The American Catholic intellectual world has been
preoccupied in recent months with some notable books published on the topic of
Christianity and American culture. Rod
Dreher’s book “The Benedict Option” continues along the thematic lines of titles
by Anthony Esolen and Archbishop Chaput, arguing that laisser-faire
Christianity is over for the West and that serious Christians must begin to
make difficult, counter-cultural choices if they hope to hand on the faith to
their children.
My hope with this little piece is not to add yet more social commentary to the fire, but instead to make a basic point about the way
forward. I think we continue to make the
same error that we have been making for quite some time: seeking lay methods and structures to solve the problem of the decline of faith in the West. We are stuck
there: stuck with this idea that the laity need to be the protagonists in the
New Evangelization. And this is where I
just feel like banging my head against a wall. Because we have been trying, to no avail, to make the laity the
protagonists of the New Evangelization for at least 50 years in the Catholic Church. It is like belonging to a fictional country
that keeps sending laborers to the frontlines after they have been sweating all
day making spears and arrows, convinced that because they are great workers they will make great warriors. Wave after wave of highly skilled laborers march onto battlefields where they are
slaughtered and demoralized while their skills go to waste. And in the face of this, we say “What we need
are better weapons – we need to get the weapons that professional soldiers use
into their hands, and then they will be successful.”
No - the problem is that we are asking the wrong people to do the wrong job. I have been thinking about it, and I can think of no time in
the history of the Church where there has been a great evangelization of a
culture carried out by laity. Instead, what the Church does have a vast and impressive
experience of is missionary activity carried out men and
women religious dedicated exclusively to Christ and his kingdom. It was monks and other religious by the
thousands upon thousands who primarily spread the Gospel to the northern reaches
of Europe and later to the Americas, to Africa and Asia and finally all corners
of the globe. These religious men and
women, with very little to lose and everything to gain, possessed a unique
freedom that was capable of transforming culture in such a rapid and
thoroughgoing way that is hard for us to comprehend in our time. They overcame cultural barriers, broke free of their own prejudices and preconceived notions, took incredible risks and continued in the face of impossible odds. They lived in a way that would have put spouses and children through hell - their lives were contorted and disfigured and pushed and prodded and stretched so that they could be just the right instrument that Christ needed to reach people in their place and time. The only thing recognizable in them after their ordeal was the image of Christ - everything else had been offered to the fire of the Gospel.
But instead of asking for these missionaries, instead of seeking
men and women to dedicate their lives to the spread of the Gospel in this
complete gift of self, some in the Church continue to tell a discouraged and tired laity that unless they adopt certain washed out forms of
religious life in their spare time without any ecclesial structure or formal
training, the culture is doomed.
This is simply not true. There is scant evidence that the laity were much more religious or prayerful or faithful during times of great Evangelization. But what is clear is that the religious at the time were. Catholics need to wake up to our tradition and our experience
over the last 2000 years. The New
Evangelization is not going to happen if it consists solely in laity who live in
secular structures trying to integrate the methods that religious used back in
the old days, as if what made religious capable missionaries was a methodology or
way of life. It wasn’t the program that
made them prophetic, it was their freedom to serve whatever God’s program was. It was the fact that they had given up wife
or husband and children and wealth and career and were able to dedicate themselves fully to serving the
needs of the wider society and church, wherever that led them.
If the New Evangelization is going to happen, we will need new
evangelizers who will be able to adopt whatever lifestyle and go wherever and do whatever is required for the
Evangelization of the culture. And so, for
the most part, those new evangelizers will need to be men and women religious. Certainly, there will be some lay people who are
able to receive significant Catholic formation and, remaining single, dedicate
themselves with the freedom and determination needed. There will also be some married laity who
were able to receive significant Catholic formation and at different chapters
in their lives will have time to dedicate toward efforts in evangelization.
But I do not think it is disputable that the most effective
evangelizing team the Church could send into our culture right now would be
thousands of faithful, well trained and motivated religious men and women. They would pray, figure out where to go, go there, and get
to work. Very little would get in their
way. If they needed to camp on the
street, they would camp on the street.
If they needed to stay in people’s attics, they would stay in
attics. If they needed to travel on
foot, beg for meals, go without health insurance, or do with just a couple
changes of clothing, they would do it.
This is all normal stuff for men and women religious. They have been doing
this for centuries. And if the
established religious communities wouldn’t do it, new ones would take their
place – that is what we have seen over the last 20 centuries.
What a boon a new influx of religious would be for the laity
– for these thousands of families that are trying to live a Catholic life in a
culture that is not Catholic, but do not feel like they know where to turn for
support. For them to suddenly find
faithful Catholic men and women at their door who were offering to help take
care of their elderly parents or educate their children or watch over their poor
neighbor next door… And no, I do not
think it would need to make them feel like second class Catholics – any more
than a soldier makes me feel like a second class American.
The truth is that the Church has always needed religious: men and women who gave up their own families in order to serve the needs of Jesus Christ and his Church
in a more universal sense. This does not
make religious some sort of higher level Catholic, or necessarily draw them
closer to God. It says nothing about
their personal sanctity. But there can
be no doubt that through their way of life, a religious is given the freedom to
become an instrument of the Gospel and a missionary of the Good News in a way
that is simply not possible for those who are caring for spouses and children and
family and community. The Church has
always recognized this, which is why, from the time of St. Paul himself, the Church
has encouraged young people to consider a life of chaste celibacy for the sake
of the kingdom, according to the pattern of Jesus Christ.
Christianity can survive and get along as a church of the
laity, but it cannot evangelize or grow into a flourishing Christian culture without
the healthy and robust presence of priests and religious. This is a fact that is so often overlooked
when we remember the ages and places where Christian culture flourished or provided
missionaries to bring the Gospel to far off lands: Europe during the high Middle Ages when the North was evangelized, and also during the Counter-Reformation, when European missionaries brought the Gospel to all of
the known world. The same seems to be the
case for Catholicism in the U.S. It was
precisely because there were thousands upon thousands of men and women religious
concentrated in huge communities that American Catholicism boomed in the early 1900s. And there is little doubt that when religious disappeared from schools, hospitals, and social service agencies by the thousands during the 60s and 70s, their absence had a catastrophic impact on the American church.
If next year an additional 20,000 laypersons joined the 150,000 or so American Catholic laypersons married in the Church and further agreed
to dedicate themselves to "the Benedict Option," there is no question that some would persevere in living a much more robust Catholic life, and that their dedication would
have a transformative impact on our culture. But what if next year those same 20,000 Catholic men and
women entered the priesthood or religious communities throughout the country, and after spending between 8 and 10 years in rigorous Catholic formation and training, dedicated their lives to various charisms directed toward the spread of the
Gospel? Can we even begin to think of
the impact they would have? Is there a
question of what would make a greater impact on the Church or on the spread of
the Gospel in our culture?
There is a
reason that so many of the great secular revolutions first went after and targeted
priests and religious. There is a reason why atheistic regimes shut down seminaries and novitiate houses. And that is because they know better than we do that religious are the greatest of our missionaries and have been
responsible for spreading the faith to the most remote and unforgiving corners of the world. Our society doesn't need more options, it needs vows. There
cannot be a Benedict option without Benedictines.
