The clearest example of the thesis on how family nurtures faith is in vocations. In the olden days larger intact families produced priests. That’s one reason the seminaries bulged back in the baby boom, also why there was something of a religious revival after the Second World War.

But today’s two-child, one-child, no-child, broken-up, broken-down, single-mother, absent-father disasters pretending to be families simply do not produce priests. Today’s disaster families don’t even produce many Church-goers to speak of let alone vocations to religious life.

In her new book How the West Really Lost God, Mary Eberstadt advances the novel idea that the rise of secularism and the decline of religion started with a disruption in the family, that it is the larger intact family that creates religious folk and not the other way around. I gave her central argument short shrift a few weeks ago, so I am back with a closer look.

Traditional secular theory explains that among other things industrialization and urbanization killed religious faith. Eberstadt explains there is an intermediate step between them and the decline of faith.

A fellow moving from the village green to the big city finds many things upon his arrival. Unlike the village, the big city is really expensive and there is not as much room for a large family. But he also discovers the enticements of city life that do not exist in the village, enticements that are inimical to family life—drinking, gambling, prostitution, and the prospect of living a double life. It was not industrialization and urbanization that directly killed the faith. They were the intermediate steps away from the family that killed the faith.

Eberstadt does not offer an ironclad rule about faith only coming within the traditional family. She suggests it is more like a double-helix, that the destiny of faith and family are intimately intertwined. Eberstadt takes us through history to prove her point.

Most people believe the decline in birthrates is a fairly modern phenomenon and they would be wrong. The first country to reach what demographers call the “demographic transition” to dramatically lower fertility was France and this occurred in the 18th century. At the same time in France illegitimacy rose dramatically “from just over 1 percent in the early 18th century to between 10 and 20 percent by the 1780s—and 30% in Paris.”

The French revolution turbocharged family-decline by liberalizing marriage laws and also saw the increased use of contraceptives. Eberstadt writes that religious practice declined precipitously. “Confraternities … saw their membership drop dramatically across the century. Religious bequests in wills declined sharply. Religious symbols became markedly less important in public life; by 1777, the city of Paris could decide that voters would no longer have to swear on the crucifix in electing city councilmen.”

First the French family fell then the faith followed. And France was not alone.

The decline in British fertility began a century later than the French, at “the very height of Victorian England.” What also followed was “fewer births, more divorces, more out-of-wedlock births” such that “by our own time, over half of all children born in Britain are born to unmarried people, and the fertility rate stands at 1.91 children per woman.” And what of the faith in Britain? “Only 15% of the population in the United Kingdom now shows up for church monthly (not weekly).”

Take a look at Ireland. Their demographic transition did not happen until much later. In the 1970s the Irish fertility rate stood at more than 4.0 children per woman. And then it fell off a cliff. Thirty years later Irish fertility had fallen to 1.89. And what about the faith? Mass attendance fell from 91 percent in 1973 to 34% in 2005. In the year 2005 Dublin did not ordain a single priest. Linger over that fact for just a moment.

Eberstadt looks at her thesis from the other direction, too. Are there places and times where a religious revival has followed a baby-boom? She points to an “outbreak of postwar religiosity” in Great Britain (1945-1958), Australia (1955-1963) and West Germany (1952-1962), all of which coincide “almost perfectly” with the postwar baby boom.

The same thing happened in the United States. Gallup polls from the interwar years showed a slight dip in American religiosity but then after the Second World War came the baby-boom and a matching revival of religious faith that only abated with the emergence of the contraceptive pill.

What about America and this thing called American exceptionalism? How is it that this largely secular country has nonetheless kept religious fervor on the boil while the faith in Europe is dying? Though numbers are dropping in the U.S., still figures for Church attendance, orthodox practice, and religious vocations are much higher than in Europe.

Eberstadt points out that as far back as Tocqueville, social scientists and historians have pointed out that American attitudes toward marriage have been different that in Europe. For instance, we never had a tradition of arranged marriages like they did in Europe. And even today, Americans are more marriage minded than Europeans.

Could this change? Eberstadt thinks so. While the U.S. performs better than Europeans in family formation, we are quickly following their lead. A year ago, it was reported that more Americans now live alone than within a family.

Still, there are signs of hope. While the poor and less educated are following the disaster-family model, moderately educated and more affluent Americans are seeing their divorce rates drop, their marriage rates increase and even now it is kind of hip in Hollywood to have more than two children.

Eberstadt’s thesis should make perfect sense to Catholics. Catholics understand that our faith grew from a family, the Holy Family. We revere the Blessed Mother and St. Joseph because it was from their home that Our Savior and therefore our faith came. Christ could have sprung fully formed without mother or father, but he didn’t and neither does our faith grow that way either. We likely learned our faith from our mother. Moreover, as Eberstadt makes clear in this book, our very presence as children likely made our mother’s and our father’s faith grow, too.

Family and faith is the double helix that saves souls and civilizations.

Editor’s note: The image above of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, entitled “The Royal Family in 1846,” was painted by Franz Xaver Winterhalter in 1846.

The 1964 Vatican II Decree on Ecumenism, Unitatis redintegratio, was quite clear: The newly launched ecumenical movement had as its sole goal, the reunification of Christians.  The appeals for reunification would be directed to baptized Christians, “those who invoke the Triune God, and confess Jesus as Lord and Savior, doing this not merely as individuals but as corporate bodies.” The prime interest would be in uniting with those Christian communities that possess the Apostolic Succession and preserve all seven sacraments, such as the Orthodox churches; and also other Christian bodies, such as the Church of England, whose liturgies and other usages are similar to Roman Catholic practices.

Other Vatican II documents, however, envisioned extending the outreach (not strictly ecumenical dialogue, but “interfaith dialogue”) to non-Christian religions. Lumen Gentium (1964) strikingly affirmed that “the plan of salvation also includes those who acknowledge the Creator, in the first place amongst whom are the Moslems: these profess to hold the faith of Abraham, and together with us they adore the one, merciful God, mankind’s judge on the last day”; and Nostra aetate (1965), urging “mutual understanding,” emphasized that “The Church has also a high regard for the Muslims. They worship  God, who is one, living and subsistent, merciful and almighty, the Creator of heaven and earth, who has also spoken to men. They strive to submit themselves without reserve to the hidden decrees of  God, just as Abraham submitted himself to God’s plan, to whose faith Muslims eagerly link their own.”

The wording of the statement that God’s “plan of salvation” also includes Muslims, who worship the same God and “hold the faith of Abraham” seemed to “push the envelope”—as if we Christians shared a common religious heritage with Islam as well as Judaism.

The “interfaith dialogue” guidelines from the Council were followed up with further initiatives—for example, The Vatican Secretariat’s Guidelines for a Dialogue between Muslims and Christians (1969); Orientations pour un dialogue entre Chretiens et Musulmans (1981), under the auspices of the Vatican Secretariat; and Christian-Muslim Relations: An Introduction for Christians in the United States of America (2003), published by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops.

Keynoting a new quasi-ecumenical approach to Islam, Pope Paul VI in his 1969 visit to Uganda, along with mention of Catholic and Anglican martyrs, also paid homage to Muslim martyrs for “refusing to transgress the precepts of their religion.” He seemed to be referring to Bábís (who latter became Bahais) executed in Persia (Iran) during the 19th century. He spoke of “Our high respect for the faith you profess, and Our hope that what we hold in common may serve to unite Christians and Moslems ever more closely.”

In the same spirit, Pope John Paul II in 1986 convoked the World Day of Prayer for Peace in Assisi, attended by non-Christian religions as well as non-Catholic churches. In 1999 a photo of the Pope kissing the Koran presented to him by an Islamic delegation—like the 2009 photo of President Barak Obama bowing to the Saudi King—“went viral” on YouTube.

In our archdiocese in 2007, the Council for Islamic-American Relations (CAIR), offered presentations on Islam. Our parish scheduled four 90-minute presentations.  I met with our pastor with my objections, and also wrote to the then-Archbishop Dolan about CAIR’s terrorist connections, but to no avail. I attended the first two of the presentations, which extolled the beauty of Islam at great length, with only a few minutes left for questions or comments.

