True Pastoral Accompaniment Requires an Accurate Reading of the Signs of the Times

By Larry Chapp

Introduction: Reading the Signs of the Times and the Concept of Accompaniment

What we need now is a proper fulfillment of the call of Vatican II for the Church to read “the signs of the times.” This call has been invoked often but rarely in a prophetic, radical, and countercultural way. It has usually been invoked instead as an adjunct to correlational theologies that seek to mold the Church’s message to the “lived experience” of “modern people,” but the cataloging of these experiences ironically usually ends up as an essentialized abstraction that is more of a projection of the secular, liberal prejudices of the catalogers than a true reflection of the gospel mandate to Christianize the world.

The weakness therefore of all of these theologies “from below” is that they begin with the presumption that the faith experiences of most Catholics are unproblematic and are therefore accurate barometers of the Holy Spirit speaking in the sensus fidelium. This presumption is denied, of course, and the assertion is made that such experiences are indeed put through a discernment process in light of Church teaching.

But I doubt this, and such comments seem more geared toward placating concerns over the obvious theological superficialities of such approaches than in taking seriously the notion that all “experience” must be judged in the light of the truths of Revelation. For instance, the rhetoric during the synodal process was decidedly unidirectional and heavily oriented toward the idea that the Church needs to listen to all voices (“Todos! Todos!”) but not that the faithful need to listen as well and that they must be open to judging their experiences in the light of Church teaching.

Hence, we have seen that the emphasis during the synodal process on “listening” and “accompaniment” was geared toward gauging which direction the Spirit wants the Church to move in terms of making fundamental changes in both praxis and doctrine. Beginning with the Instrumentum Laboris and then on through the synod itself, almost no emphasis was placed upon conversion, repentance, and the need to put on “the mind of Christ” before one can presume to speak on behalf of the Holy Spirit.

Therefore, the much-ballyhooed subject of “accompaniment” seems in this context to mean something ideological and theological rather than the more straightforward and largely unproblematic concept of pastoral gradualism as one deals with concrete individuals. Accompaniment seems instead to have come to mean a process of affirming the subjective non-sinfulness of what the Church teaches is an objective sin on the grounds of the “lived experiences” of “concrete people” in their “complex circumstances.” Furthermore, such a view of accompaniment has the downstream effect of treating any pastoral approach that emphasizes repentance and conversion as “pharisaical” and “rigid” and “harsh.” Therefore, what emerges is an accompaniment that evinces a broad pastoral latitudinarianism that pits truth against mercy and doctrine against pastoral practice.

However, this ends in baptizing the current Zeitgeist via the path of the gradual morphing of what is “tolerated” into a positive moral good, through the alchemy of theological correlationalism and its reduction of the “signs of the times” to the subjective cultural attitudes of the moment. By contrast, a properly Catholic theological analysis will insist on reading the signs of the times prophetically and in the light of the many biblical warnings about worldliness, and the Pauline admonition to “test everything,” in order to properly assess a true pastoral accompaniment which is geared toward repentance and conversion. Therefore, what we need now, more than ever, is a sober and prophetic analysis of just what the signs of the times are.

The Signs of the Times: Modernity as Constitutive Unbelief

Our age is an era of unbelief in the reality of transcendence. That is the preeminent “sign of our time.” However, one of the most obvious aspects of modern unbelief is that it is, strangely, real unbelief. In other words, we need to take seriously that the reason why more and more of our contemporaries in Western culture do not accept the Christian Gospel and are walking away from the Church in increasing numbers is because they simply do not agree with its fundamental narrative about reality. Nor does it matter if the thinking of the unbelievers is a muddled mess of historical misinformation and almost infantile notions of God. The Christian faith has lost the major institutions of our culture in a way so complete that I think most Christians scarcely begin to understand the thoroughgoing nature of our cultural defeat. And those institutions are the major engines that drive the pragmatic ethos of our times and create the ether within which we all move and breathe.

