Tim Stanley: Live Radically as a Catholic

The Madonna of Loreto or Pilgrim's Madonna (1604–1606) by the Italian Baroque master Caravaggio, located in the Cavalletti Chapel of the church of Sant'Agostino, near the Piazza Navona in Rome. The scene is a moment where everyday common man (or woman) encounters the divine, whose appearance is also not unlike that of a common man (or woman).

One of the hardest things about writing a blog is knowing when to speak and when to shut up. Believe it or not, there is quite a lot of information that comes my way that I do not post.

I do try and post uplifting and encouraging stuff here, but it is necessarily interspersed with my worries and concerns about departures from the faith I have lived and studied. My desire is to be a disciple of Jesus Christ. My family are brought up in this conviction and this makes it central to my life. I post concerns not to raise scandal, but to reject error and to educate the laity to the problems which, I feel strongly, will persist until we start to reject them.

If the laity were knowledgeable, committed and faithful disciples, there would be no space for the problems we see all around us today, the "cognitive dissonance" as I posted yesterday. Problems are allowed to proliferate in the gap between orthodoxy and praxis.

Thankfully, I receive a great deal of encouragement from a wide range of laity & clergy for this blog, but I also get some criticism. This is usually from people who, it seems to me, are not prepared to engage with the discussion, but prefer to either stand aloof or seek to further an agenda which stands in contradiction to the Magisterium.

The "keep quiet and hope it goes away" attitude is simply not good enough as far as I am concerned, certainly not for an organisation that I am entrusting the most important, sacred moments of my life and the lives of my family to.

In an environment where bishops choose not to be bishops and priests spend a great deal of time affirming sin, the only ones left to hold up the dynamic metanoia preached by Christ are the dirty feet of the Church: the laity.

Tim Stanley offers a tour de force on this issue in The Cathoilc Herald today:

Catholics not only have a right to try to transform society, we have a divine mandate. We are constantly told, sometimes by clerics, that we should keep our opinions to ourselves – that we should erect a wall between our faith and our politics. But Jesus did not die quietly or behind closed doors. The Church did not spread his message through private coffee mornings. And the Christian commandment to love our fellow man does not stop at being charitable.

Telling people the truth is an act of love. Failing to do it is a sin of omission. So the question isn’t “Should we try to change our communities?” but “How should we go about it?” The answer is with fearless honesty."

Christianity is tough and uncompromising. The modern notion of the Jesus who loves without asking for anything in return, the Jesus who tolerates, the Jesus of the therapeutic encounter, runs totally contrary to the Jesus of the Gospels. In Matthew, he says: “Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword … Anyone who loves their father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; anyone who loves their son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me.”

Catholics can conclude two things from this passage. First, that we are called to be outspoken social critics. Second, that our witness will personally cost us dear. In fact, I suspect that the true measure of how accurate our criticisms of society are will be how painfully we are punished for making them. [Goodness me this runs counter to the people who criticise my blog! The people who would have nothing said and the status quo left unchallenged!]

The Christian has to get to the heart of the human problem. To be radical: to find the immediate origins of our challenges and the real solutions.

Let us tell society the truth. We have a crisis of the family. The latest figures show that nearly half of all babies born in modern Britain are born out of wedlock. And study after study has confirmed the impact that this has upon poverty and crime.

We have a crisis of decency. Last year, there was an average of 171 hate crimes reported per day in Britain. It is commonplace in modern politics to call your opponent unpatriotic or bigoted or evil. The President of the United States, a married man, was elected despite the fact that he joked about sexually assaulting women.

We have a crisis of relationships. People will not commit to their partners. People will not commit to their children. People are retreating into a virtual reality that, in many cases, offers fleeting friendships rather than long-term relationships – and, of course, the ridiculous, corrupting spectre of pornography. A recent parliamentary report warned that “one in five children aged 12 to 13 think that watching porn is normal behaviour, and nearly one in 10 children aged 12 to 13 are worried they might be addicted to porn”.

We have a crisis of self-worth. Mental health problems are spreading like an invisible plague. NHS Digital has said that the number of young people admitted to hospital with a diagnosis of anxiety has tripled over the past five years.

We have a crisis of identity. According to a recent survey commissioned by the feminist Fawcett Society, half of Britons aged 18 to 34 believe that gender is not binary. Something as essential to our identity – arguably the rock upon which our sense of personhood is build – is eroding in a sea of confusion.