Robert Spencer in Not Peace but the Sword: the Great Chasm between Christianity and Islam casts doubt on such efforts of rapprochement with Muslims. Islam is an “Abrahamic” religion only in the sense that Muslims claim that Abraham’s sacrifice in Genesis 22 was of Ishmael, their ancestor, not Isaac. The God of Islam is not a Father, certainly not love, but rather the master of the universe, in which all human beings are his slaves. Some non-believers (as well as the mysterious spirit beings known as jinn) are actually created for hell. The commandment to “love your neighbor as yourself” appears nowhere in Islam. Jesus was not the Son of God, was not crucified, and did not arise from the dead.  Rather, he preached the coming of Mohammed—a fact that does not appear in the now corrupted versions of the New Testament.  Jesus will return at the end of the world to break all crosses, kill all pigs (food eaten by Christians), destroy Christianity, and Islamize the world.  Mary was the daughter of Imran, the father of Moses and Aaron, and thus the sister of Aaron. The New Testament has been defiled. All the references of Jesus in the Gospels to the coming of Muhammad have been removed. Christians are the “vilest of creatures” (Qur’an 98:6), and can escape the death mandated for unbelievers only if they pay a special poll tax (juzya) in Muslim countries.

It is often claimed that we can at least join in concert with Muslims on moral issues. But, according to Spencer, this is problematic.  Islamic morality allows for practices that Catholicism abhors, including contraception, female genital mutilation, and even sexual slavery of non-believing women. Abortion is permitted in the first trimester. Child marriage is rampant in Islamic jurisdictions.  Polygamy is permitted, along with easy divorce of wives by men and “temporary” marriage laws. Sharia Law, Spencer adds, makes the chasm between Christianity and Islam almost completely unbridgeable: “Sharia Law calls for, among other things: the dehumanization of women; the flogging/stoning/killing of adulterers; and the killing of homosexuals, apostates and critics of Islam. All of this is part of orthodox Islam, not some ‘extremist’ form of it.”

In a book I published during the 1980s, Ethics in Context, I included a section on the Golden Rule, which began with a listing of various versions of the Golden Rule in major religions, including Hinduism, Buddhism and Confucianism.  I was unable to find anything like the Golden Rule in Islam. There was nothing of the sort in the Qur’an. The closest approximation was in one of the Hadiths, saying “None of you believes until he wishes for his brother what he wishes for himself.” But this instruction only applies to fellow Muslims, as we discover from verses 9:23 and 48:29 in the Qur’an, which prohibit friendship with, and compassion for, unbelievers.  Spencer notes the very restricted application of the Ten Commandments also: “ ‘Thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not steal,’ and so on and so on. Islam does uphold those things, but for Muslims only.”

Aside from tolerance and normal respect and communication with Muslims, it remains questionable whether systematic and structured “dialogues”—to come to an agreement on religious doctrines or moral values—are of any benefit whatsoever. Our main hope in addressing the Christian-Muslim “chasm” is an emphasis on natural law and natural rights, which, being written on the hearts of all men, can be activated even in the midst of religious pressures and interdictions.

The absurdity of the mantra “don’t judge” is lost on the ideologues. Ideology is the worship of an idea and as such it is the worship of self because in deciding what ideas to worship, the ideologue makes himself the arbiter of truth and in doing so increases in his own sight.  We Catholics worship the absolute person, the author of life, the Logos, our Christ. He is the standard by which we must judge everything and in worshipping Him, we decrease.

Asking people to “not judge” is like asking them not to breathe.  Jesus himself commands us to judge when he says in John 7:24, “Do not judge by appearances, but judge with right judgment.” This is a reminder of the Mosaic Law in Leviticus 19:15,  “You shall do no injustice in judgment; you shall not be partial to the poor or defer to the great, but in righteousness shall you judge your neighbor.”  In our Lord’s Prayer, when we ask God to forgive us as we forgive others we are best able to forgive properly when we see reality rightly. Proper judgment is also indispensable in the quest to see reality rightly. Therefore, it is almost impossible to overstate the importance of judging rightly.

The oldest intellectual error on record is one of sophistry. To “make the worse argument the better” is to ape God’s omniscience. This is what the serpent did to great effect. The three battle fronts of our spiritual warfare—Satan, a world steeped in the Culture of Death and pervasive self-deceit—make righteous judgment an elusive skill to acquire and an arduous virtue to cultivate. In Genesis 3:17, God says to Adam “cursed is the ground because of you; in toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life.” Our fallen natures make this true of cultivating the inner landscape as well, which is so important and laborious that we have instituted universities to assist us.

The time has come for our first born to seek the assistance of a university.  Our local university is an asylum holding up the appearances of a college. The idea of a university is an enduring and worthwhile form, but outside of the Newman Society list what real Catholic options are there? We thought we would find out.

We received an invitation to a private Catholic college in Northern California, that bastion of beatnik pride and breeding ground of the barren sexual revolution. The campus is charming, it has a beautiful chapel, and saints’ names and Catholic words are flung around everywhere like rosary beads flying off a broken string. Teachers and students alike seemed very amiable before too many ideas were exchanged.

The appearance of a Catholic identity quickly began to dissipate as words of ideology began to overshadow the physical beauty of the campus. Words of inclusivity, diversity, tolerance and freedom began to paint a portrait of cultivated narcissism. There was a multicultural student panel with four students; one was the valedictorian. They were nice kids but hardly a vision of erudition or moral cultivation. Their testimonies were insipidly self-centered. The contiguous thread that ran through all four talks was the great fun they had there. Far from inspiring confidence, the valedictorian touted diversity by bragging about the LGBT and gay pride club.

After the multi-ethnic model students left, the dean of admissions took parent questions. I asked “this is a Catholic college, does it promote homosexual activity? And how do you square that with Catholic Doctrine?” A flushed silence engulfed the room. The dean of admissions took a moment to blush and regain his composure. With a mock attempt to mask mock distaste for the pedantic, he delivered a well-tempered righteously indignant response:

First of all we don’t promote anything here!
Gay people are everywhere! God created them that way!
Our goal is to promote cultural competence!

The silent tension in the room was palpable. Whether it was because I asked an uncomfortable question or whether the dean’s ideological response gave Catholics pause I am not sure.

At the end of the day in a misguided attempt at fraternal correction I approached the dean and said “that was quite an answer you gave me.” He fired “I just tell the truth.” There was a depth of sincerity in his brisk reply signaling an impassable boundary. This ended our exchange; I thanked him and went home.

To the mind that is nourished by its own authority, what passes for sophistication is childish incongruity. Cognitive dissonance is the mocking imitation of paradox and self-deceit is an abundant renewable resource in the inner landscape of the ideologue.

The dean’s three main points were demonstrably false. First he said “we don’t promote anything!” Even if they were promoting nothing, that would be foul enough. Considering that a religious order runs the school, they ought to promote Catholic truth for a thousand reasons to be found in the Holy Scriptures, explained in the Catechism, taught by the Magisterium and modeled by the Saints. Sadly, instead they are promoting the licentious ideologies that have poisoned the secular universities. But make no mistake; they are promoting plenty.

The dean’s second main point is that “God created them that way.” There is no credible evidence of a “gay” gene, but not for lack of searching. However, there is much anecdotal evidence that same sex attraction is a byproduct of disordered relationships and our fallen tendency to corrupt the natural order of things. Mark Regnerus’ study provides data to what can be observed about the nature of same sex attraction and its damaging effects on children. It demonstrates that being raised by same sex parents leads to a much higher incidence of same sex attraction.  Whether or not one is born with a proclivity towards same sex attraction is of little significance when considering the true nature of the disorder. It is an addiction, a vice, not terribly unlike heterosexual sex addiction.

We know that human sexuality is properly ordered to monogamous and faithful sacramental marriage between two complementary members of the opposite sex for the primary purpose of procreation in forming the building blocks of civilization. Another important purpose is that of communion in the struggle to attain eternal beatitude. Heterosexual and homosexual promiscuity lie outside the healthy boundaries revealed to us by the nature of the Trinity. Neither is to be condoned or encouraged nor do they represent a civil rights struggle, but a struggle with the perversion of a natural appetite

Bishop Fulton Sheen once described the three attributes of the demoniac as the love of nudity, violence, and division—a split mind. The father of lies leaves these fingerprints on his endeavors. As Catholics we are called to speak the truth with charity. If we do not, we have fallen short. But how does the “gay” community respond to Catholic Truth?  Like that of a class seeking civil rights? Or, like that of an addict?  Nudity, violence and double standards characterize “gay” parades, propaganda, and confrontations. A prime example is what happened in Belgium on April 23, 2013, when an Archbishop was attacked by four topless gay rights activists. The good witness prays and the vicious “gay” rights activists degrade with nudity, violence and double standards.

