March 11, 2012             David Timbs   (Melbourne)                      David's previous articles   
  

Culture Wars, Apologetics and The Story

John Paul II made the New Evangelisation the major theme of his long pontificate. During this time he made an astonishing number of apostolic pastoral trips throughout the world. He even reached the ecclesiastical equivalent of Rock Star, at least according to the secular media.

The consistent message of JP II’ New Evangelisation was the urgent appeal to Catholics to restore the Gospel to their own societies and to attract the unbelieving world to the compelling inner logic of the Christian story.

His programme, then, had two targets at least in its seminal stage: to the Church and to the world, although these became somewhat confused until the election of Benedict XVI which occasioned its rebranding in very distinctive livery. As Prefect of the CDF, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger had, in fact, been all the while the chief programme director and principal script writer. His pontificate simply confirmed what JP II had done as the front man for an agenda long set out.

In his native eastern Europe, the Pope Wojtyla initiated an evangelical crusade against  monolithic Communism and its dogmas of atheistic materialism. He laboured passionately to liberate those millions enslaved by the oppressive totalitarian ideology of Marxist Leninism.

When the Walls came down and even the Poles no longer listened, John Paul turned his attention to the West. His targets there were the economically robust but spiritually flabby capitalist liberal democracies. Pope Woltya pitched his campaign in those domains against what he saw as the enemy, those corrosive and dulling effects of secular relativism on Christian life.

 In the West, some of the more spectacular apostles of John Paul’s New Evangelism surfaced predictably in the United States in the form of the new evangelical movements and the broadly mandated bands of priests and laity preaching an aggressive form of Christian apologetics and Catholic fundamentalist dogmatism.

Many of these colourful groups and individuals, all bearing the ultimate and indispensable moniker of loyalty to the Pope and the Magisterium, turned out to be embarrassing failures and bitter disappointments to the Pope, the faithful and their own disciples. Spectacular disasters such as Frs Corapi and Euteneuer became victims, seduced by their own hubris, relativism, secularism and grasping entrepreneurialism and rock star status – all the things they railed against.

There are still quite a number of these uberCatholic evangelical types still extant and operating to some degree or another either near the centre or at the edges of the Church. They are usually identified as belonging to a particular single issue Ministry Inc or catering to a dedicated niche market.  More often than not their preaching is pitched at ears ready and eager to hear a message congruent with rather right wing politics, both secular and religious.

The real agenda of the New Evangelisation was launched on 18/04/11 when Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger addressed the College of Cardinals gathered in Rome for the funeral of JP II and the subsequent Conclave. In a stirring speech Ratzinger made it very clear that the mind of the Holy Spirit had been made up pretty much in advance of the ballots. He was going into the Conclave a Cardinal and he would surely emerge as Pope.

 In the third paragraph of his speech, Ratzinger laid out in no uncertain terms the challenges the Church was facing at that critical point. He listed nearly a dozen ‘isms’ which he identified as either peripheral to or totally antithetical to the Gospel. The principal ones were relativism and secularism.

A vigorous and aggressive crusade against secular relativism with its attendant culture of death has been eagerly taken up and prosecuted particularly by a group of leading American bishops .Culture wars are now being waged – the conflict between the Sacred and the Secular.  The high rhetoric and hyperbole employed by Church leaders like Cardinals George of Chicago, Dolan of NY, Burke of the Curia and Archbishop Chaput of Philadelphia have approached hysterical at times.

Cardinal Burke has even signalled, on the high drama end of the rhetorical spectrum, the beginnings of persecution of Christians in the US in the foreseeable future.

Cardinal Francis George of Chicago, however, is more definite in predicting an actual time line for public secular persecution of Christians in the US,

I expect to die in bed, my successor will die in prison and his successor will die a martyr in the public square - St Louis Review, 16/02/2012.

This increasing reference to persecution of the Church and even martyrdom, both white and red, has precedents in recent Catholic history. A particularly troubling aspect of this kind of ecclesiology is that it casts the Church in the role of the innocent victim, the scourged and falsely accused Christ figure before a cowardly Pilate and a hate-driven mob. Playing the innocent victim game is a very dangerous one given the fact that throughout the world it is precisely the leadership of the Church itself who have been charged with negligence and contempt for the rule of law over the systemic and systematic abuse, sexual and otherwise, of  innocent children. This irony is not lost on either Catholics or non-Catholics.

