As for critics of Douthat’s column, they were impatient with his uncertainties about the Church’s future. He needs to “read the room,” wrote one. “Like it or not, the young people will ultimately lead.” Christ “broke all the rules,” and so—when it comes to the Church’s traditional teachings and organization—should Pope Francis. The answer to the Church’s problems is to “truly modernize.” That perspective was echoed by another letter writer, who praised the pope for “returning the church to a proper imitation of the Jesus of the New Testament Scriptures and to His simple, yet profound message of faith and forgiveness of all.” Somehow, this letter writer lamented, that message “has morphed over time into a deeply flawed institution weaned on formalism, ideological rigidity and careerism.” With the exception of one Latin Mass enthusiast and another writer who was piously confident of the Church’s future, the consensus was that the Church needs to be simplified and modernized. “There should no longer be a privileged class of male-only celibate priesthood,” wrote a former priest. “Such a class is too susceptible to self-deception and hubris.”
Bare ruined choirs indeed. There was, alas, nothing surprising in these letters to the editor. It is increasingly the conviction of many Catholics and non-Catholics alike that the Church is a seriously and perhaps irredeemably flawed institution. The ugly reality of clerical sex abuse understandably influences that judgment. But this critique of the Church’s “message” is much older than the abuse scandals. The Church’s hierarchical structure, teachings on sexual morality, and its supposed “magical thinking” have long placed Catholicism at odds with some elements of modernity and the so-called scientific age. What is usually neglected in these critiques is how the Church’s quarrels with science and democracy have been, for the most part, fruitfully resolved. More theological questions remain unresolved. For example, is Jesus’s “message” really as simple as many now seem to believe? Is it really only about forgiveness? What about Jesus’s “hard sayings” and the seemingly impossible demands he placed on his disciples? “But Jesus looked at them and said to them, ‘With men this is impossible, but with God all things are possible’” (Matthew 19:26). Jesus also claimed to be the Son of God; that proclamation hardly seems simple to me. Has the Church been wrong in its interpretation of the meaning of those words in its Creeds and Trinitarian theology? Jesus’s disciples claimed that he rose from the dead, and that those who believe in him will do so as well. That promise certainly breaks all the rules, but probably not the rules the Times’s letter writer had in mind. Yet that promise—what some would call “magical thinking”—has given the Church its purpose and distinctive character since its improbable founding.
If the Church’s critics, or even its defenders, remain focused on its putative usefulness only in the here and now, they’ve missed the point, as Douthat explained in a subsequent column (“A Guide to Finding Faith”). Our secular, materialistic, and utilitarian assumptions about what is real and what is useful blind us to other possible realities, and leave many unbelievers alienated and mistrustful. Those assumptions are “like a spell that’s been cast over modern minds, and the fastest way to become religious is to break it,” Douthat wrote. Breaking this spell isn’t easy—as the letters to the Times demonstrate. But there is a rich and varied universe of religious experience available, if we are willing to look at the world with that exemplary modern attitude: an open mind.
All well and good. Who can say with certainty what will rekindle Eucharistic faith? Or, in O’Malley’s terms, what will create “Eucharistic cultures”? He too speaks of a needed “revival,” but one that will “assess, promote, and develop” such cultures within existing structures rather than by adding a movement or grand event. (Aren’t the “cultures” of successful marriages based on patterns of daily living rather than periodic anniversary celebrations?)
My own view is that we should just begin with O’Malley’s first verb in that series: “assess.” The bishops should focus their intelligence and energy on undertaking “a process of self-examination” and outlining ways and standards by which parishes, dioceses, and, I would add, other Catholic organizations might assess their existing Eucharistic cultures. I can imagine all sorts of ways: surveys of pastors and parishioners, focus groups, visiting diocesan teams that actually observed Sunday liturgies and inquired into their impact on other parish and parishioner activities. It would be closer to what was sketched in the strategic plan’s run-up to a Eucharistic Congress: the thorough-going reevaluation of all “activities from the celebration of the Mass and the preaching of a homily to its ministries, social programs, evangelization of the unaffiliated, and advocacy in the public square.” The bishops could create a menu of possibilities for identifying strengths (“best practices for parish renewal”) and weaknesses, especially in regard to disaffiliation. That would be the initial step toward a multi-faceted, multi-year pastoral strategy.
As for the separate task of addressing abortion, the bishops very much need a guiding document—for themselves, for the Church, for the public. It is not something they can accomplish, as the present timeline proposes, in five months. No need to rush. The moral, legal, political, and ecclesiastical issues surrounding abortion are not going away. They will not be resolved by a possible Supreme Court decision reversing or modifying Roe v. Wade or Planned Parenthood v. Casey. That will merely initiate a new chapter of public conflict. Nor will these issues be resolved by the current occupant of the White House or his successors. If they will be resolved at all, it will be only by a shift in the culture, which suggests the importance of what the bishops might say—and why they should take time and care in saying it.
The bishops’ model should be their drafting of pastoral letters in the 1980s, written in the spirit of being both a learning Church and a teaching Church. Choosing that model demands a prior decision. Do the bishops want to make a lasting contribution to moral and social struggles over abortion? Do they want to persuade and not just (futilely) command? Do they want truly to teach and not simply display their credentials to appease the current watchdogs of orthodoxy?
To prepare their pastoral letters on nuclear defense (1983) and economic justice (1986) and the abandoned letter on women’s issues (1988–92), the bishops invited representatives from a wide range of perspectives, as well as from the pews, to testify before their drafting committees. Today, for example, no bishop—certainly no bishop involved in drafting a document—should imagine addressing abortion effectively without having his beliefs tested against the reasoning of the most thoughtful leading exponents of pro-choice positions.
Likewise, no bishop should hope to contribute constructively without familiarizing himself with “How Americans Understand Abortion,” a Notre Dame–sponsored sociological study (again by the McGrath Institute) that conducted in-depth interviews with a representative microcosm of 217 ordinary Americans (21 percent Catholic). This study shows how poorly served we are by opinion surveys and political labels—and how distant the thinking of ordinary people about abortion is from the disciplined reasoning of thoughtful exponents on either side of the debate. Most Americans, the study found, avoid talking or thinking much about abortion. Their views on it are largely personal rather than political, often emotional, often inconsistent, frequently poorly informed, even about biology, and generally shaped more by the context of the pregnancy than the question of fetal life. The study provides valuable insights into how moral reasoning occurs in the minds of ordinary people rather than in seminary texts and philosophical classics, insights that could help the bishops frame the Church’s teaching in an effective manner. “How Americans Understand Abortion” suggests the need for what would be considered pre-theological or pre-philosophical discussion. Given the contextual character of much thinking about abortion, the study also suggests how disastrous it would be to mix anything that could be perceived as partisan politics with a moral argument.
A drafting committee of bishops determined to learn as well as teach could hear and question the sociologists who conducted this study, encouraging other bishops to read it themselves. Out of curiosity, I sent emails to the communications offices of nine out of the ten bishops on the USCCB’s Pro-Life Activities Committee explaining that I was interested in the study and asking if they were familiar with it and might have observations on it. Two replied through their communications directors. They were not familiar with the study and did not want to comment until seeing the draft of the letter planned for the conference’s November meeting. The others did not reply. I did not attempt the same inquiry with the members of the Doctrinal Committee, who will be writing the draft.
Would such “hearings,” like those conducted for the pastoral letters in the 1980s, be irrelevant to what is a clear Church teaching about abortion and possibly even erode it? No more than the testimony solicited by the bishops who drafted the pastoral letter on nuclear defense was irrelevant to the Church’s just-war theory or undermined it. On the contrary, such hearings would make clear what questions the Church’s case for the sacredness of all human life had to answer and where that case can and cannot find support in ordinary Americans’ profound ambivalence about abortion.
Such a drafting process would also make clear the dangers of a document like the recent pastoral letter on abortion from Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone of San Francisco. That letter begins with brief assertions of principle capped by an illustration of “what really happens in the ‘termination of a pregnancy,’ how violent it is.” There follows a gruesomely detailed description of the dismembering of “a 24-week old unborn baby.” Give the letter credit for acknowledging the late stage of this abortion, but not for neglecting to mention that most abortions take place at a much earlier point and are nothing at all like this. One can be morally horrified by the deliberate destruction of an unborn life at any stage and still feel emotionally manipulated and deceived by this grisly illustration. One wants to ascribe the choice to ignorance rather than dishonesty, but it would not go unnoticed in any document from the bishops.
The bishops’ objective, obviously, would be to make as clear and convincing a case as possible for the protection of unborn human lives. Their hope would be not only to reinforce this conviction among Catholics but also to persuade all Americans. Of course, that is not about to happen in the near future, and it is hard to believe the bishops don’t recognize that. If Roe and Casey were reversed, the backlash would simply move to states and localities. So while the Church strives to make its case by word and witness, what do the bishops urge for the meantime?
The question has three dimensions. What should the Church do within its own ranks? What should the Church ask of public policy? What should the Church seek by way of legal prohibition?
All well and good. Who can say with certainty what will rekindle Eucharistic faith? Or, in O’Malley’s terms, what will create “Eucharistic cultures”? He too speaks of a needed “revival,” but one that will “assess, promote, and develop” such cultures within existing structures rather than by adding a movement or grand event. (Aren’t the “cultures” of successful marriages based on patterns of daily living rather than periodic anniversary celebrations?)
My own view is that we should just begin with O’Malley’s first verb in that series: “assess.” The bishops should focus their intelligence and energy on undertaking “a process of self-examination” and outlining ways and standards by which parishes, dioceses, and, I would add, other Catholic organizations might assess their existing Eucharistic cultures. I can imagine all sorts of ways: surveys of pastors and parishioners, focus groups, visiting diocesan teams that actually observed Sunday liturgies and inquired into their impact on other parish and parishioner activities. It would be closer to what was sketched in the strategic plan’s run-up to a Eucharistic Congress: the thorough-going reevaluation of all “activities from the celebration of the Mass and the preaching of a homily to its ministries, social programs, evangelization of the unaffiliated, and advocacy in the public square.” The bishops could create a menu of possibilities for identifying strengths (“best practices for parish renewal”) and weaknesses, especially in regard to disaffiliation. That would be the initial step toward a multi-faceted, multi-year pastoral strategy.
As for the separate task of addressing abortion, the bishops very much need a guiding document—for themselves, for the Church, for the public. It is not something they can accomplish, as the present timeline proposes, in five months. No need to rush. The moral, legal, political, and ecclesiastical issues surrounding abortion are not going away. They will not be resolved by a possible Supreme Court decision reversing or modifying Roe v. Wade or Planned Parenthood v. Casey. That will merely initiate a new chapter of public conflict. Nor will these issues be resolved by the current occupant of the White House or his successors. If they will be resolved at all, it will be only by a shift in the culture, which suggests the importance of what the bishops might say—and why they should take time and care in saying it.
The bishops’ model should be their drafting of pastoral letters in the 1980s, written in the spirit of being both a learning Church and a teaching Church. Choosing that model demands a prior decision. Do the bishops want to make a lasting contribution to moral and social struggles over abortion? Do they want to persuade and not just (futilely) command? Do they want truly to teach and not simply display their credentials to appease the current watchdogs of orthodoxy?
To prepare their pastoral letters on nuclear defense (1983) and economic justice (1986) and the abandoned letter on women’s issues (1988–92), the bishops invited representatives from a wide range of perspectives, as well as from the pews, to testify before their drafting committees. Today, for example, no bishop—certainly no bishop involved in drafting a document—should imagine addressing abortion effectively without having his beliefs tested against the reasoning of the most thoughtful leading exponents of pro-choice positions.
Likewise, no bishop should hope to contribute constructively without familiarizing himself with “How Americans Understand Abortion,” a sociological study also sponsored by Notre Dame’s McGrath Institute. A team of researchers led by Tricia Bruce conducted in-depth interviews with a representative microcosm of 217 ordinary Americans (21 percent Catholic). This study shows how poorly served we are by opinion surveys and political labels—and how distant the thinking of ordinary people about abortion is from the disciplined reasoning of thoughtful exponents on either side of the debate. Most Americans, the study found, avoid talking or thinking much about abortion. Their views on it are largely personal rather than political, often emotional, often inconsistent, frequently poorly informed, even about biology, and generally shaped more by the context of the pregnancy than the question of fetal life. The study provides valuable insights into how moral reasoning occurs in the minds of ordinary people rather than in seminary texts and philosophical classics, insights that could help the bishops frame the Church’s teaching in an effective manner. “How Americans Understand Abortion” suggests the need for what would be considered pre-theological or pre-philosophical discussion. Given the contextual character of much thinking about abortion, the study also suggests how disastrous it would be to mix anything that could be perceived as partisan politics with a moral argument.