Finally, the dean’s whopper of a lie was to say “Our goal is to promote cultural competence!” That would be a fine goal if by “culture” he was referencing the great cultures throughout history, expressed in the truth, goodness and beauty bequeathed to us by our forefathers. Many cultures are worth much study and contemplation such as the Ancient Greek, Roman and Hebrew cultures.  He was not referencing these cultures; he meant “homosexual culture.”

The idea of “homosexuality” as a culture requiring competence is absurd. It would fall into a completely different category like that of “drug culture” and “sex culture” but not into that category of cultures known to organize and build up civilizations. The contrary category of so-called “cultures” of sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll are known to disintegrate civilization. They have an eroding effect because they degrade the integrity of the human person.

This was our first visit to a Catholic college with our eldest daughter. It is incredibly disheartening to think that ideology has replaced the honest pursuit of knowledge, Catholic truth and the cultivation of the mind and soul through the contemplation of the good, the true, and the beautiful. We must reclaim our Catholic intellectual heritage and wrest it from the hands of the ideologues who have commandeered it and hold it hostage to pathological licentiousness.

The protestors against “gay” marriage in France are wearing pink in a clear sign of reclamation. As Catholics, we must reclaim our universities starting with the words and symbols that have been thieved and violated by the “gay” rights activists. We ought to start by reclaiming the truthful meaning of the words “culture” and “competence” and reinstate true Catholic culture to our schools. To use the words “culture” and “competence” to normalize sin is a scandal. The dean of admissions misled students and parents alike. To call such a pack of lies ‘truth’ is indeed the problem of our age.

The Sebastiani family has been making and selling wine in California for more than one hundred years. One of its Napa Valley wines bears the intriguing label, “Aquinas,” in honor of the Catholic Church’s greatest philosopher/theologian.

The choice of this label might raise some eyebrows. What is the “Angelic Doctor’s” name doing on a product that comes from the earth? What does intellectual speculation have to do with grapes?

Donny Sebastiani, Jr., the executive director of Don Sebastiani and Sons, has shed some light on the appropriateness of the label in a November 18, 2011 interview sponsored by the Aquinas Center at Ave Maria University and conducted by Joseph C. Trabbic. “Wine has a significant place in Catholicism,” he remarked. “You see people making and drinking wine in the Old Testament and New Testament.  You see Jesus and his disciples drinking wine … With the ‘Aquinas’ label we saw a natural opportunity to have something with a bit of a Catholic aspect to it. Obviously we want to market ourselves to a wide consumer base, so you don’t want to beat people over the head with a big picture of a crucifix on the label. But the Aquinas wines are still a clear, less than subtle reference to our faith.  It was a natural, obvious choice.” No doubt, the Angelic doctor, himself a rather robust man, would be pleased to hear this.

The Sebastiani family is being astute in recognizing the down-to-earth temper of Aquinas’ thought. St. Thomas had far more practical sense than many people give him credit for having. “Sorrow can be alleviated,” he advised, “by good sleep, a bath and a glass of good wine.” Connoisseurs of wine can be pleased that the wise Doctor of the Church inserted the adjective “good” before “wine.” There is an art to making good wine.  Perhaps this is why Ernest Hemingway, another rather robust man, proclaimed that “Wine is the most civilized thing in the world” (although we may wonder whether this phrase came from Hemingway or from the wine).

What else did St. Thomas have to say about the consumption of wine?  In his most compendious work, the Summa Theologica, he argues strongly for the appropriateness of using wine as a sacrament (Holy Communion). He reasons that wine is more in keeping with the effect of the sacrament, which is spiritual, since, as it is stated in Psalm 103, “wine may cheer the heart of man” (vinum laetificat cor hominis).

Aquinas fully recognizes the body/soul unity of the human being. Therefore, he honors the natural desire that we all have for pleasure. In fact, he states quite emphatically that “none can live without some sensible and bodily pleasure” (nullus posit vivere sine aliqua sensibili et corporali delectione – ST I-II, 34, 1).

St. Thomas is neither a Stoic who avoids all pleasure at all costs, nor an Epicurean who embraces all pleasure at every opportunity. He states that the purpose of the cardinal virtue, temperance, is to refine the way we enjoy bodily pleasures in order to facilitate a more enduring satisfaction (ST II-II, 141, 3). Virtue can allow us to get the most out of pleasure before pleasure takes something out of us.

Hilaire Belloc was very much in tune with Aquinas when he penned his famous encomium to wine:

Wherever the Catholic sun doth shine,
There’s always laughter and good red wine.
At least I’ve always found it so.
Benedicamus Domino.

In Plato’s Symposium, there was plenty of wine at the table to loosen the tongues of the guests. As a result, they spoke eloquently and profoundly about love. In vino veritas.  For Socrates, “wine does of a truth moisten the soul and lull our griefs to sleep … [and with small cups] we shall … be brought by gentle persuasion to a more sportive mood.” Friedrich Nietzsche, no friend of Socrates, had an expressed admiration for Bacchus. But his resulting love affair with intoxication led him to babbling and to Bedlam. Aquinas saw no reason why one could not enjoy wine and remain on the path to wisdom. “A man may have wisdom,” he wrote, not by abstaining from wine, but by abstaining from its immoderate use (ST II-II, 149, 3, ad 1). Wine and wisdom are compatible as long as they are both situated on the path of man’s destiny.  Shakespeare put it more succinctly when he said, “Good wine is a good familiar creature if it be well used” (Othello).

God’s arrangement of all things is profoundly organic. Delectation can be an intimation of wisdom.  It is interesting to note that the Latin word for wisdom (sapientia) is derived from the Latin word for taste (sapio). This analogical relationship between the sensuous and the spiritual is also evinced, many times in Scripture. In Ecclesiaticus, for example, we read, “My spirit is sweet above honey.” We also find this relationship expressed in Mario Soldati’s celebrated aphorism, “Wine is the poetry of the earth” (Il vino è la poesia della terra).  Soldati was, in effect, echoing the thought of Louis Pasteur who agreed that “The flavor of wine is like delicate poetry.” It is said that when Dom Perignon first sipped bubbly Champagne, he exclaimed, “I am drinking the stars!”

Wine is poetry. But there is a great deal of wine in poetry. The quintessence of the grape is irresistibly metaphorical.  Was Omar Khayyam’s immortal phrase, “A loaf of bread, a jug of wine, and Thou,” an unintentional, though oblique, reference to the Mass? Christ referred to Himself as “the true vine.” It could also evoke the religious, social, and familial uses of wine in Judaism’s long history that dates back to biblical times.

Wine played a prominent role in Christ’s first miracle at Cana. In the immortal words of the poet Richard Crashaw, “The conscious water saw its God and blushed.” It symbolized a blessing for both the newlyweds and the family that marriage prefigures.  Wine also played a prominent role at the Last Supper in signifying both Christ’s death and the lifeblood He would provide for his disciples.  Italian families seem to have a special respect for the virtue of a good meal that is graced with wine:  A tavola non s’invecchia (at the table no one ages). Wine can bless both hearth and home.

Wine that brings cheer to the heart and pleasure to our life can also evoke thanks to its Creator.  How fitting, then, for a bottle of wine to bear the name “Aquinas,” for whom wine was not only a delectation, but a sacrament as well.

Editor’s note: This article first appeared in the Spring issue of Canadian Observer (an Ottawa quarterly) and is reprinted by permission of the author.  

You could call the nineteenth century stupid, but hardly dull. At its birth, it was the stage for Napoleon’s antics and for the heroism of the captains of wooden ships; at its death, the old Europe itself was giving way before the hard, cold era of aluminum, centralized planning, and the IRS. Sure, it was an age that liked its gauzy paintings and dolled-up houses, but this Victorian sentimentality can be understood as a kind of by-product, a clinging to comforting certainties amidst seismic changes. “To live is to change,” Newman once said, “and to be perfect is to have changed often.”

Of the many innovations of the nineteenth century, the least equivocal were in engineering, the most in the arts and philosophy. Thanks to Michael Faraday, among others, we have electric lights. Thanks to Beethoven and Nietzsche, among others, we have rock music and deconstructionism. Much harder to think through are the century’s innovations in the world of human organization and social life. In the wake of World War II, it was common for Catholics to view the nineteenth-century nation-state as a kind of political heresy. Today, however, some pine for the good old days of nationalism, seeing it as at least preferable to the etherized dreams and painful mandates of the world-planners.

