Rod Dreher's Blog, page 656

Muscle, Memory & the Death of St. Stan’s

A Catholic reader, reflecting on my post about memory, society, and the Benedict Option, sent in this story, which I publish with his permission. It’s amazing, just amazing:

Because I think it’s related to the BenOp in some remote way, and because it has to do with memory, and because my sister and I were just talking about it and feeling sad/mad, let me tell you about St. Stanislaus, in the heart of Fell’s Point in Baltimore.

My sister moved there in about 1993. I got there in 1996. Fell’s Point was already well on its way to gentrifying, but it still had a really interesting mix of old Polish ladies, aging frat boys, hippies, dock workers, etc. St. Stan’s still had a Catholic grade school, as did another Catholic church a few blocks up, so there were still families there, obviously, all living in aging row homes in walking distance of the water, tourist traps and about a bajillion bars, some of which opened at 6 am for people coming off third shift. I loved it there.

At any rate, St. Stan’s was a focal point of the weirdness. It was a beautiful old Polish church with some very devout old ladies. It was also major part of the local culture. The enormous and raucous Fell’s Point Festival saw every drunk in town along with thousands of tourists stumbling around the place, including the parking lot of St. Stan’s, which ran its own beer garden. They had a huge Coors Light sign hanging across the buildings. They regularly had polka masses, which instead of the church were held in the basement, in folding chairs. The reasoning was that the old ladies could not walk up the stairs top the main chapel. But I seem to recall that they had to walk down into the basement and back up out of it. Maybe there was an elevator, but we never saw it. I like to think there wasn’t one. At any rate, one week I was there with my sister and her future husband. He and I sat in our chairs in the back row. I kicked something under my seat. It was a handle of Crown Royal.

For some reason they did their communion line backwards. They started with the people in the back, who ran into the people coming after them as they tried to get back to their seats. It was like a ballet. They made it work, but we screwed it up and botched the line entirely. We were at a stand still until an old nun put both her hands directly in the middle of my back and shoved me back into a seat without saying a word. It was awesome.

At any rate, St. Stan’s closed in 2000, just a few months before I left town. As such, I kind of feel like I was there for the end of the “real” Fell’s Point. I know that’s how every gentrifier feels, but honestly, something changed. They were planning to use the space for ridiculously expensive townhomes. Who needs a school when the place is for young, rich college grads who have no kids? And the dock workers and drunks can live somewhere else, as that was PRIME real estate.

At any rate, all these years later, out of curiosity, I tried to find out what became of the church. Turns out the local parishioners wanted it to become a museum of Polish history. The Franciscan order that owned it had other ideas, which included $800,000 townhomes. The Franciscans won, but they never did put in the $800,000 townhomes. They did save the church, though. So what did it become? It is actually worse than I thought:

http://www.sanctuarybody.com/our-studio

It’s  GYM. Holy balls, it’s a GYM! I’d rather it was… anything but a gym! Townhomes would have been better. Worse, it’s a gym that tries to build on the building’s history by talking about itself as a SPIRITUAL gym. So yeah. Memory. In the service of…http://blog.thenewcenturyschool.com/2013/05/24/sanctuary-bodyworks-an-exercise-haven/

Gag. Gag!

I know that’s not fair. Good health is great. But I remember that Crown Royal and the Coors Light beer garden and the angry nun, who was stronger than any gym rat I have ever met and I think… this is progress?

Now listen. I am not a heritage absolutist. If I wanted it to be something else I should have bought it. But gadzooks.

And yeah. I guess the world is a different place and 120 years after the thing was built, it’s not like that neighborhood had any kids in it that would benefit from the school because…

But wait a minute…

What happened to the school? Seeing that there aren’t really kids down there and there’s no need for a school, I guess it was time to make room for…

THE SCHOOL!

That’s right. Directly next to the church, where the school was, you can now find… a school. It’s called “The New Century School.” It’s for ages two through fifth grade. It’s doing so well that they are adding a middle school one grade at a time.

http://www.thenewcenturyschool.com/

Got that? It’s a special school. Where you learn to become fluent in Chinese and Spanish.

So. Not enough Catholic kids in the area to support a private school. But a school for people who for some reason need to know Chinese and Spanish? Can’t build ’em fast enough.

Yeah, well… who can afford tuition at St. Stan’s?

Dunno. But the tuition at The New Century School is about $12,000 per year. I don’t have the data in front of me, but I bet that St. Stan’s tuition was maybe half that, and the church paid the difference. And that they couldn’t support it anymore so they closed it. But it turns out that there are lots of people in Baltimore who are interested in a private education, and are willing to pay $12,000 a year. They just want the focus to be on foreign languages.

And of course, you and I know that the Catholic church has no access to or interest in language instruction because…

Wait a minute. What I meant to say is that the Catholic church OWNS the discussion about access to and interest in language instruction. And that if any institution in the whole world could lay claim to teaching foreign languages to young people, it’d be the Catholic church. But instead of running that school, they walked away and let someone else run it and charge the full boat tuition they needed.

That’s not a criticism. Just an observation. And clearly, the world is a different place and downtown Baltimore probably doesn’t need a gargantuan cathedral and a school every three blocks like they once did. And maybe upper middle class strivers would be less willing to pay tuition at a language school if the tuition also got them some religious instruction as part of the deal, although I think that the presence of Catholic schools in the wealthy exurbs argues otherwise.

Balls. Either way, I feel compelled to go drink beer in their parking lot, just on principle. And to find that old nun, take her into the gym and have her crush everyone in a bench pressing contest. I am hoping the Crown Royal is still in the basement. I’l be needing it.

All of which is to say, memory is a really interesting concept. But it’s one that can be commodified just like anything else. Look at it Rod. LOOK AT IT! One of the links above actually uses a header that says, “He sells sanctuary” in discussing the owner of the gym. I appreciate the reference to the great song by The Cult (The Cult!), but still. And this. Just… this:

“If a former cathedral strikes you as being an incongruous site for a gym (the one divine, the other traditionally considered fully secular), think again. Owner Brandon Hallock’s choice of the former church to open his “bodyworks” was quite deliberate. Consider the name he gave it: Sanctuary—it’s not just a playful take on the building’s origins. Mr. Hallock says he wanted to create a “more therapeutic, spa-like, relaxing atmosphere—a retreat from urban living.” He even kept as is or repurposed architectural elements from the church to maintain the peaceful ambience this hallowed place continues to impart. Though no longer a place of religious worship, and re-created to focus on the physical body, it is nevertheless inherently spiritual.”

More. Therapeutic. Just thought I’d point that out for you.

Again, St. Stan’s couldn’t fill the seats. Couldn’t pay the bills. It basically had to close, and at least someone managed to find something to do with it. From a very personal standpoint, however, that transformation made that a less interesting place. And a lesser place. For me. I know. It made it a better place for people who can afford $800,000 townhomes and want their kids to be tri-lingual in Chinese, Spanish and English and can afford $12,000 per year. So they get that place.

Meh. I have my own memories. Angry nuns, Crown Royal, Coors Light and polka masses in the basement. That’s what I find therapeutic. I don’t know the details, so I can’t say that the gym guy or the parishoners or the bishop or the Franciscans did anything wrong here. Reality is reality and neighborhoods change. The church is building schools in other areas, so maybe it’s a win, writ large.

But I would not join that gym, Rod. I wouldn’t!

The reader adds in a follow-up e-mail:

Just in case you didn’t read the whole link, Rod, I decided I might ruin your day by pointing this out:

“The architects who transformed the space skillfully combined new industrial brick and steel with the existing graceful arches and faded though still ornate painted designs. Images of saints, their facial features somewhat rubbed away by time, hover on ceilings and walls as if sanctioning your fitness efforts.”

Yes. As if! Because they certainly would! Yes, my son, THIS is why I gave myself to martyrdom: So you can impress with rock-hard abs and toned buttocks. YES, my daughter, one more rep so you can justify wearing that halter top to Preakness this year!

Yes, Rod. Here they are dismantling the pipe organ. Look at the faded Saints.

