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Supernaturalism Or Nothing

Churches satisfied with the dry bread of rationalism and do-goodery are going to expire
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Here’s a great article by the Catholic writer David Mills, on why church reform programs of the left and the right fall short.  He begins with a story about how he stopped off to go to mass at a modernist church building that had been renovated inside to make it a bit more traditional, but found it to be off-putting. Yet Mills realized that had he, more of a traditionalist, had been given carte blanche to remake that church architecturally, there’s nothing he would have done that hadn’t already been done. And there is a lesson in that, he says:

The Church is like this. The form we’ve inherited determines what we can do to renew it.

Reformers think: Just do this, just do that, stop this, start that, that’ll change the Church. Make catechetics more doctrinal, or make it more personal; make the worship more formal, or make it more informal; return to the Latin Mass or make the ordinary form even more populist; learn from the Evangelicals or be as different as possible from the Evangelicals; ordain married men, celebrate celibacy, ordain women, discipline people who want women ordained, urge people to pray for vocations, put more money into parochial schools, close churches and open new ones in better places, increase the hours for confession, have rallies in the cathedral.

Good ideas, some of them, but they won’t change the Church much.

Why not? Because, he says, most Catholics, whatever they may profess, don’t really believe in the supernatural realities of the faith:

I’m constantly amazed and humbled at the number of people who have an unpolluted faith in the supernatural and easy intercourse with Our Lady and the saints. Yet many, even among those active in the Church, have secular-leaning and naturalism-assuming minds. I know this for myself. Even after years of formation I keep finding how my mind goes one way when the naturally Catholic mind would go another. The world is too much with us.

This loss makes renewal harder. It does, I think, reduce the attraction of the Mass and the reasons to go when you don’t want to. It must make confession feel less like a mercy and more like a transaction. It reduces our circles of accountability because we don’t feel intimate with the angels and the saints. It keeps us from identifying more closely with Our Lord and His Blessed Mother because we don’t practice the devotions that help us do so. It changes how deep the priest can go in his homily. These all have knock-on effects.

It certainly reduces the power of any new program to renew the Church. Programs are only as effective as the people in them allow.

Read the whole thing. I think there’s powerful truth here, and not just for Catholics.

One of the things I love most about Orthodox Christianity is the very high regard for supernaturalism it has, especially in its prayer and liturgical life. You go to liturgy at an Orthodox Church, and you know you are in another world. The mode of prayer, the icons, the incense, the candles — it all is designed to remind us that when we are in the liturgy, we are in reality in the presence of the Divine. And yet it is sadly not uncommon to hear converts talk about how they went into this or that Orthodox parish in the past, and had the feeling that they had intruded on a meeting of an ethnic club. I too have been to certain Orthodox liturgies — only a couple, thankfully — in which what was happening in the church that morning felt like an elaborate stage show. It’s hard to explain why it is, but you can feel it when that happens. I think it has to do with a certain receptivity in the congregation. As we know from human nature, it is all too easy to harden our hearts to holiness among us.

I believe that at this stage in the West, the only forms of religion that are going to survive are those that are frankly supernatural in their orientation. Dessicated naturalism has exhausted itself. Pentecostal Christianity has no appeal to me, personally, but I can certainly see why people are drawn to it, and don’t blame them when all they get from their churches is the dry bread of rationalism and do-goodery.

 

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