Reflections on 2023 (with help from St. John Henry Newman)

There’s no mere listing the big news stories of the closing year, 2023. There were too many of them. If one had to pick three story areas, they would be the violent persecution of Christians throughout the global south and east, especially in Africa, the erosion of the Catholic footprint in traditionally Catholic regions of the world, and the frequently corrupt incompetence at every level of government in the Church.

I suppose the great lesson in all that is how God sets His way straight amid the crooked ambles of human vicissitude, but that is always the lesson. While we’re ambling, we don’t see it, except by a few feet or inches at a time.

Newman had the sense of it—I recall seeing this clearly in 2019, around the time of his canonization—when he composed his lines about some definite service he and each of us may give in any and every moment.

“I have my mission,” Newman wrote for the 7^th March 1848 entry in his Meditations on Christian Doctrine. “I never may know it in this life,” he quickly added, “but I shall be told it in the next.”

I’m struck by that construction every time I see it.

I expect him to say, “I may never know it in this life.” Newman knew well how awfully dim is life this side of celestial Jerusalem, and how awful the mystery enshrouded in gloom.

“[I]f, indeed, I fail, He can raise another,” Newman wrote, “yet I have a part in this great work.” Newman knew that we do good, we do God’s own work, “while not intending it, if [we] do but keep His commandments and serve Him in [our] calling.”

I don’t know anyone who doesn’t love Newman’s “Pillar of the Cloud”—or “Lead, Kindly Light” as it is better known—which prays for just enough illumination to see where one’s foot should go next:

Keep Thou my feet; I do not ask to see
The distant scene; one step enough for me.

Newman composed those lines in 1833, about a dozen years before the Catholic Church received him, while he was becalmed in the Strait of Bonifacio between Corsica and Sardinia, which separates the western Mediterranean from the Tyrrhenian Sea and is a notorious stretch of dangerous water.

I readily confess that the doomsaying all about irks me as much as the pretense that everything is rosy, as if things today were really either worse or better on the whole than ever they have been or will be until the Second Coming.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: While we’re here, we mostly muddle.

It’s more than two years since my little book for CTS, Reading the News Without Losing Your Faith, came out. It could be time for a revision—there’s a lot of water passed under the bridge since autumn of 2021—but what I said there still fundamentally holds.

Roughly, being Catholic still means participating in a tradition that prizes the making of subtle and particular distinctions within the unity of truth and encourages us to seek—with a becoming sense of astonishment—all the inexhaustible nuance there is within the oneness of knowledge. There is a confidence that comes from knowing that the world is big, the Church is true, and God is better than we are. The truth of Catholic faith at once requires and equips us to think all the good we can of all the people with whom we disagree and pushes us to expand our capacity for thinking well.

By the same token, trying to think more than the good that is possible of persons or doings or situations, is just plain useless at best.

People sometimes do bad things and sometimes the bad things people do are our business, but we are all of us—all day, every day—imperfect creatures even when we’re at our very best, and that just doesn’t happen very often or for very long.

“If I am in sickness, my sickness may serve Him,” Newman saw, “in perplexity, my perplexity may serve Him; if I am in sorrow, my sorrow may serve Him. My sickness, or perplexity, or sorrow may be necessary causes of some great end, which is quite beyond us.”

“He does nothing in vain,” Newman wrote. “He may prolong my life, He may shorten it; He knows what He is about. He may take away my friends, He may throw me among strangers, He may make me feel desolate, make my spirits sink, hide the future from me—still He knows what He is about.”

The year 2023 saw its share of sickness, perplexity, sorrow, loneliness, displacement, upset, darkness, shadow.

Whether the business is coming to a head is too far off to see, but there is always a light that leads, and a duty of gladness that goes with us always.