Some Grounds for Catholic Optimism

The Archbishop of Westminster, Cardinal Vincent Nichols, began his New Year message for 2022 by comparing two different kinds of hope.  One he called the ‘pragmatic version’ — in which ‘a secure present’ gives us confidence to ‘look forward to an uncertain future’ — whereas the other, he said, was the ‘theological virtue’ of hope — ‘the capacity to face an uncertain present’ because, beyond it, we trust in an ‘utterly secure future.’  

Most of us in the Church would recognise this distinction.  After all, the first kind of hope, which we might also call ‘optimism’, is in distinctly short supply these days.  As the memory of the old faith drains steadily out of our cities and civilisation, as the tenets of the Creed are forgotten one by one, as forces mighty as Goliath yet insidious as the serpent conspire to hobble the Church and smother the Gospel, the psalms of lamentation come easily to the lips: ‘How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?’  And so we cultivate the second kind of hope, setting our sights and our hearts on the ‘utterly secure future’ of the kingdom of Heaven.  We brace ourselves for the ‘Long Defeat’, as Tolkien put it, in sure hope of the Final Victory.

But what if even earthly hope is not altogether lost?  For although this nurturing of Deep Hope is fundamentally the right approach to our situation, it nevertheless carries with it an understandable temptation: to give up on the immediate future altogether, and thereby to miss such possibilities as do in fact lie before us.  We are not Albigensians; we should not turn our backs completely on the world.  The Resurrection of Christ was as earthly a thing as it was supernatural, and changes the present moment as much as it does eternity; its implications are not only cosmic but comprehensive, changing the world not only in general but in detail, and from within, not from without.  Our everyday lives on earth are shot through with a new life-force — the Word, whispering perpetually into every crisis, ‘This is not the end — for I was, I am and ever shall be.’  Even in these bewildering times, there is an onward path to tread.

Cardinal Vincent in his message goes on to point out the ‘middle ground’ that exists between the two kinds of hope.  His point, if I understand rightly, is that we need to develop an intelligent combination of both: Deep Hope in the long term; courage and fortitude in the short.  Even if ‘optimism’ is hardly the first word we might use to characterise our immediate outlook, it has to be an ingredient in our approach.  Even a dash will do.  As we heard from the prophet Jeremiah (of all people!) one Sunday last year:

A blessing on the man who puts his trust in the Lord, with the Lord for his hope.  He is like a tree by the waterside that thrusts its roots to the stream: when the heat comes it feels no alarm, its foliage stays green; it has no worries in a year of drought, and never ceases to bear fruit. 

(Jeremiah 17: 5–8)

‘Never ceases to bear fruit’…  Mainstream opinion-formers may think the Catholic Church obsolete, deluded and contemptible, but we must not give the slightest impression of believing them.  Certainly we should be prudent in the deployment of our energies; absolutely we must attend to the deep and inner roots, but in the drought of the coming decades we must never lose confidence that the Church will indeed ‘never cease to bear fruit’ — because she retains countless ways to prove herself essential not only to her own members, but to our whole society.

What sort of thing do I mean?  Here are some ideas.

1.  Pro-life victory is certain

I am absolutely confident of the eventual victory, on earth, of the pro-life movement.  This might sound absurd, given the present total dominance of the abortion lobby in law and politics.  All the same, of the innumerable logical contradictions at the heart of the revolutionary secular-progressive project, this is the hardest to sustain, and indeed can be sustained only by shrill campaigning and a constant flow of cash.  A succession of scientific discoveries is steadily and consistently vindicating the Church’s position, and, sadly, so is the testimony of ever greater numbers of women as to the offence done by abortion against their dignity and happiness.  The strength of the pro-choice lobby is nearing its high water mark; it has little further ground to gain; it is already having to become defensive of its establishment position.  Its members are beginning, rightly, to recognise the possibility that they will, as the phrase goes, ‘lose the narrative’ to the joyful and energetic pro-life message.

March for Life, London, September 2018

I do not mean to sound complacent — after all, the cost in unborn lives now runs at over two hundred thousand every year in England and Wales alone — but I am not being complacent; I am being confident.  As with the trans-Atlantic slave trade two centuries ago, the whole outrage is likely to end abruptly, even unexpectedly, with a sudden anagnorisis and revulsion at the horror.  Unless our society is completely overtaken by nihilism, a point will be reached at which the injustice can be denied no more; someone at some point will ask, in a loud enough voice and in a way which will suddenly be listened to, why (for instance) we see hardly anybody with Down’s syndrome around any more; will ask why we uphold the rights of God’s animal creatures, as we should, without extending the same defence to our own unborn children.  When the tide does turn, the sheer consistency and integrity of the Church’s pro-life position, as well as her record in providing for mothers in need, will stand her in good stead when it comes to establishing a new and authentic culture of life.

That is one concrete reason for hope in our age, but still stretches the definition of ‘optimism’ a little far.  What about today and tomorrow?

2.  Fire-power isn’t everything

It is worth remembering that we still have great resources in the nature of our presence in society.  Secular progressivism is on the warpath, and hardening into a religion of its own, having at its disposal many organised shock-troops with strident and persuasive voices, and tightening its grip on our culture.  But if the Church seems not quite able to match this sheer fire-power, it is not because we lack good arguments or articulate ripostes.  It is because we have other things on our plate as well.  Unlike the cultural revolutionaries, we have always been concerned about more than mere propaganda.  The Church may be in battle, but she is not merely a battleship: she has to be a rescue vessel and a hospital ship and a flagship all at once.  She cannot be expected to swivel and aim her guns as adeptly as a purpose-built destroyer.

What is more, so much of the strength of our witness actually lies in our silence.  This is true in two senses: firstly in the simple fact of our not going along with propaganda or slogans, and secondly in the positive quality of the silence of our sanctuaries.  Especially these days, when moments of peace, let alone peace by oneself with God, are so hard to come by, precious indeed are the physical refuges of our churches amid the howling cities.

Our strength lies, too, in the aspects of the Church’s life that never make the headlines: her presence in hospitals, in hospices, in prisons, in homeless shelters, in ports, in refugee camps, in the armed forces, in universities, in schools.  And her charities: the tireless work of CAFOD for overseas development, Aid to the Church in Need for persecuted Christians, the St. Vincent de Paul Society for the homeless, and so on.  All those things that are never chalked up on the scoreboard of history: the Masses, rosaries, hymns and prayers; the confraternities, the prayer-groups, the pilgrimages, the devotions; the ‘ecclesiolae’ or ‘little churches’ of families holding their own day after day.  The kindly priest in the lit confessional; the Mary-garden under the railway arch; the soup-bowl in the homeless shelter: in all these ways the Church, with that gentle tenacity of hers, persists in living the ‘life to the full’ that her Founder promised.

The cultural revolution tends to be keener on the commanding heights of the culture — the law, the government, the arts, schools, universities, and the apparatus of civil society — than on the welfare of ordinary people.  This tells us that it is only really interested in power; that for all its capacity for intimidation it is necessarily brittle and lacking foundations, and that its strength, though incontestable for the moment, will prove ephemeral.  The Church’s appearance, by contrast, is no mere veneer.  Under the surface she is true to her word.

