Recently, His Eminence Francis
Cardinal George of Chicago
discussed the threat posed by secularism in our culture. “[T]he greatest threat
to world peace and international justice is the nation state gone bad, claiming
an absolute power, deciding questions and making “laws” beyond its competence.”[i] In today’s
world, those who would dare question the secular program for establishing a
“just” society are often criticized as pushing for theocracy (or simply of
being out of touch with the times). However, as Cardinal George reminds us,
there are those voices crying out in the wilderness such as the Servant of God
Dorothy Day and our Holy Father Benedict XVI. Concluding his article with a
reflection on the importance of the synod then gathered in Rome
during this Year of Faith, Cardinal George notes the importance of the New
Evangelization on re-forming our secular society in a new mold based on the
Gospels. With civil war in Syria, terrorism in Libya, unjust wars abroad and
mass murder of innocent children at home, the Cardinal’s statement that “the
world divorced from the God who created and redeemed it inevitably comes to a
bad end” rings true.[ii]
The vision of a just society
preached by Christ is distinctly different than that forced on us by “Holy
Mother the State,” to use a term coined by Dorothy Day and cited by Cardinal
George. The ideal of a just society springs from the mission of the Church to
“restore all things in Christ.”[iii]
This task extends to both heavenly and earthly things, St. Paul affirms,
drawing our attention to the fact that the Church’s mandate extends not only to
the “divine mission of the Church, namely leading souls to God,” but also to
that which flows from “that divine mission, namely Christian civilization in
each and every one of the elements composing it.”[iv] It is this
second aspect of the mission in particular which poses such a threat to the
secular order noted by Cardinal George. It is also this aspect which the laity,
by nature of their “life led in the midst of the world and of secular affairs”
has a natural role to play as the “leaven in the world.”[v]
God desires that all men live
together in peace and harmony. Our God is an interesting deity. He is a
communion of Divine Persons and yet at the same time One God. For two
millennia, the full meaning of this has puzzled those who pondered on this
great mystery. What is less mysterious, though, is the fact that man, created
in the image and likeness of God, has an intrinsic desire for communion and for
love.
The Holy Father reflects upon the
nature of love and our need as a Church to reflect Divine Love in our world in
his encyclical Deus Caritas Est. Benedict notes that from the beginning, one of
the major activities of the Church was the ministry of charity (diakonia) along
with preaching the Gospel and administering the Sacraments.[vi] In a way, a
Christian’s acts of charity are perhaps the most thoroughly human acts because,
first of all, they reflect the love of God[vii]
and, secondly give “refreshment and care for… souls, something which is often
even more necessary than material support.”[viii].
Charity and justice in society
are linked. The Holy Father notes that even in a perfectly just society, there
is a need for caritas, “[t]here is no ordering of the State so just that it can
eliminate the need for a service of love” because there will always be
suffering and loneliness in this valley of tears.[ix] A State,
rejecting caritas, even the hypothetical “perfectly just State” would still be
incapable of meeting the basic human need for “loving personal concern.”[x] In contrast
to a bureaucratic, secular Leviathan, the Church offers the subsidiarity State
of Catholic Social Teaching which “generously acknowledges and supports
initiatives arising from the different social forces and combines spontaneity
with closeness to those in need.”[xi]
Benedict notes that while it is the place of the government to ensure justice
in society, “charity must animate the entire lives of the lay faithful and
therefore also their political activity, lived as ‘social charity’”[xii]
and that this charity must be a “spiritual service.”[xiii]
Secular society however has other
ideas, falling for the trap (which the Holy Father connects back to Marxism and
with the Father of Lies) which holds that man can “live by bread alone.”[xiv]
We are told that if we follow the right candidate, our hopes and desires for a
changed world will be fulfilled. This most recent election saw a very wealthy
candidate who (notwithstanding his numerous flaws) also happened to be very
charitable in his giving attacked by two other very wealthy individuals as
hating the poor. This reeks of the Marxist attack on charity that Pope Benedict
denounced in his encyclical, the idea that charity is a “way for the rich to
shirk their obligation to work for justice… while preserving their own status
and robbing the poor of their rights.”[xv]
In the face of this Materialist
view of how to help man and create a just society offered by Holy Mother the
State, we are given the vision proclaimed by Holy Mother the Church. In Deus
Caritas Est, the Holy Father reaffirms the link between charitable works and
prayer.[xvi]
This is a theme central to Jean-Baptiste Chautard’s work The Soul of the
Apostolate. Quoting St. Isidore, Chautard notes that
“Just as love of God is shown by
acts of the interior life, so the love of our neighbor manifest itself by the
works of the exterior life, and consequently the love of God and of our
neighbor cannot be separated, and it follows that these two forms of life
cannot exist without one another.”[xvii]
The Year of Faith calls for us to
deepen our own Faith and to spread the Truth to the entire world. Pope
Benedict, like his predecessor, has called attention to one of the important
reminders of the Second Vatican Council. All of us, as baptized Catholics, have
a share in the mission of the Church to spread the Gospel. This is the active
life which, Isidore and Chautard stress in the above quote, must be linked with
a profound interior life of prayer.
