The Great Apostasy and Irrelevancy of The Conciliar Church.

Sunday, July 31, 2011

The Great Apostasy and Irrelevancy of The Conciliar Church.

The now-Protestant [Tim] Pawlenty explains that, as a kid, he “attended Mass nearly every Sunday,” and not only out of familial obligation. “I took my faith seriously. I went through my first Communion, catechism, and confirmation.” After Pawlenty’s mother died of ovarian cancer when he was 16, he might have held that against the Almighty. Instead, he writes that “my faith only deepened, and my belief in the existence of a loving God carried on into college and law school.” So what happened? Pawlenty fell in love with a Protestant (though not anti-Catholic) girl named Mary Anderson. While they were courting, “Mary attended church with me, and I attended church with her and as I fell in love with Mary, I also found myself increasingly drawn to her church, Wooddale Church.”

(Tim's Pawlenty Ex-Catholic Piety, Crisis Magazine.)

What happened to Tim Pawlenty, the former governor of Minnesota and current presidential Republican candidate, is all-too-common. Millions of Catholics have walked away from any meaningful observance of the rites and obligations of the Roman Catholic faith. The tragedy of the often-cited numbers of Catholic decline that has been ongoing for at least fifty years, e.g., collapsing Mass attendance, dwindling vocations, diminishing sacramental weddings, etc., is essentially a story about people and the decisions collectively they have made to create a stampede away from the Catholic Church. It is happening among white Catholics, black Catholics and Hispanic Catholics. Tim Pawlenty’s apostasy is newsworthy only because he is a former Governor and presidential candidate; if Pawlenty were an anonymous practicing lawyer in St. Could, Minnesota, he would just be one of many who drifted away -- with seemingly no consequences -- from the Catholic Church. For Pawlenty, and the millions like him, the Catholic Church has ceased to be relevant. Those decisions have also weakened the moral fabric of our nation -- just look around, the decline of Church life and moral life have moved in perfect parallel.

Is Holy Mother Church relevant? The answer to this question depends on who you ask. While admittedly conjecture on my part, many, if not most, diocesan priests would say that people like Pawlenty will not go to hell over a knowledgable decision to leave the Catholic Church and attend a non-Catholic “church.” We are, or so it seems to them, bigger than that now; we are more broad-minded than that, we have moved beyond the sectarian debates of so long ago and are one big happy Christian family making our way up the great and diverse mountain of salvation. “Denominational” titles are not what is important -- rather, the belief in one’s heart, the seriousness of one’s convictions, and the following of conscience are paramount. If that sounds like crypto-protestantism, you are paying close attention indeed.

For many years, I was greatly unnerved by stories like Pawlenty’s. I was troubled by the fact that no one seemed to care that people -- good, upright people --were leaving the Church in droves because it no longer met their needs. In a conversation with a mature and more experienced traditional Catholic than myself, he said to me in words about modern apostates that still ring in my head, “can you really blame them, what were they leaving.” His comment crystallized the idea that the Catholic faith as experienced by the overwhelming majority of Catholics in the United States (and elsewhere I suppose) has become so enervated, so wishy-washy, and so feminized that it is no wonder that baptized Catholics are leaving it in droves. In a very real sense, these apostates were not leaving the Catholic faith because they never really had it. As a lawyer, I still process information in a formal sense, but my friend reminded me that faith is not experienced in a formal sense, it is a living, breathing thing. And if it changes, if that faith becomes flabby and fit for only milquetoasts or the indolent, we should not be surprised that men of good will leave it for something seemingly less so. To be clear, my friend was not defending mass apostasy, he simply reminded me of the “facts on the ground” and provided me with the cause, which, until that point, I still did not connect.

But the tragedy exists nonetheless. Even though it is not of our making per se, and even though we oppose those churchmen who continue to create the conditions by which the apostasy grows, it is something that grieves us that well-meaning people leave the bosom of Holy Mother Church for pastures that are, in reality, not greener but filled with weeds of heresy. Something has to be done to stop it.

I submit that the essential reason for the Church's fall is one of an almost institutional and doctrinal Schizophrenia: she no longer seems to know who she really is. And because she does not know who she is, she does not know why she is here. In less opaque terms, the Church effectively denies who she is, and, by doing so, shirks her duty and mission. There are two simple questions -- ones that could be answered for the entirety of the Church's history (excepting the past fifty years) -- that cannot (or more accurately, will not) be answered today with any sense of clarity: The First Question: Is the apostolic society [i.e., church] founded by Jesus Christ and the Catholic Church one and the same? The Second Question: Does one need to be Catholic in order to be saved?