You and I have enough theology to know that these saints are SCREAMING for solid pecs and perky breasts and therapeutically enhanced upper arms. DO they seem dismayed in these photos? I suspect it has to do with their disappointment in the overall level of TONE they see in the world.

Yes, Rod. With their facial features somewhat rubbed away by time, it’s as if these saints sanction our fitness efforts. Hovering, as they are, on the walls and ceilings.

I have nothing to add to this. It’s perfect. I would point out that on its website, Sanctuary Bodyworks sells itself as, get this: “Your Body, Our Temple.”

Could their possibly be a more powerful symbol of what we have lost as Christianity has faded from our collective life? What was once a place to worship God and perfect one’s soul is now a place for worship of Self and perfection of one’s body.

We deserve what we get.

What Francis Does vs. What He Says

Nice, huh?:

Pope Francis today asked for forgiveness for scandals that have taken place in the Church, the Vatican and also in the city of Rome.

Before beginning his catechesis at his weekly general audience, in which he underlined the need to remain loyal to the promises we give to our children, the Holy Father said:

“In the name of the Church, I would like to ask you for forgiveness for the scandals that have happened in these recent times, whether in Rome or in the Vatican, for which I ask forgiveness.”

 

Speaking much, much louder than Pope Francis’s words is his granting of the prominent place of Belgian Cardinal Godfried Danneels in the Synod on the Family now underway in Rome.

There is no charitable way to read this. In 2010, a secret recording of a meeting Danneels had with Bishop Roger Vangheluwe and the bishop’s 42-year-old nephew, whom he had molested throughout virtually his entire childhood, was made public. The man told the cardinal that he needed help. Excerpts from a Reuters story of the time:

What do you really want?” asks Danneels, cutting the victim off by saying he already knows the story and doesn’t need to hear it again. When the man says “I give you the responsibility, I can’t decide … you should do what you think should be done, because I don’t know how this whole system works.”

“Do you want this to be made public?” the cardinal asks. “I leave that to you,” the victim responds. Then Danneels begins his effort to convince him to keep the lid on the problem: “The bishop will step down next year, so actually it would be better for you to wait.”

“No, I can’t agree that he takes his leave in glory, I can’t do that,” the victim replies.

The transcript is too long for me to translate all of it here and the only English version I’ve seen is too rough to be recommended. In any case, the exchange only gets worse. At one point, Danneels ducks and weaves trying to fend off the victim’s pleas to inform the Church hierarchy about Vangheluwe’s misdeeds. He says he has no authority over the bishop, only the pope does. When the victim suggests Danneels arrange a meeting with the pope, the cardinal gives the flip reply: “The pope isn’t that easy to reach.” A little later, he says: “I don’t think you’d do yourself or him a favor by shouting this from the rooftops.”

At another point, Danneels suggests the victim admit his guilt and ask for forgiveness. “Who do I have to ask forgiveness from?” the surprised man asks. When the cardinal remarks that going public would put the bishop in a quandary, the victim replies: “I’ve been living my whole life in a quandary … I was brought up Catholic. I see the institution is wavering, I read the newspapers and so I think I have a duty to do this. How can I get my children to believe something that has such a background? I can’t. That’s just always shoving it onto the next generation. And everything stays the same. That’s not what the Church is for.”

When Danneels suggests the victim may be trying to blackmail the Church, the man pleads with him to take up this case, saying there has to be someone in the Church who can handle it because he cannot bring himself to expose his uncle on his own. “We were forced to get married by him, our children were baptised by him, how can I explain this to them?” he asked. “Yesterday I said to my oldest son, look, this is what happened to me. They must know what has happened.”

The exchange goes on with Danneels repeatedly arguing he has no power to do anything and that the whole story would come out if Vangheluwe were forced to resign. That’s when the victim asked: “Why do you feel so sorry for him and not for me? … You’re always trying to defend him. I thought I was going to get some support, but I have to sit here and defend myself against things I can’t do anything about.”

There’s more, but you get the drift. I apologize for the long quote, but it’s important to read the details here, to get a sense of how morally repulsive the Belgian cardinal’s actions are. This is the kind of man Pope Francis chose as a Synod on the Family father. 

There are other reasons why the wicked Danneels, who the retired archbishop of Mechelen-Brussels, has no business at a Synod on the Family (read about them here). But his behavior in the Vangheluwe case is the most outrageous. Pope Francis can apologize all he wants to the victims, but his favoring of Danneels, who by his own account helped engineer Francis’s accession to the papal throne via his “mafia club,” speaks louder, and more definitively.

This Danneels scandal was widely reported at the time. There is no way that Francis didn’t know about it before he appointed this elderly cretin to the Synod. If this Pope really understood what the abuse scandal has done to victims and their families, and to the credibility of the Roman Catholic Church and its leadership, the thought of appointing Danneels to the Synod on the Family — the Family! — would have been unthinkable.

It is always, always, always more important to watch what popes and bishops do about sex abuse rather than to listen to what they say. Talk is cheap grace.

The Struggle of Memory Against Forgetting

Two quotes to start us off:

“The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” — Milan Kundera

“A crucial turning point in that earlier history occurred when men and women of good will turned aside from the task of shoring up the Roman imperium and ceased to identify the continuation of civility and moral community with the maintenance of that imperium. What they set themselves to achieve instead—often not recognising fully what they were doing—was the construction of new forms of community within which the moral life could be sustained so that both morality and civility might survive the coming ages of barbarism and darkness.” — Alasdair MacIntyre

On the flight home from Richmond, I read social anthropologist’s Paul Connerton’s 1989 book How Societies Remember, which had been mailed to me by a reader who said I should read it for research on the Benedict Option book. It is thin but very dense and unsexy, but it hit me with the force of revelation. When I read its final lines as the plane was taxiing to the gate in Baton Rouge, I felt the last conceptual piece fall into place to write this book. Reader, I owe you more than I can say. I am going to try to sum up Connerton’s argument, and relate it briefly to the Benedict Option.

Connerton begins by saying that “our experience of the present very largely depends upon our knowledge of the past,” and that “participants in any social order must presuppose a shared memory.” Those memories, he contends, “are conveyed and sustained by (more or less) ritual performances.” Finally, he argues that these performances have to be embodied to be effective. Let’s unpack this.

When a new regime or social order takes over, the first thing it does is to find ways to sever the society’s connection to its past. ISIS is now doing that in the areas it controls, by erasing any physical embodiment of the memory of the area’s pre-Islamic past. “The more total the aspirations of the new regime, the more imperiously will it seek to introduce an era of forced forgetting,” says Connerton.

ISIS is an extreme example, of course, but this happens in all societies that are undergoing revolutionary change. The Communist regimes of Russia and Eastern Europe tried this too. Echoing Kundera, Connerton says that the “there were people [there] who realised that the struggle of citizens against state power is the struggle of their memory against forced forgetting.”

Connerton discusses three types of memories — personal (something in the past that the individual experienced), cognitive (something in the past that the individual knows from having learned it second hand), and habit-memory, which he defines as “our having the capacity to reproduce a certain performance.” It’s like muscle memory: we may not remember how we learned the thing, but we can recall it when necessary. Reading this, I recalled the experience of Father George Calciu, a Romanian Orthodox priest, who was able to celebrate the Divine Liturgy while in a Communist prison because he had committed it to memory. The liturgy reminded him of who he was and what was true, in a time and place in which the authorities brutally tried to force him to forget. Connerton calls this third kind of remembering “habit-memory.”

When a society really wants to remember something as a society — e.g., mythical, religious, or historic stories that tell a people who they are and what they must do — it invents commemorative ceremonies around those stories. It is not enough to tell a particular story; the story has to be “a cult enacted.” That is, the story must convey a metaphysical truth, and thus has to be granted sacred status as an event that is taken out of the past and in some mystical way re-presented in the present. This is, of course, what the Orthodox Divine Liturgy and the Catholic Mass do. Rites are ways that societies maintain a living connection with their past, and enter mystically into it. Connerton says that “performative utterances are as it were the place in which the community is constituted and recalls to itself the fact of its constitution.”