Therefore, it should be obvious, even though it seems to be missed by some of our pastoral leaders, that these same cultural institutions, all of which operate on the premise that one must construct a social order based on the assertion that God does not matter, are the large scale determinants of how people think today, and not the Church. And this is true even for many Church attendees, if not most.

Paul Kingsnorth refers to this spiritually suffocating, deeply rooted, and hegemonically structured modern ethos as “The Machine.” Von Balthasar called it “The System.” Simone Weil called it “The Apparatus.” And it does not matter if most of what passes for a “value system” in this ordo has been cribbed from Christianity. Because the values embraced are now so far downstream from Christianity, so attenuated, so spindled and mutilated and twisted beyond recognition, that it matters little from where they originally came. We may now live in the twilight of the old gods, but it is a twilight fast approaching the fullness of a moonless night so dark that only the breaking-in of a streaking comet or meteor will light the skies and wake the neighbors.

The brute fact is that many modern peoplei our culture believe that Christianity is profoundly antiquated insofar as they see it as a set of answers to questions that nobody is even asking anymore. Questions like “How can I be saved from my sins?” seem like totemistic holdovers from ancient fears of angry gods that require us to kill a few goats as appeasement. It smacks of a God, or gods, obsessed with moral purity, especially in the sexual sphere, and who demand some blood sacrifice, some pound of innocent flesh, to “set things right.” For many of our contemporaries, therefore, the story of the butchered, murdered Christ, whose death is “needed” by God before He will show us mercy, and which if we do not accept as true will send us into eternal conscious torment, seems like a Judaic iteration of vengeful pagan deities. These are realities therefore, however distorted and caricatured, that are driving the flight from faith.

And the Church herself is viewed within this essentially bestial schema as well. Unfortunately, an overly narrow reading of extra ecclesiam nulla salus (“outside of the Church there is no salvation”) turned the Church into a kind of sacramental protection racket where attendance and participation is demanded of you “for your salvation/protection” or else the God of love will send his capo regime thugs to break your legs and send you to hell because you got the “religion test” wrong. Many modern people thus view the God of Christianity as little more than a mafia don in the sky whose alleged “love” for us appears tied to some concept of granting beneficent favors to the properly terrified, and punishments to the recalcitrant holdouts. And given that this is their view of what it is we believe, then even if there really is a hell, they would prefer it to the Godfather’s heaven. They are all latter-day Huck Finns who, thinking helping his friend, the slave Jim, was a damnable offense, exclaimed, “Alright then, I will go to Hell.”

Obviously, I do not agree with such caricatures of the Christian worldview. However, this is precisely how many moderns view us. And more importantly, it is how they view the God we are proposing to them as their putative “savior.” Furthermore, the depth of their rejection can be gauged by their knowledge that in rejecting this imagined God of Christianity, they have left themselves adrift and with very few viable spiritual alternatives. And even as they feel deeply the clawing, grasping, and almost living rapaciousness of the nihilistic abyss below, and even as they stare, steely-eyed, at death, with the deep suspicion that what awaits us is precisely nothing but annihilation and un-existence, they still cannot accept this God of the Christians. They cannot accept a God who seems to be a cipher for either a baseless hope in fairytale happy endings or a bestial agent of oppression, coercion, and torments galore.

In the face of this rejection, many of those lost and anguished souls cling to some new-fangled and ersatz “spirituality,” and perhaps even some sense of a spirit that lives on after death. But they also know that there is an air of fakery about such notions and deep down are suspicious of it as a “too good to be true fantasy,” but also with an air of, “But, oh my, I do hope it is true.” It is a hope that functions as the religious-sociological equivalent of a 5-year-old’s Teddy Bear. These spiritualities are a kind of whistling past the graveyard “playacting” that do nothing to dislodge “The Apparatus” from their souls. Nor do they change their thoroughly secular worldview and the immanent reductive scientism that is the default mode of their public discourse and politics. In short, to borrow the language used by Charles Taylor, such spiritualities do not change in substantive ways their “social imaginary,” and we all continue to live as “buffered selves” in a purely “immanent frame.”

