did not turn back at the first sounds of a black rider’s steps.  He saw his quest through fire and foes, through darkness and thunder, through fear and doubt and back home.  And he did not come back the same.  His enemy, Saruman, on his return said to him in awe, “you have grown... you are wise and cruel, you have robbed my revenge of its sweetness and I must go hence, indebted to your mercy...”  No one comes through trials the same.  Fulton Sheen liked to remark on the spiritual law running though the universe that “no one shall be crowned unless first he has struggled.”  The adventure leaves no man (or woman) who sees it through the same, if only he have the courage to undertake it.   

Into the Fire: Towards a Life Worth Living

“If [Jesus] is what he claimed to be, a Savior, a Redeemer, then we have a virile Christ and a leader worth following in these terrible times; One who will step into the breach, crushing sin, gloom, and despair; a leader to Whom we can make totalitarian sacrifice without losing, but gaining freedom, and Whom we can love even unto death.  We need a Christ today who will make cords and drive the buyers and sellers from our new temple; Who will blast unfruitful fig trees; Who will talk of crosses and sacrifices and Whose voice will be like the voice of the raging sea.  But He will not allow us to pick and choose among his words, discarding the hard ones and accepting the ones that please our fancy.  We need a Christ who will restore moral indignation, Who will make us hate evil with a passionate intensity, and love goodness to a point where we can drink death like water.”

            --- From The Life of Christ (p.8), Archbishop Fulton Sheen

For years in his radio and then television show, Fulton Sheen insisted to American audiences that life was indeed worth living.  It was a message  needed as much then as it is now. 

Sheen wrote in a time of continuing industrialization, consumerism, and materialism in both senses of that terrible word.  As man denied God, either by the fast route of outright and immediate denial taken by the atheist or marxist or the slow route of increasing apathy, non attendance at mass, and increasing deism, modern man found there was nothing left to lend meaning, purpose, or value to his life.

Nietzche, one of the earliest prophets of the God-is-dead movement proclaimed that since God was dead, nihilism, the destruction of all meaning, value, and purpose in life was the consequence.  Others proclaimed the absurdity of life as well.  Heidegger wrote “If God... is dead... then nothing more remains to which man can cling and by which he can orient himself.”  The French existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre  spoke of the “nausea” of existence. Camus (The Stranger) has the hero of his novel realize in a flash that the universe had no God and hence no meaning.  Indeed, to Camus the only serious question in life was whether or not one should commit suicide. 

Unfortunately, our world today followed these thinkers in denying both God and hence any meaning or purpose in life.  Nietzsche was right, the death of God leads only to nihilism.  Confronted with an apparently pointless and meaningless life, many choose to leave it.  Thence the current problem of suicide among the youth.  It is hard to live in a world where everything means nothing and nothing means anything.  After a century of world wars, genocides, ethnic cleansings, abortions, how is man to look on life without despair?

I can think of only one way out and one hope for the world.  It was given by St. Augustine when he said “you have made us for yourself O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.”  It was given by Thomas Aquinas, who when told by God that he might ask for any one thing replied, “I will have thyself.”  It was given by St. Francis when he proclaimed “My God and My All.”  And it is given above by the Archbishop Fulton Sheen. 

In Jesus there is a leader Who we can follow into the fire, because He went through it first.  In Him is someone not only worth living for, but worth dying for.  In Him is hope not only for the sunrise beyond the veil of this world, but hope for the world itself.  In Him the world becomes a place of meaning, purpose, and value.  In Him is hope that suffering and death will not have the last word.  And, in Him, is our Captain, and banner, and Resurrection.

Look for the Church

When I wrote my previous post, I removed a quotation from the end, for fear of making it too long. (In fact, I added it, and then removed it, and forgot to remove that third footnote.) The reason for removing it was not that I had found it to be irrelevant, but that since it is one of my favorite passages by Fulton Sheen, I decided to save it for later so as to give it more attention in a post of its own.

