The Old and the New

Ten years ago, when I was received into the Catholic Church, it seemed to me that I had arrived at a definite destination.

The long intellectual struggle was over. I had at last given consent to the Dogma of Papal Infallibility. Whatever might come after that would be adjustment, a matter of growing familiarity with the household of the Faith.

I was not wholly naïve. I didn’t expect to get rid of all my private failings at one blow; but even there I could see some light at the end of the tunnel. The Immaculate Conception of the Mother of God was a kind of promise to me that as one wholly human creature had never been touched by sin, so even I, the stupidest of her children, could one day be free of sin.

Intellectual certainty and the prospect of ultimate deliverance from sin – these might not seem the largest issues in the world, but to me they were (and still are) new gifts, great gifts, gifts without price. Today I am troubled at times; for it seems to me that quite a number of my fellow-Catholics may be letting these gifts dribble away like sand between their fingers.

One reads extraordinary statements like the following: ‘Ninety per cent of Catholics said they believed in God and fifty-six per cent in Hell.’ One hopes that this means that ten per cent of Catholics questioned in a given area thought that the questions of a Gallup Poll interviewer were too impertinent and stupid to be answered in regard to God’s existence, and forty-four per cent thought the same about questions in regard to the existence of Hell.

But it could even mean what it implies: that ten Catholics among a hundred were atheists too cretinous or lazy to shift officially out of the Church and that forty-four per cent had thrown away the gift of intellectual certainty offered them by Christ through His Church.

Recent disputes about Humanae Vitae seem to indicate that the same kind of thing can happen in this country. Some well-meaning correspondent of the Tablet claimed that if she ignored the message of that encyclical, her faith and hope and charity were not in question. Indeed she might love God and her neighbour and hope for Heaven like any good Methodist, but her grasp on faith was undoubtedly in question, if, when the Church offered her a precise and unambiguous teaching on a particular moral issue, she did not take hold of it with both hands.

Perhaps the convert is in a favoured position. He or she acknowledges with open eyes at the moment of reception into the Church, that a gift like a live coal has been offered and received; that this coal may burn in the heart in the process of purifying it; that one may, perhaps, unwillingly, be led into martyrdom; but that here, at last, is undoubted truth.

I remember standing in my own kitchen and saying to my wife (who was not then and is not now a barracker for the Catholic Church): ‘You must understand one thing that has happened. Before I had a number of affections page 24 and loyalties; but now, for the first time in my life, I have something that I would be glad to die for.’ If the Faith itself is in doubt, then this issue is obscured. It was never meant to be obscured.

The gift of truth and the gift of a promised deliverance from sin are in fact two sides of the same truth. We see what is required of us; we acknowledge the power of God to make us able to obey Him; and we acknowledge that we are sinners who – by our own fault, by our own fault, by our most grievous fault – do not avail ourselves sufficiently of the means of grace.

Without the promise of deliverance the gift of truth would be a barren intellectual knowledge leading us to despair. Without the gift of truth the road to deliverance would be tricky and unidentifiable except by a spiritual elite. But with both gifts our deliverance has in a sense already begun.

Why are some of us angry with the Holy Father for offering us a further amplification of Catholic truth in a doubtful and dangerous issue? Do we prefer our sickness to its cure? To live even on the borders of the desert of sin is a situation from which the whole human race has desired, throughout all ages, to be delivered. What are the dull comforts and the tawdry enjoyments of an unenlightened technological age compared with the freedom of the people of God – the freedom of Joan at the stake and Thomas More at the block – a freedom that proceeds from the recognition of God’s voice speaking through His appointed and often unworthy representatives and the power given to us to obey that voice?

I fear that I must seem to many a conservative Catholic. Perhaps that is because I have tasted the ‘freedom’ of Protestant and agnostic doubt and found it an area of torment and shadows; because I have enjoyed the ‘liberty’ to follow an uninstructed conscience and found that such a conscience is like a weathercock blown about by any strong gust from north or south or east or west. I rejoice in the freedom of my Catholic chains.

Christ in the heart has to obey Christ in the Church; for without Christ in the Church, Christ in the heart becomes a shadow and a mirror of our own unconscious desires. The issue of clerical celibacy is a stumbling-block to some. We may grant that some priests might well be allowed to marry.