Buried deep within that confusing world of nineteenth-century political and economic organization is a man who, when remembered at all, is filed away as a conservative or a reactionary—and perhaps with some cause—but who by temperament and achievement should be lauded as a healthy innovator.  He was the modern re-inventor of the family wage, Léon Harmel, owner of the woolen mill at Val-des-Bois.

Harmel (1829-1915) was born late in the reign of Charles X, the last of France’s legitimate kings. From his devout parents he inherited his conservative politics and also a factory, which he would manage, with the help of brothers and cousins, from 1854 until the German occupation in 1915. Located in the countryside just miles outside of Reims, the factory of Val-des-Bois was, for a season, a Catholic workers’ paradise. In an age that gave birth to such characters as Dickens’s Gradgrind and Hugo’s Javert, Harmel stood out for his humanity. He devoted his life to the well-being of his workers, materially, culturally, and spiritually, and rightly earned their admiration and respect.

It was no small task to run a successful textile mill in northern France in the second half of the nineteenth century. There was extraordinary competition near at hand; failed mills literally dotted the landscape, and those that survived bore their scars. Other challenges included such daunting factors as cheap English products, unreliable commodities—as during the American Civil War when cotton supplies all but dried up, a bewildering array of ever-changing tariffs and trade laws, at times an insufficient labor supply, near-constant technological change, and, finally, even fire. In 1874, Harmel’s factory almost burned to the ground, but the flames went no further than the feet of the statue of Notre-Dame de l’Usine (Our Lady of the Factory). Not only did Harmel have Our Lady to thank for having saved the part of the factory she did, but also for providing an occasion for him to modernize his operation, which may have saved the firm.

A businessman through and through, Harmel knew that profit was industry’s life’s blood: there could be no sustainable effort without it. He did not flinch from tough decisions and risks, trying out new products, making ventures into foreign markets—even once to Argentina, and sinking substantial investments into both capital improvements and the training of his workers. A brother with a knack for design supplied bright ideas in threads and cloth, but Léon himself used his gift of a lively moral imagination to shape the human side of the factory community.

To be a factory worker in those days was a tough lot. Early on in the French Revolution, the trade guilds of the Old Regime had been disbanded and a draconian law against workers’ associations passed. It remained on the books until 1884 and made collective bargaining impossible. Workers were very much at the mercy of their employers, who were, in turn, waging an increasingly bitter war for profits that led them to make demands that hardly seem human. How incredible it is that men really worked 15 hour days and women 13; that children slaved away almost as long and even before reaching adolescence; that it was ordinary for the interior temperature of certain parts of a textile mill to be over 100 degrees. And all this for a pittance in wages. Truly, the past is a foreign country.

And so, when we hear that Léon Harmel’s factory was kept at 75 degrees, that his workers toiled only 11 hours per day, and that many of them lived in company housing whose only adornment was a modest garden, we have a standard of reference. Still more important was Harmel’s dedication to the overall well-being of his laborers. He provided for their retirement, for the education of their children, for a suitable use of leisure time (with drama, symphony, and chorus), and, most importantly, he built them a beautiful stone chapel, where, within a decade and a half, he saw a 70% rate of Easter communion among his workers—an extraordinary figure for the working class at the time, and, crucially, achieved without compulsion. “Accounts are unanimous,” says Harmel’s biographer, Professor Joan Coffey, “that chapel attendance as well as participation in religious events in general was a matter of individual choice.”

Harmel’s goal was, as he once put it, to “baptize industry and make it the servant of Jesus Christ.” He pursued that ideal by a heroic practice of the virtue of justice. At the very center of that practice was his policy of a just wage, a wage that would be—again, in his words—“proportionate to [the laborer’s] work and as sufficient as possible to support his needs and those of his family.” This policy did not mean a fairy-tale pay scale. In point of fact, a man could earn more in nearby Reims, but only at the cost of either living in the city, which was more expensive, or trudging home to the countryside after a back-breaking work day that started at five in the morning. Not much of a choice. But the measure of his family wage can perhaps be seen in this fact, that over time his workers were able on average to put away 10% of their salaries for the needs of their retirement, and this in an age when workers’ savings were almost unheard-of. Harmel also rewarded merit with increased pay, and, as was customary, paid men significantly more than women. Finally, in the face of a downturn in the industry after 1900, he stood by his men, thinning the ranks of the factory mostly through retirement rather than lay-offs. The earthly reward of this justice? A good work is its own reward: he kept alive a factory employing between 375 and 675 people for over half a century. It was a solid achievement in a world characterized by flux and impermanence.

What was the secret of Harmel’s dedication? He was a devout man, to be sure. A Franciscan tertiary, he devoted himself single-mindedly to his children and his factory after the death of his wife when he was only 41. He took vows of chastity, obedience to his spiritual director, and poverty, which last he expressed by personal austerities such as giving up smoking, which had been habitual.

Yet we must not overlook this crucial fact: Harmel trusted in his people. In 1898 he gave a speech to the veteran laborers of his factory, praising them in these terms: “Thanks to your good spirit and your confidence in your leaders, we have been able to establish factory councils . . . giving you a real participatory role in the governance and the discipline of the establishment.” This was to take a great step and certainly a risky one. Was he similarly adventuresome with his management team? We will probably never know, but it seems that a man who became a diplomat of Catholic social thinking and organized and led worker pilgrimages to Rome—including one with 10,000 French laborers—was likely to have confided much of the day-to-day workings of the factory to the brothers and cousins who shared the management with him. What is certain is that Léon Harmel sought profit for his business for the sake of his people, for whom he generously poured out his money, time, and effort. And so, we can safely say that he possessed the essential and irreplaceable advantage shared by the best entrepreneurs: a trust in God’s Providence at work in the unpredictable power of human creativity.

Major League Baseball has retired the number 42, in honor of Jackie Robinson, the man who broke the color line and opened up that institution to all Americans.  Justly has the league set aside the anniversary of this event as Jackie Robinson Day, when all players on all teams wear his number.

Much has been written about Jackie’s courage, enduring insults in the more southern cities of Saint Louis and Cincinnati, though I doubt he had it a lot better in places like Philadelphia or Boston. And there were the indignities of segregated hotels, lavatories, and pools; the constant struggle against stupidities and injustice. It drove Jackie’s talented teammate, the pitcher Don Newcombe, to drink—and only a threat of divorce from Newk’s wife, and his swearing an oath on his small son’s head, turned his life around.  It was too late to save his career, but in time to save his marriage and his integrity as a man.

The colored players dealt with the troubles in various ways.  Many are the gifts of grace, but many too are the failings of frail mankind.  We who will not encounter every day such bald and self-satisfied prejudice must be slow to judge; still, it’s obvious that some men fought more successfully than others. The hatred of Philadelphians drove Richie Allen, naturally as talented as any player who ever lived and a native of those suburbs to boot, to acts of insubordination that made matters worse and divided the clubhouses he entered.  So he passed from team to team, not really helping any of them. Allen is one of the three or four best hitters who is not in the Hall of Fame and who is probably never going to be. Bob Gibson, native of Omaha and graduate of mostly white and Catholic Creighton, smoldered.  He concentrated all his anger and insecurities and ambition into one objective, to defeat the enemy at the plate. Opponents were so afraid of him that when they were traded to the Cardinals, they learned to their relief that Gibson was actually a friendly fellow—but only to his own. Satchel Paige, too old to care overmuch what anybody thought of him, cultivated his hayseed persona, telling stories and singing bass in the Indians’ barbershop quartet. Vic Power dated white women and patronized “white” restaurants.  “I’m sorry, sir,” said an embarrassed waiter in Syracuse, “but we don’t serve colored people here.”  “That’s all right,” said Power.  “I don’t eat colored people.” After his playing days were over, Power returned to his native Dominican Republic, and built up a large baseball clinic; and now, fifty years later, Dominicans are the most prominent of ethnic groups in Major League Baseball, owing in large part to the determination and foresight of Vic Power.

