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 7th 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.
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About Newman’s “notorious stretch of dangerous water,” there’s also this from Thomas More about storms and winds:
“Whatever play is being performed, perform it as well as you can; and do not upset it all, because you bethink you of another which has more wit. So it is in commonwealth with the deliberation of kings. Suppose wrong opinions cannot be plucked up by the root, and you cannot cure, as you would wish, vices of long standing, yet you must not on that account abandon ship of state and desert it in a storm, because you cannot control the winds.
“But neither must you impress upon them new and strange language, which you know will carry no weight with those of opposite conviction, but by indirect approach and covert suggestion you must endeavour and strive to the best of your power to handle all well, and what you cannot turn to good, you must make as little bad as you can. For it is impossible that all should be well, unless all men are good, which I do not expect for a great many years to come” (Thomas More, UTOPIA, 1516).
Reading this made me think of Cardinal Burke. I wish someone would open a ‘go fund me’ site for him; we, the people of God could then support him! As an elderly person,I don’t know how to set it up or how to administer it; I would happily contribute ….
I’d certainly contribute.
Altieri citing Newman poses what concerns many. “I have my mission. I never may know it in this life” (Newman). My psychic sister in law once warned me in taking risks with the words, Peter, you have a mission in this life.
I wondered what that mission was. Perhaps there’s a simple response to the mystery some of us, probably many query about. That became apparent when commenting on Kaithler’s Joseph Ratzinger, Alexander Schmemann, and the eschatological person. “Could God be lonely? No. Perfectly content within himself, nevertheless a desire to love beyond himself, setting the groundwork for understanding man”. Card Gerhard Muller, interviewed by Solène Tadié during the tribute to Benedict XVI was questioned along those lines, responded that Benedict understood that God’s love for us is unique among world religions. That we extend or enter converse of love with the other. Muller adding that Islam, Kant, Aristotle speak of loving God but not of God’s love for us. Perhaps the mystery of mission is best answered at least in general by loving beyond ourselves.
About Islam versus a “God who loves us,” this from von Balthasar:
“The responses of the Old Testament and a fortiori of Islam (which remains essentially in the enclosure of the religion of Israel) are incapable of giving a satisfactory answer to the question of why Yahweh, why Allah, created a world of which he did not have need in order to be God. Only the fact is affirmed in the two religions, not the why. The Christian response is contained in these two fundamental dogmas: that of the Trinity and that of the Incarnation” (“My Work in Retrospect,” Ignatius, 1993).
Fine reponse Peter, that we are indeed drawn by participation into the community of love and goodness that is the Trinity.
Margit Thompson above – I wonder what will come out of the meeting of Pope Francis and Cardinal Burke.
In the year-end podcast of The Catholic Thing, Ed Pentin said that cutting off someone’s pension would be illegal in Italian civil law.
Thank you for these wise words and reminders from Cardinal Newman, whom I just love. I’m also reminded of St Mother Teresa saying that whatever God wills us to be doing on a particular day, whether it’s cleaning bathrooms all day or being sick in bed, we should do as service to him.