By Dr. Jeff Mirus (Bio – Article – Email) | August 9, 2024

Behind my title question lies a deeper one that is perhaps more important. Is the level of indifference and even hostility toward Christ in today’s world so great that we can shirk the challenge of raising our children Catholic, of strengthening the faith and devotion of our fellow Catholics, and of evangelizing others in the midst of a secular culture that simply has no interest? I suspect this question answers itself, except for one thing: Don’t many of us believe, at least secretly, that contemporary Western culture is so uniquely disinterested and even hostile toward Christ that engaging in any kind of mission is all but pointless?

What got me thinking again yesterday was the announcement of a new book from Ignatius Press (Catholic Evangelization: Stories of Conversion and Witness by Steve Dawson), of which I requested a review copy. I know that some people are very good at evangelizing others personally (FOCUS is one of several other good examples), and I also know that I am in agreement (for better or worse) with the idea of ​​strengthening the Church and promoting the Catholic mission through a Internet Apostolate – which, compared to many other commitments, sounds too much like an admission of guilt.

But the point of today’s reflection is to address what I think is a widespread view that we live in a unique cultural situation, one in which indifference and even hostility to Christianity are so culturally ingrained that the time is not ripe for evangelization or purely Christian mission at all. In other words, that there is no point in trying, which would of course mean that we are absolved of the effort. This view is, I think, quite common for two reasons: First, there is still an eerie feeling that over the last two or three generations we have gone from being a thoroughly Christian culture to being a thoroughly secular culture. In other words, we have an awful feeling that the “Christian era” is over. Second, we often believe that the secular abyss into which we have fallen is unprecedented—too deep to climb out of.

Misunderstandings

This affects us in many ways. It is even a (small) factor in the very positive and certainly brilliant book Restoration of the Day of the Lord by Daniel Fitzpatrick (as I mentioned last May in Remember the Sabbath Day, to Keep It Holy), in which the author spends perhaps too much time discussing the “unique” features of our modern culture (such as an interest-based economy) that contribute to our current Christian apathy or acedia. No doubt there are features in every culture that are particularly discouraging to us, but the very first misconception about the possibility of evangelization and apostolate in the modern world is to believe that we are faced with unprecedented conditions that make any kind of Christian effectiveness utterly impossible.

In a new collection of short passages of wisdom from Pope Benedict XVI (“God Is Always New: Meditations on Life, Love, and Freedom,” Ignatius Press), the late pope offers the following piece of wisdom in an excerpt aptly titled “In Temptation, God Is at Stake”:

The tempter is clever. He does not push us directly toward evil, but toward a false good, making us believe that the true realities are power and everything that satisfies our primary needs. In this way, God becomes secondary; he becomes a means. In short, he becomes unreal, he no longer counts, he disappears. Ultimately, in temptation, faith is at stake because God is at stake. (p. 58)

This naturally leads us to suspect that our perception of the singular impossibility of a fruitful Catholic witness today is in fact a temptation, a mere trick of the father of lies. His particular presuppositions for our lives today can be refuted by a series of pointed questions.

Do we really believe that God was deeply and personally respected in the West in the mid-twentieth century (that is, before the very rapid institutional secularization that triumphed in the 1960s)? In a society so prone to falling prey to absurd sociopolitical ideologies? In a society that almost without exception approved the use of atomic bombs against large civilian populations in World War II? In a society that had already hosted secular intellectuals in its universities and colleges for a generation or more, including (at least in hidden form) modernists in Catholic universities and colleges? In a society that stopped opposing divorce as soon as pressure for it began to grow? In a society that turned massively to contraception as soon as the pill was developed, and from then on to widespread abortion in the years that followed? And even in a church that was almost instantly shaken to its foundations in the 1960s, when the attitudes acceptable in the dominant culture began to change? Is it the outward forms of The The society of the 1940s and 1950s, which makes us believe that things have changed so much in the recent past that effective Christianity is impossible Today?

