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The Contempt of the World

Thomas à Kempis, author of the 15th-century classic The Imitation of Christ, wrote that for the Christian, “it is sweet to despise the world and to serve God.” Pro-abortion activists have made it clear that the hatred runs both ways.

In the run-up to and the immediate aftermath of the Court’s decision in Dobbs vs. Jackson Women’s Health, pro-abortion activists have defaced Catholic churches across the country. Rioters have stolen tabernacles and decapitated statues of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Pro-abortion protestors vandalized a church in Virginia and left what appeared to be an accelerant-laced fire in a nearby mulch bed. St. Colman Catholic Church in Shady Spring, West Virginia, was burned to the ground in an apparent act of arson.

I do not wish to claim that Catholics are being “persecuted”; American Christians have an exaggerated sense of victimhood, and their persecution, such as it is, pales in comparison to that of Christians in the Islamic world or Christians in the Church’s early centuries. I do think, however, that the reaction to the Dobbs decision and the sense among both its supporters and opponents that Christianity lies at the heart of the abortion debate points to the intractable divide between Christianity and the world, which endures in spite of progressive Christians’ efforts to capitulate to the spirit of the age.

There is an old idea within the Catholic intellectual tradition called contemptus mundi—contempt of the world. It denotes the believer’s obligation to spurn the temporal world for higher things. Scripture makes clear that the “contempt” comes from the other direction, too. Christ warns the disciples that “the world” may hate them as it hated Him. The Pauline epistles are laced with warnings about the dangers and wickedness of “the world.” Even Christ’s call to be “in the world,” but not “of the world” presupposes an antagonism between the temporal world and authentic Christian faith.

Some Christians reject the notion that this antagonism persists in liberal modernity. They think the modern world is basically good and praiseworthy. They insist that if a tension exists between the Church and modernity, it is the Church that must change.

This view dominates segments of organized Christianity. You can hardly drive by a mainline Protestant church in the United States without seeing a gay pride flag. Even the Catholic Church, famously antipathetic to the world and its princes, softened its posture considerably after the Second Vatican Council. As the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano wrote in 1974, the modern Church has been eager to find “points of convergence between the Church’s thinking and the mentality characteristic of our time,” and administer, in the words of Pope John XXIII, “the medicine of mercy rather than severity.”

But the Catholic Church, however mealy-mouthed its prelates, has never wavered at the institutional level on the issue of abortion. And since abortion is the central sacrament of liberal modernity—representing as it does the complete freedom of the individual against unchosen obligations—the Church finds herself the natural and inevitable object of the world’s hatred. This antipathy between the Church and the world has endured across generations, because, as the Swiss-Italian theologian Romano Amerio observed, the Church insists upon those virtues most deficient in each era:

One can therefore conclude to a general rule that while Catholicism’s antagonism to the world is unchanging, the forms of the antagonism change when the state of the world requires a change in that opposition to be declared and maintained on particular points of belief or in particular historical circumstances. Thus the Church exalts poverty when the world (and the Church herself) worships riches, mortification of the flesh when the world follows the enticements of the three appetites, reason when the world turns to illogicality and sentimentalism, faith when the world is swollen with the pride of knowledge.

Amerio points to the thirteenth century, when the Church confronted “violence and greed” with the “spirit of meekness and poverty in the great Fransiscan movement,” and the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when the Church responded to the modernism crisis by “condemning the principle of the independence of reason.” It is why the Church today is accused of being “obsessed” with sexuality; the world insists that the Church’s teaching is wrong, and the Church insists, with equal vigor, that she is right.

So as churches are defaced in response to the Court’s ruling in Dobbs, the proper response is not, as some progressive Christians have done, to insist that the overturn of Roe is a “bastardization” of Christianity, that Jesus Christ would have been fine with abortion, and that the Church must change to meet the demands of the times. Neither is the proper response to whine and whimper on social media about the “persecution” of Christians. The proper response is the one Kempis identified in the apostles: “they had their conversation in this world blameless, so humble and meek, without any malice or deceit, that they even rejoiced to suffer rebukes for Thy Name’s sake, and what things the world hateth, they embraced with great joy.”

Instead of complaining on television or adapting ourselves to the spirit of the age, Christians ought to consider that if the world doesn’t hate us, we might be doing it wrong.

The post The Contempt of the World appeared first on The American Conservative.

