What direction should Catholicism take in America today? It’s a new setting, historically speaking, and despite all efforts, we don’t seem to be dealing with it well.
We live in a democratic consumer society that emphasizes widespread security and prosperity, and certain kinds of individual choice. It’s mostly been able to deliver those things, but that success appears increasingly precarious.
We seem prosperous, but prices outrun incomes, young people can’t find jobs or establish families, and the American federal deficit last year was 7.5% of national economic output.
In general, we are physically safe, but see constant wars abroad that threaten to involve serious adversaries with possibly horrific consequences. And we have recently seen a rise in crime at home, with criminals becoming more brazen, and the authorities often refusing to prosecute.
We also keep hearing about looming catastrophes—another pandemic, new and bigger wars, economic collapse, environmental degradation, political threats, climate change. The latest worry is that AI will take over the world, throw everyone out of work, declare humanity obsolete, and abolish us all.
But the world is big and complicated, and trustworthy analysis is hard to find, so it is difficult to evaluate these things. Are the dangers as real as advertised, or are they social media panics, scare stories propagated for political reasons, or illusions induced by misinformation and unrealistic expectations? And if the problems are real, how reliable are proposed solutions that evidently benefit their proponents?
Cultural changes exacerbate the unease.
A deep-seated technological utopianism tells people that politics and technology can do anything, and freedom, equality, safety, and comfort are the default state of human life.
That belief has replaced religion for many people, but it is obviously false. Life has unpleasant surprises, and something as complex and subtle as social life can’t possibly be managed. For that reason people constantly feel threatened by incomprehensible forces, since nothing works as they expect.
The feeling extends to our rulers. They fear their outlook may not be as well founded as they think, but can imagine no alternative, so when something unexpected happens they think the world is falling apart. If a flashy real estate billionaire wins an election, or a rich tech entrepreneur buys Twitter, intelligent people in responsible positions believe the Nazis are taking over.
The greatest contributor to insecurity, though, is loss of a setting in which people feel connected to their environment and to those around them. Global markets and bureaucracy are taking over more and more social functions. Electronic connections are replacing the physical presence of other human beings. People live in virtual worlds made up of transitory images and soundbites that can be assembled to make anything seem true.
The results are that people lose touch with reality, while family, Church, cultural tradition, and other non-market and non-bureaucratic arrangements lose importance. The latter are considered oppressive, since they are not based on individual choice like markets, nor on the neutral principles liberal government claims to uphold.
The downgrading of particular human connections, and the general unreality, mean loss of common standards on how to deal with each other. Some continue to believe human relations should be governed by a moral law based on human nature. Others insist that human nature does not exist, morality is a human creation, everyone creates his own identity, and it is bigoted and tyrannical to say otherwise.
The result is that some people think pornography in school libraries, and drag queens and sexual reassignment surgery for young people, are a matter of basic respect for members of sexual minorities. Others say they are blatant child abuse. What can the two sides say to each other?
The progressive side of the dispute aligns with our rulers’ preference for a manageable and administratively transparent system. They prefer to get rid of human ties and distinctions that are irrelevant to their concerns so the whole population can become an aggregate of graded interchangeable resources.
Public policy therefore tries to suppress them. Transgenderism provides one example. Mass immigration from everywhere provides another. It is inevitably disruptive, but the problems are blamed on racism and xenophobia: the existing population is excluding the newcomers and making it impossible for them to live peacefully and productively.
So the official answer is to get rid of exclusion, which includes every advantage local people have over new arrivals. That means further destruction of community and cultural standards and the networks of relationships that carry them. You can’t say “Merry Christmas,” or fly the national flag, because that would make some people feel left out.
The effect of all this is to make us lost in the world, because there is no place in which we belong. We can’t act effectively, because we are not connected to others in a way that makes trust and common effort possible. Hence careerism, ideological conformism, and obsession with money and pop culture. These are the ways people are still allowed to connect to the world and each other.
People respond to this situation with anxiety, paranoia, depression, various forms of addiction, populist outbursts that invariably fall apart, and insistence that government make them feel safe and wanted. In a secularist world of global uncertainty and individual isolation, what else is there to look to?
But can government deliver? There is the basic problem that social management does not work. In addition, though, looser social ties mean institutions are becoming less effective, less trusted, and more corrupt. And growing nihilism and social division make the common good ever harder to define. In its absence, social peace is maintained through propaganda, censorship, and a system of payoffs idealized as “diversity, equity, and inclusion.”