3.  The Church comprehends the new and pluralised Britain 

Another opportunity for the Church in years to come, one in which it stands as good a chance of success as any other institution apart from the Crown, is in making sure we fashion a harmonious society of the new pluralised Britain, and preventing the emergence of any division or mutual alienation.  Relatively few things can be said to unify us as a country these days, and certain fractures are emerging which the Faith is placed uniquely to heal.  What but the Christian imagination could even conceive of bringing into serious dialogue, say, the secular liberal on the one hand — whose instinct for mercy, though misproportioned, echoes a distinctively Christian idea — and the observant Muslim on the other, whose concern for justice, codified by the bracing tenets of Islamic law, testifies to a sincere attentiveness to God’s will?  Because the Church understands this paradox of justice and mercy, knowing how to temper one with the other, she can, I think, foster more fruit from such a conversation than anyone else.

And where else but within the Church can the demographic changes of the past fifty years be not only reconciled but harmonised convincingly with the deepest roots of our society?  To take only one of countless examples, consider the Tamil pilgrimages to Our Lady’s shrine at Walsingham, which I understand attract the largest numbers of all the pilgrim groups.  In this village in the heart of rural Norfolk, a place of pilgrimage since before the Norman Conquest, an ancient English devotion is unified with a Tamil one.  There is no contradiction between love of England and love of neighbour; there is simply one faith, one Church and one Lord.  Thus the world-wide roots of today’s pilgrims are entwined with the very depths of England and Englishness, new Britons follow in the footsteps of medieval kings, and all pilgrims throughout the ages are unified in peace and goodwill.  For many immigrants and their families and descendants, the Catholic Church is a ‘home away from home’ — and yet it has been here in England, waiting for them, it seems, since England’s very beginning.

Tamil Pilgrimage to Walsingham, Norfolk, 2016

4.  New alliances amid the crisis of meaning

Then there is the crisis of meaning: the alarming and deepening void at the centre of modern life, and, which is often even more horrifying, all that is rushing in to fill the void.  Only a decade ago the New Atheists were trumpeting the new dawn of a fanaticism-free secular age of cool rationalism, but now their vision seems completely unequal to the socio-cultural forces of our present time — forces which I am convinced are also spiritual.  As R. S. Thomas wrote,

In cities that
have outgrown their promise people
are becoming pilgrims
again, if not to this place,
then to the recreation of it
in their own spirits […]

Amid a loss of confidence in our institutions, our culture and even ourselves, a tremendous spiritual famine has suddenly declared itself: often vague, often outwardly hostile to formal religion, but unmistakeably spiritual in character.  This manifests itself in some obvious ways — the growing and understandable popularity of ‘mindfulness’, or the emergence of whole new academic fields such as ‘Loneliness Studies’ — but also in some more alarming forms: in the new ideologies sweeping every public institution, our blind faith in progressivism, and the many genuinely troubled young people.

Writers such as the essential Mary Eberstadt have long been observing how sixty years of aggressive secularism have been incubating this situation — but plenty of non-churchgoers are also noticing the crisis.  They share our alarm at the widespread subjugation of truth and reason to personal desire, and many are realising that even the Church may have something interesting to say about it.  We can and must do our best to repay that confidence; if we do, we may find ourselves entering into some new and fruitful kinds of dialogue.  (I say this from personal experience.) 

5.  The crisis of gender, though tragic, is a particular opportunity

One friend with whom I regularly enjoy such conversations recently brought to my attention a recent lecture on freedom of speech, one of the BBC’s annual series of Reith Lectures, by Nigerian-born novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.  At the core of this address was an appeal for a ‘coalition of the reasonable’ to maintain the standards of public debate.  She was speaking mainly with reference to the extraordinary behaviour in recent years of many advocates of gender theory, who have often been using outrageous tactics in order to advance their contentious cause, organising social media storms, releasing personal information, and even hounding their opponents from their jobs.

Adichie’s is an invitation to which the Church can and must respond positively.  We believe in reason and know that civil and reasonable debate are essential to our whole society — so there is an opportunity here for some real solidarity and co-operation.  In forming such alliances we do not have to pretend to agree where we disagree, but there is no reason why an edifying exchange of ideas should not take place.  The ‘reasonable secularists’ can discover our sincere interest in truth and reason, while we might draw some inspiration from their strength of purpose and concern for accountability and integrity.  Maybe, in finding ourselves on the same side for once, the discussion will be more constructive than it has been for many years.

Perhaps, too, at a relaxed moment, the conversation might turn to higher things, and to the spiritual dimension of the crisis of our time.  We might mention Benedict XVI’s insight that as well as reason we need faith, and that the two are not only compatible with but absolutely essential to each other.  We might make the point that the sense of meaninglessness from which so much of the crisis has stemmed corresponds to a deep reality about ourselves — that our longing for meaning is not some vague and inconvenient appetite, nor some functional or dietary need to be satisfied by the appropriate vitamin, but is a sign of the deepest truths about ourselves: the spiritual truths.

Even so, the urgent task remains to offer charitable but robust collective opposition to gender theory, which even now is doing irreversible damage to many confused and unhappy young people, as well as offending in a particular way against the rights and dignity of women.

6.  The Re-evangelisation of Romance

Another obvious mission for the Church is also one of the most dangerous: to confront head-on the ongoing melting down and recasting of marriage and the family, and to re-evangelise the sphere of romantic and marital love with the fullness and beauty of the Church’s teaching.  

Here, as with abortion, the post-Sixties revolutionary movement is visibly running into difficulties, and beginning to fray amid its own contradictions.  But its power is still tremendous, and its price exacted mainly on the young — who secretly, often even without knowing it themselves, long to hear the truth.  They long to be told what deep down they suspect: that all men and women were made for each other’s mutual respect and friendship, not for sullen rivalry; that the unique kind of friendship which is life-long marriage, the real thing, is no fancy but the gold standard, given to us by God for our flourishing; that a bride and bridegroom really are worth to the other nothing less than the gift of a great cosmic vow, one equal to the weight of an entire human life and strong enough to sustain the multiplication of new life; that such a vow is no mere formality, but something we long with all our hearts to make and to fulfil.  Youth seeks truth — the truth about ourselves, a truth which is written in our bodies as well as in our souls — and the Church, with teaching that is as beautiful as it is true, must be there to meet their longing.  Our culture is near enough rock bottom to hear it.  

We will often run up against wild rage and hatred — for those entrapped by darkness hate and fear beauty and truth — but there are millions of others waiting to be captivated by the high mission to which the Church calls them.

As Mary Eberstadt said in a recent interview,

Catholics should be proud — in the right way — of all these unpopular teachings.  They’re only unpopular for the moment, and […] they resonate with the human heart.  That again is to our advantage as we try to press this case.

This is one of the few spheres of life in which many people will still acknowledge a spiritual dimension, while often remaining sceptical about the form of marriage.  We are in much the same situation as those who argue for rhyme and metre in poetry: our task is to show how the form gives sense to the feeling; how the rules and vows give the underlying human impulse the sense and the strength to endure.  Against the pessimism of liberalism, with its fear of commitment, with its cynical assumptions about loyalty and perseverance, many will be surprised and inspired by the frankness, the freshness, the bracing realism, and, yes, the sheer optimism of the Church’s vision.

