18 May 2026
No One for Vatican II? | Fr. Robert McTeigue, SJ
Of Performative Impiety and Nonperformative Piety
From Crisis
By Alexandria Chiasson McCormick
We know that we cannot judge the soul merely by exterior attributes; we know that it is wrong to make assumptions about a person’s interior disposition or depth of holiness based on casual clothing or external postures at Mass.
It's a common sight in the ordinary form of the Mass: throngs of people (all of them, actually, despite the fact that, statistically, only a small fraction of these people could have gone to Confession within recent memory) shuffle restlessly forward, thrusting their hands out to snatch God on their own terms. Most of them are dressed very casually, showing how little effort they think the Lord deserves on Sunday morning.
Then there is the equally casual one-handed way these communicants pop their Lord and God into their mouths, wiping their palms on their jeans afterward—can these people possibly believe that they are receiving the very body and blood, soul and divinity, of their Savior? Surely not.
The way they stand, so confidently, in front of the Eucharistic minister, reaching their hands out to help themselves at the table of the Lord, displays open arrogance. You can tell they consider themselves on a level with God Himself by the way they barely acknowledge His presence, save, perhaps, for a brief nod of the head, such as one directs toward a vague acquaintance one sees at the grocery store. Overall, the way in which the average communicant receives at a standard Novus Ordo Sunday Mass is far from edifying.
The above is a sort of reductio ad absurdum answer to a recently published article on individuality and piety. I do not actually think about any of these things when I am at Mass. First of all, I have my own concerns of which to be mindful—my own spiritual preparation, scraps of pre-Communion prayers I remember from a distant past when I was able to balance a prayer book instead of multiple children; on a less spiritual level, merely attempting to corral toddlers on the way up to and back from the front of the church is really enough of a challenge to keep anyone adequately focused on their own business.
Secondly, and more significantly, the fact remains that as much as I may struggle with uncharitable thoughts toward others, it is patently obvious that I can’t actually know anything about the interior state of anyone else at Mass. Of course, it’s entirely possible that the man in jeans and a football jersey chose to dress that way because he is more invested in the game he is watching at a friend’s house afterward than he is in worshipping at Mass; but it’s also quite likely that he is simply a fellow who doesn’t think much about clothing and has never been instructed on how to dress for Mass.
The young, fit woman who doesn’t bother to genuflect may not care too much about the Real Presence—or she could have a running injury afflicting her knee, although you can’t see the brace under her skirt. These people are strangers, but they are also members of the Body of Christ, and what we owe them are our prayers and our charity—not a spiritual or psychological analysis.
Anyone who reads the first paragraph of this essay, without recognizing it as parody, would quite rightly be shocked by the idea that a person was entitled to sit in judgment of the Communion queue. While any of us might have occasional thoughts along some of these lines, we can rationally dismiss them, ask God to forgive us and help us grow in love of our neighbor, and strive to assume the best of others, as the virtue of charity demands of us.
We might be shocked, in passing, by a plunging neckline, or someone’s blundering into Mass at the halfway point, but deep down we know that these externals are shaky evidence on which to judge a person’s heart. We know that we cannot judge the soul merely by exterior attributes; we know that it is wrong to make assumptions about a person’s interior disposition or depth of holiness based on casual clothing or external postures at Mass.
And yet, somehow, when the tables are turned, it has become acceptable to point out the interior shortcomings of people who display any kind of outward trappings of piety or devotion. We can assume that women who veil think they are better than women who don’t; that people who kneel and receive Communion on the tongue do so not out of respect for the One whom they receive but, instead, in order to create a scene and call attention to their excessive holiness. People who wear suits and ties or dresses to Mass on Sundays other than Easter are surely just making a statement that they are better than those who attend in shorts. A longer hemline or a higher neckline, a habit of staying after Mass to make one’s thanksgiving, carrying a missal or prayerbook, special care in genuflecting or crossing oneself—the signs of spiritual pride are so subtle and varied!Is it possible that a person who dresses modestly and reverently for Mass, who kneels and bows and observes the outward forms of piety, might be a whited sepulcher? Assuredly. These outward devotions are certainly not a guarantor of holiness. On the other hand, there is absolutely no reason to interpret these as signs of interior decay. Perhaps this is difficult for people who themselves struggle with feelings of spiritual pride; people who, in acknowledging their own shortcomings in this regard, tend to project them onto others who engage in outwardly observable devotions.
But this struggle to control others in order to calm one’s own anxieties is not a healthy response. We recognize this in other areas of life: an alcoholic does not find healing by micromanaging other people’s consumption of spirits. The answer to obsessive compulsive disorder is not to force others to wash their hands constantly for the comfort of the one suffering. Why do we continue to insist that everyone must conform to exactly the same spiritual practices in order to make others comfortable?
Unity and conformity do make many people more comfortable; and the Church does indeed regulate our comportment at Mass within certain bounds. At the same time, however, souls are individuals, and God’s relationship with each one of us is unique. If that is true, and if the Church, in her wisdom, can tolerate a degree of nonconformity among the laity at Mass, could we, perhaps, as well?
Monday Within the Octave of the Ascension
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O King of glory, Lord of hosts, who didst this day ascend in triumph above all the heavens! leave us not orphans, but send upon us the Spirit of Truth, promised by the Father, alleluia.
The Kingship over men is not the only diadem given to our Emmanuel at his Ascension. The Apostle expressly tells us that he is, moreover, the Head of all Principality and Power. (Colossians 2:10) Noble, indeed, is man; but nobler far are the glorious Choirs of the angelic hierarchy. We have already seen, that in the great trial, whereby God tested the love of his angels, many rebelled and were cast into hell; the rest, who were faithful, entered at once into the possession of their sovereign good, and began, round the throne of God, their ceaseless hymns of adoration, love, and thanksgiving.
But a portion of their happiness was reserved till the fulfillment of one of God’s decrees. Laden as they are with the most magnificent gifts, they await another; it is to be the completion of their joy and glory. God revealed to them, at the first instant of their coming into existence, that he intended to create other beings, of a nature inferior to their own; and that of these beings, who were to be composed of body and soul, there should be one, whom the Eternal Word would unite to himself in unity of Person. It was also revealed to them, that this Human Nature, (for whose glory and for God’s, all things were made,) was to be the FIRST-BORN of every creature; (Colossians 1:15) that all angels and men would have to bend their knee before him; that after suffering countless humiliations on earth, he would be exalted in heaven; and, finally, that the time would be when the whole hierarchy of heaven, the principalities and powers, yea, even the Cherubim and Seraphim, would have him placed over them as their King.
The angels, then, as well as Men, looked forward to the coming of Jesus. The angels awaited him as he that was to confer upon them their final perfection, give them unity under himself as their head, and bring them into closer union with God by the union of the Divine and created natures in his own Person. As to us Men, we awaited him as our Redeemer and our Mediator: as our Redeemer, because sin had closed heaven against us, and we needed one that would restore us to our inheritance; as our Mediator, because it was the eternal decree of God to communicate his own glory to the human race, and this was to be by union with himself. Whilst, therefore, the just ones on earth, who lived before the Incarnation, were pleasing to God by their faith in this future Redeemer and Mediator, the angels in heaven were offering to the Divine Majesty the homage of their proffered service of this Man-God, their future King, who, in virtue of the eternal decree, was ever present to the Ancient of Days. (Daniel 7:9)
At length, the fullness of time came, (Galatians 4:4) and God, as the apostle expresses it, brought into the world his first-begotten, (Hebrews 1:6) the prototype of creation. The first to adore the Newborn King were not men, but the angels, as the same apostle assures us. (Hebrews 1:6) The Royal Prophet had foretold that it would be so. (Psalm 96:7) And was it not just? These blessed spirits had preceded us in their longings, not indeed of a Redeemer—for they had never sinned—but of a Mediator, who was to be the link of their closer union with infinite beauty—the object of their eternal delight—in a word, the realization of the want there seemed to be even in Heaven, that is, of Jesus’ taking and filling up the place destined for him.