Cardinal George chose a good
example of this in Dorothy Day. She was a daily communicant, prayed the
Breviary, and went to confession and adoration regularly. Typically, her first
visit upon arriving at a new place on her trips around the country to Catholic
Worker houses was to Christ in the tabernacle. Reflecting upon a former nun who
told her she was tired of going to daily Mass and felt it a needless routine,
Dorothy notes in her diary:
“[E]ating [is] routine, and many
a time we had no appetite, food even seemed disgusting to us….When we take to
heart literally the humanity of Jesus as well as his divinity,…then we should
simply obey his commands. We are nourished by his flesh that we may grow to be
other Christs. I believe this literally just as I believe the child is
nourished by milk from his mother’s breast.”[xviii]
Dorothy was a woman of great
Eucharistic piety, and Christ clearly plays a role as the source of her work
with the poor. As the Church came under increased attack after the Second
Vatican Council and the practice of the Faith, let alone orthodoxy, was seen as
optional or dependent fully upon one’s “feelings,” her sadness becomes apparent
in the diary entries near the end of her life.[xix]
If we wish to engage in Christian
charity in the world, we must focus on forming our interior life. Regardless of
our state in life, a well-formed interior life is paramount. Chautard says that
our souls “should be flooded first of all with light, and inflamed with love,
so that reflecting that light and that heat, it may enlighten and give warmth
to other souls as well.”[xx]
He draws attention to St. Bernard’s saying that we should be “reservoirs and
not channels” since a reservoirs fills with water first and then, “without
emptying itself, pours out its overflow, which is ever renewed, over the fields
which it waters.”[xxi]
Drawing upon Aquinas, Chautard also notes that “every cause is superior to its
effect, and therefore more perfection is needed to make others perfect, than
simply to perfect oneself.”[xxii]
Lastly, drawing from common experience, Fr. Chautard sums his argument up by
saying that “a mother cannot suckle her child except in so far as she feeds herself.”[xxiii]
Without making sure that our acts
of charity are not divorced from God and from the spiritual needs of ourselves
and our fellow man, the Holy Father notes that there is no hope of finding
justice. Without paying attention to man’s spiritual/material nature, we do not
see before us the reality of man, thus we cannot help him. Additionally, Fr.
Chautard warns that the active life without the interior is dangerous to our
own soul as well. This does not simply arise from the dangers of falling into
various heresies (Materialism, Modernism, Marxism, etc.), but from the very
fact of his active life sapping so much of his strength that St. Bernard could
write to Bl. Pope Eugenius III warning him to temporarily withdraw even from
his good works and governance of the Church, which for him had become “accursed
tasks.”[xxiv]
They were tempting him to fall into the trap of burning himself out. This is what
he terms the “Heresy of Good Works” following Cardinal Mermillod.[xxv]
The “feverish” activity of good works replaces Jesus and there is a confusion
of means and ends.[xxvi]
Today, this threat seems to
present itself in another form much more pressingly than just burnout. We are
told that we can do good things without God in the forefront. This is the
secular mindset once again coming to the fore, the destructiveness of which the
Church knows well. She has seen this beast before. Pope Benedict recounts one
example in Deus Caritas Est: Julian the Apostate.[xxvii]
In establishing his revived paganism, Julian established a State-run charity
network meant to replicate that of the Church and thus make them redundant,
winning converts to paganism. Once again, in the modern era, we see similar
moves happening in France.
