With the alarmingly high amount of partisan political censorship on social media of late, it has dawned on me that if I said on Facebook or any other social media site, “As a Roman Catholic, these are a few of the foundational tenets of my faith…” and then named a handful of basic Catholic teachings, at some point I would be censored or outright kicked off the site. It would be the result of an embedded secularism that is utterly antagonistic toward a religious worldview.
Walker Percy, the wonderful southern Catholic novelist/philosopher, has his own take on modern, post-Christian society: He says contemporary culture is not really all that secular. It is, rather, a kind of quasi-religious bent of mind grounded in what he calls “scientism,” as opposed to science.
Rather than celebrating near miraculous advances, medical and otherwise, in the service of all, especially the sick and the poor, scientism extrapolates the scientific method out to the point where the mind and heart, both created to seek transcendence, give over their sovereignty and become willing to believe almost anything. Scientific method becomes what Percy calls an “all-construing worldview.” Percy should know, as he was educated as a scientist, becoming an M.D. before falling prey to a debilitating disease and becoming a novelist – and converting to Catholicism as he recuperated.
So the more stridently secular, or attached to scientism, we become, the more a traditional Catholic cast of mind seems outlandish and, at times, the more we Catholics pretend nothing out of the ordinary is going on. Percy’s essays remind us that euthanasia did not become a part of German culture with the Nazis. It was instituted by the friendly democracies of the Weimar Republic, then followed by the Nazis. He calls to mind in his book of essays, “Signposts in a Strange Land,” the incident when Russians and Americans joined forces to save three stranded whales, an act of cooperation hailed and applauded by the world looking on. All the while, during that same time period, a million Sudanese were dying of starvation. He adds, “Americans are the nicest, most generous, and sentimental people on earth. Yet Americans have killed more unborn children than any nation in history.”
The proverbial elephant in the Catholic room today is not embodied in the issues themselves that bump up against Catholic teachings, such as the sanctity of human life from conception to natural death, the disordered nature of homosexual acts and the definition of marriage as an indissoluble bond between one man and one woman, both unitive and procreative. No, the elephant in the Catholic room is our becoming desensitized to these and other issues, some involving mighty and devastating transgressions, to the point where adherence to the teachings themselves is not even necessary for one to call himself or herself “Catholic.”
I try to be as apolitical as I can in these articles, but we have a president of the United States who is a self-described devout Catholic, yet who is the most ardent pro-choice president in our history. We have a president who presided over a same-sex wedding. I certainly don’t expect an outcry from the general public to go against the prevailing cultural grain, but where are our Catholic voices? When many Catholics voted for a platform anchored firmly to pro-choice ideals, same-sex marriage and gender fluidity – one that scoffs at Catholic morality – where are the bullhorns from the Catholic clergy? When nearly half of Catholics in the U.S. say they don’t believe in the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist, where has our strident formation in the faith gone?
Here’s the elephant in the Catholic room: our apathy, our acceptance of a degraded culture, and a hierarchy mostly silent and in some cases even supportive of a cultural milieu antithetical to everything we believe. And hiding under the ample girth of this complacent elephant are the frightful beginnings of schismatic ideals.
Fred Gallagher is an author and editor-in-chief with Gastonia-based Good Will Publishers Inc.