Then was accomplished that act of adoration of the Man-God, which was demanded of the angels, at the first moment of their creation, and which, according to its being complied with or refused, decided the eternal lot of those noble creatures. With what love did not the faithful angels adore this Jesus, the Word made Flesh, when they beheld him in his Mother’s arms at Bethlehem? With what transport of joy did they not announce to the Shepherds, and to us through them, the glad tidings of the Birth of our common King?
As long as he lived upon this earth and submitted to every humiliation and suffering in order to redeem us from sin and make us worthy to become his members, the blessed spirits ceased not to contemplate and adore him. The Ascension came; and from that day forward, it is on the throne prepared at the Father’s right hand that they behold and adore their Lord and King. At the solemn moment of Jesus’ Ascension, a strange joy was felt in each choir of the heavenly hierarchy, from the burning Seraphim to the Angels who are nearest to our own human nature. The actual possession of a good, whose very expectation had filled them with delight, produced an additional happiness in those already infinitely happy spirits. They fixed their enraptured gaze on Jesus’ beauty, and were lost in astonishment at seeing how Flesh could so reflect the plenitude of grace that dwelt in that Human Nature as to outshine their own brightness. And now, by looking on this Nature, (which, though inferior to their own, is divinized by its union with the Eternal Word,) they see into further depths of the uncreated Sea of Light. Their love is more burning, their zeal is more impetuous, their hymns are more angelic; for, as the Church says of them, the Angels and Archangels, the Powers and Dominations, the Cherubim and Seraphim, praise the majesty of the Father through his Son, Jesus Christ: per quem majestatem tuam laudant angeli.
Add to this, the joy these heavenly spirits must have experienced at seeing the immense multitude that accompanied Jesus from earth to heaven. According to their respective merits, they were divided among the various choirs, and placed on thrones left vacant by the fallen angels. Their bodies are not yet united to their souls; but, is not their flesh already glorified in that of Jesus? When the time fixed for the general Resurrection comes, the trumpet of the great archangel will be heard, (1 Thessalonians 4:15) and then these happy souls will again put on their ancient vesture, the mortal made immortal. Then will the holy angels, with fraternal enthusiasm, recognize in Adam’s features a likeness of Jesus, and in those of Eve a likeness of Mary, and the resemblance will even be greater than it was when our first parents were innocent and happy in the Garden of Eden. Come quickly, O thou glorious day, whereon the bright mystery of the Ascension is to receive its final completion, and the two choirs of angels and men are to be made one in love and praise under the one Head, Christ Jesus
It is St. Ambrose who is to help us today, by the following beautiful Hymn, to celebrate the mystery of the triumph of our Human Nature in Jesus. The Hymn is inserted in the Breviary of Milan.
The sacred Day, longed for by us all, hath shone upon us: the Day whereon Christ, our God, the hope of the world, ascended to the highest heavens.
When our Lord ascended on high—returning to his rightful throne—the kingdom of heaven rejoiced, for it was the return of the Only Begotten of the Father.
O triumph of the great battle! Having defeated the prince of this world, Jesus presents to his Father the Flesh that had won the glorious victory.
He was raised up on a cloud, and opening the gate of heaven, which our First Parent had closed against us, he inspired believers with hope.
What a joy was this to all mankind, that the Son of our Virgin-Mother—after being spit upon, and scourged, and crucified—was placed upon his Father’s throne!
Let us, then, give thanks to him that avenged us and wrought our salvation, for that he took our flesh and made it dwell in the heavenly courts above.
Let there be a lasting fellowship of joy between the angels and us; they rejoice because he offered himself to their delighted gaze; we, because he ceased not to be our Brother.
It behooves us now, by the practice of virtues of which he has set us the example, to await our union with Christ, and so live as to merit our ascension into heaven.
Glory be to thee, O Lord, who ascendest above the stars! and to the Father, and to the Holy Ghost, for everlasting ages. Amen.
We may use this Prayer of the Mozarabic Breviary, wherewith to close the day.
O Jesus! the power and wisdom of God! who, coming down from heaven for our sake and for our salvation, deignedst to clothe thyself in human flesh, that, by a most merciful union, thou mightest clothe us with thy divinity, and that, by ascending into heaven, thou mightest enrich with immortality the mortality thou assumedst by descending upon our earth;—grant, we beseech thee, by the merit of this day’s solemnity (whereon we rejoice at and desire to imitate thine Ascension) that we may acknowledge the favor of this most loving dispensation, by paying to thy mercy the only homage in our power—the offering of our praise, and awaiting thy second coming which is to console us with joys eternal.
St Venantius, Martyr
Today’s Martyr carries us back to the persecutions under the Roman Emperors. It was at Camerino, in Italy, that he bore his testimony to the true Faith; and the devotion wherewith he is honored by the people of those parts (which are under the temporal Sovereignty of the Roman Pontiff) has occasioned his Feast being kept throughout the Church. Let us, therefore, joyfully welcome this new champion, who fought so bravely for our Emmanuel. Let us congratulate him upon his having the privilege of suffering Martyrdom during the Paschal Season, all radiant as it is with the grand victory won by Life over Death.
The account given by the Liturgy upon St. Venantius is a tissue of miracles. The omnipotence of God seemed, on this and many other like occasions, to be resisting the cruelty of the executioners, in order to glorify the Martyr. It served also as a means for converting the bystanders, who, on witnessing these almost lavish miracles, were frequently heard to exclaim that they too wished to be Christians, and embrace a Religion which was not only honored by the superhuman patience of its Martyrs, but was so visibly protected and favored by heaven.
Venentius, who was born at Camerino, was but fifteen years of age when he was accused of being a Christian, and arraigned before Antiochus, the Governor of the City, under the reign of the Emperor Decius. He presented himself to the Governor at the city Gate, where, after being long and uselessly coaxed and threatened, he was scourged, and condemned to be chained. But he was miraculously unfettered by an Angel, and was then burned with torches, and was hung, with his head downwards, over a fire that he might be suffocated by the smoke. One of the officials, by name Anastasius, having noticed the courage wherewith he suffered his torments, and having also seen an Angel walking, in a white robe, above the smoke, and again liberating Venantius—he believed in Christ, and, together with his family, was baptized by the priest Porphyrius, with whom he afterwards merited to receive the palm of martyrdom.
Venantius was again brought before the Governor; and being solicited, though to no purpose, to give up his Faith, he was thrown into prison. A herald named Attalus, was sent thither, to tell him that he also had once been a Christian, but had renounced the profession on discovering that it was false, and that Christians were duped into giving up the good things of the present by the vain hope of what was to follow in the next life. But the high-minded soldier of Christ, knowing well the snares of our crafty enemy the devil, utterly spurned his minister from his presence. Whereupon, he was again led before the Governor, and all his teeth were beaten out, and his jaws broken; after which, he was thrown into a dung-pit. But, being delivered by an Angel, thence also, he again stood before the judge, who, while Venantius was addressing him, fell from the judgment-seat, and died exclaiming: “The God of Venantius is the true one! destroy our gods!”
