Stronger than Anyone Suspects

The secular-progressive opponents of the Church think of her only as a worldly force; a powerful one, yes, and stubborn, but one whose final defeat now seems within reach.  And if it could be defeated, what a prize that would be for Progress!   All those treasures in the Vatican citadel broken up and sold off… all those schools and universities and halls of propagation scattered to the four winds… all that power torn away — this supreme manifestation of Organised Religion, this most oppressive of ‘oppressive structures’, finally toppled and brought to ruin!  Think how many other, mightier empires and kingdoms Progress has already vanquished, that now are but the dust of the Wrong Side of History… the Church too, they think, with one big effort, could be overthrown.  ‘How many divisions has the Pope?’ they would not be the first to scoff.

Meanwhile we, the poor peasantry in the pews, grin wryly to ourselves.  If only they knew, the secular-progressivists, the sheer ricketiness of the whole outfit!  Organised religion?  More like disorganised religion!  Dripping ceilings, peeling paint, prehistoric plumbing…  and parish incomes, these days, scarcely greater than those of a meagre crowd-funding campaign for any secular cause.  Artistic treasures, in the main, do not pay the bills.  And this is before we come to our other weaknesses: self-interest, grudges, fear, indifference; the confusion and the cynicism and woeful inadequacies amongst our own members — in our own hearts — even as the Faith ebbs steadily out of our cities and civilisation.

But still, to everyone’s surprise, the Church abides, and will not go away.  Here it is, this ramshackle body of believers which, owing to what he memorably called its ‘knavish imbecility’, Hilaire Belloc was certain would not have lasted two weeks without divine assistance; here it is, after all these centuries, ever being made new.  The Church’s long defeat by the forces of this world may go on and on and on, but it is never accomplished; it is never finished.  But it should not be a surprise: after all, the Faith on Good Friday was finished as completely as anything has ever been finished, but on Easter Sunday found itself suddenly and entirely back in business.  After that, she can survive anything.  What Chesterton once said of the virtue of faith applies to the Church as well: it is ‘a perpetually defeated thing which survives all conquerors’, one which resolutely contradicts, if only by quiet non-assent, the world’s madnesses and iron ideologies, and which awaits in patient hope the turning of the tables, the unassailable vindication, the unanswerable victory — and the gates of Hell shall not prevail against it.

Side-chapel in the church of Saint Maurice, Lille, France, December 2019.