But what do we say when some sad, egocentric man forsakes the flock that God gave him to guard in order to give his heart to one member of that flock? And what shall we say about the disturbed and deluded woman who allows her passion to be admired and protected and bring her within that unlawful grasp of hands anointed for quite another purpose? We may pity and try in charity to alleviate their situation. But we will also shudder inwardly, because their tragedy is not the one dear to the heart of the sentimental novelist – the tragedy of frustrated love – but a tragedy of betrayal occurring in each because they have chosen to disobey the Church.

The issue of the role of women within the community of the people of God is a very live one nowadays. I have heard that in the Church of England page 25 there are those who would have it finally disown its claim to the Apostolic succession by deciding to ordain women priests. What I have heard may be wrong; and I pray that it is wrong. But what would we say if some extreme and well-meaning feminist group organised opposition to traditional Catholic authority on these grounds? Again we would shudder because they were trying to turn the Church into something other than the Church.

There are many other issues – such as, for example, the tendency of some modern theologians to whittle down the meaning of Our Lord’s real Presence in the Eucharist – at which we may also shudder.

What many of the so-called Liberalisers have in common is a spirit of vitalism and a reliance on purely natural evidence. Our Faith is not a matter of natural evidence.

It is Our Lord speaking from the Cross which we hear when we hear the words of the Holy Father mourning over the disasters of modern war or the less obvious spiritual disasters rising from the use of artificial contraception. When we shudder, it is not because our prejudices are being overturned – we should be glad to be rid of them, if they exist – but because the life-blood of the Faith, which is obedience, is being drained away.

A Redemptorist monk once gave me some advice to which I have held firmly ever since. ‘Jimmy,’ he said, ‘the Devil will do his utmost to get you to abandon the practice of the Faith. The only advice I can give you is this: In matters where obedience is due, give your obedience freely and gladly. And in matters where obedience is not required, use your own judgment firmly and confidently. You may be in the wrong of course, but if it’s an honest decision, you won’t end up in the cart.’

I have fought all my life for freedom – literary freedom, political freedom, social freedom. If the Holy Father himself were to tell me how to write plays or whom to vote for – a most unlikely eventuality – then I would most politely tell him to go and attend to his own business. But where the Church requires obedience I must give obedience or drift away from the Church herself. The great problem of the modern Catholic is intellectual imprudence. To begin with, perhaps he was not enough of a sceptic; his obedience to the Church in non-essential matters led him in turn to give too great credulity to modern ‘authorities’ – sociologists, psychologists, economists, whose brands of opinion change from hour to hour. And then, finding them fallible, he began to question everything including the statements that issue from the magisterium. This is his and our calamity.

It is calamitous because our business in the Church is to become saints. Catholics who are unable to obey Christ in the Church do not become saints, whatever may happen to their Protestant brethren who have the true excuse of invincible ignorance. It is most of all by obedience that we of the common herd will find our way to the uplands of the Faith, that bare and holy landscape of the Trinity where the saints walk and bathe in the fire of page 26 Divine Love. We need tracks to follow. We need bridges. The Church herself provides these for us.

But those who advocate disobedience are destroying our tracks and breaking down our bridges. They may end by taking the Cross away from us. Without the Cross we will have only the miseries of human comfort – the approval of our neighbours, a claustrophobic ring of material possessions, the ‘pleasure’ of an egotisme à deux in marriage, and the folly of our own images and doubtful intuitions to guide us.

These are strong words. They can only be justified by the gravest and most real spiritual dangers. Yet I think these dangers are actual wherever a Catholic inwardly begins to prefer sin, or the shadow of sin, or even the possibility of sin, to the directives of the Church. It may be argued that all men are sinners and the issues that concern us most today are doubtful ones that can best be left to conscience.

Certainly all men are sinners; but the horror of human life begins when one ceases to struggle and pray for deliverance from that incubus. Then the will itself is corrupted. And the issues in which we have been given clear direction from the magisterium are no longer doubtful. It is even possible that some Catholics, in the soup-thick darkness and muddle of modern thought, may eventually fail to remember that obedience is a virtue and disobedience a sin.

This will not, of course, destroy the Church. But it may put many in danger of losing their souls. And that is all I care about; for the souls of my brothers and sisters are dearer to me than the whole world or the beauty of a million galaxies.

I trust that God will prevent us from forgetting that obedience to Him in His Church is the road he has given us for eventual union with Him.

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