The Pope and the Monster of Modernity

By Larry Chapp

“The notion of the end of the world recurs throughout history; but our time has renewed this theme by discovering not only how to distort phenomena, but also how to distort consciousness and thought. Nowadays, the end of the world is not so much feared or desired: it is palpable.”

-Alain Besançon, The Falsification of the Good (8)

The Vatican is much in the minds these days of Catholics who pay attention to social media and who get most of their Catholic news from those venues. And for Catholics of a more conservative persuasion much of the news is disconcerting to the point of troubling their faith. But it is instructive to remember that before the era of mass media there were most likely vast swaths of the Church where at any given moment most Catholics did not even know who the current pope was. And in many ways, our current extreme disappointment with the current pontificate is merely the flip side of an exaggerated papalism and cult of papal personality that the modern mass media helped to create. The papacy is theatrical, grounded in the supernatural, antiquarian in its renaissance epicene frills, and shrouded in a mythos of secrecy and intrigue. Therefore, it makes for great media optics, which have led to Catholics themselves becoming a bit beguiled in a bad way by this superficial allure.

And so long as we had some of the greatest popes in the history of the Church gracing the Chair of Peter, this grand mystique of the papacy flourished. But beyond the mystique there was also something profoundly energizing about those popes which accounts for why so many Catholics began focusing their attention on the papacy as a beacon of hope. And what was energizing was that we sensed that they had our backs. In a Church riddled with feckless cultural sycophants, and even many bishops of suspicious orthodoxy, the fact that Rome held firm against the culture of modernity was more than a consolation. It was a foundation upon which one could build his or her faith.

John Paul II referred to modernity as the promoter of a “culture of death” and, when he said that, we all knew what he meant. We felt it and lived it as moderns. We therefore knew that he “got it” and understood what we were up against. The same was true for Pope Benedict, whose constant refrain about “the dictatorship of relativism” and the “eclipse of God” indicated that he perfectly well understood the neuralgic point at the intersection of modernity and the Church. Their witness inspired an entire generation of young Catholics, now grown older, to rise to the challenge of a new evangelization of this culture. The popes, in other words, were our heroes and our champions.

But now we have a pope who does not understand. He does not “get it” and he does not “have our backs.” And worse than that, he seems to have made Catholics of the JPII/Benedict sort into villains and thrown us under the bus as just so many “ideologically rigid backwardists.” He seems to be waging the intra-ecclesial battles of 1955 while ignoring the altogether different situation of 2023. For him, devout Catholics are the problem, even as he valorizes Catholics who don’t really seem to give a damn about the faith as it is expressed in an actual lived Catholicism.

Image Credit: 1 Peter 5

And so perhaps it is time to put the papacy back into proper perspective and to realize that all along our love for previous popes was really mostly about our desire to live in a Church possessed of a robust faith, such that it could act as a true counterweight to the toxicity of modernity. Previous popes aided us in that desire for cultural resistance. This Pope does not. Therefore, perhaps it is time to forge ahead on our own to pursue a life of sanctity and prayer—in spite of whatever the latest insane pastoral advice from Rome might be. Perhaps it is time to admit that maybe we have been putting too much focus on Rome all along and that now is the time to put our hands to the plow and to not look back. And after all, was this not the message of John Paul? “Launch out into the deep waters…”

But this project will now require of us that we make an analysis of the “signs of the times” and thereby understand what our task as laity in the modern world is really up against. It is a world that Pope Francis does not seem to understand in its deepest and most constitutive ethos. He seems content to judge it on its surface without plumbing the depths of its metaphysical challenge to the Gospel. And since he refuses to do this, so we must do it ourselves. This is what living in a Church where the pope does not have your back entails. We must strive to become saints in a world gone mad, without the aid of Rome, at least for a time.

As David L. Schindler noted long ago, “Curious men attend closely to the passing of events all about them. But such men merely drift along on these currents of past and future, remaining on their surfaces. It is the saint who truly penetrates the events of history” (Heart of the World, Center of the Church, 228).

We must “penetrate the events of history.” We must become saints in a world that has no room for such silly things. We must become the quaint antiquarian guardians of the dying smoldering coals of sanity in our world. That should be our focus, and not the latest curial intrigues. Therefore we must set aside our fascination with “Roman things” and focus on a description of the monster that crouches before us.

And so what is this monster? I have written often of modernity as the nullification of the question of God, which is itself the eruption into full view of a deeper metaphysical commitment to the aesthetics of nothingness. And is it not the specter of this deep and seemingly bottomless abyss of nothingness that most haunts our era? We can, albeit with great effort and despite the trenches dug for the 20^th century’s mountain of corpses, rouse ourselves to a righteous anger that demands that the torturers not have the last word. But even here, even in the smoldering anguish of this affirmation of justice in the midst of carnage unimaginable, we sense a gnawing monster within. And it is a monster without a face, unnamable and hidden, refusing the light and recognition, even as its effects are diffused everywhere. Alain Besançon, meditating on the genocidal nature of our times, speaks of “an evil more evil than evil itself, because it is confused with goodness” (The Falsification of the Good, 8).

