Beggars Finding Bread

I was moved by this letter that came in from a reader this morning:

I want to offer you an apology.

Though I’ve been an admirer of your work for years, I have nevertheless harbored the suspicion that your defection from the Roman Catholic Church was due to “weakness” on your part and that at least some of your professed reasons for doing so were disingenuous. Being a cradle Catholic whose formative years in the faith were the felt and burlap 1970s, I was certain that, if I could weather that, I could weather anything.

I’m starting to think I was gravely wrong about that.

The last few years have been very rough for me as a Catholic. Between the continued water torture of the Scandal and the chaos and confusion sown by Pope Francis and his enablers, I regularly find myself wondering why I bother going to Mass each week. I used to be heavily involved in my parish’s life, along with my wife and children, but in the past couple of years we’ve slowly been absenting ourselves from everything except our weekly obligation — and that’s increasingly what attending Mass feels like, an obligation rather than a joyous occasion to give thanks and praise to the Lord.

I’m being worn down by the feeling that very few Catholics really believe in the faith anymore (or that what they say they believe isn’t even close to what the Church claims to teach). This feeling goes double for the clergy, who at their best are social workers in Roman collars and at their worst men actively seeking to undermine the traditions and beliefs of the Church.

I used to get angry at all this and fulminate against the stew of fecklessness and heresy that passes for Catholicism these days, but increasingly I can’t even be bothered to care. What’s the point? I can’t do anything on my own and whenever I’ve tried to enlist the aid of others I’ve been met with either Pollyannaish nonsense about the coming “springtime of renewal” or hostility at the very idea anything is wrong.

In all likelihood, I’m not going anywhere, at least not yet. I like to joke that I have no hope, a little faith, and less charity, but that’s not completely true. Beneath it all, I do retain a small hope that somehow God can make something glorious out of this mess. It’s hard to nourish that hope and I find it ever more plausible that there will eventually come a time when I simply fall away from the Church entirely. It saddens me to write those words and yet I know I’m not wrong in writing them.

All of this is a long-winded way of saying I was wrong to ever doubt your motives or the sincerity of your bidding farewell to Catholicism. I was also wrong to think I’d better withstand the winds of the coming storm. I was arrogant to think that and now I know it.

Apology unconditionally accepted! I am so grateful for the humility in this letter. I have received four or five e-mails like it over the past year, since the McCarrick news broke.

I feel absolutely no I-told-you-so triumphalism in the face of these admissions. I know very, very well how much pain lies behind them — that is, how much suffering a man has to go through to be able to make that realization, and to be able to articulate it.

You will not hear me saying, “Come on over to the Orthodox Church, where we don’t have these problems.” I am not aware of these problems within the Orthodox Church, and I hope we don’t have them. Certainly the ancient liturgy and the spiritual practices of Orthodoxy give one a strong place to stand and to be built up — something you sadly do not get in most Catholic parishes today. But nobody anywhere — not in the Orthodox Church, and not in any church on earth — should think that as a corporate body, they are immune to the sins and failings that have led the Catholic Church to such a crisis.

When I talk about what happened to me — losing my ability to believe as a Catholic after years of reporting on the scandal — I emphasize that I came into Orthodoxy as a different man. I was broken, profoundly broken. Once the pain of that break subsided, I was able to thank God for it, because I needed the intellectual arrogance in me with regard to religion to be broken. I needed to confront the aspects of my own character that pushed me to have such uncomplicated reverence for the church hierarchy. And I needed to work on my own repentance, and to try to become the kind of Christian who had the capacity, through the grace of God, to endure spiritual desolation — a spiritual desolation that is coming for all of us, whatever our church home, because these are the times in which we live.

When the reader writes:

I was also wrong to think I’d better withstand the winds of the coming storm. I was arrogant to think that and now I know it.

… I say that he has been granted a severe mercy. Now he will be better able to build the fortifications against the darkness coming upon all of us. As my friend Nathan, who is struggling with his wife against her demonic possession, under the close care of an exorcist, told me, there is no greater weapon against this darkness than to be humble, and to rely completely on Jesus Christ. What that means in concrete terms will differ with each of us, but it at least means that we should take nothing, absolutely nothing, for granted.

Yesterday, in Massachusetts, I heard the Anglican Bishop Emmanuel Maduwike preach about how we must establish and nurture a personal bond with Jesus Christ. I wish I had a copy of his sermon, because he did not sound at all like the kind of American Evangelical boilerplate, e.g., “Jesus, my personal savior.” In his words, and in their emphatic delivery, he spoke as if we were all lost on a stormy night, and the only way we would get through it is if we met Christ and held his arm with all our might, as he led. It was powerful. I think this is something very close to what Nathan was saying, though he articulated it in somewhat different language.

I want to say a word about this passage from the reader’s letter:

I can’t do anything on my own and whenever I’ve tried to enlist the aid of others I’ve been met with either Pollyannaish nonsense about the coming “springtime of renewal” or hostility at the very idea anything is wrong.

This is quite familiar to me. After dinner on Friday night in Massachusetts, I thanked Bishop James Hiles and Father Atwood Rice for a heavy, rather dark discussion about the spiritual state of things. I told them that nothing is more depressing to me than to be around Christians who believe that there’s nothing seriously wrong, or that there’s nothing wrong that more Republican victories at the polls can’t fix.