It has been almost a month since that post on having faith in God and the Church (which I wrote for the topic of counseling the doubtful, part of a Lenten series about spiritual works of mercy). Lent is almost over. Today is Holy Thursday. It seems like an appropriate time to go back to thinking about that post, and connecting my additional thoughts to it.

Recently, Marc at "Bad Catholic" was discussing failed attempts to sabotage the Catholic Church. His clever response to the anti-Catholic New York Times advertisement pulls from a message of insensitivity and bigotry an admonition to "repent, and believe in the Gospel," a call for an examination of conscience, and a need to increase faith in the Church. Explaining why such attempts to dishearten the faithful ought not to discourage us, he concludes, "But the reasons our enemies are foaming at the mouth over the Church are the very reasons we embrace Her. . . . they remind us of how good, how true, and how beautiful the Bride of Christ is." His statement brings me to the same excerpt of an essay by Fulton Sheen that I had originally planned to post because I like it so much. 

Here is my continuation of my last post:

It is sometimes difficult to be outwardly Catholic, especially in the face of mainstream culture.  We are confronted by a culture that is not only secular, but often outright anti-Catholic.  Perhaps it may be said that the Church does not "get along well with the world," or that it may be "the Church the world hates" (1).  Fulton Sheen tells us, though, that these are not characteristics of the Church that should cause us to fear it. On the contrary, they tell us why we ought to courageously seek it:

My reason for doing this would be, that if Christ is in any one of the churches of the world today, He must still be hated as He was when He was on earth in the flesh. If you would find Christ today, then find the Church that does not get along with the world. 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 men sneer at as socially inferior, as they sneered at Our Lord because He came from Nazareth. Look for the Church which is accused of having a devil, as Our Lord was accused of being possessed by Beelzebub, the Prince of Devils. Look for the Church which, in seasons of bigotry, men say must be destroyed in the name of God as men crucified Christ and thought they had done a service to God. Look for the Church which the world rejects because it claims it is infallible, as Pilate rejected Christ because He called Himself the Truth. Look for the Church which is rejected by the world as Our Lord was rejected by men. Look for the Church which amid the confusion of conflicting opinions, its members love as they love Christ, and respect its Voice as the very voice of its Founder, 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. Since it is other-worldly it is infinitely loved and infinitely hated as was Christ Himself. But only that which is Divine can be infinitely hated and infinitely loved. Therefore the Church is Divine.

Notes:

(1)Fulton Sheen, Preface to Radio Replies Volume 1, Catholic Apologetics Online: Radio Replies. http://www.radioreplies.info/vol-1-preface.php  (accessed March 9, 2012).

[I encourage you to follow the link and read the whole preface. There are too many things that I would love to quote, especially the last paragraph of it.]

See also:

I also like this blog post by Alexander Pruss, in which he applies C.S. Lewis's "Lord/liar/lunatic" argument about Jesus's divinity to the divinity of the Church. Found here: http://alexanderpruss.blogspot.com/2010/10/catholic-church-infallible-liar-or.html

Pride and Humility

Lenten reflections drawing on C.S. Lewis and Fulton Sheen

            I have a booklet of daily Lenten reflections that include excerpts from various works by C.S. Lewis.  A recent reflection was on pride and humility, taken from the "The Great Sin" chapter in Mere Christianity.  I wanted to think more about these two concepts, and I find the things that both Lewis and Fulton Sheen say about them (Sheen in "The Infinity of Littleness," one of the chapters in Life is Worth Living) pretty interesting.  Just thinking and comparing is basically what I'm doing here.  I'm not being very original.

            What exactly is pride?  What exactly is humility?  Just as importantly, what are they not?  I think sometimes it does help to understand what something is by also understanding what it isn't.  One example is that pride is not taking pleasure in being praised, as long as the pleasure is from the fact that you have pleased someone else, and not about yourself (Lewis 106).  Lewis states, "The trouble begins when you pass from thinking, 'I have pleased him; all is well,' to thinking, 'What a fine person I must be to have done it.' The more you delight in yourself and the less you delight in the praise, the worse you are becoming" (p 106).  In contrast, humility is not refusing praise, and is not denying that statements of praise are false.  In fact, these acts of false humility are actually pride.  Sheen gives an example that if after being complimented on his telecast, he replied that "it was nothing" and he only prepared three minutes for it, that would be pride, because it implies "Just think how of what the show would be if I spent four minutes preparing for it" (42). 

