Neither the fervently religious nor the militantly secular atheist will ever have lasting political power in the West, since neither side will ever be able to wrest control from the mediocre and nominally religious. The West will always be ruled by those who call themselves Christian in phone surveys, usually baptize their children and have nice church weddings, and go to a service once or twice a year, if they get around to it.
The nominally religious are those for whom neither religion nor atheism is of much interest. I’m reminded of an old friar who loved to quote St. Thomas’s comment on the Apostle Thomas when he saw the resurrected Lord. The Apostle said, “My Lord and my God,” but Aquinas says, “He saw one thing and said another,” that is, he saw one thing with his eyes and said another by the light of faith. The old friar explained that the Apostle could have just as easily said, “O, I never knew you had a twin brother” or “O, you got better quickly” or “Wow, I have no idea what is going on here.” All these responses would be much more in keeping with his skeptical nature. But the response of the mediocre religious would be something like saying, in a warmly pleasant way, “O, you’re alive!” which he would certainly say with a warm and sincere smile. After leaving the upper room and resuming his affairs, he would think about the event now and again, and bring it up as an interesting story to his friends, who would themselves smile and nod warmly and sincerely, saying, “How interesting! I always knew there was something special about him!”
...I always think of the old saying, “The average person is average.” I can’t help but wonder how the gospel resolves the fact that it calls us to extraordinary sanctity while calling the radically substandard, of whom I am the exemplar of substandardness. I think it’s one of the reasons we are told not to judge. We simply have no idea where the saints are in that statistical mix. The parables of the net and of wheat and the tares emphatically underscore that the Church is “Here comes everybody” while the sayings about the broad and narrow ways emphatically underscore that a hell of a lot is asked of that everybody.
I do sometimes fancy that, in fact, thousands of people saw the Risen Christ on that Easter morning and that the apostles are just the ones who realized what it meant instead of saying, “Huh” or “That’s odd” and going back to their blintzes in the marketplace. I’ve just finished writing a study guide about the apparitions at Fatima, which concluded with as spectacular and well-attested a miracle as modernity could possibly ask for. And yet, today, nobody in mainstream culture is particularly interested in it. We’re talking “Sun dancing in the sky before 70,000 awestruck eyewitnesses, including scoffing atheists” levels of miraculous awesomeness. Prophecies about the rise of communism, World War II, the assassination attempt on the Pope: the whole 20th century summarized in a single forecast. Really cinematic stuff that is exactly what any atheist could hope for in the whole, “If God is real, then let him do some big splashy miracle in front of a huge number of witnesses!” department.
And yet, nobody much cares about it today. It’s a little footnote to history in a civilization that no longer knows any history. It illustrates powerfully what the Church means when it says that faith is a gift and that apart from it, all the miracles in the world won’t make any difference. The Pharisees were eyewitnesses to plenty of miracles, but they just bounced off their eyeballs and fell dead to the ground because the Pharisees refused the gift of faith, sometimes with extreme prejudice (as in “What? Lazarus was raised from the dead? Then let’s kill him and Jesus!” levels of blindness to the bleedin’ obvious). Seeing a miracle, even the raising of Lazarus, won’t save you any more than seeing a sign that says “Seattle 10 miles” will get you to Seattle if you refuse to go. What our age needs desperately is the faith to see what is in front of our noses. For we do not suffer for lack of signs from Jesus, but from our own refusal to read them.
And so, it behooves us, like the man said, to “Repent and believe in the gospel!” Lent is all about giving up mediocrity and it’s never too late to start. As Leon Bloy said, “In the end of life there exists only one tragedy: not to have been a saint.”
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We witness a miracle every time we attend Holy Mass. But many of the people there hardly seem to care and some don’t actually believe the miracle. I thinking being able to take Jesus “under my roof” even though I am not worthy like the Centurion is the greatest gift. I pray more people come to realize what it is we have with the Holy Catholic Church.
Anyone for a cross-country Rosary run/walk for mothers and their children? It would stop the craziness of the world if enough people participated.
Mark; I’ve noticed of late that more of your articles reflect an undercurrent of impatience and anger but I agreed with most of the points you made. When I first started to read you I was impressed by the honest and profound points made all within a satirical and a kind of subtle/in-your-face, forthright manner. It reminded me of watching a fencing match, a sort of ballet with weapons where the points scored were subtle and the performance itself a secondary artistic expression. Your recent performances seem to more closely resemble a WWF wresting match; a lot shouting,struting and wild audience responses.This is not intended to diminish your gifts and much needed challenging style of writing and if I am mistaken just hit the delete button and go get your ashes as I am about to do. God bless and thank you.
