Calling a Spade a Spade

Bearings

            “You must keep to what you have been taught and know to be true; remember who your teachers were, and how, ever since you were a child, you have known the holy scriptures – from these you can learn the wisdom that leads to salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. All scripture is inspired by God and can profitably be used for teaching, for refuting error, for guiding people’s lives and teaching them to be holy. This is how the man who is dedicated to God becomes fully equipped and ready for any good work.

            Before God and before Christ Jesus who is to be judge of the living and the dead, I put this duty to you, in the name of his Appearing and of his kingdom: proclaim the message and, welcome or unwelcome, insist on it. Refute falsehood, correct error, call to obedience – but do all with patience and with the intention of teaching.” (2 Timothy 17:8-13 from the 29^th Sunday in Ordinary Time – Year C)

            A couple days ago I viewed Fr. Robert Barron’s latest video, “Fr. Barron comments on The Depressing Pew Forum Study”. I was impressed especially by his image of a disarmed Catholicism of decades past, colorless, beige (as he says it), running naively into the arms of a modernity which is running in the other direction and the Church or parts of it (this caricature of the faith today really) being devoured or torn to shreds by that same modernity, who wants no part of her with or without her tradition. I shared the video with some of my people only to get the surprise of my life by having it categorically rejected by a middle-aged woman, with no particular agenda or leanings to the right or to the left, as off-hand and misty-eyed, “The-Sky-Is-Falling”, Chicken Little speak. Needless to say, I was shocked and decided to sit on the matter and wait for light or some kind of enlightenment.

            If this terse dismissal of Fr. Barron’s read of the “Pew Forum Study” as something valid and telling about Church today had caught my eye in a comment box at the bottom of his blog it would have been different. This double-barreled blast came from someone outside the blogging world, unaccustomed to the frequently jaded banter of the few remaining uncensored bottoms of the pages. This is rather someone in that broad spectrum of your average people in the pew, who might even have been asked to answer questions by the “Forum”. Perhaps, as far as this woman is concerned, Father’s mistake was in lending credence to the “Pew Forum Study”, which could just as well be a setup by the same babes-in-the-woods or over-the-hill types, who still haven’t figured out that modernity is not about to be disarmed by their dull cuteness.

            The Second Reading for this Sunday kind of came to my rescue as I waited for light. “You must keep to what you have been taught and know to be true; remember who your teachers were, and how, ever since you were a child, you have known the holy scriptures – from these you can learn the wisdom that leads to salvation through faith in Christ Jesus.”

            I think that St. Paul knows what is at issue in the world and he knows his interlocutor within the Church as well: an overseer appointed by him, a bishop of that early Church, St. Timothy. St. Paul picks up the thread to be woven into the tapestry of Timothy’s leadership mantle, capable of doing what Church does for itself and obviously, if we know anything about St. Paul the Missionary, also for our world (modern, post-modern or otherwise): “Before God and before Christ Jesus who is to be judge of the living and the dead, I put this duty to you, in the name of his Appearing and of his kingdom: proclaim the message and, welcome or unwelcome, insist on it. Refute falsehood, correct error, call to obedience – but do all with patience and with the intention of teaching.” St. Paul is going to build up the Church not by chasing Timothy out after anybody out there in the big, wide Roman or Greek world, but by keeping him home, with his nose to the grindstone, building up the community and otherwise moving only where the Spirit leads him.

            Fr. Barron’s interlocutor remains anonymous. Is it a bishop, a priest, a deacon, a catechist, who? Father is totally right in admonishing (…) to the hard work of recovering real philosophy, salted with metaphysics, theology in the tradition of the Angelic Doctor, and by starting with that gift for the Church in our day, which is the Catechism of the Catholic Church (I wonder if Father Barron and Peter Kreeft don’t read each other?). I’m thinking that Father’s interlocutor has to be the hope of the Church, our seminarians, right? Without being too much of the comment box, I hope you see where I am going: Father seems to be “arm-chairing” the thing in hopes that someone will pick up the ball and run with it. St. Paul took a different approach. 

For those who are in the forefront and hopeful for the Church today, beige is no longer in (the reality of these past decades oft-times might better be described as a romance with tired old heresies). The folly of decades past (all pervasive in some circles but not throughout the Church), which claimed to be courting modernity, was not so much that as the sort of improvisation which in many sectors of Church life (take parish worship and pop Church music) continues to carry the day. Father’s imagery, his caricature of the beige Catholicism, is sort of like Cinderella’s lost slipper, except that nobody is stretching a foot in Prince Charming’s direction in hopes that it might fit. Clever, yes, but not pointed enough to win the kewpie doll, I am sorry. 

I rather think that Father is too good and too ready to believe that reasoned discourse broadcast far and wide will win the day. Timothy! “All scripture is inspired by God and can profitably be used for teaching, for refuting error, for guiding people’s lives and teaching them to be holy. This is how the man who is dedicated to God becomes fully equipped and ready for any good work.” I doubt seriously if I could have done a better video on the topic. My average woman in the pew has brutally posed the only question worthy of the comment box: “What’s his problem?”

These days lots of people tell me how hard it is to get catechism teachers. I know from my French territories how determined they are to have a second go at young adults by binding them into the instruction of their youngest children and giving Mom and Dad, together with sons and daughters an attempt to come to know the Lord. The challenge is that concrete and we find it at home and in our own back yard. 

            “Before God and before Christ Jesus who is to be judge of the living and the dead, I put this duty to you, in the name of his Appearing and of his kingdom: proclaim the message and, welcome or unwelcome, insist on it. Refute falsehood, correct error, call to obedience – but do all with patience and with the intention of teaching.”

            Thank you, St. Paul! Each of you Timothys out there knows who you are and what it is you are called to do. Blessed are those who weep, yes, but let St. Paul call you out to action: “You must keep to what you have been taught and know to be true; remember who your teachers were, and how, ever since you were a child, you have known the holy scriptures – from these you can learn the wisdom that leads to salvation through faith in Christ Jesus.” A bow of the head and cordial thanks also go to my sister in Christ, that average woman in the pew!