The Countermarch: Taking Back the Culture

In the 800 block of North Jefferson Street in Huntington, Indiana, stands one of the most impressive homes I have ever seen. At roughly 17,000 square feet, the David Alonzo and Elizabeth Purviance House is a two-and-a-half story Romanesque Revival/Châteauesque style brick-and-stone building. With its two towers—one rounded, and one octagonal—and a slate roof, leaded and stained-glass windows, and multiple chimneys, the Purviance House feels like a castle snatched up out of a European countryside and set down in this small city 20 miles southwest of Fort Wayne. Built in 1892, when the population of Huntington was somewhat less than half of the 17,000 souls that it is today, the Purviance House is one of the most impressive structures in the city of Huntington—indeed, in all of Indiana—but it is by no means an anomaly. Right next door is the Taylor-Zent House, another Romanesque Revival building that is a few years younger but no less impressive; unlike today’s suburban McMansions, both houses were built not just for a lifetime but for the ages.

The Purviance House and the Taylor-Zent House are just two of the 701 contributing properties in Huntington’s North Jefferson Street National Historic District, which includes a remarkable variety of buildings in a dozen or so architectural styles, including both of Huntington's Catholic churches—Saints Peter and Paul, originally a German parish established in 1844, and Saint Mary’s, a parish willed into existence by an Irish farmer in the 1890’s when he got tired of worshiping with the Germans. The two parishes—both still active and independent of each other today—are literally a block apart; their front doors face each other across the residential block in between. Like the Purviance House and the Taylor-Zent House and the many Georgian and Italianate and Victorian and Stick Style and Queen Anne and Craftsmen homes in the North Jefferson Street Historic District, Saint Mary’s and Saints Peter and Paul were built to last by people for whom the very idea of disposable houses and churches and courthouses and libraries was quite literally unthinkable.

When I say “quite literally unthinkable,” I don't mean it the way most people would use that phrase today—in other words, that the folks back then thought about the idea of disposable buildings and rejected it as abhorrent; I mean that the idea could never even have entered their minds, because the culture in which they were formed valued the future as an extension of the past, what Chesterton meant when he called tradition “the democracy of the dead.” In such a culture, people do not disrespect their ancestors by suggesting that all their efforts have led to a world in which nothing needs to be built to last because something better is always coming.

The builders of the houses in the North Jefferson Street Historic District were economical in their efforts, saving the best wood and brick and stone for those areas of their buildings where people might see them, and using wood with less interesting grain and uneven brick and mottled stone in areas where only homeowners and sacristans and librarians and clerks were likely to stumble on them. They weren’t spendthrifts, but they also weren’t cheap, because to be economical is something very different from being cheap. The men of this era built these structures to last because these houses and churches and public buildings were—and still are—the concrete manifestation of the things most valued by the Germans and Irish and English and Miami Indians who built the Lime City from the ground up: hearth and home; family and faith; community and continuity.

Most Americans continued to value those things up through the first half of the 20th century. But in the postwar economic boom—well before the social upheaval of the mid to late 1960’s and the economic crises of the 1970’s and early 1980’s—the increasing affluence of the working class and the expansion of the middle class had a strange effect: Rather than strengthening the bonds between generations, this newfound wealth encouraged mobility. People were “going places,” and if they themselves could not, they wanted to make sure that their children could and did. In Huntington, Indiana, and thousands of other small towns and cities across the United States, the children of farmers and factory workers, department store owners and bank clerks, restaurateurs and tavern owners went off to college, seldom to return. And the newer homes built in the wake of their departure reflected this reality: They were smaller and architecturally less interesting—even though those who built them were generally more affluent than their ancestors were—and many of these houses were intentionally built to last not much longer than a 30-year mortgage.

The David Alonzo and Elizabeth Purviance House and the Taylor-Zent House could reasonably be described as mansions at the time that they were built. But most of the other homes built in the North Jefferson Street Historic District from 1860 to 1930 would not have been so described at the time, though many people call them mansions today. Rather, these were single-family dwellings, but a “single family” back then did not mean simply a father and a mother and 1.7 children. The “nuclear family” was a product of postwar affluence, a reflection of cultural changes that had already occurred, and an indication of changes that were still to come. Many of us think fondly of the era of Leave It to Beaver and Father Knows Best without realizing that these seemingly idyllic nuclear households were themselves a symptom of changes in the culture that would eventually lead to unprecedentedly high levels of contraception, abortion, and divorce, and historically low levels of marriage and even lower birthrates among native-born Americans—Catholics included.

When the houses in the North Jefferson Street Historic District were being built, the family stretched across generations and down through many branches. Brothers built houses next to each other, and across the street from their parents. Children often moved freely from house to house, counting their cousins not only as kin and friends but as erstwhile roommates. Family dinners were not Mom and Dad and Johnny and Susie in front of a TV, but Grandma and Grandpa and Mother and Father and Aunt and Uncle and cousins, spilling out of the formal dining room into the parlor and, in warm weather, onto the porch. As they do now, Thanksgiving and Christmas came only once a year back then, but the central experience of those celebrations—the reason we regard them as the quintessential family holidays—happened every Sunday, and for quite a few families even more often than that. Many Americans today will reach middle age before having as many dinners with what we now call “extended family” as the Purviances or any of their neighbors likely had in just a year or two.

About a mile northwest of the Purviance house, as the crow flies, another impressive structure—a home of a different kind—rises above the Lime City. Saint Felix Friary was erected in 1928 by the Order of Friars Minor Capuchin. A year before the stock-market crash plunged the country into the Great Depression, the Capuchins were building for the ages, too. Somewhat larger than 62,000 square feet, Saint Felix Friary could hold almost four Purviance Houses, and, as originally constructed, the friary had cells to house over 120 friars. The Capuchins intended Saint Felix Friary for the ages not simply in its architectural details but in its mission as well: The friary was designated as a novitiate, a center for the training of young men to enter the Franciscan brotherhood and the priesthood. Saint Felix Friary was never meant to be a place to retreat from the world, to withdraw from struggles of life, to keep oneself pure from the moral turpitude of the Roaring 20’s. It was, rather, to be a training ground to prepare to engage the world, to establish a firm spiritual foundation for going forth in response to Christ’s Great Commission: to baptize all nations in the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.

