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The State of the Church

Perhaps the neatest thing in Lander this week was that J.D. Flynn gave a lecture for Wyoming Catholic College. That’s J.D. Flynn, co-founder of The Pillar and former editor-in-chief of the Catholic News Agency, the man whose website seems to have changed Vatican policy—that J.D. Flynn, right here in Nowhere, Wyoming.

I actually met and shook hands with J.D. in a coffee shop this morning. It came about this way. My favorite coffee joint is run by an old friend, Andrew Whaley, and one day Andrew joked that he would like to make every Wednesday “Bollywood Day,” meaning that staff are required to sing their interactions with customers and customers get a discount for singing their orders. Ever since then, I’ve made a point of singing my order every Tuesday, and Andrew always says no, it’s not Wednesday, and warns that on Tuesdays people who sing their orders actually pay more, etc. It’s our thing. Anyhow, I walked in this morning and noticed that the place was almost entirely empty, so I launched into my order with amateur baritone zeal—and only then, out of the corner of my eye, saw J.D. Flynn sitting at a table.

Yep, J.D. Flynn, the journalist, the maker and breaker of reputations, just sitting right there watching a WCC professor sing for his caffeine. Well, I thought, he has dedicated his life to the truth, so he might as well know the truth. I kept singing. But getting cream for my wife’s coffee took us right next to his table, and at that point I could either pretend I hadn’t been making a spectacle of myself in a public place or I could meet his eye boldly and introduce myself. So we shook hands.

J.D.’s lecture this evening was well done. He is funny, takes his topic seriously without taking himself too seriously, and he focused on telling great stories. The title was, “What Is the State of the Church? Hint: It Isn’t What You Think”. He began by describing the anxiety he encounters constantly about the state of the Church, and he recounted the reasons for it: scandals among the clergy, the Synodal Way, corruption in the Vatican, etc., etc. But then he told the story of a recent Nigerian martyr under Islamic persecution, and the story of a heroic Nicaraguan bishop who may soon be a martyr under the persecution of a corrupt government, and he advised his listeners that these are the real stories in the Church right now. There is in fact a kind of clericalism, he said, about assuming that stories about Rome are the only really important stories. He concluded by quoting John Henry Newman to the effect that in every age people make the mistake of thinking their age is the worst one yet, when in fact things are bad in every age.

The bottom line: You should get J.D. Flynn as a speaker. He’s great.

If I am asked to put on my professor hat and take a critical stance, then I would say that the lecturer needed to define terms more clearly. What precisely does “the state of the church” mean, and what does it mean to say that this state is good or better or bad or worse?

J.D. seemed to be addressing people who think of “the state of the Church” as “the probability that the Church will collapse soon”. Since our faith tells us that the Church will never collapse, then from the point of view of faith the probability that the Church will collapse is zero in every age, and so the Church is doing equally well in every age. But humanly speaking it is helpful to have encouraging stories to reassure us that in our age, too, the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the next era of the Church.

However, I expect that most of the people in the audience in Lander tonight would not define “the state of the Church” that way. Our faculty and students have no fear that the Church will collapse. For this audience, I expect that “the state of the Church” means something like “the probability that a given Catholic will stay Catholic and be saved” or “the probability that a given non-Catholic will become Catholic”, or perhaps simply “the probability that any one of my children will stay Catholic and be saved.” A higher probability means a better state, and a lower probability means a worse state. One could put this the other way around: “the probability that my child will be eaten by the surrounding secular culture,” and then a higher probability means a worse state for the Church. These are reasonable definitions, because the Lord’s mandate to the Church was to make disciples of all nations, and fundamental to making disciples is keeping the disciples she has. If the Church is not fulfilling her commission well, then in some real sense she is in a bad state.

Taken this way, it is immediately obvious that the Church has been in a better state in some centuries than others. Some centuries have seen great growth in the numbers of believers, while others have seen a precipitous falling away. From this point of view, the state of the Church in the United States right now is worse than other times, i.e., the probability that a given Catholic will stay with Christ, or that his child will stay with Christ, is much lower.

A further distinction has to do with the reason for the probability. If the probability of a given individual remaining Christian is low because of government persecution, then one can argue that the Church herself is doing well, i.e., carrying out her mandate well, but the effect is being impeded by external factors. But when the probability of a given individual remaining Christian is low precisely because of things the Church is doing, then the Church is indeed bearing her mandate badly. In this sense, J.D. Flynn’s opening litany of woes is not entirely answered by his ensuing stories of heroism.