            Lewis states that pride is "competitive by its very nature" (p 104) in that it comes not only from having something, but having more of it than someone else, or doing something better than something else.  Sheen seems to agree, stating, "Pride is an admission of weakness; it secretly fears all competition and dreads all rivals" (p 44).  Lewis also states, "Pride is enmity. And not only enmity between man and man, but enmity to God" (p 105).  He explains that a prideful person refuses to acknowledge something superior to himself, and therefore cannot know God without being able to acknowledge him as superior.  Similarly, Sheen states, "If we are filled with our own importance, then we can never be filled with anything outside ourselves" (p 40).  For this reason, humility is necessary for getting to know God: "Humility is the condition of discovering the Infinite Truth and Love...

No man discovers anything big unless he makes himself small.  If he magnifies his ego to infinity, he will learn nothing, for there is nothing bigger than the infinite.  If he reduces his ego to zero and is no longer proud and conceited, then   he will discover everything big, even bigger than himself.  His world begins to be infinite.  In order to discover truth, goodness and justice, and God, one must be very humble" (p 40).

            Lewis mentions how pride is different from self respect.  I think he means that it comes out of an excessive perversion of self-respect.  Sheen states, "Pride is inordinate self-love" (p 43).  Many evils are perversions of good things.  So it could also be inordinate self-respect, or maybe an improper recognition of it.  Lewis mentions that sometimes a person might use pride disguised as self-respect to conquer other vices by the fact that they are beneath his dignity.  "The devil laughs," he says:

 He is perfectly content to see you becoming chaste and brave and self-controlled provided, all the time, he is setting up in you the Dictatorship of Pride—just as he would  be content to see your chilblains cured if he was allowed, in return, to give you cancer.  For pride is spiritual cancer: it eats up the very possibility of love, contentment, or even common sense (p 106).

While (I think) I understand his point, I am caught on what seems to be a complete prohibition against using the concept of self respect or dignity to avoid a vice or a sin.  What confuses me is that numerous sins are things that we should avoid because they truly are contrary to our dignity as persons created in the image and likeness of God.  I do not think that any recognition of this fact is automatically and inherently an act of pride.  It probably would depend on whether the motive is obedience or competition.  Thinking back to where Lewis says that pride is competitive, if the motive is simply to be better than others, then that would be pride.  On the other hand, if the motive is obedience to God's laws, then that would be humility, "the virtue that tells us the truth about ourselves, that is, how we stand, not in the eyes of men, but before God" (Sheen 41). 

            Toward the end of Lewis's chapter comes the part that my reflection booklet quoted.  He explains that God does not forbid pride and demand our humility for his own good, but for ours.  Humility is necessary for us to get to know God, and that pride hinders our ability to be open to Him.  "He is trying to make you humble in order to make this moment possible: trying to take off a lot of silly, ugly, fancy-dress in which we have got ourselves up and are strutting about like the little idiots we are" (Lewis 107) [I had to quote that.  I found the ending hilarious].

            Sheen ends his chapter by talking about the "greatest act of humility this world ever knew" (p 44).  It's obvious to us what he means, but he begins with an interesting analogy of a person becoming a dog, "that gives a faint idea of something that actually happened.  Think of God becoming man... He would not forgo the companionship of men, but would become a victim to their abuse, their misunderstanding, their scorn, and their cruelties." I really like how he doesn't stop at what pride is and what humility is and tell us why we need to be humble.  He reminds us just how humble God was willing to be for our sake.  

Here's a link to Fulton Sheen's talk, "The Infinity of Littleness"

http://www.fultonsheen.com/Fulton-Sheen-MP3s/Life-Is-Worth-Living---The-Infinity-of-Littleness.cfm?PID=251#

You can listen for free, the website just wants you to register.