And for 50 years, Saint Felix Friary did just that. Fr. Benedict Groeschel is the best known of the men who entered the Franciscan life at Saint Felix Friary, but he is only one of hundreds to do so.

And 50 years later, it all came to an end. There are many reasons for the collapse of vocations and the crises within the various religious orders in the second half of the 20th century, but I’m not going to go into them here. Suffice it to say that I am sure we can all agree that many things went horribly wrong, and another 50 years down the line, the Church and society as a whole are still suffering the consequences. By 1978, the Capuchins could find no one who was interested in becoming a novice, and the older friars were dying off or leaving the religious life, and in 1980 the order sold Saint Felix Friary to the Church of the Brethren.

Shortly thereafter, the owners of the David Alonzo and Elizabeth Purviance House, who had earlier divided this grand mansion up into nine apartments, boarded up the windows and locked the doors. Up and down North Jefferson Street, many glorious old homes had fallen into disrepair, as the families who had given them life left town or simply died away.

Small towns and big cities; religious orders and secular organizations: All have life cycles similar to those of the men and women who bring them into existence. Like children, they experience periods of rapid growth; if all goes well, they have many years of stable community life; and then time catches up with them, and they go through periods of decay. And because these cycles of life remind us of the lives of men and women, we all too often see a town or a city or a religious order in a period of decay, and become convinced that nothing can be done; the end, it seems clear to us, is nigh. When we say that an elderly man has entered his second childhood, we don’t mean that his youthful vigor has returned, and his best days once again lie ahead. We know that he will return to the dust from which the Creator fashioned the first man.

And so we tend to get pessimistic when we drive down Main Street and see empty storefronts, or we hear of factories closing, or of a religious order collapsing, and a jewel like Saint Felix Friary passing out of the hands of the Church. We may see a certain nobility in those who cling to the past, but all too often we regard them as dreamers at best, and sometimes as fools. “Change is inevitable,” we say; “You can't stop the march of progress.” “Time moves on.”

And yet, down deep inside, our very nature rebels against the idea that this is really progress, especially when the changes we see in the physical world are reflected in the moral and spiritual and religious worlds. We know that something is wrong when men and women no longer get married; when those who do get married no longer have children; when those who do have children no longer baptize them; when those who do baptize them never bring them back to church. We see the sustained assault of the secular and political world on believers and the Church; we may even begin to wonder, Christ’s promise to Saint Peter notwithstanding, whether the gates of Hell might in fact someday prevail against it.

We look around us at a world gone mad, in which an increasing number of people seemingly believe that the sky is green and the grass is blue and a man can marry a man and a girl can have two mothers and a boy can grow up to be a woman if only he sets his mind to it. Even if we aren’t familiar with the term, we recognize that we live in the aftermath of the Long March Through the Institutions, a 50-year campaign in which the political left successfully captured and subverted all of the primary institutions of culture, including many of the human institutions surrounding the Catholic Church. Our whole being urges us to fight back, but we cannot do so effectively, because our own minds have been subverted in such a manner that the only way we can think of to try to take back the institutions of culture is through politics. And yet the history of the modern world, from the time of the French Revolution on, has shown that politics is always the domain of the left, of the forces of revolution. That is why the chief objective of the Long March Through the Institutions was to draw the institutions of culture into the political arena. Politicize the family, the schools, the churches, and the forces of revolution win every time. When we try to fight back politically, we only strengthen the forces of the left, because we are fighting on their battleground. Roe v. Wade and Obergefell v. Hodges were far closer to the end of the battles over abortion and homosexual marriage than they were to the beginning; the cultural seeds had been sown for both many decades before. As we used to say at Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture during my years as executive editor, “There are no political solutions to cultural problems.”

And so we see a world that’s gone to hell in a handbasket, yet we still want to believe that there is something that we can do. So perhaps we start planning for the long term. We talk about building an ark—call it the S.S. Benedict Option—that can carry cultural memory forward until a day, many decades or perhaps even centuries from now—in any case, long after all of us in this room will be dead—when the world might return to something closer to normal, and the cultural riches of the Christian Faith might once again be appreciated. In the meantime, that ark will protect us and our families from the deluge around us. We may not be going out and baptizing all nations, but at least we can save our souls and the souls of our children. We tell ourselves that this is exactly what Saint Benedict, the father of Western monasticism, was doing in the wake of the collapse of the Western Roman Empire.

But was it? Looking backward, it may seem like it was, because we know that the monasteries of Western Europe became cultural repositories that saved, among other things, many classical manuscripts that might otherwise have been lost. They became centers of the Christian Faith for the communities that surrounded them. They created agricultural techniques that helped Europe become a true, settled, stable civilization. In the late Middle Ages, they spawned the first hospitals and universities. Monasteries were, in short, remarkable agents of tradition and of civilization.

But it is a logical fallacy to assume that, because all of these things happened as a result of the monasteries, Saint Benedict must have intended each of them. There’s no reason to believe that he did. Rather, like all saints, he had one overriding purpose in everything that he did. As St. Francis de Sales would put it a thousand years later, “Serve and love God well. This should be our only intention.”

To serve God well, we must serve our fellow man. To love God well, we must love our fellow man. Even cloistered monasteries are places of service and love, through the prayers and liturgies that they offer on our behalf. Down through the centuries, much of the life of the average monk has consisted of work on behalf of his fellow man—not the men of some far-flung future, the object of a “Benedict Option,” but the men of his day and age.

Very few of us are called to the religious life, to be monks or nuns. But every one of us is called to the same process of conversion and renewal that monks and nuns exemplify. Through the grace of God, we must discern His will and remake our own lives in the image of Christ. And as we renew our lives, we not only can but must renew the world around us.

