A Real Openness to the World

By Margaret Harper McCarthy

The World after Jesus without Jesus

The French Catholic poet and essayist, Charles Péguy, described what had become of the world as “a world after Jesus without Jesus.” This, he thought, was the fault of “two gangs of parish priests,” one “clerical” one “lay.” Each had detached the temporal from the eternal in its own distinctive ways. The “lay” one denies heaven for the sake of the earth, with its “mysticism of materialism.” The “clerical” one denies the earth for the sake of heaven, with its “error of mysticism,” its “vague spiritualisms, idealisms, immaterialisms, religiousisms, pantheisms and philosophisms.”¹ Both are anti-Christian, thought Péguy, but the latter more properly so. It is the “greatest heresy,” for it denies “the most wonderful thing,” namely the eternal in the temporal: the Word of God become flesh.

The Most Wonderful Thing

The “most wonderful thing” is the definitive and most positive ̶word on what the world is for God. It is the apex of what began at creation when he, out of no necessity from within, nor demand from without, wanted the world into existence, then looked upon it as good. This is utterly unique to Christianity. No other account of the world has God as its total cause (including matter) and understands it to be freely wanted by God to the point that he would join himself to it (indivise et inconfuse), in a singular human being. It is because there is Another in God, that there can be a finite other and one that is good for God. Here is the root of the much celebrated “openness to the world” that so permeated the Second Vatican Council. It is God’s own “openness to the world,” and to the humanity at the center of it.

Two Paradoxes

This “openness,” of course, is not immersion, as a theology of secularization would have it, where God and his Church must “humbly” disappear indistinguishably into its historical flux and “new understandings”̶—chiefly about sex, as it happens—in order to be really “open.”  Such immersion would contradict the definitive Word on the world, in whom a singular humanity is united to what is not the world, unconfusedly, so that it be in a communion with God as he is in himself. As a result, it would compromise the positive word on the world, the very thing an “openness towards the world” purports to want. On the contrary, just as God is open to what is not God, on the grounds of who he is—a unity in communion—so too the world is open to what is not the world, on the grounds of what it is, a creature owing its integrity and goodness to the Creator. Joseph Ratzinger expressed this paradox in his commentary on the conciliar document most concerned with the Church’s “openness to the world,” Gaudium et Spes. Man is taken most seriously, he said, when he is recognized as the being “who is constituted to be not merely in himself, but above and beyond himself, and who is only in full possession of himself when he has gone forth from himself.”² This openness to what is “above and beyond” is, of course, openness to what has already come into the world: the Word made flesh, with whom man can call the Creator “Abba Father.”

And were man not to take himself seriously? Henri De Lubac had already shown overwhelmingly the cataclysmic result of an un-paradoxical affirmation of man in The Drama of Atheist Humanism.³ And, together with the other council fathers, he warned that without God, the creature himself would “evanesce.” Creatura enim sine Creatore evanescit.⁴

An Evanescent Creature

Sixty years after the Council, the prediction of “evanescence” could not have been more perfectly fulfilled. For even without a third world war (for now), humanity is “freely” set against itself at the most basic level, to the point of willing its own abolition in “fluidity.” After the centuries-long subjection of nature in general to the technological imperative,⁵ we now have gotten our biotechnical hands on the origin of nature itself, namely birth,⁶ in its cause and its effect, generation through the union of the two sexes and sexual difference, the very mark of birth. These have been replaced by artificial reproductive technologies and “gender identities.” As Benedict XVI said in one of his last speeches as pope: “The manipulation of nature . . . now becomes man’s fundamental choice where he himself is concerned. From now on there is only the abstract human being, who chooses for himself what his nature is to be.” The result, he noted, was that: “the key figures of human existence . . . vanish father, mother, child—essential elements of the experience of being human are lost.”⁷ This is tragic.