Years ago I want to a planetarium show where the discussion was about how witnesses aften claim to have seen an object in the sky moving eratically around. Typically this object is Venus which appears first sometimes in the evening sky without other stars are references. The operator dimmed the lights and shown a single solirary light at the dome. Sure enough I saw it move eratically around the dome. When the lights were raised and I had other objects to reference around it it stopped. The physiology and the brain of the eye creates this illusion as the sye is capable of only seeing a small section of our visual space at a time, the brain fills in the rest.
Surely the prudent thing would be to explore explanations like this for the Fatima phenomena that can be demonstrated easily before invoking divince explanations.
Mea culpa. I apologized for my numerous typing mistakes in the previous comment. I dashed it off quickly with checking but I hope you get the gist of what I was trying to say.
When one of Germany’s major “Catholic cities,” Cologne allowed for a local Muslim community to build a mosque with four minarets that’d surpass the spires of the city’s most famous landmark, it’s Gothic “Dom” cathedral, it should’ve caused more rumbles than mere ripples in the Euro/German press. Much more of a ballyhoo was raised about the Swiss not allowing mosques to be built.
I have no problem with a local zoning board in any country allowing a mosque to be built providing that the decision’s not made mostly for “politically correct” reasons, or simply to avoid trouble by giving in without respect for local customs or even longstanding architectural considerations that help the city or town as a whole maintain its unique image. Our nation’s capitol has a very strict architectural enforcement code and as a result, no structures within a certain area around the Mall are allowed to exceed the height of the Old Post Office, Capitol and Washington Monument. Thus the historic character/image of the city remains intact. Two our nation’s largest religious structures, the Catholic National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception and the Episcopalian National Cathedral, both immense and possessing very tall steeples were built outside of the inner core of the city surrounding the Mall, thus exempt. Rest assured, if some religious organization attempted to build any structure that’d mar the long ago accepted successful schema set down by Congress years ago, they’d have one tough fight; and rightfully so.
What’s very sad about the German situation is that it occured with almost no fuss whatsoever and this is in a nation that has done marvelous work rebuilding and preserving its churches, public buildings and countless half-timbered buildings in many bombed out cities. I lived in Germany less than 20 years after the war ended and with few exceptions, it was hard to tell how much damage had occured. So for this council in Cologne to have gone ahead and willingly disrupted what previous generations painstakingly worked hard to preserve ... considering that Cologned was blasted to hell by bombers and combat ... it’s telling, and not for entirely positive reasons.
Are the Muslims to blame? No. They did what any religious organization in a free society does when it seeks to accommodate its expanding membership. It accepts design proposals, decides what it can afford and puts them before the local authorities for zoning approval just like the folks over here. At least their people are getting off their dupas and they take their faith seriously. We should take note, (we, meaning Christians, regardless of ethnicity or geographical locations.)
And is it the Muslim’s fault that they’re able to become more ascendant in rapid fashion vz the Christian (or nominally Christian) majority population. No more than it was the Catholics’ “fault” when they finally overtook the old Yankee establishment in the late 19th Century in New England, an area where it was illegal for any Catholic, much less an Irish Catholic, to be found in especially during the decades prior to the Famine. The Protestant establishment, by and large, save for the more traditionalist and then much more conservative Episcopalian Church in the area, could’ve cared less what your denomination taught so long as it wasn’t “tainted” by “popery” and was officially non-Catholic. (That’s what allowed the Episcopalians to grow.) But the old-line Puritan/Congregationalist Yankee churches started losing much of their salt as early as the booting of Jonathan Edwards from Northampton, notwithstanding the brief impact he and George Whitfield had in the area and on the Revolution. But it faded real fast once freedom and COMPLACENCY settled in, and the devil sure made good use of those complacent idle minds ... ‘cept when the Catholics washed ashore. Then they were Capital P Protestants again, but only for identification purposes only insofar as maintaining their position on the totem pole.
