Centrifugal

One of the regular posters on the aforementioned Irish Catholic Forums often uses the term ‘centrifugal’ to describe the diffuse movements, groupings, and (dare I say it) factions within the Church today.

In other words, they’re all spinning away from the centre, the centre in this instance being rationality, orthodoxy, the leadership of the Church, balance, what have you. I suppose that this is what happens when centres cannot hold.

I bring this up because I experienced a microcosm of the diverse problems we face as a Church today.

This morning, on the feast of St. Charles Borromeo, the great reformer of the 16th century, I heard a homily in which he was described as being a good thing for the sixteenth century, but now the Councils of Trent had been surpassed and rendered obsolete by the Spirit of Vatican II and all these Latin-botherers should learn to give up and just follow the Holy Spirit into the new age of beautiful uncertainty and no priests.

When I came home, I logged onto Facebook to find a Catholic of a very different stripe reposting an article written by an elderly American reminiscing about his time in 1960s Spain. This gentleman was idolising (and I mean that in the most pejorative sense of the word) El Caudillo, General Franco of Spanish fame.

This man’s piece ran along the lines of: ‘if only we could go back to an era when bikinis were banned, the state inspected women’s swimsuits to make sure that they were acceptably modest, police would arrest young couples for holding hands in public, etc. etc.’ This individual went on to lambaste Stalin and the communists and their Republican allies in Spain for their awful atrocities (no disagreement there), but the contrast is intended to provide a justification for doing the same to enemies of the Franco regime. Here I quote directly:

What interests us is that fighting the Crusade, and also the maintenance of Christian social order after the Nationalist victory in 1939, sometimes required the execution of spies, revolutionaries, and other malefactors. As commander of military forces in war and Caudillo later, Franco always insisted on reviewing the file of anyone sentenced to death, and also that he be the one who signed the death warrant. It was important to him because shooting a man is no small thing.

The article itself is here, but try not to give this kind of nonsense too much traffic. Franco was a brutal tyrant. The Church was stupid to get into bed with him, although I’ll have to admit that the Republicans managed to kill a similar volume of innocents in a shorter period.

Why do I bring this up?

We have a dying left-wing guard within the Church, which want to imitate every failed policy of our Prostetant brethren and have dug in deep, partially energised by what I can only call the Spirit of Pope Francis.

And we have a newly energised far-right wing emerging within the Church, typified by the worship of figures such as Francisco Franco, Vladimir Putin and every right-wing thug under the sun, as long as they’ll pay lip service to the Church’s corner in the culture wars.

We desperately, desperately need to articulate a strong, truly orthodox position that adheres to Christian principles over feel-good capitulation to the world on the one hand and the growing extremism that preys on a fragmented Church on the other. We need to build bridges between Catholics. Without that the extremes will be the only voices heard. And the Gospel will be lost amidst the tambourines and the stomp of jackboots.

The key problem here is the right-wing extremism, which is gathering a vicious, angry energy in many quarters, rather than the left-wing laxity, which is on its last legs anyway (even if we shall live with the consequences for a long time).

This kind of extremism preys on those who have an idea that the dominant left-wing cultural narrative does not correspond to reality, but who can see nowhere else to turn since the Church seems to have lost its preaching voice, at least here in Ireland and Europe more generally.

I think that the problems here are threefold:

1. Lack of strong leadership. We need bishops and other Church leaders to really be shepherds of their flocks, leading by example, firing up the lukewarm whilst channelling the passion of the zealous. Hopefully the new crop of bishops will provide this.
2. Lack of a well-articulated, visible, balanced and orthodox Catholicism that can attract those dissatisfied with the status quo. If we’re shut out of mainstream media, we need to find ways around.
3. Finally, and very importantly, I think that the image of a ‘centrifugal’ Church reveals something very important. We’re atomised; the normal point of contact, the parish, is often ineffective at best at reaching out to a modern generation. There are too many young Catholics out there who need the support of Catholic peers and mentors who are balanced, and there aren’t enough lines of communication and encounter to meet them. This is a big problem in universities, where it’s difficult for Catholics to coalesce and form groups, and so those naturally inclined towards the Church feel alone and are either swept away by the culture, or reject it and go into extremism, which they often encounter on the internet. And there IS a radical, extreme version of Catholicism doing the rounds and growing in strength online. We need to find new avenues of reaching such people.

I had another post I meant to write; this was a footnote that got carried away. Oh dear. I might get onto that other tonight.