Christians as Custodians of the Natural Order

What is interesting in all of this, though, is that now it is (almost) only believers who are holding fast to the world and to the creature at the center of it. Chesterton predicted this over one hundred years ago:

The great march of mental destruction will go on. Everything will be denied. Everything will become a creed. It is a reasonable position to deny the stones in the street; it will be a religious dogma to assert them. Fires will be kindled to testify that two and two make four. Swords will be drawn to prove that leaves are green in summer. We shall be left defending . . . this huge impossible universe which stares us in the face. We shall fight for visible prodigies as if they were invisible. We shall look on the impossible grass and the skies with a strange courage. We shall be of those who have seen and yet have believed.⁸

The creaturely paradox is vindicated (in the negative). For it is now only the believer— “the one who is not merely in himself, but above and beyond himself”—who is the custodian of the world, in all its naturality. It is he who is committed to nature, his own and everybody else’s, recognizing that it is men and women who marry, that those who generate outside their bodies are men, and those who generate inside their bodies are women, and so on.

This is exciting. For notwithstanding all we must worry about concerning our freedoms (to operate actual schools, run businesses, adopt children and hold on to the ones we have), we are the “creative minority” who will be there to pick up the pieces when the great experiment in nihilism has exhausted its patients. We will “place [ourselves] at the service of all humankind.”⁹ We will be like real medics in a field hospital. We will not only welcome the wounded, but also diagnose their ailments truly and prescribe the proper medicine (pastorally of course!). We believers, in other words, will put salve on their blind eyes so that they can see what stares them in the face: the real, visible world.

The Church’s Openness to the World: The Eternal in the Temporal

The Council prepared the Church to do just this when it renewed her self-understanding as both hierarchical and lay—Petrine and Marian. The former had already been well identified. “Peter” is entrusted to embody Christ and thus ensure the constant flow of life from the resurrected body of the Bridegroom to the Bride, so that she be “filled” with the “fullness of deity dwelling bodily” (Col 2:8). But when the council fathers identified the common priesthood of the laity and religious as distinct from the ministerial priesthood—“in essence, not only degree”—they removed every hint of inferiority typical of anything on the lower end of a single continuum. On the contrary, they defined the (Marian) priesthood positively, as a distinct mode of priesthood facing the Petrine mode and both, together, facing God,¹⁰ presenting themselves to the Father as “spiritual sacrifices.”¹¹ In so doing, they confirmed the positivity of the world which is carried upward to God but always as itself, in all of its creatureliness, because the sacrifices are “offered to the Father along with the Lord’s body.” Then, when the council fathers identified the laity as secular¹² and placed them on the “front lines” of the Church¹³—not its margins—they understood the Church herself to be (also) facing the world so that God can be “all in all.”¹⁴ The temporal realm for the laity, then, is not a merely “external/environmental framework,” but a fully ‘theological reality.”¹⁵ It is the place of the “continued embodiment of God in the world.”¹⁶ The laity are at home in the world where they complete the work that began with Creation by bringing it up into the reality of the Incarnation, renewing the temporal order—marriage and family life, daily occupations, leisure, etc.—and “consecrate[ing] the world … to God.¹⁷ Instead of moving in the “wrong direction” then, the laity are moving in the very direction of the Archetype, in whom the world was created, who descended into it, assumed it, then ascended with it. Returning to Péguy, we can say that the Church’s renewed self-understanding through her understanding of the laity as secular is tied to a renewed awareness of “the most wonderful thing”—namely, of the eternal in the temporal, by which the temporal can be in the eternal as temporal, “inconfuse et indivise.”

