The case for remaining Catholic in this moment, then, is basically that all this has happened before and will happen again — in what G.K. Chesterton once called the “five deaths of the faith,” the moments across two thousand years when every human probability pointed to the church of Rome passing into history, becoming one with Nineveh and Tyre.
For American Catholics at least, this era feels understandably like another death — in which the saints seem hidden, the would-be prophets don’t agree with one another, the reformers keep losing. And it is all-too-understandable that people would choose to leave a dying church.
But it is the season’s promise, and in the long run its testable hypothesis, that those who stay and pray and fight will see it improbably reborn.
– Ross Douthat, “Stay Catholic in Christmas“, New York Times
I’m a pretty big fan of Douthat – I think he’s a pretty honest and intellectual figure who is not afraid to work through his thoughts in public – which can leave him open to criticism and future reevaluation; but which is also needed for us politically, culturally, and spiritually.
His Christmas Day piece highlights the genealogy of Christ and points out one of the core tenets of Jesus’s teaching and our own faith – the gates of Hell will not stand against our Faith.
We’ve had Popes with concubines, mistresses, children, insanity, holiness, wit, wisdom, Parkinson’s, blind eyes, and more. We’ve had bishops who are heretics, saints, libertines, scholars, mismanagers, backstabbers, politicians, hardworkers, and more. Our priests are human, but we are too.
At the same time, we should hold our leaders and our Church to a higher level of respect and expectation of behavior. My faith is not rooted in the sense of a particular Pope, Bishop, philosophy, or movement; but in a Church established by Christ on his rock, St. Peter nearly two thousand years ago. In those two thousand years, much has changed. Humanity has not.
The genealogy of Christ covers a similar period of time – stretching back from Jesus Christ to Abraham, the father of the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim families. Each one of those figures in the Old Testament that we call “patriarch” or “matriarch” have their own sins; why would our leaders be different? [Interestingly, it is usually the matriarchs who come off looking the best; but a discussion of the need for female leadership in our faith is beyond the scope of this blog post].
A priest in confession told me that sometimes the hardest place to keep the Faith is for those that work in the Church itself. Being day in and day out in the human institution – where our leaders squabble over pennies; conflict arises over food stolen from the refrigerator; the microwave in the staff lounge isn’t cleaned; parents get angry; and people reply all to emails across the Archdiocese (seriously! WHY?!) is a simple reminder that Christ’s family wasn’t and isn’t perfect – but we believe that it one day will be.
Merry Christmas.
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