How many of these Dominicans were taught by Dominicans—or Franciscans, or Benedictines—I don’t know, though I imagine it’s quite a few. If we have to wait till the sports media tell us about it, though, we might as well wait for a double no-hitter. The reporters and the players do not come from the same place, economically or spiritually. That explains why the most important thing in Jackie Robinson’s life is not common knowledge. Jackie was a devout Christian. That’s why the other devout Christian in the story, the teetotaling Branch Rickey—the Mahatma as he was called late in life—chose him. Rickey needed a man who understood how much courage it would take not to retaliate; to pray for his enemies, to turn his face to buffets and spitting. Rickey knew, and Robinson knew also, that the man chosen to bear years of opprobrium must win the doubters over by his excellence not only as a player, but also as a man, a Christian man.

We don’t know what thorn in the side plagued Saint Paul, but he had a natural eye for athletics; his metaphors taken from wrestling and racing don’t derive from the Old Testament but, it seems, from his own experience or esteem. “I have fought a good fight,” he says, “I have run the race to the finish.” The metaphors are apt; every athlete knows that he cannot excel without askesis, training, the severe self-denial that makes us fit for strenuous labor. So it isn’t mere accident, I believe, that many great athletes were also deeply religious men: not delicate, not always well spoken, but of a rough and hardy saintliness whence our contemporary Church could learn some lessons.

These are stories our young people should hear. Why don’t they?  Christy Mathewson was a Hall of Fame pitcher who grew up a few miles from where I did. The Little League there was named after him, and that’s all I knew of Matty. I didn’t know he was a clean-living Christian, one of the last players who observed the Sabbath by not playing on Sunday—meaning that he’d often pitch on short rest on Saturday instead, not that that affected his success. I didn’t know that he was so honest that umpires sometimes asked him for help if they were out of position to see a close play; nobody doubted Matty’s word. I didn’t know that when everybody else was looking the other way, Matty declared publicly that the Black Sox were throwing the 1919 World Series. I didn’t know that he volunteered to help train soldiers for World War I, and that in those exercises he inhaled the poison gas that destroyed his lungs and led to his early death in 1923. Matty was a Billy Sunday, that ballplayer who became the most famous preacher in America, but he “preached” with his career of courage and grace and generosity.

Why don’t we hear of that? Why do so few people know about the faith of the greatest ballplayer of this generation, Albert Pujols? Albert has endowed the Pujols Family Foundation, for children born with Down Syndrome; he and his wife have adopted two, and have several other children besides. Albert arrived in Kansas City from the Dominican when he was sixteen, and he still speaks with a thick accent, so it’s easy for spindly sophisticates to smirk when he gives thanks to God; but devotion clears the eyes, and Albert sees more than they do, even if he cannot express it in dime-a-dozen English sentences. Stan Musial, who passed away earlier this year, was a churchgoing Catholic from the coal mines of Pennsylvania.  He didn’t marry a famous sexpot, as did Joe DiMaggio, and he didn’t toss obscenities at the fans, as did Ted Williams; all he did was play as well as they did (better, in Joe’s case), and open his heart to all who came his way, especially children. Babe Ruth was a hard drinking and hard living rascal, but then, he was a rare sort of orphan, too. He didn’t lose his mother and father. They lost him: they sent the unruly boy to live in a Catholic orphanage in Baltimore, where he learned baseball from one of the priests. The Bambino best earned his Italianate nickname as he lay dying, when he entered the Roman Catholic Church.

Bill James, statistician and baseball historian, once remarked that Leo Durocher was wrong, that nice guys do not finish last. If you rounded up a team of the greatest players whom everybody would call good and upright men (Mathewson, Pujols, Jackie, Honus Wagner, George Brett, Musial, Willie Mays, Roberto Clemente), and another team of the greatest players whom nobody would so denominate (Williams, Ty Cobb, Rogers Hornsby, Allen, Rickey Henderson, inter alia), the good men would clean the bad men’s clocks. I’d alter the terms and say that if you took a team of the greatest ballplayers who always darkened the doors of the church on a Sunday, and another team of the greatest ballplayers who never did so, the churchgoers would win, hands down. This should come as no surprise. They who open their hearts to God will open their hearts to their fellow man; not only to the fans, but to their teammates. They will do more than sweat or bleed. They will sweat blood, but without the anger that sours a victory and sets the stage for the next disappointment.

I’m not judging the faith according to the success it brings. Our Lord gives us the ultimate picture of defeat, mocked by the Jews, abandoned by his friends, and despised with a shrug by his Roman tormentors. But surely it is fair to be an umpire of men! Not simply for their goodness or sinfulness as measured on some sliding scale—no such thing exists.  I mean instead that an Albert or a Stan, nourished by the springs of the faith, grows into a different kind of man, almost as if they dwelled at once in this world and in another world, where the fields are green, and the children cheer, and the sky is blue and everlasting.

It’s ironic to me that my recent article, “Fifty Years Later—Vatican II’s Unfinished Business,” has provoked anger among many traditionalists, because for most of my priesthood I have angered liberals who consider me an arch traditionalist. Nevertheless I want to respond to those traditionalists who include both the SSPX and my fellow Catholics still fully united to the Church. I assure you of my prayers and support for your passionate defense of Church practices through the ages.

Nevertheless, I stand fully by my article and support the Second Vatican Council, called by one pope, John XXIII, and brought to a close by his successor, Paul VI. The grave errors and outrages that blighted the Church in the following years—and which traditionalists rightly deplore—cannot be blamed on the council, but on the frailties and sometimes the hidden agendas of those who implemented it. But should we really be shocked that the Church is home to human imperfections? Of the first 12 disciples, one-twelfth went over to the enemy, a future pope loudly denied Him, and all but one deserted Him, just when He needed them most.

The point is, Christ did not shrink from leaving His Church in the hands of imperfect people. We must separate our anger over the damages of many unwise decisions throughout the years from the ongoing mission of the Church. And let’s not forget that the 20th century was hardly the only century of missteps. Yet in every age, the Church regains Her footing.

That firm footing (which of course never completely deserts the Church) continues to be restored into the 21st century in exciting ways. The Year of Faith and the powerful evangelization of our new Pope Francis show the Holy Spirit continuing to heal His Church. I rejoice with my traditionalist friends on the ongoing restoration and if I had unlimited space, I would cite many examples of this. But here are just a few of the timeless notes of the Church, which I would continue to defend right along with my critics:

• Reverence at receiving Communion—kneeling preferably—and maintaining the rules that protect the sacred.
• Modesty in women’s dress
• Solemn, majestic liturgy, including music
• A disciplined, catechetical approach to teaching the faith.

I agree with traditionalists that there are many more  (to name them all would take a catechism), and yes, sadly, some parishes and pastors are less than vigilant about them. The answer is to keep teaching and instructing. Like a battleground after a war—and yes, the decades following Vatican II were like a desolate, postwar battlefield—new ground must be tilled, new seeds planted, and destructive weeds pulled. That takes patience and time, but we trust that God has both to give.

Reforms Allow Greater Access to Sacraments
Where I part company with my critics is when “rules” trump the love of Christ and His access to human beings. In this regard, Vatican II rightly freed the Church’s hands.

I became acutely aware of this while serving for 11 years as director of prison ministry for the Archdiocese of Denver. The old “rules” which required specific Mass linens, receptacles and rubrics, for example, would have seriously limited my ability to offer Mass for prisoners who deeply needed the Real Presence of Christ.

The old rules didn’t allow for lay extraordinary ministers of the Eucharist, either. As one priest, I could not possibly distribute Holy Communion to every prisoner in my care and still complete the rest of my priestly duties. To eliminate the ability of Church approved and instructed laity to take the Blessed Sacrament to literally thousands of Catholic prisoners every month when these prisoners desperately need the Lord—that seems a terrible lapse of charity.

And speaking of tradition—can the traditionalists forget the holy young layman Tarcissus, who took Holy Communion to prisoners in the early Church? It was necessary then and is necessary now.

Traditionalists who oppose these changes seem to say, “No, the important thing is that a priest and no one else distributes Communion! If that means these prisoners only receive once a year instead of once a month, so be it!”

These critics of the council should remember what Jesus said about the Pharisees. “They bind up heavy loads, hard to carry, to lay on other men’s shoulders, while they themselves will not lift a finger to budge them….   Woe to you Scribes and Pharisees, you frauds!” (Mt. 23:4 & 13.)

The Pharisee Mindset meets Modernism
The Pharisees whom Christ rebuked don’t just exist in Bible history. There is a Pharisee mindset, which exists through time and is part of our broken humanity. In other words, Christ wasn’t just chiding the Pharisees who stood before him. He was emphasizing to the people of His times that He was praying for all those who would believe in him through the word of the apostles (John Ch. 17:20). In other words, he was speaking to us! We must guard against becoming Pharisees as well.