The Medicine of Mercy

San Francisco Archbishop Salvatore Cordelione announced Friday that he has barred Speaker Nancy Pelosi from receiving the Eucharist in his diocese until she repudiates her support for permissive abortion laws. In a letter to Pelosi, the archbishop indicated that he reached out to her privately in the past year to warn that her public support for abortion could trigger canon 915 in the Code of Canon Law, which prevents those who “obstinately persist in manifest grave sin” from receiving Holy Communion. The archbishop announced the move weeks after Pelosi called the potential overturning of Roe v. Wade “an abomination.”

The archbishop’s statement drew predictable backlash. One progressive friar called it a “scandal.” The canon lawyers over at the San Francisco Examiner said the act constituted “open defiance of Pope Francis” and called on the pope to remove the archbishop from his post. The director of the Cardinal Bernardin Center argued that Pelosi’s support for abortion “just doesn’t matter” because she is acting “as the people’s agent” and the way she “represents the people she represents is not a religious or moral matter.” Would the professor would apply that theory to Herman Talmadge?

In any case, it is understandable that so many people, even those within the Church, are taken aback by the archbishop’s sacramental discipline. To partisans of a certain vision of post-conciliar reform in the Catholic Church, denying someone the Eucharist is a return to the days before the Second Vatican Council, and a rejection of the soft universalism that has reigned in corners of the Church’s human element since the middle of the 20th century. To deny a person the Eucharist suggests that it is possible for someone to place himself outside the boundaries of Catholic communion and, therefore, outside the bounds of Christ’s Church.

It’s not just Hans Küng disciples who bristle at the archbishop’s actions. Many Catholics, as a result of the intentional neglect of progressive priests and prelates, have no idea what the Church teaches on the worthy reception of the Eucharist and are therefore scandalized by his apparently “exclusionary” practice.

St. Paul says that anyone who consumes the Eucharistic species unworthily “eateth and drinketh judgment to himself.” The Church has historically interpreted this passage to mean that all Catholics in a state of mortal sin, with few exceptions, are to avoid receiving the Eucharist until they’ve made a valid sacramental confession, which requires the penitent to have a firm purpose of amendment to avoid the sin in the future.

Many Catholics are unfamiliar with the Church’s teaching. If you attend a Mass in the suburban United States, it shows. Most or all of the parishioners approach the priest for Communion after the Agnus Dei prayers. How many have gone to confession? It’s unknown, and not for me to speculate, but I do know that many well-to-do parishes hold confessions just once per week for about 30 minutes. It is not uncommon for the priests at those parishes to hear fewer than five confessions in their half-hour in the box. It is possible that the Catholics of Strathmere, New Jersey, are an extraordinarily holy bunch, but it’s more likely that something else—a lost sense of sin or poor catechesis—is at work.

Abstaining from the Eucharist is not, of itself, a virtue. The only reason one should do is if—speaking from some experience here—one is conscious of having committed a mortal sin. I only mean to say that taking the Church’s teaching on the Eucharist seriously involves regularly examining one’s conscience, which is uncomfortable, and militates against the therapeutic ethos of the age. At many parishes, suburban and otherwise, it seems like only sin is to believe that sin exists at all.

Some in the hierarchy refuse to exercise sacramental discipline. Their refusal is, in part, a response to perceived disciplinary excesses in the pre-conciliar Church. This, in effect, has lead some of the faithful to believe that the Church’s teaching on the reception of Holy Communion has changed. It has not. And the unwillingness of certain elements  within the Church to let their “yes” mean “yes” and their “no” mean “no” on the question of Eucharistic discipline has produced the absurdity of a Speaker of the House in one breath calling herself a “Catholic mother of five” and in the next endorsing the right to abort a child in defiance of the Fathers, the earliest writings of the apostles, and two millennia of magisterial teaching.

No Catholic ought to rejoice at Nancy Pelosi’s being denied Communion. The Eucharist is the source and summit of Catholic sacramental life. To be deprived of it for even one week is a terrible privation. I am an awful sinner and in no position to act as judge of the Speaker or anyone else. But before consuming the Eucharist, Nancy Pelosi, like all Catholics, must form her conscience and examine herself. If she refuses to do so, Archbishop Cordelione’s intervention in the matter is nothing less than an act of charity.

The post The Medicine of Mercy appeared first on The American Conservative.

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