Bulletin column from May 30, 2021

Dear Friends at Saint Mary’s Immaculate Conception Parish and Saint Frances Cabrini Parish:  Praised be Jesus Christ!

For the entire history of the Christian Church there has existed the struggle about how we are to live in the world without at the same time becoming corrupted by the world.  There have always been movements in Christianity that advocate for a more pure, untainted, uncorrupt faith that tend towards the withdrawal from the world into self-created havens or zones of like-minded observant believers who agree to common daily practices that allow them to avoid the taint of the secular.  This is done, it is said, in the name of authentically preserving Christian life and revelation from hostile, worldly forces that bear within themselves sinful or evil characteristics. 

The most familiar example of such a movement or group to many of us in this part of the world would be the Mennonites, or as they are more commonly called, the Amish.  For them, most contact with modern social structures and forces are sinful and are to be avoided. They accomplish this act of avoidance by living together with other like-minded thinkers who adopt a commonly agreed to set of behaviors that keeps the sinful world out, keeps the purely observant ones in, and thereby carries an untainted Christian life (as they see it) forward in history.  In all of this they consider themselves to be saved and in many respects as the “elect.”

The Church has constantly had to fend off the temptation, in every era, to become like the Amish.  We all want to be pure and to avoid sin, and it is true we must take that very seriously.  It is true that in “the world” there are always, in every era, dangerous ideas, practices, interfaces and contacts that run the risk of doing harm to the soul.  It is true that we must draw hard lines about what is right and wrong.  It is true that we are obligated to tell the world around us what is true and what is false, and that we are to be a witness to another way to live.

That said, withdrawing into little Christian communes has never been a viable mechanism to accomplish all this.  Every time in history that the temptation began to build, in the face of whatever secular challenge we put our finger on, to withdraw and become some pure, Amish type movement, the Church has had to correct it and explain that we as believers are obligated to engage the world and to live in the mainstream.  The reason is because that is how we act as saving agents in the world. Out of heroic love for the world, we choose to live in it, even though it may make us feel “safer” to live among the “pure” ones. 

Granted, it is true that maybe at times we will have to “underground” (sometimes literally) to worship or gather for occasional community bonding in the face of dangers, but we do not spend our whole life “underground” even when at times we are forced to worship that way.  We leave the Mass “dismissed” to go back out into the world and engage it.

Not only is it forsaking our duty to save the world if choose to withdraw from it, but doing so always leads to its own set of spiritual and practical problems.  Such communes inevitably require their own sets of rules, and their own type of charismatic personality leaders to sustain their required borders against the secular.  They gravitate toward certain clergy, or bishops, or loud voices as a center of gravity.  Which inevitably leads to arguments and to, in most cases, a lack of sustainability.  It also becomes very difficult for such communities not to fall prey to the great sin of pride and also of control as they seek to mold a new generation against every possible outside threat they can think of, doing great harm to them in the process. 

These days as so much becomes secular around us, the divide is growing between what we might call the “secular Catholics” who are simply the baptized, Christmas and Easter Catholics who have a label but few other markers of the faith, and on the other hand the “observant Catholics” who are regular church-goers, and who seek to adhere to the entirety of the Catholic life that the Church proposes and professes.  The secular Catholics are growing more secular as the culture grows more secular, and the observant ones are growing more isolated.  In such a scenario, the temptation for the observant to withdraw and form pure, Amish-type communities grows stronger and stronger. 

I have great sympathy for the movement out of the world that I see happening more and more around me in Catholic circles.  Wouldn’t it be nice to live in a little Catholic village where I never get my hands or my soul dirty by having to deal with all that is so pervasively corrupt in our modern economic and legislative structures? I do indeed lean in this direction myself, to be sure.  There is great, great merit in this option.

That said, the Church has always said it is not the answer.  It is popular right now to read back into Medieval Europe some romantic solution to our current situation in what, back then, were the monasteries.  This is the so-called “Benedict Option” advanced by Rod Dreher and others like him.  His reading of that time period is far too simplistic and is inaccurate, and it should not be thought of as the broad-based solution to secular opposition.  There is also no such thing as going backwards in history. 

No, the difficult fact is that the secular Catholics need to not be so secular, and the observant Catholics cannot avoid getting hands and selves dirty.  There is no leaving the world, however tempting it may be.  The Gospel is given to push us into the world and to save it by doing so.  Into the world we will continue to go. 

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