Steve Skojec

Just in case she realizes that she said it, and takes it down, I thought I’d make a record of it here.

In all seriousness, in her meandering post (and I’m nobody to criticize on that count) she takes a crack at some of the really important questions we’ve been discussing. Because I generally agree with her, I like what she has to say:

How do we get the proper perspective on a culture in which we are ourselves completely steeped, to which we owe the very shape of our thoughts?

This raises other questions. Can we have friends “in the world”? Non-Catholic friends? Can we hope for the salvation of our non-Catholic loved-ones?

Do we set ourselves up as arbiters of who qualifies for membership in the Elect? If so, according to what criteria and by whose authority?

Does it matter that we are, while being systematically forced out of public life in the secular world, at the same time deliberately withdrawing ourselves from it? Is this exclusion and withdrawal a bad thing or a good thing? Should we fight it or help it?

There are all sorts of solutions, some better than others, but none The Right solution. Many retreat. Many give up the struggle. Many join groups that help them withdraw, like the SSPX. Some go out of their way to live near a place where there is some safety and the protection of something like a monastery or an Oratory. Some just try to go it alone.

Catholics in general, and traditionalist Catholics in particular, have a habit of looking to the past for precedent to figure out a way to cobble together a method of dealing with the problem.

Is there a precedent for our current situation? I think not an exact one. As someone said, although we are indeed returning to a variation on pre-Christian paganism, complete with child sacrifice, lawlessness and philosophical fatalism, there is a vast difference between a virgin and a divorcee. A Christendom that has spurned Christ in her maturity is not the same bride that was wooed in her innocence.

So, how are we to see our times? How are we to interact with our non-Catholic, paganised neighbours? Do we approach them with disdain? Do we not approach them at all?

Is it possible for a Christian to make use of the things of the pagan world that are, through the working of the Natural Law, still under the headship of Christ, though He is unknown?

Can we read Truman Capote? Do we dare laugh at the bawdy jokes on Boston Legal, or empathise with the moral struggles of Alan Shore? Can we see goodness in films and music that is not specifically Christian?

Did the early Christians read the Classical writers?

Augustine derided the pagan entertainments of his youth, but was he entirely right? (Terribly daring, I know, to question so venerable a Doctor).

The fact is, I do not know the answers to these questions. But I believe this is the essence of our task, having been stuck in these almost inconceivably dreadful times.

I’m a child of this civilisation. I’m even a child of the hippie generation, and I’m sure am also unconsciously greatly influenced by that movement. I want to know the world, not reject it. The world is full of human beings, and there is nothing so interesting and wonderful to a misanthrope like me as human beings.

I can’t help it. I love the world.

And I understand that it was not entirely repugnant to the Father either.

Hilary found it first, but I love it too much not to include it here.

Yes, that’s right - it’s the John Paul II Random Speech Generator!!!

Ok, so the title of this post is over-wrought, and not even really what I mean to say. But it was all I could think of, and it struck me funny.

Recently, Hilary sent me an article in which she highlighted a section relevant to our discussion of those who, out of a rejection of the modern culture, adopt (seemingly arbitrarily) a way of doing things that is from the past. The section in question is about Renaissance artistry:

This liberal approach to the arts, in this case literary, meant taking risks. It was therefore hopeful, not only for the improvement of the arts, but also for the betterment of the human condition. Perhaps because of being critical of the then current (late medieval) culture for its presumed decline from ancient glory, these authors longing was for a past so distant that it could not really be returned to; therefore, there really was nothing to conserve,  and so they felt emboldened to try their hands at new epics and rhetoric. On the contrary, our contemporary classical conservatives mostly long for a not so distant past–maybe only several decades gone–and therefore feel compelled to conserve  it, or reconstitute it whole. This is not the dream of a renaissance, but a revival. A renaissance is a rebirth, characterized by the past being made new again…”

This was floating about in my head as I continued to evaluate what is going on when Catholics “opt-out” of modern life. When styles, customs, modes of dress and the like from another time are “revived” (as the article cited above would say) rather than an attempt made to create a true renaissance in Catholic culture in the sense of being emboldened to try our hands at creating something new in the spirit of the old.