A drafting committee of bishops determined to learn as well as teach could hear and question the sociologists who conducted this study, encouraging other bishops to read it themselves. Out of curiosity, I sent emails to the communications offices of nine out of the ten bishops on the USCCB’s Pro-Life Activities Committee explaining that I was interested in the study and asking if they were familiar with it and might have observations on it. Two replied through their communications directors. They were not familiar with the study and did not want to comment until seeing the draft of the letter planned for the conference’s November meeting. The others did not reply. I did not attempt the same inquiry with the members of the Doctrinal Committee, who will be writing the draft.
Would such “hearings,” like those conducted for the pastoral letters in the 1980s, be irrelevant to what is a clear Church teaching about abortion and possibly even erode it? No more than the testimony solicited by the bishops who drafted the pastoral letter on nuclear defense was irrelevant to the Church’s just-war theory or undermined it. On the contrary, such hearings would make clear what questions the Church’s case for the sacredness of all human life had to answer and where that case can and cannot find support in ordinary Americans’ profound ambivalence about abortion.
Such a drafting process would also make clear the dangers of a document like the recent pastoral letter on abortion from Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone of San Francisco. That letter begins with brief assertions of principle capped by an illustration of “what really happens in the ‘termination of a pregnancy,’ how violent it is.” There follows a gruesomely detailed description of the dismembering of “a 24-week old unborn baby.” Give the letter credit for acknowledging the late stage of this abortion, but not for neglecting to mention that most abortions take place at a much earlier point and are nothing at all like this. One can be morally horrified by the deliberate destruction of an unborn life at any stage and still feel emotionally manipulated and deceived by this grisly illustration. One wants to ascribe the choice to ignorance rather than dishonesty, but it would not go unnoticed in any document from the bishops.
The bishops’ objective, obviously, would be to make as clear and convincing a case as possible for the protection of unborn human lives. Their hope would be not only to reinforce this conviction among Catholics but also to persuade all Americans. Of course, that is not about to happen in the near future, and it is hard to believe the bishops don’t recognize that. If Roe and Casey were reversed, the backlash would simply move to states and localities. So while the Church strives to make its case by word and witness, what do the bishops urge for the meantime?
The question has three dimensions. What should the Church do within its own ranks? What should the Church ask of public policy? What should the Church seek by way of legal prohibition?
But the inadequacies of Latin were just the tip of the iceberg. The anonymous priest devoted an entire essay to the inadequacy of Catholic school education at precisely the time there was a great boom in the building of new Catholic schools and churches. “Indeed the sisters, who are ninety percent of the Catholic teachers, are devoted and zealous in their work,” Anonymous writes. “There is nothing else but goodness and virtue in their penitential lives. Freely and gladly they expend themselves for the little ones of Christ. The more the pity, since they are unfitted for the work.”
Even in the 1920s, it was obvious that the nuns were charged with preparing children for a life with which the nuns themselves were unfamiliar because of their rule of life. “Those who have renounced all family ties would teach the young to become the fathers and mothers of future generations,” he writes. And the system of education they imposed “tends to depersonize [sic] the pupils—to create revulsion for religion within them.” The end result was a people self-ostracized. “Our children may not sit in the classroom with the children of the unorthodox. We must have our own schools, our own charities, our own graveyards. We are the modern Pharisees who will not sit with the publicans. We may thank our own aloofness for it. The spirit of segregation is diametrically opposed to the spirit of Christ. It was His aim to eliminate the narrowness from His people.”
He attributes much of this narrowness to the clericalism fostered by the mandatory celibacy of the clergy. Priestly celibacy is the great paradox of Catholicism, he laments. “The Church insists upon the supreme importance of family life. Her priests are exhorted to be moral patterns for the people. It is not, then, a question why priests do not marry. The great problem is, Does a bachelor priesthood fit into the scheme of the modern world? Not only the lay mind, but that of many a cleric, pauses to reflect upon this grave issue.” While pointing out how little support for mandatory celibacy is actually found in the Gospels or the early Church, he notes, “Be that as it may, the rule of celibacy is taught in all its force today.”
The roots of clericalism are planted deep in the training seminarians receive. “Always the priesthood is glorified. The students must listen daily to pious discourses on the high dignity to which they aspire. From this continual preachment a peculiar psychology is developed in them. They become jealous of the high honors for which they are being groomed. They feel constrained to become champions of the priestly dignity. They grow impatient when confronted with the opinions of those who have not been trained in the sacred science. In this frame of mind they go out into the modern world to become leaders of men.”
Nowhere is the inadequacy of seminary training more pronounced, he believes, than in the confessional when the priest is faced with the struggles of married couples. There he is expected to pass judgment on the most intimate relations of connubial life. “Of this he knows nothing save that which he has read in his ancient textbooks. He, a celibate, must solve the intricate problems of sex.”
Even if he wants to, a priest cannot recommend to his parishioners that they think for themselves about what the Pope John XXIII would later call “the signs of the times.” “Though a heart of gold beat in his bosom, [the priest] must still stand before his people in the guise of a medieval pedagogue. To be true to his trust he must be a reactionary. He must preach and interpret the teachings of Christ according to the minds of men who never dreamed of an age or a country like this in which we live. His every public expression must conform to the minds of those savants, mostly Italian, who have grouped themselves about the Vatican.”
According to Anonymous, the utter lack of participation or engagement on the part of the people in the pews inevitably leads to moral and spiritual ossification. “Self delusion is pathetic in its relation to the individual and tragic when it entails such consequences to the human race. The fact is that the Catholic Church has never sought to develop intelligent faith. The Church has never encouraged religious thought in the individual Catholic. She demands abject intellectual submission to her teachings. Alleged explanations of doctrine are nothing else than controversial arguments. These too are to be accepted in the humility of obedience due to authority. The intellectual coercion practiced in the Church today is just as debasing to human dignity as was the physical coercion which the Church practiced in the Middle Ages.”
In the end, the priest warns, if the bishops are to “convert America to the faith,” they must first return to the ancient Christian emphasis on virtuous behavior rather than adherence to ritual formalism. “They must rear a people distinguished by the virtue of their lives. Attendance at Mass and reception of the Sacraments are salutary practices, according to our belief. Yet they do not impress the outside world. Men to-day are not deceived by the crowds that frequent our churches. There is but one quality that proves the excellence of a religion. It is the excellence of the lives lived by its devotees. When the American bishops cease their school-building crusade and begin the work of developing Christian character, there will be hope for the Church in America.”
As bleak as things looked to the good father back in 1928, I find his words now inspiring, precisely because they come from an era that today’s reactionaries yearn to return to, blind as they are to the deficiencies of the religious formalism they idolize. This contemporaneous account of that era reminds us just how important the reforms of the past hundred years have been to ordinary Catholics.
The Archdiocese of Atlanta officially welcomed the faithful back to Mass for the Feast of Pentecost on May 22. The Catholic Conference of Ohio declared that “the general obligation to attend Mass on Sundays and Holy Days of Obligation” would resume throughout the state the weekend of June 6. Pennsylvania’s dioceses announced in July that the general dispensation would expire in time for the Feast of the Assumption on August 15.
Meanwhile, on June 30, New York’s Cardinal Timothy Dolan wrote a letter to his own flock explaining why no similar announcement was forthcoming: “Here in the Archdiocese of New York, there has never been a dispensation from Sunday Mass, because no man can ‘dispense’ or set aside a Divine (as opposed to man-made) law.” He explained that the Third Commandment, which requires believers to keep the Sabbath holy, makes it impossible for him to dispense with the Sunday obligation, adding, “to deliberately miss Mass is a sin.”
Dolan’s claim that a bishop is never able to issue a dispensation from the obligation to attend Mass is difficult to reconcile with the fact that bishops across the country, and in dioceses neighboring New York, did exactly that in March 2020. Cardinal Dolan surely knows this; in fact, as the metropolitan archbishop of the region, he has a responsibility to know it. What must those other bishops think of his accusing them of disregard for the Commandments? What are we lay people to think?
“Of course,” Dolan goes on, “the Church has always held that there may be some justifiable reasons why a person can miss Mass, including old age, illness, and infirmity; this is still the case.” Yes, and the point of issuing a general dispensation is to confirm that such a justification exists for everyone in a given diocese. It is a pastoral response to an acute threat to the well-being of a community, like a blizzard, a hurricane, or a deadly communicable disease.
The third step of Friedman’s argument focuses on a transformation of Scottish Calvinism. British Protestantism generated the Westminster Confession (1646), which affirmed the basics of classic Calvinist theology: the total depravity of human nature after the Fall and God’s predestination of each individual, such that a life of sin could not cause the damnation of one who before birth was chosen for salvation, nor could a life of virtue save another who was not.
The late seventeenth-century Dutch theologian Jacob Arminius began a shift within Calvinism by proposing that an act of human will was involved in receiving God’s undeserved grace: one of the elect could reject God’s plan for his salvation. Friedman precisely traces these debates, interwoven with irruptions in British political history. The upshot was that eighteenth-century Scottish Calvinist intellectuals came to endorse three new ideas: the natural goodness of man, the efficacy of human freedom, and human happiness as a goal of creation, along with the glorification of God.
The final step of this argument is that Adam Smith was influenced by this neo-Calvinist worldview even though he didn’t share it. Smith said almost nothing about his own religious beliefs. The few scattered references to a higher being in his writings indicate that he was at most a Deist. His best friend, David Hume, was openly disdainful of religious faith, a fact that kept him from ever holding a faculty appointment.
The influence of neo-Calvinism on Smith’s worldview occurred, Friedman argues, because of the integration in Smith’s day of all the strands of intellectual life that are now kept separate in the various disciplinary departments of a modern university. Educated men from all walks of life used to meet together weekly over early afternoon “dinner” in social clubs. Smith was a founding member of the most prestigious of these in Edinburgh, the Select Society, which included Hume, but also five Church of Scotland ministers. Conversations at such dining clubs were wide-ranging and, Friedman argues, Smith would undoubtedly have been part of the lively discussions going on about shifts in the prevailing theology. Religious confidence in the effects of human efforts for self-improvement was in the air. As Friedman puts it, “Smith and his contemporaries were secularizing the essential substance of their clerical friends’ theological principles.”
The remainder of Religion and the Rise of Capitalism focuses on issues in the United States, tracing similar trends in Calvinist thinking and the influence of religion on economics. It is well known to historians but not to many others (including economists) that most of the founders of the American Economic Association were committed Christians aiming to implement the Social Gospel in economic life. Today, the 23,000-member AEA is thoroughly secular. As Thomas Kuhn pointed out, mature sciences have well-developed paradigms and are rarely influenced substantially by outside intellectual forces. Friedman recounts a fascinating history of the American debate on the economic implications of Christian faith that I don’t have the space to summarize here.
Friedman concludes with the shift in the United States from a nineteenth-century identification of much of Christianity with progressive economic policies to the post–World War II alliance between conservative Christianity and conservative economic policies. He explains how, for example, so many ordinary citizens today with no hope of leaving a bequest to their own children nevertheless oppose inheritance taxes on the wealthy.
This is an excellent book, destined to be discussed widely. Friedman’s claim about Adam Smith is that “the time was ripe for new thinking on self-interest,” and religious developments were part of that ripening. The evidence for this influence of religion on the father of modern economics is, admittedly, circumstantial. But, of course, this is what makes Freidman’s claim so impressive. If there were textual evidence for it, someone would have made the argument a century ago.
The synthesis that Friedman attributes to Smith may be grander than Smith himself was aware of. In the chapter where Smith argues that self-love motivates the daily economic services offered by butchers and bakers, he does not claim that competition will protect the consumer from their greed. Friedman makes this claim for him—as I do each time I teach the history of economics—and the claim is central to any moral approval of the market system. But we do need to ask why Smith doesn’t bother to say this.
Three hundred pages later, Smith observes that “the freer and more general the competition,” the greater will be “the advantage to the public.” But this occurs as the final sentence of a forty-page chapter on money and banking, which isn’t the place to catch the reader’s attention concerning the larger question. We may have to admit that despite our interest in the moral legitimation of the market system, and the importance of competition for that purpose, it just wasn’t a significant concern for Smith himself.
Friedman’s account of developments in Protestant theology is deft and precise. Catholic readers will recognize in it a move away from some of the fundamentals of the Protestant Reformation back toward a Catholic view of creation, personhood, and grace. Those familiar with Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age will enjoy Friedman’s analysis of the shifts in Calvinism as part of the long road to today’s secular individualism that Taylor outlines from the twelfth century onward.
This is a pathbreaking book. It will satisfy those interested in the role of religion in the modern world as well as those who simply want to better understand the history of ideas that have brought us to where we are today. Friedman has done both religion and economics a great service.