7. How hope works

I have one final remark on the way hope itself works, and where to look for it.  Whether pragmatic or theological, hope does not usually come marching over the hill; it grows fierce and green in unlikeliest places, as tenacious as grass or wildflowers.

One hot day a few years ago I was riding down a cycle path alongside a heaving A-road in south London, gritting my teeth against the noise and hostility around me, when the path narrowed and, seeing a child of about ten or eleven coming the other way, I braked to let him through.  To my complete astonishment, he very sincerely and deliberately thanked me; I hadn’t expected it and was too stunned to respond adequately.  There, uncrushed by the juggernauts and the tyres, defying the smirking warlords of the road, a tiny counter-witness, a green shoot of hope — something so vital, so ‘original, spare, strange’, that it offered a stronger riposte to its surroundings than perhaps the boy knew.  Like Lovejoy’s garden in Rumer Godden’s book An Episode of Sparrows, hope grows and germinates in defiance of overwhelming forces, even in spite of ourselves, in the ‘fields of our hearts that dead and bare have been…’

In the same way, as we should know from our own lives — and at Eastertide of all seasons — the vindication of the faith is with us, on earth, in this very hour.  ‘Christianity works,’ as Douglas Gresham, C. S. Lewis’s straight-talking step-son, once said.  It works in our lives, in every detail of our lives, even if the wider world is ignoring it for the present.  

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I am under no illusions: this is a very uncertain and unsettling age, and things will not be easy for the Church for some time.  Many of the opportunities I describe may only be born of various crises and amid great suffering: it may be that we can be optimistic only to the extent of being poised to respond to a crisis.  It is also undeniable that the Church as an institution — in Europe and the West at least — has been severely weakened in the past fifty years — partly by mockery and marginalisation from without, partly by slacking and scandal from within.  But the Church’s members on the ground are chastened and made wise by crisis; we are all, clergy and laity alike, more alert, less complacent, and more capable of giving an account of ourselves than we have been for some time.  And in an age when all institutions are struggling to win trust, the Church is again as well-placed as any other to recover her integrity and a visible authenticity.

As far as external threats go, the Church can handle crises far better than she can uncertainty and apathy.  Our very foundation began with an utter catastrophe which was gloriously and outrageously inverted into triumph.  We have the ‘utterly secure future’; we have the Final Victory — but the near future is worth fighting for as well.  Keeping courage, then, means keeping courage in the short term as well as the long; today and tomorrow, this hour and the next, so that, in a happier time, our descendants will remember and give thanks for their forbears in faith, as we give thanks for ours.

The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear?…
Though an army encamp against me, my heart shall not fear.
For in the time of trouble he shall hide me in his pavilion:
In the secret of his tabernacle shall he hide me; he shall set me up upon a rock.  

(Psalm 27: 1–5)

Pope Benedict at Hyde Park, September 2010.

Why a ‘dictatorship’ of relativism?

It was a remarkable thing to say, and a remarkable moment at which to say it.  It was at the opening Mass of the 2005 Papal Conclave, addressing those gathered to elect the next Pope, that Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, as he then still was, warned of a growing ‘dictatorship of relativism’ in our present era.  He was reflecting in his homily on words of St Paul to the Ephesians —

We are all to come to unity in our faith and in our knowledge of the Son of God, until we become the perfect Man, fully mature with the fullness of Christ himself.  Then we shall not be children any longer, or tossed one way and another and carried along by every wind of doctrine, at the mercy of all the tricks men play and their cleverness in practising deceit.  If we live by the truth and in love, we shall grow in all ways into Christ … [Ephesians 4:13-15]

— and his thoughts, which, when of course the next Pope turned out to be Joseph Ratzinger himself, came to serve in a way as the first homily of Benedict XVI, were these:

How many winds of doctrine have we known in recent decades, how many ideological currents, how many ways of thinking. The small boat of the thought of many Christians has often been tossed about by these waves — flung from one extreme to another: from Marxism to liberalism, even to libertinism; from collectivism to radical individualism; from atheism to a vague religious mysticism; from agnosticism to syncretism and so forth. Every day new sects spring up, and what St Paul says about human deception and the trickery that strives to entice people into error comes true.

Today, having a clear faith based on the Creed of the Church is often labelled as fundamentalism. Whereas relativism, that is, letting oneself be “tossed here and there, carried about by every wind of doctrine”, seems the only attitude that can cope with modern times. We are building a dictatorship of relativism that does not recognize anything as definitive and whose ultimate goal consists solely of one’s own ego and desires. 

(http://www.vatican.va/gpII/documents/homily-pro-eligendo-pontifice_20050418_en.html, accessed 13 May 2018)

That phrase, the ‘dictatorship of relativism’, has become one of Benedict’s best-known and oftest-quoted.  Even without it, this would be a startling homily; indeed, it attracted a good deal of attention at the time from the secular media, whose spotlight, he knew, that Monday the eighteenth of April, was trained on the Vatican as a new shepherd was being chosen for the Church.  Yet it ought perhaps to have been no surprise to hear a Cardinal opposing moral relativism.  For the Church has always asserted the unchanging nature and the objectivity of the fundamental moral principles that it has been her business, over the centuries, to discern.   Just as the foundations of our human nature have not been designed by us, lie outside our control and are determined by laws above us, the Church tells us that the moral life by which that nature should flourish comes ultimately from standards not our own.  The Church looks with a clear eye and the Holy Spirit’s help at the way we are made, and at the perfect example of Jesus Christ, the man who was God, and concludes not merely that we should not but that we cannot adjust, relativise or negotiate these standards — even if it feels or seems to us like a good idea — without doing ourselves harm.  There are no circumstances, then, in which we may put aside the commandments, disregard the dignity of any human being, or accept the use of evil means in any cause, even a good one.   Moreover, what is fundamentally good and just is the same in every time and place, even if its precise manifestation can sometimes vary from age to age, so neither social change nor technological advances can change these rules.  Now, the Church at its best has also always understood nuance, and knows that different kinds of actions vary in moral gravity, that there is a distinction to be made between the wrongness of a deed and the guilt of the person who commits it, and above all, that God is as merciful as He is just.   But that very paradox of justice and mercy, one of the most tremendous of Christianity’s strengths, would only be weakened if the Church allowed the moral principles themselves to be slackened, offering mere excuses for sins, rather than the limpid water of forgiveness.  If God’s justice were not absolute, the gift of God’s mercy would be diminished.  Relativism weakens justice and falsifies mercy: this is why the Church cannot accept it.

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Obedience to moral principles does not spare us moral dilemmas, though.  Indeed, moral principles sometimes appear to impose suffering on us, seeming to ride roughshod over mankind’s weakness and woe.  Of course the Church is opposed to an unrelenting fundamentalism.  But even as we move mountains to hold out mercy to people, we have to insist, again not without nuance, that the slightest concession to a moral principle itself, even a chink or fracture in the underlying foundation, opens up a temptation to widen it a little further, and then a little further again, and then further still, until, slowly or swiftly, we are tempted into believing that the moral law is below us, rather than above us.  Only when it is too late does it become clear how surprisingly malleable a moral principle may become under surprisingly little pressure, just as easily, we know, as we yield to temptation ourselves.  Hence principle after hitherto-unassailable principle — the dignity of the poor, the sanctity of life, the indissolubility of marriage, the common good — come to be undermined through any number of apparently just, and undoubtedly sincere motivations.  In our own age we have seen this happen.  The Church is not just being jittery when it keeps its look-out for the thin ends of wedges, and Cardinal Ratzinger knew what he was talking about when he warned against it.