Books:

The Complete C.S. Lewis Signature Classics. C.S. Lewis

Life is Worth Living. Fulton J. Sheen.

(Yea, I know those aren't proper citations. I'm being lazy.)

The Spark and the Flame

Reflecting on the joys of married love, Archbishop Fulton Sheen once suggested that couples recognize that such joys, though great, were only glimmers and echoes of the joys of heaven. He advised couples to accept them as such and ask themselves, “if the spark is so bright, what must be the flame?” In doing so, he followed an old Christian tradition of seeing the goods and joys of the world as glimmers of the future weight of glory and signposts to God. Hence, in one of his more beautiful passages, St. Paul compares the union of a husband and wife to that between Christ and the Church. This attitude recognizes the natural human orientation to God. In the same way, a medieval Franciscan observed that man naturally desired the infinite, since anything less would not content him, hence man naturally desired God. These attitudes recognize the orientation of human nature to its divine end and confirm the world’s goodness as a sign and promise of that of God. And when the material world can be a sign of the spiritual world, the universe suddenly becomes both larger and more exciting.

Today though, the conviction that we are living in a materialistic universe pervades society. God is thought dead, and now the material world can no longer be a sign of the spiritual. In such a world, the universe is forced to take on the role of God. (1) It is not the spark that points to the flame, rather the spark must now become the flame. The finite has to satisfy the human desire for the infinite. There is no hope for heaven; heaven, if it is to be at all, must be in this world.

Doubtless this explains the odd strand of utopianism in modern, often especially modern scientific, thought. The Catholic philosopher Peter Kreeft has pointed to a recent Time Magazine cover story that asked why the world was getting so much better (and by better, Time meant wealthier). Another modern philosopher commented on the strong sense of utopianism at a recent Mexican science and technology conference. And the same is present in politics; surely, the next politician or next social program will cure society’s ills.

Yet, there is something empty and unconvincing in materialism and the thought that it really suffices for human hopes. Chesterton suggested that the appropriate response to a modern lunatic who claimed to be Christ would be to tell him that if he were God, then he is not much of a God. He observed the same of a material universe. If the universe be solely material, one has the feeling that it is not much of a universe. If the universe is to fill the role of God, then it is a cheat of a God. The spark is not much of a flame. In politics, we find we have placed our hope in fallible institutions and fallible men, and that science and technology are no cure for human sin.

The youth recognize this. In the same article, Peter Kreeft observed that suicide among the youth has increased 5000% since the 1950s (2). They can no longer say with St. Paul, “I reckon the sufferings of the present life are not to be compared to the glory that awaits us.” They no longer believe future glory does await them. Divorce rates show it too. Marriage cannot be a sign of God, it has to replace God. Forced into a role it was never meant to play, it is a poor replacement, and so rather than accept their love as a glimmer and anticipation of God, the couple thinks their love a cheat and separates in search for the real infinite they desire. An author I do not remember said that they are right to seek the infinite, but wrong to seek it in human persons.

St. Augustine offers the answer. He sought for God and said,

“I asked the earth and it said, ‘I am not He…’ I asked the heavens, the sun, the moon, the stars. They replied, “neither are we the God Whom you seek…” I said “you have told me something concerning my God that you are not He; tell me something of Him.” And they all answered with the loud voice, “He made us!” (3)

The world is not a cheat, it was never meant to fulfill the infinite desires of human beings. The material is a sign of the spiritual, and so the answer is to affirm human and worldly joys and say of them with Fulton Sheen, “if the human heart can so thrill me, what must be the heart of God; if the spark is so bright, what must be the flame?"

(1) Incidentally one skeptical astronomer, Carl Sagan, has always spelled “Cosmos” with a capital “C.”—cited from Reasonable Faith (2008) , p. 82.

(2) http://www.integratedcatholiclife.org/2011/01/kreeft-the-winning-strategy/

(3) Confessions, Book 19, chapter 6.