I associate, whether it’s accurate or not, some of the sensibilities of these Catholics who wish to bring back the formalities and fashions of what they consider a more reasonable time with a sort of neo-Victorianism. (I am willing to be disabused of this notion if I am incorrect.) But it was with this very neo-Victorianism in mind that I stumbled on Chesterton’s essay, The True Victorian Hypocricy. It occurred to me upon reading it what a bad idea it would be to try to choose this particular period of time to revive:

Half the trouble has arisen from two falsehoods; both of them current, not so much among those who are young enough to be troublesome, as among those who are old enough to know better. But in both generations there is a fixed idea; first, that what is called the Victorian Age was a golden age of domestic respectability and unity; and second, that there was something specially British about this solid and conventional family life. The very name of Queen Victoria is supposed in some way to stamp a sacred domesticity upon the period and the place, and to suggest that the idea of the family was at its highest or strongest in that age and in that country.

Both these ideas are quite false. The Victorian age was not one in which domesticity was at its highest. On the contrary, it was one at which domesticity was at its lowest. Half the present evil arises from the fact that the Victorians never did understand the virtues that they were vaguely supposed to defend. It was as if we were to say that the Catholic religion and the French monarchy were at their healthiest and most hopeful moment in the time of Voltaire. In the eighteenth century there were still bishops for Voltaire to make fun of, as in the ninteenth century there were still British matrons for Bernard Shaw to make fun of. But the matron no more embodied all that was meant by the Mother or the Madonna than an Abbe who was a sycophant was like an Abbot who was a saint…

…Now the Victorians were people who had lost the sense of the sacredness of the home. They still believed in the respectability of the home; but that is only another way of saying that they wanted to be respected by other people for reverencing what they did not really reverence. If we compare Victorian customs with the customs of the mass of mankind, the first thing that will strike us is that the purely domestic customs have been cut down to next to nothing; that they are duller and not brighter, colder and not more convivial. It is as if we were to say that because a Victorian banker generally disapproved of walking about naked, therefore his age was the golden age of glorious and flamboyant costume. The truth is that he had cut down costume to something meaner and more prosaic and less significant than costume had ever been before. He wore chimney-pot hats and mutton chop whiskers because he thought less and not more about the possibilities of dress than did a gallant of Giorgione or a cavalier of Van Dyck. He preferred the chimney-pot hats as he preferred the chimney-pots to the Tower of Giotto. He tolerated the mutton-chop whiskers as he tolerated the mutton-chops; because he despised French cookery along with French culture. It is quite possible for a sympathetic imagination to see something manly and bracing about such a Philistine. But nobody, however sympathetic, would say that he understood the real meaning and possibilities of dress. Nor did he understand the meaning and possibilities of domesticity.

Each age, I suppose had its glories; each also had its ignominies. Ours is no different, even if one could reasonably argue that we have more of the latter than the former.

So, if we need to effect a renaissance rather than a revival, how would it best be accomplished?

I was just gape-jawed in stunned disbelief when I read this:

The nation’s Catholic bishops have rejected a new translation of Mass prayers, a rare instance of U.S. prelates denying a Vatican-ordered liturgical change.

While ballots are still coming in, it’s clear they won’t add up to the 166 needed to pass the new translation, said Sister Mary Ann Walsh, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. A two-thirds majority of the USCCB’s Latin rite bishops is required for approval.

Walsh said she could not recall another instance in which the U.S. bishops have rejected a full document of Vatican translations, though they have at times tinkered with individual phrases and words.

Our bishops opposing Rome? Perish the thought.

Seriously, this must be a pretty darn good translation for them to so unanimously oppose it. Since when did the USCCB get the power to vote down a “Vatican-ordered liturgical change”, anyway?

…via e-mail, on the culture debate. Specifically, he references my Newman-heavy post:

It’s hard to argue with Cardinal Newman. :)  But, a few quick (ADHD) points anyway:

1.  Of course, the family state is different; however, there’s that “universal call to holiness” mandate.  One shouldn’t become a hothouse flower, but pearl diving in sewers isn’t good for the health either.

2. Didn’t the Benedictine monastaries become centers of culture and of communities?  Made up of — families.  So, I wonder if that Benedictine model isn’t more applicable than the narrow focus of abbey life.

