Re-Enchanting Catholic Speech

Recently, I told my 4-year-old the story of the Miracle of the Sun that took place during the last apparition of the Blessed Virgin at Fatima on Oct. 13, 1917. Her reaction was completely unlike mine when I first read about this miracle at Marc Barnes’ blog back over a decade ago. I, at that point already an avowed believer in miracles in principle, had not yet come around on most miracles in particular. “Yes, Jesus rose from the dead, but nothing of note has happened since,” I might have said to myself.

When I told my daughter what happened at the Cova da Iria over 100 years ago, she was not surprised. She was filled with wonder, of course—she knows enough to know that the sun doesn’t dance around the sky. I, on the other hand, reading about it for the first time at age 16 or so as a prospective Catholic, was absolutely floored that I had never heard about it before. I eventually chalked up the silence to my Protestant background and the Mother of God’s role in the miracle. Imagine my surprise when, even after I converted, I scarcely heard this incredible event mentioned.

When most adult Catholics do talk about Fatima, it is usually in the context of a warning about Hell, an exhortation to repent, and a direction to pray the Rosary daily. Perhaps we hear about the three secrets of Fatima, usually exaggerated. When we talk about Our Lady of Guadalupe, the miraculous image (both its origin and its inherent qualities) on the tilma is often quickly bypassed in favor of discussing the ways that the appearance to a man like St. Juan Diego shows God’s care for the poor and lowly sung about by Mary in the Magnificat (Luke 1:52). These moral lessons are of course true—we should fear judgment, repent, pray—but by focusing on the metaphor, we filter out the shock of the supernatural. My daughter is ready to accept the most obviously supernatural elements of our faith. She knows that if she falls into a lake she will sink; she knows just as well that when she sees the icon of Christ lifting St. Peter out of the water and hears the reading at Divine Liturgy every summer, it really happened. We adults, even those who really believe that miracles are possible and happen, instinctively filter out the shock of the supernatural.

This phenomenon is brought into sharp focus by the ongoing crisis of belief in the Real Presence; whether the true number of Catholics who believe the dogma is one-third or two-thirds, it is clear that a vast portion of the Church has adopted a purely symbolic, sanitized understanding of the Sacrament. Whatever the true number, the CARA study revealed another concerning statistic: just under one half of adult Catholics in the U.S. can correctly identify the Church’s teaching on the Eucharist, with a slim majority incorrectly believing that the Church teaches a symbolic understanding.

To remain respectable in a materialist, secular culture, even orthodox Catholics have unconsciously adopted a sanitized vocabulary. When was the last time you heard a homily on the dozens of well-attested Eucharistic miracles? There has been a slight increase in discussion with the recent National Eucharistic Congress and the canonization of St. Carlo Acutis, who designed a website to catalog such miracles. Do we adults talk about these miracles with and in front of our children, as if they really happened (as they surely did)? Our culture, steeped in materialism as it is, has trained us to translate miracles into ethical reminders or de facto parables, and we run the risk of passing on this mode of speech to our children. The miracle evidence for Catholicism is immense (though of course insufficient to convince anyone who is closed off), but the real benefit of embracing the ongoing miraculous nature of our faith is to reclaim what Charles Taylor called an enchanted view of the world. We have created “buffered selves,” where the physical and the spiritual aspects of our beings (and beliefs) are separate. If we only speak of God acting through His effects on us through the Sacraments, rather than the real change effected by the priest at the Altar, or the physical healing that can come about from the sacrament of Anointing, it is no wonder that by the time we have grown up, we are confused even about what the Church believes.

A disenchanted, materialist culture cannot be converted using its own sterile vocabulary. Christianity is not a philosophy with helpful and comforting symbols attached. It is an invasion of infinity and eternity into physical matter and human history. One of the most evocative titles for the Mother of God in the Christian East is Platytera ton Ouranon—More spacious than the heavens. St. Augustine evokes the same idea at the end of his sermon for the Nativity (184): “The heavens cannot contain him, a woman carried him in her bosom.” Mary contains Him who cannot be contained by all of creation! If this is true, why should the sun not obey His mother and dance around the sky? Why shouldn’t the Eucharist transform physically into flesh and blood?

Those of us who pride ourselves on our orthodoxy do not need to be convinced that the supernatural is real, but we do need the courage to speak about it unapologetically. We must refuse the temptation to translate Christ’s miracles (in Scripture and in recent history!) into safe, respectable metaphors. A disenchanted world will only be converted by a Church that speaks with the absolute conviction that the physical veil has been pierced. We must work to become like little children again—looking at the Altar, looking at the sky, and speaking to each other with the total, guileless wonder of a child who knows the sun can dance.