Religion and the Rise of Capitalism
Benjamen M. Friedman
Knopf
$37.50 | 560 pp.
Rebel Hearts portrays the community pitted against McIntyre, who was a runner on the New York Stock exchange before he entered the priesthood and brought Wall Street savvy with him to Los Angeles, overseeing unprecedented growth in Catholic parochial and high-school enrollment. The IHMs provided the greater portion of his teachers. A cheap and, McIntyre must have supposed, docile workforce, they frequently taught seventy or eighty children in each classroom. The majority of women had neither training nor experience. Says one sister, all they felt was defeat. “I think Cardinal McIntyre saw women, at least nuns, as coolie labor for his schools,” one sister remarks, as a cartoon image of nuns placed on a conveyor belt, like so many mass-produced dolls, takes over the screen. “We realized that our labor problem was at the root of everything else…. I can hear the cardinal telling us you aren’t going to tell me how to run my schools,” another remembers. The women stood firm for better working conditions, including smaller class sizes and greater institutional support, feeding the anger of their boss.
A different spirit, one of mutual support and open inquiry, reigned at the sisters’ Immaculate Heart College, whose all-female professoriate had more degrees than all the priests in the diocese of Los Angeles, and who took up their task as researchers and educators with a confidence and ambition that threatened the clergy. Photographs and film capture classrooms crammed with tools of investigation and creation—scientific apparatuses, books, musical instruments, paintbrushes—conveying the exuberance that accompanies the love of learning, which the sisters cultivated and which fed the community’s devotional life. Students and teachers collaborated to replace staid Mary’s Day processions with a boisterous paean to her role in recreation. “God Likes Me,” a hot-pink lettered sign proclaims. “Peace, Peace, Peace,” reads another, as women in full habit and crowned with wreaths of flowers strum guitars alongside their students, dressed in bursting purples, blues, and yellows and waving giant paper sunflowers, all jostling for our attention against a southern California landscape of palms and pines, together proclaiming the grandeur of creation and celebrating human creativity.
“In those days, I was surrounded by some of the best women you could ever meet…. I’m sure if I had been a nice proper housewife I would not have bumped into any of these ideas,” says Corita Kent, Caspary’s contemporary and the community’s most well-known member, who taught her students to scout supermarkets for source material, to mine for meaning in everyday banality, and to wonder at the hidden gems of L.A.’s landscape, littered with gas stations and garages. Although the Los Angeles Times hailed Kent as one of its 1966 “Women of the Year,” and Newsweek featured her on its cover—“the nun going modern”—in 1967, she was overshadowed in art by big boys such as Andy Warhol and Robert Indiana. “Mary Mother is the juiciest tomato of all,” her take on the Del Monte slogan, is a one-upping of Warhol’s Campbell Soup canvasses, a text-heavy offering for ecclesial renewal, a silkscreen in red, yellow, orange, and white. The piece was a breaking point for McIntyre, its mingling of the mundane and the holy an affront to his more tidily organized sensibility. “You will suffer” for this, he promises the congregation, one of the several hold-your-breath moments this film provides.
Energized by a growing attentiveness to the world around them, the sisters took their enthusiasm for engaging with it outside the college. A clip captures them dancing with their students among the stars on Hollywood Boulevard. “Perhaps everything terrible,” one of Kent’s silkscreens reads, quoting Rilke, “is in its deepest being something that wants help from us.” She and her sisters responded to contemporary demands for justice by marching in Selma in 1965, protesting the war in Vietnam, and linking arms with California farmworkers. The “college always provided an alternative education,” we hear one sister say, “but it was the years ’63 to ’70 where everything was popping.” Catholics more tightly bound to the trappings of tradition began keeping their daughters away from the college. The film only hints at the larger Los Angeles Catholic context of the sisters’ activism and the political engagement the IHMs inspired. A National Catholic Reporter article suggests the power of the sisters’ words and example. Sue Walsh, a graduate of the Immaculate Heart College and one of many who decried McIntyre’s racist disregard for his Black parishioners, recalls her involvement with Catholics for Racial Equality: “We had marches, sit-ins, and even a torch-light procession in front of the cardinal’s home.… After I appeared on the NBC news that night, they sent two priests to my house looking for me. It was crazy. They called us communists and outside agitators from their pulpits. We were just putting into action what we learned from Catholic schools.”
Rebel Hearts portrays the community pitted against McIntyre, who was a runner on the New York Stock exchange before he entered the priesthood and brought Wall Street savvy with him to Los Angeles, overseeing unprecedented growth in Catholic parochial and high-school enrollment. The IHMs provided the greater portion of his teachers. A cheap and, McIntyre must have supposed, docile workforce, they frequently taught seventy or eighty children in each classroom. The majority of women had neither training nor experience. Says one sister, all they felt was defeat. “I think Cardinal McIntyre saw women, at least nuns, as coolie labor for his schools,” one sister remarks, as a cartoon image of nuns placed on a conveyor belt, like so many mass-produced dolls, takes over the screen. “We realized that our labor problem was at the root of everything else…. I can hear the cardinal telling us you aren’t going to tell me how to run my schools,” another remembers. The women stood firm for better working conditions, including smaller class sizes and greater institutional support, feeding the anger of their boss.
A different spirit, one of mutual support and open inquiry, reigned at the sisters’ Immaculate Heart College, whose all-female professoriate had more degrees than all the priests in the diocese of Los Angeles, and who took up their task as researchers and educators with a confidence and ambition that threatened the clergy. Photographs and film capture classrooms crammed with tools of investigation and creation—scientific apparatuses, books, musical instruments, paintbrushes—conveying the exuberance that accompanies the love of learning, which the sisters cultivated and which fed the community’s devotional life. Students and teachers collaborated to replace staid Mary’s Day processions with a boisterous paean to her role in recreation. “God Likes Me,” a hot-pink lettered sign proclaims. “Peace, Peace, Peace,” reads another, as women in full habit and crowned with wreaths of flowers strum guitars alongside their students, dressed in bursting purples, blues, and yellows and waving giant paper sunflowers, all jostling for our attention against a southern California landscape of palms and pines, together proclaiming the grandeur of creation and celebrating human creativity.
“In those days, I was surrounded by some of the best women you could ever meet…. I’m sure if I had been a nice proper housewife I would not have bumped into any of these ideas,” says Corita Kent, Caspary’s contemporary and the community’s most well-known member, who taught her students to scout supermarkets for source material, to mine for meaning in everyday banality, and to wonder at the hidden gems of L.A.’s landscape, littered with gas stations and garages. Although the Los Angeles Times hailed Kent as one of its 1966 “Women of the Year,” and Newsweek featured her on its cover—“the nun going modern”—in 1967, she was overshadowed in art by big boys such as Andy Warhol and Robert Indiana. “Mary Mother is the juiciest tomato of all,” her take on the Del Monte slogan, is a one-upping of Warhol’s Campbell Soup canvasses, a text-heavy offering for ecclesial renewal, a silkscreen in red, yellow, orange, and white. The piece was a breaking point for McIntyre, its mingling of the mundane and the holy an affront to his more tidily organized sensibility. “You will suffer” for this, he promises the congregation, one of the several hold-your-breath moments this film provides.
Energized by a growing attentiveness to the world around them, the sisters took their enthusiasm for engaging with it outside the college. A clip captures them dancing with their students among the stars on Hollywood Boulevard. “Perhaps everything terrible,” one of Kent’s silkscreens reads, quoting Rilke, “is in its deepest being something that wants help from us.” She and her sisters responded to contemporary demands for justice by marching in Selma in 1965, protesting the war in Vietnam, and linking arms with California farmworkers. The “college always provided an alternative education,” we hear one sister say, “but it was the years ’63 to ’70 where everything was popping.” Catholics more tightly bound to the trappings of tradition began keeping their daughters away from the college. The film only hints at the larger Los Angeles Catholic context of the sisters’ activism and the political engagement the IHMs inspired. A National Catholic Reporter article suggests the power of the sisters’ words and example. Sue Welsh, a graduate of the Immaculate Heart College and one of many who decried McIntyre’s racist disregard for his Black parishioners, recalls her involvement with Catholics for Racial Equality: “We had marches, sit-ins, and even a torch-light procession in front of the cardinal’s home.… After I appeared on the NBC news that night, they sent two priests to my house looking for me. It was crazy. They called us communists and outside agitators from their pulpits. We were just putting into action what we learned from Catholic schools.”
Indeed, the real question is who will lead Italy once the Right presumably recaptures power: Matteo Salvini’s League (formerly the Northern League), a local autonomist party that has adopted nationalism, or Giorgia Meloni’s Fratelli d’Italia, which gathers former fascists, nationalists, clericalists, small-business owners, and rentiers. Both Meloni and Salvini compete for the approval of figures like Hungary’s Viktor Orbán and other neo-nationalist Europeans. Both are sympathetic to anti-vaxxers and have long stoked fears over immigration, Islam, and European elites. But Meloni is a more disciplined politician than Salvini, and would be Italy’s first female national leader if victorious. She cultivates the sympathies of Italian clericalists, but without Salvini’s crass displays of devotion (crucifixes, rosaries, and a well-publicized trip to Fatima in May 2021); she is also less coarse than Salvini in her criticism of Pope Francis’s position on immigration. Meloni’s platform can be summed up as “God, fatherland, family”: Italians-first nationalism and culture-war Catholicism, aligned not just with Orbán, but also with the anti-liberal parties in Poland and other European countries, the Likud in Israel, and Trumpism in the United States. She is better equipped than Salvini to bring Italy into the global neo-nationalist community.
What all Italians seem to agree on is that the country needs to rethink its economy and address a host of pressing financial challenges, including a staggering national debt and the future of social security. It can no longer be so dependent on tourism—the pandemic proved that—and it must make wiser use of EU grants and subsidies. Far less clear is what the country should do in terms of foreign policy. In seeking to distance Italy from the EU, the Conte government made haphazard overtures to Russia and China, but its actual strategy (to the extent there was one) was never clear. Draghi has returned Italy to alignment with the EU and alliance with the United States but the uncertainty of traditional American hegemony and questions over NATO’s mission have still left Italy somewhat at sea.
“Italy was one of the founders of the European Union ‘club,’ and this, in addition to an international situation different from the current one, guaranteed us respect that was greater than our economic, political, and military weight,” Mario Ricciardi, editor-in-chief of the political journal Il Mulino told me. “Today things have changed a lot, there are so many new members who no longer have any awe of older members, and this doesn’t always work to our advantage.”
At the same time, the Catholic Church in Italy continues to face uncertainty about its role in the nation’s political and everyday life. More than a year since the worst of the pandemic, its influence is questionable, the bishops’ conference has sunk further into irrelevance, and many Italians feel free to criticize it in ways that might have been unimaginable just a few years ago. The Vatican itself seems less able to exert the kind of political influence on national politics than it once did.
Under Francis, the Vatican has been more transparent on a number of issues, including its own finances. But this has also opened an ugly chapter in the history of the “temporal” justice administered in the name of the pope, who is the absolute sovereign of Vatican City State. On July 27, the Vatican trial of ten people involved in a money-losing investment in a controversial London real-estate deal began. Among those being tried is Cardinal Giovanni Angelo Becciu, who is the first cardinal ever to be indicted by Vatican criminal prosecutors, and whom Francis stripped of the rights and duties of the cardinalate in September 2020. Becciu was not just the prefect of the Vatican Congregation for the Saints, but also, as the sostituto (or No. 2) to the Secretariat of State between 2011 and 2018, a key figure in navigating relations between the Vatican and Italy. It is hard to say what the consequences of his trial will be for the Vatican and for the Italian Church.
Cajka presents Thomas Aquinas’s theory of conscience at the crux of all this action. “Thomas Aquinas,” he writes, “placed a conceptual bomb in Catholic thought in the thirteenth century that went off in the second half of the twentieth century.” For Aquinas, conscience is not a special faculty or power, but instead a function of practical reason. In conscience, I apply the precepts of the natural law to me in my circumstances. So-called cases of conscience are occasions when it is difficult to know how some precept applies, or whether it does at all. For example, if I am starving, is it licit for me to steal the bread I need to survive? Would taking the bread in those circumstances even be “stealing”? Aquinas says it would not be. If I can reason my way to that conclusion, I can take the bread in good conscience, so to speak.
Until the middle of the twentieth century, however, it was understood that the good Catholic wasn’t supposed to be a morally autonomous agent. Instead, he or she was supposed to work through cases of conscience under the guidance of the Church. As Cajka notes, the practice of confession was supposed to bring the “law and conscience into the proper relationship between input (law) and output (correct action).” A Catholic with a badly formed conscience might be in error about, say, contraception. In that case, the Catholic was to “put away” his or her badly formed conscience and allow it to be conformed to the law as explicated by a priest in the confessional. “The system,” Cajka remarks, “flowed from top to bottom, from law to conscience.”