Faith leads to charity, to love of God and neighbor; and both faith and charity are animated by hope. No matter how bad things may seem at any point in time, we know that the victory is already won. Christ conquered death, and in doing so, He made the restoration of the world possible. The work of that restoration lies in our hands.

The subversion of the culture through the Long March Through the Institutions has filled too many of us with despair, which is the opposite of hope. If we indulge it rather than resist it, despair is also one of the greatest of sins. But when we look at all that there is to do, we feel small and powerless, and with good reason. How can we renew the culture, when the culture is so far gone?

The first step in doing anything is recognizing that we cannot do everything. Pregnancy care centers throughout the United States have saved many babies from abortion since 1973, but if all of those who have put their efforts into those organizations had convinced themselves that there was no sense in saving one baby unless they could save them all, no babies would have been saved. Every baby saved is a mother saved as well, and perhaps a father. And every baby and every mother and every father saved opens up new possibilities that we cannot see at the time, and that we ourselves may never see, but which set the world on a new path and open it up to new infusions of grace. At the national level, in the world of politics, [in 2017] the pro-life movement continues to lose, pro-life Supreme Court nominations notwithstanding; but at the local level, outside of the realm of politics, lives are saved, lives are changed, and the culture is renewed.

In 2000, after sitting empty for 20 years, the David Alonzo and Elizabeth Purviance House was condemned, and came within weeks of demolition. A businessman from North Manchester, Indiana, stepped in, purchased the property, and began its restoration. Fifteen years later, after restoring most of the exterior, he sold it to someone else, who has taken on the task of restoring the interior. The possibility that it may be restored to its former glory is one of many little things that has brought new life to the North Jefferson Street Historic District. Other houses are being restored; new families are moving in; a city that 35 years ago many said would never recover has new reason for hope. A new generation of young people is finding value in older buildings, and in small-town life, and in the hearth and home, family and faith, community and continuity that they represent. The politicians in Washington, D.C., don’t spend any time thinking about Huntington, Indiana, but for the residents of Huntington, that’s not a bad thing.

In 2010, a decade after the Purviance House was pulled back from the brink of oblivion, the Church of the Brethren in Huntington could no longer afford the upkeep on the former Saint Felix Friary, and so they were looking to sell. A Catholic businessman and investor from Fort Wayne came out to take a look. Over the years, the Church of the Brethren had combined a number of the monastic cells of the friary to make larger rooms; but there was one cell that had never been touched. The door had been padlocked, and the interior of the cell was just as its former occupant had left it when he departed Huntington in 1956.

The friar whose brown robe is still draped across the small bed in his humble cell was the Venerable [now Blessed] Fr. Solanus Casey, the porter of Saint Bonaventure Monastery in Detroit, friend of the poor, and worker of wonders both during his life on this earth and after it. Father Solanus, who will be beatified in Detroit later this year [2017], lived at Saint Felix Friary for ten years, from 1946 through 1956. During Father Solanus’s final year at Saint Felix, a young man named Ron Rieder entered the friary. Fifty-five years later, Fr. Ron Rieder, then the pastor of Saints Peter and Paul Church in Huntington, would introduce John Tippmann, the Catholic businessman from Fort Wayne, to the life of Father Solanus.

Captivated by the story of the humble friar and wonderworker, Mr. Tippmann vowed to purchase Saint Felix Friary with the intention of restoring it and returning it to the Catholic Church. Meanwhile, in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, Bishop Kevin Rhoades had erected the Franciscan Brothers Minor, a private association of the faithful dedicated to living the Franciscan life according to Saint Francis’s Rule of 1223. When Bishop Rhoades was transferred to the Diocese of Fort Wayne-South Bend in 2010, he brought the Franciscan Brothers Minor with him. You can probably see where this is going . . .

Today, Saint Felix Friary has been lovingly restored. It functions as a Catholic center and retreat house, and it is one of five friaries in the Diocese of Fort Wayne and South Bend of the Franciscan Brothers Minor, who have grown from eight men in November 2009 to more than 50 brothers today.

When the Capuchins built Saint Felix Friary in 1928, they could not know where their efforts would lead. They weren’t creating a “Benedict Option” community; they were simply serving and loving God and their fellow man. But they set into motion a chain of events that bears spiritual fruit to this day. All of the Saint Felix Capuchins from 1928 have gone on to their eternal reward, but their actions back then continue to redeem the culture right now.

But wait—there’s more. I mentioned that Fr. Benedict Groeschel entered the Franciscan novitiate at Saint Felix Friary. It was there, in 1950, at the age of 17, that he first met Fr. Solanus Casey, and that encounter would mark him forever. Throughout Fr. Benedict Groeschel’s life, Father Solanus would remain a touchstone for his understanding of what it meant to be a Franciscan. And that example would lead, in 1987, to Father Groeschel’s founding of the Franciscan Friars of the Renewal, along with seven other Capuchin priest friars, including, of course, Fr. [now Bishop] Bob Lombardo, who addressed this group last month. While I don’t need to tell you the great fruit that has resulted from Father Bob’s work in founding the Franciscans of the Eucharist of Chicago, I will reveal one personal grace: I am certain that without the powerful intercession of the sisters at the Mission of Our Lady of the Angels, I would not be moving to Huntington this weekend to start my new position at Our Sunday Visitor on Monday. In July, my family and I will move into our new home just a few doors up the street from the David Alonzo and Elizabeth Purviance House, and within easy walking distance of Saint Felix Friary, where I expect to go frequently to pay my respects to the humble friar whom my grandmother had met, and whose beatification and eventual canonization she prayed for every day of her life, never realizing the role that Father Solanus would one day play in mine.

