Rising to Today’s Challenges
By Helen Alvaré
I was given a topic that I couldn’t resist, but which has caused me weeks and months of difficulty: the Church as Mother and Teacher, in the context of her present difficulties—both within and without—and in the context of our desperate need for her at all times. My roadmap has two parts. First, to broadly describe the lights and shadows concerning Mother Church today; and second, to identify ways we can and cannot realistically contribute to the renewal of her essential identity.
First: Remember Mother Church Is Human and Divine
I don’t have time for extensive detailing here, but I begin by mentioning beautiful signs of light and life in the Church: the Eucharistic Revival, burgeoning new religious orders, the renewal of so many Catholic schools, and the devotion and activity of so many Catholic lay initiatives, to name just a few.
But I might also say that many Catholics in the United States feel that the Church doesn’t always seem to live what she is—the continuation of Christ’s presence on earth, as He was, both human and divine. We know in her being she is a loving parent who is also of course, as parents are, a teacher, but the Church sometimes today doesn’t feel very motherly toward us, nor consistently confident in her role as teacher.
Instead, we feel that we are even possibly disfavored children here in the States, and sometimes confused about some of her teachings. Please forgive me for highlighting only one large teaching area, because it’s the area of my specialty—the family. It is an area in real turmoil and confusion in some Vatican documents and processes, in curial offices, and among several vocal theologians and the professional Catholic commentariat here and abroad.
And let me add here that Catholic sex, marriage, and parenting teachings are never solely about sex, marriage, and parenting. According to Scripture and Tradition, God’s design for male female relations and parenting point us to a truer understanding God’s identity as a community of persons. The family points to how He loves us—like a spouse and like a parent—and how we are to love Him and one another—as faithful, permanent, fruitful spouses and as loving, vigilant, authoritative parents. These are central architectural matters of our faith.
Furthermore, playing with overturning a millennia of Catholic teaching on these subjects calls into question what we really believe about the authority of Scripture, tradition, and magisterium; what we believe about creation as a source of information or natural law; and what we believe about the harmony between faith and reason—also architectural pillars of our faith. These are extremely troubling and possible consequences of our observing today, that often right alongside affirmations of perennial teachings in this area, Rome sometimes elevates or cooperates closely with figures who have denied or disparaged our family teachings.
And not infrequently, we sense that we are being told that our family doctrines are not “loving” and not “pastoral,” suggesting the impossible idea that God’s law and His love are opposed. At the same time, these newer claimed pastoral efforts and tone are coincident with declining affiliation with the Church, declining Catholic baptisms and marriages, and declining vocations to the priesthood and religious life.
Thus we sense here in the US, that those of us—I include myself here—working on family issues, might be considered by our own Church to be small-minded, judgmental, moralistic, narrow, even un-Christian. All this despite the architectural importance of family issues to all branches of Catholic theology, despite what we know is the relationship between family health and individual and social welfare, and despite the clear warning of Sister Lucia. In the early 1980s, this Last Seer of Fatima, sent a letter to Cardinal Caffara stating “a time will come when the decisive battle between the kingdom of Christ and Satan will be over marriage and the family. And those who will work for the good of the family will experience persecution and tribulation.”
Second: Identify How We Can and Cannot Help to Renew the Church
How do we help our Church to renew herself? To be the continued human and divine presence of Christ on earth and a foretaste of His Kingdom? Or in the words of theologian Luigi Giussani, how the Church can be a way to encounter Christ and to know that He is God, with a reasonable degree of certainty, thousands of years after Jesus has physically left this earth? How do we bring to life Jesus’ promises that “I will not leave you orphans” (Jn 14:18)?
The first of my sub-proposals is: Be not afraid of the difficulties we’re facing because:
Ours is a very irrational time in history;
A human Church “lists” like an imbalanced ship, which shouldn’t surprise us at all;
The Church has previously incorporated “new things”—new ideas, emphases, practices—and re-interpreted or transformed them in Christ, all the while remaining Christ’s Church and being able to be understood and accepted by every culture it encounters;
God is more powerful than humanity.
We are living in a time characterized by an often loose association with reason. We are living at a moment when more and more people, a la Alice in Wonderland, are believing six impossible things before breakfast. G.K. Chesterton was surely speaking of our times when he wrote that “We shall soon be in a world in which a man may be howled down for saying that two and two make four, . . . in which people will persecute the heresy of calling a triangle a three-sided figure, and hang a man for maddening a mob with the news that grass is green.”
This tendency, particularly characterizing matters concerning sex, marriage, and parenting, is so obvious that I won’t waste my precious minutes recounting the ways for you.