What upended this system? And why, in the late 1960s, did many, if not most, Catholics stop going to confession? In her book Catholics and Contraception, the historian Leslie Woodcock Tentler cites a long backdrop of anguish and resentment over the Church’s teaching on family limitation, an “increasingly permeable Catholic subculture,” “the period’s increasingly radical individualism,” a growing sense of moral autonomy among increasingly well-educated Catholic laypeople, and finally a perception that Humanae vitae amounted to a raw exercise in authority, without adequate rational support. Cajka adds that, in the middle of the twentieth century, priests discovered and promoted the emancipatory side of Aquinas’s theory of conscience. If, as Vatican II’s Gaudium et spes proclaimed in 1965, “conscience is the most secret core and sanctuary of man,” where “he is alone with God, Whose voice echoes in his depths,” then it seems an individual’s decisions made in conscience should not be countermanded, lest God’s will for that individual be overturned. Catholics thereby had both a right and an obligation to stand up both to the state and to the institutional Church.
Cajka’s history has one major flaw: his highlighting, time and again, the “medieval roots” of modern Catholic conscience language obscures what is distinctively modern about it. It is true that Aquinas holds that even a conscience in error ought to be heeded: one would do wrong to act against one’s conscience, even if it is wrong. But the reason for this is not that, as Cajka claims, even the erroneous conscience “generated an objectively true reality for the individual.” Conscience, at least on Aquinas’s theory, is not “the individual’s own truth creator.” Instead, one would do wrong to act against one’s conscience because, in doing so, one would be choosing to do what one takes to be wrong, and that can never be right—even if one is wrong about what is right or wrong. The classic literary example is Mark Twain’s Huck Finn. To simplify the story, let’s say that Huck believes it is wrong to help the runaway slave Jim escape down the Mississippi. Huck is wrong about that, but if Huck truly believes it is wrong for him to help Jim escape, then Huck would be wrong to help Jim escape, because Huck would thereby be choosing to do what he takes to be wrong. In scholastic terminology, there are two ways to evaluate Huck’s action: “formally” and “materially”—terminology that Cajka mentions but doesn’t explain. When we evaluate Huck’s action formally, we consider it under the description that he gave it: stealing property. That is wrong for Huck to choose to do. When we evaluate Huck’s action materially, we consider it under the description that someone who knows better would give it: liberating a human being. That is right to do, but until Huck is able to “put away” his erroneous conscience, he shouldn’t act against it.
In fact, Gaudium et spes’s account of conscience owes much more to John Henry Newman—whom Cajka does not cite—than to Aquinas. At least in some of his writings, Newman seems to treat conscience as a distinct faculty or power whereby we can apprehend what is right for us to do in our circumstances, so long as we can cut through the noise and corruptions of our culture (that is why, for Newman, listening to the Church is crucial). Ignatius of Loyola’s sixteenth-century method for the discernment of spirits also must figure in this genealogy. For Aquinas, we encounter God’s law in conscience. It is a modern innovation—though maybe one with Augustinian roots—that we can encounter God’s will for us amid our limitations and in our complex situations, to speak of conscience as Pope Francis does in Amoris laetitia. (Francis is a Jesuit, after all.)
Despite this flaw, Cajka’s book makes a persuasive case that Catholics, with priests leading the way, did indeed “change the terms of American freedom”—though not always for the best. As Cajka comments, his is not simply “a story of progress.” Conscience clauses now protect doctors, nurses, and Catholic hospitals from having to participate in abortions, but should provision also be made for employers, like Hobby Lobby, that object to coverage for contraception under health-insurance plans, or for bakers, florists, and the like who object to selling services for gay marriages? The proliferation in recent years of so-called conscience wars within our culture wars suggests a nation that is loath to seek middle ground. Invoking conscience can be a way of not having to engage one another. Similarly, as a Church, we don’t really talk about contraception any longer. Nowadays, few U.S. Catholics, including those who regularly attend Mass, agree that contraception is morally wrong or even a moral issue. Our consciences have spoken. But the bishops don’t really want to hear from laypeople, and laypeople don’t want to hear from them. “Conscience” has become a pact of silence.
Follow Your Conscience
The Catholic Church and the Spirit of the Sixties
Peter Cajka
University of Chicago Press
$45 | 232 pp.
Cajka presents Thomas Aquinas’s theory of conscience at the crux of all this action. “Thomas Aquinas,” he writes, “placed a conceptual bomb in Catholic thought in the thirteenth century that went off in the second half of the twentieth century.” For Aquinas, conscience is not a special faculty or power, but instead a function of practical reason. In conscience, I apply the precepts of the natural law to me in my circumstances. So-called cases of conscience are occasions when it is difficult to know how some precept applies, or whether it does at all. For example, if I am starving, is it licit for me to steal the bread I need to survive? Would taking the bread in those circumstances even be “stealing”? Aquinas says it would not be. If I can reason my way to that conclusion, I can take the bread in good conscience, so to speak.
Until the middle of the twentieth century, however, it was understood that the good Catholic wasn’t supposed to be a morally autonomous agent. Instead, he or she was supposed to work through cases of conscience under the guidance of the Church. As Cajka notes, the practice of confession was supposed to bring the “law and conscience into the proper relationship between input (law) and output (correct action).” A Catholic with a badly formed conscience might be in error about, say, contraception. In that case, the Catholic was to “put away” his or her badly formed conscience and allow it to be conformed to the law as explicated by a priest in the confessional. “The system,” Cajka remarks, “flowed from top to bottom, from law to conscience.”
What upended this system? And why, in the late 1960s, did many, if not most, Catholics stop going to confession? In her book Catholics and Contraception, the historian Leslie Woodcock Tentler cites a long backdrop of anguish and resentment over the Church’s teaching on family limitation, an “increasingly permeable Catholic subculture,” “the period’s increasingly radical individualism,” a growing sense of moral autonomy among increasingly well-educated Catholic laypeople, and finally a perception that Humanae vitae amounted to a raw exercise in authority, without adequate rational support. Cajka adds that, in the middle of the twentieth century, priests discovered and promoted the emancipatory side of Aquinas’s theory of conscience. If, as Vatican II’s Gaudium et spes proclaimed in 1965, “conscience is the most secret core and sanctuary of man,” where “he is alone with God, Whose voice echoes in his depths,” then it seems an individual’s decisions made in conscience should not be countermanded, lest God’s will for that individual be overturned. Catholics thereby had both a right and an obligation to stand up both to the state and to the institutional Church.
Cajka’s history has one major flaw: his highlighting, time and again, the “medieval roots” of modern Catholic conscience language obscures what is distinctively modern about it. It is true that Aquinas holds that even a conscience in error ought to be heeded: one would do wrong to act against one’s conscience, even if it is wrong. But the reason for this is not that, as Cajka claims, even the erroneous conscience “generated an objectively true reality for the individual.” Conscience, at least on Aquinas’s theory, is not “the individual’s own truth creator.” Instead, one would do wrong to act against one’s conscience because, in doing so, one would be choosing to do what one takes to be wrong, and that can never be right—even if one is wrong about what is right or wrong. The classic literary example is Mark Twain’s Huck Finn. To simplify the story, let’s say that Huck believes it is wrong to help the runaway slave Jim escape down the Mississippi. Huck is wrong about that, but if Huck truly believes it is wrong for him to help Jim escape, then Huck would be wrong to help Jim escape, because Huck would thereby be choosing to do what he takes to be wrong. In scholastic terminology, there are two ways to evaluate Huck’s action: “formally” and “materially”—terminology that Cajka mentions but doesn’t explain. When we evaluate Huck’s action formally, we consider it under the description that he gave it: stealing property. That is wrong for Huck to choose to do. When we evaluate Huck’s action materially, we consider it under the description that someone who knows better would give it: liberating a human being. That is right to do, but until Huck is able to “put away” his erroneous conscience, he shouldn’t act against it.
In fact, Gaudium et spes’s account of conscience owes much more to John Henry Newman—whom Cajka does not mention—than to Aquinas. At least in some of his writings, Newman seems to treat conscience as a distinct faculty or power whereby we can apprehend what is right for us to do in our circumstances, so long as we can cut through the noise and corruptions of our culture (that is why, for Newman, listening to the Church is crucial). Ignatius of Loyola’s sixteenth-century method for the discernment of spirits also must figure in this genealogy. For Aquinas, we encounter God’s law in conscience. It is a modern innovation—though maybe one with Augustinian roots—that we can encounter God’s will for us amid our limitations and in our complex situations, to speak of conscience as Pope Francis does in Amoris laetitia. (Francis is a Jesuit, after all.)
Despite this flaw, Cajka’s book makes a persuasive case that Catholics, with priests leading the way, did indeed “change the terms of American freedom”—though not always for the best. As Cajka comments, his is not simply “a story of progress.” Conscience clauses now protect doctors, nurses, and Catholic hospitals from having to participate in abortions, but should provision also be made for employers, like Hobby Lobby, that object to coverage for contraception under health-insurance plans, or for bakers, florists, and the like who object to selling services for gay marriages? The proliferation in recent years of so-called conscience wars within our culture wars suggests a nation that is loath to seek middle ground. Invoking conscience can be a way of not having to engage one another. Similarly, as a Church, we don’t really talk about contraception any longer. Nowadays, few U.S. Catholics, including those who regularly attend Mass, agree that contraception is morally wrong or even a moral issue. Our consciences have spoken. But the bishops don’t really want to hear from laypeople, and laypeople don’t want to hear from them. “Conscience” has become a pact of silence.
Follow Your Conscience
The Catholic Church and the Spirit of the Sixties
Peter Cajka
University of Chicago Press
$45 | 232 pp.
The presence of large numbers of refugees in the country further complicates the situation. Lebanon already had more than three hundred thousand Palestinian refugees within its borders when refugees from the war in Syria began pouring into the country. They were welcomed at first, but as their number continued to grow, and as conditions in the country worsened, humanitarian aid earmarked for displaced Syrians was diverted to support soaring numbers of needy Lebanese. In mid-July, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) estimated that there were more than 1.5 million Syrian refugees in Lebanon—this in a country smaller than Rhode Island. Patriarch al-Ra’i has accused the international community of making Lebanon carry the burden for the unrest that is sweeping throughout the Middle East.
Lebanon is facing the kind of deprivation it has not seen since the famine of 1918, when two-thirds of the mainly Christian population of what was then known as Mount Lebanon died of starvation, typhoid, and malaria. Today, Covid is spreading as vaccines are increasingly hard to come by.
The main objective of the Vatican meeting was to rally international support to address the humanitarian crisis unfolding in Lebanon. But neither this nor the effort to stem the mass exodus of Christians from the country—and from the Middle East generally—will be easy to achieve. Donor countries traditionally led by France and the United States are understandably cautious. Their fear, based on decades of bitter experience, is that desperately needed aid will end up in the pockets of Lebanon’s corrupt politicians. As jobs disappear and the value of the currency plummets, convincing what remains of the Christian population to remain in the country will be difficult.
Christians began fleeing Lebanon in great numbers during a fratricidal civil war that lasted from 1975 to 1990 and turned Muslims and Druze against Christians, Palestinians against Israelis, and Christians against other Christians. Since the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, an additional 3 million Christians have fled the region. Countless others have died trying.
Lebanon has long been at the forefront of the Vatican’s efforts to stem the flight of Christians from the region. Pope John Paul II visited the country in 1997, followed by Pope Benedict XVI in 2012. Pope Francis, who included Lebanon and Syria in prayers he led during his trip to Iraq in March, has repeatedly expressed his desire to go to Lebanon “when conditions allow.” The likelihood of that happening any time soon is remote. Lebanon is mired in a fractious political system that is kept in place by entrenched ruling families who oppose even the suggestion of reform. The situation is further complicated by the role of religion in Lebanese politics.
Lebanon’s constitution apportions key government positions according to religious affiliation. The president must be a Maronite Catholic; the prime minister, a Sunni Muslim; and the speaker of parliament, a Shi’a Muslim. Four other communities—Antiochian Orthodox, Druze, Melkite Greek Catholics, and Armenians—have guaranteed cabinet posts alongside the Big Three. In spite of longstanding Muslim majorities, seats in parliament were divided on a six-to-five ratio of Christians to Muslims until 1990 when the ratio was changed to half-and-half. Politicians from across the spectrum exploit a broken system to instill fear of the other while amassing enormous personal fortunes.