There are no political solutions to cultural problems; but there are no cultural solutions to cultural problems, either. Cultural problems require a religious solution: Walking in the way of faith; asking God for forgiveness and begging Him for His grace; doing the right thing without thought for tomorrow or despair for today, because, while we may never know in this life the chain of events that the most humble of our actions may set into motion, God knows. We don’t have to fix everything; we cannot fix everything. All we can do—all we are called to do—is to love God, and to love our neighbor, wherever that may take us.

I will close with four short quotations, the first three from Fr. Solanus Casey, and the last from St. Josemaría Escrivá, because I think that, taken together, they sum up perfectly the principles that should guide us as we begin the Countermarch Through the Institutions, the restoration of culture by enshrining Christ first in our hearts:

From Father Solanus:

We are continually immersed in God's merciful grace like the air that permeates us.

We must be faithful to the present moment or we will frustrate the plan of God for our lives.

Do not pray for easy lives; pray to be stronger people. Do not pray for tasks equal to your powers; pray for powers equal to your tasks.

And from St. Josemaría Escrivá:

The task for a Christian is to drown evil in an abundance of good. It is not a question of negative campaigns, or of being anti anything. On the contrary, we should live positively, full of optimism, with youthfulness, joy and peace. We should be understanding with everybody, with the followers of Christ, and with those who abandon him, or do not know him at all. But understanding does not mean drawing back, or remaining indifferent, but being active.

This speech was delivered in Chicago on June 9, 2017, to the Catholic Citizens of Illinois. It is published here for the first time.

A Blessed Model of Humility

Humility is not much in vogue these days, even among Christians. The modern world used to scoff at humility as an outdated remnant of a “slave morality” (that is, Christianity); and it’s no coincidence that humility is usually associated in our imaginations with silence, or at least with restraint in speech. A man may on occasion be too proud to speak to someone he knows, but the truly proud man has little trouble rising to his own defense — whether he is in the right or in the wrong.

But our discomfort with humility today is not simply a result of a decline in Christian belief, or a sense that silence connotes weakness rather than strength. The spirit of the age has made the very idea that humility is a virtue seem obsolete. Everything is measured in terms of size and scale, from television audiences to Facebook “friends.” In comparison with disaster-relief operations measured in scores of millions of dollars, the Parable of the Good Samaritan feels pretty penny ante. Bigger, we now know, is always better: Get big, or get out.

And yet Christ, after humbling Himself to accept death upon the Cross, could have chosen to appear simultaneously to every man, woman, and child then alive to let them know of the gift of salvation that He had won for them and for us. Instead, He sent the 11 disciples who had humbled themselves enough to remain true to Him to preach the Gospel — in person — to all nations and to accept, with humility, their own deaths in imitation of His. Maybe, just maybe, there is a lesson there.

On November 18, 2017, my wife and I had the privilege of attending the beatification of Fr. Solanus Casey, O.F.M., Cap., along with 60,000 of our closest friends. The size and scope of the beatification Mass, held at Ford Field in Detroit, was impressive and, on the surface, quite the opposite of humble. Yet the humility that characterized the life of Father Solanus suffused the proceedings, providing a stark contrast to the sports events, concerts, and political rallies normally held in that venue.

While some were simply attracted to a once in a lifetime event, many of the 60,000 people who descended on Ford Field that day were there because Father Solanus, who died 60 years before, had touched their lives or the lives of people they loved. A Capuchin, Father Solanus was a man under obedience who did as his superiors ordered. A simplex priest, he could say Mass but was forbidden from delivering doctrinal sermons or hearing confessions. A native of Wisconsin, he spent his years as a Capuchin in New York City, Detroit, and Huntington, Indiana, far from his family. Yet, as Father Solanus once said, “What does it matter where we go? Wherever we go, won’t we be serving God there?”

Father Solanus did not worry about reaching as many people as he possibly could; he worried simply about the person who stood before him at the door of Saint Bonaventure Monastery in Detroit or Saint Felix Friary in Huntington. Some days, he received a steady stream of visitors or phone calls from dawn to dusk. He gave advice when asked, but he spent much of his time simply listening. He urged those who sought him out to trust humbly in God, in Christ, in the Blessed Virgin. Thousands claimed to have been healed through his intercession while he was alive, but he never took credit for any healing, and he urged those who sought his intercession to “thank God ahead of time” not just for a hoped-for cure but for any sufferings they might endure. When we humble ourselves in gratitude to God, graces greater than any miraculous healing may flow from our sufferings.

“For every one who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted” (Luke 14:11). Facebook and Twitter will one day fade away, and Google Analytics will crumble into virtual dust, and any house built on the sand of pride and popularity will fall; but the word of the Lord will remain true. Fr. Solanus Casey humbled himself, and because he did so he has now been raised to the ranks of the blessed.

Father Solanus did not set out to change hundreds of thousands of lives but to change one life at a time, starting with his own: “If we strive and use the means God has given us, we too can ascend to great sanctity and to astonishing familiarity with God, even here as pilgrims to the Beatific Vision.” Inspired by the life of Father Solanus, let us thank God ahead of time for the virtue of humility.

A version of this article first appeared in Catholic Answers Magazine on December 26, 2017.

An Epiphany

In most years, Epiphany marks the real beginning of winter here in northern Illinois. November and December roll along, as temperatures drop and the days grow shorter, but the weather that we normally associate with the Upper Midwest — days-long snowstorms, blowing winds, bitter temperatures — make their appearance about the same time as the Wise Men. It’s not unusual to have a less-than-white Christmas — or even to have a green one.

This is not most years. In December, we saw almost as much snow as my parents did, living in the snow belt on the eastern shore of Lake Michigan. But repeated thaws and freezings, sunny days and windy evenings, have hardened off the snow banks and left the roads mercifully free of snow and ice.

Not so the sidewalks, which, on this Epiphany, are in the most treacherous shape I can remember. I pick my way cautiously, eyes focused on the ground, skirting around large patches of black ice that are obvious enough in the sunlight but which, I realize with a sense of foreboding, will be invisible as I walk home from work in the northern darkness of Epiphany evening.