We have a crisis of responsibility. More than half of Britons over 75 live alone and two–fifths of them say television is their main source of company. Where are their families? Our parents raised us; now it is our turn to take care of them. We have to do this. The longer we are living, the greater the incidence of elderly infirmity and dementia. The NHS is overcrowded, the hospices have no room, the local authorities don’t have enough money. Raise taxes to pay for things if necessary, yes. But the Catholic should also be asking: why aren’t their families taking responsibility for their own?

Failing that, we are creeping inexorably towards the legalisation – even encouragement – of euthanasia. And euthanasia is a logical end to a culture that treats human beings as units of production, and which deems them not only useless when they have finished their labour but even a burden upon the rest of us.

This is a crisis of humanity. And the statistic that sums it all up, the statistic that should outrage Catholics to their very core, is that 185,000 abortions are carried out in England and Wales every year. Even if you accept that an abortion is a woman’s legal right – even if you were to accept the proposition that backstreet abortions are a worse prospect and likely to proliferate if abortion were banned – it should still prick your conscience.

Abortion speaks to every social ill we have. Abortion is so often linked to poverty. The highest rate of repeat abortions is among black women. People with Down’s syndrome are being slowly eradicated. And there is even the outrage of gendercide: the purposeful abortion of girls purely on the basis that they are girls. Class prejudice, racial disparity, ableism, sexism: why is the Left not up in arms about this?

Tim's solution is for us to start living radically Catholic lives and to put our faith at the centre of our every day existence. It is interesting to note that this is one of the clearest calls of the Second Vatican Council. In Chapter 4 (“On the Laity”) of Lumen Gentium (the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church), the Council said the laity are called, as “living members” of the Body of Christ, “to expend all their energy for the growth of the Church and its continuous sanctification, since this very energy is a gift of the Creator and a blessing of the Redeemer” (33). Then, in a key passage, the Council went on to identify the essence of the lay apostolate by which the laity are to answer this call:

The lay apostolate…is a participation in the salvific mission of the Church itself. Through their baptism and confirmation all are commissioned to that apostolate by the Lord Himself. Moreover, by the sacraments, especially holy Eucharist, that charity toward God and man which is the soul of the apostolate is communicated and nourished. Now the laity are called in a special way to make the Church present and operative in those places and circumstances where only through them can it become the salt of the earth. Thus every layman, in virtue of the very gifts bestowed upon him, is at the same time a witness and a living instrument of the mission of the Church…. (33)

It would appear that most Catholics today consider that the Council was calling lay people to do the work of the priest. However it is quite clear that the Council did not intend that these extraordinary forms of “cooperation in the apostolate of the Hierarchy” (such as the liturgical functions of lector and Eucharistic minister) should cause the laity to be cast as miniature clergy but rather that the laity should be encouraged to engage in their own proper apostolate, which is the transformation of the social order in Christ; exactly as Tim states in his piece.

The Council makes the usual and proper focus of the lay apostolate refreshingly clear:

The faithful...must assist each other to live holier lives even in their daily occupations. In this way the world may be permeated by the spirit of Christ and it may more effectively fulfil its purpose in justice, charity and peace. The laity have the principal role in the overall fulfilment of this duty. Therefore, by their competence in secular training and by their activity, elevated from within by the grace of Christ, let them vigorously contribute their effort, so that created goods may be perfected by human labour, technical skill and civic culture for the benefit of all men according to the design of the Creator and the light of His Word…. Moreover, let the laity also by their combined efforts remedy the customs and conditions of the world, if they are an inducement to sin, so that they all may be conformed to the norms of justice and may favour the practice of virtue rather than hinder it. (36)

Has the council's vision been enacted? Or has it rather been hijacked, the energy it evoked, more heat than light, spent on fighting battles that did nothing to spread the Gospel, but invoked petty rivalries and liturgical wars that fostered mediocrity and drove the faithful from our Churches to escape the bland mediocrity and rampant hypocrisy.

Chapter 4 of Lumen Gentium concludes with the Council’s insistence that

“the laity have the right, as do all Christians, to receive in abundance from their spiritual shepherds the spiritual goods of the Church.” This relates especially to the word of God and the sacraments (rights which were too often denied through heterodox teaching and illicit liturgies in the generation following the Council). The laity are also, “by reason of the knowledge, competence or outstanding ability which they may enjoy, permitted and sometimes even obliged to express their opinion on those things which concern the good of the Church” (37).

So, by writing this blog, I am carrying out my sacred duty as a committed Catholic and the will of the Second Vatican Council. If you beg to differ, let's talk about it! But let's not pretend that, if bishops were doing their jobs, there would be no need for lay people to write blogs about the Church.