By Russell Shaw
Will the present whiff of secularist persecution be a help toward
healing what ails American Catholics as a Church? Leaving aside predictions,
I’ll only say: it may.
Cardinal Timothy Dolan has a flair for getting
people’s attention. The archbishop of New York did that recently by declaring
the Big Apple “mission territory.” Many other bishops could say the same of
their sees. As far back as 1943 in fact, the famous Cardinal Suhard of Paris
became forever linked to the title of a book—La France, Pays de Mission?—that he’d commissioned two youth
chaplains to write.
In France as in New York and many another place,
the fundamental problem was and is the same. Cardinal Dolan calls it “the
societal crisis of faith.”
In just two months, a general assembly
of the world Synod of Bishops will be under way in Rome wrestling with the
problem implied in calling New York or Paris or anywhere else outside the third
world mission territory. Its theme, chosen by Pope Benedict XVI, will be the
new evangelization. And new evangelization, as nearly everyone must know by
now, has repeatedly been proposed by Pope Benedict and Pope John Paul II before
him as a matter of the highest urgency.
But for all the discussion the topic
has received, there’s a large question: How do you do it? Without imagining that
it’s the whole answer, I suggest that unyielding resistance to militant
secularism — as in the U.S. bishops’ campaign in defense of religious liberty
against secularist inroads — may be the best tool for a new evangelization
presently available to the Church in the United States and other Western
countries.
There’s anecdotal but real evidence for that. A
book I coauthored several years ago with Father C.J. McCloskey ("Good News, Bad News") cites the witness
of recent converts who report that, disgusted by the increasing decadence of
the secular culture, they were drawn to Catholicism as the most effective
bulwark against it. The continuing onslaught against the Church in sectors of
the secular media is a form of negative testimony to the same reality.
Something I heard not long ago helps
illustrate the point.
Several Catholic men had come
together for an evening of conversation and fellowship. One of them was a
fairly new convert to Catholicism, and someone asked him what moved him to take
that step.
Here’s what he said:
“I’d reached a point in my life
where I was puzzling over the big questions that people sooner or later do
face — what’s the meaning of it all and what am I doing here and where am I
going? That kind of thing.
“I thought hard about all that, and
after a while I came to a conclusion. In the end, there are two, and only two,
real options—atheism and Catholicism. The other possibilities just can’t
compete. So I thought it over some more, and I decided that Catholicism was the
best bet.
“And that is why I’m a Catholic
now.”
Not everyone will see the options that
clearly. And not all who do will reach the same conclusion. But others are
likely to travel the same intellectual and spiritual path as the options become
ever more clear in the face of secularism’s cultural imperialism.
As that happens, many will find themselves
turning to the Catholic Church — or perhaps turning back to the Church they abandoned
years ago. Provided that — and this is crucial — the Church keeps up the good fight
for decency and faith in our confused and polarized society.