And what is this Pharisee mindset? Well, first of all, it is the error at the opposite end of the moral spectrum from the radical modernists who say that, when it comes to interpreting Scripture and Church dogmas, “Anything goes!” That free-for-all code, the modernist heresy, was called by Pope Pius X “the synthesis of all heresies,” because it encompasses them all. In recent centuries the Church’s greatest battle has been against that many-headed monster, modernism, which Pope Pius X masterfully outlined in his prophetic 1907 encyclical, Pascendi Dominici Gregis.

We all know—too well—the outrages and disruptions caused by modernist inroads in the Church. But in reaction to that heresy, the Church has been, in effect, abandoned by many people at the other end of the spectrum as well. These well meaning people have retreated to the mindset of the Pharisees, who hold up rigid rulemaking as the greatest good. I am convinced that many ultra traditionalists (including many of my critics) believe they are doing the right thing. After all, every war brings confusion and deceit, and in this ongoing war against modernism, Satan has set a reactionary trap for many who don’t fall for the obvious allurements of modernism, which is to run after anything that is new, innovative, and culturally acceptable. The rest of us may recognize these evils of modernism. But that doesn’t mean Satan gives up on us! For many of us, unless we remain vigilant, he offers the temptation of the Pharisee mindset, which relies on rules rather than the power and authority of God’s love. This trap is far more subtle, but it is equally designed to enslave people and separate them from the Church.

Examine Closely Council Documents
And so we come to the crux of our disagreement—Vatican II. The Council that Pope John said would “throw open the windows of the Church” also swept in these two great temptations—modernist thinking and, in reaction, the Pharisee mindset. But this is not the fault of the Council, but part of the mysterious battle between good and evil. If anything, the forces of evil which Satan hurled against the Church after the Council prove that the Council was good, because Satan had to stop its fruits from growing, at all costs.

I urge traditionalists to say a prayer to the Holy Spirit and then crack open the Vatican II documents, and really read them with an open heart. You will see that no essential doctrine of the Church has been discarded—only enhanced. The documents only reveal the open arms and the mercy of Christ.

Critics of the Council who reject these documents out of hand deprive themselves of an opportunity to find Jesus Christ.

For example, ultra traditionalists take great offense at this Vatican II statement:

Those who through no fault of their own do not know the Gospel of Christ and His Church, but who nonetheless seek God with a sincere heart and, moved by divine grace, try in their actions to do his will as they know it through the dictates of their conscience—those too may achieve eternal salvation. Nor shall divine providence deny the assistance necessary for salvation to those, who through no fault of their own, have not yet arrived at the explicit knowledge of God, and who, not without grace, strive to lead a good life (Lumen Gentium, no. 16).

Traditionalists counter with Boniface VII’s statement in his bull, Unam Sanctam, that “outside the Church there is no salvation” (Nov. 18, 1302, Denz. No. 468, 30th edition).

Of course what Boniface said is true. But how God introduces His Church to each individual cannot be fully gleaned by any human being. Vatican II merely acknowledged that God is free to distribute his grace where He wills—and that He has access to each human heart in ways that we are not privy to.

The traditionalist error is to believe that human beings are allowed to be, in effect, the mystical gatekeepers of God’s mercy—that they can somehow penetrate every aspect of God’s providence and speak with the authority of God. This is pride. No individual can rightfully block God from gaining access to the soul of any human being.

Our proper role on this earth is far more humble, even as we must remain vigilant. We are to abide by Church discipline, doctrine and the Magisterium. These laws stand immutable and firm as ever. In other words, we all agree, with ringing truth, that certain sins are mortal, that hell is real, and that our free-will choices determine our eternal destiny. We all believe Christ gave the Church the power to loose and to bind sin.

We are also called by the Church to believe in the divine purpose and role of Vatican II while preventing the Church from becoming a watering hole for modern Pharisees.

The Damaging Effects of Rigidity
If this had ever happened—of course the Holy Spirit would not allow it—rigidity would end up governing everything. For example, I ask the traditionalists: If every person has to have an express knowledge of Jesus Christ to be saved, what would they say is the fate of adults in far flung countries, bereft of missionaries? And what of infants, including the pre-born? What about the dying Hindu beggars whom Mother Teresa lovingly rescued from the gutters of Calcutta? Are they all categorically damned?

Instead, the Church rightly interprets Boniface’s statement to mean that the only door to salvation is the Church—in other words, Christ’s authentic call to faith does not come through Buddhism, or Islam, or any other religious tradition. But this does not mean that God, through the power of Christ and in His own mysterious ways, cannot save Buddhists and Muslims. Such enlightenment can come in mysterious ways known only to God, including in the womb. This is possible, as we know from the account of John the Baptist leaping in the womb of Elizabeth upon recognizing Jesus in the womb of Mary. So Vatican II teaches that “those too may achieve eternal salvation.” “May” means that, of course, they too will have to make a decision based on their own free will, like each one of us.

Likewise, extreme traditionalists need to be very careful when they start pinning people with narrow and exacting literal interpretations of the Scriptures and Church teaching. That’s because Pope Boniface, in the same document as above, also notes that all humanity,  “by necessity for salvation are entirely subject to the Roman Pontiff” (Denz. no. 469, 30th ed.).

On one hand, Traditionalists cite Boniface as correct, yet on the other hand, they deny Boniface when they reject the authority of the six Roman pontiffs who, since 1963, have, in their writings and pronouncements, both explicitly and implicitly, declared the authenticity of Vatican II.

Why Religious Coercion was Abandoned
There is another objection. Some traditionalists claim that the Church reversed Her teaching in no. 4 of the Document on Religious Liberty by calling for “freedom or immunity from coercion in religious matters.”  Instead of making the state subject to the Church, they say she now makes the Church subject to the state. But they have misunderstood the meaning of this document. In brief, the document has to do with “freedom from coercion in civil society” in relation to the state and “it leaves intact the traditional Catholic teaching on the moral duties of individuals and societies toward the true religion and the one Church of Christ.” This is pointed out in the very first paragraph. So the Document on Religious Liberty has nothing to do with people’s relation to the authority of the Church which is aptly set forth in Lumen Gentium, no. 14.

Nevertheless, these modern traditionalists condemn the document because it makes the point that the state should not force anyone to accept a set of beliefs. Do traditionalists really want a society where they could coerce Muslims, atheists, or even their Lutheran neighbors to be Catholic?

In fact, the spirit of the Church, as well as Her teaching, is the very opposite, and best proven by the fact that the sacraments are never valid when a person resists, or is forced to receive them. This holds true for every sacrament, including marriage, baptism, and confession.

Let me conclude this way.

God asks for our love and our hearts, but He also put us on earth to use our brains. It should not make us angry to periodically re-evaluate the man-made “rules” we developed over time, and ask whether they continue to serve the Church and Her mission to win souls.

Yes, some rules are immutable and should continue. Others are more a product of one’s culture and the times we live in. God gave us the intelligence, judgment and prudence to periodically examine and re-evaluate all the holy trappings—trappings, not doctrines—which we have put in place to support Christ’s Church on earth.

Vatican II was such a time of re-evaluation. Did some people misuse it? Yes. But the world that once looked in awe at a pope carried aloft on a fancy throne has vanished. We may lament the passing of a more dignified age, but that doesn’t mean we should bring back papal thrones! Remember that Jesus walked in sandals and let a woman wash his feet. He was not afraid to “re-evaluate” traditions when needed. Praise be to God that, through the Holy Spirit, the Church which Christ founded is not afraid to, either.

In his new book, George Weigel explicates the historical development of Evangelical Catholicism, a reform begun by Pope Leo XIII (1878-1903), developed by the renewals of the early twentieth-century, formalized by Vatican II, and authoritatively interpreted by John Paul II and Benedict XVI, and now expressed with particular aplomb by Pope Francis.

It’s a stunning account, and, for a recent convert like myself, a mark of the ability of Catholicism to retain the abiding and unchanging truths of faith while allowing new expressions—ever ancient, ever new.