When this was made known to the Governor, he immediately ordered Venantius to be exposed to the lions: but those animals, forgetting their own savage nature, threw themselves at his feet. The Saint, meanwhile, instructed the people in the Christian Faith, and was therefore removed and again thrown into prison. On the following day, Porphyrius told the Governor, that he had had a vision during the night, and that he saw that those who were bathed with water, by Venantius, were brilliant with a splendid light, but that the Governor was covered with a thick darkness. This so irritated the Governor, that he immediately ordered Porphyrius to be beheaded, and Venantius to be dragged, until evening, along places covered with thorns and thistles. He was left there half dead; but he again presented himself, in the morning, to the Governor, who at once condemned him to be cast headlong from a rock. Again, however, he was miraculously preserved in his fall, and was once more dragged, for a mile, over rough places. Seeing that the soldiers were tormented with thirst, Venantius made the sign of the Cross, and water flowed from a rock, which was in a neighboring dell; on which rock, Venantius left the impress of his knees, as may be still seen in the Church which is dedicated to him. Many were moved, by that miracle, to believe in Christ, and were all beheaded, together with Venantius, on that very spot, by the Governor’s orders. So awful were the lightnings and earthquakes which followed the execution, that the Governor took to flight. But he was not able to escape divine justice; and, a few days after, met with a most humiliating death. Meanwhile, the Christians gave honorable burial to the bodies of all these Martyrs, and they are now reposing in the Church, which is dedicated to Venantius in the town of Camerino.
Dear youthful Martyr, loved of the Angels, and aided by them in thy combat! pray for us. Like thyself, we too are soldiers of the Risen Jesus, and must give testimony, before the world, to the Divinity and the Rights of our King. The world has not always in its hands those material instruments of torture, such as it made thee feel; but it is always fearful in its power of seducing souls. It would rob us, also, of that New Life which Jesus has imparted to us and to all them that are his Members; holy Martyr, protect us under these attacks! Thou hadst partaken, during the days of thy last Easter, of the divine Flesh of the Paschal Lamb, and thy courage in Martyrdom redounded to the glory of this heavenly nourishment. We, also, have been guests at the same holy Table; we, also, have partaken of the Paschal Banquet. Like thee, we have known our Lord in the breaking of BREAD: (Luke 24:35) obtain for us the appreciation of the divine mystery, of which we received the first-fruits at Bethlehem, and which has been gradually developed, within our souls, as well as before our eyes, by the merits of the Passion and Resurrection of our Emmanuel. We are now, at this very time, preparing to receive the plenitude of the divine gift of the Incarnation. Pray for us, O Holy Martyr, that our hearts may more than ever fervently welcome, and faithfully preserve, the rich treasures which are about to be offered us, by the sublime mysteries of the Ascension and Pentecost.
St Venantius: Don't Fear What Happens to the Body
St Eric, King of Sweden, Martyr
See Israelis Eriandi liber de vitâ et miraculis S. Erici Regis, ex editione et cum notis Joan. Schefferi, is 8vo. Hoimiæ, 1675, and Henschenius, t. 4, Maij, p. 186.
A. D. 1151
ERIC1 was descended of a most illustrions Swedish family: in his youth he laid a solid foundation of virtue and learning, and took to wife Christina, daughter of Ingo IV., king of Sweden. Upon the death of king Smercher in 1141, he was, purely for his extraordinary virtues and qualifications, placed on the throne by the election of the states, according to the ancient laws of that kingdom. His first care in that exalted and dangerous station was to watch over his own soul. He treated his body with great severity, fasting and watching much, in order to keep his domestic enemy in due subjection to the spirit, and to fit himself for the holy exercises of heavenly contemplation and prayer, which were his chief delight. He was truly the father and servant of all his people. With indefatigable application he himself administered to them justice, especially to the poor, to whose complaints his ears were always open, and whose grievances and oppressions he took care himself to redress. He often visited in person the poor that were sick, and relieved them with bountiful alms. Content with his own patrimony, he levied no taxes. He built churches, and by wholesome laws restrained the brutish and savage vices of his subjects. The frequent inroads of the idolatrous Finlanders upon his territories obliged him to take the field against them. He vanquished them in a great battle; but after his victory he wept bitterly at the sight of the dead bodies of his enemies which covered the field, because they had been slain unbaptized. When he had subdued Finland, he sent St. Henry, bishop of Upsal, to preach the faith of Christ to that savage infidel nation, of which he may be styled the apostle. Among the subjects of this good king were certain sons of Belial, who made his piety the subject of their ridicule, being mostly obstinate idolaters. Magnus, son of the king of Denmark, blinded by ambitious views to the crown of Sweden, put himself at the head of these impious malecontents, and engaged them in a conspiracy to take away the life of their sovereign. The holy king was hearing mass on the day after the feast of the ascension, when news was brought him that the rebels were in arms, and on the march against him. He calmly answered: “Let us at least finish the sacrifice; the remainder of the festival I shall keep elsewhere.” After mass he recommended his soul to God, made the sign of the cross, and, to spare the blood of the citizens, who were ready to defend his life at the expense of their own, marched out alone before his guards. The conspirators rushed upon him, beat him down from his horse, and struck off his head with a thousand indignities in derision of his religion. His death happened on the 18th of May, 1151. God honored his tomb with many miracles. It remains to this day at Upsal undefaced. St. Eric was honored as chief patron of the kingdom of Sweden till the change of religion in the sixteenth century. He ordered the ancient laws and constitutions of the kingdom to be collected in one volume, which bears the title of King Eric’s Law, or the Code of Uppland, highly respected in Sweden: it was confirmed in the thirteenth century by the learned king Magnus Ladulas, who compiled and published in 1285 another code under the title of Gardsrætte.
All power and authority among men is derived from God, as Christ declared to Pilate,2 and as the wise man often repeats. Whence St. Paul teaches us, that he who resisteth power, resisteth the ordinance of God.3 On no men doth he confer the least degree of jurisdiction, but with the most severe injunction and obligation that they employ it according to his will, and in the first place for the advancement of his divine honor. Hence every father, master of a family, magistrate, or king, is accountable to God for those under his charge, and will be condemned as a traitor on the last day, if he employs not all the means in his power that God may be known, praised, and faithfully served by them. This is the primary obligation of those whom God hath vested with authority. In the faithful discharge of this trust the glorious St. Eric laid down his life.
St Venantius, Martyr
Collect of St Eric of Sweden, King & Martyr ~ Indulgenced on the Saint's Feast (See Note)
According to the Apostolic Penitentiary, a partial indulgence is granted to those who, on the feast of any Saint, recite in his honour the oration of the Missal or any other approved by legitimate Authority.
V. O Lord, hear my prayer.
Let us pray.
Grant, we beseech Thee, almighty God: that the venerable feast of Blessed Eric, Thy Martyr, may through his intercession be strengthened in love of Thy Name.
Collect of St Venantius of Camerino, Martyr ~ Indulgenced on the Saint's Feast
According to the Apostolic Penitentiary, a partial indulgence is granted to those who, on the feast of any Saint, recite in his honour the oration of the Missal or any other approved by legitimate Authority.
V. O Lord, hear my prayer.
Let us pray.
O God, in Whose sight this day is holy, because Thy blessed Martyr Venantius did become more than conqueror thereon, graciously hear the prayers of Thy people, and grant that all who reverence his right worthy loyalty to Thee, may be like him in godly endurance.
17 May 2026
On Sanctifying Sodomy
"The Final Report of Study Group 9 ... is a jaw-dropping attack on Scripture and everything that the Church has ever taught concerning sodomy."
From Crisis
By Regis Martin, STD
The Final Report of Study Group 9 of the Synod on Synodality is a jaw-dropping attack on Scripture and everything that the Church has ever taught concerning sodomy.
Is sodomy no longer a sin? Are instances of same-sex attraction among those inclined to commit it no longer to be viewed as a disorder? Will the sacrament of marriage soon be administered to couples in committed homosexual relationships?
Has the Church, in other words, changed her mind on the subject of sexual perversion, no longer insisting sodomites cease and desist from a practice that, until quite recently, she had unequivocally condemned? One might certainly think so, judging from the latest document coming out of the Office of the Synod of Bishops, in which the Church’s traditional teaching is thoroughly trashed on the grounds that it persists in keeping alive a “paradigm” no longer applicable in today’s world.