3. As I said, it’s hard to argue with Newman.  However, I think it’s worth asking — is our culture today fundamentally different in a way from Victorian England in a way which invalidates (or at least lessens) Newman’s point?  Where’s the precious that needs distinguishing from the vile?

My response:

1. I don’t disagree. I’m big on striving for balance. See my comments today, re: Chesterton’s assessment of cliques vs. small communities. I said, “This is why I continue to believe that the only sensible course, if never a particularly safe one, is the middle road. Create your castle, but take care not to build too big a moat. Defend your fiefdom, but do not hide within your walls - go out and engage the world (which requires, of course, that you know something about the “culture” that informs it.)”

2. Yes, the Benedictine model is a good one, where possible, though it shouldn’t be construed as the universal norm. Such a thing is being build around Clear Creek Monastery in Oklahoma, and I support that. In that sense, I think there is an authentic community being built around a common cause, provided that enough people from different perspectives come there to share a common goal. Excessive homogeneity is bad, and shutting out the outside world is problematic (unless you have a monastic vocation, which means you’re probably not called to married life) but sharing in the richness of this community in order to bring its life to the world is a very good thing.

Further, not everyone is called to this. Certainly, some may be better off in a life of solitude, work and prayer, even if they are a family. I would caution here, however, that children are notoriously unpredictable as regards their willingness, once they are old enough to decide, to stay in environments with limited choices and opportunities. If, again, they are completely cut off from the outside world, if they decide to finally venture out into it, Newman’s assertions about being “thrown upon Babel” hold true.

Finally, I think that with as few real Catholics as exist in modern society, taking an inordinate number of them and putting them into a Benedictine community may not be as beneficial, depending on their level of isolation there, as it would have been when Catholic society was flourishing. Every evangelist you take out of the world is that much less leaven. It also makes that much more work for the rest of us.

3. Yes, of course our culture is different, and arguably far worse. Which isn’t to say that it wasn’t sufficiently bad already, or Newman may not have made the observations he did, which he seemed to assume were fairly obvious. I think, however, we are on a trend line that is simply further degraded than it was in Newman’s time. If we trace the problems with modernity to the Enlightenment and Protestant Reformation, Newman was already in the thick of it, it just hadn’t yet blossomed into what it has now.

As for discerning what is precious from what is vile, that’s precisely the reason for this argument. Newman could no doubt, if asked, point to contemporary works that exemplified what we should wish to see. Can we? Possibly, but they are few and far between. The Passion of The Christ is a paradigm, but I’m happy with contemporary fiction like Eifelheim as well. The problem is that there is too little of this sort of thing being made, because, as Barbara Nicolosi said:

I have gone to these schools—the Catholic schools, the special Catholic schools—I’ve gone to them all several times and spoken there and pleaded, and what I find there is that kids do not have any apostolic drive. After getting these great Great Books educations, what they want to be is maybe a DRE in a small country parish in the backwoods where nobody will notice them and they can just shut the world down and out. You know, there’s nothing apostolic in that. St. Paul could’ve done that—the Church would be nothing if we had done that. We have not received a mandate to head for the hills.

So we need to revive a sense of Catholic culture, even if we, like Chesterton, are taking potshots at modernity. And we need to get our heads around what Catholic art is - that it can be sacred art, but that it can also be secular art that is produced by people with a Catholic worldview. Why should the secularists have a stranglehold on producing culture? What can we borrow from the talent of those crazy, sinful, postmoderns who know a little something about making art with mass appeal, and capitalize on that?

I am not an art/music/literature snob, and that will no doubt bother some people, or give them cause to criticize me, or my formation, or whatever. I don’t care. I like the music of Michael Buble (and the Rat Pack singers that inspired him.) I love the voice of Amy Winehouse, even if her life and her lyrics are horrifying. I’m a fan of Christopher Nolan’s directorial style, William Gibson’s approach to storytelling, the imagination of George Lucas, and the food-is-culture sensibility of Anthony Bourdain. I think Dr. Gregory House (played by Hugh Laurie) is a fascinating character, even if (and perhaps because) he’s crass. I think Jeremy Clarkson’s a brilliant satirist, and so, for that matter, is Seth MacFarlane. None of this stuff is stuff I would produce, but I can skim through and find things about all of it that I love.