Chautard records instances of teaching orders of nuns who are faced with the
choice of secularizing or losing their apostolate of teaching. Both Leo XII and
Pius X responded by telling the sisters that they must maintain their spiritual
life no matter the cost of that decision to their apostolate.[xxviii]
Today, we see a similar scenario
unfolding. The Obama administration has set itself up as the supreme dispenser
of “charity” in the form of welfare and “Obamacare.” Doubling down, they have
made sure that the Church cannot participate in this new order through various
tactics. Flat out denial in some cases[xxix]
and in others by passing rules and regulations, such as the infamous HHS
mandate, with which the Church cannot comply. The Church as an institution in
this country is faced with a serious challenge. Comply and turn its back on the
teachings of Christ or refuse to serve this new paganism and face whatever
consequences may come. For most of us, this is not a battle in which we will
play a direct part. However, each of us, as a part of the Body of Christ will
be impacted by the outcome of this struggle and need to pray for the conversion
of this country and the triumph of the Sacred and the Immaculate Hearts.
Each of us, however, is faced
daily with the question of how to live out our lives as Christians. How can we
better live our active life in this world as we seek the “extension and
increase of the Kingdom of God
in individuals, families, and society?”[xxx]
Each of us is called to use our energy “for the good of [our] neighbor by the
propagation of revealed truth, by the exercise of Christian virtues, by the
exercise of the corporal and spiritual works of mercy.”[xxxi]
In short, we are called to exercise Christian Charity in our work in creating a
more just and peaceful world. With four more years of the most pro-death
president this country has ever seen, a man who seems to have a personal
vendetta against the Church, it can indeed be very hard to continue to hold
onto hope that we will ever see a just society built upon love. This is where
the power of this Year of Faith comes in. With providential timing, we enter on
this Year of Faith, which is focused on living the New Evangelization, at a
very dark point of time in this world. The new paganism of our secular society
is powerful, but it is a fertile field for missionary work. By deepening our
interior life, looking to the examples of those like the Holy Father, St.
Bernard, and Dorothy Day let us use this Year of Faith to the fullest, going
forth into the world making disciples of all nations, keeping in mind the words
of Cardinal George noting that after the depths of persecution his future
successor will “pick up the shards of a ruined society and slowly help rebuild
civilization, as the church has done so often in human history.”[xxxii]
—Brian Douglass
Mr. Douglass lives in St.
Louis with his lovely bride where he serves the
community with a non-profit which provides free home repairs to low income,
disabled, and elderly residents. An agrarian at heart, he is a fan of urban
farming and liturgy.
[i] Francis Cardinal
George, “The Wrong Side of History,” Catholic New World, 21 October 2012
www.catholicnewworld.com/cnwonline/2012/1021/cardinal.aspx
[ii] Ibid.
[iii] Ephesians 1:10.
[vii] “If you see charity,
you see the Trinity”-St. Augustine,
qtd in Benedict, 19. Also Ps. 145:7-9
[viii] Ibid., 28.
[ix] Benedict XVI, 28b.
[x] Ibid.
[xi] Ibid.
[xii] Ibid., 29.
[xiii] Ibid., 21.
[xiv] Ibid., 28.
[xv] Ibid., 26.
[xvi] Ibid., 37.
[xvii] Jean-Baptiste
Chautard, The Soul of the Apostolate (Charlotte:
TAN Books, 2008), 61.
[xviii]
Dorothy Day, The Duty of Delight: The Diaries of Dorothy Day, (Milwaukee:
Marquette UP, 2008), 459.
[xix] Ibid., 390, 531,
etc.
[xx] Chautard, 54.
[xxi] Ibid., 55.
[xxii] Ibid.
[xxiii]
Ibid.
[xxiv] Ibid., 78.
[xxv] Ibid., 10
[xxvi] Ibid.
[xxvii]
Benedict XVI, 24.
[xxviii]
Chautard, 48-9.
[xxix] Michelle Bauman,
“Obama Administration Defunds Bishops’ Migration and Refugee Services Work,” National
Catholic Register, 14 October 2011,
www.ncregister.com/daily-news/obama-administration-defunds-bishops-migration-and-refugee-services-work/
[xxx] Pius X, 3.
[xxxi] Ibid.
[xxxii]
George.