“The Church’s mission,” we are now being told,
is not a matter of abstractly proclaiming and deductively applying principles that are set out in an immutable and rigid manner, but of fostering a living encounter with the person of the risen Lord Jesus, by engaging with the lived experience of faith of the People of God.
And when the lived experience finds itself at variance with the received teaching of the Church? What then? Why simply adjust the teaching to fit the practice. God forbid that people should have to adjust their practice to fit the teaching. Unless, of course, like all tyrants, the Church were to force her teaching down unwelcome throats, thus causing people to throw up.
Otherwise, the document appears to be saying, we shall all remain helpless “against the temptation of the sterile and regressive ossification of principles and statements, of norms and rules,” which stand athwart “the lived experience of individuals and communities.”
You mean, like so many normal gay men and women who wish only to have Mother Church approve and bless their union like everyone else? And thus to reinforce the point, the authors include actual testimony from self-confessed Catholic homosexuals, who proudly claim to be married to other men. They are entirely at peace, too, with the arrangement, inasmuch as they see it as both assuaging their own appetites for gay sex while, according to their lights, satisfying the demands of the Church’s faith.
“My sexuality,” insists Jason Steidel, one of the two men quoted in the report—last seen, by the way, on the front page of The New York Times, photographed alongside his so-called husband while receiving a blessing from Fr. James Martin, S.J.,—“isn’t a perversion, disorder, or cross; it’s a gift from God.
I have a happy, healthy marriage and am flourishing as an openly gay Catholic. It’s taken years of prayer, therapy, and affirming community to get here, but I thank God for my sexuality and station in life…. Being an LGBTQ Catholic is not easy, and many days I grieve the harm the church has caused. But I also have hope. I have witnessed conversion during Pope Francis’ papacy at the local and universal levels of the church, and I look forward to helping build up the body of Christ that reflects Jesus’ ministry of healing and inclusion.
He is not alone, it seems. A number of progressive prelates have joined the same team, including no less a figure than the current Cardinal-Archbishop of Washington, D.C., Robert McElroy, whose embrace of “radical inclusion” requires that LGBTQ+ Catholics, however unrepentant, be given a seat at the same table where heterosexual Catholics dine, prompting his fellow bishop Thomas Paprocki of Springfield, Illinois, to suggest that by holding such a view, which is flat-out heretical, he may no longer be “in full communion with the Catholic Church.”
Not a problem, meanwhile, for Cardinal Jean-Claude Hollerich of Luxembourg, who has long argued that, thanks to the discoveries of “value-free” modern science, we now know that the Church’s teaching on homosexuality has become hopelessly outdated—positively paleolithic even. We need to jettison it at once, therefore, lest we remain so hidebound in our beliefs and habits that no one will ever take us seriously again.
We must overcome the obvious inadequacies of the creation account in Genesis, for instance, which rather quaintly supposes that God was actually making us male and female and that the institution of marriage and family would naturally follow. Not at all, he tells us. Instead, we need to apply “a synodal interpretation of the text,” in order to see that, in fact, it was “humanity” that God was creating, not men and women. Such Bronze Age binaries must give way to a more polymorphous conception of how humanity chooses to mate.
“We as Church are part of that humanity,” he reminds us, “and we are called to serve humanity.” Yes, even when it looks as if it’s throwing itself off the nearest cliff.
Well, here’s my binary, and it leaves little room for maneuver: either sodomy is a sin, in which case those who practice it need to repent and try, with God’s grace, to get over it; or, if it’s not a sin, then throw out the two testaments, Old and New, along with every other stricture of nature and grace going all the way back to Eden before and after the Fall—leaving nothing at all left to forbid in the sexual realm.
Or favor, for that matter. Like chastity, which is the practice, in these days ever more necessary and heroic, to conform one’s sexuality to a standard of self-mastery after the pattern of Jesus Christ Himself. Isn’t that, after all, the real mission of the Church? To help us all live more chaste lives in order to burnish the image in which we were first made and, thus, grow ever more perfectly into the likeness of God?
The bottom line here is that the Church is not now, nor has she ever been, pastorally invested in the spread of sin. Her job is to do all that she can to help us get to Heaven, which means urging us all to become saints. Yes, even the sodomites. Provided, that is, like the rest of us, they give up their sins.
A Realist Outline of History
A look at history through the lens of various philosophies and outlooks that people have taken over the past few centuries.
From The Imaginative Conservative
By Joseph K. Woodard, PhD
The last three centuries have proven that imposing an ideological vision upon any civilization is cataclysmic. So we must conclude—annoyingly—that no formula can resurrect a Christian culture, but only a Christian response to the concrete needs of real people.
Part One: The Rule of Necessity and the Rule of Love
Most diagnoses of our current cultural malaise have focused on either of two narrower causes, the ideological and idealistic, or the organizational and materialistic. On one hand, critics like Patrick Deneen, Alasdair McIntyre, and Charles Taylor condemn liberalism’s seductive individualism, arguing that Lockean ideology has bred religious indifferentism, modern moral relativism, and now post-modern psychosis. On the other hand, critics like James Burnham, Christopher Lasch, and Thomas Sowell have long decried the rise of the bureaucratic New Class, faux-experts dangerously unshackled from democratic-republican constraints.
The first sort of diagnosis, the idealistic, rightly acknowledges that that people live what they believe. Those who believe a literally idiotic anthropology live lives of lonely despair. Yet Locke’s simplistic Epicureanism has been around since, well, Epicurus, prompting the question, why now? A narrowly ideological diagnosis assumes the Enlightenment’s reification of culture, the presumption that a people’s beliefs are linguistic “raw material,” to be deposed by some better formula. History is then reduced to a rhetorical contest between philosophic elites (as with some Straussians). Yet any people’s beliefs are as much a symptom of their real living relationships, as their “cause.”
As pioneer geographer Halford Mackinder insisted, every civilization is a “Going Concern,” an unimaginably complex mare’s nest of coercive and voluntary relationships —defensive, judicial, and economic; devotional, aesthetic, and architectural (like Milton Friedman’s famous “yellow pencil,” cubed). A way of life is impossible to reduce to a formula, and certainly impossible to generate from one. So, as Tolstoy put it, “some men in France wrote about liberty, equality, and fraternity, then other men beheaded or drowned a great number of their fellows.” Locke, Rousseau, and Hegel assumed that they could replicate the myriad achievements of cultural Christianity—Christian “theory”—with alternative, abstract anthropologies. What they achieved was a Confusion of Tongues. Meanwhile, nurtured by Christian service, populations grew, and technology, urbanization and mass communications marched on. This fueled an inevitable growth of public bureaucracy, while the intellectuals blithely assumed that they led the parade.
The second sort of diagnosis, the materialistic, is grounded in the real, productive relationships of a living society and its ruling regime, but it ignores the fact that this concrete organization of life itself imports a substantive anthropology or cosmology. Natural regimes or states arise to meet the brute necessities of a particular people in their time and place: “some need we have of one another,” as Socrates’ young friend says (Rep. II). Material necessities seem non-negotiable, so natural regimes are necessarily coercive in their division of labor and in everything they do. In the absence of an enduring, visible dissenting witness (spoiler alert: Christianity), any regime’s dominion is the compelling argument for the nature of the Cosmos: the implacable heaven of theocratic mandarins, the tragic battleground of heroic warriors, or the plunder of oligarchs.
A people’s concrete organization and its “metaphysic” form a single way of life and develop in a symbiotic relationship. Considering warrior regimes, for example, pagan Apaches, Shinto samurais, and Christian knights share cultural qualities like their insatiable appetite for heroic epics; but between them, the status of women varies dramatically indeed. Christian theocracies (Byzantium), oligarchies (Venice) and republics (Switzerland) all repudiate child sacrifice, certainly contrary to Carthage’s oligarchic norm.