We may not be creating Catholic culture these days, but it’s not for lack of talent. Every person I just mentioned could be doing it, because God gave them their gifts. The fact that they aren’t is saddening. The fact that we aren’t - all of us Catholics who no doubt have equal talent among our ranks - that’s even worse.

Maybe the people I mentioned don’t know better. We should.

Fr. Tom Euteneuer, one of my favorite priests these days. He has the stones to stand up to guys like Sean Hannity despite wimpy attacks from The Borg Legionary media star Fr. Johnathan Morris. Maybe he’s got backbone because he trains with tougher sparring partners than well-coifed talking heads. Like demons.

The pope wants more exorcists. This is a very good thing. Having seen first-hand some of the battle between priests and the fallen, you want to bring as many soldiers to that fight as you can. It’d be brilliant if the Holy Father would re-institute the minor orders, but the Church would still be in a far better place if even a significant number of priests could be equipped to fight the occultism of the age.

There’s nothing scarier, or more saddening, than a person who has lost control of all or part of their will to demonic forces. There are more of them out there than you might think.

Saint Michael the Archangel,
defend us in battle.
Be our protection against the wickedness and snares of the devil.
May God rebuke him, we humbly pray;
and do Thou, O Prince of the Heavenly Host -
by the Divine Power of God -
cast into hell, satan and all the evil spirits,
who roam throughout the world seeking the ruin of souls.

Amen.

At Inside Catholic. Having never seen the sort of vitriol in the comm boxes as I did on Kate Wicker’s piece on breastfeeding in church published last Friday, I felt compelled to respond.

We can have a constructive debate about the best way to nurse with discretion (or where) in Mass, but that’s not what happened.

Continuing our look at the proper Catholic response (if there is an objectively proper response; this may in fact not be so) to the modern world, I’d like to look at the problem with cliques. Last night, I finished my old professor Dr. Regis Martin’s rather brief What Is The Church in time to pick up the collection of essays by G.K. Chesterton compiled in the book, Brave New Family.

Chesterton doesn’t waste time, so it should be no surprise that I was hit nearly straight away with this:

It is not fashionable to say much nowadays of the advantages of the small community. We are told that we must go in for large empires and large ideas. There is one advantage, however, in the small state, the city, or the village, which only the wilfully blind can overlook. The man who lives in a small community lives in a much larger world. He knows much more of the fierce varieties and uncompromising divergences of men. The reason is obvious. In a large community we can choose our companions. In a small community our companions are chosen for us. Thus in all extensive and highly civilized societies groups come into existence founded upon what is called sympathy, and shut out the real world more sharply than the gates of a monastery. There is nothing really narrow about the clan; the thing which is really narrow is the clique. The men of the clan live together because they all wear the same tartan or are all descended from the same sacred cow; but in their souls, by the divine luck of things, there will always be more colours than in any tartan. But the men of the clique live together because they have the same kind of soul, and their narrowness is a narrowness of spiritual coherence and contentment, like that which exists in hell. A big society exists in order to form cliques. A big society is a society for the promotion of narrowness. It is a machinery for the purpose of guarding the solitary and sensitive individual from all experience of the bitter and bracing human compromises. It is, in the most literal sense of the words, a society for the prevention of Christian knowledge.

The salient point here is twofold: that there is a huge distinction between a clique and a small community; and that cliques are dangerous because of their homogeneity in a way that small communities - somewhat surprisingly - are not.

I think that what Chesterton is talking about here sheds some light one what modern Catholics, particularly American Catholics, face. We do not live in a Catholic society, and so if we find ourselves in a random small community it is likely not only to be filled with people very different than we - many of whom we wouldn’t care to be next to in a bowling alley, let alone have as our next-door-neighbors - but people who do not, despite this natural variety of human life that is good for the Christian soul to encounter, have any common belief with us.

That is, I think, what creates our problem. Because Chesterton is right when he says, “Sociability, like all good things, is full of discomforts, dangers, and renunciations. The club tends to produce the most degraded of all combinations– the luxurious anchorite, the man who combines the self-indulgence of Lucullus with the insane loneliness of St. Simeon Stylites. ” And this is precisely the sort of thing that catalyzes our growth as men and offers the opportunity to cultivate virtue. But because in any sensible society, at least some component of random socialization would be bound to include individuals who share our beliefs, Catholics in a sensible society would be less likely to be overwhelmed by their neighbors who have nothing to offer.

