Tea at Trianon: A Church Without Purpose?

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Friday, December 10, 2021

A Church Without Purpose?

The purpose of the Catholic Church is the eternal salvation of souls. From Crisis:

The only way to overcome this crisis is to begin to seriously engage with those vexatious but essential questions upon which our salvation may well depend. For example, how exactly do we distinguish the extraordinary from the ordinary means of salvation? And how prudent is our preoccupation with the former at the expense of the latter? Doubtless this ecclesiastical soul-searching is an uncomfortable business, one which risks offending our modern sensibilities. Yet that is why it must be addressed.

For too long we have bewailed declining Mass attendance and growing institutional corruption while ignoring the elephant in the room —or, perhaps more aptly, the dragon in the presbytery—which is summed up in our inability to articulate what the Church is for. (It is, moreover, surely indicative of a wider problem that even a figure as learned and saintly as Pope Benedict should feel hesitancy as to the underlying mission of the Church.)

Looking to Sacred Scripture, I would venture to suggest that there we discover a twofold solution. On the one hand, put negatively, it is abundantly clear that the mission or télos of the Church is to prevent you and me from being eternally damned, because Hell is real and people actually go there. This truth is affirmed literally dozens of times in all four Gospels as well as the epistles and especially in the book of Revelation. Verses such as Jude 1:7 establish it beyond reasonable doubt.

On the other hand, put more positively, the mission of the Church is to provide mankind with the perfection of supernatural life, a life that will be fulfilled in the world to come but that begins in the here and now. This theme is especially prominent in the Johannine corpus, but it also finds expression in, for example, Matthew 5:48: “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.”

To put the matter succinctly, we could say that Christ established the Church in order that we might be saved, both in the negative sense of delivering us from sin and damnation and in the positive sense of calling us to the divine life. The latter is the more metaphysically significant, but the former cannot be neglected; in fact, it is the one that Jesus seems to epistemically prioritize.

Whatever humanity’s final fate, therefore, it seems that the psychological modus operandi Jesus invites us to adopt is one of extreme caution. It is the Pauline perspective of working out one’s salvation with “fear and trembling” (Philippians 2:12). For although it is not our place to know who or how many will be damned, the simple and undeniable fact of the matter is that the Gospels give us every indication that the numbers are great and they could easily extend to you or me.

For the first 1,900 years of the Church’s history, this approach was taken for granted. It was an approach which prompted souls to personal conversion and which inspired the community of believers in their missionary efforts. It was an approach that took the Great Commission seriously because it could provide a cogent explanation as to why that commission mattered. Compare this to the compromised sacramental life and ersatz evangelism of today and the contrast becomes stark.

When assessing the present, doleful state of the Church, the question put by the rich young man to Our Lord—“Teacher, what good deed must I do to have eternal life?” (Matthew 19:16)—ought to be at the forefront of our minds. In making this assessment, we should avail ourselves of that distinctively Christian vantage point of hope: “Rejoice in your hope, be patient in tribulation, be constant in prayer,” St. Paul tells us (Romans 12:12). (Read more.)