In ignoring and obfuscating the answers to these questions, the Church denies to the world who she is and what her utterly unique mission is. It creates millions of Tim Pawelentys. In part, this clouding of the Church's mission and identity is driven by the desire to please men -- to please especially those men in disagreement with the Church. By doing so, these individuals -- some of them her very trusted shepherds -- would rather please those souls in error than correct them through some sense of false charity. Many of her pastors, responsible for this dereliction, will undoubtedly rue it.

These questions posed above could be treated in formats much longer than provided here. Suffice it to say (and perhaps the subject of another article), the questions posed should be non-controversial because they have been answered affirmatively for two thousand years. The first question can be answered by the uniform answer of the Church’s Tradition. The second question too can likewise be answered (albeit with some debate over the scope of an exception to the general rule). These two rules of faith are central to the identity of what it means to be Catholic, and, more importantly for purposes of this article, why being Catholic matters.

By failing to preach the truth that the Catholic Church is the one, true Church of our Lord -- and preach it regularly -- her pastors deny a central truth of the faith: the visibility of the True Church. From the time of the Reformation (and the Pagans and Heathens before that), Protestants have either denied the visibility of the Church, or so explained it as to rob it of most of its meaning. According the (Old) Catholic Encyclopedia, it means:

In asserting that the Church of Christ is visible, we signify, first, that as a society it will at all times be conspicuous and public, and second, that it will ever be recognizable among other bodies as the Church of Christ. These two aspects of visibility are termed respectively "material" and "formal" visibility by Catholic theologians. The material visibility of the Church involves no more than that it must ever be a public, not a private profession; a society manifest to the world, not a body whose members are bound by some secret tie. Formal visibility is more than this. It implies that in all ages the true Church of Christ will be easily recognizable for that which it is, viz. as the Divine society of the Son of God, the means of salvation offered by God to men; that it possesses certain attributes which so evidently postulate a Divine origin that all who see it must know it comes from God.

Articulating this doctrine clearly (for sure, it need be articulated clearly today) is not a form of triumphalism; our "team" does not win. Nor is denying "church-hood" to other Christian communities inimical to ecumenism. Real and genuine ecumenism must start and end with the Truth. Whitewashing it does no party any favors. The truth of the exclusive Catholic claim of being the True Church is wholly tied up in the similarly exclusive claim that Jesus Christ makes to humanity. He alone is the way, and the truth, and the life. In like fashion, His society -- what we call the Church -- is similarly singular. Our proclaiming His Church to be "one" and "true" is as triumphalist as our proclaiming Him to be the only name by which man can be saved.

When the Catholic Church does not proclaim this truth about herself in clear and forceful terms, her flock begins to disintegrate. One reason for this disintegration is demonstrated by examining what has happened to Protestant communities in the last fifty years. The mainline and more liberal-minded churches have been in free-fall in terms of adherents. The more conservative minded evangelical churches (at least in terms of the centrality of their truth claims) have flourished (unfortunately, with many ex-Catholics like Tim Pawlenty in their midst). When the Catholic Church begins to act like a mainline liberal-minded church (i.e., pretend to be something that she cannot possibly be) -- she begins to die.

The one advantage the the Catholic Church has over evangelicals is that the latter only much but not all of the truth; whereas the former has all of it. In a contest therefore, the former will prevail if only her pastors will be honest about who she is. Indeed, our Lord prophesied as much in promises that the "the gates of hell shall not prevail against [his Church.]" (Gospel According to Saint Matthew 16:18) All she has to do in order to prevail is be true to herself and her founder. Then, once again, will men treat the Church as the very center of their lives, and not merely an annoyance, or, worse still, as irrelevant.

But the apostasy has dire consequences for everyone. For the remaining faithful, the body of Christ has been wounded by desertion. Much like a family member who deserts his family, the apostate’s decision leave a Church that is more weakened that it otherwise would have been.
For the apostate, we must ask what it means for him. It is a truism worth repeating that there is no controversy that if any man is saved, he is saved through the Catholic Church.

The question of formal membership as a requirement for salvation has been discussed over the centuries by learned churchmen. It was debated in a public way most recently with respect to the case of Father Feeney who appeared to go so far as to say that there can be no salvation without water baptism. On the opposite side of the spectrum, which I submit is the position maintained by many of the Church’s current leadership, churchman have all but denied that membership in the Catholic Church is relevant at all to the question of salvation. Indeed, there is no more controversial statement for the modernist Catholic than Extra Ecclesiam Nulla Salus: Outside the Church there is no salvation. But if we accept the first premise that the Church of Jesus Christ and the Catholic Church are one and the same, this statement should be markedly less controversial. Nonetheless, no matter the context we say it, it falls excruciatingly hard on modernist Catholic ears. Whatever we can say about most of her pastors for the past fifty years, we can say without controversy that they generally detest this teaching as an anachronism of a bygone era. Indeed, they recoil at its very mention.