Therefore, today’s unbelief is a strangely muffled reality which abides in a bracketed latency; a nullification of God that is happy to remain as merely implied rather than explicitly affirmed, suspended in mid-air between doctrinaire unbelief and a miserable, cynical, agnostic apophaticism. It is more of a whispered insinuation rather than a bold Nietzschean bellowing. It possesses the self-awareness that it is an unbelief of exhaustion and deep regret more than a principled rejection of the divine. Furthermore, this kind of atheism is a quiet cultural desiccant that dries us up from within and leaves us all like a desert so bereft of vegetation that it cannot catch fire in any direction. Von Balthasar puts it succinctly:

Success, said Martin Buber, is not one of the names of God. But one of his names is consuming fire, and the Son came to cast this fire upon the earth. Is it possible that in today’s drought that fire should no longer have anything to consume?¹

In a deeply constitutive sense, for many of us God is not real and therefore not part of our social imaginary. But the archons that rule our immanence are very real to us, and so we are thrown back into the ordo of the strong gods of Blut und Erde. Thrown back on all of those Dionysian, elemental impulses, once constrained by a Christianity that frowned upon their apotheosis as a mixture of good and evil in need of ascetical weeding and reordering, but now unleashed again with renewed vigor. And they are unleashed this time without the usual emphasis upon their simple pleasantness as cathartic releases of endorphins and, therefore, of only a negligible significance. Instead, they are unleashed in a new way as basic human goods and part of the fundamental rights of human nature. They are therefore held up as the unassailable emblems of liberation from the life-denying God of the Christians. But these archons, and these elemental impulses, are jealous and rapacious gods whose deconstructive suspicions devour all higher goods, and thus we eventually degenerate into getting drunk on the couch in order to forget the day as we surf the channels.

And in the wake of the destruction of the higher goods of human existence comes a new, binding force from the lower regions, now aided and abetted by technological enhancement, that is addictive in nature and normalizes as essential what was once mere fetish, and which is the sacramental expression of the bourgeois cult of well-being which has been, along with “scientism,”—a simulacrum of the Kingdom of God on earth. This “Kingdom” is our “collective”: the collective of concupiscence.

Therefore, in the end, these boutique shop bourgeois spiritualities matter little and do even less. It is what happens when the spiritual corpse of Christianity rots and the decomposing crew of wee beasties arrive to clean it up; “spirituality” in this sense is a maggot, a dung beetle, or a fimicolous bacterium that inevitably arrives when the real gods have left the building. Were it a form of pre-Christian paganism then fine; there is sap in that wood, and it was a serious belief system no matter how bestial at times. But this rot is not that. It is mostly just a post-Christian shadow, like the ghostly images of evaporated bodies at Hiroshima.

At this point some will stop me and point out that the secularization of our culture has slowed, that the rise of the religious “nones” has dwindled to a trickle, that young people are rediscovering traditional forms of religion in an apparently genuine religious revival, and that there are an increasing number of public intellectuals, mostly “conservative” in orientation, who have begun to express a sympathy for the social value of religion, and of Christianity in particular. Ross Douthat characterizes these intellectuals as “believers in belief,” who see religious faith as a “Noble Lie” that they admire even if they cannot themselves conjure up a belief in the reality of any of it.

But I am not convinced by any of this that the deeply secular and radically immanentist social imaginary of our culture is about to change or is even on the cusp of change. Yes, liberal culture is intellectually bankrupt and yes, the older militant atheism has lost its platform if not its voice, and yes, people are searching for meaning in life in “spiritual things.” But it is all still being carried out in our horizontalist frame of mind and from within the categories of the therapeutic fixation on the “self” and its search for meaning. And as such, unless there is a real breakthrough into actual belief in the “really real” truth of Christian claims, then I fear that any such religious revivals will be stillborn.