Realism: Uniting Body and Soul, Regime and Society
We must connect the dots between the metaphysical and structural diagnoses of the new regime and its implicit cosmology. Our current bureaucratic insurgency is akin to German warrior bands, surging over the frozen Rhine. De Tocqueville warned two hundred years ago, that a democratic republic faced the baleful prospect of a bureaucratic tyranny. And as Plato suggests, a new regime itself imports a generic cosmology, as German warriors initially overlaid the old theocratic Empire with a brutal cosmos of tragic heroism. Today, we’re being overlain by a cosmos of mechanical indifference by an inevitable—but not hopeless—bureaucratic regime.
For five hundred years, Christians have been distracted by a contest of ideologies, the “treason of the intellectuals.” Epicurean propagandists as far back as Marsilius, Machiavelli and Montaigne mocked the Good News of Original Sin as priestly duplicity, to promote a “natural” happiness. They took for granted the benefits of Christian culture, the sap of the branch beneath them, while underestimating human malice and despair. Seeing only Christian docility, and blind to the Church’s prodigious cultural achievement, Hobbes and Rousseau concluded that human nature is utterly malleable. Ever since, intellectuals have competed to impose badly sketched cartoons of human destiny onto a Christian civilization. They took for granted the uniquely Christian achievement of voluntary societies with substantial autonomy from their coercive regimes.
Sometimes, a collision of interests is an opportunity for legislators to recast a regime. Like Solon’s Athens, the Glorious Revolution, or American Founding, this works only if they work within the limitations and aspirations of the broader society. Their success is measured, not by some abstract legitimacy, but by a new and enduring concord. Asked if he’d given Athenians the best law, Solon famously replied, “The best they could accept.” Where the concrete limitations of the “Going Concern” are not respected (like the French National Assembly outlawing hunger), the result is catastrophe (like the Terror). The distinction between founding legislators and revolutionary ideologues is crucial when later we consider the American founding.
Throughout history, given inevitable demographic change, peace-loving Christian societies have enjoyed an incomparable continuity (thus the reality of history itself), despite their perennially confrontations with new regimes This Western Exceptionalism—personal rights, liberal education, free association, limited government and natural science—arose only given their sacrificial service in teaching, nursing, and sheltering the poor: free services of love. Today, with the growth of population, trade and communications, the progress of bureaucracy was inevitable. As in our previous epochs, however, the practical challenge is how to evangelize it.
Christian Societies’ Challenge to New Regimes
Only the Christian Gospel nurtures an enduring, dissenting witness to the raw power of a natural regime, what Nietzsche condemned as “the overturning of all values.” Yet this confirms the counter-intuitive axiom that even natural happiness is found, not in dominion, but in sacrificial love. Perennially, the Church generates innumerable, voluntary little societies of love, founded not on “some need we have of each other” (as Socrates’ friend says), but on the need others have of us, “the art of the ruler serving the ruled” (Rep. I)
The Church has always earned an independent moral authority and witness for its loving God with familial services of teaching, sheltering, and nursing. As witnesses of love, these services must be voluntary, personal, and sacrificial. These loving societies are always in tension with the coercive States, busily implementing their core (and justifiable) necessities of defense, civil justice and public works. The States’ duties are necessarily mandatory, categorical, and monetary. Limited within a horizon of a substantive code of justice, a State cannot care sacrificially for the Imago Dei in each unique person. The perennial challenge is adapting the State to the fact that, beyond its core necessities, love liberated is simply more practical, productive and innovative, working infinitely better than public regulation for a Common Good.
Tragically, as we’ll see, over the past century, progressive Christian denominations downloaded their charitable duties—services of love—onto the public administration. By abandoning their familial responsibilities, they voided their witness of love and moral authority. As Plato said, regimes fall when their officers themselves—the religious elite—betray their visible, defining purpose. Rendered into bureaucratic protocols, and administered by anonymous bureaucrats, these personal services were necessarily corrupted. Liberal education became occupational training and now public propaganda. Nursing became medical protocols and now herd management. Shelter became welfare dependency and now tribal subsidies
The new regime can and must be moderated by representative institutions, but this is possible only with persistent Christian witness. We need prudent, sacrificial witness in the loving services of teaching, nursing and shelter, elevating the family. If that seem improbable, consider our forbearers, the Benedictines of the 10th century. Monasteries were little islands of love in a sea of brutal warriors. Yet over time, they taught reverence for women and chastity as a manly virtues to the unlettered sons of fratricidal chieftains, an unimaginable cultural achievement.
Natural Regimes and the Worship of Power
Outside the West, there’s never been the distinction of Church and State. The State has always trumpeted its Divine authority, so Classical political science stressed the unity of the regime, the visible human character of different forms of sovereignty. Warrior regimes (like the Samurais or Apaches) see the Cosmos as a glorious battleground for a glorious death. Oligarchic regimes (like Carthage) see the universe as a treasure vault for industrious larceny. Democratic regimes (like pagan Athens) see the world as a stage for salacious spectacle. Given the press of its local urgencies and opportunities, a definable human type always rises to unquestionable, coercive visibility and therefore oracular power.
The Christian West’s succession of ruling offices bears an eerie resemblance to the “tragic decline” of regimes in Plato’s Republic. The improbable rule of his Philosopher King was pantomimed by Rome’s Pontifex Maximus and his imperial bureaucracy; and for Christianity’s first 500 years, sacrificial theologian-bishops fought ceaselessly to preserve their freedom from his Caesaro-papist pretensions. Over the next 500 years, Germanic warriors provided the anarchy, within which spontaneous monasteries nurtured the institutional autonomy and spontaneity of Christian social services. Then came the oligarchic nationalism of the Renaissance and Reformation, post-Enlightenment democracies, and now, “doubling-back” through the post-Woodstock “tyranny of relativism,” monolithic bureaucracy.
Thinking outside one’s regime is almost impossible. One instructive example is the attempted coup of Japanese samurais at the end of World War Two, defying the divine Emperor’s call to surrender. Glorifying death, engrossed in a cosmic battlefield, these unwavering warriors embraced collective annihilation, even after two atomic bombs. They clung to their traditional duty to “smash the gems”—destroy everything, rather than let it be taken booty by their enemies. This seems insane, yet, in the light of Christian revelation, most natural regimes seem suicidal.
To some extent, our budding bureaucratic rulers have already imported their faith in a merciless, impersonal universe. Like simmering frogs, we’ve already accept as normal, what, sixty years ago, we would have considered malicious psychosis. Historically, the ultimate terminus of a fully developed imperial economy is an Oriental Despotism, and we’re almost there.
The State that Swallows Society
The inner dynamics of a theocracy or bureaucratic regime were first dissected by the Marxist defector Karl Wittfogel in his cancelled masterpiece, Oriental Despotism (Yale, 1962). In 500 dense pages of comparative political economics, Wittfogel argues that any fully developed imperial economy and unfettered State ultimately consumes its entire Society. It absorbs all property into the public domain, mutates all private enterprise into public works, and reduces its subjects to anonymous work levies and military drafts, all under the temple guards of a deified sovereign. Barring disasters, natural or military, this is humanity’s natural political destiny.
The bureaucratic regime’s absolute power naturally and inevitably evangelizes a mechanistic, impersonal, and despotic universe, which in turn legitimates the State’s absolute power. In Archaic times, its authority was wielded by priest-scientists, Egyptian astronomers or Chinese Mandarins. At its best, Confucianism respected its peasants’ natural religion of ancestor worship, yet its cosmology was frozen, impersonal and merciless. The peasants of Babylon and Egypt were kept busy and docile between harvesting and planting, by building sacred temples. At their worst, Aztec public works greased the gears of a ravenous cosmos with the blood of tens-of-thousands of real human beings, sacrificed to their demonic butterfly god.