As Weigel explains in a recent First Things essay, “Evangelical Catholicism is a Spirit-led development reflecting the cultural contingencies of history, like other such evolutions over the past two millennia,” of which we could identify (1) the Patristic Church, (2) the Medieval Church, and (3) the Counter-Reformation Church. Each was necessary for the demands of its time, each was in keeping with the abiding truth, and each gave way to a new form. The Patristic church, a roughly thousand-year development between the primitive and medieval Church, produced the Creeds, gave us the Fathers, and evangelized the pagans. The 500 years of medieval Catholicism gave us the Cathedrals, systematic theologies, and major religious orders before splintering. In roughly the same length of time—500 years—the Counter-Reformation—“the Church in which anyone over sixty today was raised”—“converted much of the Western Hemisphere … withstood the onslaught of the French Revolution … met the challenges of twentieth-century totalitarianism,” and much else besides.

And yet, “its time has passed.” Led by the Spirit, the Church moves to a “new evolution in … self-understanding and self-expression,” even though, of course, the way the Church expresses and lives itself out never fundamentally alters the “enduring marks” of the Church, namely, “unity, holiness, catholicity, and apostolicity.” Despite the constancy of essentials, the new expression and life is, at times, quite dramatically different in feel and language, although nothing really changed. It is the same Church proclaiming the same Faith in the same Lord.

It also presents, I’d suggest, a genuine opportunity to reach out to evangelical Protestants, which, until Palm Sunday, I was.

“Roman fever” is a well-documented Protestant phenomenon, perhaps especially among academics and college students, prompting the common question “Why are so many evangelicals going to Rome?” A good deal of this results from the fact that reason alone is insufficient, always requiring tradition, and as evangelicals look to recover tradition they discover the Tradition. While recovering the past, they also find the sheer enormity and depth of the Catholic intellectual heritage, including its music, art, literature, and poetry, all providing a place to dwell rather than the furious scuttling about of constant reinvention.

While suspicions are not as deep as they once were, in part because of ecumenical cooperation on issues such as abortion and marriage, still many evangelicals have hesitations (to put it mildly) about Roman Catholicism, largely in four categories: (1) the status of the Bible, and how that relates to doctrines about Mary, the Saints, and Purgatory; (2) Papal infallibility (however much this repeats the previous issue); (3) justification and faith/works, and (4) the Catholic thing—statues, mumbled prayers, fish, the Rosary, Swiss Guards, noisy kids in the Mass, an odd inability to sing, and so on.

Don’t underestimate the fourth category. At the evangelical college where I teach, most students have given me a respectful berth about my conversion—everybody knew, no one was surprised, no one asked very much—but before one Honors class a student hesitantly asked if I could explain Marian doctrine, then another question was asked and another, for about an hour. The vast majority of questions related to the fourth category: “What’s the deal with Catholics and drinking?” “Why are people so inattentive during Mass?” “Bingo … what’s with that?” “Why not spontaneous prayers?” “Why are homilies so short?” and so on. Not a single question, not one, about justification, even though in a survey of concerns they would list that objection, but laregely because they know they’re supposed to, not because they really are bothered by it.

Given the history, how could that be? First, the evangelical Protestant world is a mish-mash of theologies, a good many of which are not remotely linked to the magisterial Reformers on justification, which is why there is so much discussion about it, sometimes heated, and a good many evangelicals are not overly tied to Scriptural authority anyway. Second, most people in the pews are not theologians or Church historians, and evangelicals are perhaps particularly concerned to not be bogged down by the past and so not overly worried to distinguish sola fide from sola gratia. Third, young evangelicals are decent people, and many are more concerned with care of the poor then with the finer points of sixteenth-century theological disputes. In other words, I’m proposing that while all would list the four categories of objections, the most alienating and troubling for many is the fourth—Catholicism just seems weird and foreign to the most salient aspect of evangelicalism, which is a committed, personal, meaningful relationship with Jesus. And from the perspective of a young evangelical, Catholics just don’t get this.

One of my students, to use a representative anecdote, was seriously exploring Catholicism. He was attending Mass, was in conversation with a local priest I had recommended, and was hard at work reading the Catechism and some theologians. And he loved what he was reading. Eventually, however, he went to a Presbyterian congregation because, in his words, “the people at Mass were so uninterested and it was a serious challenge to my faith.” On the one hand, this reveals a cultural difference on the point of going to services; I go to Mass, primarily, to receive Jesus Christ in the Eucharist. Everything else is a bonus, but when I was a young evangelical, I was taught that if I didn’t have an experience of God something was wrong, and so I had to express my enthusiasm as proof of my experience. One pastor once told me to “worship hard”—meaning with visible emotion and zeal—so to help others have a similar experience. If this is your expectation, the mumbled prayers, sometimes uninspired homilies and music (oh dear, the music of some parishes! I’ll admit it delayed my own conversion) can be seen as a mark that this is dead, a religion without spirit. Of course, this misunderstands the Mass and is an imperialism of expectations, but culturally it’s a big deal.

On the other hand, it’s also why Evangelical Catholicism has such great missionary potential for drawing in younger evangelical Protestants. I had read Aquinas and Augustine and Athanasius, I had studied with the Jesuits, I had learned the ancient music, I knew the art, I encountered the saints, I was impressed with the commitment to the poor, but until I met Evangelical Catholics for whom, as Weigel puts it, friendship with Jesus Christ was the main thing, I wasn’t convinced. What Weigel describes makes sense to evangelicals, and coupled with the markers of unity, holiness, catholicity, and apostolicity is precisely what a good many of them/us are searching for: “in friendship with Jesus Christ, we come to know the face of the merciful Father, for whoever experiences the Son’s power to forgive sins sees the merciful Father, who welcomes home the prodigals and reclothes them with the garments of integrity.”

The Great Commission continues, and as we experience the ongoing contraction of Christendom, the Oneness of the Church will be especially important. Welcoming home those who left will be an enormous task, requiring patience and charity. If I’m right, though, a good deal of this work could be accomplished if we just did what we should be doing anyway, if we just were who we should be—friends with Jesus.

A Church without Christ is not worth having, but a Christocentric Church will bring home its separated brothers and sisters; it will evangelize those who already have faith but wait for its fullness.

The most astonishing fact about contemporary American politics—that there is not a single Protestant on the Supreme Court, while there are six Catholics—goes largely unremarked, even though on the surface it seems to fulfill the most dire predictions made at the time of John F. Kennedy’s ascendancy in 1960. On the other side, the fact that no Catholic since Kennedy has occupied the White House also attracts little notice.

The atmosphere
 that surrounded Kennedy’s election is today almost unimaginable, and the few sparks struck off Mitt Romney’s Mormonism in 2012 failed to ignite. There is a good deal of suspicion of, and hostility to, Islam, but such hostility remains socially disapproved.

Ironically, however, in this age of ostensible good feeling, religious animosities are now more intense than they have been for a long time, a fact that is not fully understood because of the deliberately ambiguous use of the term “religion.”

The membership of the Supreme Court illumines this. Those who opposed the nomination of the Catholic Samuel Alito did not oppose the Catholic Sonia Sotomayor, and vice versa. Going back more than seventy years, those who saw Southern Baptists largely through the eyes of H. L. Mencken nonetheless rallied behind Hugo Black and Wiley Rutledge. The explanation seems obvious: political ideology trumps religion. There are Catholics and then there are Catholics; there are Southern Baptists and then there are Southern Baptists.

The Religion of Liberalism
But this explanation falls short, because it fails to understand that in reality there are now two fiercely contending religions in America, which are—trite though the phrase may be—engaged in a fundamental battle for the American soul. Sotomayor is not seen as a Catholic except incidentally, and, although the issues were much less clear around 1940, Black and Rutledge were not seen as Baptists. In each case the nominee to the Court was recognized as really an adherent of another, unnamed religion.

One of the two competing contemporary religions encompasses perhaps most Orthodox Jews, orthodox Christians, and (in theory) devout Muslims. It acknowledges divine authority in the affairs of men, the need to conform the human will to the divine law.

On the other side, liberalism is now not merely a political philosophy compatible with many kinds of religion but has itself become a religion. Although the social sciences have long defined religion in very broad terms, it is expedient for liberals that their movement not be seen as a religion, since it thereby escapes the accusations of dogmatism and intolerance that are routinely made against conventional religions. Liberalism is a religion because, for liberals, ultimate meaning lies in a commitment both to the ever-expanding welfare state, which is the fulfillment of the ideal of justice, and to the continuing liberation of individuals from all binding authority, which is the key to personal happiness.
 Liberal ideology ultimately rests on an act of faith.

