#george weigel

-Archbishop Charles J. Chaput, Strangers in a Strange Land: Living the Catholic Faith in a Post-Christian World

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“A great deal was made of the fact that two bishops from the People’s Republic of China, Guo Jincai and Yang Xiaoting, would be attending a Synod of Bishops for the first łtime. Both bishops had once been excommunicate (one as recently as mid-September), because they had been illicitly ordained. They were warmly welcomed by Pope Francis in his homily at the Synod’s opening Mass, and proponents of the Vatican’s recent deal with the Chinese government on the appointment of bishops lauded the two Chinese bishops’ presence as a first fruit of that arrangement and a step toward the deeper unity of the Church.

“Then, after ten days or so, the Chinese bishops left, pleading previous engagements at home. One could only wonder what those engagements might be.

“It then turned out that the two bishops had been proposed by the Chinese communist party (which now has supervisory responsibility for religious bodies in China) and then accepted by the Vatican. That sequence, plus their premature departure, seemed to signal that the “first fruit” of the new Vatican/China deal might be a bit rotten, as many had feared. One also wonders what impression all this made on young adults in China who are pondering the Catholic Church and its message. If the message conveyed by this subplot is that the Church is another puppet of the Chinese communist party and the Chinese government, it is difficult to see how evangelization in China will be advanced among the young people who were supposed to be the Synod’s primary concern.

-Archbishop Charles J. Chaput, Strangers in a Strange Land: Living the Catholic Faith in a Post-Christian World 

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(7) George Weigel, "Diognetus Revisited, or, What the Church Asks of the World," in Against the Grain: Christianity and Democracy, War and Peace (New York: Crossroad, 2008), 70.

This could be a source of inordinate pride for Christians, but it should never be so. As Benedict XVI pointed out many times, we don't possess the truth of Christ; we are first and foremost possessed by it. Being possessed by Christ's truth empowers us to live the Gospel with courage. Christians know that the underlying logic of the cosmos is one in which the very principle of existence is self-giving love. As one writer puts it, "Christians are a people both in and ahead of time. Christians are the people who know, and who ought to live as if they knew, that the Lord of history is in charge of history. Christians are the people who know how the story is going to turn out."(6) We know that it ends with the triumph and wedding feast of the Lamb.”

-Archbishop Charles J. Chaput, Strangers in a Strange Land: Living the Catholic Faith in a Post-Christian World 

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(5) Henri de Lubac, S.J., Paradoxes of Faith (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1987), 145. Or, as Richard John Neuhaus put it: "[T|hink of it this way: If the culture of the Church-her teachings, practices, and habits of thought-is the culture that comprehends all reality, then it is not a matter of the Church's being countercultural but of the world's being countercultural in challenging the meta-culture of which it is a part. This is an audacious, some would say outrageously audacious, way of putting things. But it is an audacity that is inescapably implicit in saying that Jesus Christ is Lord, and he is Lord of all or he is Lord not at all. The totus Christus is Christ and his body the Church, and therefore our audacious claim for Christ necessarily entails an audacious claim for his Church." Richard John Neuhaus, Catholic Matters: Confusion, Controversy, and the Splendor of Truth (New York: Basic Books, 2006), 170.

Weigel’s story unfolds in five acts. In Act One, the papacy of the early and mid-nineteenth century upholds the alliance of throne and altar and denies the possibility that liberals might have a point about freedom or progress. Act Two begins with the pontificate of Leo XIII (1878–1903), the first pope elected after the loss of the papal states. Freed from this political burden, Leo was able to begin “exploring” the modern project in earnest and with an open mind. This exploration led to the development of Catholic social doctrine. Act Three centers on Vatican II. In this act, the Church definitively shifted from a defensive stance to a stance of evangelical ambition. The Church decided to “embrace” modernity and convert it from within.

In Act Four, the Church finally becomes itself. St. John Paul II and Benedict XVI offer a critique of political modernity that accepts modernity’s premises. They adopt its aspirations and even its forms, while demonstrating that those aspirations can be fulfilled only in Christ. They envision a “proposing” rather than an “imposing” Church, one that converts hearts rather than controlling institutions or polities. In Act Five, the Church is hit with clerical scandals and finds itself in heightened conflict with a now postmodern West. Then it is burdened with the confusing and seemingly backsliding ­pontificate of Francis, who oddly seems to revive both the defeated modernist danger from the left and the defeated ­Gallican danger from the right.

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It is not the case that modern man was the first to think about freedom, to seek it with true fervor, and that finally the Church came around and saw that freedom was, after all, good. What marks modernity is not the conviction that men can attain some measure of freedom, prosperity, and solidarity. What marks modernity is the belief that these goods can be attained without grace, that grace is not socially efficacious, that we don’t need God in order to have a happy world (if we need him at all). As ­Weigel demonstrates, this belief is what all the popes have relentlessly opposed. They preach that God is necessary. And this preaching is directly opposed to political modernity.

The Church’s opposition to modernity is complicated because everything that exists is, in a sense, good. In The City of God, St. Augustine showed the ancient world that the goodness in paganism was but a shadow of the goodness that is complete in Christ. He showed that all men desire peace. In their drive for power and glory, the pagans themselves were seeking peace. Yet peace was finally found only in Christ. ­Augustine was able to acknowledge the goods of paganism, but in doing so he was not embracing paganism. He was undermining it. When the Church takes the aspirations of the nations and turns them around as a mirror, showing men the incoherence of what they are doing and presenting them with the gospel as the answer to what they ­really want, the Church is not endorsing their world, but rather attacking the root of their error. There is much goodness in the world, and all that is good is, in the end, already Christian. All that is left over is sin.

This is going to be controversial among Traditional Catholics no matter how this is presented but one reason why I’m not so hostile against Vatican II is because of this one point that this video stated, “We’re never going to resurrect the Christian civilization as it was before the Treaty of Westphalia or French Revolution. There’s just no resurrecting that. It’s our project now to create a new culture base on what was good in those but also being alert in the Modern world.”

It’s often struck me that there are intriguing parallels among four intensely Catholic nations that went all-in secular during the late-twentieth century: Québec, Spain, Portugal, and Ireland. The differences are obvious, but look at the similarities. In each case the Church, and especially its clergy, was deeply entangled with politics and state power. In each case authoritarian government long prevailed, in marked contrast to other parts of the West. In each case, the inevitable confrontation between Catholicism and modernity was deferred as long as possible—not least through that Church-state entanglement. And in each case, when the tidal wave of modernity hit, it swept all before it within a generation.