Like most Americans, over the years I have abused my body with reckless abandon, shoveling junk food (as well as overly large quantities of more healthy fare) into my maw as if there were no tomorrow. And yet, like most, I’m much more concerned about the dangers to my body while out walking in our winter wonderland. Gluttony sneaks up on us, wears us down so insidiously that we rarely notice until it’s too late; but a misplaced foot on an icy sidewalk can bring consequences that are immediate, severe, and obvious — a bump on the head, a sprained wrist, a cracked rib.

And so we avoid the near occasions of slipping far more painstakingly than we avoid the near occasions of sin. Yet, just as my left foot briefly loses traction, the words of the Baltimore Catechism come back to me:

Q. Of which must we take more care, our soul or our body?
A. We must take more care of our soul than of our body.

Even in the worst of years, the black ice of our winter streets and sidewalks is a sporadic phenomenon, usually obvious (as long as you’re paying attention) and thus avoidable. In the modern world, however, the black ice of our spiritual life surrounds us every day. Worse, even when it’s obvious, we may make little effort to avoid it. Sometimes we even go out of our way to skate on the ice, deluding ourselves into thinking that we will not fall.

And yet, when our recklessness brings us down, the consequences are much worse than a bruise or a broken bone.

Q. Why must we take more care of our soul than of our body?
A. We must take more care of our soul than of our body, because in losing our soul we lose God and everlasting happiness.

As I leave work, the night is perfectly clear, still, and black. Walking down the driveway to the sidewalk, I see that the ground is covered with a fresh coat of snow. It’s not much: somewhere between a quarter- and a half-inch — just enough to lure the unsuspecting walker onto a cloaked patch of black ice. The air is cold, so the snowflakes are small and hard, reducing the friction between my boots and the ground beneath.

I pick my way carefully, wishing that I had paid even closer attention in the morning, so that I might recall where the worst patches are. In the first few blocks, I slip a half-dozen times, and I consider halting and calling my wife to come pick me up. She’s a good woman; she wouldn’t complain — and I could be home and settling down for our Epiphany feast in under ten minutes.

Something in me rebels against the thought. I’ve got less than a mile to go. I can make it; I don’t need help.

I cross another street and start up the next block. One of the few streetlights on this stretch of Harlem Avenue casts a soft yellow glow over glittering snow on the sidewalk ahead, and I remember from my morning walk that one of the most extensive and perfectly smooth patches of black ice lies under that snow. Like the snow covering it, the ice has a perfect natural beauty.

Thomas Aquinas, following Aristotle, argued that men do not choose evil and ugliness for their own sake, but out of a perverted or inordinate desire for happiness and beauty. A rough analogy begins to form in my mind. The ice and the snow are not bad in themselves; indeed, they have both brought me brief moments of happiness today. But throw a man into the mix, and the combination, on this night, could spell disaster.

Perhaps my thoughts distracted me; perhaps there was nothing I could do, but as I advance upon the snow-covered ice, my feet slide out from under me, and I go down — hard. Lying on the ground, winded, I’m surprised that, other than my right elbow, I don’t seem to be in pain. I work my way up to a sitting position and pause before trying to rise.

“Are you OK?” a voice behind me says. “You hit hard. I could hear it inside.” An elderly gentleman is coming down the driveway of the house I just passed. My pride smarting more than my body, I roll to my left and rise. “I’m fine.”

“Are you sure? Would you like me to take you somewhere?” I start to say no. It’s not that much farther; the only thing that hurts is my elbow. Having fallen once, I’ll be more careful. I don’t need your help.

And then, oddly, as I look into his face, lined with worry, the words of the Baltimore Catechism come back to me again: “We must take more care of our soul than of our body.” Quite literally, my pride has gone before my fall.

“Yes, please. I’d appreciate a ride home.” A smile breaks his look of concern: “I’ll go get my keys.”

As I wait on the sidewalk for my newfound friend to return, I remember a passage I had marked this very morning in the current Catechism of the Catholic Church, to come back to for further reflection. Discussing “Communion in charity,” the Catechism notes, “In this solidarity with all men, living or dead, which is founded on the communion of saints, the least of our acts done in charity redounds to the profit of all” (953).

There was no need for me to fall tonight; my pride brought on the aching that I feel slowly spreading across my back and down my arm. But my pride also prevented the act of charity that my wife would have happily performed in coming to pick me up. And even after my fall, it almost prevented the one that this elderly gentlemen longed to perform.

Too often, we struggle across the black ice of our spiritual life alone, not because others have abandoned us, but because we’re not willing to admit that we need help or to accept it when offered. We may happily perform acts of charity ourselves, but how often do we rebuff the efforts of others, their little acts of charity that would redound to the profit of all — to us, to them, to the entire communion of saints? In doing so, we not only expose ourselves to unnecessary falls, but deprive them — and the entire Body of Christ on earth — of the increase in grace that we all so desperately need.

My family waits at home, and through the kindness of a stranger, I’ll be there in a few minutes, in time to pull out of the oven the slow-roasted pork shoulder that we have prepared for the feast. It is Epiphany, and God has granted me an epiphany, and tonight I will celebrate both.

First published on January 14, 2009, in Inside Catholic (now Crisis Magazine).

The Cheap Trick of Whiteness

A half-truth, as John Lukacs is fond of saying, is more dangerous than a lie, because the element of truth in it, speaking to our hearts and minds, can mask the accompanying falsehood. We see this in the current embrace of multiculturalism, which propagates the dangerous lie that a civilized human society can exist—whether at the level of the family, the city, or the nation—without a unifying culture.  (That, and not the claim that all cultures are equally “valid” or valuable, or even that all other cultures are more to be admired than ours, is the greatest danger posed by multiculturalism.) Despite the evident falsity of this claim (history presents no example of a lasting society without a dominant, unifying culture), the ideology of multiculturalism has flourished in the United States not because it has been imposed by political and cultural institutions, such as public schools and universities (though it has), nor because the former elites of the once-dominant culture in this country have been ill prepared to defend that culture as a unifying force (though they have), but because of the element of truth that the proponents of multiculturalism use like a katana to slice through any resistance to their destructive agenda: Diversity, like unity, is a positive good.