In simpler language, this means that the words spoken in a rite both bind its participants together and remind the people who they are, as a people. Further, the most effective rituals involve the body. Connerton:

To kneel in subordination is not to state subordination, nor is it just to communicate a message of submission. To kneel in subordination is to display it through the visible, present substance of one’s body. Kneelers identify the disposition of their body with their disposition of subordination. Such performative doings are particularly effective, because unequivocal and materially  substantial , ways of ‘saying'; and the elementariness of the repertoire from which such ‘sayings’ are drawn makes possible at once their performative power and their effectiveness as mnemonic systems.

The most effective rituals do not vary, and are removed in the form of speech and song from everyday life. And:

Finally, ritualised posture, gesture and movement, instead of flexibly combining to impart a variety and ambiguity of information as in what we conventionally describe as everyday situations, is restrictive in pattern, and hence easily predictable and easily repeatable, from one act to the next and from one ritual occasion to the next.

(My margin notes at this point read: “The lack of ritual in most Protestantism and much of modern Catholicism — does it impede our ability to remember?”)

Connerton says that modernity is a condition of deliberate forgetting, of choosing to deny the power of the past to affect our actions in the present, so as to create a new condition of existence marked by the individual’s freedom of choice. Capitalism requires this deliberate forgetting, and facilitates it, and rites we invent in modern times “are palliative measures, façades erected to screen off the full implications of this vast worldwide clearing operation.” Here is the core:

Under the conditions of modernity the celebration of recurrence can never be anything more than a compensatory strategy, because the principle of modernity itself denies the idea of life as a structure of celebrated recurrence. It denies credence to the thought that the life of the individual or a community either can or should derive its value from the acts of consciously performed recall, from the reliving of the prototypical. Although the process of modernisation does indeed generate invented rituals as compensatory devices, the logic of modernisation erodes those conditions which make acts of ritual re-enactment, of recapitulative imitation, imaginatively possible and persuasive. For the essence of modernity is economic development, the vast transformation of society precipitated by the emergence of the capitalist world market. And capital accumulation, the ceaseless expansion of the commodity form through the market, requires the constant revolutionising of production, the ceaseless transformation of the innovative into the obsolescent. The clothes people wear, the machines they operate, the workers who service the machines, the neighborhoods they live in — all are constructed today to be dismantled tomorrow, so that they can be replaced or recycled. Integral to the accumulation of capital is the repeated intentional destruction of the built environment. Integral too is the transformation of all signs of cohesion into rapidly changing fashions of costume, language and practice. This temporality of the market and of the commodities that circulate through it generates an experience of time as quantitative and as flowing in a single direction, an experience in which each moment is different from the other by virtue of coming next, situated in a chronological succession of old and new, earlier and later. The temporality of the market thus denies the possibility that there might co-exist qualitatively distinguishable times, a profane time and a sacred time, neither of which is reducible to the other. The operation of this system brings about a massive withdrawal of credence in the possibility that there might exist forms of life that are exemplary because prototypical. The logic of capital tends to deny the capacity any longer to imagine life as a structure of exemplary recurrence.

What does this mean? He’s telling us that in modernity, the market is our god. It conditions what we imagine to be possible. We can’t dream that life should be ordered by rituals that bound and define our experience, and link it to the past, to a sacred order. There is no sacred order; there is only the here and now, the tangible. The world exists to be remade to fit our desires. There are no ways of living that we should conform our lives to, no stories that tell us how we should live. When Connerton says that in modernity, and under capitalism, we can hardly “imagine life as a structure of exemplary recurrence,” he’s saying that we can no longer easily believe that we should live according to set patterns of thought and action because they conform to eternal truths.

It’s like this. On my trip, I had several conversations with conservative church folks in middle to upper middle class social groups. Washington DC and Charlottesville, Virginia, (home of the University of Virginia), are full of such people. My interlocutors told me how hard it is to get many people in their circles to believe in anything prophetic in the Christian way of life that would prevent them and their children from participating fully in the meritocracy. When these are rival goods, mom and dad know which kingdom they serve. A man and a woman ask their pastor to speak to their college-age child, who wants to become a missionary, and ask him to talk her out of it; they want her to be successful, not to throw her life away.

In most cases, I understood my interlocutors to say, these in their social circles are not liberals. Quite the opposite, actually. What they appear to want, though, is a faith that baptizes the American Way of Life. Anything that conflicts with that they resist. Consequently, they cannot see how the American Way of Life, with its relentless valorization of innovation and individualism, annihilates Christianity by assimilating it.

You can have left-wing Moralistic Therapeutic Deism and you can have right-wing Moralistic Therapeutic Deism, but neither one is Christianity. Both are the pseudo-religion of the Rich Young Ruler from the Gospel parable. Every single one of us is subject to this temptation, by virtue of the fact that we are Americans, and we live in modernity.

It occurred to me while reading this that the most dangerous enemy we face is not the State, and what it might yet do to individual Christians and their institutions and businesses. The most lethal foe is the Empire of Amnesia, which induces us at every turn to forget who we are, to forget who God is, and to forget what He wants from us. The Empire of Amnesia does not force us to forget our sacred Story as the Soviet empire did to believers; rather, it entices us to forget so we can set free our passions. So we can have our best life now. So we can be as gods. And as Ross Douthat once wrote, “no conservative dream, in the 400 years from Francis Bacon until now, has proven strong enough to stand in its way.”

This is the mission of the Benedict Option: to turn away from the Empire of Amnesia, to build “new forms of community” that can offer sustained resistance to it, and to give ourselves, our children, and our communities resilience in the face of its power, and ultimately to create, over time, the conditions for the resurrection of Christian civilization.

As historian Robert Louis Wilken has written, the early church, embedded within the Roman Empire, built up its particular culture for the sake of nurturing its inner life. The Church needed material means — art, architecture, language, ritual — to tell the sacred Story to itself. Wilken:

Material culture and with it art, calendar and with it ritual, grammar and with it language, particularly the language of the Bible—these are only three of many examples (monasticism would be another) that could be brought forth to exemplify the thick texture of Christian culture, the fullness of life in the community that is Christ’s form in the world.

Nothing is more needful today than the survival of Christian culture, because in recent generations this culture has become dangerously thin. At this moment in the Church’s history in this country (and in the West more generally) it is less urgent to convince the alternative culture in which we live of the truth of Christ than it is for the Church to tell itself its own story and to nurture its own life, the culture of the city of God, the Christian republic. This is not going to happen without a rebirth of moral and spiritual discipline and a resolute effort on the part of Christians to comprehend and to defend the remnants of Christian culture.

The Benedict Option, as I see it, does not require Christians to leave the world behind and retreat to Anabaptist communes. It will require some Christians to leave their job, or leave the place where they are now living; I think of my Texas friend Robert Hutchins, about whom I wrote in Crunchy Cons, where he told the story of how he quit his high-paying but soul-sucking job at a defense contractor and embraced the life of a farmer, to save both his life and his family’s. The Benedict Option will require Christians who live in the world, and who want to be a “faithful presence” there, to work as never before to nurture their own inner lives, and the inner lives of their communities, for the sake of remembrance. If we do not tell our own Story, we will be colonized by other stories.

Telling our own Story effectively, though, requires far more than reading books, as Wilken avers. This is where the third part of Paul Connerton’s book is so helpful. Note well this passage:

What, then, is being remembered in commemorative ceremonies? Part of the answer is that a community is reminded of its identity as represented by and told in a master narrative. This is a collective variant of what I earlier called personal memory; that is to say a making sense of the past as a kind of collective autobiography, with some explicitly cognitive components. But rituals are not just further instances of humanity’s now much touted propensity to explain the world to itself by telling stories. A ritual is not a journal or a memoir. Its master narrative is more than a story told and reflected on; it is a cult enacted. An image of the past, even in the form of a master narrative, is conveyed and sustained by ritual performances. And this means that what is remembered in commemorative ceremonies is something in addition to a collectively organised variant of personal and cognitive memory. For if the ceremonies are to work for their participants, if they are to be persuasive to them, then those participants must be not simply cognitively competent to execute the performance: they must be habituated to those performances. This habituation is to be found … in the bodily substrate of the performance.