The government thus fights exclusion by destroying the traditional relationships that connect people, and tries to make them feel secure through the technocratic approach to social life that causes much of the insecurity.
Under such circumstances, what should Catholics and the Church do?
One response has been to accommodate the tendencies now dominant. If respectable thought opposes traditional disciplines and distinctions, and wants to make everything an individual choice within a universal system of social administration, the Church should do so as well. She should make inclusion, accompaniment, and progressive social justice her prime concerns.
But can that approach be reconciled with Catholic teaching and tradition? Can it work as planned, or deliver a way of life anyone finds rewarding? And do people see any reason to bother with churches that adopt it?
It seems not. It seems better to maintain a basically traditional understanding of the Faith, try to live well in accordance with it, and offer the world an alternative.
That has advantages even from a skeptic’s point of view. As the secular outlook grows darker and more chaotic, Catholicism becomes more appealing by contrast. It has a structure of doctrine, authority, and discipline that has motivated, sustained, and developed a way of life and understanding of the world that millions have found immensely rewarding for two thousand years. These things have profoundly affected social relations for the better, and provided the setting for an active and diverse intellectual and artistic life.
On the other hand, the conditions that weaken and disrupt traditional arrangements in general affect Catholicism as well. We are constantly awash in images, soundbites, and anti-Catholic messages, while living in a hyper-organized society that wants us to become inert units of production and consumption.
To make matters worse, intellectual, artistic, and political life has mostly turned against the Church, depriving her of some of her best defenses and ornaments. But mainstream intellectual, artistic, and political life has also been disrupted and degraded. Why should we accept its continuing authority—the authority of Harvard University, The New York Times, and the Pulitzer Prize Board?
The condition of secular institutions makes it all the more imperative for Catholics to maintain their independence. Views differ on how that should be done, but it seems clear that cultural openness, which by itself points nowhere, should be subordinated to orthodoxy and tradition.
Suppression of traditional liturgies and insistent outreach to sexual dissidents therefore makes little sense. The idea that the way forward lies through politics makes even less. What we need above all is to love God, neighbor, and the Faith, and let that, under the guidance of Catholic tradition, inform our whole manner of life.
Where that leads us, we will discover: may we rise to the occasion.
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“The condition of secular institutions makes it all the more imperative for Catholics to maintain their independence.”
Rome warned about a freemasonic plot to infiltrate the institution from 1700s to 1958. Then silence fell and a 1789 revolution took place.
It’s too late to maintain independance: Rome fell to the apostates 1958-2024.
So where’s the “Barque of Peter” now?
The bark of Peter is today taking on water on every side (ppBXVI) and eclipsed (our lady of la Salette).
“The Church in an age of anxiety.”
I think, rather, it should read, “The Church in an age of sin.” It is sin that alienates. And worst of all, it is the pride that accompanies the denial of sin where sin exists that cements the anomie and alienation. It is the affront of God that man can never remedy with man-made inventions or solutions. And when the Church does not call out sin, then the Church becomes part of the problem and no longer the conduit of grace won for us poor and lowly sinners by Christ’s redemptive act. (N.B. See the piece by Anthony Esolen over at today’s The Catholic Thing.)
I agree. Our true focus is on God and the corollary of what is not Him. What is not Him is sin. Everything else is vanity and useless worry. The world may conflagrate itself but those with God shall not perish. We waste our energy worrying what the world may do. God knows and allows every little thing that happens to us, down to those hairs falling from our head.
Living in a disrupted time much like ours, St. Augustine recalled the permanent things and the Word made flesh…
From his vantage point in NORTH AFRICA in A.D. 410, and upon hearing about the sacking of Rome by Alaric and the pending collapse of the Roman Empire and the entire cosmos, Augustine sermonized:
“this is grievous news, but let us remember if it’s happened, then God willed it; that men build cities and men destroy cities, that there’s also the City of God and that’s where we belong.” He then spent thirteen years elaborating, in his “The City of God.”
In a later era, the MEDIEVAL synthesis also was disrupted on the way to being replaced by some other and more pretentious (dis)order of things. Jan van Eyck (1390-1441), one of the Flemish Masters, offered a more visual sermon. At the center of the Ghent Altarpiece, through what is called visual metaphor, he shows us an expansive landscape with much of the perennial Church in groups surrounding a grass-covered clearing.
