The Shifting Axis

 Eric Sammons had a great podcast a couple weeks ago titled The Death of Catholic Apologetics? He says "the apologetics movement is losing steam...and their impact has been greatly neutered" and points to three main reasons why: 

1. An increased apathy towards religion 

    -If you don't care--aka apathy--about religion, you're not going to spend any time trying to determine what is true.

2. The Church has lost her witness

    -People may have hated the Catholic Church a hundred years ago--but people respected it. You knew what you got with it. She is now weak, with a scandalous pope that makes things that much more difficult for apologists. 

3. The fracturing of Catholicism 

    -What Catholicism do you represent? "Just Catholic" doesn't exist anymore. 

I wrote to Eric and commended him for the podcast, and also sent him my post The Time For Preaching and Teaching Are Over that I wrote three years ago, essentially saying the same thing (he declined to publish it for Crisis, although he said he enjoyed it, since it would have been too much overlap given his recent podcast on the topic). 

It's interesting times we are living in. While a spark to the powder keg of civil unrest has France burning, I'm reminded of another perceptive insight from Marine Le Pen (who lost the French presidential race to Emmanuel Macron, who was re-elected in 2022):

“There is no more left and right. The real cleavage is between the patriots and the globalists.” Macron makes the same claim: “The new political split is between those who are afraid of globalisation and those who see globalisation as an opportunity.” 

And on U.S. soil, Trump, for all his flaws, perceived this changing landscape as a political dark horse: “The future does not belong to the globalists. The future belongs to the patriots,” he told the U.N.

 

If you're a Weigelian neo-conservative still acting like it's 2003, and we're duking it out for souls with Protestants or inquiring Atheists in the internet comboxes, I'm sorry to say that ship has left the harbor. Traditionalists are the 'new kid on the block' (though, arguably, the longest-standing), the "patriots" of the Church who are willing to fight for their patrimony. They still compromise a small but growing percentage of those in the pews, but that doesn't mean they are inconsequential. They want the Faith--the TRUE Faith, not some watered-down version of it--and they live by it, the way a patriotic American would still hold to the ideals of the Constitution and believe that America is still a great country founded on noble (and proven) ideals. They need to be taken into account in the shifting landscape of the Catholic world, because they are not going away (as much as people like Michael Lofton would like them to)

Meanwhile, it would be a misnomer to tag any Pope as a "globalist," since this political nomenclature doesn't overlay on the Church very well--the Church is, by nature, global in scope and reach; she has a global dimension and mission. But it does seem that Pope Francis has more sympathies with the mindset of those in the globalist camp. 

In the aforementioned blog post, I wrote:

"What did this religious mean, "the time for preaching and teaching is over?" My first reaction when my friend mentioned it was YES. But then, why? 

Haven't the Word on Fire videos brought many spiritually curious people to intellectual assent of the faith? Haven't we been learning to make "intentional disciples" in parishes and through workshops and conferences and retreats? Haven't we been DOING something to address the "failure of catechesis"by LEARNING more about what the Church professes, TEACHING more about the truths of the Faith, EVANGELIZING by having discussions on social media with non-believers? Haven't we been preaching the good news to the poor, the imprisoned, as a kind of spiritual product to be considered to improve one's life, gain eternal life, attain peace?

I'm sorry to be so negative, but I'm in a bit of a stripped down state of being right now. The words my friend shared by the erudite religious--the time of preaching and teaching is over--point to a harsh and unsettling reality we are faced with as followers of Christ in war.

In fighting off demons of despair shooting arrows in my back, another wise friend also sent me a scripture that made me exclaim, once again, "Wow":

"And the places that have been desolate for ages shall be built in thee: thou shalt raise up the foundations of generation and generation: and thou shalt be called the repairer of the fences, turning the paths into rest" (Is 58:12).

But we are not in this state yet either, I suspect. We are in an in between. The well-produced teaching and catechetical materials, the preaching to a pagan culture--I have lived through these endeavors and been a part of them myself. I don't know how effective they are, or if they are making wrong assumptions about things. I do have a friend who makes rosaries and plants them for people with instructions on how to pray it; he does is clandestinely. Someone he knew even picked one up and considered it a sign to come back to the faith. So you never know. 

But we are not saving masses here, we are pulling stray bodies on the ark who, I'm sure, are ultimately grateful to be there. Like writing a book these days, it is, I'm afraid, ultimately futile. Not to those who have been saved, who would consider it anything but. And there is it's place--of course, we need to preach and teach when called for, one on one. But we are not going to convert the world by well-produced series on the history of Catholicism, or using any of the tools of the modern age. Those going to the front lines are getting mowed down by the culture because they are ultimately going alone with no shepherds to have their back, no critical mass to support them long term. The Steubenville degree and Thomistic defenses of Natural Law in a disordered society, I'm afraid, may not hold their weight against the breaches." 

The left-right paradigm is falling away. Republicans and Democrats are two sides of the same corrupt coin. Liberal Catholicism is a sterile ecclesialastical vasectomy of course, but even Neocons are becoming increasingly irrelevant post JP2. Traditional Catholics may have more in common with Orthodox Jews and fired up Muslim parents in the culture war than with lukewarm CINO's. 

The 18th century American "experiment" worked because people believed in the ideals and fought for them. But it wasn't a guarantee, as we are seeing that an immoral society divorced from virtue has no claim to its fruit. Alexis de Tocqueville, the French political thinker and historian, traveled to America in 1831 on behalf of the French government to examine the penal system and report back on what he learned. Tocqueville marveled at the flourishing American democracy at that time, recognizing that the uniqueness of such a system depended on a liberty "which cannot be established without morality, nor without faith." 

I used to think globalism was a made-up thing, until the World Economic Forum basically laid it all out in the open: You will own nothing and be happy. In other words, the Great Reset is not some Orwellian fiction: IT'S RIGHT THERE (HERE). Read them. If these ideals seem at odd with the freedom of the Christian and fill you with dread, you may not be a globalist in your heart of hearts. And if you oppose the ideals of globalism or if you think to yourself "this doesn't seem right," prepare to be humiliated, the way LGBT activists will humiliate those who oppose their ideology, the way Communist governments seek to humiliate those who oppose it. Prepare to be called a "far-right nationalist" or something similar. The incisive words of Theodore Dalrymple should then sear into your subconscious to draw on when the gaslighting gets especially bad and you start to second-guess yourself:

"Political correctness is communist propaganda writ small. In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, nor to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is to co-operate with evil, and in some small way to become evil oneself. One’s standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to."

 Just as those who truly believe in the tenants of the Faith of our fathers, Tradition, the depositum fidei, and live by it will be the future rebuilding of the Church from the ashes, as prophesied by Cardinal Ratzinger. It betrays the contempt those within the Church who are lukewarm or who do not believe as to why they hate traditionalists. The axis has shifted...as it has throughout history, and I'm not sure how long this center can hold both in the nation and in the Church herself before the Antichrist comes.