We do not have to draw on parallels from agriculture about the dangers of large-scale monoculture, or from genetics about the dead end of restrictive gene pools, to recognize this truth. It is not simply boredom that leads us to seek out new friends and to sample different cuisines, to learn languages other than the one we were born into and to study the history of other civilizations, or even the far-flung corners of our own. Russell Kirk argued that diversity—true diversity, not multiculturalism masquerading under that name—is a conservative principle, because (like all other true conservative principles) it is a reflection of the good, the true, and the beautiful. The Christian God Himself is a diversity in unity.

The problem, as always, is one of balance. Unity is a positive good; diversity is a positive good; but either one, taken to the extreme, destroys the other. Variety (the saying goes) is the spice of life, and sometimes a dish can become unbalanced because too little salt has been added. Yet, as any good cook knows, it is easier to destroy a dish through an overabundance of spices. Multiculturalism, as practiced in the United States, isn’t a measured dose of garlic or cumin or harissa incorporated into a hearty beef stew; it’s a cup of MSG poured on top of a Big Mac. The initial dish is toxic enough without any help from the Orient’s secret salt.

If the half-truth of multiculturalism is that diversity is a positive good, the half-truth that some opponents of multiculturalism push beyond the limit is that unity is a positive good. When unity becomes the highest value, we end up not with, say, the vibrant yet diverse Christian civilization of Europe in the Middle Ages but with the excesses of Enlightenment rationalism and (as I discussed last month) the post-Christian hypermonotheism of Islam. And among the excesses of Enlightenment rationalism is found an obsession with race as a unifying principle, among both liberals who see “whiteness” as the root of all evil, and some of their opponents who increasingly see it as the sole source and foundation of everything worth preserving.

A.D. 2015 will long be remembered here in Rockford as the year when that great “white power” band Cheap Trick (“Mommy’s all white / Daddy’s all white / They just seem a little weird”) finally received the recognition that they deserve, with the announcement that they will be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, Ohio. Bad puns aside, it is hard to imagine four men who are collectively more white than Rick Nielsen, Robin Zander, Tom Petersson, and Bun E. Carlos (Brad M. Carlson, who says that he chose his stage surname because “We sounded like a bunch of Swedes”).  Yet it is absurd to speak of Cheap Trick as a “white” band, even in the sense that it is legitimate to speak of their fellow 2016 inductees N.W.A. as a black one.  Cheap Trick’s music cannot be reduced to a product of their “genetic endowment,” or even to some generic “white culture.”  Nielsen, Zander, Petersson, and Carlos are men of a certain time and a certain place—the mid–20th to early 21st century Upper Midwest, and specifically Northern Illinois—and their music has its feeder roots here and now (and then), even if other roots run deeper. Their longevity is the result, in large part, of their continued connection to this place and to the people who make their home here. As my barber recently noted, Rockford has changed a lot since he was young, but if you’re trying to find out something about a fellow Rockfordian you’ve never met, chances are you know not just one but several people who have worked with him, eaten with him, had one too many drinks with him, or worshiped with him.

Too many use the terms patriotism and nationalism today as if they were interchangeable, but they mean radically different things, especially in the context of a nation spread across an entire continent. Patriotism not only implies a connection to a certain people but demands a mutual connection to a certain place. There may be reasons why it is hard for me, a native of West Michigan, to be a Rockford patriot even after 20 years of living here, but it is many orders of magnitude easier than being a generically American one. America is not a place; it is many places—thousands of towns and regions and 50 states, all within the bounds of a continental empire that even in its infancy was more political than cultural. (The cultural differences between the original states, and even within each state, are almost incomprehensible to those whose historical imaginations have been fed from infancy on a steady diet of Thanksgiving turkey.) This country has always had, by its very nature, an inherent diversity that nationalism at best glosses over and at worst, reflecting its roots in Enlightenment rationalism, seeks to destroy in favor of an artificial unity. The subtitle of this magazine notwithstanding, there can be no single, deep, and lasting “American culture,” but there have been and still are many American cultures, local and regional, and the stronger they are, the more likely it is that the country as a whole will manage to survive.

Fame, alas, is fleeting, and the music of Cheap Trick may not be remembered outside of Rockford a century from now, much less four centuries, but what is true of Nielsen and Zander, Petersson and Carlos is just as true of Bach and Beethoven, Brahms and Mozart. When the multiculturalists dismiss the latter as “Dead White European Males,” and some of their opponents respond by lumping them together as “White Western Christians,” both sides turn these great composers into abstractions, as if the works of each one were (absurdly) interchangeable with those of any of the others. Notre Dame de Paris, Hagia Sophia, Saint Paul’s Cathedral, and Sagrada Família were all built by Christian men of varying shades of whiteness, but the individual beauty and majesty of each edifice arises from the differences between those men and their cultures as much as it does from their underlying unity. Those who look at these churches through a monochromatic lens will never experience their full beauty—much less the fullness of truth that each represents and was built to honor. That some of those people, in fact, celebrated the blasphemous suicide of Dominique Venner in Notre Dame de Paris in May 2013 speaks volumes about what they truly worship.

Ostensibly, one of the reasons Venner chose to commit his “eminently political” act in the sanctuary at Notre Dame was to awaken the people of Europe to the dangers of Islamic immigration—a real threat that he correctly understood might spell the death of Europe as we know it. But the nations of Europe have faced this threat before, and they did not repel it through individual or mass suicide. Jan Sobieski, Janos Hunyadi, and Giovanni da Capestrano were all Western white Christian men named John who fought Islam, but they did not do so on behalf of the abstractions of “Europe” or “the West,” much less of “whiteness.” Each fought for the truth incarnate in his native land and people, in “the ashes of his fathers / and the temples of his gods.”