Just as this position might be expected of the Church, it is nothing new that it should meet with the disagreement of main-stream secular thought.  Many Western commentators and campaigners would argue that to insist more than a little on more than a minimum of moral standards is to take upon ourselves an authority that is not ours, and in fact to display a certain short-sightedness — a failure to allow for the difference of others’ situations from our own.  From this point of view, relativism is not only harmless, but becomes a virtue, a positive proof of a lack of prejudice, a sign of  a citizen’s readiness to make adaptations in an age of rapid change — and, as we shall see, more important even than that.  The main-stream would probably accept the definition given in an article published in BBC News’ online magazine just after Benedict’s election.  According to this, relativism is the idea that moral principles lack any objective foundation, and vary across cultures and between individuals: not only beauty but ‘goodness, virtue and duty also lie in the eye of the beholder’.  Therefore, in direct contradiction to the Church’s view, it is logically necessary to say not merely that particular discrete acts or deeds or incidents are morally relative to each other (as a judge might hand down different sentences to those found guilty of the same crime) but that the underlying principles that make them right or wrong are also relative, and therefore fallible or negotiable (as if circumstances could put into question the very criminal quality of a given crime; as if the proven act of burglary were not necessarily always forbidden by law).  This idea leaves it up to us to form our own moral standards; we are left to navigate the world by our own light, according to our own perception of our freedom. The secular point of view is far less troubled by the thin ends of wedges than the Church, because it sees no important difference between the wedge and the moral fabric into which it is driven.  Each is as valid, or as fallible, as the other.

The fundamental disagreement is this: the Church says that morality, having an objective source, namely God, is unchanging, written within us and must be discerned; whereas modern Western secularism acknowledges no overall moral authority, understanding morality simply as an agreement reached within a community for the sake of peaceful living.

So, the mind of the Church and the prevailing culture of secularism disagree with each other: business as usual, then!  But what about this word dictatorship’?  This might initially strike even faithful Catholics as quite strong.  We might have expected Cardinal Ratzinger to foretell of a collapse or a disintegration of moral standards, an ‘anarchy of relativism’,  but here he is describing an overt, concerted effort of construction; he seems to be warning of an organised threat.  “Really, a ‘dictatorship’?” even faithful Mass-goers might respond.  “But secular society allows us to practise our religion, doesn’t it?  We are not yet persecuted for our faith, are we, by any authoritarian regime?” Yet a harder phenomenon, with order and purpose, is indeed what he perceived, and to describe it he deliberately chose a word that conjure up in the mind’s eye a whole picture-library of the outbreaks of totalitarianism that litter the twentieth century.  And for the secular mainstream the term touched another nerve.  It is one thing to criticise relativism,” they might retort, “but quite another to suggest that it could lend clout to any organised form of oppression.  Surely this is a contradiction in terms.  Our permissive society seeks precisely to weaken such tyrannies and to liberate the will of the individual; the more dictatorial the authority, the more fervently we oppose it.”  And some of their number would probably add, “And that includes your Church!”

This choice of the word ‘dictatorship’ is all the more startling because Joseph Ratzinger’s writing is characterised precisely by a careful, restrained use of language (it is more the sort of thing his successor Francis would say!).  And, furthermore, to know even a little about his biography and the events that shaped his youth is to realise that he would not employ the term ‘dictatorship’ lightly.  The young Joseph Ratzinger, like the young Karol Wojtyła (Pope John Paul II), was embroiled in the very cauldron’s depth of the Second World War.  Even during the 1930s he had gone to great lengths to obtain exemption from the Hitler Youth, and in 1945 actually deserted his post in the German army, risking his life in doing so, and made his way hundreds of miles home to Bavaria.  Cardinal Ratzinger, having witnessed from within the rise, realisation and collapse of the Third Reich, knows better than most of us what a dictatorship looks like.  He would not make such an allusion glibly.

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Where and how, then, did the man who was about to become Pope see a dictatorship emerging in the modern West?  Not, perhaps, in its outward appearance — there are no mass rallies, no night raids, no goose-stepping infantrymen — but perhaps he sees it, firstly, in our willing blindness.  The apostles of Western progressivism, in allowing the old morality to be compromised, have missed something: the relativism of moral principles has itself been exalted as an absolute moral principle.  And it is rapidly becoming the only absolute moral principle, stiffening among us silently and ironically behind the velvet veneer of fashion, social convention and even, to an increasing extent, the law.  The reasonable freedom to allow each other to order our own lives as we see fit and the reasonable custom of showing tolerance towards those with whose actions or opinions we may disagree have been fashioned into a new moral obligation, a duty to avoid the assertion, in the public sphere, of any absolute moral principle whatsoever, lest others suspect a curtailment of their individual freedom.  It is the bureaucracy of the dictatorship of relativism that, all across western Europe, has in recent years expelled religious signs from public buildings, attempted to interfere and mediate between parents and children, even taken to test in court the unfashionable views of public servants, and gradually elevated quite broad, shallow and unelucidated notions of ‘tolerance’, ‘liberty’, ‘dignity’ and ‘best interests’ to the status of the tenets of a creed.  Quietly, and, it seems, perceptible only to those on its receiving end, a new force crystallises and hardens.

Still, some secularists might say, “Well, even if the law has to be heavy-handed in preventing interference with our liberty to do whatever we want, does this not still mean freedom for us as individuals?  We are still some way short of dictatorship.  Can we not all just lead our lives as we like, so long as we get along with each other, even if the law sometimes has to make to mind our own business?”  But the Church understands that this idea is really an illusion.  This is actually the very threshold of the dictatorship of relativism, which is capable of holding sway over whole cultures and individual minds alike.

To see why, perhaps the first thing we must do is to perceive, behind the promise of freedom that sounds so good, the quality of indifference that pervades and underpins it.  Even that phrase, ‘just do as we like’, apparently resonant with liberty, is radically and inhumanly self-centred.  If I, the ego, am at the centre of my own existentialist quest, I am less concerned not just about what my neighbour is doing, but also how my neighbour relates to me, and who my neighbour is.  Individualism may prevent me from meddling, but it also liberates me from caring. The loosening of the bonds between human beings may sound just fine to strong, independent people, but not to the vulnerable and downtrodden, whom bonds support as much as they bind.  Is it really others’ freedom for their own sake that is so appealing to the individualist, or our own freedom to care less about them?

Once such indifference to our neighbours is permitted we see — and have seen in our culture in the past fifty years — the rise of a general moral indifference: an ‘OK’ culture, in which the maximum we can reasonably expect of others is the bare minimum.  Although there are certainly many exceptions to this rule — I encounter them daily — it is in many places the lowest common denominator: I’m OK, you’re OK, I’m OK with you if you’re OK with me and we’re all OK with whatever each other is OK with. (Unless you’re not OK with what I’m OK with.  That’s not OK).   The smaller aspects of morality — good manners, common decency and solidarity — are threatened and eroded.  The world becomes a rougher-edged, sharper-elbowed place.  We might now be more reliably deterred from prying into others’ business, but we now lack conviction and the support of others, or even the language to offer people guidance and help if necessary.  