Lebanon is facing a daunting future. In addition to its latest, largely self-inflicted problems, the country is the western front in a proxy war being waged by Iran and Saudi Arabia, a situation Pope Francis pointedly acknowledged at the end of the July meeting when he called upon outsiders to stop exploiting Lebanon and the Middle East for their own interests.
To date, appeals by Pope Francis and Lebanon’s religious leaders have fallen on deaf ears. On July 10, after ceremonially invoking Vatican efforts to bring the crisis to an end, the caretaker government announced with great fanfare that it had created a $556 million ration-card program for poor families. It was Lebanese politics as usual. The government offered no plan for how the program would work and no details about where the money for it would come from.
If Lebanon survives, it will not be because of corrupt, self-serving politicians who line their pockets at the expense of the country. It will be because of the courage and determination of the Lebanese—Christians and Muslims—who are fed up with a feudal political system. It was for them that the poet Kahlil Gibran wrote: “Your Lebanon is a political knot, a national dilemma, a conflict and a deception. My Lebanon is a place of beauty and dreams, of enchanted valleys and mountains.”
She didn’t choose to sacrifice. She was the sacrifice.
Watching the ostensible warmth and camaraderie of the U.S. gymnasts and their coaches today, it is almost possible to forget that these athletes are competing in the shadow of a searing sexual-abuse crisis. Nassar abused an entire generation of girls and young women in the sport while USAG officials and other authorities looked the other way. Victims were silenced, threatened, and abandoned by those in positions of trust. The culture of abuse within the sport was an open secret among seemingly everyone with the power to stop it. It took an exposé in the Indianapolis Star, the courageous public testimony of survivors, and state and federal criminal investigations to begin to uncover and unravel the web of abuse.
All of this should sound eerily familiar to Catholics, of whom Biles is one. What can the Church learn from her witness?
The first is a lesson for the Church as an institution. In an April interview with NBC’s Hoda Kotb, Biles reminded viewers that she is the only remaining survivor of Nassar’s abuse still competing on the U.S. team. Her decision to press on in the sport, she explained, came in large part from a desire to use her high profile to prevent USAG from sweeping the abuse crisis under the rug—to continue to hold those in power accountable for perpetuating a culture of abuse. In fact, it was only in 2018, after Biles publicly lamented the prospect of returning to the same training facility where she was abused, that USAG finally and permanently shut the facility down. In this sense, within the sport, she has assumed the role of prophet, publicly calling the institution to account and refusing to simply go away. In her interview with Kotb, Biles described feeling called by God to be a “voice for the younger generation.” Institutions need prophets. Institutionalized structures of abuse begin to crumble when we give ear to the voices that dare to challenge them—especially the voices of Black women, whose liberating work has been too long taken for granted.
The second is a lesson for the Church as the People of God. Beneath Biles’s decision is an ethical and theological through line with deep resonances in womanist theology. A womanist, wrote Alice Walker in her 1983 classic, In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens, is a Black woman who “loves herself. Regardless.” As a white woman raised in a society that chronically equates human worth with productivity, I admit that Walker’s words have always proven a stumbling block for me. (Which, of course, is no accident.) On that marrow-deep level that lies beneath mere intellectual comprehension, I’ve always known that there were things I did not understand—could not understand—about what Walker meant, and about what my Black colleagues who embrace womanist theology today mean when they invoke Walker’s words.
Last Tuesday, Simone Biles helped me to understand what womanist theologians mean when they underline that final term: regardless. Faced with unimaginable pressure, memories of trauma, and doubtless many other factors that are only hers to know, Biles’s unwillingness to “power through”—a decision that, in all likelihood, spared her from serious physical injury—was a “no” to the sanctification of grit. Even more, it was a “no” to the legacy of abuse and objectification faced by both U.S. gymnasts and Black women. Defying the expectation that she sacrifice her health, safety, bodily integrity, and psychological well-being for national prestige and institutional reputation, Biles chose instead to do for herself what USAG repeatedly failed to do on her behalf: treat her mind and body with the care it deserved.
As many try to imagine a future for the Church beyond its own culture of abuse, the example of fellow Catholic Simone Biles merits both empathy and attention. She teaches us that an institution complicit in perpetuating abuse does not get to dictate to survivors how they heal, or where, or when. She teaches us that the best thing any wounded institution can do is to heed the voices of its prophets—those who relentlessly refuse it the luxury of just moving on. Finally, Biles teaches us the power of love. Her interview with Kotb suggested that at the root of her persistence in professional gymnastics lies a profound sense of vocation, the Godly call of love within concrete reality. Biles loves her sport, her team, and the generation of young women and girls who look to her as an example. And on Tuesday, in front of the entire world, Biles chose to love herself—regardless.
Of course, when we say “the Catholic imagination” we’re always referring only to some Catholics’ imaginations, because the Church transcends genre. Would a Byzantine Catholic recognize the “Catholic imagination” of luxury, criminality, moral irony, and lack? I don’t know! And the queer imagination I’m describing here is only one piece of even my own limited experience of the queer culture of the nineties. I loved Rebecca Brown’s story collection The Terrible Girls, whose camp tragedy and jewel-toned, flickering-shadows cinematic physicality resonate with the queer imagination I’m describing here, but stand alongside, rather than within, its almost exclusively male domain. The other lesbian writers who shaped my experience—Dorothy Allison, Sarah Schulman, Audre Lorde—have even less in common with the specific kind of queer imagination I’m describing. (Brown herself has now converted to Catholicism; Lorde was raised Catholic.) My queer imagination was shaped by Leslie Feinberg, Marlon Riggs, Donna Deitch, and Tribe 8, none of whose work is best illuminated by the lens I’m using here.
And yet I know the thing I’m describing is real because I can recognize it when I encounter it anew. In recent years I’ve discovered two authors who worked brilliantly within the queer tradition I’m outlining, but moved, by sharply divergent paths, beyond its compulsive self-laceration.
José Luis Zárate’s novella The Route of Ice and Salt imagines the terrible passage of the ship carrying Stoker’s Dracula to England. Route was originally published in 1998 but translated into English for the first time this year by David Bowles. In its nightmare vision of men being picked off one by one, seen in the embrace of a stranger and then sick and then dead, it is a novel of the AIDS epidemic. Sex and death intertwine in passages that swerve from pornography into graphic horror. Zárate’s prose is sensual, starting with the title, and swelling in passages like this: “My tongue a blade, a short finger that digs into his skin. Rough, earthy, bitter. And at that moment, mine.”
It’s a threatened sensuality, with the self-policing hyper-awareness of the closet. Zárate’s narrator is the ship’s captain, all suppressed longing and guilt and responsibility. The terrible sea journey teaches him the blamelessness of his desire. Zárate takes the vampire, creature of forbidden thirsts and symbol of sexual excess, and makes him instead a symbol of the homophobic mob. The vampire dissolves into fog, breaks up into a horde of rats. Route plays with the question of whether the vampire is target or hunter, outcast or lord. It comes down on the side of the vampire as abusive community: his eyes are the torches of the citizenry. Meanwhile the homosexual, whom both artists and Catholic theologians have often imagined as consumed by lust so excessive that he cannot confine himself to the proper sex, here becomes a figure of selfless responsibility.
By the end this is a didactic book: “‘I am not a monster,’ I told the Demeter, gripping the helm in the midst of the fog…. ‘But they are.’” The captain sheds the old guilt that has haunted him. “I know that Thirst is not evil in and of itself,” he declares, and extends this moral neutrality to “even Sin.” Thus acquitted, he dies trying to thwart the monster, clutching a rosary. The captain claims personal moral superiority over those who once treated him as morally inferior—a posture of pride versus humility, not merely pride versus shame. I disliked these moral lessons. If I wanted to be taught my moral goodness, which I do not, I would not be reading a sexy vampire book.
But Zárate is writing for gay people who had been taught that our sexual desires barred us from responsible love. He says: You are not and were never the disintegrating, destroying vampire. In fact, when you were captured and violated, it was the mob whose teeth began to lengthen and gleam. This moral judgment on the moralizers is the kind of overturning performed by Jesus in the Gospels, as well as Wilde in his plays.
Moreover, the evidence of our senses is not simply to be denied. God did not allow us to experience the shocking beauty of another woman, or another man, as a trick or a cruel joke. When we are pierced by beauty, it isn’t always the vampire’s fangs; sometimes it may be the arrow that pierced Teresa. The grotesquerie and inadequacy of the flesh, while real, are not the only truths. The created beauty and the imago Dei are real too.
Dunstan Thompson’s journey ran parallel to that of Zárate’s suffering captain, but found a different harbor. Thompson is an American poet whose work reflects the stages of his life: first tormented, writhing poetry about anonymous sexual liaisons edged with violence; then scholarly, reflective poems written after he attained domestic happiness with his life partner; and at last, when first Thompson and then his partner began to practice the Catholic faith of Thompson’s youth, devotional poetry of rare gentleness. Thompson’s early work is all like this: “The red-haired robber in the ravished bed / Is doomsday driven.” It’s heady stuff, hot and rough: “This tall horseman, my young man of Mars /…takes / Me to pieces like a gun.” And then Thompson discovered that love was not the enemy of peace. Suddenly he can write:
The end of love is that the heart is still….
Here I have found, as after thunder showers,
The friend my childhood promised me.
Thompson’s later poetry doesn’t argue for the moral worth of anything in particular—not his own life, not his Church. His Heaven is not a reward for good behavior. Heaven is the place where no company is more desirable than that of the despised and the sinners, “among the wrecks / Of life.” It’s the place where the rescued can laugh in relief: “Oh, the saints with the lollipop eyes / Are getting us out with our lives.” Heaven is home, Thompson insists, and kindness: “By kindness, write the mystics, here is meant / The daily going up of self in smoke.” Above all Heaven is friendship, with the Beloved and a beloved, both found after long desperate wandering.
The later poems have not only gentler subject matter than the early poems, but a wider emotional range and much more variation in meter. But they don’t feel like repudiations. In several poems Thompson suggests that obedience to God restores us to ourselves: the immolated self rises from the ashes splendid and laughing. So too his own poetic voice remained artsy and ardent, but insouciance and gratitude replaced much of the anguish.
For all its beauties, the queer imagination that formed me found it hard to picture refuge. It was a violent time and we did not know where to find peace. The churches were more often sites of violence for us than sanctuaries. Thompson’s Heaven is one possible flowering of that gay aesthetic: at once flamboyantly Catholic, and traditionally queer.
Certain individual bishops, however, have reacted differently. Regina Archbishop Don Bolen, whose archdiocese includes the Cowessess residential school, publicly and swiftly acknowledged that the discovery “brings us face to face with the brutal legacy of the Indian Residential School System…. I know that apologies seem a very small step as the weight of past suffering comes intro greater light, but I extend that apology, and pledge to do what we can to turn that apology into meaningful concrete actions.” He singled out as particularly reprehensible the decision of a priest in the 1960s to destroy headstones, wiping out the preserved memories of the dead. Bolen is seeking a papal apology. Vancouver Archbishop J. Michael Miller, former president of St. Thomas University in Houston, has also been forthright in acknowledging past atrocities, saying in his Expression of Commitment that the Church was “unquestionably wrong in implementing a government colonialist policy which resulted in devastation for children, families and communities…. If words of apology for such unspeakable deeds are to bring life and healing, they must be accompanied by tangible actions that foster the full disclosure of the truth. Truth comes before reconciliation.”
But it is not only Regina and Vancouver that are making all records available to investigators, Indigenous leaders, curators, and legal representatives. Many other dioceses are also pledging transparency, and in doing so providing a “tangible action” engaged in the unearthing of the truth.
Meanwhile, the two leading Canadians in the Vatican—Marc Ouellet, Prefect of the Congregation of Bishops, and Michael Czerny, SJ, a close advisor to Francis on numerous social-justice issues—have not publicly contradicted the CCCB, but they are taking a more irenic stance than their national brethren. The Canadian ambassador to the Holy See, Dennis Savoie, a former Deputy Supreme Knight for the Knights of Columbus who has been nuncio since 2013, would seem in position to negotiate the troubled diplomatic waters, but there is little evidence of that. In fairness, diplomats work behind the scenes, but this is an extraordinary situation; I am not familiar with any previous comparable strain between Canada and the Holy See, so it is not unreasonable to expect leadership from Savoie.
But if a papal visit and an apology do not seem likely, the pope and the CCCB have come to some kind of arrangement: in December, a delegation to the Holy See of Elders/Knowledge Keepers, residential school survivors, and youth from across the country, as well as a small group of bishops and Indigenous leaders, will visit Rome for “personal encounters” with Francis, who has agreed “to foster meaningful encounters of dialogue and healing.” (This is something that Francis does well.) In their statement, the CCCB affirms that the pope is “deeply committed to hearing directly from Indigenous Peoples…in the hopes of responding to the suffering and ongoing effects of intergenerational trauma.”
