There Are No Silver Bullets (Also Entitled ‘Things Fall Apart’)

There is a trend I’ve noticed cropping up from time to time when Catholics, concerned with the state of the Church in Ireland, set about thinking of solutions and come up with a ‘silver bullet;’ that is to say, a single thing that can be done to change everything.

Often these Catholics have correctly and astutely identified a key problem and suggest good things that might be tried to overcome it. An assumption is made that there is one simple thing that can be done, or one thing more important than any other.

Take this blog post, for example, by Dom Mark Kirby, Abbot of Silverstream Priory.

Dom Kirby highlights the fact that in the wake of the same-sex marriage result, many people are suggesting various particular strategies as solutions to the Church’s decline:

The Church in Ireland finds herself in a crisis from which, not a few are saying, she will not emerge. People of goodwill are attempting to identify the root of Ireland’s spiritual pathology. Some would argue that it has to do with the cultural shift away from immutable objective values, and the consequent spiraling down into the tyranny of relativism. Others would wish for an Irish Savonarola to rouse sleepy consciences, denounce vice, and spearhead moral reform. Still others would wish for a new rising of intellectual insurgents and articulate theologians capable of appealing to reason: teachers of the true faith gifted with eloquence; orthodox catechists; zealous apologists; a new Frank Duff and a new Fulton J. Sheen.

He goes on to suggest his own solution:

I would identify a different pathology and propose a different remedy…

The vertical dimension of Catholicism has been mortally compromised by an approach to the sacred liturgy that offers no piercing through the limitations of time and space into the eternity of God and the unfading beauty of His kingdom…

“As for me and my house we will serve the Lord” (Joshua 4:15), by placing at the beginning of this glorious restoration, what the Fathers placed at the beginning of the Second Vatican Council, the liturgy, God, and adoration…

Now, I think he’s right in saying that the lacklustre state of the liturgy in the Irish Church is a major contributing factor to the exodus from the Church. If the liturgy gives the impression that not even the priests believe that what they are doing has any supernatural meaning, then what’s the point in the rest of us going?

So kudos to Dom Kirby for tackling this issue and trying to do something about it. His community in Silverstream are a blessing to Ireland, and in using him as an example of what I perceive to be an unhelpful trend I hope I don’t come across as criticising him. He’s done more for the Church in Ireland in the last few years he’s been here than I ever have. Think about supporting their work if you can! If I single out the Dom, it’s because he’s put his solution of choice in a convenient place on the internet which I can link to.

But here’s the thing. I’ve heard others suggest other pathologies, to use the Dom’s term, and cures for those pathologies, which will seemingly cure the Church in Ireland. It might be better catechesis in schools, or this or that devotion, or promoting openness to life, or…

The list goes on.

What is common to these different ideas is a leaping on a particular solution to one aspect of the crisis, perhaps in the hope of a quick fix or simple remedy.

Let’s use a metaphor. Let’s say the Church is a complex machine which has stopped working, and those who rely upon the machine are standing around, each pointing to a different part of it that seems to be broken and saying: ‘There, that one, if we just replace that one it’ll be working like new in no time!’

Allow me to demonstrate using another of my incredibly artistic marker diagrams:

 

Now you know that I am not an engineer.

If we just replace that red cog, then the others will get to work in no time, right?

The problem with this approach is that the focus is too narrow. It ignores all of the other problems impacting on each other.

We think of the Church’s problems as being like the diagram above, but really we’re looking at a different situation:

The problem isn’t that one aspect of the Church’s approach is off-kilter, and fixing that one thing will solve everything. The problem is that everything is broken. It’s the liturgy, but it’s not just the liturgy. It’s catechesis, but not just catechesis. It’s lack of a proper focus on the Sacraments, but not just lack of such a focus. It’s clericalism, and anti-clericalism, but not just clericalism and anti-clericalism. It’s the abuse crisis, but not just the abuse crisis.

We’re not looking at isolated problems; we’re looking at a total systemic failure with very, very deep roots.

We can see this in the wide range of problems we face.

Any approach we take has to take into account ALL of the factors, all of the broken parts, all of the systemic problems, and deal with them together. Whatever our strategy is, it has to deal with all of the problems as parts of a greater whole.

There are no magic bullets.

Thankfully, there is Providence, and He’s not going to abandon us. We just need to prayerfully reflect on what we can do to cooperate with Him, and get to work.

On Hell

Many apologies for the extended absence, life took a turn for the busy over the last two months. I hope to start blogging regularly once more now that things have eased off.

I thought I would start out again with some brief reflections on a particular ongoing debate over hell and how many souls might actually end up there. There seems to be quite a back-and-forth between certain well-known US Catholic figures on the internet about hell, which might be exemplified by Church Militant’s response to Fr. Robert Barron’s elevation to the Episcopate.

