|
|
|
KARL KEATING'S E-LETTER
TOPICS:
CHRISTIAN CULTURE IS DEAD. LONG LIVE CHRISTIAN CULTURE!
Dear Friend of Catholic Answers:
On Sunday, in an audience held at Castelgandolfo, the Holy Father bemoaned the decline of Christian culture in Europe. He was being polite, since he could have said that Christian culture is almost dead in Europe.
Not that this is a new or surprising development. It isn't. Christian culture has been on the wane in Europe--and here and elsewhere, of course--for decades or, some would argue, for centuries.
It doesn't much matter where you draw the line chronologically. The point is that we and the continent from which we received our cultural patrimony have been going downhill for a long time, and there is not much indication that things are turning around.
This is no surprise either. You can't have a vibrant Christian culture unless you have a vibrant Christianity, and that certainly isn't something that Europe has. We think things are tough here, with only a quarter of the Catholics attending Mass regularly. In Europe they would be thrilled to have a quarter of the Catholics show up for Christmas and Easter. On regular Sundays the turnout is in the single digits.
The decline in culture can't be fixed by this pope or by any other, because culture can't be imposed from the top. It has to be lived from below. If the people are authentically Christian, their culture will be; if they aren't, it won't be. It's that simple and that frustrating.
The French historian Ernst Renan (1823-1892) also bemoaned the decline of Western culture. He wasn't a even practicing Christian, but he realized that something important was disappearing fast. In a famous remark he said that Europe was "living off the perfume of an empty vase." That vase has much less of a scent nowadays, I'm afraid.
Throughout Europe you can see the artifacts of the Christian culture that used to be there, but they are just artifacts. They no longer are parts of a living culture. They have become museum pieces.
Gorgeous churches once opened their doors to loyal and large congregations. Now they open them to camera-wielding tourists and only a token number of the faithful. Such churches never could be built nowadays--not just because architectural preferences may have changed but because there are not enough believers to underwrite the costs. That tells us something.
By the way, I want to make clear that there can be a multitude of Christians without a Christian culture, if those Christians "buy in" to the secular culture around them. This, of course, is what has happened.
There are millions of American Christians who attend church weekly and, during the rest of the week, give no evidence that their faith determines who they are and what they do. Not only do these Christians not want to "impose" their religion on their culture, but they seem not to want to "impose" it on themselves in any substantive way.
When I was young I privately studied Egyptian hieroglyphics and developed a small facility with them. I memorized about 200 of the symbols and some of the grammar. No one really knows how ancient Egyptian was pronounced, since there has not been a native speaker for several thousand years. Still, it was fun to go to the museum, stand before a monument that once was perched along the Nile, and translate the inscription for onlookers.
Many artifacts of ancient Egyptian civilization still exist, the pyramids and the Sphinx being the most famous examples. But there is no ancient Egyptian culture today, not the least trace. The culture one finds in today's Cairo is not a lineal descendant of the culture of the pharaohs.
The artifacts that dot the Egyptian landscape are just artifacts. A scholar can occupy his entire professional life with them, and a young man can learn enough about them to show off at a museum, but then what? The scent from the Egyptian vase dissipated entirely many centuries ago.
Will someone in the distant future be able to say the same about the culture that produced us? "Ah, yes, those fine cathedrals with their entrancing gargoyles and delicate pinnacles; those finely-crafted statues and carefully-fashioned icons; those long-faded paintings; those wayside stations of the cross in the Alpine passes; and those books with a Christian ethos and story line--all of them worth studying but none of them any more constitutive of today's culture than are the monuments of ancient Egypt."
It could happen. In fact, it is happening. Our Lord guaranteed that the Church would not disappear. That's a given. But he never said anything about the longevity of Christian culture, which could be reduced to a mere historical curio.
("In this hall of the museum, ladies and gentlemen, we have the remnants of Hittite culture. In the next hall we have the remnants of Christian culture. Both are obscure.")
I have complete certainty that the Church will not disappear, and I suspect that Christian culture will not disappear either, even though today it is in eclipse. In fact, I think Christian culture will revive. Call me an optimist on this one--but a long-range optimist.
I will not live long enough to see the return of a culture based on Catholic principles, and neither will you. Perhaps our grandchildren will live to see the start of its return. A culture takes a long time to grow, especially one that has been dying for lifetimes.
Woodrow Wilson talked, quite foolishly, about "making the world safe for democracy." I am not interested in making the world safe for democracy, but I am very interested in making the world safe for Christianity. The faith is the necessary condition, I think, for just about anything else--a good culture, a good political order, a good life.
As I see it, Christian culture declined because Christianity declined. You can't have a culture if you take away its basis. If we want to have a Christian culture again (and by that I mean specifically a Catholic culture), then Christianity needs to be what informs the whole of our society. It needs to be the ground of our literature, art, politics, labor, everything.
Put another way, the world needs to become Catholic. If it becomes Catholic, we will end up with a culture based on the Catholic faith.
That's why one of my interests, both short-term and long-term, is conversions--first of Catholics themselves (most of whom are nominally Catholic, not practically Catholic), then of other Christians, then of non-Christians. Actually, all three groups need to be approached simultaneously.
I have no game plan worked out. I just know that this is what needs to be done if we're to have the kind of culture that we'd like to live in. This is not to say that today's culture is without value, without its good points (which are leftovers from when the culture was Christian). But today's culture just isn't what it ought to be, not by a long shot. I have a sense that it can become what it should be, but I have no timetable and no guarantee.
That's okay. I figure I have my part to play, and you have yours. We do what we can. We see a few successes today, and we envision others in the future. We lay the groundwork for what will be accomplished later. Then we exit stage right, and others take over our parts in the drama.
Yes, let's bemoan the decline of Christian culture, but then, like the Pope, let's roll up our sleeves and do what we can to revivify it.
|
|
|
[TOP]
C A T H O L I C A N S W E R S :
of
Index
Prior issue
Next issue
Sign up