Nevertheless, corrective action for the CCCB requires the implementation of recommendation No. 58, no matter what it demands. As Elder Sam Achneepineskum, a member of Marten Falls First Nation, said to journalist Tanya Talaga: “They hire lawyers and then more lawyers to convince themselves they didn’t do wrong. Yet it is easy to take the good road. It is Jesus’s teachings—not about image and creating false senses of self. How can anyone who calls himself a Christian not see that?”
Gawker lacked a shred of news value for its story, which led to an award (eventually reduced to $31 million) that drove it under. The Pillar has a better case for its article’s news value, saying that while Burrill was involved in important meetings at USCCB and in Rome on clergy sexual abuse of minors, “Data app signals suggest he was at the same time engaged in serial and illicit sexual activity.”
One can be glad that journalists who are faithful Catholics—such as The Pillar founders JD Flynn and Ed Condon—would want to call powerful clergy to account with the ultimate aim of protecting children. But they just don’t have the facts to justify making this accusation, an assertion needed to boost the story’s news value. The Pillar devotes about a thousand words of a roughly 2,800-word article presenting a very one-sided argument that Burrill may possibly have used his app to connect with minors for sex, despite acknowledging there was “no evidence” after scrutinizing a year’s worth of his daily travels. My reaction to this was: Where was the copy desk on this? Perhaps there isn’t one at The Pillar.
Flynn, formerly editor of EWTN’s Catholic News Agency and former chancellor of the Archdiocese of Denver, and Condon, who previously worked with Flynn at CNA, started The Pillar in January with a soaring expression of their journalistic values:
We believe that serious Catholic journalism is a service to Christ and the Church—and that journalism can be done in a uniquely Catholic way, which takes the doctrine of the Catholic Church to be true, which treats people with respect, and which looks for the truth above all else, without getting bogged down in partisan agendas or mudslinging.
We think the story matters more than we do, and we’d rather tell you the facts than tell you what we think. We aim to focus on the facts, and to provide the context and background that helps make sense of them. The Pillar upholds the highest standards of journalistic independence and craftsmanship. We’re independent of any ecclesial agenda but the holiness of the Church and its members—we won’t be afraid to tell the stories that need to be told, but we’ll tell them with integrity and fairness.
The Burrill story flunks these standards in various ways. If it provided the context and background needed to understand the facts reported, it would have at least included the mainstream view—featured in the John Jay College study done for the USCCB—that homosexual priests were no more likely to sexually abuse minors than heterosexual priests.
If the story were crafted properly, the writers would have made some effort to identify the source of the “commercially available” data it used. Even if the source was granted anonymity, it was necessary to give some hint of what the source’s agenda might be, as well as the reason the source wanted to be anonymous (assuming that is the case). For that we are left to read a story that EWTN executive Alejandro Bermudez published with CNA, The Pillar duo’s former employer, on July 19. It disclosed that in 2018 “a person concerned with reforming the Catholic clergy approached some Church individuals and organizations, including Catholic News Agency” with the app data. That vaguely signals some kind of agenda, which is more than the Pillar story acknowledged. (CNA took a pass on the story.)
If The Pillar were upholding the highest standards of journalistic independence, it would disclose who its funders are and identify any who might have funded the expensive business of acquiring such “commercially available” data. The story seems to be crafted to endorse the “ecclesial agenda” of the source who provided the data, presumably an agenda that rejects the John Jay study’s conclusions on the sexuality of gay priests.
It’s especially necessary for The Pillar to provide greater disclosure given the past employment of Flynn and Condon. Both are canon lawyers who have worked within the Church’s legal system. Condon’s online bio notes that he is a practicing canon lawyer who has worked in dioceses on three continents and in the Holy See. Flynn came to journalism at EWTN already being identified with the conservative culture warriors among the U.S. Catholic bishops, having served as a key aide to Denver Archbishops Charles Chaput and Samuel Aquila, and then James Conley, bishop of Lincoln, Nebraska. Somehow the story about Burrill—whom Flynn described in a CNA column last summer as “theologically orthodox, intelligent, and pastoral”—detours to repeat past criticism of one of the leading liberal bishops, Robert McElroy of San Diego.
The Pillar has sought to justify its poor journalistic judgment by noting that the New York Times ran a piece in February “in which reporters used app signal data to identify and name a participant in the January U.S. Capitol incursion, even after he denied participation,” and “did not prompt similar reaction.” But the Times piece, written not by news reporters but writers from the opinion staff, was crafted more responsibly. Information was provided on the source’s motives, and the reason that anonymity was granted. It acknowledges that the location data can be imprecise, and that it could not confirm that the one person identified in the story was really inside the Capitol on January 6. Ultimately, it was not an investigation aimed at piercing the privacy of individuals who allegedly tried to disrupt the electoral process but “a demonstration of the looming threat to our liberties posed by a surveillance economy that monetizes the movements of the righteous and the wicked alike.” The Pillar has led us further down that road.
In an article first posted at Commonweal and republished on July 7 in La Croix International, Professor John Thiel of Fairfield University, while criticizing the U.S. bishops’ decision to prepare a teaching document on Eucharistic coherence and integrity in the Church, performed the not-inconsiderable feat of striking out four times (swinging).
The first whiff: “In the judgment of the bishops, Biden’s sin seems to be that, as a Catholic politician, he has not taken a public, political stand against abortion.” Wrong. What the bishops (and Catholics serious about human rights) object to is that the Biden Administration is bending every effort to increase the incidence of abortions at home and abroad. Moreover, the administration, by eliminating from its recent budget request the Hyde Amendment and its prohibition of using tax dollars for abortion “services,” is threatening to implicate conscientious-driven pro-life Americans in its misguided policies.
The objection here is not to a missing statement — “The President isn’t taking the right public stand” — but to specific actions: Led by President Biden, the Administration is promoting and facilitating a grave moral evil — the killing of innocents.
The second whiff: “Biden has stated many times that he considers abortion to be a moral evil. This is his Catholic belief. But…he finds that his personal belief conflicts with the beliefs of other citizens and with the law in a democracy….” Wrong. The Catholic rejection of to abortion is not a distinctively “Catholic belief” and the bishops have never suggested that it is. Rather, the bishops have consistently argued that it’s a matter of elementary biology (the product of human conception is a human being and nothing other than a human being) and an elementary principle of justice (innocent life deserves legal protection law in a just society).
You don’t have to believe in the Triune God, the Incarnation of the second Person of the Trinity, the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary or her Assumption to grasp why the abortion license is an evil that should not be permitted in law. Catholic belief in the power of grace (not to mention in the particular and final judgments) may give public officials the courage to withstand political pressure and support a culture of life that offers women in crisis pregnancies something better than abortion. But there is no uniquely Catholic belief-ticket to the pro-life position, which is science-based and rational.
The third whiff: “The bishops seem to see the Church as the Donatists did…[as] a Church characterized by a purity that cannot abide the sinful pollution of Biden’s political behavior.” Wrong. While it’s true that the Donatists in mid-first-millennium North Africa believed in a Church of the pure and that their view was rejected by orthodox Catholic teachers like St. Augustine, the key issue in the Donatist controversy was the efficacy of the sacraments, not the purity of the Church. The Donatists demanded that Catholics who had apostacized by various acts of idolatry be re-baptized; Augustine correctly argued that post-baptismal sin, however grave, did not alter the efficacy of baptism, which was a matter of divine grace, not human action.
No one is suggesting that President Biden (or Speaker Nancy Pelosi, or Senator Dick Durbin, or any number of pro-“choice” legislators of both parties) be rebaptized. But the hard fact is that, by actively facilitating a grave moral evil, these men and women have put themselves in a defective state of communion with the Church, such that their own integrity requires that they not present themselves for holy communion — an act that, among other things, suggests that one is in full communion with the Church.
The fourth whiff: “The Church is not a gathering place for the saved but a refuge for sinners…Augustine insisted that…the sacraments possessed a supernatural power that brought sinners to salvation…” The Church is indeed that, and the sacraments indeed have that power. But a brief reflection on Peter’s denials during the Lord’s passion suggests that sinners are saved when they acknowledge their sin. We have all heard the cock crow, more than once. No one urging Catholic public officials to recognize the evil in which they’re involved when they facilitate abortion imagines himself or herself without sin. The bishops don’t, I don’t, and it’s absurd to suggest that any of us do.
We do care for the spiritual welfare of our fellow-Catholics caught in the grip of Big Abortion, its propaganda and its campaign contributions. As fellow-sinners touched by grace, we pray for their deeper conversion to the truth. And we applaud the bishops who call for that conversion by all appropriate means.
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In divinity school I studied with the liturgist Aidan Kavanagh, OSB. In 1988, twenty-five years after the introduction of Vatican II’s liturgical reforms, Kavanagh wrote a commentary on a recent study of how the reforms had been implemented and received. (The essay appears in The Awakening Church: 25 Years of Liturgical Renewal, edited by Lawrence J. Madden.) He was, it should be said, a strong advocate of the council’s actions. As he notes in his article, his research as a graduate student in Germany played a small role in persuading the council’s bishops that the liturgy needed reforming. Kavanagh had no illusions about any attempt to revive the Tridentine Mass, an effort he regarded as a “vast mistake, often well-meaning but still mistaken.” He knew well what worship was like in the pre-conciliar “golden age” that traditionalists pine for. “Those were the days when the main liturgical rubric was minimalism, piety was something else, and liturgy had nothing theological about it except in the form and matter required for the valid confection of the sacraments,” he wrote. “The Tridentine liturgy was, by the twentieth century, a liturgy filled with non sequitur. It was rarely done well, but contained enough late medieval and baroque elements…to intrigue those with recondite tendencies.” Most Catholics who are honest about the pre–Vatican II Church will confirm Kavanagh’s assessment.
Because we know vastly more about the early Church and its worship than the Council of Trent could, the reform rite, in Kavanagh’s view, is “incomparably more rich,” more Catholic, and even more traditional than the Tridentine rite. But neither did he have any illusions about how the reforms had been carried out. These were, he argued, unprecedented both in their scope and in the speed with which they were enacted. Yet ritual behaviors are simply not that malleable. He did not question the motivations or faith of the clergy and laity who implemented the reforms, but he did question their judgment and knowledge of what makes ritual practices work. “Far from suffering from too little change, the present Roman liturgy, if anything, suffers from the abnormality of too much change executed too rapidly,” he wrote. “If sustained too long, confusion begets demoralization, self-doubt, and finally resignation, a void. All manner of things rush in to fill this void.”
That, it seems to me, is an apt description of the ongoing liturgical crisis, one that has seen Catholics abandon Sunday Mass in droves and all but ignore Holy Days of Obligation. Kavanagh believed that too many contemporary middle-class expectations had rushed in to fill the new void, subordinating the “vertical” dimensions of the liturgy to the “horizontal.” Too much of the Mass had become a celebration of community and the assembly, and not enough a veneration of the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Jesus the Christ. “I see very little that is countercultural in the parish liturgies reported in the study,” he wrote. One “reason seems to be a decline in emphasis on the transcendent holiness of God, and consequently on the lack of this quality among worshipers.” The Church, Kavanagh argued, understands itself “as a distinctive counterpoise to the world,” and the liturgy must cultivate “a spirit of adoration in leading a life toward God.” If it doesn’t, Catholics will begin to seek substitutes for that spirit elsewhere. In Kavanagh’s view, the superficial enthusiasms and devotions permeating popular culture are where many people turn.
Admittedly, Kavanagh tended to paint with a broad brush, but the precipitous decline in belief in the Real Presence and in Church membership since 1988 seems to confirm many of his fears. He knew the recondite antiquarianism of the Latin Mass was no answer, and to his credit so does Pope Francis. But affirming the “validity and the legitimacy of the liturgical reform” is not enough either. The Mass must not just comfort the faithful; it should, as Kavanagh wrote, discomfort us as it comforts us. Defenders of the Council’s liturgical reform should not be complacent about the problems in its implementation. As long as those problems persist, so will the temptation to look elsewhere.
The actual responses have not been made public. Only one document has been leaked: the summary report from France. It was fair-minded, yet also critical. Crucially, it observed that the goals of Pope Benedict’s project—reconciliation and enrichment—had not been reached. In a nice turn of phrase, the French bishops reported that those who desired the older rites were “pacified,” but not reconciled.
