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Keeping the (Year of) Faith in 2012

Mon, 23 Jan 2012 00:01:00 -0500

Coinciding with the 50th anniversary of the opening of Vatican II, the twentieth year since the publication of the Catechism , and the first-ever Synod on the New Evangelization, 2012 has been declared the “Year of Faith.” As Benedict underscored in his 2011 Christmas address to the Roman Curia, the Year of Faith is meant to incite more than lively belief; its celebration is also a call to glance backward and to look forward.

The Year of Faith provides a chance to remember both the fruits and the failures of the Second Vatican Council’s implementation, with honest clarity. The failure to transmit the habits of piety coupled with the advance of an aggressive secularism led many young people, often after years of sitting at the desks of parochial classrooms, simply to abandon the Church. Such baptized but unformed souls never have nor ever will attend the fraternities, Catechism classes, or processions that their parents took for granted.

An alternative response has been the revival of energetic orthodoxy. The cultural conditions that alienated some young people and their parents have galvanized others. These youth are the fruit of Blessed John Paul II’s call for the New Evangelization and have been emboldened by the courage of Benedict XVI. Increasingly, seminaries and monasteries are filled with young men and women such as these.

With the 2012 worldwide Synod on the New Evangelization , we must consider anew what strategies are congruent with the task of preaching in our time. Of course, we should be leery of grand plans that would propose to remake the Church in the name of relevance. Even so, as Cardinal Newman once said in relation to the development of doctrine, since the Church militant needs to march through time, she must in a certain sense constantly be on the move.

If in this generation the Church is to advance her world-transforming mission we can aim for no less than these four practical objectives: the ending of abortion; the return of large families; the renewal of classical education; and the building of better churches. These correspond, so it seems, to the most pressing political, social, educational, and liturgical needs of the Church in the West.

As grace builds upon nature, so Catholic culture builds upon certain goods, like society. If low birth rates are both a symptom and cause of cultural decline, then killing your children is an act of cultural suicide. (Christians cannot be fooled by those who would reduce abortion to an evil equal to, say, unfair immigration rules. They are not equivalent. The good of life is more basic than the good of mobility.) Next, besides defending children, Christians need to have more of them. Even the UN now admits that demographic meltdown chills the economy. The Church, for her part, has never abrogated its longstanding commendation of large families. As from the Catechism : “Sacred Scripture and the Church’s traditional practice see in large families a sign of God’s blessing and the parents’ generosity.” (The italics are in the original.)

Third, we must take control of our own children’s education. Since John Dewey the professional guild of educators have been trained according to a progressive philosophy that destroys memory. Teaching Latin conveniently forges a link to the history, art, literature, and philosophy of the West that has been largely shaped by the Catholic Church. Catholic parents feel a need to introduce their children to what is noble and fine in the Christian intellectual tradition, which explains, at least in part, the rise of independent Christian academies and of home-schooling (which grows at a rate of 7 percent per year).

A final objective: let us build better churches. Culture follows cult. If Christian culture depends upon learning, it presupposes piety. Activism and education”necessary as these are”will lose their way if not nourished by a rich liturgical experience. So, alongside this Year of Faith, believers need to remember again what it means to celebrate that faith with solemnity. Given the often reckless liturgical experimentation of the last fifty years, any effort at re-evangelizing the West will depend on a renewal of liturgical piety. With the new translation of the Novus Ordo and a new lease on life given to the old form of the Mass, this renewal is now well underway.

Pope Benedict’s call for the Year of Faith is a call, at the least, for the defense of life, for the flourishing of the family, for the renewal of education, and for the revival of cult. But all programs for reform must be taken in the right spirit. It is not committees or conferences that will ultimately bring about the New Evangelization. It will be our Lord himself. Who knows under which florescent bulb the next great saint is studying, or serving? In one very real sense, the Year of Faith should teach us that there is nothing for us to do . As the Russian monastic Seraph of Serov memorably said, “Acquire a peaceful spirit and then thousands of others round you will be saved.”

Ryan N. S. Topping, is the Visiting Chair in Studies in Catholic Theology at the John XXIII Centre for Catholic Thought at St. Thomas University, Fredericton, Canada. These reflections are adapted from a manuscript which he is completing titled “Lazarus Rising: The Catechism and the Renewal of Catholic Culture”.

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A New Generation of Theologians

Tue, 27 Sep 2011 00:01:00 -0400

Much of the animosity felt by older theologians toward the Vatican or, more generally, toward episcopal authority, has disappeared. Such skirmishes that do occasionally play out the old ‘free-thinking theologian’ versus the ‘heavy-handed bishop’ script simply bore. To young eyes media events dramatizing the conflict between freedom and authority look tired, and to be a pastime for the retiring. (A case in point is the recent vitriolic over the Bishops’ censure of Elizabeth Johnson’s Quest for the Living God .) By contrast, the majority of young Catholic philosophers and theologians that I have met through my teaching”in England, Canada, and America”are eager to serve the Church, to imbibe her customs, and to perpetuate her faith. For the most part, where frustration is felt it is not at being restricted by authority; it is at not being confidently commissioned . Being a bishop is not for cowards. Failure of episcopal leadership in the post-Vatican II era has typically not been in the clumsy exercise of power, but in their reluctance to support those who defend authentic Catholic teaching. This trend is passing.

From September 15-17 the US Catholic Bishops’ Conference brought together a group of young untenured theologians to Washington D.C. for a symposium titled The Intellectual Tasks of the New Evangelization (co-sponsored by Catholic University of America and underwritten by the Knights of Columbus). Keynote presentations were delivered by Professors Janet Smith and John Cavadini, a top theologian from the University of Notre Dame, as well as Houston’s Cardinal Di Nardo and Archbishop Joseph Di Noia O.P., Secretary of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments. The need to re-evangelize the West is now obvious; less clear, or at least less often discussed, is what shape the intellectual apostolate should take in these troubled times. The question put to the new scholars was this: if theology is an ecclesial activity how can your efforts serve the reconversion of Europe and the Americas?

