The Death of Catholic Culture?

James Matthew Wilson, a Sorin Research Fellow at Notre Dame, writes in the college newspaper:

Ignorance of the Church's faith, however, is just a symptom of an even more grave condition. It is one thing not to know the doctrinal expressions of particular sacred truths; it is another thing - and a more serious thing - to live one's life with a worldview blind to and uninformed by those truths. The great achievement of the so-called secularizing forces of modernity has been in reshaping the way in which we live in and perceive the world. Plenty of persons deny the religious truths their parents and grandparents approved and defended confidently. But plenty more persons affirm their belief in God, or confess they accept myriad other formal doctrines of our faith, while they see the world with the eyes of indifference and unbelief. One can claim to believe in the God Who died for our sins, while at the same time thinking about the world as if none of that business had happened. I do not speak of hypocrisy, but of a loss of religious feeling.

When a student at a Catholic university can write that dining halls should serve meat on Fridays during lent because such "penance" is an individual activity, meaningless if everyone else does it, and a matter of importance only between himself and God, ignorance and blindness converge in a monstrous concatenation. To be clear, that student seems unaware that one performs penance as an act of repentance for one's sins. One "abstains" from meat on Fridays during lent as an act of solidarity with the poor and hungry, and as a sign of unity with other Christians preparing for Easter.

The ignorance that resulted in misnaming abstinence "penance" is easily corrected. I have just corrected it. But how can one correct a worldview that blindly believes one's life of faith is entirely private - an affair between the individual soul and God and nobody else? I am no Church historian, but I bet it took many generations for the truth that Christians are "one body in Christ" to disseminate widely and become deeply meaningful. It has taken at most two generations to wipe out that truth, to make it appear repugnant to the average American, Catholic or otherwise.

The great vision of Christianity is that no person is an individual and no one exists alone. God created all things and keeps them in being through a personal act of His love. He creates us not separately, but for each other and in His Kingdom. The families, clubs and countries of which we are children, members and citizens are legitimate but relative analogues to our role as subjects of that Kingdom. When we worship together in mass, we perceive with our senses the fellowship of the Kingdom. When we pray in silence in a monastery, we experience that fellowship in the deepest part of our souls. Being part of Christ's spiritual body is what makes us most fully persons. From this perspective, there is no such thing as an individual, but only persons in one spiritual body (an analogue to the Blessed Trinity).

Dana Gioia, chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, recently observed, "Most of what modernity has accomplished has been the secularization of culture and society. Contemporary consumer culture not only makes the individual the center of value; it also caters to the lowest elements of human nature - greed, vanity, gluttony, lust and sloth. Conformity, complacency, and creature comfort hardly represent the ideals of a great culture. They may be economically powerful motives, but they inhibit any genuine spiritual development."

Historically, individualism began as a Protestant doctrine. Since it leads, by its very nature, to a thoughtless variety of atheism, it now may be called an atheist doctrine. When someone tries to explain a Christian practice like abstinence from meat on individualist, private grounds, it is not that person's misinformation that perturbs me. I worry rather that such a person is merely one sign of the malformation of an entire culture. When Catholics can no longer perceive themselves as part of God's Kingdom, as intrinsically bound up in the sacramental movements of the Church's life, it is only a matter of time before they can no longer confess any belief in the Trinity. And unfortunately, it is far easier to inculcate a belief than it is to help someone to see creation anew.

The tensions rears its head again: How can we reclaim and absorb the cosmic claims of our faith - the conviction that Jesus died, not just for me, but for the whole world, for the Creation at his feet - and live that out in modernity, in a secular society?

The answer, it seems to me, lies not in yearning for Christendom, but in trudging back even further. You can't get more cosmic than Colossians 1 or Romans 8 or The City of God and you can't get more pagan than the 1st century Roman Empire. It is not a template to be slavishly transplanted, for we live in a different world. It is, however, a reason for hope and.... a clue, which calls us, I think, not to ghettos, but neither to a determination that the "success" of Christianity lies in remaking worldly structures right here and right now. (Please note the emphasis in that phrase. Not about withdrawing the Church's attempt to influence culture and society, not to be "sanguine," but not making it the purpose of Church and believing that the mark of "success" is in that effort. ) It is something different, something that the Christian in Nairobi, Savannah, Lima, London and Baghdad is called to. Something that is the point of Wilson's essay, in the end.

In case you've never seen it - Eamon Duffy's essay on the Friday abstinence, which makes much the same point - the value of us, the Church, fasting as one:

What was also at stake was the Church’s prophetic integrity: its claim to solidarity with the poor. Considered from this perspective, compulsory fasting and abstinence, practiced regularly, routinely, and in common, was a recognition by the Church that identification with the poor and hungry, with those who know themselves to be needy before God because they were needy among men, is not an option for Catholics, but a necessary and definitive sign of their redemption, as essential in its way as attendance at Mass. The Church has always linked personal asceticism and the search for holiness with this demand for mercy and justice to the poor; the Lenten trilogy of prayer, fasting, and almsgiving is both fundamental and structural. By making fasting and abstinence optional, the Church forfeited one of its most eloquent prophetic signs. There is a world of difference between a private devotional gesture, the action of the specially pious, and the prophetic witness of the whole community—the matter-of-fact witness, repeated week by week, that to be Christian is to stand among the needy.