I was thinking back to my last year or so as a Catholic, and being at mass at a full parish in Dallas. The local newspaper, for the past few years, had been dropping bombshells on the Dallas diocese, about the sexual criminality of some of its priests, and the cover-ups by its bishops. I was reading this every day, and from time to time talking to people who had been victims of this criminality. The devastation within individuals and their families beggars belief. But very few lay Catholics seemed to care. I didn’t understand how every week the newspaper revealed to us that our house was burning down, but most everybody wanted to pretend that it wasn’t happening. I couldn’t take it anymore, at last.

In Massachusetts this past weekend, at the Festival of Faith where I spoke (along with a Catholic priest and a Lutheran theologian, as well as the Anglican bishop Muduwike), someone shared a story with me about a Catholic parish priest in New England who recently lamented that no one in his parish really believes any of it anymore. They come, in dwindling numbers, out of habit, but he can see no evidence that they take the faith seriously. I also met a Catholic laywoman who is in a parish like that, and who is thinking of going to an LCMS Lutheran parish instead, because she and her husband are desperate for spiritual life. They can see that the Lutherans have it, while her own Catholic parish is desolation.

I also met a man who left the Catholic Church after a lifetime of being there, and forty years of working for the Church in various capacities. He told me that he had been molested by a priest as a boy, and that one of his sons had also been molested by a priest. He said he has lost his marriage and most of his family over all of it. He also told me that he recently spent three hours being interviewed by an investigator for a state law enforcement agency — I’m not going to give more details here — in connection to an abuse ring they are uncovering. This one is within a very conservative Catholic institution, and it involves the suicide of a victim.

The man with whom I spoke said that he had reported the abuse of a boy to the local authorities at the time, but they did nothing — and he got fired from the church institution. Years went by, and the boy victim, as an adult, committed suicide — and left a note with lots of details about what had been done to him. It vindicated my interlocutor’s initial report to authorities, which is why the state police sought him out for an interview.

On Saturday, my interlocutor told me that the state police investigator said to him, at the end of the recent interview, that he did not understand the laypeople involved with that particular Catholic institution. The man quoted the detective saying, “They would rather sacrifice their own children” as long as they can keep getting what this particular Catholic institution provides. (I’m being deliberately obscure here; the man told me he expects the story to break nationally within a month, with indictments.)

This is human, all too human. I’m talking about the Church, but there are people who make false idols of the Nation and of the Family, for example, and will sacrifice their children to those idols rather than face down the fear of life without the psychological security that idol has given them.

This is the ultimate meaning of Dante’s Commedia: that anything on earth can become a personal god for us — our romantic partner, our king, our work, even the Church — and can lead to our damnation if we worship it instead of the living God. All things in this life are meant to be icons of God, things that point us to Him.

So, to the reader, I’m not going to tell you to walk away from the Roman Catholic Church. I am not going to tell you to remain there. If you want to know what I have found in the Orthodox Church, I will tell you (you have my e-mail address). I know that I have no authority at all to tell people which church they should belong to — not after having left my childhood Protestantism for Catholicism, and then that for Orthodoxy. Don’t read this as a matter of Rod Dreher’s spiritual indifferentism. I’m not indifferent: I have definite opinions about ecclesiology. But I also am aware that I have no credibility on that matter, and won’t even attempt to test it.

But to rely solely on ecclesial systems is a trap — a trap that intellectual Christians are particularly susceptible to. What I will say, based on my own experience, is that whether you stay Catholic or leave for another church, you need to establish a deep and abiding relationship to the living God, just like Bishop Maduwike said. There is no substitute for that. As you’ve read me say in this space many times, I thought my Catholic faith was safe because I had all the arguments for the faith down pat, and because I went to mass and confession regularly, and, to be honest, because as a conservative Catholic, I read the right books and magazines, and held all the right prejudices against liberal Catholics.

It’s not enough. 

No matter which church you go to, none of it will be enough to sustain you through what is coming, and what is already here. Bishop Maduwike shepherds an Anglican diocese of three million in Nigeria, which is a very religious country. Yet he said at the conference that they need the Benedict Option there — meaning a sustained and rigorous discipleship — to strengthen themselves against the acid of liquid modernity. He knows what’s coming, and is indeed already manifesting itself, even in Africa.

Finally, I want to speak to this part of the reader’s letter:

In all likelihood, I’m not going anywhere, at least not yet. I like to joke that I have no hope, a little faith, and less charity, but that’s not completely true. Beneath it all, I do retain a small hope that somehow God can make something glorious out of this mess. It’s hard to nourish that hope and I find it ever more plausible that there will eventually come a time when I simply fall away from the Church entirely. It saddens me to write those words and yet I know I’m not wrong in writing them.

It is a blessing that you know this about yourself. That you can foresee it as a possibility. Now you can act to change your life, to do whatever you must to keep this from happening. When I was in your position, though writhing in torture from all the anger and fear, and much closer to losing it all than you are now, I realized one day that the Truth that saves any of us is not a doctrine, but a Person — the Word made flesh, Jesus Christ. If, for whatever brokenness within myself, and within the Catholic Church at this point in its history, I could not establish and sustain a living relationship with that Truth through Catholicism, then I had to reach Him by any means necessary. Because it wasn’t just me: it was my wife and children too, and their children.

My own painful experience made me think at length about how judgmental I had been to others who had fallen away from the Catholic faith. I too thought they were weak or disingenuous. And then it happened to me, despite fighting with everything I had to keep it from happening. God did bring good out of it for me, and renewal. There is hope. Whether you remain a Catholic or leave for another church, you, dear reader, are closer to the Kingdom now, in your humility and suffering, than you were before. It’s an extremely difficult thing to understand and to accept, but it’s true. My hard experience has verified the truth in the saying, “Christianity is just one beggar telling other beggars where he found bread.”

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