Another example of the glaring hubris of the American bishops at the moment in their self-promoted apocalyptic moral conflict between Church and State (Christ and Satan) is the repeated charge that the legal protections of religious liberty are being eroded and restricted. To add to the impassioned rhetoric of protest, the US bishops – they’re not alone in this – have conveniently forgotten the standard Catholic principles of moral theology dealing with a free and informed conscience. They have clearly forgotten that especially since the pastoral catastrophe of Humanae Vitae the vast majority of Catholics know exactly how to form an authentic and informed conscience.

The end result in the Bishops’ evangelical apologetical crusade is that they have created a credibility rod for their own backs. They are not trusted by a very significant portion of their constituency. They have clearly and publicly demonstrated a failed moral authority, gross irresponsibility and appalling lack of good governance.

No wonder the counter attack is on. The hierarchs have everything to lose, especially their people, but that may have already happened.

As a result of this intense confrontation between Church and State, Christ and the anti-Christ, the Catholic hierarchy led by Benedict XVI has called on Catholics to make the urgent and necessary courageous and prophetic public choices in favour of explicit and uncontaminated faith. The Church is strongly urging Catholics to reassert in no uncertain terms their Identity. This is what the conflict is ultimately all about – Catholic Identity in a hostile bloody minded world.

The era of sweet conversation and dialogue with the enemy is over and now is the time to draw a clear line in the sand. It is into this socio-religious environment of conflict that the New Evangelisation has assumed a more ground level, populist form.

Fr RobertBarron, an American Catholic theologian and defender of the Faith, has recently been in Australia to promote an evangelical apologetics outreach programme known as the Catholicism Project.

The Catholic story for too long has been told by the wrong people (the secular press) has been used as a headline promo for Barron’s speaking tour and presentations of the DVD of the television series produced expressly for the programme.

While Barron is correct in identifying the secular media as a significant and often quite aggressively negative voice in attempting to hijack the Catholic story, he appears to be rather reluctant to ask why this might be. He appears to fob that one off and, in so doing, fails to acknowledge the fact that the keepers of the Story have for far too long been the few of the hierarchical elite. The Church has become identified in popular culture with that small sectional interest group who have much to protect and preserve, depending on how the Catholic story is told and who articulates its deepest truths.

Vatican II sought to put an end to this Church-by-oligarchy structure and culture when it enshrined in both Lumen Gentium and Gaudium et Spes the teaching that the Laity and other non-ordained Catholics along with the hierarchy constitute the People of God. All have an equally important voice in the telling of the common story. That said, I wonder if Fr Barron has faced questions on his East Coast promotional tour which were not of the scripted Dorothy Dix type, such as why is it that increasingly the voice of the laity is either censored, ignored or just plain dismissed? How is it that the accountability, subsidiarity and collaboration directed by Vat II are now widely ignored? How is it that the local Church is once again almost completely controlled and administered by a centralised, authoritarian bureaucracy far away?

A constant negative dynamic in societies is to be found in that constant: who controls the story of the group and therefore, who redacts and publishes its history.

Catholic will always be sitting ducks for the secular media. It dines out on the obvious muting,even silencing of the Catholic voice. It takes particular pleasure in observing the narrow editorial processes and the sanitizing spin put on the collective Story.

 Some legitimate questions that Fr Barron and other apologists might not like to hear….

How free is the local Catholic media to publish just exactly what ordinary Catholics are really thinking? How many diocesan newspapers in this country have a Letters to the Ed section, and if they do, who seriously believes anything but that the ‘safe,’ positive and uncritical ones get past the editor.  Authorities mostly don’t like to hear what people are really thinking and saying as these might inconveniently disturb the manufactured institutional calm to which they are accustomed. The Catholic Church in this country is no exception. No wonder we are held up to ridicule and contempt especially when we preach about the truth setting us free.

Barron, to be fair, is a visitor to our shores, and a new boy on the block, a non-episcopal front-man for a slick, foreign, pre-packaged Catholic apologetic project.  The package is intended for the twenty-first  century Catholics who live in an age of anxiety. It is being presumed, however, that Catholic laity are so insecure and ill prepared for the Culture Wars that they will require a catechetical armoury adequate for the hostilities and an irrefutable apologia prepared by clerical overseers with Counter Reformation minds.

At a time when Australian Catholic laity have never been better educated theologically, who know the narrative and who are not at war with their world, whose presumptions are being acted on here and whose needs are being met? And furthermore, whose story is it any way?  

David Timbs writes from Melbourne, Victoria, Australia.