It can never be discredited by historical events, because the believer simply knows it to be right. Liberal ideas are considered self-evidently true, and, in their present ascendancy, liberals prefer merely to assert those ideas rather than discuss them. The religion of liberalism makes demands on the individual that traditional religion is no longer allowed to make.

The principal religious divide in America cuts across denominational lines on a diagonal, so that the religion of liberalism encompasses most “mainline” Protestants, many Catholics, most Jews, and (most significantly) those who are categorized as non-church-members or unbelievers.

The history of liberal Christianity and Reform Judaism is essentially the story of progressive emancipation from the binding authority of creeds, so that those movements have finally become anti-credal, thereby enabling the new religion of liberalism to encompass people who are agnostics and even atheists. Conversely, orthodox Christians and Jews are necessarily regarded by liberals with a high degree of suspicion, because they threaten a reversion to credal dogmatism.

Liberalism’s Imposition
All of which explains why religious animosity is at a higher level now than it has been for decades. While conservative believers are often aggressive in their criticisms of the liberal society, they are seen—rightly or wrongly—as being a minority, and they have little influence over the mass media, most of the educational system, or the agencies of government.
 For the most part, conservative believers have learned to accept a pluralist society, and their battles—such as over the Obama health plan or public-school textbooks—are merely on behalf of their rights as citizens. But as did most Catholics and Protestants in earlier times, the religion of liberalism considers itself the one true faith that has the obligation (and the power) to impose its beliefs.

When conservative believers demand their rights as citizens, they fail to realize that, as far as the religion of liberalism is concerned, “error has no rights.” The religion of liberalism holds that the media and the educational system should enshrine liberal beliefs and discredit conservative ones, that government should enforce liberal programs by law, and that it is an open question how far heretics should even enjoy freedom of expression.

Editor’s note: This column first appeared in the March/April 2013 issue of Touchstone Magazine and is reprinted with permission.

The revelations of the scandals within the Obama administration in the past couple of weeks make those of us who are old enough recall 1973, when Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s investigative reporting and then the hearings of a special Senate investigative committee brought to the public one astounding detail after another about Watergate. The current developments have been even more striking. One scandal or possible scandal after another, reaching across different executive branch agencies, have come to light in breathtakingly brief succession. There has been the apparent cover-up about the Benghazi episode, the Justice Department’s open-ended seizure of phone records from a wide array of Associated Press offices (including one in the U.S. Capitol Building), the disclosure of apparently politically-motivated decisions and actions by the IRS, the seeming policy of the EPA of waiving fees and fines on the basis of groups’ political views, the reports that HHS Secretary Sebelius has been contacting companies—including possibly those regulated by her department—to solicit funds to help implement Obamacare, and accusations of sexual assault against military men in two branches of the armed forces whose jobs were to prevent sexual assaults.

Of all these possible or acknowledged scandals, however, especially troubling for most Americans is the one involving the IRS—if for no other reasons than that its sights can easily be turned on them. The IRS has admitted to singling out TEA Party and other conservative groups that were applying for tax-exempt status under Section 501 (c) (4) of the Internal Revenue Code. It delayed their applications—sometimes for years—and made excessive and irrelevant inquiries. It often flagged organizations just because they used terms such as “patriot” or “limited government” to refer to themselves and their work. Sometimes it asked for donor or even membership lists (this directly violates the standing U.S. Supreme Court precedent of NAACP v. Alabama [1957]), which held that such membership queries violated the freedom of association implicitly protected by the First Amendment. At the same time, leftist groups got a pass. Such disparate treatment flies in the face of another long-established constitutional doctrine, in which the Court has forbade viewpoint discrimination under the First Amendment free speech clause.

The IRS apparently also leaked confidential information, a violation of federal law. It appears that they provided information about pending 501 (c) (4) applications by conservative groups to ProPublica, a leftist media organization. During the 2008 campaign for the anti-same-sex “marriage” Proposition 8 in California, it also appears that the IRS leaked confidential information about the National Organization for Marriage’s donors to its adversary, the pro-homosexualist Human Rights Campaign. The head of the HRC was Obama’s 2008 campaign co-chairman. NOM plans to sue the IRS over this.

There have also been revelations that the IRS made as a condition of a favorable ruling for tax-exempt status for a pro-life group that it not actively protest at Planned Parenthood facilities. Another pro-life group—a Christian organization—was closely scrutinized for involvement in the annual “Life Chain” and prayer vigils and was probed about the viewpoint content of its educational materials. The Thomas More Society, a national public interest law firm, has taken up their cases. The one involves an attempt to stop constitutionally protected peaceful picketing, and the other more unconstitutional viewpoint-based discrimination and a threat to the freedom of assembly.

Perhaps most troubling is the situation of Dr. Anne Hendershott, my colleague on the Franciscan University of Steubenville faculty and the Society of Catholic Social Scientists Board of Directors. Dr. Hendershott is one of the leading Catholic sociologists in the U.S. When the current IRS scandals broke, she decided to go public about the questionable audit she was subjected to in 2010, apparently because she wrote articles that: questioned the true Catholic character of two well-known sister non-profit organizations, Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good and Catholics United; exposed the funding sources from these organizations (which included George Soros’ Open Society Institute and a major Democratic party fundraiser); and her raising tax questions about the leftist activist leader of these organizations. She had also written a series of articles critical of Obamacare. According to reports—I have not communicated with Dr. Hendershott about the matter—she was called into the IRS’s New Haven office for an audit of her “business” affairs connected with her writing. She said that at the audit session she was asked about who paid her for writing the articles and what their political viewpoint was. The effect of the audit was that Dr. Hendershott stopped writing about these topics. This is the very essence of “chilling effect.” The Supreme Court has consistently held that government cannot act in such a manner that it will have a “chilling effect” on speech so that people will be fearful of expressing their opinions. Moreover, the fact that Dr. Hendershott’s criticism was partly questioning whether these organizations were correct in understanding and interpreting Catholic social teaching adds another possible constitutional dimension to this. Did the IRS violate both the establishment and the free exercise clauses of the First Amendment? Did it effectively make an official governmental judgment about correct Catholic doctrine relating to certain public questions, and then called Dr. Hendershott to task for criticizing the positions of these left-tilting Catholic organizations?

It is not an overreaction to say that these IRS scandals sound like official favoritism of certain organizations and political viewpoints and an attempt to suppress opposition. The question of undue political influence also presents itself. For example, did the people who were prominent in the Obama campaign and the Democratic party go to contacts in the administration or in the agency itself to ask for the IRS action? While the IRS has had a history of taking actions that curry favor with the current political powers and has sometimes been accused of a pro-Democratic bias, the funneling of information to ProPublica and the HRC, the “hands-off Planned Parenthood” demand, the Hendershott matter, and the late-breaking news that information about the scandal was known about but not disclosed during the 2012 election year suggest political pressure from outside the agency. That would not be surprising. After all, this is the administration that has given us the HHS Mandate, supported the claim in the Hosanna-Tabor case that a religious body could not choose its own ministers, wouldn’t defend the Defense of Marriage Act in court, increased federal financial support for Planned Parenthood, and is trying to stop military personnel from sharing their faith. This all indicates an agenda of hostility to traditional Christian morality and a willingness to share in the repressiveness that has come to characterize the political left.

Congressional hearings on the IRS scandals have begun. The respective Congressional committees should invite Dr. Hendershott and the heads of NOM and the pro-life groups in question to come before them to tell their stories. The committees need to be unrelenting in their effort to reach to the depths of this scandal, which may be one of the most serious in U.S. history. While I have not always been a supporter of special prosecutors—I wonder if their concerns have always been with seeing that justice is done and if they have sometimes promoted political agendas—the questions about the Obama administration’s role in this and the seriousness of the matter indicates that one might be needed. Both high and low-level officials and civil servants and political appointees in the IRS should also be aware that such behavior—along with any attempts to silence critics of the agency—is the “stuff” of massive civil rights lawsuits, not just against the government so that the taxpayers pick up the bill but also against them individually.

In light of all this, one also hopes that the public will see the grave danger of having the IRS enforce the Obamacare law and demand that it be stopped.

Beyond this, it is time for the serious debate—that has been avoided for years—about the entire federal tax structure. A flat tax that would necessitate a smaller and less intrusive collection apparatus than the IRS may be indicated. It could easily bring in as much revenue as currently, and meet the demand of Catholic social teaching that it be geared to the principle of  “ability to pay” as much as a graduated tax does.