What he means is that to remember who we are, our Story must be ritualized in some public ceremony, or ceremonies. Those rituals must not be simply commemorative; there has to be something more going on — “a cult enacted,” which is to say, an idea taking material form. And it must be not simply something we carry in our heads, but something that is in our bodies. It must be a “habitual memory” — something we carry with us without thinking about it. “In habitual memory the past is, as it were, sedimented into the body,” writes Connerton.

How does this work? Connerton’s explanation is complex, and hard to summarize. The essence of it, however, is that the Word must be made Flesh. We must live out the ideas in the Story so deeply that they become second nature to us — not ideas, but practices. The beginning pianist knows how to read music, but he cannot really play the piano if is conscious that he’s reading the notes. He becomes a pianist when he can play fluidly, without thinking about it. He has become habituated to music.

So it must be with us and our Christianity, especially in this time of mass forgetting. Take a look at this terrific National Review interview with the philosopher and motorcyle maintainer Matthew B. Crawford — who, I should say, is not a Christian — about his new book The World Beyond Your Head. 

According to the prevailing notion, freedom manifests as “preference-satisfying behavior.” About the preferences themselves we are to maintain a principled silence, out of deference to the autonomy of the individual. They are said to express the authentic core of the self, and are for that reason unavailable for rational scrutiny. But this logic would seem to break down when our preferences are the object of massive social engineering, conducted not by government “nudgers” but by those who want to monetize our attention. My point in that passage is that liberal/libertarian agnosticism about the human good disarms the critical faculties we need even just to see certain developments in the culture and economy. Any substantive notion of what a good life requires will be contestable. But such a contest is ruled out if we dogmatically insist that even to raise questions about the good life is to identify oneself as a would-be theocrat. To Capital, our democratic squeamishness – our egalitarian pride in being “nonjudgmental” — smells like opportunity. Commercial forces step into the void of cultural authority, where liberals and libertarians fear to tread. And so we get a massive expansion of an activity — machine gambling — that leaves people compromised and degraded, as well as broke. And by the way, Vegas is no longer controlled by the mob. It’s gone corporate. And this gets back to what I was saying earlier, about how our thinking is captured by obsolete polemics from hundreds of years ago. Subjectivism — the idea that what makes something good is how I feel about it — was pushed most aggressively by Thomas Hobbes, as a remedy for civil and religious war: Everyone should chill the hell out. Live and let live. It made sense at the time. This required discrediting all those who claim to know what is best. But Hobbes went further, denying the very possibility of having a better or worse understanding of such things as virtue and vice. In our time, this same posture of value skepticism lays the public square bare to a culture industry that is not at all shy about sculpting souls – through manufactured experiences, engineered to appeal to our most reliable impulses. That’s how one can achieve economies of scale. The result is a massification of the individual.

It’s a terrific book, and one that argues for approaching knowledge as craft, knowledge as something that you acquire not through cognition but through apprenticing yourself to a practice — and practicing until it becomes what Connerton would call habit-memory. Much of our Christianity in America today is what the sociologist would call “dispositional” (i.e., something that stays inside our heads), but it needs to become habitual if it is going to provide the thick, deep roots needed to embed the Story within us in this time of darkness and forgetting. Jane Jacobs — who was not, to my knowledge, a religious person — said that we are living in a Dark Age, a barbarian time, because we are without roots. “During a Dark Age, the mass amnesia of a survivors becomes permanent and profound,”she writes. “The previous way of life slides into an abyss of forgetfulness, almost as decisively as if it had not existed.”

We cannot resist sliding into the abyss without habitual practices that enact the Story. Intellection — reading, criticism, creating syllogisms in sermons, etc. — is one thing, but it’s not the most important thing. Habitual practices, especially those that involve the body, is. One of the most important gifts the Rule of St. Benedict gives us today is a sense of the importance of order in daily life. Yes, the monks preserved memory by copying books, laboriously. But they also did it by praying liturgically, singing the same songs, saying the same prayers at the same time. You might say it imposed sacred order on their lives, but I would say it rather revealed sacred order, and created the space within the community and the imaginations of its members through which God could manifest himself.

Yes, ritual can become dead. Ritual is not a magic incantation; without an active sacramental imagination, which has been dissipated by modernity (and the recovery of which is an indispensable part of the Ben Op), religious ritual is just so much repetitive mumbo-jumbo. But rituals of the Christian life are not simply what is said and done in church. Rituals of the Christian life are the way we live, enacted narratives that we receive, and accept as sacred, and around which we build our lives.

How do we Christians do this in the 21st century, shoring up the fragments against our ruin? The day may come — will come — when we have to resist the State and its agents, as well as its master, the Market. If we don’t wake up and understand how so many of the ways of approaching the world that we take for granted in modernity blind us to the possibility of experiencing God; and if we don’t form strongholds of resistance and rebellion to the Empire of Amnesia, and sediment them into our bodies, the Empire will conquer and convert us away from Christianity without incident.

Indeed, it already has to a great extent — and we don’t even know it. MacIntyre:

What matters at this stage is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us. And if the tradition of the virtues was able to survive the horrors of the last dark ages, we are not entirely without grounds for hope. This time however the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have already been governing us for quite some time. And it is our lack of consciousness of this that constitutes part of our predicament.[Emphasis mine — RD] We are waiting not for a Godot, but for another — doubtless very different — St. Benedict.”

To fight the power requires recovering memory, and battling amnesia. So, again: how might we Christians do this in a secular, post-Christian age? Answering that question will require a book. I’m on it.

 

Louisiana’s Next Governor: A Democrat?

New polling out today, ten days before Louisiana’s fall general election, suggests that the governor’s race runoff will be between Republican US Sen. David Vitter, and Democrat John Bel Edwards, a veteran member of the Louisiana House:

Edwards is now in first place at 24 percent, while Vitter is at 21 percent; Lt. Governor Jay Dardenne, 8 percent and Public Service Commission Scott Angelle, 7 percent, according to the poll.

A large percentage of voters — 37 percent — remain undecided. Three percent of those questioned declined to answer.

The gap between Edwards and Vitter widens when the results are narrowed to the “most likely” voters — the 400 respondents who profess to being either “very” or “extremely” interested in the Oct. 24 gubernatorial election.

Among those voters, the results are Edwards, 32 percent; Vitter, 24 percent; Dardenne, 10 percent; and Angelle, 10 percent..

More:

In a hypothetical runoff, Edwards, with 48 percent, leads Vitter, with 32 percent, among registered voters.

That margin jumps to Edwards, with 52 percent, and Vitter, with 33 percent, among most likely voters, according to the poll.

Pollster John Grimm said the numbers are based on those likely to vote in the primary.

Dardenne and Angelle are splitting the anti-Vitter Republican vote. Vitter is disliked and distrusted among many Republicans, and you see bumper stickers around that say “ABV: Anybody But Vitter.” My guess is that the huge number of undecideds at this point are Republicans who can’t decide which of the two un-Vitters to vote for.

Under the state’s election rules, the top two vote-getters, regardless of party, advance to the runoff. Most voters in the state are Republicans. If Vitter and one of the other Republicans make it to the runoff, the other Republican will probably beat him, given how stained Vitter is with scandal. But if it’s Vitter and Edwards, there’s a very good chance that the Democrat will emerge triumphant from the runoff. Why?

Though he is way ahead in fundraising, Vitter has high negatives, especially among women, who don’t appreciate his being caught in a prostitution scandal in 2007. Apparently in Louisiana, if you’re a politician who’s going to cheat on his wife, you can only get away with it if you are charming, like Edwin Edwards; Vitter is many things, but charming is not one of them. On the other hand, Vitter easily won re-election in 2010.

The Democrat, John Bel Edwards (no relation to Edwin), is a solid legislator who is widely respected. He’s a pro-life, pro-gun Catholic Democrat from rural Louisiana, and a West Point graduate who served as an Army Ranger. He benefits from the fact that the Republicans, who have run both the executive (under Gov. Bobby Jindal) and legislative branches of government since 2007, have presided over a budgetary disaster, including the evisceration of LSU. Often, Edwards was the loudest voice standing up to Jindal. Quite a few Republican voters motivated by good-government concerns wouldn’t have much trouble voting for Edwards, if only because Jindal has so tarnished the GOP brand.