We’ve certainly seen harmful results in the United States, which has the world’s highest proportion of locations offering the older rites. Instead of promoting greater harmony with and closeness to the universal Church, broad availability of the older rites has been used as an opportunity to create a “Church within a Church,” a community apart from the mainstream. Dubious pastoral practices have attended this development, such as using the Baltimore Catechism instead of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, or reading the Douay-Reims Bible in preference to modern Scripture translations. It is not just a matter of lace and Latin. A reactionary thought world is being cultivated as well.
One can hardly overstate the noise that freeing the older rites has introduced into liturgical discussions, even though the actual number of traditionalists remains small. A constant stream of criticism has poured forth from traditionalist enclaves challenging liturgical decisions flowing from the reform, such as use of the vernacular, Communion in the hand, women in the sanctuary, and the priest facing the people at Eucharist. This noisy opposition grabs attention and causes distraction. A graver problem is that some adherents of the older rites have sown doubts about the validity of the liturgical reform overall, and propagate the erroneous view that the reformed liturgy represents a betrayal of orthodoxy and a departure from “the true Church.” Rather than a softening, there has been a hardening of ideological opposition to the Council as a whole. This is no trivial matter. When someone attacks the liturgical reform, they attack the Council.
This situation is getting worse, too. Leading voices among traditionalists in America lately have totally abandoned Benedict’s project of “mutual enrichment.” There can be no real peace with the newer liturgical forms, they argue, because the reformed rite is fundamentally flawed, a modernist creation. It is not even a rite, they claim, but a mere “construction.”
In this context, Pope Francis’s move is one of great strategic importance. It corrects the balance. It safeguards the integrity of the Council. It decisively rejects frivolous claims (“this isn’t what the Council wanted”; “the reformed liturgy is irreverent and unorthodox”), and calls everyone back to one common path. It will not eliminate political conflicts or disagreements in the Church, but it deprives traditionalists of the possibility of using the Eucharist as a hub of resistance to the Council and its legitimate implementation.
Some have charged that Pope Francis acted autocratically in abrogating Summorum pontificum, but actually his actions have been far more collegial than those his predecessors took in expanding availability of the older rites. A brief look at the history reveals this. In 1980, when Pope John Paul II was considering giving an indult for celebration of the Tridentine Mass, he took a survey of the world’s bishops. Most expected it to cause division and were opposed. Only 1.5 percent were in favor. Nevertheless, he went ahead with it. He was hoping to effect a reconciliation with Archbishop Lefebvre and his followers who had broken with the Church because they would not accept Vatican II. This outreach proved unsuccessful.
When John Paul considered whether to broaden this permission in 1988, he didn’t ask the bishops. Instead, he consulted with the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, headed by then-Cardinal Josef Ratzinger. Once again motivated by hope for the healing a the wound caused by schism (which is why the motu proprio is called Ecclesia Dei afflicta), he expanded access further. Still, there was no reconciliation with Lefebvre’s group, the Society of St. Pius X (SSPX).
When Benedict XVI issued Summorum pontificum in 2007, he conducted no survey, but it appears that some bishops did voice doubts and try to dissuade him. He overruled them. History repeated itself; the overtures to the SSPX were again rebuffed. He said (in 2007) that the bishops could evaluate how Summorum pontificum was going in three years. But no evaluation was sought until 2020 when Francis sent out his survey.
Discernment takes place in and through our relationship with God in the intimacy of our conscience, what Dignitatis humanae calls “man’s most secret core and his sanctuary,” where “he is alone with God whose voice echoes in his depths.” Properly understood, conscience is a way not of evading responsibility, but of assuming it. Discernment is what all good Catholic politicians need when they must choose between, on the one hand, staying and compromising in the hope of effecting change and, on the other, resigning to preserve their integrity. Most know there is a line they will have to draw, but the best of them stretch as far they can before getting there, in the hope of getting something done.
A former politician I admire, Ruth Kelly, served in the Labour governments of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. She is a Catholic and a member of Opus Dei. When the Labour government in 1996–1997 introduced laws making it illegal to refuse adoption rights to same-sex couples, she stayed in cabinet, securing permission to be absent from the vote. Inside the system, Kelly says, she just had to do “the best I could to limit the damage that I see in any particular piece of legislation.” In this case, she stayed to argue for exempting the thirteen or so Catholic adoption agencies, and only resigned when the vote went against her and Blair. Dr. Kelly took the view, made famous by a speech by Edmund Burke, that politicians are elected to exercise their own consciences, not anyone else’s. They are not the tools of their constituents, nor of bishops.
A politician can exercise her conscience only if she is living in the gap between the starting-point principle and the concrete choices she faces on the ground. Part of the Church’s mission in contemporary Western society is to create that gap: to proclaim fearlessly what the Kingdom of God demands. This is what bishops must do, while at the same time understanding that the conscience of Catholic politicians must be given freedom to determine how and when to act. As Pope Francis notes in Amoris laetitia: “We find it hard to make room for the consciences of the faithful, who very often respond as best they can to the Gospel amid their limitations, and are capable of carrying out their own discernment in complex situations.” Priests and bishops, he writes, “have been called to form consciences, not to replace them.”
Gaudium et spes asks laypeople to use their “well-formed Christian conscience to see that the divine law is inscribed in the life of the earthly city,” and to “penetrate the world with a Christian spirit.” It asks priests and bishops, meanwhile, to so “preach the news of Christ that all the earthly activities of the faithful will be bathed in the light of the Gospel.” Active citizenship is a virtue, voting an obligation, politics a high form of charity. The teaching Church helps form consciences, and laypeople are asked to use them in the hurly-burly of political life, to discern what is possible and prudent, to apply the principle in the here-and-now. For it is in reality, not in the idea, that the Kingdom of God is born.
Any threat to deny the Eucharist to “disobedient” Catholic politicians, however deeply buried in the document to be voted on by bishops in November, would encroach on the freedom necessary for discernment and indeed good governance. St. Thomas Aquinas made clear that not all sins are crimes, nor all crimes sins. A government is not obliged to prohibit or punish all evils, but only those the conscience of the people recognizes (Summa theologiae, I-II q. Q.96 a.2).
It is true that law has an important pedagogic function, but a law introduced without sufficient popular backing can badly backfire, making it harder, not easier, to bring about the good. Indeed, an important part of the judgement of any legislator is to understand when something has matured in the conscience of the people to the point where a good law can “nudge” citizens in the right direction. In politics, timing is all: what can be all but impossible at one time suddenly becomes possible at another. A good politician knows how to wait, biding his time until the propitious moment. A Catholic politician might conclude that to press for a particular policy in accord with Church teaching right now will not only fail but make it harder to press for in the future.
That conclusion may be misguided. But we can only get to truth through conscience. That’s why, as the Church teaches, a person must always follow their conscience, even when it is wrong: coscientia erronea obligat.
The moral theologian James Keenan, SJ, suggests that Americans may find this harder to accept than Europeans because of their contrasting experience of fascism and war. In Europe, shocking evidence of the acquiescence and passivity of Catholics led to an awakening of the vital role of conscience through remorse. In the United States, by contrast, there was no such crisis of conscience “because Americans, including their theologians, believed they were on the right side.” Appeals to conscience in postwar America instead came to be associated not with assuming ultimate responsibility but with individual opt-outs from laws and rules.
If there is a silver lining to the U.S. bishops’ painfully divisive debate, it is perhaps this: the chance for a recovery of the true meaning of the conscience of politicians. In Amoris laetitia, Pope Francis summarizes St. Thomas Aquinas’s explanation that “general rules set forth a good which can never be disregarded or neglected, but in their formulation they cannot provide absolutely for all particular situations.” The work of conscience is to identify those situations when such a general rule must be obeyed directly, and other situations where the general rule doesn’t apply, or doesn’t apply directly.
The Church teaches not just that we must follow our consciences, but also that we are responsible for the state our conscience is in. A malformed conscience will yield bad judgments. The bishops’ job is to remind us all, including politicians, what the Church teaches and what the Gospel demands, and to challenge us to avoid the corrosion of conscience by the surrounding culture. With freedom comes responsibility and accountability: politicians must obey their consciences, and voters must hold them to account for their choices. The Church’s task is to walk with them, assisting and guiding them. That means keeping open the channels of grace—not sending Catholic politicians away from the Communion rail but holding them close.
During the interrogation, the officials produced reams of material they claimed had been extracted from Swamy’s own computer. An extensive investigation of this claim has been conducted by Arsenal Consulting, a digital forensics firm near Boston. They’ve concluded that the material was planted by malware in another activist’s computer and then transferred to anyone that activist corresponded with, including Swamy.
At the end of the video, Swamy said he had been summoned to Mumbai for further questioning, but had refused to go. His age (eighty-three), his health (he had Parkinson’s and a heart condition), and the Covid pandemic all seemed good reasons for him not to travel. His video statement ends with these words:
What is happening to me is not unique, or happening to me alone. It is a broader process that is happening all over the country. We are all aware how prominent writers, lawyers, poets, activists, student leaders have all been put into jail because they have expressed their dissent or raised questions about the rulers of India. So I am a part of this process and I am happy to be a part of it. I am not a silent spectator. I’m part of the game and I am ready to pay the price, whatever it be.
A few days later, Swamy was arrested and flown to Mumbai, where he was imprisoned in the Taloja jail. The formal charge was sedition and contravention of the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act of 1967.
The Superior General of the Jesuits, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, cardinals, bishops, priests, and members of religious orders, as well as human rights organizations and ordinary citizens throughout India and around the world, all spoke out in defence of Swamy and the other activists. Demonstrations of solidarity demanding their immediate release were held all over the country. When these proved ineffective, the approach turned to palliative measures, especially for Fr. Stan, given his precarious health. We were particularly concerned that, because of his Parkinson’s, Stan was unable to hold a cup steady enough to drink from it. I, and many other disability activists here, sent several sippy cups to the prison. All of these were returned to their senders.
This little detail, more than anything else, brought home to me the petty vindictiveness of this arrest. Who would deny a sippy cup to an eighty-three-year-old priest living with Parkinson’s? In the end it was, as usual, the poor who saved the day. In one of his last letters from jail, Swamy spoke movingly of the help he received from his fellow inmates: poor and illiterate, they had no difficulty understanding what it means to be human. They spoon-fed Fr. Stan, held the cup to his lips, supported him to get to the toilet, and bathed him when he was unable to do it for himself. “We still sing in chorus,” he wrote in his letter. “A caged bird can still sing.”
When, as seemed inevitable, he contracted Covid, he was finally removed to a Mumbai hospital where, though chained to his bed as required by law, he finally got the care he had been denied in prison. But by then it was too late. Hooked to a ventilator, he died of cardiac arrest on July 5.
The thanks Fr. Stan Swamy got for a lifetime of defending the poor was to be treated exactly like one of them at the end. In India’s current climate of ruthless suppression of dissent, the example of his mistreatment may be seen as a warning to others. Paradoxically, however, many here find hope and inspiration in his story. A legal case challenging the violation of Fr. Stan’s human rights is now being planned, and his death has already made more people aware of the injustice the poor live with every day in this country. Christina Samy, who was trained by Fr. Stan and went on to become a full-time human-rights activist, put it well: “Living, Stan was a challenge to the status quo. In his death, he is even more so.”
On May 24, 2021, the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation in the Canadian province of British Columbia announced that it had located the bodies of 215 children, some as young as three years old, buried in unmarked graves at the site of the former Kamloops Indian Residential School. In the weeks that followed, ground-penetrating radar found still more buried children at sites across Canada, including the recent discovery of 751 children’s bodies at the former Marieval Indian Residential School in Saskatchewan. Since there were more than 130 such schools in Canada, it’s expected that the coming weeks and months will reveal many more unmarked graves.
“Residential schools,” the Canadian euphemism for boarding schools that separated Indigenous children from their families and communities, were designed to take away Indigenous language and culture—“to kill the Indian in the child.” These schools existed from the late nineteenth century until 1997, and about 70 percent of them were operated by Roman Catholic missionary orders and dioceses. Residential schools were not only explicitly imperialist in their aims, but, unsurprisingly, were the sites of much emotional, physical, and sexual abuse. The trauma caused by the system is still felt by survivors and their communities. The 2015 report of Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission concluded that the residential school system amounted to “cultural genocide.” The questions that all Canadians are now asking about restitution and reparations to Indigenous people are thus especially urgent for Roman Catholics—including what responsibility we the living have for sins that, in some cases, were committed centuries ago.