Thus is set — very low, it must be said — an upper limit, a kind of ceiling of cultural morality.  But where is the lower limit; where is the minimum?  For how long does the ‘OK culture’ remain merely vaguely, lukewarmly ‘OK’, before it curdles into callousness?  Perhaps the question is now to ask how individuals might respond to life in such a culture, and the answer is surely that many would soon come to permit themselves lower standards.  If my ego believes I am entitled to all the freedom I can get that does not impinge on others, I will naturally be tempted to exercise my own freedom to the full, to the very limit of my neighbour’s freedom.  If that limit is contestable, how long will it be before I am indeed tempted to contest it?  And then how could I be sure, without some external and absolute moral rule, that I was not riding rough-shod over my neighbour?  Would I have the self-discipline to stop short of that limit, if I did not acknowledge any moral authority over me?  Many of us might, much of the time, but we all know enough about the nature of human beings to see how precarious this arrangement is.  This is how yawning temptation and the keen encouragement to fend for oneself consolidate the inward power of the Dictatorship of Relativism, and its command over individual hearts and souls. 

Soon a vicious circle emerges: such changes repeated in many souls all add up to a culture of competition and self-seeking, which, in turn, again strengthens its influences on the individual.  The Church is often accused of ‘scaremongering’ — and no doubt is very adept at scaring people — but the trouble is that the cliché is true: relativism really does lead down a slippery slope towards ever-lower standards of personal behaviour.  The evidence is before us: we can see for ourselves what happens when principles are compromised in the name of some economic or political benefit.  There are modern Britain’s dismal marriage statistics, the slave trade’s legacy in America, the volume and aggression of road traffic, the gradual ruination of river estuaries, and so on.  The effects of the general relaxation of certain laws or moral rules tend to match, even to outdo, the worst fears of those who wish to retain them.

A culture filled with individuals who revere personal choice and freedom above all will not only tend towards self-seeking and indifference, but may also use coercion or the application of heavy pressure to protect its interests, at precisely those troublesome boundaries where the freedoms of individuals collide.  The distance is surprisingly small from an insistence on personal autonomy to the compulsion of others to provide for that freedom, in ways both great and small.  Thus, in liberating the radio broadcaster from the watershed, children’s freedom to tune in is severely reduced; thus, for the sake of motorists’ freedom, rural settlements are subjected to the severing swathes and sempiternal howl of motorways; thus our easy equivocation about the humanity of the unborn compels midwives to supervise and co-ordinate staff involved in abortion procedures.  Now it all begins to look more like a dictatorship.  Or, if I leave my words unminced, the tyranny of the spoilt brat.

This dictatorship has other victims, too, for those whom it does not coerce it may abandon.  For example, to those who use their freedom unwisely it can give only the cold shoulder.  Sartre, the founder of existentialism, acknowledged this with honesty.  The existential doctrine that offers us freedom to form our selves by ourselves never claims to offer any positive guidance other than that we must keep within our boundaries; it ‘accepts no liability’ if people come to regret how they have used their own freedom.  But who, then, will teach us how to use our freedom properly?  The Church understands that the free will that God has given us leaves us with the capacity to do ourselves great wrong and great damage — but is not indifferent to this risk.  As we have seen, the Church proposes moral rules and guidance to help us to use our freedom for greatness, and offers the channel of God’s mercy to help us when we misuse it.  A culture of relativism is not so good at doing this.

Yet even if moral relativism did not produce the coercive lowering of standards, its inhibition of a heightening of standards is equally tyrannical.  Relativism has nothing to say about sainthood.  It is perturbed by holiness.  It prefers to bury itself in a stifling mediocrity of morality.  If somebody actually asks, like our brethren in the Gospels, ‘What must I do to inherit eternal life?’ — in other words, ‘How do I live excellently?’ — what happens?  They are brushed off with a curt, dismissive ‘Whatever you wish’: no answer at all.  That too is dictatorship.  People are deprived of the gold standard of living for which they were made, for which they thirst, and to which they are entitled.  The ‘OK culture’, in the guise of liberty, forbids the true freedom obtained by meaningful living. 

For the Church has a revolutionary understanding of freedom that is radically different from the world’s.   The freedom that the modern world offers is, as we have seen, the freedom to do whatever we please at the present moment as far as possible.  But there is another kind of freedom.  For we also call an athlete’s highly-trained movements free; we speak of the freedom of a musician’s thousandfold-practised performance.  Hard-won fluency in a language is a freedom.  But these achievements do not come about by accident.  The athlete, musician and linguist have not spent their lives casually doing what they want.  No; they have made a definite, hard effort to train themselves in a particular direction and to conform to certain rules, of physics, of music, of grammar, that are not of their own making.  Beyond the press-ups, the scales and the verb-tables lies a greater freedom that can be achieved only by conforming to those apparently restrictive and arbitrary rules.  Surely it makes sense, then, that the same principle applies to the moral life.  Bishop Robert Barron, one of the greatest living evangelists of the English-speaking world, has set this out in an article here, which is worth quoting at length:

The view of liberty which has shaped our culture is what we might call the freedom of indifference. On this reading, freedom is the capacity to say “yes” or “no” simply on the basis of one’s own inclinations and according to one’s own decision. Here, personal choice is paramount. We can clearly see this privileging of choice in the contemporary economic, political, and cultural arenas. But there is a more classical understanding of liberty, which might be characterized as the freedom for excellence. On this reading, freedom is the disciplining of desire so as to make the achievement of the good, first possible, then effortless. Thus, I become increasingly free in my use of the English language the more my mind and will are trained in the rules and tradition of English. If I am utterly shaped by the world of English, I become an utterly free user of the language, able to say whatever I want, whatever needs to be said. 

  In a similar way, I become freer in playing basketball the more the moves of the game are placed, through exercise and discipline, into my body. If I were completely formed by the world of basketball, I could outplay Michael Jordan, for I would be able to do, effortlessly, whatever the game demanded of me. For the freedom of indifference, objective rules, orders, and disciplines are problematic, for they are felt, necessarily, as limitations. But for the second type of freedom, such laws are liberating, for they make the achievement of some great good possible. 

  St. Paul said, “I am the slave of Christ Jesus” and “it is for freedom that Christ has set you free.” For the advocate of the freedom of indifference, the juxtaposition of those two claims makes not a bit of sense. To be a slave of anyone is, necessarily, not to be free to choose. But for the devotee of the freedom for excellence, Paul’s statements are completely coherent. The more I surrender to Christ Jesus, who is himself the greatest possible good, the very Incarnation of God, the freer I am to be who I am supposed to be. The more Christ becomes the master of my life, the more I internalize his moral demands, the freer I am to be a child of God, to respond promptly to the call of the Father. 

  Finally, human beings are not hungry to choose; they are hungry to choose the good.

