The Catholic Weekly 7 June 2020

24 NEWS 7, June, 2020 ONE OF the things I have long pondered is why it is that peo- ple fall away from the faith. The answer is hiding in plain sight: for whatever rea- son, they just no longer be- lieve the Christian narrative anymore. It really is that sim- ple, because if you really did believe the Christian truth claim you would put up with any number of ecclesiastical micro aggressions in order to stay the course, despite the rocky terrain. You would say to yourself in themidst of your existential dyspepsia over the Church’s endless foibles and absurd ‘stratagems’: “Lord to whom shall we go? You have the words of everlasting life.” I know this is certainly true in my own life since I would have long ago left the Church over its modern descent into mediocrity and banality were it not for the fact that I actually still believe in both the Chris- tian narrative and the Church that bears it forward. That really is the bottom line because, quite frankly, the post liturgy doughnuts have grown stale as sacra- mentals of forced conviviality and I can get better “fellow- ship” at a Star Trek conven- tion. This is what puzzles me then when I hear people en- gage in grandiloquent “exit narratives” for why they left the Church. You know the formula as well as I do: some priest far- ted in the confessional once, or because they couldn’t get an annulment for their fifth marriage, or because the mu- sic minister dropped the Hill- song as the main music for Mass, or the priest said some- thing in a homily that “offend- ed” you – and so on. Very often, when confront- ed with such narratives I will just bypass the whole bowl of sentimental crud and cut to the chase and ask: Do you still believe in the Creed and the Sacraments? And most often the an- swer is a qualified umming and ahhhing, with all kinds of linguistic sleight of hand they learned at a workshop run by a Jesuit-Buddhist-Zen mas- ter-massage therapist, before Do Catholics leave because they find Church boring? they finally just give up and admit that “well no, I don’t accept most of those ‘rules’ anymore.” Nor is there usually any reverse “road to Damascus moment” where the faith is lost in a single dramatic traffic stop gone bad.The truth of the situation is usually far more boring, with faith gradually ebbing away in the acedia-in- ducing wort of our fermenting culture. I have a very good priest friend, an old seminary chum of mine, who is a man of very high intellect and even higher wisdom, who often laments to me on the phone that “no- body believes anything any- more.” And by that he means what the priest at the beginning of Bernanos’s Diary of a Country Priest means when he says: “My parish is bored.” In other words, underneath the out- ward façade of sacramental participation, parish dinner fundraisers, youth ministry sports days and pet blessings, there lurks the noonday devil of quiet disbelief. My priest friend further opines that since this is true, the pastoral strategy the Church has adopted over the past 60 years - the strategy of turning the faith into the spiritual equivalent of rice cakes - is doomed to failure, as the current implosion bears out. Nobody dies for something they think is not true. Nobody sacrifices for something they think is not true. Nobody long endures suffering for some- thing they think is not true. And the bottom line is that if one is deeply bored by something, chances are it is because in the grand scheme of things you judge it to not be true, or, at the very least, even if true, of little importance. In the past year I met a most remarkable person at a conference who has since become one of my favourite authors. He is the poet James Mat- thew Wilson who is involved in a project to re-inject high calibre beauty back into the Catholic faith. The Church is still the re- pository of Christ, but that image has been effaced in the ugliness andmediocrity of the modern Church. What is needed is for the Church to be repristinated through Beauty, Goodness, and Truth. Because these realities, when perfected, are anything but boring and are a real, hon- est to goodness remedy for acedia and the noonday devil. The Church must once again become a patron of the arts as it seeks to reclaim a culture of beauty and of excel- lence. James Matthew Wilson is involved in the Benedict XVI Institute, a new venture that seeks to create that culture in the Church once again, in the midst of a world that careens toward the anti-human abyss of technocratic nihilism. In other words, underneath the out- ward façade of sacramental participa- tion, parish dinner fundraisers, youth ministry sports days and pet blessings, there lurks the noonday devil of quiet disbelief ... Nobody dies for something they think is not true. Nobody sacri- fices for something they think is not true. ” The image many seem to have of the Church - including Catholics: old (in a negative sense), tired and not relevant to modernity. Sadly, the embrace (often at parish level) of a bland, uninspiring faith may have had a lot to do with that. PHOTO: 4CAMRES MULTIMEDIA/FLICKR, CC BY 2.0 What he and the Institute, understand is that there can be no appeasement or “ar- rangement” between the Gos- pel and the ugly, vulgar, world of consumeristic kitsch. For when the Church seeks to enculturate into an an- ti-culture (which is what our society enfleshes) it commits suicide as it dissolves and is absorbed into the world of our technocratic Borg masters. I mention this new Insti- tute by way of conclusion, not because I think it will sin- gle-handedly bring the need- ed renewal, but because it is a model of what must once again blossom in the Church in order to reinvigorate the motives for faith and the soil in which that faith can grow. The Gospel cannot flour- ish in the culture of shopping malls. Of course modern Catholics are “bored.” We have turned our Churches into grand temples dedicated to the gods of efficiency, bour- geois comfort, and the ugli- ness spawned by expedience. Everything is geared toward making the Gospel “safe” and “inoffensive” and the spiritual equivalent of the Boy Scout Oath – if you are lucky. And the whole enterprise - the lot of it - is boring. That is why modern Catho- lics, like modern people in general, talk endlessly about “sexuality.” Because all our culture has left is a degraded eroticism masquerading as liberation. But degraded eroticism is the most pathetic god in our entire pantheon of divinised addictions. Because the erot- ic, devoid of love and an ori- entation to Transcendence, is the ugliest and most boring thing of all. Beauty will save the world. That is to say, Christ will save the world. So can we please stop doing all within our pow- er to render Christ boring? Can we please stop turning him into a cipher for subur- bia? Christ Pantocrator has become the Christ of the at- tached garage. Is it any wonder then that people walk away? With permission. This article first appeared at www.doro- thydaycwfarm.org ¾ ¾ Larry Chapp