To be sure, conversion is a complicated and often conflicted process that can evolve into a deeper faith conviction of actual truth, beyond its utility as an analgesic against the pain of meaninglessness. This happens all the time. We should not disparage such conversions but nurture them so that they can reach fruition.

But such conversions can also simply die on the vine and rot away. Initial excitement gives way to apathy, and, in many cases, resentment builds in the recognition that the Church too is a fraudulent Potemkin Village that hides the nothingness that lurks, crouching, behind the façade. This too happens with great frequency.

Why This Matters Pastorally

The raw and brutal acknowledgement of this reality is of critical importance for us, if for no other reason that it should be the most obvious of facts, and that this unbelief has real world consequences. Sadly, inattention to this reality is a form of ecclesial misjudgment that borders on pastoral malpractice, because such unbelief is not neatly confined to those outside of the Church.

This inattention to the obvious facts of unbelief, pointed out as far back as 1833 with John Henry Newman, has led to the almost comical spectacle of a self-referential Church spending time and treasure on the comparatively trivial topic of ecclesial structures. Ecclesial structures are indeed important, but to make them our central focus is a further sign of the de facto atheism of our time within the Church herself. Because a purely intramundane worldview always degenerates into the bureaucratic and managerial obsessions with “procedures” and “structures.” And our current ecclesial fixation on the flow chart of authority distribution also points toward another feature common to intramundane modernity: an unhealthy fixation on power.

This pastoral blindness to the true needs of our time is shocking. Rome “synodals” while the world burns. What this actually leads to is the rise, as I said, of a Potemkin Village reality to the Church of today, where the outward façade of Catholicism remains, and public sacramental participation by our hierarchs continues, but the façade masks an inner disposition of unbelief. Any theological argument will do, no matter how flawed on the level of adherence to the proper canons for doing real Catholic theology in an ecclesial context, so long as those arguments have enough of a superficial resonance with cultural memes about Jesus as the great “includer” of “everyone.”

By contrast, a Church grounded in a cruciform and kenotic view of Revelation—i.e., a Church grounded in the view that the crucified Christ is our primary hermeneutical key to the whole—cannot be a Church of such play acting. It cannot be a Church that interprets cruciformity as a call for a radical conversion to the world out of a stance of fundamental unbelief in the Church’s core Revelation. It can only be a Church that returns over and over to the great Tradition and its fundamental sources as the only divinely willed medium for bringing the whole Christ into historical time. It must also be a Church that views itself as a transparent medium for communicating Christ as the crucified “Lamb who was slain from all eternity.” The Church’s tradition is therefore nothing more than the full and faithful communication of the Paschal Event and all that this kenotic movement implies. Furthermore, the Church must actually live this kenotic truth in order to breathe fire into the doctrinal equations.

This is the only true “traditionalism”: the traditionalism that views the economy of salvation as the ever-deepening of our understanding of God as an eternal kenosis of love. This then will also by necessity be a traditionalism that is bold, creative, and unafraid of “descending” into the worldly world in order to plumb its full depths intellectually, but also to gain a connatural understanding of the abyss, the hell, that characterizes the monism of meaninglessness of the modern world. A true traditionalism of kenosis will be unafraid to occupy the “in betweenness” of our existence as befits our sojourn in the eschatological moment of the “not yet.” And it will be unafraid to read the Tradition as contextualized in this “in between” space as itself not yet complete and in no way an exhaustive accounting of the truths of Revelation. Thus, a kenotic traditionalism will be at once faithful to the Tradition and creatively open to new insights into that Tradition.

Then, and only then, will we be able to engage in a proper accompaniment of sinners, which is to say, an accompaniment to all of us. An accompaniment that realizes that those on the margins and peripheries are vulnerable and are thus potential victims of modernity and in danger of spiritual ruin. And therefore, that what they, and what we, need now more than anything is the palliative care of the field hospital of truth—a truth that is both lived and preached.

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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.

1. Razing the Bastions (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1993), p. 46. Many thanks to Conor Dugan for sending me this citation.