Contemplating the Aztec example: only rationalistic human beings, prostrate beneath a cold, merciless zodiac, could let themselves be slaughtered with such fatalistic docility. No purely instinctual animal could ever submit to such butchery. In a four-day festival, forty thousand real people are marched up Tenochtitlan Temple, to have their hearts ripped out and gaping bodies flopped down the pyramid’s four sides, thoroughly baptizing it in blood. Imagine the flies. Yet no one resisted. Pace Rousseau, such is natural humanity’s expectation of Divine Retribution.
Today, such authority is claimed by Marxist historical science, with four million Ukrainians massacred in Stalin’s Five-Year Plan, or 40 million in Mao’s Great Leap Forward. In the West, Catastrophic Scientism, scientists corrupted by State patronage, claim the same priestly wisdom, wielding the absolutist Precautionary Principle. Human nature abhors a spiritual vacuum; so they can inflict the ritual sacrifices of epidemiology, climatology and environmentalism upon a docile society, in propitiation for our common sin of being human. The promise of Progressivism—ubiquitous bureaucracy—has mutated from “maximizing Good” into “forestalling Evil.”
Such universal malice is not of course inevitable under a bureaucracy, and every sort of natural regime can provide equally malicious examples. But it gives pause to think that the British Museum recently celebrated the “beauty” of Aztec art, cartoons capable of admiration, only if one abstracts from—the sin of bureaucracy—the real human persons being slaughtered.
Bureaucratic dominion arises naturally in public works, like China’s great irrigation canals. In a work levy, we question our fate no more than ants in an anthill. When bureaucracy absorbs all enterprise, as Thomas Sowell says, “procedures are everything, and results, nothing.” People are mere numbers, as in Stalin’s quip, “One death is a tragedy; ten thousand, a mere statistic.” This dehumanizing authority is now wielded by public health administrators like Britain’s National Health Service: statistical science reducing personal care to drug protocols, and human flourishing to a biochemical bell curve. Coerced medical infanticide is accepted with a shrug. Yet the British apparently love their NHS.
The real mystery is not the challenge of the Total State to Christian Society, but how Western Exceptionalism happened at all. Other civilizations rise and fall with their coercive regimes, yet, as Chesterton quipped, Christianity has been “not a sinking ship, but a submarine.” Somehow, free Christian societies have endured half-millennia each of theocratic Roman emperors, German warrior chiefs, oligarchic aristocrats, and nationalistic parliaments. How did Christian Society be inundated by such diverse and brutal masters, then survive and humanize? The Church witnessed to a universal, supernatural love, overshadowing any local rule of necessity, a distinction Augustine defined as the City of God versus the City of Man.
Monarchs with Theological Pretensions
At the dawn of Western Exceptionalism, the Church earned an independent moral authority. This was not in spite of its powerlessness, but because of it. When neo-pagan Emperor Julian, Constantine’s grandson, tried to revive the old paganism, he found the Church’s charity put it beyond his reach: “The impious Galileans not only feed their own poor, but ours also,” he whined. “Welcoming them into their agapae, they draw them as children are drawn by cakes.”
Yet cultural axioms die hard, especially in ruling offices. The emperor was Rome’s Pontifex Maximus, Supreme Priest. The Edict of Toleration may have ended mass persecutions, but with the Church challenged by heresies, the emperors insisted on adjudicating our disputes. Their political instinct was to force a consensus, mushy middles for public peace, thus betraying the paradoxical Gospel. Resisting the theocratic State, the Church’s sacrificial witnesses were its persecuted theologian-bishops, like heroic Athanasius and Ambrose. Their achievement was hammering out permanent (and paradoxical) teachings of the Christ’s “perfect divinity and perfect humanity,” and the Trinity as “one God of three Persons.” They were ready to die for the Gospel, and sometimes did, until the emperors gradually lost their appetite for persecuting them.
While the Western Empire fell in the late fourth century, the Byzantine East endured for another thousand years under theocratic Caesars. So, in the late fifth century West, now submerged under the brutal Ostrogoths, Rome’s bishop Gelasius wrote to Constantinople’s Emperor Anastasius that Christ himself “separated the two ministries for the following ages”—geographically, the sacred from the worldly—“so no one might be proud.” This defined the uniquely Western political theology, down to and including the American First Amendment.
In the East, Roman emperors still asserted their right to adjudicate doctrinal disputes, like the 9th century Iconoclast Controversy. Powerless Byzantine bishops, like St. John Damascene, successfully resisted the arrogance, often again to their death. Yet, even after Constantinople finally fell in 1453, that vaguely theocratic civilization endured as Orthodox Christianity, fractured into national churches and tragically submissive to autocratic monarchs.
Parenthetically, Western Christianity might have suffered the same fate with Charlemagne’s false dawn, the new “Emperor of the Romans.” After a half-century of relative peace, however, his reconstruction crumbled under a fresh onslaught of Vikings and Magyars, so by the tenth century, his organs of defense and justice were again shredded. Yet, his “schoolmaster,” Alcuin, had used that half-century to build an enduring culture—a culture that’s come down to us as Classical Education. He standardized the monastic copiers’ script as Carolingian miniscule—now Times New Roman. He baptized language instruction as the Trivium, and science as the Quadrivium. He then delivered this curriculum to thousands of scattered monasteries, independent “points of light,” undefended, but teaching, nursing, and sheltering as they might.
How did Christianity plant the axioms of a free society in the West? It was blessed with anarchy, forcing its witness into spontaneous, voluntary, self-sufficient monasteries. The Enlightenment literati had assumed that the old scriptoria were filled with block-headed peasants, ignorant of what they copied. But now, less arrogant scholars like C.H. Haskins, Christopher Dawson, (early) Lynn Whyte, Kenneth Clarke, Rodney Stark, and Tom Holland have shown that those loving monks not only read the books, but built the moral framework of Western Civilization.
Part Two: Dancing with the One You Brought
The First Apocalypse: The Blessings of Anarchy
In the fifth century, the Western Church suffered its First Apocalypse, losing its demographic race to revive the dispirited, depopulated Western Empire. For its next 500 years, with occasional lulls, it was swamped by waves of brutal Germans, Huns, Muslims, and worst of all, Vikings. Communications and trade died. Pax Romana shrunk into crumbling cities and isolated villages. Yet, providentially, tiny Societies of Love do not require a State. They survive even where only “two or three gather together.” Floating above the chaos, a shattered Church shrank to isolated bands of “silent men…clearing forests and draining swamps” (Dawson)—models of productive, self-sustaining free association, regardless of their nasty warrior chieftains.
The Rule of St. Benedict, voluntarily embraced, united ora et labora, eight hours of work and eight of prayer. Its mandate was hospitality, with Pax carved over each rough gate. Any hungry soul, any Imago Dei, could freely enter, eat in the refectory, sleep on a cot and worship in the chapel. If sick, they were nursed in the infirmary. If healthy, they’d work the fields alongside the monks. These monasteries survived the political rule of brutal warrior chiefs, by freely offering their learned service as “clerks” to their illiterate bosses.
With loving service—voluntary, personal and sacrificial—the monasteries implanted deeply into the culture the axiom of personal human dignity, and norms of voluntary association, personal ingenuity, and subsidiarity—the proper autonomy of even peasant families and menial trades. Working their fields, learned monks modelled the nobility of manual labor, upending Antiquity’s aristocratic contempt for real work. Unlike the Ancients, they valued “matter” as such—material Creation—inspiring technological innovation like crop rotation, stock breeding, water power, and clocks. Most bizarre, they eventually taught reverence for women and chastity as a manly virtue to the sons of brutal warriors—totally mind-boggling to an Achilles or Apache warrior, and disgusting to a Nietzsche.