Countering This-Worldly Unworldliness

The Church, through its lay faithful does not only carry something new into the world—the light of Christ, the leaven, the salt—it also “restore[s] to creation its original value.”¹⁸ “Restoration” brings us to the sinful “worldliness” of what St. Paul calls “this world,” the world that has Satan for its god (2 Cor. 4:4). That world consists not in the mere denial of God; for “even the demons believe [in him].”¹⁹ Rather, it consists in the denial of “the coming of Jesus Christ in the flesh.”²⁰ Paradoxically, then, the worldliness of the Pauline “this world” is profoundly un-worldly. For by denying the God who became flesh it denies the ultimacy of the world in all its resurrected material worldliness. At the same time, and for the same reason, it also disintegrates the world, and at the very heart of nature itself—namely, where it gives birth. Men and women “exchange natural relations for unnatural ones” (Rom 1:26), St. Paul said. And now, they would exchange who they are naturally for what they, most unnaturally, make themselves to be. Both are of a piece. The failure to adore the true God results in an “upside-down existence” within the created order itself, as St. Paul said. Commenting on the first chapter of Romans, Ratzinger wrote:

Adoration is due to God alone, but what is adored is no longer God; images, outward appearances, and current opinion have dominion over man. This general alteration extends to every sphere of life. That which is against nature becomes the norm; the man who lives against the truth also lives against nature. His creativity is no longer at the service of the good: he devotes his genius to ever more refined forms of evil. The bonds between man and woman, and between parents and children are dissolved so that the very sources from which life springs are blocked up. It is no longer life that reigns, but death. A civilization of death is formed.²¹

Here is where the Church’s “openness to the world” through the lay faithful is so important. Living at the heart of the world, the laity restore creation—countering its “this worldly” un-worldliness—by affirming the coming of Jesus Christ in the flesh. For in knowing the incarnate Son, they affirm the positivity of the natural order. They know that finitude, and everything that manifests it—the body, sexual difference, marriage, generation—is good. And in knowing the incarnate Son, they know the destiny of that natural order—namely, to be “inseparably” and “unconfusedly” united to Christ.²² They thus draw all things up into the reality of the Incarnation, in their creaturely integrity.

Of the World but Not in It

What is notable here is that the Church is “of Christ” (1 Cor 3:23), not “of the world” (John 17:16). Yet, because of that, not in spite of it, they are most in the world, especially through its secular laity, living at the heart of it. What would happen, then, if the laity were to cease to be there and instead be drawn into the hierarchical offices, parish counsels, and synodal listening sessions, and all other manner of clerical-like activity? Already in the 1970s with all the talk about investing the hierarchical offices with laity, especially women, that had begun to happen. At that time, Hans Urs von Balthasar, who had articulated a profound theology of the laity, thought that the conciliar teaching had almost entirely been lost.

The Church since the Council has to a large extent put off its mystical characteristics; it has become a Church of permanent conversations, organizations, advisory commissions, congresses, synods, commissions, academies, parties, pressure groups, functions, structures and restructurings, sociological experiments, statistics: that is to say, more than ever a male Church, if perhaps one should not say a sexless entity, in which woman may gain for herself a place to the extent that she is ready herself to become such an entity.²³

One wonders what he would say now, about our big conversation about conversations!

The point is that the rush to push laity into clerical jobs suggests a Church that has lost its awareness of having received something from Christ to give to the world through the nuptial interplay of the “Petrine” and “Marian” dimensions of the Church. The result, to return to Péguy, is the denial of “the most wonderful thing”: the eternal in the temporal. Now though, the “clerical gang,” unlike its pious forebears—hands folded in prayer fleeing mystically from the world, and its flesh—immerses itself in the world, googling the latest polls and questionnaires to find out where the “Spirit” is, and coopting the laity while they’re at it. In the end the sources which guarantee the perpetual presence of the “Spirit of the (incarnate) Son” who became flesh, are stopped up. The world is left to its un-worldliness, to the point of the denial of its very flesh. Worse still, the Church—now “listening humbly” to “this world”—is engulfed by it, just as the world is about to fall off its own cliff. In short, being of the world, the Church is no longer in it.

What the Church needs now, instead, is renewed excitement about “the most wonderful thing.” The words at the end of every Mass (which, incidentally, gave the Mass its name) remind them of it constantly. They encapsulate the paradox of God who is not “of the world” and for that reason the most in it and for it, that is … open to it. “Ite Missa Est!” Roughly translated: “You are dismissed. Go home…into the world with the one you have just received…and bring it back to him.”