True, Vitter and Jindal are well known for their mutual animosity, but I’m not sure if that helps Vitter at all in a Vitter-Edwards race. Plus, in a strongly anti-Washington political climate, the fact that Vitter is a US Senator can’t be helpful to him. On the other hand, Vitter has shown no reluctance to attack his Republican opponents for being soft on free phones for welfare recipients, illegal immigration, and other issues that press racial buttons hard. And you can expect Vitter to hit hard on the move by New Orleans Democratic mayor Mitch Landrieu to try to remove the statue of Robert E. Lee at Lee Circle. Given the high emotion surrounding the issue of race, identity, history, and symbolism, it’s hard to see how Edwards could avoid coming out against Landrieu’s plan, though doing so risks turning off black voters, whose turnout would be crucial to an Edwards victory. Point is, if Vitter has to face Edwards, the Republican is going to go for the gutter to win the race.

Having nearly four in 10 voters undecided so close to election day means almost anything can happen. If either Angelle or Dardenne dropped out before October 24, the remaining Republican would be a good bet to make it to the runoff, in which case the GOP would likely hold on to the governor’s mansion. If not, though, and it’s a Vitter-Edwards runoff, one of the reddest states in America stands a reasonable chance of electing a Democrat as its next governor.

Benedict, Out of the Carnage

It’s time for Carnage 2015 in the UK, a nationwide series of college freshman pub crawls:

A girl lies passed out on the street, while another female student vomits on the pavement.

These pictures from across the UK show new students taking part in the controversial Carnage booze crawl.

The centres of Huddersfield, Lincoln and Bristol were taken over by young revellers enjoying their first taste of university life.

This year’s tour is given the title on flyer’s of Animal Instinct – Unleash Your Beast.

It will visit 36 towns and cities across Britain.

From Pope St. Gregory the Great’s Life of St. Benedict:

He was born in the province of Nursia, of honorable parentage, and brought up at Rome in the study of humanity. As much as he saw many by reason of such learning fall to dissolute and lewd life, he drew back his foot, which he had as it were now set forth into the world, lest, entering too far in acquaintance with it, he likewise might have fallen into that dangerous and godless gulf.

Therefore, giving over his book, and forsaking his father’s house and wealth, with a resolute mind only to serve God, he sought for some place, where he might attain to the desire of his holy purpose. In this way he departed, instructed with learned ignorance, and furnished with unlearned wisdom.

Somewhere in the UK right now, there is a young man or woman who is watching the Carnage, and who has an instinct to go the other way. Might he or she be the new and very different St. Benedict that the world awaits?

Benedict & Dante Turn Tarheel

http://www.ncstudycenter.org/events/“... North Carolina Study Center at UNC-Chapel Hill is hosting me next week for a series of events. Two Benedict Option ones October 22, a Dante-influenced reflection on love and justice on on October 23, and a How Dante Can Save Your Life seminar on Saturday October 24. Follow the link for details. Come out and say hi and meet others interested in the Ben Op. After meeting and talking with folks in DC and Charlottesville, I’m even more excited about the opportunities for innovation and collaboration in Christian living in a post-Christian culture.

Let me urge you in particular to consider the Saturday Dante seminar. It costs a little something, and it’s four hours long, but I really do think you’ll get a lot out of it. This is not going to be literary criticism, but an in-depth conversation — not lecture, conversation — about how engaging with this poem was a means of radical, transformative grace for me, and how it can be for you too.

I am hoping there will be a little Hauerwas while I’m in the area, and barbecue too.

And hey Colorado Springs, I’m going to be in town giving a Benedict Option talk at the Anselm Society on October 31. Boo! More details to come shortly.

Eye on Mordor

The Browser links to an interview with the anonymous Iraqi blogger who runs Mosul Eye, which reports from the city under ISIS captivity. It’s beyond chilling. Excerpts:

How do you describe the feelings of Mosul inhabitants today?

Many of them are creating their own worlds to live in, a world in the street different from that in their homes. They cannot trust anybody, in some cases not even their family members. There is a state of fear, just like in the times of Saddam Hussein. People look at ISIS as a cruel, terrifying entity imposing harsh rules, but it provides services that people need.  They try to reconcile these two things. But I am afraid that people will not be able to continue to do this for long, and that they will surrender within five months to totalitarian governance under ISIS.

How has life in the city changed?

Everything has changed. Gender segregation is imposed everywhere; women are forced to veil their faces, and men must wear long beards. There is a wave of radicalization among young children, which parents are unable to do anything against. Young people are learning a radical ideology even more extremist than that of the current example. Still amid this rise of radicalism, there is a hidden countervailing rise in atheism. People have started to ask questions like “Is God happy with all this killing?” or “Is Islam a problem?” Some have concluded that atheism is the only way to liberate the city.

More:

What are the possible solutions, in your opinion?

It is difficult, and it is getting more difficult as time passes. Solutions that were possible yesterday are not available today. The problems we will face in the period following the end of ISIS might be even more difficult. We have a hidden army now, those teenagers with such a radical vision that it is beyond imagining. To end ISIS, we need to eradicate it everywhere, in Iraq, Syria, and everywhere.

How do you see the future?

It is not difficult to predict the future anymore; the world is on the cusp of a big change, and a shift in humanity’s principles.  In the near future, we will witness continuous wars between the various social groups in the Middle East. Extremism will spread more easily than at any time previously. Our children have a dark future waiting for them. Children have become the most essential source for extremism’s growth in the region. Today, ISIS has youth volunteers who have received strict religious and military training that will transform them into monsters in the future. I cannot watch this world collapsing. The most depressing thing is our seeing everything clear and obvious in front of us. I wish I could have been able to track the way humanity moved from savagery into civilization, but unfortunately, I am tracking now its move from civilization into savagery.

Read the whole thing. 

God help those people. God help Europe. And may God withhold his judgment from America, which helped unleash the demons.

On second thought, it’s easy to say, “God help those people, and God help Europe.” What role must the US play now? Can we do more good than harm? Walter Russell Mead writes:

Syria and Iraq are becoming Greater Lebanon as their inhabitants turn on one another. The law of the jungle is the only law left when communities are fighting, or believe they are fighting, for their survival. Shi’a against Sunni, Kurd against Arab, perhaps soon Kurd against Turk…once these wars get going, they rarely end quickly. The bitterness and above all the fear—existential fear for the survival of your kind—remain, ready to flare into new rounds of hideous violence.

These are the demons that have been unleashed in the Middle East; it is hard to see now how they can be tamed.

Taming them is one thing; can they even be contained? I am reminded of a piece Adam Garfinkle wrote a few weeks back, about the refugee crisis in Europe. Excerpts:

If only a tenth of one percent of these Arabs are now or are later turned toward salafi-based political violence for any number of reasons we can all think of, then Germany will have a problem that will shred its esteemed privacy laws to bits, whether Germans like it or not.

More:

The Left’s normative seizure of Germany is truly amazing. Even the Chancellor, who by German standards is far from a raving leftist, appears to firmly believe that everyone must be a multiculturalist for moral reasons, and that all people who want to preserve the ethno-linguistic integrity of their communities—whether in Germany or in Hungary, Poland, and elsewhere—are acting out of base motives. One even sees self-righteous criticism of the Australians now in the German press. The German leadership’s understanding of its moral obligation is without qualification against contingency; they refuse to limit in any way the number of asylum seekers who can be taken into Germany, or the speed with which they may come. But more in Europe—a place of bloodline nationalisms compared to the U.S. creedal version—than in the United States there is a moralbasis, too, for a community’s own sense of self-determination, which presumes the right of self-definition and self-composition. That is not racism in Europe any more than nervousness about immigrants is racism here in the United States. Wanting one’s own community to be a certain way is not aggressively or actively prejudicial against others, any more than declining to give money to a beggar on a city street is morally equivalent to hitting him in the head with a crowbar. It is simply preferring the constituency of a high-social trust society, from which, social science suggests, many good things come: widespread security, prosperity, and a propensity toward generosity being prominent among them.