The difficulty involved here is that we feel very deeply an abiding sense that something has changed and that the monster we face is not one terrible in tooth and claw, but a more subtle beast unlike any seen before. It refuses open combat lest it valorize our resistance—indeed, lest it also valorize the very concept of crisis as such and therefore of any sense of “justification” in our resistance. The resistance therefore comes to be seen by most as something clownish and cartoonish, the wild gesticulations of an overwrought apocalypticist drunk on tales of the coming desolation, followed by an eschatological denouement. Borrowed sword in hand, and with an ill-fitting suit of armor pilloried from an old castle that is now a B&B, the resister stands alone in the street at the barricades waiting for an enemy who does not come. He looks like a pathetic fool. And perhaps he is.

Besançon continues his analysis of the strange nature of this furtive and shy monster, and emphasizes that it falsifies the good and inverts evil into good, precisely while remaining hidden as simply “that which is obviously reasonable” or, more simply, “this is just the way things are.” It is the tyranny of an everydayness that is the monster’s sock puppet. And as such it robs us of imaginative wonder. It destroys the very concept of imagination and wonder and mocks the poetic dreams of the romantics, thus gutting from within our ability to resist via the path of imagining differently. Thus, says Sebastian Morello, “as a consequence we have gone to sleep a grey people in a grey world” (The World as God’s Icon, 10).

Along the lines of Morello’s “grey world,” Besançon turns to the Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert who, in a poem entitled, “Mr. Cogito’s Monster,” illustrates the hidden nature of the beast we face. Besançon summarizes the poem as follows in a lengthy quote worthy of full citation:

Lucky Saint George who, from high on his charger’s saddle, could observe the movements of the dragon and judge its strength! Mr. Cogito is not in such a happy position. He sits at the bottom of a valley shrouded with thick fog. Through it, he can only make out a shimmering nothingness. Mr. Cogito’s monster is difficult to describe and defies definition. It is like a vast depression covering the whole country. It cannot be struck down by the pen, by lance or by argument. If it only brought death and crushing weight from above, one could believe it to be the hallucination of a sick imagination. But it exists, for it destroys the structures of the mind and covers the bread with mold. Its victims are the indirect proof of its existence, but they are enough. Sensible people say you can live with the monster: all you have to do is avoid sudden movements and strong words, act like a rock or a leaf, breathe softly and say it is not there. But Mr. Cogito is not satisfied with only pretending to live. He wants to fight the monster in the open. At dawn, he walks through the sleeping suburbs, at the ready. He calls the monster down empty streets, he insults it, provokes it as though in the bold vanguard of some non-existent army. He calls it a coward. But in the mist he can only see the immense jaws of nothingness. Mr. Cogito looks for a fight, even an unfair one, and he wants it soon. But before that, inertia will be his downfall, and ordinary mundane death, a suffocation by shapelessness. (9)

This paraphrase of Herbert’s poem, in my view, cuts to the bone of our situation. It reminds me of the quote attributed to the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci: “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.” Something is indeed struggling to be born in our era. And my claim is that it has already happened. Just as with the obscurity and seemingly hidden nature of Christ’s birth, so too here. The simulacrum of Christ and his Church in modernity’s adoption of Comte’s “religion of man” has come already and is now the near-totalitarian ideology of our age. Or, as Daniel Mahoney calls it, “The Idol of our Age.” During Gramsci’s time perhaps the monster was still struggling to be born. But no longer. The child is here, not in a manger or in front of Simeon’s gaze, but in the algorithmic reduction of everything to the regime of digital surveillance, commodification, and bureaucratic suffocation. Reduction to the regime of God’s nullification and the rise of the culture of metaphysical nothingness. The rise of an “evil more evil than evil itself, because it is confused with goodness.”

But few there are with the eyes to see what this parturition has wrought. And, as with Mr. Cogito’s lonely and futile battle against nothingness, so too are those with the prophetic sense to “see” this most invisible of monsters dismissed as fear-mongering doomsayers battling against phantasms of their own making.

It is imperative that we understand this point if we are to understand the kind of sanctity, the kind of saints, that we need to become today. In one sense true sanctity transcends all historicization and localization since it is not entirely reducible to anything other than a radical openness to the unique provocation and call of Christ. And therefore this christological holiness is falsified at its root when it is reduced to a mere sociological construct invented in committees or synods by tired ecclesiastics, both clerical and lay, who speak incessantly of this or that movement of the Holy Spirit, which they have now captured, analyzed, and reproduced in bureaucratic form as a manufactured “reform of structures and disciplines.” As my friend Lewis Ayres describes this process: “It is salvation by Ph.D. alone.”

But in another sense, sanctity is always tailored to the needs of its time. What we need now are saints who can struggle and kick against the crushing weight of modernity’s immanent frame filled with Charles Taylor’s buffered selves. And we must do this by returning over and over again to the trough of the Church’s spiritual heritage in her mystics, theological doctors, sacraments, and ascetical prayer disciplines. Because nobody in Rome is riding to our rescue these days. And perhaps that is a good thing. Perhaps it reminds us that all along these are the things to which we should attend if we are to stand at the barricades awaiting modernity’s hidden, furtive monster.

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Dr. Larry Chapp is a retired professor of theology who taught for twenty years at DeSales University. He now owns and manages, with his wife, the Dorothy Day Catholic Worker Farm in Harveys Lake, Pennsylvania. He can be visited online at Gaudium et Spes 22.