Maybe that’s what happened in Europe. The going was very good in Germany’s Economic Miracle years, perhaps complacency and spiritual idleness that usually comes with prosperity (sans sufficient gratitude)then did their jobs, accompanied by a very left-leaning and semi-anti-American and anti-western culture which was allowed to worm its way through the curriculum of many German schools and the following generations, the children of the tantrum-throwers of ‘68 had by then begun to lose almost all faith in God, their Christian heritage and focused too much on the negatives of their history while ignoring all the glorious contributions to civilization in the graphic arts, music, literature (largely through Catholic/general Christian influences)and settled for the banality of post-modern “cubist” junk. (Read George Weigel’s The Cathedral and the Cube or check his blog: http://georgeweigel.blogspot.com/2007/12/george-weigel-cube-and-cathedral.html .)
What’s it going to take? The demolition of a famous landmark, to be replaced not even by a mosque, synagogue, etc., but a shopping mall or just as bad, a ballpark that’ll carry some company’s name for decades, and stocked with super-luxury boxes that are subsidized by every single taxpayer through the wealthy owners manipulation of the tax codes for their amusement purposes whilst they watch other people make millions playing childrens’ games?
In fairness to the Germans, at least they have a Chancellor who’s willing to buck her chattering classes; a far cry from what we’re seeing in other European nations, save for Poland and even Italy. In England, your Christian faith will be held against you if you want to adopt a child into a loving home.
While the sports-facility prospect I used above might galvanize enough Americans to wake up and realize what they’re losing; the Europeans, especially Germans will perhaps wake up one day when they find that some Muslim dominated local city council or zoning board outlawed their local annual Kristkindlmarkt on perfectly legal, albeit specious grounds to us Christians. I doubt that’ll happen because the Muslims are intelligent enough to realize what Christmas means to the majority population and the economic impact of what losing these wonderful outdoor markets will mean. For now anyway. What happens if the councils are dominated by a more puritanical group of, say perhaps Wahabist Muslims, who unlike so many lackluster western Christians, will put their faith in God as they see Him, before the proverbial golden calf of materialism?
Jim:
Sorry. Can’t please everybody I guess. I was, FWIW, writing with my own mediocrity in mind. After all, I believe the story of Fatima, which makes me as responsible to respond to it as if I had been an eyewitness. But I’m not exactly up to par even with the sanctity of a seven year old peasant girl. So, as you note, I need to get on with Lent.
By the way, your prayers would be appreciated. I have been plowing through a ton of work for over a month now and this may have something to do with why my post is displeasing to your. I dunno. May God bless you this Lent.
Michael:
The sun is not Venus, nor was it night and there were plenty of visual cues absent from your darkened planetarium. Explanations like this always seem to participate in the notion that people at Fatima were a hundred years dumber than we are. I urge you to look at the evidence for the Miracle of the Sun. Eyestrain does not cut it as an explanation.
Steven - Would you have had the same problem if instead of a Muslim mosque being built in Germany it was a Jewish synagogue or a Hindu temple or a Mormon Cathedral? How consistent are you.
Mark - More of a miracle that no other people on the planet witnessed the eratic movements of the sun at that time and only the faith filled pilgrims who were told to stare at the sky looking for a sign say it? Would you believe this account if it was attested to by 70,000 Hindus or Muslims or Mormons? I can produce many accounts from them that I would assume you would dismiss. And do you have any criteria for discerning real from mistaken (or hoxes) miracles or do you just accept the ones that confirm your religious predispositions?
And don’t forget the revelation of Fatima that there are more people in hell for sexual sins than for any others. Kind of embarassing to say in public that the creator of the universe’s morality is fixated on what consenting adults do while naked.
Michael:
Seriously. Before playing the “I’m way smarter than peasant suckers who will believe anything” card, go find out what actually happened. In fact, many of the people who turned out for the promised sign were skeptics who came to laugh and remained to pray, including the editor of O Seculo, the fiercely anti-clerical paper. Portugal had a strong contingent of people extremely hostile to the Church who were eager to sneer and not at all the peasant hysterics you imagine. In addition, the Miracle was witnessed by lots and lots of people many miles from the site of the apparitions who were neither interested in, nor thinking about, the apparitions when the miracle occurred.
Mass hysterical hallucination is the sort of explanation that *only* gets trotted out in the attempt to explain away miracles. In this case, there are insuperable problems with that exceedingly lame explanation. Really, do the homework before trotting out these glib dismissals.