In thinking about all of this, I keep returning to Dante’s Inferno, especially what it teaches us about responsibility and culpability. The odd trait uniting the souls in Dante’s hell is their refusal to accept that they deserve to be there. In Canto III, the first thing the pilgrim hears from the damned is them “cursing God, cursing their own parents, / the human race, the time, the place, the seed / of their beginning, and their birth.” This pattern continues through the Inferno; from the deceitful lovers Paolo and Francesca, who blame their reading of Lancelot for their infidelity, to Lucifer himself, who weeps in self-pity, those eternally punished are marked not only by a refusal to repent, but also by a denial that they sin. By foregrounding this evasion of culpability as the distinction between salvation and its absence, Dante shows pride as a longing for a world that operates according to our will rather than God’s. To curse your age, rather than to humbly acknowledge your failure to respond to it in Christian charity shows that you’ve become closed off to your dependence on God’s love.
In Talbot’s essay there is a predictable opposition between what is “progressive”—and therefore obviously to be embraced—and what is “traditional.” It is taken for granted that inherited practices and values usually stand in the way of equality and fairness. She notes that other, more liberal Christian churches began ordaining women and adopting modern attitudes toward sexual morality decades ago. She does not mention the dramatic decline of mainline Protestantism over these same decades. The Catholic Church, needless to say, is not a modern institution. It does not justify its own teachings and actions by contemporary liberal Western criteria. Like most traditional cultures, its theology, sacred texts, anthropology, liturgy, and organization are suffused with metaphors drawn from human sexuality and gender. Of course, the Church can change—and has changed—but when it does so it must build on its own foundations, not repudiate them.
The women Talbot interviews repeatedly declare a love and attachment to Catholicism’s “rituals, its liturgy, and its tradition of service to the poor.” The assumption seems to be that you can dispense with the Catholic practices and social arrangements that offend modern sensibilities and still retain what is of ultimate importance, which appears to be a quest for self-expression married to “social justice.” Does the Church patriarchy need reform? Yes, it does. Does the Church need to give women decision-making authority? Yes, it does. Is ordination the only way to achieve that end? Perhaps not.
Writing about women’s ordination in Commonweal (“A Modest Proposal: A place for women in the hierarchy,” June 14, 1996), the anthropologist Mary Douglas made the matter-of-fact observation that “you can tell a hierarchical institution to become egalitarian till you are blue in the face, and nothing will happen. No one would know where to start. But tell it to reform the hierarchy and something might actually be done.”
Douglas agreed that if women are truly as valued as the Church claims, “they should not be left out of the Church’s official structure.” But she did not think ordination was the answer. The demand for ordination, she wrote, was not just about patriarchal control. “When the church’s use of the gender model is being criticized it is the form of society that is on trial, not a form of words.” She was skeptical of Church reform based on “vaunted” egalitarian claims. “Does Christianity really imply egalitarianism?” she wrote. “Or might the protections and sense of community afforded by hierarchy also reflect a genuine Christian vision?”
In egalitarian systems, Douglas insisted, the rules are easily manipulated or ignored: “The loudest voice has the main say, and woe to the weakest.” Hierarchy, in her experience, does not need to be repressive; it can make room for counterbalancing obligations between the strong and the weak. Gender and sexuality, she noted, are metaphors almost universally used in traditional cultures to justify such mutuality and counterbalancing arrangements. The metaphors denote partnership, not just dominance or competition. She urged Catholic reformers to “work with the hierarchical principle,” not seek to “abolish” it. It should be “invoked to justify an equal share of authority for women.”
Ideally, Douglas proposed, there should be a Women’s Commission on Doctrine, one that would be responsible for certain areas of Church teaching and practice, with veto power over the actions of the traditional male hierarchy. She argued it might be appropriate for the commission to have special authority over questions such as contraception, abortion, and bioethics. It would be made up of both women religious and lay women from all walks of life. Such a commission would give flesh and blood to the Church’s claim about the equality of men and women, while remaining tied to the sources of traditional Catholic identity, culture, and dynamism.
“If we respect a religious institution, we cannot dismiss out of hand its claim to honor its continuity with its own past,” Douglas wrote. “Telling its members to forget their common past and make new myths of present reality is the same as telling them to get lost, die off, and disappear.” Sadly, that is what some of the women in Talbot’s article actually say. For decades, this sort of a standoff has gotten Catholic women and the Church nowhere. At this point, as Talbot’s article inadvertently shows, both sides of the dispute are blue in the face.
Rather than an attempted retreat into an irrecuperable past, what Sloterdijk believes we really require is a new sphere of solidarity that can encompass all life, a shelter strong enough to create a robust co-immunity for the defenseless whole: global society, animal and vegetal life, nature, the earth itself. Religion has been irretrievably lost as a binding system of values, so we need a new piety devoted to, and sustained by, the oneness of the earth that we inhabit, share, and depend on. As far as Sloterdijk is concerned, moreover, the history of revelation—if one may use that word—has continued to the present day, and there are many things we have learned on the way to modernity, such as the nobility of the individual soul’s “proud” search for a system of personal freedom. These are lessons we must not forsake or let ourselves forget if we are to create a habitable future. For him, they constitute a “Newer Testament.”
Here, for me at least, the details tend to become a bit nebulous. I find Sloterdijk’s politics largely unintelligible, though I concede that it may all have some sort of deep coherence that I have simply failed to grasp. All I can hear are the dissonances. At times, he can sound as childishly inane as any American libertarian fulminating against social-welfare provisions. At other times, he gives voice to a healthy disdain for the liberal democratic cult of mediocrity, as well as the prison of routine in which the modern state and modern economy hold so many people captive. At yet other times, his Nietzschean dread of the age of the “Last Men” seems to overwhelm his vision of global solidarity and his sense of our pathetic human dependency on spheres of co-immunity. And yet it is that vision and that sense, as well as the essential, unpretentious humanity of both, that illuminate and guide his thinking at its best. Still, because I remain as unconvinced of the real existence of Sloterdijk’s greater political vision as of the real existence of snarks, I am no more disposed to dilate on the contents of the former than to speculate upon the biology of the latter.
What might Christians make of any of this story? Why should they care? Well, to begin with, they should acknowledge that Sloterdijk, in confirming Nietzsche’s diagnosis of God’s death in the developed world, is doing nothing more than stating an evident fact of history. The disappearance of that transcendent horizon of meaning and hope within whose commodious embrace just about all persons and cultures once subsisted is simply a fait accompli. The frantic extremism of the fundamentalisms and religious nationalisms and crypto-fascist integralisms of our current moment poignantly attests to the inconceivability for late modern culture of a God who is anything other than the construct of either the will to power or a desperate emotional need. None of them is a true sign of a revival of faith; all of them are only the hideous contractions of a deepening rigor mortis. And inasmuch as the genuinely living Christianity of the past was the vital wellspring of “Enlightenment” in the Western world, the departure of that Christianity from Western culture has carried away all those earlier possibilities of “co-immunity” that it had summed up in itself.
Epochs of the spirit are not reversible, or even susceptible of recapitulation. This is an Hegelian insight that no one should doubt: great historical and cultural transitions are not merely ruptures, but also moments of critique. The rationality of history lies in the ceaseless triumph of experience over mere theory, and so in the impossibility of any simple return to pre-critical naïvetés. Sooner or later, just about every cultural economy is defeated by its own inner contradictions, barring interruption of this natural process by a sudden foreign conquest. And the new order that succeeds it is probably no freer from contradictions of its own, which will be exposed in their turn. More to the point, every cultural order’s collapse is also the exhaustion of the synthesis that that culture embodied. Innocence yields to disenchantment, and disenchantment cannot revert to innocence.
Certainly this has proved so in the case of Christendom and its sequel, secularization. The Christendom of the empire or the nation state, being an alloy of two ultimately irreconcilable principles, inevitably subverted itself. It persisted for as long as it did by virtue of a genuinely organic cultic devotion with a durable practical and theoretical infrastructure. But its inherent contradictions ultimately destroyed that basis. The language and principles of the Gospel frequently illuminated the society that cherished them; the offices and powers of the state consistently sheltered, preserved, and advanced the religion that legitimated them. But the alliance was a suicide pact. The most devastating solvent of Christendom, in the end, was the ineradicable presence of Christianity within it. The corrosive force most destructive of Christianity as a credible source of social order was in the end the crushing burden of Christendom upon it.
Resistance to this destiny has always proved fruitless, precisely because it has tended to proceed from within the rationality of the old Christendom. In Catholic culture, for example, since at least the time of the Council of Trent, the struggle against the reality of the old order’s intrinsic fragility has been constant and utterly futile. It has been like an attempt to save a house already swallowed by the sea by adding new locks to its doors. Despite the countless cultural and social riches created by the unstable accommodation between the Gospel and empire—and even though many of those riches could yet perhaps be recovered within a new Christian synthesis—still the Christendom of the past was a fruitful catastrophe and its inevitable terminus was always secularism. And in the fullness of time, this secularism had to become a fully self-conscious metaphysical nihilism.
As for the liberal secular order that succeeded Christendom, its own inner stresses and volatilities are all too obvious. In the economic realm, it has created prodigies of material production and destruction, as well as forms of power and oppression on a scale formerly unimaginable. In the social realm, it has created ceaseless struggles among incompatible visions of the good while providing no clear transcendent index of values for adjudicating their conflicts. For better or worse, it has eliminated or marginalized almost all mediating or subsidiary forms of social agency and reduced meaningful social order to the interdependent but necessarily antagonistic claims of the state, capital, and the sovereign individual. And Sloterdijk is quite right: under such conditions, we have little defense against the ecological and social calamities that we have created for ourselves. So, again, given these realities, what ought Christians to do?
Certainly, what they should not do is indulge in sickly nostalgias and resentments, or soothe their distempers with infantile restorationist fantasies. History’s immanent critique has exposed too many of the old illusions for what they were, and there can be no innocent return to structures of power whose hypocrisies have been so clearly revealed. There are any number of reasons, for instance, for dismissing the current vogue of right-wing Catholic “integralism”: its imbecile flights of fancy regarding an imperial papacy; its essentially early-modern model of ecclesial absolutism; its devotion to a picture of Christian social and political order that could not be any less “integralist” or any more “extrinsicist” and authoritarian in its mechanisms; the disturbingly palpable element of sadomasochistic reverie in its endorsement of various extreme forms of coercion, subjugation, violence, and exclusion; the total absence of the actual ethos of Christ from its aims; its eerie similarity to a convention of Star Trek enthusiasts gravely discussing strategies for really establishing a United Federation of Planets. But the greatest reason for holding the whole movement in contempt is that it is nothing more than a resentful effort to reenact the very history of failure whose consequences it wants to correct. Secularity was not imposed upon the Christian world by some adventitious hostile force. It simply is the old Christendom in its terminal phase.
To this extent Christians have much to learn from Sloterdijk’s narrative, even if they might demur from some of its details. That said, the lovely burden of historical consciousness of which I spoke above can also incapacitate the political and moral imagination. Too much “genealogy”—too much history, as Nietzsche warned—can produce a paralyzing fatalism. Sloterdijk himself is acutely aware of this, but it is notable how parochial is his assumption that the current situation of the West must determine the future of religion, or even just the Christian “sphere” of immunity. He may be right, of course, but I think he sometimes fails to appreciate the degree to which history is always also a realm of radical novelties. Genealogy tends to create the impression that cultural evolution is governed by an inflexible law of efficient and material causality, but in fact historical processes are constantly redirected by formal and final causalities that simply cannot be predicted.
The configurations of the old Christian order are irrecoverable now, and in many ways that is for the best. But the possibilities of another, perhaps radically different Christian social vision remain to be explored and cultivated. Chastened by all that has been learned from the failures of the past, disencumbered of both nostalgia and resentment, eager to gather up all the most useful and beautiful and ennobling fragments of the ruined edifice of the old Christendom so as to integrate them into better patterns, Christians might yet be able to imagine an altogether different social and cultural synthesis. Christian thought can always return to the apocalyptic novum of the event of the Gospel in its first beginning and, drawing renewed vigor from that inexhaustible source, imagine new expressions of the love it is supposed to proclaim to the world, and new ways beyond the impasses of the present.
The ultimate result, if Christians can free themselves from the myth of a lost golden age, may be something wilder and stranger than we can at present conceive, at once more primitive and more sophisticated, more anarchic in some ways and more orderly in others. Whether such a thing is possible or not, however, it is necessary to grasp that where we now find ourselves is not a fixed destiny. It becomes one only if we are unwilling to distinguish the opulent but often decadent grandeur of Christendom from the true Christian glory of which it fell so far short. The predicaments of the present are every bit as formidable as Sloterdijk’s diagnosis suggests, and our need for a global sphere of solidarity that can truly shelter the life of the whole is every bit as urgent as he claims. But it is also true that we are not actually fated to live “after God,” or to seek our shelter only in the aftermath of God’s departure. In fact, of all the futures we might imagine, that might prove to be the most impossible of all.
After God
Peter Sloterdijk
Trans. by Ian Alexander Moore
Polity
$24.95 | 280 pp.
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