Considering that it has not been revealed definitively to the Church how narrow or broad the exception is to the formal membership requirement of Extra Ecclesiam Nulla Salus, we should adopt, in an abundant sense of charity, the most cautious approach and comport ourselves as if it is quite narrow. No matter who ultimately conceives of this doctrine in closer proximity to its divine reality, we would all be best served if we collectively conceived of it more narrowly than it really is. Indeed, charity is best served by erring on being cautious with heaven, not the other way around. In my humble opinion, Father Feeney's error was to construct that narrowness so as to eliminate the notion of exception altogether. Nonetheless, we should assume that the vast majority who do not become Catholics (or leave Church) are lost (even if we are ultimately wrong). Internalizing that notion will fire our missionary zeal to bring all men home to the True Church.

By analogy, if I "suspected" that you may be poisoned and die if you digested certain medicine, it would be appropriate for me, in an abundance of caution because of charity, to advise you of my concern. Perhaps you would become angry and call me foolish. But I would have done the right thing by you -- you would have been warned and taken that next step with eyes more open. Conversely, the "liberal" and "tolerant" friend who figures, "it's probably not poison" or "it's none of my business," and lets you ingest it does you a great disservice. He really shows that he is "indifferent" to you.

If matters of heaven and hell are much more important than questions of our temporal demise, how much more should we respond to this question of membership in the True Church? Presuming in any other fashion is uncharitable. And if we suffer the scorn of some for our warnings that they must get on the ark of salvation or perish, we must be ready to accept it. "Remember my word that I said to you: The servant is not greater than his master. If they have persecuted me, they will also persecute you: if they have kept my word, they will keep yours also." (Gospel According to Saint John 15:20)

There is one obvious observation worth making about the Conciliar Church; her pastors effectively have defined the exception aspect of this dogma in very broad terms -- in terms so broad that the exception is now wider than the rule. In practical terms, this type of orientation has literally sucked the missionary marrow from the bones of the Church. Why go through the hassle of seeking conversions if God will simply save them where they are if they lived so-called righteous lives? Why bother upsetting our neighbor with the Truth of the Gospel and Jesus' Church if God will save all men? Why continue conceiving of the Church in such neolithic teams as the "True Church" or "Holy Mother Church," if God is pleased by all men of good will no matter where they worship (or don't)? These novel and alien theological innovations have been disasters for both the Church and those many lost souls seduced therefrom.

The intentional softening of this doctrine has had paradoxically much greater impact on Catholics than non-Catholics. When coupled with the deafening silence as to singularity of the Church's mission, the often rampant indifferentism of some leaders in the Church (or even, perhaps more, of still more leader's mild indifferentism) has convinced many Catholics that even the Church does not teach that there are any consequences for leaving. It has also convinced many that joining her is simply not necessary (even according to Holy Mother Church's dictates).

How much different would Tim Pawlenty’s analysis have been in considering leaving the Catholic Church if his priest told him bluntly, “Tim, what you are contemplating is insane -- you are thinking of leaving the true Church that our Lord founded for a facile fabrication. If you were to follow through on this decision, you would be stamping your passport to hell.” Who knows, but what Pawlenty would have done is really irrelevant, what is important is that he deserved to know what he was leaving and the divine consequences for doing so. True charity requires this honesty for all Catholics.

As I ponder the so-called “new evangelization,” I wonder if the policy wonks in the bowels of a conference room maintained by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops knew how simple this proposition really is. Splashy fliers and “Come Home” initiatives will never move anyone to commit their life to Jesus Christ and his True Church. No one makes a meaningful sacrifice for an ad campaign -- they only do it because they believe that the sacrifice is worth making. Give me one bishop, just one, who preached rigorously that the Catholic Church is God’s only true Church and the only means to salvation, and two things would happen: he would be utterly hated by the “world,” but his flock would grow in terms both of love and charity and ultimately numbers. We do not need a “new evangelization” to save the Tim Pawlentys of the world, we need the “old” one; we need the evangelization of Saint Paul -- fearless in its proclamation and truthful in its content.

Saint Paul, pray for us.