Abstractions draw man away from reality and lead him to despair; a firm grounding in reality gives man hope—or at least something that he can fight for when the odds seem overwhelming. A man, history shows us, will fight for his wife and children; for his family and friends; for his home and native land. Given time, talent, and resources, he may build things that last for generations yet to come. He may go to his grave knowing that his name may be lost to the ages within a century or two, but his presence will still be felt.

If, however, he abjures all of this, cuts his ties to his native soil (and never puts down roots anywhere else), makes few lasting friendships, chooses not to marry (or, if he marries, refuses to have children), and devotes his life instead to battles that are so large they cannot be won on behalf of an abstraction spun out of centuries of mass delusion—then such a man has not fought the enemies of civilization; he has joined forces with them.       

First published in the February 2016 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

Returning to Reality

And Jesus answering said unto them,
Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s,
and to God the things that are God’s.

Go ye therefore, and teach all nations,
baptizing them in the name of the Father,
and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost . . .

On February 28, 2013, as Pope Benedict XVI was leaving office, the magician Penn Jillette was interviewed on CNN by Piers Morgan, a nominal Catholic. Morgan, a critic of Benedict, thought he would have a sympathetic ear in Jillette, an outspoken atheist, but the interview quickly took an amusing turn as Jillette began lecturing Morgan on the teachings of the Catholic Church, which Jillette got (mostly) right. Morgan pushed back, but in the process only revealed his own ignorance of why the Church teaches what She teaches. Jillette made short work of him, as would anyone even modestly versed in Catholic theology.

Catholic commentators, especially those who are politically conservative and thus despised Piers Morgan for other reasons, enjoyed a bit of Schadenfreude at Morgan’s expense. One obvious lesson—which many of the commentators drew—is that Catholics of Morgan’s generation (he is 48) were poorly catechized.  If an atheist can beat a reasonably intelligent Catholic not just in technique but in the substance of a debate over Catholic theology, something is wrong.

There were less obvious lessons to be learned. The first is that American Catholics are just as enamored of celebrities as Americans of other stripes are. Not a few of the Catholic commentariat jumped to the conclusion that Jillette was ripe for conversion. (Many of the same commentators had declared Christopher Hitchens another Augustine or Saint Paul in the making, and had not only hoped for—a good thing—but expected his deathbed conversion, no matter how often Hitchens assured them it would never come. Which it didn’t.) Just as Kourtney Kardashian was lauded as a pro-life hero back in 2009 when she revealed in an interview that she could not bring herself to abort her unborn child, conceived out of wedlock, so Jillette became, for a moment, the potential new face of the Catholic Church in America. And as prolifers had made excuses for Kardashian, when in that same interview she had made it clear that she thought it perfectly fine for other mothers to kill their unborn children even if she could not personally do so, Jillette’s admirers tried to explain away the actions of this militant atheist who has used his stage act and his television show, Bullsh-t!, to launch a series of nasty attacks on the Catholic Church, the Eucharist, and the priesthood.

Which brings us to a second, less obvious lesson: The Devil knows not only Latin but Christian theology. And he can use that knowledge in more than one way: to try to undermine the faith of those who are weak, by instilling doubts in their minds; but also to mislead others through a form of spiritual pride, by convincing them that saying the right thing is necessarily the same thing as believing the right thing. If the Devil can convince people that the Faith is simply a checklist of propositions to which we must give assent rather than a lived relationship with the Risen Christ from which those doctrines flow, his work is mostly done.

Faith is, among other things, the perfection of reason, but that does not mean that reason alone can lead us to faith. Penn Jillette may know all the right things to say, but Morgan, despite his dissent from Church teaching, has the benefit of baptism and membership in the Church, while Jillette not only rejects both for himself but has made it perfectly clear that he despises those who choose them for themselves (and even more so for their children). Jillette was not, as so many seemed to assume, urging Morgan on to deepen his faith (or even simply “keeping him honest”); he was ridiculing him for being less knowledgeable than a man who rejects Jesus Christ, and all His works, and all of His salvific promises.

Put this way, this all seems rather obvious; so why did so many miss what Jillette was up to? Part of the problem is that, in the United States, Christianity has all too often become a surface phenomenon. Doctrine has become a substitute for the substance of the Faith, rather than a catechetical tool that is meant to help us understand what we, as Christians, experience. To put it in stark terms: Which came first, the Incarnation, Death, and Resurrection of Christ, or the dogmatic councils? As Harold O.J. Brown, the longtime religion editor for Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture, explained in his greatest work, Heresies: The Image of Christ in the Mirror of Heresy and Orthodoxy From the Apostles to the Present, Christian doctrine developed from the lived experience of the Church, the Body of Christ, not the other way around. A credo is a distillation of what Christians believe because they know it to be true, rather than a list of propositions to which they give assent, and thus come to believe. The convert recites the Creed at his baptism not as a test of his orthodoxy but to affirm what he already knows, through his experience, to be true.

Many factors have contributed to the distortion of Christian doctrine from a distillation of the Christian experience into an abstraction, even an ideology. In the United States in the 20th century, a certain neo-Thomism played an important role, beginning in the Catholic Church but with its effects spilling out into other Christian denominations. Thomistic theology is not the problem; the problem, as Owen Barfield demonstrated in Saving the Appearances, comes when that theology is treated as an end in itself, and the experience that underlies it and which it encapsulates becomes attenuated or even lost. Recover that experience, and Christian doctrine takes on a new life that can deepen our faith; the works of Thomas become as fresh as if they were written yesterday. But without that experience, we become caricatures of Penn Jillette—functional atheists who, unlike Jillette, are convinced that we have the fullness of the Faith.

The problem, though, runs much deeper than modern neo-Thomism. It extends back to the beginning of the modern age and the rise of the modern state, as the realm of politics, previously limited, began to encroach upon more and more areas of everyday life.  And it has reached its apotheosis in 21st-century America, where even so-called conservatives no longer believe that there are no political solutions to cultural problems, but that all cultural problems are at base political and can only be solved through elections and legislation and court decisions.

