Post-Comfortable Christianity and the Election of 2012
Shortly
before he died in Oxford in 1988, the Jesuit retreat master and
raconteur, Bernard Bassett, in good spirits after a double leg
amputation, told me that the great lights of his theological formation
had been Ignatius Loyola and John Henry Newman, but if he “had to do it
all over,” he’d only read Paul. “Everything is there.” There is a
temptation to think that God gave us the Apostle to the Gentiles in
order to have second readings at Sunday Mass, usually unrelated to the
first reading and the Gospel. But everything truly is there. Paul was
one of the most important figures in human history, and a great
character to boot. That is, a character in the happiest sense of the
word. “But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace toward me
was not in vain” (1 Cor 15:10).
Tragedy and comedy intertwine, ultimately issuing in glory, whenever
he is on trial. He longs to live and to die in the same breath: ”For to
me to live is Christ and to die is gain” (Philippians 1:210). Whenever
he is on trial for his life, he invokes a forensic brilliance to save
the very life he is willing to sacrifice. Just as Jesus who had come
into the world to die, slipped through the mob in Nazareth because his
hour had not yet come, so does Paul become his own defense when on
trial, ready to die by God’s calendar and not man’s. In Caesarea, he
confounds Antonius Felix, the Roman governor of Judaea and Samaria, and a
little later he does the same to the successor of Felix, Procius
Festus. The best court scene is Paul before Marcus Annaeus Novatus,
who had taken the name of his adoptive father Junius Gallio, the
rhetorician and friend of his father Seneca Sr. whose son Seneca, Jr.
was the noble Stoic. Nero forced Seneca’s suicide, but before that, in
Achaia where Gallio was proconsul, Paul was bit of a Rumpole of the
Bailey, in how he played the jury like a piano to the frustration of the
judge. The point is this: Paul, both innocent and shrewd, was willing
to suffer and did so regularly, as he was not loathe to recount at
length, and he was also ready to die, but as death comes but once, he
wanted it to be at the right moment.
There is in Paul a model for Catholics at the start of the Third
Millennium which began with fireworks and Ferris wheels but is now
entering a sinister stage. Like Paul, it is not possible to be a
Christian without living for Christ by suffering for him, nor is it
possible to be a Christian without willing to die for him when he
wants. The Christian veneer of American culture has cracked and
underneath is the inverse of the blithe Christianity that took shape in
the various enthusiasms of the nineteenth century and ended when voters
were under the impression that they finally had a Catholic president.
This new period is not “Post-Christian” because nothing comes after
Christ. We can, however, call it “Post-Comfortable Christian.”
Niebuhr, looking out from New York’s Neo-Athens on Morningside Heights
with its Modernist Christian seminaries and highly endowed preaching
palaces and office towers of denominational bureaucracies, caricatured
the Messiah of mainline religiosity: ”A God without wrath brought men
without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of
a Christ without a cross.” The virtual collapse of those institutions
on Morningside Heights, is mute testimony to the truth of his irony.
The bishops of the United States have asked the faithful to pray for
religious liberty, now facing unprecedented assault. The national
election in November, 2012 will either give Christians one last chance
to rally, or it will be the last free election in our nation. This can
only sound like hyperbole to those who are unaware of what happened to
the Slavic lands after World War I and to Western Europe in the
1930’s. St. Paul was writing to us when he wrote to the Galatians and
Corinthians and Washingtonians – or rather, Romans – in his lifetime.
Unless there is a dramatic reversal in the present course of our
nation, those who measured their Catholicism by the Catholic schools
they attended, will soon find most of those institutions officially
pinching incense to the ephemeral genius of their secular leaders, and
universities once called Catholic will be no more Catholic than Brown is
Baptist or Princeton is Presbyterian. The surrender will not come by a
sudden loss of faith in Transubstantiation or doubts about Papal
Infallibility. It will happen smoothly and quietly, as the raptures of
the Netherworld always hum victims into somnolence, by the cost factor
of buying out of government health insurance. Catholic businessmen with
more than fifty employees will be in the same bind. Catholic
institutions and small businesses owned by those with religious and
moral reservations about government-imposed policies, will wither within
a very short time, unable to bear the burden of confiscatory tax
penalties. As analysts have figured, an employer offering a health plan
that does not comply with the preventive services package and other
requirements under the federal health plan could be subject to a
confiscatory penalty. The fine, imposed through a civil penalty or
excise tax on a non-exempted religious employer could be as much as $100
a day for each employee insured under a plan at variance with federal
law. The burden would amount then to $36,500 for each employee.
Add to that the approaching discrimination against Catholics seeking
positions in commerce and public life. Catholics will not be suitable
for public charities, medicine, education, journalism, or in the legal
profession, especially judgeships and law enforcement. As the bishops,
by the acknowledgement of many of their own number, failed to articulate
the cogency of doctrines on contraception and other moral issues, so
will they now, despite the best intentions, not be able to stem the
radical attrition among native Catholics whose eyes are on mammon, and
among recent immigrants whose privileges are guaranteed only if they
vote for opponents of the Church. The general election of 2012 may
rally the fraction of conscientious Catholics among the sixty million or
so sympathetic Catholics. If their influence is not decisive, and the
present course of federal legislation accelerates, encouraged by a
self-destructive appetite for welfare statism on the part of
ecclesiastical bureaucrats, the majority of Catholics with tenuous
commitments to the Faith will evaporate, as did the lapsed baptized in
North Africa during the oppression of the emperor Diocletian.
Should the present direction of the federal government be endorsed by
a reiterative vote in the November elections, more blatant threats to
the Church will begin, culminating in a punitive suspension of tax
exemptions on church properties, once the Church’s moral precepts are
coded as offenses against civil rights. The test case in this instance
will be what is known in Orwellian diction as “same sex marriage.” In
the Supreme Court case, McCulloch v. Maryland, argued in 1819, the same
year that Daniel Webster reduced Chief Justice Marshall to tears in the
Dartmouth College case which vouchsafed private charters, Webster said:
“An unlimited power to tax involves, necessarily, a power to destroy.”
Chief Justice Marshall, an antecedent of Chief Justice Roberts, said
“That the power of taxing (the bank) by the States may be exercised so
as to destroy it, is too obvious to be denied, and that the power to tax
involves the power to destroy (is) not to be denied.”
St. Paul would have understood this. After all, he lived through its
precedents. His self-defense in the secular courts showed his disdain
for bravado and theatrical martyrdom. He enjoyed common sense, reason,
and native intelligence in outwitting evil, for he knew as did St. John
Vianney, who was not as bright as the student of Gamaliel but whose
heart was at least as large, that “the Devil is stupid.” Because of
that, the Devil can only get his way with the help of stupid Catholics.
This year offers the best and possibly last chance to see how many
actually obey Christ’s pastoral instruction in a conflicted world:
“Behold, I am sending you out as a sheep among wolves, so be shrewd as
serpents and innocent as doves” (Matt. 10:16). (http://www.crisismagazine.com/2012/the-election-of-2012)
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