And:

 I would love to be proved wrong about all this. But the derangement of moral reasoning in Western Europe seems so advanced and deep that it is hard to be optimistic. One fears that if reasonable people do not somehow apply a brake to this wild excess of selfless saintliness, unreasonable people eventually will. And guess who might still be around to cheer, encourage, and perhaps even arm the unreasonable? Yes, Vlad the Putin himself, as he is indeed already doing in a minor key.

Whole thing here, if you can bear it. People get mad at Obama for having failed in Syria, but it’s hard to know what to do if the US is determined not to support the tyrant Assad. In the end, Putin is doing the dirty work that might have a chance at stopping ISIS, a much worse devil. He’s not doing it because he is a humanitarian, heaven knows. But he is doing it. A deeply disturbing thought: with regard to the Middle East, the autocrat Vladimir Putin is acting as a better friend towards the Europeans than the democrat Angela Merkel, and her class of leaders.

UPDATE: From the Christian Science Monitor:

“Russia isn’t playing this game of distinguishing between ‘good’ terrorists and ‘bad’ ones,” says Yegeny Satanovsky, president of the independent Institute of Middle East Studies in Moscow, and a strong backer of the Kremlin campaign. “For Russia, the only way to do this is to back Syria’s existing central government, which is the force that has boots on the ground, and put an end to this rebellion.”

“It’s not that we love Assad,” Mr. Satanovsky says, “but that we’ve already seen what happens when central governments get destroyed: monsters come rushing into the vacuum. If Damascus should fall, it won’t be gentle pro-Western rebels who come marching in, but the genocidal maniacs of IS and Al Qaeda.”

Hard to come up with a more villainous Slavic name than “Satanovsky,” but still, he has a point.

 

The ‘Yes We Can’ Catholics

The indispensable Catholic journalist John L. Allen writes:

As the synod rolls into its second week, yet another way of understanding the fundamental divide is coming into focus: The gap between those who believe the demands of classic Catholic teaching on sex, marriage, and the family may be unrealistic or inappropriate for some share of the contemporary population, and those convinced that it’s widely attainable in the here-and-now.

Perhaps one could call the latter position the “Yes We Can!’ brigade at the 2015 synod.

(Presumably, the irony of applying Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign slogan to a bloc of folks who would generally be seen as cultural conservatives isn’t lost on anyone.)

Many in this camp suspect that advocates of a more “pastoral” approach on matters such as homosexuality and divorce have quietly thrown in the towel on the idea that it’s reasonable to expect lifelong faithful marriage to be the norm, or that divorced and civilly remarried Catholics shouldn’t be sexually intimate, and so on.

The “Yes We Can!” faction wouldn’t deny that many people don’t actually live those teachings, but they insist that it can be done, and fear that by not encouraging people to do so, the Church clearly risks selling them short.

More:

The “Yes We Can!” camp, however, believes Church teaching isn’t just an ideal, but a practical way of life, though without minimizing the sacrifices it may entail. As they see it, the synod’s message ought to be, “You’re called to this, and we’re going to have your back in pulling it off.”

Boy, did this ever make me want to cheer. When I became a Catholic in 1993, I committed myself to living chastely, as the Church required. This was a desert experience for me, who was not used to denying himself in this way, but it was a desert experience that brought me out of bondage to my own disordered desires. It was hard, but it was necessary, and it was necessary because it was hard.

At virtually no point did I believe, or have reason to believe, that the institutional church and its ministers had my back. In fact, the silence from the pulpits was total. There is, or was, no sense in contemporary American Catholicism that asceticism is a normal part of the Christian life, and that we might help each other bear those burdens. One of the reasons I sympathize so instinctively with gays and lesbians like Wesley Hill and Eve Tushnet, who keep raising the issue of the Church needing to make affirmative space within its life for same-sex attracted Christians who seek to live celibacy, is because the loneliest and most difficult period of my life as a new Catholic was the four years in which I struggled to be celibate, before I married.

I didn’t need Father to remind me every week in his homily to keep my pants up. That’s not the point. What I could have used was any sign that the life to which I had submitted, in obedience to what I believed was the truth, mattered to the Church. The message I constantly received from the silence in the parish(es) was: You are wasting your time trying to live out these teachings. Nobody here cares about this stuff, so why should you?

I knew what kind of Egypt I had been delivered from, and that memory, plus a strong prayer life, strengthened me in the journey. But the institutional Church was worthless in this struggle. I knew I had a strong ally in Pope John Paul II, but Rome was very far away. Thinking back on it, the heart of the problem was the culture of the American church, in which the idea of dying to self to live in Christ was an alien concept. I was deeply struck the other day by the e-mail I received from a young Catholic I met in Charlottesville, and posted here. This part:

The Church’s shedding of Her ancient liturgy, ascetic and disciplinary practices, and the destroying Her sacred buildings and art leading up to, during, and after Vatican II is one of the greatest losses to Catholicism and to the West in recent history.

… comes especially to my mind when I think about the “Yes We Can” Catholics. Last night, on the flights home, I read a short but dense book a reader sent me, a work of social science analysis called How Societies Remember, by Paul Connerton, a social anthropologist at Cambridge University. It is one of the most important books I have ever read, and one I now see as key to the Benedict Option. I’ll post on it later today, but for this discussion, I can say that the book shines a Klieg light on the Catholic reader’s observation above. Connerton describes modernity, driven by the logic of capitalism, as a “worldwide clearing operation” regarding historical memory. Modernity, he says, is a condition of  “deliberate forgetting.” Connerton writes:

Under the conditions of modernity the celebration of recurrence can never be anything more than a compensatory strategy, because the very principle of modernity itself denies the idea of life as a structure of celebrated recurrence. … The operation of this system brings about a massive withdrawal of credence in the possibility that there might exist forms of life that are exemplary because prototypical. The logic of capital tends to deny the capacity any longer to imagine life as a structure of exemplary recurrence.

In everyday language, Connerton is saying that living in modernity makes it all but impossible to believe that there is a way of life that we should follow — that is, that our desires should be ordered around a certain ideal, one given to us instead of chosen, and that we should observe certain practices to incarnate that ideal in our own lives. “Life as a structure of exemplary recurrence” means living as an order one submits to for the sake of conforming to a sacred ideal that comes down to us from the past. Note well that Connerton is writing not as a theologian, but as a social scientist. What he’s saying at bottom is that the very structure and logic of modernity is radically antithetical to anything like historic Christianity. “[I]nvented rites … are palliative measures, façades erected to screen off the full implications of this vast worldwide clearing operation.”

Reading the book — and I’ll explore this more fully in a subsequent post — I felt the full weight of the young Catholic’s statement. You hear these kinds of things from Traditionalist Catholics all the time, but thinking of it in light of the “Yes We Can” Catholics, gave me a certain perspective on my own experience. The institutional church in America, by and large, does not care to produce holiness, but rather happiness. It embraced the “worldwide clearing operation” of modernity in the Sixties, and turned away from the rites and practices that formed Catholics by teaching them to experience life as a structure of exemplary recurrence. People like me didn’t fit into the new, this-worldly church order. This was a difficult thing to come to terms with.

Fortunately, there are within the Catholic Church communities of resistance — joyful resistance, even. The amazing Leah Libresco, for example, is a one-woman dynamo of joyful resistance, and it’s impossible to spend any time around her, as I did this past week in Washington, and despair about the future of American Catholicism. In the early part of the last decade, a priest friend in New York grew weary of listening to me and another Catholic pal griping about the failures of the institutional Church. He said, in effect:

“Everything you say is true, and if you two sit around waiting for the institutional Church to get its act together, you’re sunk. But you don’t have to do that. You have the Catechism. You can go on Amazon.com tonight and order a library that would have made Aquinas envious, and have it at your home in a few days. You in the laity can do this on your own. What are you waiting for?”