In a sense, this lends even more credibility to Chesterton’s assertion (made about a different sort of society than ours) that:

We do not dislike them [our neighbors] because they have so little force and fire that they cannot be interested in themselves. We dislike them because they have so much force and fire that they can be interested in us as well. What we dread about our neighbours, in short, is not the narrowness of their horizon, but their superb tendency to broaden it. And all aversions to ordinary humanity have this general character. They are not aversions to its feebleness (as is pretended), but to its energy. The misanthropes pretend that they despise humanity for its weakness. As a matter of fact, they hate it for its strength.

So what we are left with in our big, American society is to decide: community or clique? Because the click is every bit as dangerous in the long run as the small community of very different people who do not share our beliefs. In the former, we are left to create an echo chamber, a sterile environment in which our social immune systems become unable to cope with outside influence, and so doom us (and our children) to remain forever in our enclaves and bunkers.  In the latter, we run the risk of assimilation through immersion, being worn down by the endless tide of secularity and all that goes with it.

This is why I continue to believe that the only sensible course, if never a particularly safe one, is the middle road. Create your castle, but take care not to build too big a moat. Defend your fiefdom, but do not hide within your walls - go out and engage the world (which requires, of course, that you know something about the “culture” that informs it.) Hospitality is necessary if we are to be the leaven in society, and part of hospitality is not appearing so uninviting to the outside world that they’ll never bother with you even if they have the chance. People thrive on common ground, so the closer you appear (within reason, in the case of modesty, say) to being like them, the more likely they are to listen to what you have to say.

One never knows where the opportunity will arise to have that chance encounter that bridges the gap, but if we aren’t out there we can be sure it will never come. As I rode home the other day on the subway, God forced my hand. The first train car I hopped onto was thick with smothering heat, so at the next stop I jumped on to the one just ahead. I was standing just across from a young woman who noticed, because of our proximity, the rosary ring that I was tolling discreetly on my finger. She looked at me, looked away, looked back, and finally blurted out:

Her: “Can I ask you a question?”

Me: “Sure.”

Her: “I see you praying your rosary…I was raised Catholic, although I’m kind of fallen away. What I want to know is, God gives us free will, right?”

Me: “Of course.”

Her: “So how is it that prayer doesn’t violate that? I mean, if we were going to pray for something, say, world peace, and that depends on others changing their actions, how are we not asking God to violate their free will?”

We talked about this for a while, and exchanged e-mail addresses. I haven’t heard from her, but the encounter was a positive one. She had been asking Catholics this question for a while, and had never gotten an answer. She had even asked a priest about the idea she had that faith and reason were meant to cooperate, and he had laughed at the thought, she said. But because I happened to be there, in the teeming mass of people on the subway in this big, decadent, capital city - for all intents and purposes the modern Rome - God was able to use me as an instrument.

We have to meet them where they are. To be in the world and not of it requires, of course, being in it first.

(Germany; Post WWII Surrender. Still trying to source.)

From the so-called “Letter to Diognetus“:

Christians are indistinguishable from other men either by nationality, language or customs. They do not inhabit separate cities of their own, or speak a strange dialect, or follow some outlandish way of life. Their teaching is not based upon reveries inspired by the curiosity of men. Unlike some other people, they champion no purely human doctrine. With regard to dress, food and manner of life in general, they follow the customs of whatever city they happen to be living in, whether it is Greek or foreign..

…Christians love those who hate them just as the soul loves the body and all its members despite the body’s hatred. It is by the soul, enclosed within the body, that the body is held together, and similarly, it is by the Christians, detained in the world as in a prison, that the world is held together. The soul, though immortal, has a mortal dwelling place; and Christians also live for a time amidst perishable things, while awaiting the freedom from change and decay that will be theirs in heaven. As the soul benefits from the deprivation of food and drink, so Christians flourish under persecution. Such is the Christian’s lofty and divinely appointed function, from which he is not permitted to excuse himself.