Over the course of the weekend three themes emerged. First was the need to reconstruct a humane anthropology. The most dynamic contemporary thinking on this front has been inspired by Blessed John Paul II’s reflections on the theology of the body. Janet Smith showed how, in John Paul’s own understanding of personalism, the language of self-gift, self-mastery, and so forth, should be received as an extension, not a revision of Thomistic categories. Smith remarked how in the coming decades it will take “an army of scholars” to draw forth the richness of the late pope’s work. One task for the next generation of theologians, so it seems to me, will be to show how the theology of the body integrates within the Church’s more settled vocabulary of virtue, vice, concupiscence, and natural law. It is not that the older terms have been surpassed. It’s more of a case where meanings have been lost in translation. That new rhetorical strategies should be deployed in the defense of the person and of the family is not unsurprising. What Europe suffered two hundred years ago was an attack on God. What we face today is an attack on man. As the politics of the last century has made abundantly clear, humanism without God devolves into an inhuman humanism. And, without a transcendent origin or destiny, why should we respect ourselves? In a world of material scarcity, even the well intentioned find it hard these days to offer compelling reasons for giving a preferential option for the human. Monkeys need trees too.

Beyond confronting the antihumanism of the reductionist scientists (who would reduce mind to brain) and the over-zealous environmentalists (who would elevate beasts to men), the New Evangelization requires a more confident philosophical grounding. Respect for a diversity of theological styles is healthy. But pluralism has stepped wildly beyond its useful limits. Theology must once more regain trust in reason’s native capacity for truth . So to the second theme: the queen of the sciences must choose her help maids wisely. Some servants are unworthy. Others will betray her. Theologians today can settle for nothing less than a robust philosophical realism. Only such a foundation will support the world transforming ambitions of the New Evangelization. On this front, Archbishop Di Noia warned of the “third schism” that was splitting the Church; Cardinal Di Nardo spoke movingly about a “degenerate apophatism” that was undermining much modern theology.

To some pious ears this might sound like a throw-back to the days before the Council. In part, it is. The Church has yet to retract her praise of St. Thomas as a model. The chime is often rung that neo-scholastics of the pre-Council era squeezed propositions about God into a perfectly rational, and hence suffocating, matrix. I have often pondered this claim. If I would have had Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange as my professor perhaps I too might have thirsted for a greater sense of the mysterium dei . But he was not my professor. And most of my friends in theology, especially in Biblical Studies, trained under the shadow of Derrida. Today it is not mystery that is lost, but our hold on the world beyond words. It is not systems that threaten, but the prospect of finding no escape from the gerbils’ wheel. Sadly, theologians with a background in Continental philosophy rarely find their way off an endlessly deferring round of words about words about words. We need humility, of course. Not intellectual despair.

And the bishops are right. No middle ground exists between those who would and those who would not affirm the possibility of metaphysical truth claims. Can we have natural knowledge of God, or not? Can we establish binding moral truths, or not? Only an impoverished mind would consider natural theology the summit of Christian doctrine. Still, it is a solid footing. It is as necessary to theology”as Aquinas might say”as is mathematics to music. We all want to learn to sing beautifully. But a great ear only goes so far until you have to learn how to count out the beats. We have to be clear: the modern alternatives to philosophical realism are bleak: Heideggerian silence or fundamentalist noise. Though they wear different hats, underneath the brim they both mumble with their eyes closed. If being is never present in the world, if all we can look at is the fuzzy white screen of shifting appearances, then man really is alone in the world, alien from the infinite, a stranger even to his own nature. For, as Aristotle said, man desires to know . Affirming the natural knowledge of God, then, saves theology from stumbling either into the pit of liberal indifference or over the rock of Biblicism.

Third, if these are some of the tasks before us, how should the next generation of theologians go about their work? What resources beyond post-Kantian philosophy can serve? It was notable”though perhaps not surprising”that several of the conference’s speakers called for a return to classical texts of apologetics. In works like Origen’s Contra Celsum and Augustine’s City of God , John Cavadini suggested that young theologians can find enduring models of engagement with a secular or half-believing culture. There was also a call to deeper prayer. Over drinks one evening, the group I sat with battered around ideas for how we could find time to pray more, even amidst the demands of changing diapers and preparing lectures. At my office I’ve now added the prayer to St. Michael the Archangel as part of my morning routine.

All of this for me, as a young theologian, was inspiring. And, as far as such gatherings go, everyone was treated to a banquet of good ideas for thinking about the intellectual apostolate. I must admit that what most struck, however, were not the discussions, but the setting. The room was full of good will. Many of the young participants I met this weekend had growing families of four or five children (our fifth is due during exams). Though being a dissenting theologian is still, in many Catholic universities, the best thing you could do for your career; that is no longer universally true. This weekend I observed once more that what younger believers are increasingly experiencing is not a rebellion against the Church”for that is old; but a rebellion against rebellion, a revolt against intellectual anarchy and a return to tradition. The conference put on by the US Bishops is a herald of these new times. And we can be grateful for it.

Ryan N.S. Topping, D.Phil., is the Visiting Chair in Studies in Catholic Theology at the John XXIII Centre for Catholic Thought at St Thomas University, Fredericton, Canada. His most recent book is Happiness and Wisdom: St. Augustine’s Early Theology of Education (forthcoming with Catholic University of America Press).

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