This final flourish explains a great part of the Church’s mission.  People of good will want to know how to do good, and they want trustworthy instruction.   The Church is not there just to make life difficult for us, while the world handily tries to work out what the minimum is that we can get away with.  The Church is there (among many other things) to discern the way of life that leads us to our highest dignity.  It offers, in Christ’s example, the gold standard of morality, which is the gold standard of both justice and mercy.  Quite often the path diverges from our own wishes, and very often it is extremely difficult to follow.  We might say ‘this is a hard saying’ (John 6:60) and disregard it.  But it is the way home.  The Church is simply setting out as much of the truth as has been given to us to understand.  We are not obliged to follow the Church if we choose not to, but the Church is itself obliged to put the truth forward intact, and thereby to offer the possibility of sainthood to us all.  In the cosmic scheme of things, grace notwithstanding, it is only a slight simplification to say that practice does make perfect, including when it comes to practising a religion.  The more we practise opening ourselves to the Holy Spirit, the less attached we become to our bad habits, the more used we become to good habits and the freer we become to do what is right.  Perhaps St. John Paul II put it most pithily: freedom consists ‘not in doing what we like, but in having the right to do what we ought’.  The fleeting satisfaction brought by the freedom of indifference is a dull thing compared to the greatness that the freedom for excellence would lend us.

Coutances cathedral

But St. Paul had another insight.  If we choose not to pursue that freedom for excellence, it is not the case that settling for freedom of indifference simply provides us with a tolerable second-best.  The freedom of indifference offers no guarantee against falling into slavery, the slavery of the ‘devices and desires of our own hearts’, or ‘all the tricks men play and their cleverness in practising deceit’, and indeed the way there lies clear.  For relativism’s ultimate aim, to achieve freedom by abolishing moral authority, is impossible.  We are all religious creatures; we all have our objects of worship, even if we do not realise it.  Nature abhors a vacuum, and there is always something, good or bad, set on the altar of our hearts.  How easy and how tempting it is to place on that altar ‘our own ego and desires’, and become slaves to them.  This would be the ultimate triumph of the dictatorship of relativism, which is ultimately the dictatorship of the self.  By this it claims as its third set of victims those who think they are doing rather well out of it.  The tyranny of the spoilt brat, even as it is inflicted on others, always ends up by turning on the spoilt brat himself, ruining and enslaving, by his own greed and selfishness, a person who could have been a saint.

All this goes some way to show, I hope, why Cardinal Ratzinger chose such an arresting phrase for his homily.  It was not because he was just another grumpy old man in the Vatican wanting to spoil everyone’s fun, as the world’s media somehow persisted in believing, against all the evidence, for eight long years.  Rather it was because, as a keen observer of Europe and the world, he could see forces at work, turning us in on ourselves, towards self-slavery and away from the dignity and glory for which we were made.  He knows as well as we do how hard it is to be good, how much help we need to avoid making mistakes, and what the Church’s vision of freedom means.  This is why, in that homily, and all through his pontificate in one way or another, he urged us so boldly to reject the lure of the Dictatorship of Relativism, and to seek instead the Kingdom of God.

Embed from Getty Images

Pope Benedict is ‘photo-bombed’ by H. M. the Queen

Vows and Vocations

At three o’clock — or sometimes shortly thereafter, now that live broadcasts can be rewound — we allow the television to interrupt our merry-making on Christmas Day.  The Christmas pudding having been doused in brandy and set fire to and sung over and most assiduously devoured, we are usually just in time for one of the more unfrenetic and comforting broadcasts left on the main channels: the Queen’s Christmas message.  I find it invigoratingly traditional in spirit, and there is a rare feeling of national togetherness as the Queen invites us to look back on the year.  Gloriously heedless of the BBC’s dull secularist ethos, H.M. always makes unforceful but unambiguous (and therefore courageous) mention of her Christian faith. This year’s message was the fiftieth the Queen has made by television, so it is a well-established tradition in its own right.

But even fifty years of Christmas broadcasts struggle to shine against the seven decades of the Queen’s marriage to the Duke of Edinburgh.  There beside the Queen as she delivered her message, next to the portraits of her great-grandchildren George and Charlotte, are two photographs of Elizabeth and Prince Philip.  One was taken on their wedding day in 1947, and the other in November this year to mark their Platinum Anniversary.  Seventy years separate the pictures, but one reciprocal vow is common to both.

A post shared by The Royal Family (@theroyalfamily) on Nov 19, 2017 at 2:49pm PST

This is marriage, the real thing, and this particular marriage is special because it belongs to us in much the same way as the Queen herself belongs to us.  It is one of the last lit beacons in bleak Britain, whose marital statistics show that a third of all marriages are sooner or later put asunder, and that more and more couples move in under the same roof without entering into marriage at all.  More than three million families have been begun without the security of wedlock.  It is some decades since the State showed any understanding of its proper responsibility in this field, which is to create all the right conditions for stable family life, especially for the sake of its oldest and youngest citizens, without meddling in it.  What has happened instead is that marriage has been undermined so that, from a simply practical point of view, people can hardly be blamed for choosing to set up home in co-habitation.  The social and financial benefits that marriage once brought do not now make economic sense, and to many people the law appears to set a trap, being still just tenacious enough to protract and sour any parting, yet not firm enough to banish the very idea from people’s minds, encouraging building rather than dismantling.  By Britain’s national anticulture, by spectres of the imagination and by the reality of people’s own experiences, many have come to fear the unsunderable vows.  Yet couples who are ready to found a household should surely wish for just such a bond.  Marriage helps couples, before they ever enter into it, by serving as a test or proof: if they do not feel they trust each other enough to marry, then they cannot know whether they trust each other to start and sustain a family.  On the other hand, if their mutual trust does indeed go far enough that children seem a real possibility, then why delay in giving form to the natural truth?  Marriage is for life because children join their parents for life.  The great vow is there to protect first husband and wife, and then their children, against human weakness and the evils of the world outside.

But we have also forgotten not only the practicality and common sense of marriage, but its transcendent, spiritual dimension.  This is another casualty of the dictatorship of relativism — Benedict XVI’s phrase — the tyranny of indifference that surrounds us, unctuously bidding us do as we please but offering no railings of guidance, and certainly no healing, if our desires lead us into wrongdoing and suffering.  The idea of marriage as a calling to high friendship, as a sacrificial mission that elevates the dignity of man and woman, has vanished, and along with it a sense of motherhood and fatherhood as vocations, to be honoured far above mere career or material prosperity or political engagement.  So people no longer know what to hope for, nor what to build, are therefore afraid of commitment, and so settle for too little from themselves and others.

Yet the Church insists not only on its spiritual dimension but on recognising it as a sacrament, that is, an encounter with the explicit presence of God.  Marriage is, indeed, a minor miracle.  I don’t mean this in a facetious way.  It is one of the great paradoxes of life, this unexpected, triumphant treaty of accord by which men and women, in their rival camps with their baffling, amusing, mysterious, undefinable differences, can find not merely reconciliation, nor even simply fleeting pleasure, but actually their highest earthly adventure by pairing up with a member of the other team (the rival team!), and sealing with them an all-transfiguring, world-creating pact, each a match for the other, and each the other’s match.

