‘Roman Catholicism and Hopes for Western Renewal’

 

Many conservatives often portray the Roman Catholic Church as the salvation of the West.  A healthy Roman Catholic Church (i.e., a good and faithful Pope) is the key to a spiritually healthy West in their thinking.  Examples abound, from Hilaire Belloc (via The European Conservative):

This our European structure, built upon the noble foundations of classical antiquity, was formed through, exists by, is consonant to, and will stand only in the mold of, the Catholic Church. Europe will return to the Faith, or she will perish. The Faith is Europe. And Europe is the Faith.

To Rod Dreher (speaking here about a pilgrimage of traditional Roman Catholics to Chartres Cathedral in France, via The Free Press):

The reasons for the quiet revival of Catholicism among the young vary, but they all come down to the search for meaning, purpose, stability, and identity. These new converts—or “reverts,” for the baptized who have rediscovered their faith—are drawn to ancient forms of Christianity because these traditions are more rooted, and more demanding, than the looser, therapeutic model of contemporary Christianity. They also rely much more on liturgy and beauty to incarnate theological principles—“smells and bells,” as some have it. These things have stood the test of time.

 

The road from Paris to Chartres—also a stop on the famous pilgrimage trail to Santiago de Compostela in Spain—has been well trod over the centuries. The Reformation, religious wars, and later the French Revolution discouraged the faith journeys, but they began again in the 19th century, along with Catholic revival in France. A further revival in the early 1980s saw a group of traditionalist French Catholics fall in love with the pilgrimage. Today, in the midst of another Catholic revival, it is organized with bivouacs—temporary shelters—along the route to aid pilgrims, who camp along the way.

 

 . . . Chartres stands to them as a beacon of what the world might be again. It is a prophetic manifestation of light and beauty amid the darkness of an ugly world that does not comprehend the message engraved in its walls, and proclaimed in the glow of its ruby, emerald, and azure glass. In the wonder of this medieval cathedral, a symphony of stone, they hear the Latin-chanted melodies and the beacons of bejeweled light summoning them out of the dark wood of modernity.

The Roman Catholic Church has an understandable allure, as Mr Dreher points out:  It retains many external rites that seem to point to its possession of a deep, venerable tradition that can impart stability to individuals, families, and whole societies.  It is a deception.

We will dispense with the usual rationalistic arguments, however.  For those who want a tete-a-tete argument about the fundamental differences between the Orthodox Church and the Roman Catholic Church, we would direct folks to the recent debate between Jay Dyer and Tim Gordon.

We want to focus instead mainly on the arts and the saints of the two confessions.  Roman Catholicism claims to be the straight plumb line, the measuring rod, against which all other religions must be tested.  But there is something disconcerting about, something disturbingly bent and distorted within, Roman Catholic faith and practice, and this manifests in the aforementioned arts and saints.

We begin with an image presented by the famous Roman Catholic apologist G. K. Chesterton in his book ironically named Orthodoxy, a description of the quintessential Roman Catholic saint:

No two ideals could be more opposite than a Christian saint in a Gothic cathedral and a Buddhist saint in a Chinese temple.  The opposition exists at every point; but perhaps the shortest statement of it is that the Buddhist saint always has his eyes shut, while the Christian saint always has them very wide open.  The Buddhist saint has a sleek and harmonious body, but his eyes are heavy and sealed with sleep.  The mediaeval saint’s body is wasted to its crazy bones, but his eyes are frightfully alive.  . . .  The Buddhist is looking with a peculiar intentness inwards.  The Christian is staring with a frantic intentness outwards.  If we follow that clue steadily we shall find some interesting things (Ignatius Press, San Francisco, 1995, p. 138).

We shall indeed find some interesting things.  But first we must let Mr Chesterton elaborate a bit more on the meaning of this image of a Roman Catholic saint for the West:

That external vigilance which has always been the mark of Christianity (the command that we should watch and pray) has expressed itself both in typical western orthodoxy and in typical western politics:  but both depend on the idea of a divinity transcendent, different from ourselves, a deity that disappears.  Certainly the most sagacious creeds may suggest that we should pursue God into deeper and deeper rings of the labyrinth of our own ego.  But only we of [post-Orthodox western] Christendom have said that we should hunt God like an eagle upon the mountains:  and we have killed all monsters in the chase (Ibid., p. 141; bolding added).

The first thing to note is the unfortunate truth that God did indeed disappear in the West because of the Roman Catholic faith that Mr Chesterton tried so hard to defend.  In positing a God that is only a transcendent, unknowable essence rather than an unknowable essence together with its energies that are knowable and in which man and the creation can participate, and in which they are invited to unite through the Orthodox Church – in positing such a God, the Roman Catholics have expelled God from the world.  The Gothic cathedral at Chartres and the other cathedrals elsewhere in the West are a perfect reification of the Roman Catholic idea of the missing God:  The high, empty vaults inside, the tall, pointed spires directing our eyes heavenward, are a testimony that God is precisely NOT with us, that we must ‘hunt Him like an eagle upon the mountains’.  And millions in the West, faltering in that search that has been undertaken with erroneous directions from the Vatican, have given up in despair and become atheists, Muslims, and (no doubt to Mr Chesterton’s chagrin) Buddhists in a desperate effort to reconnect with the Meaning of Life that Roman Catholic theology took away and hid from them.

 . . .

The rest is at https://orthodoxreflections.com/roman-catholicism-and-hopes-for-western-renewal/.

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Holy Ælfred the Great, King of England, South Patron, pray for us sinners at the Souð, unworthy though we are!

Anathema to the Union!