His point was that by remaining grumpily docile, we were collaborating in our own spiritual ruin. He told us that his parents raised him and his siblings through the catechetical and spiritual disaster of the immediate post-conciliar era, when you had to be radically countercultural, even in the face of the institutional Church, if you were going to form Catholic children properly. Today, the priest said, we have far more resources to draw on to fight the disorders of modernity, especially as they manifest themselves within the institutional Church. We only lack the courage and the imagination to lay hold of them, and put them to use.

That priest was right. Is right. I think about how radically different my experience of Catholicism as a single man would have been had I had people like Leah around — or, to fault myself, if I had known back then how much I would need community to walk this difficult path, and opened myself up more to the opportunities that were there at the time (CL, for example), instead of being standoffish, because I was getting my sea legs as a new Catholic, and wasn’t sure what to do. That life cannot be re-lived, and in any case, I have found in Orthodoxy what I thought I was going to find in Catholicism when I converted. Still, the Connerton book has helped me to understand more deeply why the Church was a lonely place for me as a new, single Catholic who wanted to live out the countercultural truths of Christianity, especially regarding sex and sexuality.

Here’s a story from Crux about a young Catholic now at the Rome synod on behalf of Catholic orthodoxy. Excerpts:

And then there are those Catholics who hope that bishops talk about challenges such as divorce, gender theory, and homosexuality not because they want the Church to liberalize on these issues, but because they believe Catholics must find better ways to engage a skeptical world about the beauty of traditional Church teaching.

Alix Verdet is in the latter camp.

She’s come to Rome from France on behalf of the Association pour la Formation Chrétienne de la Personne, a Catholic organization that promotes the teachings of St. John Paul II, based at a Benedictine abbey dating back 1,000 years in Solesmes, France, a village about 150 miles southwest of Paris.

Solesmes. There’s your Benedict Option, folks. More:

“The doctrinal and the pastoral are the two sides of a single mystery,” she said. “They can’t be separated.”

If bishops go soft on doctrine, even in the face of opposition from the laity, she fears the Church will be seen as wishy-washy to its most devout adherents.

“If the teaching of the Church would change because of fashion, I wouldn’t be interested in it, because it would be like politics,” she said.

Still, she hopes that the synod is able to articulate creative ways to engage those whose lives might not be in accord with Church teaching.

“We all have friends who are divorced, who are gay, and we are asking God, ‘What is the response you want us to give them?’” she said. “I’ve met some gay people who have asked 10 priests for help, but they couldn’t help. Nothing. That’s not normal.”

Oh, but it is.

See, this is why the Synod worries me greatly, even though I’m not a Catholic, and even though I think Pope Francis is not necessarily wrong in wanting to reform some of the procedures for pastoral reasons. If these proposed reforms were to take place within a church culture that still valued the ascetical element of Christianity, one that still believed in fasting, and that had a robust culture of practices that helped its people order their lives according to God’s revelation, instead of the modern world’s preferences, there would be little problem. As it is, though, Alix Verdet’s point about the Church devaluing eternal verities is a powerful one.

Liberal Catholics and their fellow travelers look at orthodox Catholics and see people who just want to punish gays, lesbians, and heterosexuals who don’t want to conform their sex lives to the Church’s teaching. What they do not and, I think, will not see, is that orthodox Catholics believe that these teachings, however hard, are both true and liberating. “You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free,” said Christ. What did he mean by that? He meant that the only real freedom is freedom that we find when we live our lives, and order our loves, according to His teaching — which, for Catholics, is revealed in Scripture authoritatively interpreted by the Roman Church. In my own case, the three or four years I lived as a single Catholic, struggling with chastity, were very, very difficult. A time in the desert, for sure, a period of suffering and loneliness that made no sense to me at the time — but in the end, it helped save me. In How Dante Can Save Your Life, I talk about it this way:

By the time I was received into the Catholic Church in 1993, I had committed to live chastely until marriage. I was twenty-six years old. It was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done — and one of the best.

Many Catholics think the Church makes too big a deal about sex; some think the Church should say nothing about sex at all. But practicing chastity after my experience with sex, I understood the wisdom of the Church’s teaching. All the lies I had told myself, and that our culture tells us, about what sex is for left me feeling hollow and unsatisfied.

I didn’t want sex; I wanted love. I mean, yes, I wanted sex, but when it was decoupled from love, that desire was a counterfeit, a false idol. It was destructive to me and to the women I had been with. I realized around this time that by trying to banish that guilty feeling so I could be as free as I wanted to be and thought I had a right to be, I was killing off the most humane part of myself.

When I embraced chastity, I had no idea if I would ever get married. The thought that this might be a lifetime thing filled me with dread. But the prospect of going back to the Egypt from which I’d just been delivered was worse. So on I went, trusting that God knew what was best for me, and that I would rather die to my body with him than live in my body without him.

I was not entirely successful in those first years, but I was a lot better than I had been. Prayer and the confessional helped me with my repentance. Learning to tell myself no was a new thing, and an important one. I learned to steer myself away from getting involved with women who didn’t share my faith and my commitment to chastity before marriage.

My secular friends thought I was a very odd duck because of this. But I didn’t care. I knew what I was being saved from. I knew the kind of man I was and the kind of man I wanted to be. By practicing chastity, I began to understand better the workings of my own heart, and how I had fallen into self-deception (and deceived others) in past relationships.

On October 11, 1996, I was introduced in an Austin bookstore to the woman who would become my wife. I was instantly smitten; we were talking about marriage only days later.

How in the world had that happened, and happened so quickly? Sure, I’m a hopeless romantic, but I am convinced that if my own heart had not been purified by those three years I spent walking through the fire, I would not have recognized the smile of the beautiful, pure-hearted woman who was my own Beatrice, for whom I had been praying and longing for years.

So when the pilgrim Dante meets two condemned lovers in the Circle of Lust, they were not strangers to me. I could easily have been one of them.

Read the whole thing, amici. In the book, I talk about how the seriousness with which Orthodoxy takes asceticism (that is, practices that help us die to our own passions so we can live in Christian freedom) as a normal part of daily Christian life brought me out of myself, de-centered me from myself and re-centered me around God, and healed me. Lust is not a sin I struggle with today as I did back then, but Wrath is, and so is Gluttony, and many others. Orthodoxy is very imperfect in the parishes in this country, but the liberating gift the ancient church’s spirituality gave me was to say:

Welcome to the Way of the Cross. This journey is hard, and you are going to fall over and over on this walk. But there is no other way. Your priest will be there to guide you and to hear your confession when you fall, and to help you get back up and keep going. Everybody else in the church is on the same journey. The structure of our liturgical life together, and the practices of fasting and all the rest, will keep you on the straight path, if you truly submit to them. The church is a hospital for souls, but if you went to a hospital that only gave you anesthesia for your broken arm, you would never get better. This is going to hurt sometimes, but it’s the only way to be truly healed. This is the way passed down to us from the early church. You are free to ignore it, of course, and many do, but if you truly want to save your soul, if you truly want to live in Christ, this is the sure path. The faith is not an electric blanket; it is the Cross.

In parishes where it hasn’t been taken over by tribe-at-prayer ethnicity, or an assimilationist ethos (two cradle Orthodox friends of mine lost their Orthodoxy because of this), Orthodoxy is still serious about this stuff. The Roman Catholicism I encountered mostly is not. Don’t get me wrong: there are many, many Catholics who are serious about this stuff, and find in the Church the resources they need to help them on the Way of the Cross. I know Catholics like this, and they are my brothers and sisters in Christ. We are walking the Way together. But they often have a harder walk than I do, because the modernized Church has lost confidence in its own teaching, and too often conveys the message that the Way is too hard, and doesn’t have to be attempted. I’m surprised by how much this gets to me, even today (the Orthodox equivalent is reducing the Way to ethnic enthusiasm), because it leaves so many of us walking wounded out on the battlefield instead of bringing them into the hospital for triage.

The good news is that these Yes We Can Catholics exist — may their tribe increase! — and are standing up to offer a counternarrative to those within their own Church who sing the siren song of self-satisfaction, a counterfeit way that can only lead to shipwreck and captivity. Those Catholics are the ones who are going to make it through what’s coming. In fact, any Christian — Protestant, Orthodox, or Catholic — who wants to make it through will have to be a Yes We Canner.