In the end, I think J.D. Flynn knows all this and would agree with it. He said that he does what he does, including exposing corruption in the Church, because he thinks that public accountability is good for the Church’s governance and that good governance is crucial for the Church. In other words, he thinks that times when we have lacked public accountability have been worse for the Church and so not all eras have been equal in some sense. His lecture was great on the assumption of a certain definition of “state of the Church”, but he could have reached his audience better tonight by clarifying his definition and distinguishing it from other valid definitions.

A lecture on Abraham

I was recently out at the New England campus of Thomas Aquinas College, where I gave a lecture on the patriarch Abraham. It was a blessing to see the little pioneer community in their cavernous campus, planting a 50-year-old tradition on new soil. The lecture is available here:

https://www.thomasaquinas.edu/news/shaping-vessel-mercy-life-abraham

Here’s a funny coincidence: my father was out there a couple of years ago, and he lectured on Abraham Lincoln!

The Bible: inerrancy, inspiration, etc.

Questions from a man in the trenches, with answers from yours truly:

When we read a biblical passage, what is the criteria for determining when the biblical author is making an assertion; and when the author is expressing his opinion, or making an assumption? The same question would relate to the Church Fathers scientific and historical knowledge of their day, compared with the scientific and historical knowledge of our day.

The initial problem here is that most of us are unaware of the intricacies of our own speech. We think there is a simple on/off between assertion and non-assertion, and we think it is fairly clear which is which, so we want to know what are the two or three criteria one would need to detect the on/off in Scripture. Newman’s An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent is helpful for beginning to explore how many subtle distinctions there are within our own experience of thinking and claiming. Add in the further complications of multiple genres of text and distance in time and culture, and you can imagine that a list of criteria for determining when Scripture is or is not asserting could go on more or less indefinitely. How many ways are there for a human being to signal his intent linguistically? It would be like trying to make an exhaustive list of criteria for determining whether an individual from any given contemporary culture is serious or telling a joke.

How authority works

Last night I gave a lecture to interested students about why we should obey authorities. As I have listened to people and watched the Internet over the years, I have had the impression that most people in fact do not believe we have any obligation to obey authorities, so decided to enrich our local conversation with another viewpoint. Download here or listen here:

The lecture was followed by a lively Q&A. Download here or listen here:

Three Theologians Talk Annunciation

On the Feast of the Annunciation, Kyle Washut, Kent Lasnoski, and I had a round-table talk about the most famous treatment of the Annuncation, namely Bernard of Clairvaux’s Missus Est. Although we mostly stayed with the themes Bernard raises, we went on some fruitful tangents as well. All in all, I thought it was a great way to celebrate the day!

Here’s the video:

You can download an audio-only file by clicking h ere, or you can listen via this embedded player:

Humble seeds of a better liturgy

Aleitia.org recently published an excellent article on how lectors are often given bad advice. When lectors receive any training at all, which is rare enough, their preparation is borrowed from the many books on public speaking: Make eye contact, make a personal connection with the audience, etc. But the reality is that lectoring is not in the category of public speaking at all. It is public reading.

The point is well taken, and raises a question: How did we reach a point where people not only lector badly, but can’t even identify what category of action “lectoring” would go in?

Here’s my suggestion: We reached this point because “public reading” is no longer a thing. People do not read out loud to each other anymore. To read at Mass is not mere public reading, of course. It is a sacral action. So one might say that we have not only lost the “species,” i.e., sacred public reading, but we have even lost the “genus,” i.e., public reading itself.

Much of what needs to happen to fix lectoring needs to come from those in authority. But for a lasting difference, the deepest solutions to our problems rarely come from the top down. While we wait for priests or bishops to establish and enforce good practices, we need to take humbler steps at home: we need to read out loud to each other. To our kids, to our spouses, to our friends. Reading out loud in the home needs to become a thing again, a normal pastime.

For both inspiration and realistic, nitty gritty advice, I highly recommend the Read-Aloud Revival blog by Sarah McKenzie. Her book is superb as well. It can take as little as a few minutes once per week to sow the humble seeds of a future liturgical blessing.

All Saints: A Public Feast

On the Solemnity of All Saints, we stop to remember that salvation is not something that belongs primarily to me or to you. Salvation belongs to the Heavenly Jerusalem, to the City of God, and we are saved by joining that august community. Even though my friendship with Jesus is closer than any other, still my union with him is union in his body. Consequently, the Solemnity of All Saints resists being a merely private affair.