The impossible union is not only a wonder, but a plausible reality.  A bride will cost a man his life, but, mirabile dictu, it can come to pass that even such a wayward creature as a man will vow to pay, and keep his vow.  The hard-won reward is generous: he finds himself the beneficiary of a vow of equal magnitude, and he finds himself in a unique position to give the gift of self.  Moreover, the happiness and security this brings him overflows into any children the marriage produces, children who encounter no pit of dread in asking two of the most important questions in growing up: ‘Who am I?’ and ‘Whom can I trust?’, though many young people do encounter such a chasm.  And the Queen, who in her life has had to make some fearsome vows before God, to her bridegroom and to her realm, is one of our greatest living examples in this regard.  Her own family has not been untouched by the turmoil of marriage in late twentieth-century Britain, but she and her husband have kept their faith and their vows, and quietly encouraged the rest of us to do the same.

In marriage is found, and from marriage comes, the ‘home’ of which the Queen spoke in her Christmas message.  I think it would be a good challenge for the Church and all people of good will to make this a year of promoting marriage, simply the idea, in our tired culture.  The Coalition for Marriage is already doing an excellent job in keeping an eye on the state of things, informing public opinion and encouraging the Government to do the right thing.  But marriage ought to be an urgent topic of conversation.  It needs to be allowed to set alight the imaginations of young people (I write as one) who are hungry for a mission, and the message needs to be proclaimed that marriage is a good thing from alpha to omega and at every scale: national, local and in the innermostnesses of the soul.  It ought to be given a place near the heart of the New Evangelisation; to solve the marriage crisis would be to ease many of the other social, moral and spiritual problems that afflict us.  Along with the other sacraments of mission (Holy Orders and Confirmation), it is the antidote to the dictatorship of relativism’s shrugs of indifference, and the soundest, least wasteful vessel into which to pour, with generosity and joy, the fruit of one’s sacrifices.

Meanwhile… Merry Christmas!  Keep feasting!

(Malcolm Archer’s setting of the Linden Tree Carol)

Happy birthday, Pope Francis!

Happy eightieth birthday to the unstoppable Pope Francis, who continues to teach and us less by words (which I think he sees as a secondary tool) than by gesture and example, in which his real homilies are to be found. 

“How many of you speak Spanish?” Pope Francis prays with refugees in Rome.

He is certainly a Pope who pulls no punches: man has, he says, “slapped nature in the face”; young people are to “renounce the sofa” — and remember the “Curse my mother; expect a punch” line?  People don’t realise how much tougher a nut he is than Benedict ever was!  But he has to be tough.  Time is short.  The world is awash with wrongdoing and riven by evil, and Francis has more to contend with even than the unfolding spiritual decline of the West.  As I have pointed out before, I think he wants to concentrate on the rest of the world before Europe, whose faithful remnant, with its particular mission, can still draw on the (far-from-exhausted) well of teaching of Benedict and St. John Paul, in addition to Francis’s, for years to come.

“Pray for me,” he has asked us, so we should do so.  And the same for his predecessor.

‘My guilt towers higher than my head…’

Some thoughts as the Year of Mercy approaches its close…

My guilt towers higher than my head; it is a weight too heavy to bear.

The choir of Westminster Cathedral sings Psalm 37 (38).

Many of us in the West, most of the time, don’t know what mercy means because we don’t know what guilt means, and don’t know what guilt means because we don’t know what sin means.  But mercy is what we are hungering for all the same.

I have read C. S. Lewis somewhere pointing out the difference between being forgiven and being excused.  Our culture is very good at making excuses, particularly for the wrongdoings of grown adults, and then using syrupy pathos in novels and dramas or the sheer deluge of distraction to paper over any remaining cracks in the conscience.  Forgiveness, however, it finds more difficult.  Hence the hardening of our culture into extremes: certain misdeeds bring guilt crashing down irrevocably upon the wrongdoer, but anything short of this is unblotted innocence.  And notice a gradual slide into condemning persons along with their actions.

But I have a feeling that guilt, even for wrongs excused by our culture that would never make the headlines, accumulates into a sludge that in the end makes itself felt in all but the hardest of hearts.  Paradoxically, the abandonment of a Christian sense of penitence only strengthens this feeling, and in three ways that I can see.  Firstly, I think that modern morality allows the distinction to be blurred between an ordinary sense of weakness — not guilt but the feeling we all have of lacking the strength to achieve all we wish — and the awareness of having done wrong: some people, knowing that something is their fault, but unable to tell what, might be tempted to conclude that everything is.  

Secondly, these feelings are surely made all the more piercing by their foreignness to our culture.  ‘Through my sin, there is no health in my limbs’? ‘My wounds are foul and festering, the result of my own folly’?  The dictatorship of relativism is baffled by such sentiments, so it forbids them.  For even if no other impulse is to be held back, guilt (and, incidentally, therefore also innocence) must be repressed.

Thirdly, since nobody mentions mercy, still less a merciful God, the way out is hidden.  Hence, I suppose, an enormous, vague, lonely wave of hollow pain with no outlet, expressed in the bone-dry aching words of the thirty-seventh psalm.  No wonder this is such an unhappy age.

Those of us who, to greater or lesser extents, know of this reality that rings with paradox — that justice co-exists with mercy — should also know that it is nothing to be smug or self-satisfied about.  We are bound by the inverse (not the opposite) of the beatitude: those who are shown mercy are to be merciful.  Thus mercy, like other things, is meant to cascade down the terraces of the Church and shimmer between heaven and earth.

The New Evangelisation: ten thoughts

How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?  The question asks itself now not in ancient Babylon but in our own country and our own day, and with growing urgency.  The Church’s answer is the New Evangelisation —  a great call to re-evangelise Christian cultures that have forgotten the faith — but it can be hard to see how we are to fit into it, or where to begin.  I am not a convert, still less an expert, but I thought it might be worth putting up this list of reflections, even if most of them might seem obvious.