I didn’t call the “peasants suckers”, you did. I never claimed I was “way smarter” than them, you made that accusation. I never said they would “believe anything”, you did. ( I hope this isn’t you projecting) All I am saying is that one must be very skeptical of “miracles”, especially when they confirm one’s pre-ordained beliefs. “Miracles” like this happen in a variety of religions in all different cultures and most can be explained by natural phenomena.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. All Lourdes and Fatima need to do to prove a miracle is to have someone leave a wooden leg at the shrine rather than a crutch. I’ve only seen lots and lots of crutches.
Would you believe this account if it was attested to by 70,000 Hindus or Muslims or Mormons?
Sure, assuming there is reasonable evidence. In fact, I do think the testimony of a huge crowd of Muslims to an apparition is, in this case, reliable. Note that the apparition took place at a Coptic Orthodox, not Catholic, Church. I have no doctrine which holds that God is somehow only bound to work wonders for Christians.
I can produce many accounts from them that I would assume you would dismiss.
You are wrong. I would not necessarily accept all claims of the miraculous, of course. But I am not bound, as you are, by a philosophy which decrees that I must not admit the possibility of the miraculous no matter what. If the evidence looks reasonable that 70,000 people saw a miracle, I think the sensible thing is to take their word for it.
And do you have any criteria for discerning real from mistaken (or hoxes) miracles or do you just accept the ones that confirm your religious predispositions?
Here, again, you display your ignorance of how deeply *disinclined* the Church is to accept claims of private revelation. Investigation of Fatima took 13 years. If you like, I can recommend books and links to discussions of how the Church establishes very sensible (and rigorous) criteria for dealing with claims of miracles and private revelations. Turns out the average intelligence of Catholics is much like that of atheists and, indeed, the Church has a very strong interest in weeding out false or phony claims.
</i>And don’t forget the revelation of Fatima that there are more people in hell for sexual sins than for any others. Kind of embarassing to say in public that the creator of the universe’s morality is fixated on what consenting adults do while naked.</i>
Only if you happen to think that sex and love have nothing to do with one another. The embarrassing thing is how provincial moderns are in actually swallowing that line of bull. Sins of the flesh are, in the Catholic tradition, the least serious of mortal sins. But if they do the job of severing your relationship with God, that’s all that’s necessary, because hell is nothing other than the loss of communion with God.
I never said I would never accept miracles based upon my philosophy, once again you are assuming based perhaps on your predisposition of skeptics. I only said that I require extraordinary evidence to accept a claim, especially when in many cases much more pedestrian explanations would suffice. (A combination of Occam’s razor and Hume’s’ criteria for accepting a miracle).
I am glad you accept (at least some) of the miracles in the faith traditions of Muslims, Hindus, Mormons, etc. At least you show consistency as I hope I do in expressing skepticism in the light (no pun intended) of so many miraculous claims can be explained by physical mechanisms.
Sex and love have everything to do with each other. But committing a mortal sin by wearing a condom, I doubt it.
If sins of the flesh are the least serious of mortal sins, I assume less so than murder, war, slavery, etc. your God’s hell must be a very full place indeed because over the years one can read of the number of people who committed the later acts and they must be less than those who committed sexual sins. As a non-believer I cannot imagine anything that would cause me to torture a child of mine indefinitely, but obviously your God’s ethics are different than mine.
Hi Mark: Where do you get the info that sins of the flesh are, in the Catholic Tradition, the least serious of mortal sins..Also you mention that hell is nothing more than a loss of communion with God. Isn’t really more than that including punishment for sins including fire and pain etc.
Hugh:
Re: sins of the flesh vs. sins of the spirit, I’m basically relying on St. Thomas. You can see the same idea in Dante.
And you are right about Hell. I wrote too fast. Its *core* is the loss of communion with God, but there are other sufferings that attend it. Mea culpa.
@Michael Hogan. You brought up a good point and a fair question. If the synagogue or temple or even a Christian church/cathedral/basilica/temple or megachurch stood out like a sore thumb in an area where it never should’ve received a zoning permit to build, sure I’d be skeptical or opposed to its construction—on that particular site.
It’s one thing to make accommodations for foreigners or people belonging to a minority faith when it comes to making sure they’ll be treated fairly in the proceedings and that cultural sensitivities will be respected. Allowing any religious body to come in and build a huge edifice that’ll clearly alter the long-established and recognized cityscape purely out of a desire to placate them for politically correct reasons, or fears that any rejection or request for a scaling down of the minarets’ heights, would be seen as a “racist” or “anti-Muslim” act defies cultural, architectural, and not the least, political commonsense.