In the middle panel, the “Adoration of the Mystic Lamb,” is a skewered lamb with its sacred and sacrificial blood draining into a barely detectable chalice at the center of all. On the tiny chalice is engraved only one word: “tueri.” Roughly translated as “uphold,” or “cling to this”–the sacramental Real Presence (CCC 1374).
I appreciate your article, thank you for sharing. First, my following comments should be understood they are coming from a very broken man that has lived long enough to experience a change in perspective from “knowing” truth to a position of believing in the pursuit of truth. I do not claim to know much now.
If the Church should do anything, let it continue to teach the pursuit of holiness and the desire to follow others who exude holiness, wisdom, integrity, honesty, peacefulness, virtue, and in doing good to all men. This change that is often sought in public discussions, in conjunction with a raft of complaints in abundance, should be understood to be a criticism of the self. Society’s change will come one human at a time.
The Church’s purpose is to teach, testify, and proclaim that Jesus is the Christ; that he lived, was crucified and rose from the dead; through him each human will be resurrected. The pursuit of holiness is the path of each follower of Jesus Christ.
I think about this. The last three sentences of the column were mostly a gesture toward it.
It does seem to me though that we are not only Catholics but citizens with the obligations of citizens, so politics, policy, law, justice, the public good and so on should matter to us even though Jesus – who had no dependents, no property, no organizational position – put other things at the center of his concerns (Luke 12:13-14).
The proper relation of Catholics to everyday social institutions seems a difficult one to me, at least theoretically. But we aren’t all Saint Francis.
“The Christian who neglects his temporal duties neglects his duties toward his neighbor and even God, and jeopardizes his eternal salvation” (Gaudium et spes, n. 43).
Earlier, about using our heads well and about discouragement, we have this from the decapitated St. Thomas More:
“…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 to weight with those of opposite conviction, but by indirect approach and covert suggestion you must endeavor and strive to the best of your power to handle all things 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” (Utopia).
The ” proper relation of Catholics to everyday social institutions” is simply to speak the truth with charity in ALL situations. Few Catholics (clergy and laity alike) do that. If they did, we’d have more Catholics and more people on a path to sanctity. That’s how we engage the culture.
What direction should Catholicism take in America today? The only direction it should ever take. To follow our Blessed Lord Jesus Christ.
“The result is that some people think pornography in school libraries, and drag queens and sexual reassignment surgery for young people, are a matter of basic respect for members of sexual minorities. Others say they are blatant child abuse. What can the two sides say to each other?” capsulizes a Church in divisive anxiety in an age of anxiety. As Sage Bill Clinton would say, it’s the moral collapse stupid! Just as Kalb sees it in his final endlines.
Unfortunately with the preeminence of politics as politics and within the Church we may have breached the endlines of sanity. Somehow someway beyond rational thought we’ve handed political sanctity to the most egregious moral disorder known to Man. Sexual perversity. Homosexuality in all its deranged forms. Why? The displacement of the religious moral convictions of the founding fathers with atheistic secularism. This was intentionally engineered by the great academic minds of the recent past, especially prominent John Dewey, Dewey, American philosopher, psychologist, and educational reformer [Dewey’s photos remind this writer of a determined Adolf].
We now suffer the outcome of the secularist ideologists to transform academia and public schooling into an indoctrination instrument. All the tools named by Kalb diversity, equity, and inclusion couched in pretense of democratic freedom make renewal and return to an ethical academic landscape impossible. This writer is convinced the only option is a radical transformation, which if attempted will draw cries of fascism. My endlines for the dilemmas facing us is What will save us, Lord? Let the light of your face shine upon us and we will be saved. Miracles do happen.
We need Catholic schools that are tuition free for the children of faithful Catholic families. The exodus of nuns from their vocations post VatII is the bad fruit of a bad tree. Our bich-ups seems oblivious as they seem to focus on anything but the gifting of the teachings of the Faith to God’s children. Wichita Kansas and Lincoln Nebraska have shown the way yet they are ignored.
It is a trait of our feeble human intellects that in ‘teaching’ a matter we become much more acutely aware of what we are trying to say…and might find ourselves illumined.
Shawn: You are fully correct; free tuition for Catholics who are registered in the parish, attend liturgy regularly, financially support the parish, and are actively engaged in family life. It’s also very likely that if the above conditions were satified, fewer Catholics would be inclined to use contraceptives.