Starting around 1050, the socially unified Church, firmly grounded in its worship and free education, inspired an explosion of historically unprecedented free cities, guilds, universities, cathedrals, pilgrimages, music, art, and the first experimental science. This was the Renaissance of the Twelfth Century (Haskins), or what Kenneth Clark (Civilization) called the Great Thaw. Its moral authority and Peace of God ran from Portugal to Prussia, restraining (a little) its princes’ cheerful brutality. So the States were finally able to get their act together, princes defending borders, enforcing justice, fostering commerce and gathering taxes. Between the princes and bishops, there were constant, bitter squabbles over episcopal appointments, legal jurisdiction, and taxation—such endless quarrels, prophetic versus pragmatic, being the cost of a free society.
This was Christendom, from the First Crusade (1094) to the first imperial pope (1294). The universal call to love—tailored for warriors as Chivalry—overshadowed tribal antipathy. There was always a tension between the North and South, German mysticism versus Latin naturalism, personal inspiration versus communal consecration, and the perennial needs for both reform and authority. Yet the alliance between Northern reformers and Southern governance endured. For those two centuries—the High Gothic—Popes were weak, yet holy; Princes rowdy, yet subdued; and the People, devout and confident, with the confidence needed to build a glorious civilization.
The Second Apocalypse: The Love of One’s Folk
Emerging from the anarchy, though, Europe was a mare’s nest of haphazard loyalties (like the warrior-monk Templars), begging for rational administration. Growing prosperity inevitably tempted ambition, clerical and aristocratic. Princes, merchants and poets justly became partisans of native tongues and customs, pushing back the Latin, and the Crusading spirit waned. Bishops and abbots had become feudal lords, and lords likewise brokered clerical offices or benefices, confusing secular and sacred authority. Kings enlisted their own, ambitious civil servants, and the revenue demands of both a newly imperial Church and newly impertinent States could not be reconciled. In 1303, two-hundred years of ecclesial chaos were inaugurated by the kidnapping and death of the first imperial pope, Boniface VIII, by France’s Prime Minister Nogaret. Though an age of intense popular piety, the loving Christian Society frayed at the top—typically.
The Roman hierarchy, now hugely wealthy, sank to power politics in Italy and Germany, thus squandering its real moral authority. So in 1525, a religious and political schism tore the West, splitting the Latin Renaissance and German Reformation, tragically crippling the Church’s universal call to love. National societies asserted their real Christian freedom in discipleship, but drew their wagons into circles, refusing fellowship to other Christians, condemned as idolaters and blasphemers. Ever since, Divided Witness has crippled the Church’s universal witness with theological tribalism.
This Second Apocalypse was sparked by Luther’s 1520 Letter to the German Princes, urging them to seize their local churches. They were delighted to obey. The blood flowed for over a century, in the Schmalkaldic War, Dutch Eighty Years War, Spanish Armada, English Civil War, Bartholomew’s Day Massacre and Thirty Years War, killing (among others) over five million Germans. Called the Wars of Religion, they were truly Wars of Nationalism. Alliances cut across any theology, Catholic-Lutheran-Calvinist-Zwinglian, each prince stoking fanaticism in his own service. The bleeding ended with the 1648 Peace of Westphalia, enshrining Cuius regno, illius religio, “Whose reign, his religion.” The princes, later styled Enlightened Despots, were happily put in command of their local splinters of the universal Church.
Across Europe, the Reformation might have been a fraternal debate in a socially unified Church, but it plunged into tribal political warfare. Christians were long accustomed to balancing parallel demands from sacred and secular authorities, given duties to both. But political fealty was secured by solemn oaths, so few could imagine even trivial diversity in creed. The sole exception was the United States, founded largely by dissenting sects, given their diversity and weakness.
As the blood dried, the ascendant State attracted a new class of public intellectuals like John Locke, faux-clergy buzzing, “Religion is too fanatical to be allowed out in public.” Ordinary pastors and priests still served sacrificially in teaching, nursing, and sheltering, but their hierarchies became agents of the State, compromising the Church’s universal social authority. Humble clergy launched spectacular global missions, seeding the future abroad, but across Europe, prostrate before the local political authorities, national sects began a slow death spiral.
Within 150 years, turncoat French bishops (like vile Talleyrand) were evangelizing the French Revolution’s religion of Reason. A century later, Lutheran bishops, seduced by Hegelian nationalism, marched their flock into two world wars with Aztec docility. In contrast, given its enduring, unfashionable Dissenters, England enjoyed a brief Methodist revival, a powerless witness that shamed wealthy oligarchs into outlawing the slave trade. Embattled nations like Ireland or Netherlands clung to sacrificial churches, with an impressive though unsustainable fraternity of political and ecclesial authority. But gradually, Europe’s stormy marriage of universal charity and local patriotism, as cooperative spouses, was corrupted by domestic abuse.
The Third Apocalypse: The New Tower of Babel
The Church’s third Apocalypse is called the 20th Century. The First Apocalypse (850-950) was the Crucible of Anarchy; the Second (1520-1638) the Crucible of Nationalism; and the Third (1914-present) the Crucible of Globalism. In suicidal ambition, a Cult of the Universal State has sought to supplant the Christian mandate of a universal Society of Love with artificial ideology. Nazi racism was a mere blip in this slide toward a ubiquitous, homogenous bureaucratic culture, the ambition for a global Oriental Despotism. And globally, so far, a hundred million defenseless civilians have been slaughtered by their own governments in their lust to build Heaven on Earth.
Global progress in population, trade, and communications meant an inevitable growth of bureaucratic government, importing—to some degree—its implicit cosmology of mechanical fatalism. Some were more vulnerable, like Orthodox Russia or Confucian China. America’s constitutional federalism has proven more resilient in taming it, but ultimately, an amelioration of our current mischief depends on the voluntary, personal and sacrificial witness of Christian families, servant families, and a renewed social visibility of their faith, particularly among teachers, nurses and social workers in the bureaucratic bubble.
American Exceptionalism and the Temptation of Power
The one exception in this age of national churches was the West’s youngest shoot, the United States: American Exceptionalism within Western Exceptionalism. The American Republic was founded largely by dissenting denominations, deeply suspicious of state power (though often inflicting confessional authority on their local colonies): Puritans, Quakers, Baptists, Catholics, and especially break-away Methodists. One now-forgotten colonial grievance was the failure of the king’s Anglican Church to provide missionary bishops, inciting both Methodist and Episcopalian schisms. The confessional states soon conformed to the federal model of benign neglect, as in Washington’s 1790 Letter to the Jews of Newport. Yet it was unimaginable that the new republic might not be generically Christian (however stylish its Freemasonic fringe elite).
Our contemporary pathologists, diagnosing the etiology of our distemper, seem to have ignored the real distinction between legislators and ideologues. The Founding Fathers did not gather in Philadelphia as a debating club, arguing abstract anthropology. They were not propagandists. They were gentlemen, mostly Christian, hammering out a structure of sovereign offices, so that they might live together in peace, liberty and mutual service. Believers like Adams saw utility in Locke’s vocabulary, oblivious to his crass anthropology. Deists like Jefferson knew America’s political freedoms rests entirely on its Christian Society and education in moral self-government. Since then, Christians like Lord Acton, Cardinal Newman, and Orestes Brownson, have seen a narrowly political liberal state as friendly to Christian society, open to—and always needing— constant re-evangelization.
The Founders owed their inventions more to the realist Montesquieu, drawing his lessons from the evolution of the British constitution. Many saw their offices as an echo of Aristotle’s “mixed regime.” However, they leavened this classical intention with the Good News of Original Sin, which they implemented with their enduring system of “checks and balances.” This did not reduce the Common Good to a bourgeois “cage match” (as some allege), but recognized that no one can be trusted with unchecked coercion—that the real Common Good resides in the Society, and not the State’s coercive offices. And in fact, historically, Aristotle’s practical ideal, however attractive, had no traction whatsoever in the culture of Antiquity. Only a Christian culture, subordinating local, coercive political necessity to universal, divine love, could bring it to life.