(If I were to go back to my concept of the Four Camps, Church Militant and its founder, Michael Voris, seems to appeal to a certain more extreme group of Catholics who would fall somewhere halfway between Camp A and the Traditionalist Camp, whereas the newly minted Bishop Barron is an example of somebody who tends more towards Camp B)

Some startling claims are made in this article. For example, the article says that ‘Father Barron’s teaching contradicts the tradition of saints and doctors of the Church, who have said with unified voice that only a minority of mankind will be saved.’ Follow that link, however, and you will be led to a selection of quotations from about twenty-odd Saints and a smattering of Bible verses, which is hardly a ‘unified voice.’

(A unity of the Church Fathers is, I believe, a very specific theological concept, which entails that anything that ALL of the Church Fathers held to be true in faith and morals is as binding as the rulings of an Ecumenical Council; the selection of Church Fathers quoted does not prove that this is the case).

The same Saints are repeatedly quoted for good measure, and the meaning of some of their statements is ambiguous in the context.

Follow the link to Church Militant’s analysis of Fr. Barron’s Catholicism series, and you will find further criticism of his approach to hell. Key issues Church Militant has with the series are that ‘As mentioned, out of the entire ten episode series, Fr. Barron spends a mere five minutes on the topic of hell’ and that his account of hell, while portraying it as ‘deeply unpleasant’ is not ‘horrifying’ enough.

Church Militant takes other issues with Fr. Barron’s approach, namely his support for the theories regarding hell of theologian Hans Urs Von Balthasar, who believed that there’s a possibility that nobody has gone to hell. I think that it’s quite fair that they tackle this issue, but I believe that it is unfair of them to attack him as adhering to the heresy of universalism, since there are subtle differences between the two positions and as one commentator has pointed out, Von Balthasar was not reprimanded for his theories by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, implying that it is at least an acceptable view for a Catholic to hold if not necessarily the correct one.

One thing I find particularly wearying about Church Militant is that they exemplify that tendency I spoke about in my post on the Four Camps to lay into other faithful Catholics with a sledgehammer rather than trying to reasonably debate our differences and cooperate with each other. This kind of ‘hammer-of-the-heretics’ style discourse might make a person feel good about themselves, but in the end it only leads to a house divided against itself.

A good analysis of the question of hell and salvation from several years ago by Avery Cardinal Dulles was recently reposted by First Things, presumably in response to these debates. Anybody interested in the topic should go check it out for a balanced look at the topic and what the Church has said through the ages. Although there seems to be a majority who lean towards the position that most humans will end up in hell, there is a significant minority who believe that almost all will be saved, or at least almost all Christians.

(On a side note, I wonder why the position that perhaps a majority will be saved, but a substantial minority will be lost, doesn’t seem to have much traction anywhere?)

Now, I can see why there might be a fear amongst certain Catholics about the Church taking on a Von Balthasarian position. If we grow complacent about hell, our efforts at evangelization risk growing lukewarm, and many more might be lost on account of this.

This is a key thing we have to remember: the actual number of souls is not what matters in the slightest. Each soul is a human person, loved by God, and we have to try and cooperate with God’s plan and bring His salvation to as many of them as possible. Even if 99% of all people who are alive and have lived and will live go to Heaven, the fact that 1% don’t is an unmitigated tragedy. Otherwise, why are we bothering?

But there can be too much of a focus on hell, which ultimately weakens us.

Let’s use a metaphor. A parent is right to teach their child not to stick their hand in the fire, because if they do they will get burned. But if a parent constantly, incessantly talks about the dangers of fire, and how awful getting burned is, their child will grow up with a crippling, irrational fear of fire. It is one thing to raise a child to know that they shouldn’t stick their hand in the fire. It is another to raise a child to be afraid to even be in the same room as an open fireplace. The former is common sense; the latter is a psychological problem.

So it is with an excessive focus on hell. We need to teach people to reject sin and thus avoid hell. But if we talk constantly about eternal damnation and sin, turn the focus away from God, Love, Goodness and Heaven, then we are only promoting a false image of God as a harsh judge, an image which allows scrupulosity and rigidity to fester in our souls.

Instead, without ignoring the risk of hell, we should listen to St. Paul in his letter to the Philippians: ‘Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things.’

I firmly believe that one of the problems we had in the Church here in Ireland was an excessive focus on hellfire and damnation as exemplified by the infamous sermon in Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Catholic guilt is a real thing, and it doesn’t lead to devout Catholics.

When I was first learning more about my faith, I was taught that there was a hierarchy of motivations to do good; the lower, ‘impure’ motivations were fear of hell and desire for reward; the highest, ‘purest’ motivation was to do good out of love for God and neighbour.

I fear that if we return to hellfire and damnation as the key instrument of encouraging Catholics to do good, then we are like a sower who goes out to sow his seed, and does so exclusively on rocky ground. So it was in Ireland; the seeds of faith sprang up quickly, because the soil was shallow, as Jesus says, but as soon as the hot sun of materialism and secularism came out it withered away and died.

Instead, we need to focus on the love of God and the love of neighbour. These are the greatest commandments, and these alone will inspire a deep faith that simple fear cannot.

The possibility of hell cannot be ignored; but if we’re serious about saving souls then we need to actually take the right approach, not the easy one.

UPDATE: Some further points on this post here.