In a society with a strong common culture, the encroachment of politics into more and more areas of human life may not initially seem to pose a problem. Indeed, to the extent that legislation, for instance, is seen as supporting what is good in human life against external threats to the common culture, such encroachment may even be welcomed. But as the common culture breaks down, the increased power of the state over culture becomes a battering ram that accelerates that destruction.

So, for instance, state laws against abortion before 1973 largely represented the common moral sense of the people. But Roe v. Wade, while imposed from the top down, did not come out of nowhere. The moral consensus on abortion had been eroding for decades, and it reflected a more advanced erosion within the Christian churches on contraception, which itself reflected a loss within those churches not simply of the Christian understanding of the sacredness of life but, more importantly, of the experience that gave life to that understanding.

Jump forward to today, and for any person under the age of 40 in the United States, abortion has always been a part of the fabric of his or her life, and the battle over abortion, while framed in moral terms, has always been a political one. Those who believe that abortion is wrong wish to see Roe v. Wade overturned and new laws passed banning abortion; those who think otherwise work hard to maintain a pro-Roe majority on the Supreme Court.

The latter are winning, and will keep winning, until the former recognize that the only way to win the battle is to reassert the primacy of culture over politics. To put it in explicitly Christian terms, in order to save the lives of unborn children, Christians must first set about saving the souls of their fathers and mothers. And that means not simply preaching to those mothers and fathers about the Christian moral tradition concerning the sacredness of human life but leading them to the salvific relationship with Christ that underlies and gives life to that tradition. Disconnected from that experience, especially in a society in which politics claims for itself the ultimate moral authority, the Christian moral tradition becomes ossified, at best, and at worst takes on the character of an ideology, both adversary to, and counterpart of, the ideology of individualistic liberalism.

The problem, as I have made clear, is nothing new, finding its roots in the rise of the modern world five centuries ago; and it was accurately diagnosed almost half a century ago by Josef Pieper, who also pointed toward its only possible solution in his short but indispensable work Tradition: Concept and Claim (translated from the German in 2008 by E. Christian Kopff and published that same year by ISI Books). Tradition, in both the secular usage and the capital-T of Christian Sacred Tradition, is not merely a collection of things worth preserving, as both political and religious “conservatives” today treat it, but the means by which the most important of all experiences is handed down. As Pieper writes,

There is really nothing praiseworthy in the mere fact that something which has been thought, said, or done “since forever” will continue to be thought, said, and done. The praise due the act of tradition only makes sense when what is preserved and will continue to be preserved through the generations is what is truly worth preserving. That is the point of young people’s doubting question. Why is it, they ask, that a duty has been violated, if we simply let what has been handed down rest on its laurels, so that we can say, think, and do something totally different? We can only hope that someone hears this radical question and gives an existentially believable and equally radical answer, “the” answer that goes to the heart of things: that among the many things that are more or less worth preserving and may have been accumulated as “tradition,” there is in the last analysis only one traditional good that it is absolutely necessary to preserve unchanged, namely the gift that is received and handed on in the sacred tradition. I say “necessary” because this tradition comes from a divine source; because each generation needs it for a truly human existence; because no people and no brilliant individual can replace it on their own or even add anything valid to it.

It should be obvious that Pieper is speaking here not of external forms, but of that which gave them life, and which may require those external forms to change over time so that what is truly worth preserving may continue to be passed on. This is the problem faced by modern conservatives, who primarily seek to defend what they respected and loved when they were young, rather than what is necessarily worth preserving. Pieper contrasts “Tradition (singular)” with these “traditions,” which may start out supporting a healthy culture but ultimately have the potential to do more harm than good:

Genuine consciousness of tradition makes one positively free and independent in the face of conservatisms, which worry obsessively about the cultivation of the “traditions.” Certainly, a “cultivation of tradition” that attaches itself to a historically accidental external image of what has been handed down becomes a positive hindrance to a real transmission of what is truly worth conserving, which perhaps can occur only under changed historical forms. It is possible to imagine a real transmission of what is in the last analysis worth handing down, which a dogmatic conservatism could not even recognize.

This is the problem faced also by the Church, and here I speak broadly, and not just of the Catholic Church of which I am a member. Even under the best of circumstances, in a healthy culture in which the structures of society and of politics are not antagonistic toward the Christian Faith, the Church must be a countercultural institution.  That is the only way in which She can be certain to be able to hand down the ultimate Truth of the Faith, and not let it become obscured or deformed by an “historically accidental external image” that may have arisen from that Truth but has since become abstracted from it.

We are always in danger of turning the traditions of Christianity—the rituals and doctrines, the moral teachings and institutions—into ends in themselves, rather than means to the true end, “the gift that is received and handed on.” Or rather, we should use the Gift (singular), Who gave Himself to save our souls, and Who continues, in every age until the end of time, to give man what he needs “for a truly human existence.”

American conservatives of a certain generation summed up the insight of a different German philosopher in the catchphrase “Don’t immanentize the eschaton!” And yet, while warning against the dangers of trying to bring about heaven on earth, they themselves, through their obsession with elections and legislation, did much to subjugate culture to politics and to make Christian moral teaching a means to a political end, rather than a means of transmitting the Truth of the Faith. The fruit of their efforts can be seen today in the lost battles of the Culture War, and in entire generations that have sought salvation not in the sacraments of Christian churches but in the squabbles of “the public square.”

All is not lost, however, so long as “the gift that is received and handed on” continues to be received and handed on. But the locus of that transmission—that “Tradition (singular)”—has never been the polling place, but the Church, which guards that gift.

When we get that straight—when we recognize once again that the duty we owe to God is to pass on the Good News to our fellow man—only then shall we begin the process of returning to reality, revitalizing our culture, and putting politics back in its proper, limited space.

First published in the December 2013 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.