1. Apathetic agnosticism is a greater, a subtler and a more widespread challenge than aggressive secularism.  Our country is awash with spiritual apathy (or acedia): a number of people are openly opposed to Christianity, but far more in modern Britain seem almost to sleepwalk through life, hurled by busy lives from distraction to distraction, not seeing what weighs them down.  There is a lot of unwise, stupid and wrong behaviour as well, but we should never confuse this, the result of sin to which believers are hardly immune, with the actual intelligence and goodness of non-churchgoers.   Easy though it might be to forget in a culture opposed to the Church in so many ways, people really do examine the human heart carefully without any particular grudge against Christianity.  We should remember that our faith does not make us, in ourselves, superior to them — see Galatians 6:14.  Another point is that people have different reasons for not going to church, and these cannot necessarily be bashed aside with a copy of the Catechism.  For instance, many young people, having been brought up without regular church attendance, might feel that to start practising would be a slight to their parents and their values; it would be wrong for us to ride rough-shod over that loyalty.  Many people stay away from church without resenting churchgoers; many pray without practising; many believe in God but lack faith in the visible institution of the Church; many people are of good will but spiritually unadventurous. There are also more people with misgivings about modern values than the media suggest: I know a number of (young!) people who reverence marriage, dislike bad language, seek beauty in poetry, and so on.  To be evangelised is to discover something that is not completely unfamiliar.
2. We should announce the Gospel by asking people questions.  This is an age, in thrall as it is to the doctrines of self-determination and relativism, in which people dislike being lectured to, and in any case, it is better to invite people to discover the faith for themselves and in their own time.   Proclamations, however resonant, can be taken as slogans and brushed off quite easily.  Even quietly-posed questions are less easy to ignore.  They are more likely to percolate unobtrusively through the mind, reappearing every so often, never really going away, gently nudging and pestering for an answer.  We could learn from our Evangelical brethren here:  the talks and discussions they organise often have a question as the title, such as ‘Is there more to life than this?’, ‘What if the Resurrection really happened?’, and so on.  Even rhetorical questions demand unspoken answers.  Do you believe that you have an absolute and irreducible dignity as a human being?  Would you prefer to be excused for your wrongs, or to be forgiven?  Do you remember that we believed because it is true?
3. We must evangelise the arts and culture.  We must have the courage to answer the cults of sarcasm and ugliness with works of art, literature and music that uphold human dignity and strive for beauty.  The right artistic intention is, I think, to be prized even more than accomplishment or execution.  A  sincere true utterance with some rough edges is better than a thousand polished works calculated to trample goodness and truth gratuitously (I think works of art or literature can be evil, as well as simply bad).  The ideals by which all art was once made have been so neglected that they now represent a niche in the market, and it is up to us to fill it.  We need writers, composers and architects whose subjects are not necessarily explicitly religious but whose faith can be seen to leaven their work.  We need audibly beautiful, even musical poetry.  Popular music must be prized out of the hands of the industry that has dragged it down into sordidness, and the airwaves filled with simple, unaffected, authentic and uplifting tunes.  Films, too, could explore the world and the soul far more deeply, and without sermonising (Inside Out, which I have already praised, is a case in point).  These things matter because art is not inanimate: it always acts upon us for better or worse.  If beauty is a reflection of God, and God is love and truth, beautiful art will lead us towards deeper understanding and purer love of each other and of God.  Such love is several orders of magnitude above a love of music or poetry, but both have the same essence and the same divine origin.
4. Our position should not be a merely anti-modern or reactionary one, even though we are right to mourn to much of what the past has taken with it.  Although we should cherish tradition, resist our culture’s chronological snobbery with energy and revive certain aspects of the old world, our aim is not simply to return to the past.  Likewise, given that much of what we say and believe might be called ‘conservative’, we should remember that we are so confident in its truth because it is Christian orthodoxy, not because it is conservative.  We should look for opportunities in the modern world; we should embrace new technology.  This is, for instance, the age of the image, and ours is the religion of the image: the modern ‘explosion of imagery’, Fr. Robert Barron has said, even makes this a ‘Catholic moment’.  Why should the Church not encourage the building of beautiful websites or beautiful graphic design?  I am probably guiltier than most of yearning for the past and raging against the present, but we should make the effort to receive the ‘sacrament of the present moment’ gratefully.
5. We must never tire of striving and praying for Christian unity.  Christians have inherited a difficult and a painful tangle and our divisions, though less raw than they once were, remain scandals and obstacles to faith.  We should make a greater effort to collaborate with Evangelical Christians who, like us, hold to Christian faith in the teeth of fashion, their concern for what is ‘Biblical’ corresponding to ours for what is ‘orthodox’.  We should make an effort to understand the Eastern Orthodox faith: last February’s meeting between Pope Francis and the Russian Patriarch Kirill, and good relations with the Patriarch of Constantinople, are valuable and significant.  (I have heard a priest say that fifty years might suffice for full communion to be restored between East and West.)  Even within the Catholic Church, we should overcome our differences by trying to keep them in perspective, avoiding airing them in public if possible, and also by keeping our minds and hearts fixed on Jesus Christ (see point 10). 
6. Marriage, the family and childhood matter.  It is on this front that the modern world has declared war most explicitly on the Church.  We need courage to defend it.  A preoccupation with the welfare of adults, though not unjustified, has contributed to the social and cultural neglect of children and the elderly, who in their own ways have become almost second-class citizens.  Children in particular are segregated from the world of adults: because the adult world believes itself entitled to violent and sordid entertainment, children must be given their own isolated culture.  This, among other things, means that the passage from childhood to adulthood is no longer a steady growth or slow mellowing but a series of disillusioning shocks and blows, the worst of which fall between the ages of eleven and fourteen.  Surely most of us have seen this happen: the descent of the grey veil of cynicism; the deliberate self-vandalism of the soul; the hideously thorough revolt against childhood.  The New Evangelisation reminds us of the importance of the family, in which all people have their place and by which all understand their own lives.  Somewhere (I wish I could remember where!) I have heard and heartily agreed with the statement that ‘all men are called to be fatherly and all women to be motherly’.  I think it would also be good rule to behave at all times as if children might overhear.  Unfashionably, I also believe that men can and should cultivate chivalry towards women and that women should demand excellent manners of men.  Both men and women, if they are called to do so, should steel themselves joyfully for the mission of marriage and parenthood.
7. There is a good deal of health in the Church’s youth.  I can report this from belonging to it!  In university chaplaincies, in diocesan ministries, in parishes, however small in number, there is plenty of energy, intelligence and good humour to be harnessed.  The Church has great strength in its youth, as World Youth Day has proved again and again, and will surely do again this coming July. 
8. A sense of vocation is the antidote to the myth of self-determination.  There is more strength to be gained from the feeling of being called to do something than from simply wanting to do something.  The current idea that we may do as we please as long as we think it harms nobody else will, I think, pall, since it leaves nobody but oneself to blame for plans going wrong or indeed for suffering.  As people tire of endless fruitless avenues, the Church should be there to propose a robuster way of life, something requiring service and devotion and even vows, which nevertheless brings far greater happiness than the path of self-absorption and quick gratification.  I never tire of quoting Cardinal Newman’s meditation about service and vocation, from which this blog’s name is taken: ‘God has created me to do Him some definite service; He has committed some work to me which He has not committed to another. I have my mission — I never may know it in this life, but I shall be told it in the next […] I have a part in this great work; I am a link in a chain, a bond of connexion between persons. He has not created me for naught. I shall do good, I shall do His work; I shall be an angel of peace, a preacher of truth in my own place, while not intending it, if I do but keep His commandments and serve Him in my calling.  Therefore I will trust Him’. One way of telling whether something is a real vocation, it has occurred to me, is to feel a strong desire to do something good, to be terrified of doing it, and to be determined, almost in spite of oneself, to do it all the same.
9. We are sharing a revealed faith, not advocating a philosophy or policy.  Our faith is not an idea that we came up with one afternoon in the pub and are rather pleased with.  It is not a theory to be evaluated, nor a strategy to be risk-assessed.  It is not our idea but God’s.  If we invite people to understand the Church, we do so because we believe they will be happier for knowing it, and we want happiness for them out of love: it is something that we can hardly help telling other people about, like the urge to share music or discuss favourite books. 
10. Who do we say that He is?  Our first task is to evangelise ourselves.  In a lecture that is well worth listening to, Bishop Philip Egan of Portsmouth says (here to be precise) that in the modern world we are to concentrate above all on the person of Jesus Christ.  Where, before the Council, the emphasis might have been too often on ‘The Church of the Lord’, we are invited now to found our lives more clearly upon ‘The Lord of the Church’.  The New Evangelisation may be a great task, but it begins here, and is a futile exercise without it.  It may also be a great task, but it is to be gone about in small, even unseen ways.  Whatever happens, we should not worry: we have already been told that it will all come right in the end.

Do readers have thoughts about these?  I would be interested to read any comments.