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Dr. Margaret Harper McCarthy is Associate Professor of Theological Anthropology at the John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family. She is also the editor of Humanum: Issues in Family, Culture, and Science and serves on the editorial board of the English edition of Communio: International Catholic Review and The New Ressourcement quarterly journal. This essay is adapted from "The New Ressourcement: Ite! Missa Est," The New Ressourcement 1, no. 2 (Summer 2024): 446–87 (particularly pages 483–87). 

1. Veronique: Dialogue de l’histoire et de l’âme charnelle (Paris: Gallimard,1972), 145 (my translation).

2. J. Ratzinger, “The Dignity of the Human Person,” in Commentary on the Documents of Vatican II, vol. 5 (Montreal: Palm Publishers, 1969), 163.

3. De Lubac, The Drama of Atheist Humanism, 58–72.

4. Gaudium et Spes §36.

5. Cf. Pope Francis, Laudato Si’, encyclical letter, May 24, 2015, vatican.va.

6. The Latin natura (meaning the essence and/or principle of life of a thing), stems from the older Latin gnascor, which comes from genh (meaning “to procreate”). Related to natura is natus (meaning “born”), which is past participle of nasci (meaning “to be born”).

7. Benedict XVI, “Christmas Greetings to the Roman Curia,” December 21, 2012, vatican.va.

8. G.K. Chesterton, Heretics (New York: John Lane, 1905), 305.

9. Joseph Ratzinger & Marcello Pera, "The Universalization of European Culture and the Ensuing Crisis." In Without Roots: The West, Relativism, Christianity, Islam. (New York: Basic Books, 2006), 64-74.

10. Lumen Gentium §10; Christifideles Laici §14. There is good reason to consider the man-woman relation as analogous to the two priesthoods as Hans Urs Balthasar has done, referring to the “Marian” and “Petrine” dimensions of the Church. See “The Marian Principle,” in Elucidations (London: SPCK, 1975), 64–72; Office of Peter and the Structure of the Church, trans. Andrée Emery (San Francisco: Ignatius,1986), 183–225; “Who Is the Church?,” in Explorations in Theology, vol. 2, Spouse of the Word, trans. A.V. Littledale and Alexander Dru (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1991), 143–91; “Woman’s Answer,” in Theo-Drama, 3:283–360. Cf. John Paul II, Pastores Dabo Vobis §21–23, post-synodal apostolic exhortation, March 15, 1992, vatican.va.

11. Lumen Gentium §10.

12. Lumen Gentium §38.

13. Christifideles Laici §9. The expression comes from Pius XII’s Discourse to the new cardinals, Feb. 20, 1946: AAS 38 (1946), 149.

14. Christifideles Laici §14: “[The Lay Faithful] share in the exercise of the power with which the Risen Christ draws all things to himself and subjects them along with himself to the Father, so that God might be all in all.”

15. Christifideles Laici §15.

16. Balthasar, “The Layman and the Church,” in Explorations in Theology, II: Spouse of the Word (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1991), 327. Also: “All Christian activity is the incarnation of the invisible grace in the visibility of the world” (Balthasar, “The Layman and the Church,” 328). The council fathers refer to the patristic idea of the Christian as the soul of the world, the body: “What the soul is in the body, let Christians be in the world” (Lumen Gentium §38).

17. Lumen Gentium §34. Cf. also Christifideles Laici §14, 15. Balthasar writes: “The Christian working . . . is all the working of the Church in the field where she is truly at home: the world.” “The Layman and the Church,” 328.

18. Christifideles Laici §14

19. James 2:19.

20. 2 John 7. Cf. also 1 John 2:18–22.

21. J. Ratzinger, Christianity and the Crisis of Cultures, trans. Brian McNeil (San Francisco: Ignatius, 2006), 95.

22. See Christifideles Laici §14 -15.

23. Balthasar, “The Marian Principle,” in Elucidations (London: SPCK, 1975), 70.