This is one reason why I love our yearly public procession. Students, faculty, and staff of Wyoming Catholic College gather downtown and parade through Main Street and up to the parish church with the Eucharist in the lead. We sing songs and walk, old and young, big and little. Continue reading “All Saints: A Public Feast”

An Introduction to the Gospel of John

Over the past few months, I have been using thinklikeaquinas.com to post content for my undergraduate theology students. So far we have been working our way through Aquinas’s Compendium of Theology, and I have posted short introductions to the chapters.

Our past two classes have been devoted to particular themes in the Gospel of John. Today, I posted a half-hour lecture offering a general introduction to John’s Gospel, together with a .pdf of my outline of how I think the text is organized. Some of you may be interested, so I thought I’d link to it from this, my main blog:

One and Triune God

A first look at Charles Taylor

Some friends and I have begun a series of conversations about Charles Taylors’ enormous book, A Secular Age. Taylor first defines “secularity” in terms of the “conditions of belief,” that is, what made it hard not to believe in God 400 years ago as compared to what makes it hard to believe in God today. He begins by describing the pre-modern consciousness and contrasting it with the modern consciousness, and then spends about 600 pages (practically a page per year) narrating the change from one to the other. Continue reading “A first look at Charles Taylor”

Basic Catholicism in a Crisis

As the crisis surrounding Cardinal McCarrick and the Vigano letters unfolds, I have not said much. For the most part, my thoughts have already been put out there by others, and to be honest, I’m too tired most of the time to write something fresh. But as I see more evidence that Catholics in the trenches are feeling their faith shudder under the impact of cascading revelations of corruption among Church officials, I think it might be good to review just a couple of basic points of Catholic belief.

Now, let’s be clear: I think the crisis is big. In fact, I am personally inclined to think that a tremendous punishment is looming over the Church, and I am inclined to think that the current crisis is the tip of that punishment. Preparation for next week’s classes required that I re-read the account of Sodom and Gomorrah, and I felt chills run up and down my spine. But still and all, we have to keep our heads. So, two basic points:

1. The validity of a sacrament does not depend on the personal holiness of the priest.

This was hammered out in the Donatist crisis way back in the time of St. Augustine. Jesus has given us the sacraments as channels of grace, and he was not so stupid as to make the efficacy of the sacrament depend on whether the priest is in a state of grace or not. If the sacrament of Baptism depended on the priest’s personal state of grace, for example, then no one could be sure of being baptized. You just can’t know from outward appearances whether a priest is in a state of grace–as we are re-discovering in a rather dramatic fashion.

So even when Cardinal McCarrick was abusing seminarians and doing whatever horrid things he did, the sacraments he celebrated were real sacraments. He himself increased his own guilt by celebrating them, but the people who received the Eucharist from him really did receive the body and blood of Jesus. (I received the Eucharist from McCarrick, so this is not an abstract statement for me.)

2. The pope’s teaching authority does not depend on his personal holiness.

Whatever you think of Pope Francis, to the degree that he engages his papal office, to that degree his teachings have authority. There have been some truly stinky popes in history who nonetheless left us authoritative teachings. Jesus was not so stupid as to make the authority of the Magisterium depend on the state of grace of the bishops.

So yes, Pope Francis has taught some things with real authority. As annoying as it is that Cupich seemed to rank environmental concerns over care for abuse victims, still and all, Pope Francis’s statements about the environment mostly continue and confirm statements made by the two previous popes. The fact that Pope Francis devoted an encyclical to the issue gives real magisterial clout to the Church’s position on the environment.

Surprisingly, Pope Francis has not engaged his authority to any great degree on a lot of divisive issues. Amoris Laetitia has a low rank among magisterial documents, and is easily overshadowed by previous documents. Even the change to the Catechism on the death penalty is a low-level intervention, technically speaking. In theory, Pope Francis could have issued a papal bull with “I define, declare, and decree” and so on and so forth on any issue he wanted, so it is remarkable how little he has actually engaged his authority in this stormy pontificate.

Amidst the real calamity, let’s keep our heads. The crisis does not trace back to Pope Francis: Our Lady of Fatima was warning people to do penance for sexual impurity way back in the nineteen teens. And Jesus knew these kinds of times were coming. Worse times are probably still to come. But let’s keep on frequenting the sacraments and reverencing the authority of the Magisterium. Just because the world has gone crazy doesn’t mean you have to.