But I want to emphasize that we shouldn’t be surprised when a Church that is both human and divine “lists” in one direction or another. She often does so with good intentions, such as a belief that something new is needed to stem the tide of disaffiliations or to boost evangelization. The Church will always bear the shortcomings of the age she operates in. But she will also learn from the age’s new things or new pre-occupations. Spend a morning with a Church historian who can take you chapter and verse through dozens of such periods. You will feel much better pretty quickly.
At this moment, for example, some in the Church are overemphasizing the secular versus religious interpretations of currently ascendant values—i.e., equality, freedom, dignity. They are confusing worldly visions of compassion with Christian love. They are suggesting false dichotomies, where there should rather be unity and “both/and” dynamics. Here I think of the pairs: laity and clergy; worship and social justice; doctrine and pastoral practices; discipline and love-in-truth.
At the same time, be grateful for Pope Francis’ turning our hearts and minds and doctrine toward the most dispossessed of the planet. Reminding us of our obligation, in Christ’s words, to remember the “least of these,” and even to do so until it hurts. This is a perennial and central teaching of the Church and not any part of the above-described “listing.”
Also remember that the Church has successfully incorporated, while illuminating and offering advancements upon, Hellenism, Eastern monasticism, rationalism, technology, humanism, and other historical developments and values. This is in keeping with St. Paul’s advice to the Philippians: “brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is gracious, if there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things” (Php 4:8, emphasis added).
Remember that the Church has made herself comprehensible to every people and culture, without losing her identity as One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic, as well as Mother and Teacher.
These miracles of encounter with a changing world might also be called a miracle of continuity that the Church possesses. Yes, there is development of doctrine, and of the means of explaining doctrine, but these are manifestations of the Cardinal Newman principle that in order to preserve unity, multiplicity of expression is necessary in a Church that lives in history, saves in history. In Newman’s words:
When we consider the success of ages during which the Catholic system has endured, the severity of the trials it has undergone,… the incessant mental activity and the intellectual gifts of its maintenance,…the fury of the controversies which have been carried on among its professors, the impetuosity of the assaults made upon it…, it is quite inconceivable that it should not have been broken up and lost, were it a corruption of Christianity.
We continue to see this in miniature frequently today, for the most part every time the press or dissenting theologians or commentators predict the fall of this or that doctrine—most recently in the sexual and family realms. A reassertion of the basic truths ensues, from one or another Vatican congregation or from the Holy Father himself. Take a moment to really appreciate the seeming miracle that your Church remains alive amidst today’s cultural tsunami. That the power of God remains visible to so many.
Remember that no one, whether inside or outside the Church, is powerful enough to hide God’s divine presence and continuing action therein. I’m reminded of the Church’s bold and definitive insistence upon a Eucharistic revival, upon the Real Presence, as against an ascendant materialism and scientism; her demand for a preferential option for the dispossessed of this world; her insistence that nothing is more important than our encounter with the person of Jesus Christ; her championing of marital commitment and a generous openness to children. These live somehow, despite how intensely countercultural they are.
Also, don’t forget the ways in which her divine face is present in small or local or at-first-hidden ways that are nonetheless mindblowing. These seemingly small movements are the way of Jesus. I’m thinking how God became a frail human being, allowing His body to be crucified before He resurrected and defeated death for all of us in one small town in one corner of the world. And I’m thinking of 1 Kings 19:11–12, wherein God did not appear to Elijah as the strong and violent wind rending the mountains, “nor as the earthquake,” nor the fire, but in what the Scripture calls a “light silent sound.”
Think also about the RCIA at your parish and the only-God-could-do-it conversion stories we continually hear; the young boy Carlos Acutis privately cataloguing Eucharistic miracles, whose exhibit now travels thousands of miles from where he lived; a 24-year-old Carmelite nun dying in a small French town whose “little way” to God is famous across the globe; or a Jesuit priest serving 23 years in Soviet prisons and work camps, whose memoirs instruct countless readers how to turn absolutely everything over to God. I think of a formerly atheist friend of mine who couldn’t pass the Catholic church in her neighborhood without being bothered by the overwhelming feeling that something definitive for her life was happening in there, and who, by sitting in the back pew for Masses became aware of the Real Presence and became the beautiful Catholic she is today.
After Be Not Afraid, What Next?
I propose recognizing what we cannot do so as to stop beating our heads against a wall. Most of us cannot change what is happening in Rome, or likely even regarding those matters in the hands of a particular bishop. Though of course we can take a moment to personally voice our support for the courageous voices, including many bishops in our Church here in the United States, who refuse to be silent when the Church’s teachings are confused or threatened, even in the face of personal costs.