UPDATE: A really good, balanced post about suffering, joy, and the Church, by Erin Manning.

Benedict Option Mamas

Cardinal Dolan says:

A very refreshing, consistent theme of the synod has been inclusion. The Church, our spiritual family, welcomes everyone, especially those who may feel excluded. Among those, I’ve heard the synod fathers and observers comment, are the single, those with same-sex attraction, those divorced, widowed, or recently arrived in a new country, those with disabilities, the aged, the housebound, racial and ethnic minorities. We in the family of the Church love them, welcome them, and need them.

Can I suggest as well that there is now a new minority in the world and even in the Church? I am thinking of those who, relying on God’s grace and mercy, strive for virtue and fidelity: Couples who — given the fact that, at least in North America, only half of our people even enter the sacrament of matrimony– approach the Church for the sacrament; Couples who, inspired by the Church’s teaching that marriage is forever, have persevered through trials; couples who welcome God’s gifts of many babies; a young man and woman who have chosen not to live together until marriage; a gay man or woman who wants to be chaste; a couple who has decided that the wife would sacrifice a promising professional career to stay at home and raise their children — these wonderful people today often feel themselves a minority, certainly in culture, but even, at times in the Church! I believe there are many more of them than we think, but, given today’s pressure, they often feel excluded.

Where do they receive support and encouragement? From TV? From magazines or newspapers? From movies? From Broadway? From their peers? Forget it!

They are looking to the Church, and to us, for support and encouragement, a warm sense of inclusion. We cannot let them down!

This brought to mind something a homeschooling mom in Alexandria, Virginia, said to me at lunch on Sunday. I paraphrase:

I agree with the Benedict Option vision, but I haven’t heard you yet talk about an important part of it: moms. We are the ones on the front lines.

She’s right. I need look no further than my own family for evidence. There is no way — no way — I could accomplish a thing in my writing career without Julie’s tireless labor with the kids, homeschooling them. I’ve had a couple of conversations on this trip with both men and women in homeschooling families, and heard that the moms often feel overlooked and undervalued.

A story: A pastor in the DC area told me once that his congregation was filled with extremely accomplished, massively educated young adults who had ticked off all the boxes on the list of How To Be Successful, but who were still unhappy. There was one particular woman whom the pastor said was on the verge of depression. He said that after spending a lot of time counseling her, it became clear to him that she wanted nothing more in the world than to be married and at home raising kids. But she would not allow herself to entertain that thought, because it was forbidden to her by the culture in which she was raised. He said he was not, or not yet, in a position to raise it with her, because she could not hear him.

Another story: A DC friend told me a story about a pastor he knows who was approached by two parishioners asking him to have a word with their college-age daughter. “She wants to be a missionary,” they said. The pastor was pleased, but the parents said no, they preferred her to be successful, and they needed the pastor to intervene to talk her out of this nonsense.

Within the church, we have to raise both boys and girls to reject the world’s vision of success. Were the martyrs successful? Yes, in fact, they were, from a Christian point of view. If we can say that they were successful, then surely the countless lesser martyrdoms that we Christians face for the sake of rightly ordering our loves by the light of Christ also count as success. In fact, to refuse to order our loves in that way amounts to grave failure, even if we find fame, fortune, power, and all the rest. That is the lesson of the Divine Comedy.

The Church must form its people to prefer holiness to happiness. And we Christian men must absolutely not be a people who make that choice, but expect only the women among us to bear its weight. I’m talking to myself here, just so you know. What stories do we tell ourselves, and our children, about what constitutes success? Well, what does the Church tell us? What does Scripture tell us? What does Tradition tell us? Stanley Hauerwas, from The Hauerwas Reader:

How do we know what choices to make?



That’s what the church is all about. It says that we really don’t know what powers and what stories have a hold on us until our lives have become one with the life of the church. The church says to us, “We’re not giving you a story that you can choose. We’re making you part of a story you didn’t choose: God’s story. You don’t get to make God; God gets to make you. You are made by being brought into this community trough which you discover your story. And your story is that you have been created to praise and glorify God – all moral life derives from that truth. Therefore, there is a distinct difference between you and those who have not been made part of God’s story.”

What sets Christians apart?

Christians are put in jeopardy in a special way because they have been made part of God’s creation and providential care. What God does with a Muslim, a Hindu, a Buddhist, and so on is God’s business. All a Christian knows is that God has given him or her a special mission as a witness to the kingdom brought by Jesus.

This kind of talk doesn’t sit well with Christians who are constantly trying to make it as good citizens in the United States. But Christians should be in contention with what is called modernity because modernity is in contention with the Christian belief that an individuals’ freedom comes from being engrafted into a community and into a narrative that he or she did not create or choose.

I’m in the airport in Richmond now, headed back home, and I don’t have time to write any more at the moment. I want to say, though, that one of the great lessons of this short but extremely rewarding trip to DC and to Charlottesville is that there are many Christians struggling to see what the Good is, versus what the world calls good — and many more Christians who don’t struggle at all, because they don’t perceive a difference. I have been challenged in my own faith and thinking by the work and lives of people I have met, and greatly encouraged, too. And I am going home with particular gratitude for the Benedict Option Mama to whom I am married, and whose faithful presence and tireless labors of love keep the mission of our family toward the good that is God, and who makes our domestic monastery a home full of rightly ordered love. I am blessed beyond measure to be part of her story, and the story of our children, and the story of our little church under the live oaks, where I am learning every day to be part of the Story.

The Desolate City

A young Catholic man came to my speech last night, and e-mailed the following comment:

I was struck by your descriptions of Orthodox asceticism and practices. The Church’s shedding of Her ancient liturgy, ascetic and disciplinary practices, and the destroying Her sacred buildings and art leading up to, during, and after Vatican II is one of the greatest losses to Catholicism and to the West in recent history. By doing so, the Latin Church has effectively induced Her own amnesia, which is reflected, I believe, in the recent experience you described traveling in western Europe. It was the buildings, liturgy, discipline and practices that formed the Church’s memory for the previous 1,930-odd years. Remove the sensory connection with the past, and it will not be long before the memories fade. Furthermore by doing so, She has disarmed Herself of much of the armor or weaponry Her members had always used to build up personal and communal strength to be counter-cultural. Catholics no longer act like Catholics, because much of that content has been dispensed of: eucharistic fasting, Friday abstinence, Lenten fasting and abstinence, Ember days, eucharistic processions, saint’s processions, etc. Replace all of these things with a vacuum of daily practices and devotions, and a minimalist liturgy that, while certainly valid, is anthropologically centered, and barely adequate at expressing the truths of the faith, and it is no coincidence that the Latin Church has been in free-fall since the Council, and utterly inept at preventing the secularization and mass exodus of its members. Lex orandi, lex credendi, lex vivendi. May the East not succumb to such blunders!

And now, to mark the 98th anniversary of the final apparition at Fatima, here is your Synod woo-woo of the day. Excerpt from a 2008 interview with the Cardinal of Bologna, about an exchange he had with Sister Lucia, the last surviving Fatima visionary:

Q. There is a prophecy by Sister Lucia dos Santos, of Fatima, which concerns “the final battle between the Lord and the kingdom of Satan”. The battlefield is the family. Life and the family. We know that you were given charge by John Paul II to plan and establish the Pontifical Institute for the Studies on Marriage and the Family.

Yes, I was. At the start of this work entrusted to me by the Servant of God John Paul II, I wrote to Sister Lucia of Fatima through her Bishop as I couldn’t do so directly. Unexplainably however, since I didn’t expect an answer, seeing that I had only asked for prayers, I received a very long letter with her signature – now in the Institute’s archives. In it we find written: the final battle between the Lord and the reign of Satan will be about marriage and the family. Don’t be afraid, she added, because anyone who operates for the sanctity of marriage and the family will always be contended and opposed in every way, because this is the decisive issue. And then she concluded: however, Our Lady has already crushed its head.

(And hey, as long as we are lamenting what a church’s leaders do to cripple the spiritual integrity of the Body of Christ, check out Sergei Chapnin’s lament for the Russian Orthodox “Church of Empire.” Woe.)