Germany’s done more than any nation to make up for the scar of the Holocaust. Granted, she was primarily responsible for it, but she had plenty of enabling allies and patsies throughout the countries she dominated in World War II ... and many of those patsies have yet to fully come to grips with their role(s) in the extermination of all of the Holocaust’s victims. It’s understandable why Germany is perhaps overly solicitous in some instances; but consider what she was like when she was the opposite.
I used the Cologne example because I remember reading about it a year or so ago and it was quite an interesting story. But you can go through the European press and find lots of other even more egregious examples of where the European cultural baptized Christians have shown their religio-cultural state of exhaustion and with that, a glaring lack of desire to get back on their legs and take a stand on behalf of their own continental heritage, (of which Christianity has played such a prominent if not dominant role in shaping.)
It’s very difficult to understand how a group of nations which have basically tossed in their cultural chips at the table, and watched as the Muslims began overtaking them in terms of rising birth rates or just the act of taking one’s faith seriously ... yet at the same time consistently deny Turkey, a NATO ally and partially European nation, from membership in the EU. Well, perhaps it’s the fact that Muslims do take their faith seriously, thus shaming the Euro-Christians that the latter has such a difficult time welcoming their NATO ally.
Cubism in politics, sociology and the handling of religious differences is as cold as its representative “art.” Cubist “art” (a real oxymoron) is NOT relative to any form of Christian or pre-modernist architecture of the past century. BTW, American-style “megachurch architecture” is as close to “Cubist ‘art’” as Christianity unfortunately allows. lol
Hey Mark: Thank you for your quick response. God Bless You and may His Face shine upon you…Hugh
I think the article is spot on! I’ve wondered, too….you’d think we’d be crazy about God and live that way, with all the proof he gives us….miracles happen every day ....God reaches out to us every day…..I do believe!!!
Wow. A perfect example of the content of the article right here in the combox. Nice!
Hi, Michael. Yeah, it does sound ridiculous: “committing a mortal sin by wearing a condom.” I don’t suppose the condom is the essential element here. I suspect that “deliberate and intentional misuse of one’s own body and that of another person, with no regard for the Creator’s intention or the ultimate well-being of my partner” is probably the real point, and the condom is the physical symptom.
Billy Bean - alas no. With regards to condoms in Catholic theology, it’s not intention that matters, condoms are intrinsically evil. There is no Catholic justification for their use in heterosexual intercourse. Does their use really justify hell as Our Lady of Fatima tells us (most people are in hell for sexual sins)?
Michael
A physical object cannot be intrinsically evil. Not Even an atomic bomb or a satanic bible or the rifle that shot JFK. *Things* are not evil. They can be put to evil use. Please try to learn what you are talking about before attempting to instruct people who know what they are talking about why they are wrong.
Mark - You must have had Jesuit training, like me. Correct, an object isn’t intrinsically evil, it’s the use of that object. In Catholic moral theology the use of a condom in heterosexual intercourse is always illicit as it removes the procreative from the unitave aspect of sex. (The pope’s recent comment about its use in homosexual intercourse aside.) If the Church had stressed intention over action, it wouldn’t be in such a indedensible position now. How many people have left the Church because they found this teaching inconpatible with their moral outlook, one will never now.
Mark - Looking back on my original post I see I did refer to condoms in their use in heterosexual intercourse as being intrinsically evil so your dismive post saying that my reference solely to an object as intrinsically evil is a (deliberate) misreading of my post to avoid answering my point. That point was that Our Lady of Fatima, whose apparition you are so confident in, said that the majority of people in hell were there for sexual sins one of which, according to Catholic ethical theology, is the use (intention is irrelevant) of a condom for heterosexual intercourse.
Your admonition to “try to learn what you are talking about before attempting to instruct people who know what they are talking about why they are wrong” I will answer with “don’t twist the words of people you don’t agree with so you can produce an answer you can respond to rather than deal with what the person actually said.”
Obviously it’s your column, you’re free to respond to whatever you like and let the readers decide.
@ Michael: I’m well aware of the phenomenon you are talking about. I noticed it as a child; even then, never once did I think there was anything extraordinary about it—that would take something that actually *was* extraordinary. Perhaps I am making a leap in assuming I am not all that exceptional and most people are probably at least as intelligent as I was in kindergarten, but it does seem that you must think those people were colossal dupes, even if you don’t put it in so many words. I have a very hard time buying that as an explanation.
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