In a more affirmative set of moves, however, we can stop going along with the notion that all “polarization” is problematic, as if it is never warranted. In fact, somethings are worth disagreeing over, including the fundamental theological matters apparently in dispute today, though, of course, always with love and truth.
Additionally, we need to say frankly, and in a charitable manner, and without casting unnecessary aspersions on others, that we sometimes feel offended and confused by some voices in our Church. We can tell our pastor, any Catholic institutions involved, or our Bishop. Ask to feel the Church’s motherly embrace and receive clarity of teaching. Be specific and nonpolemical and of course never ad hominem. Be simple as doves, yes, but also shrewd as serpents as Jesus advises in Matthew 10:16. Be very, very knowledgeable before speaking. Do not go into any conversation on the basis of innuendo or half-information.
From time to time it will be necessary, as the laity, to remind even some leading Catholic clerical voices today of their limits and the expertise of the laity. Particularly when the former are venturing into areas where the Catechism, Christifideles Laici, and Lumen Gentium recognize lay prominence. This certainly includes the area of family life wherein, while the Church has great expertise, it does not possess the exact types of expertise the laity has. The laity has the experience in the trenches, we have the battle scars, and we have the empirical data concerning the sexual revolution and the state’s efforts to proselytize our children with its new sexual orthodoxy.
In fact, the Catechism specially emphasizes that lay duties are “the more pressing when it is only through them that men can hear the Gospel and know Christ” (#900). This has direct and particular application to the situation we face today with many Catholic institutions, because they are often led and usually staffed by the laity.
Finally, be the incarnational presence that unmistakably brings to life, for those around us, the ongoing presence of Christ on earth.
Jesus founded the Church incarnationally—with His body, at a particular point in history, interacting with other human beings at a particular location, with particular human encounters/behaviors. Remember how the Apostles shared His life for three years. And in the words of the theologian Fr. Luigi Giussani, how they came to understand Jesus as exceptional—powerful yet good, brilliant but not arrogant, meek but able to command nature with a gesture of His hand. It became highly reasonable to trust in Him, and with the passage of time, they acquired incomparable certainty about this man.
Remember how from these few men, and the men and women who became His disciples in one small corner of the world, the Church spread worldwide. This all started at one moment in history; a moment, by the way, devoid of mass media communications.
So be the disciples in the 21st century who witness this trust-in-Jesus, this “incomparable certainty” to those observing you.
I don’t think anyone has expressed this stumbling block of Jesus’ having left us to be witnesses to His continuing Presence on Earth as movingly as the poet Charles Péguy. He wrote:
Miracle of miracles,… mystery of mysteries
It is to us, the weak, that Jesus was given
He depends on us, weak and carnal
To bring to life and to nourish and to keep alive in time
These words pronounced alive in time.
O misery, oh happiness, that it would depend on us,…
We who are nothing,… who spend a few years of nothing on earth
A few wretched, pathetic years….
[I]t is we who are responsible
We… who are incapable of anything, who are nothing, who are uncertain of tomorrow,
And even of today,
We who are born and who will die like creatures of a day….
It’s folly,… but it’s still we who are responsible to preserve and to nourish, the eternal on earth.
I think of stories in my own experience bringing this to life. A young man moves to New York City and is told by a friend to contact another group of friends there. He doesn’t know they are members of a lay Catholic community. They take him to lunch and to a record store his first lonely weekend there. They keep up with him to make sure he’s feeling more at home in the city. He wonders, “Who are these people who actually seem to care about my happiness? What drives them? Why are they so good to one another and to me?” He learns the source of their joy and humanity, and eventually joins them.
In short, whether God is speaking quietly through a holy young woman or man in a remote location, more directly to a human heart through the Real Presence, or is made manifest in the “too good to be true” lives of His followers, you simply can’t hide His light/our faith/the Church under a bushel basket.
We have to stop feeling sorry for ourselves and do our part! Yes, the universal Church, our diocese, our parish, is Mother and Teacher; but good mothers and teachers don’t free their children and students of adult responsibility. They empower them by introducing them to reality, they correct them and forgive them, but they don’t make their adult decisions for them. Instead, they empower them to act.
I have no long conclusion save to repeat what we need now: be not afraid, but at the same time, implore the Church to be who she is, and do your part.
Dr. Helen Alvaré is the Robert A. Levy Professor of Law at the Scalia Law School at George Mason University who has worked for the Church for 38 years in various capacities. Her most recent books include Religious Freedom After the Sexual Revolution: A Catholic Guide and Christianity and the Laws of Conscience: An Introduction. This essay is adapted from a talk given at this summer’s Napa Institute conference.