Blaming the American State for the eventual apostasy of American Society is idealistic impatience. The American Founding endowed upon the Body of Christ, not only the duty to evangelize Society, generation after generation, but more important, the duty to resist the temptation to enact its own moral imperatives with State coercion. By any practical measure, its political offices themselves stayed behind the lines of religious repression and opportunism, and their resilience was manifest within fourscore years. A sacrificial Abolition crusade prophesized the Imago Dei in black slaves, but its political appeal was the Declaration. And its more important cultural appeal was Uncle Tom’s Cabin. So ultimately, the war was fought to preserve the Union, a union incidentally abolitionist—and this a healthy ambiguity.
In stark contrast, forty years later, elite mainline Protestant churches backed a coercive Prohibition movement. They were so powerful, they eventually imposed a constitutional amendment on the entire country, criminalizing not merely drunkenness, but alcohol. This violated the Christian principle that not all sins should be proscribed as crimes (assuming alcohol is a sin). Wielding such power, they squandered their moral authority, and succeeded only in supplanting relatively benign beer halls and backyard vineyards with bootleg gin, speakeasies, the Mafia, and Roaring Twenties. By 1933, the popular culture was dead drunk. Scan the “classic cinema” of the ‘30s and ‘40s, awash in cocktails.
Since Christian Society has humanized so many diverse, coercive States—theocratic, warrior, oligarchic, or parliamentary—why now are we challenged by a bureaucratic regime? Plato teaches that regimes fall only when their own officers betray their faith. America’s Christian society was betrayed by Progressive clerics of the mainline denominations, downloading their charitable duty, first and fatally in education (1900), onto the public administration, in the name of the State’s greater expertise and revenue. State-ruled schools were the camel’s nose of the bureaucratic culture into Christian Society.
Faced with massive Irish, Mediterranean and Slavic migration, by the late-1800s, mainline Protestant clergy-politicians turned to government to solve the problem of educating the benighted Orthodox, Catholics and Anabaptists. Through the lens of Reformation tribalism, they saw the newcomers, not as fellow Christians with diverse devotions, but as pagan aliens, an unwashed urban mass, unequipped for citizenship and industrial labor.
They might have respected the autonomy of Christian families, by empowering parent-ruled schools. Instead, they argued, “Citizens have a right to education,” so schools are “crucial public works.” In that ambition, they boosted Progressive pedagogues like Horace Mann, Egerton Ryerson, and John Dewey, and then rode the wave of progressive President Woodrow Wilson, son of the founder of the segregationist Presbyterian Church USA, and former president of Presbyterian Princeton. The Founding’s Christian dissenting sects became the elite Apostles of oxymoronic State Social Services.
Proving its resilience, Christian culture endured four generations of bureaucratic schools, even while cities, industries, cinemas and taxes burgeoned (proving that parents remain the primary educators of their own children, even in their neglect). But progressive State pedagogy could never rest content with Abraham Lincoln’s poetic education in civic virtue—Aesop’s Fables, Pilgrim’s Progress, Robinson Crusoe, Shakespeare and Bible. Dewey’s goal was never educating self-governing citizens, but skill-training a docile levy for the industrial economy. Public schools gave no thought to the Imago Dei—though, as homeschoolers always rediscover, youth nurtured in Christian self-government can easily pick up any needed skills themselves.
The Depression’s welfare revolution arguably kicked a momentary market crash into decade-long stagnation. Having argued, “People have a right to education,” Progressive clerics now argued, “People have a right to food and shelter.” In the 1960s, an ever more ambitious medical industry argued that a healthy labor market was really a “public work,” and by the way, “People have a right to health care.”
Such “rights” now mean standing in long lines at government wickets or waiting “on hold,” because nobody wanted to ask whether the Christian familial duties of education, nursing and shelter could translate into coerced administration. The propaganda is so pervasive, it’s hard to realize today that such political rights are inherently self-defeating, mutating spontaneous self-government into docile, careless public dependency. Like Renaissance popes and Reformation bishops, the mainline denominations squandered both their creed and moral authority in politics.
The coercive State cannot enact a Christian Society’s loving, familial services of teaching, nursing and sheltering. To repeat, civic education becomes mechanical training and now propaganda; personal nursing becomes medical protocols and now herd management. Shelter becomes welfare dependency and now tribal patronage. Services once voluntary, personal, and sacrificial—crucially, education—came under public management, mandatory, categorical, and monetary. And the Bubble is insulated from the real human costs of its bloating protocols.
In the Sixties, with dozens of administrative and cultural devices, the Bureaucratic dominion of justice began to filter most tragically into the family. This End Game supplanted the happy Christian expectation of loving mutual service with the discontents of a contractual exchange. No-fault divorce was enacted for the convenience of the elite, confident of their stock portfolios. Spouses became increasingly isolated as contracting parties in categorical and monetary relationships, further obscuring the Imago Dei through a lens of justice and cosmic indifference. The marriage covenant became the first contract where the State sided with the defaulter.
The Constitution may well survive this culture war. England’s morally questionable Glorious Revolution, preserving some sort of monarchy, arguably defused the potential for a London Terror. And given this marvelous Constitution, righteous legislators may get their leashes back on the public servants. One challenge is the Bureaucracy’s capture of scientific research with unaccountable public funding. Bureacracy’s totalitarian Precautionary Principle—any possible catastrophe justifies the real costs of any hypothetical prevention—corrupts real science into religious Scientism. So our politics is fractured by the rhetoric of “pro-science and anti-science.” Still, Western science itself shows a remarkable knack for reform—but that is another discussion.
Prescription and Prognosis: Sanctifying the Family
The last three centuries have proven that imposing an ideological vision upon any civilization is cataclysmic. So we must conclude—annoyingly—that no formula can resurrect a Christian culture, but only a Christian response to the concrete needs of real people. St. Benedict penned his millennia-old Rule in response to the immediate needs of his brothers. Today, we see a return to a faux-theocracy, the religion of Scientism. Its priests are bureaucrats. Their instinctive ambition is to regulate families, simply because families are unregulated. Thus the challenge.
Yet Christian families are already sacrificing loving service: teaching, nursing, and sheltering across denominational divides, with homeschool co-ops, parent-run schools, apprenticeship programs, crisis pregnancy centers, midwiferies, hospices and addiction recovery centers. There’s great potential in the under-the-radar Christian Halls (q.v.) network for post-secondary education. Yet, so many kids today suffer from broken homes, the most urgent witness may be an open dinner table—what most annoyed apostate Emperor Julian.
There’s surely a place for political action in this: pushing back an almost despotic bureaucracy, while a new Christian society grows within. For this humble service, that amazing Constitution and “demographic federalism” are an enormous help. Meanwhile, given urbanization, the complexity of modern finances, industry, and technology, some influence of a regulatory culture will remain a fact of life, across all institutions. Every corporate “human resources” department must run on protocols. Every City Hall zoning office must run on protocols. Every college admissions office must run on protocols. The alternative is graft and nepotism.
In the end, the administrative categories of the bureaucracy will arise from the culture of the society itself, as the Christian reverence for mothers turned rape-loving German warriors into chivalrous knights. This past century would have looked very different, had progressive “social services” been defined in terms of autonomous families, rather than isolated Lockean individuals, with education vouchers, health savings plans, and family subsidies for shirt-tail relatives. In ages past, the Christian responses to our masters were identified, in retrospect, as the Gothic, Renaissance, and Baroque Ages. Optimistically, in the next generations, we may anticipate a Domestic Age, marked by welcoming public architecture, home-made music, front porches, mother-friendly playgrounds, gardens and home canning, sourdough bread, and the decline of fast-food outlets.
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The featured image is “Charlemagne, empereur d’Occident” (1837 or 1839), by Louis-Félix Amiel, and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.