The deeper reality

What has happened to us today is, in essence, that the forces of evil (whether indolently materialistic or thoroughly diabolical) no longer hide behind an inherited facade of cultural propriety. I am not saying that this is an insignificant development; I am only saying that what is coming to light here, first and foremost, are the deep problems that have long plagued the West, as they had come to light in certain preparatory flashes in the totalitarian secularisms of the French Revolution, Communism, and Nazism—so that today we are merely witnessing, in a somewhat diluted form, the public legitimization of secularist views that have fragmented the West since the transition from the High Middle Ages to the so-called Renaissance.

And even when we look back at the age of Christendom, we see (along with so much public good promoted by the influence of the Church) chronic secular corruption in a Church led by worldly, aristocratic bishops and largely ignorant parish priests. There were many wonderful outward forms and many genuine Christian achievements were characteristic of this culture, but we must remember the many reform movements (including many new and reformed religious orders and certain saints) that prevented this particular Christian and “ecclesiastical” culture from being destroyed even more rapidly by the widespread corruption even in the institutions of the Church.

And so it goes back to the time of Christ himself. At some times the outward forms were wanting, but the fervour of the faithful was relatively strong, while at other times the outward forms were very strong, but the fervour of the faithful was often falsely maintained by mere cultural habits. A period of thoroughly Catholic faith, without serious blemishes caused by its members from head to toe, has never existed in the Church, much less in the surrounding culture. This does not mean that some periods and places have not fared better than others; but it does mean that we must not suppose that our difficulties in the West today are so uniquely terrible as to render apostolic witness so futile that it could be considered not worth the effort.

A final example

Our times and our culture are not uniquely terrible, not uniquely impervious to grace. What I mean by this point in particular is that we must not use our cultural situation as an excuse to avoid evangelization, mission, Christian witness, apostolic work, or witnessing to the truth in all the ordinary aspects of our own daily lives and the daily lives of our families. It is about living out our baptism. The concrete form it takes in each person’s life will vary, and it is always permissible to exercise genuine prudence. But the substance must be the same: the substance must be union with Jesus Christ, visibly manifested and, whenever possible, lived out in and through the explicit ministry of Christ’s Church.

Lest anyone still suspect that our times are something new under the sun and that the special circumstances of cultural unbelief have allowed for widespread neglect of what would otherwise be a Christian duty, I invite you to read the second chapter of the biblical book Wisdom, or The Wisdom of Solomon, written in Alexandria, Egypt, two millennia ago, shortly after the birth of Christ. Here are excerpts from a description of the mindset of the unjust that show how wrong it is to see our cultural situation as uniquely evil and uniquely incompatible with the light of Christ and his Church:

(2) “We were born by mere chance,
and afterward we will be as if we had never existed.
because the breath in our nose is smoke,
and reason is a spark ignited by the beat of our heart.
(3) When it goes out, the body turns to ashes,
and the spirit will vanish like empty air….

(6) Come now, let us enjoy the good that is here,
and enjoy creation to the fullest as in youth.
(7) Let us enjoy the precious wine and the ointments,
and let no spring flower pass us by.
(8) Let us crown ourselves with rosebuds before they wither.
(9) None of us should fail to take part in our feast,
Let us leave signs of joy everywhere,
for this is our portion and this is our lot…
(11) But let our power be our law of justice,
for what is weak proves to be useless.

(12) Let us lie in wait for the righteous,
because it is inconvenient to us and opposes our actions;
He accuses us of sins against the law,
and accuses us of sins against our upbringing.
(13) He claims to have knowledge of God,
and calls himself a child of the Lord.
(14) He became to us a rebuke of our thoughts.
(15) His sight is a burden to us,
because his lifestyle is different from that of others,
and his ways are strange…

(17) “Let us see whether his words are true,
and let us examine what will happen at the end of his life;
(18) For if the righteous man is the Son of God, he will save him,
and will deliver him from the hand of his enemies.
(19) Let us test him with insults and torture,
so that we can experience how gentle he is,
and test his patience.
(20) Let us condemn him to a shameful death,
for according to what he says he will be protected.”

Jeffrey Mirus holds a Ph.D. in intellectual history from Princeton University. A co-founder of Christendom College, he also pioneered Catholic Internet services. He is the founder of Trinity Communications and CatholicCulture.org. View full bio.

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