The Beginning of the End of Recreational Catholicism

Recreational Catholicism? Let me explain.

It is an attribution identifying the current stage of collapse in the Roman Church. Its coinage is meant to convey the tangled knot of the therapeutic, political, theatrical, and ego-massaging trend besetting the Church, all of which produces a kind a zombie Catholic, who is daily fed on what Huxley called in Brave New World the “feelies”: engineered pleasures that maintain their victims in a state of floating euphoria.

Its principal vehicle is the liturgy, where Sunday “celebrations” are carefully planned by Liturgy Committees for maximum effusions of non-threatening messages of “welcoming.” While normal men gag on its oozing sentimentality, certain kinds of Catholics crave it. Sunday after Sunday. It is like a narcotic, you see.

Music is meticulously chosen to leave participants in swoons of gratified self-absorption. Toxic language, such as defined doctrine or the moral law, are proscribed. In fact, not a few bishops insist that the communion line (deliberate lower case for accuracy) be absolutely non-discriminatory. One and all come forward, the shepherds intone, because the sacrament is not a place of judgment but a place of warm fellowship.

All of this is topped by celebrant priests who see their roles as talk show hosts. Each is vested shabbily enough (a requirement) to telegraph a casualness consistent with sipping margaritas. Added to this are churches resembling airport lounges. Of course, the Recreational bureaucracy is always intent upon improvement. So now churches are equipped with jumbo screens guaranteeing the mood of a sports bar.

Other vehicles exist to proffer Recreational Catholicism. The entire educational apparatus of the Catholic Church, for instance. What was once an unprecedented tool for the inculcation of Catholic truth and devotion has become a factory of counter-Catholicism. Every facet—from grammar schools, high schools, universities, and colleges, to seminaries and houses of formation—have become appendages of a sprawling Recreational Catholicism. Even the once named “convert classes” (now labeled RCIA) are immersions in an inverted Catholicism with familiarity of the Nicene Creed as foreign as Sanskrit.

At the highest levels of church governance, defense of the Faith is now replaced by another tentacle of Recreational Catholicism—the Synodal Listening sessions. These are sandbox exercises where participants babble about redesigning a Catholic Faith more suited to a modern, woke sensibility. Breezy conversation stands in place of granite doctrine, producing a Catholic Church stretched into forms barely resembling historic Christianity. Various dicasteries of the Holy See concoct a no-fault Catholicism where the repeal of the moral law proceeds apace by a thousand cuts, and traditional Catholic dogma suffers the blows of intentional ambiguity.

This Recreational Catholicism is merely the next iteration of historic Modernism. The 1907 heresy was a more subtle version of Renan’s 1893 Vie de Jesus, a shocking reinterpretation of the New Testament, blanched of any trace of the supernatural. Or, in the charged words of his disciple C.A. Sainte-Beuve, “we have forced Jesus to hand in His resignation from the Godhead.” This was nothing less than a take-no-prisoners assault on doctrinal Catholicism. By the closing years of the nineteenth century, the Catholic Modernists appeared. Fathers Loisy, Tyrrell, et al. insisted upon a more “spiritual” Catholicism, where the object of Faith was not the crude intrusions of Divine Revelation and its doctrines, but a gentler “spiritual faith.” Doctrinal Catholicism was to be surrendered to a religion of personal élan.   This Recreational Catholicism is merely the next iteration of historic Modernism. Tweet This

G.K. Chesterton remarked; “Beware those who clamor for the spirit of Christianity, for what they really want is the ghost of Christianity.”

Modernism is Christianity’s “ghost.”

Recreational Catholicism is Catholicism’s “ghost.”

Just as the same Chesterton spoke of the five resurrections of the Church, in his memorable The Everlasting Man, we are on the cusp of a sixth. Or, to borrow from the First Letter of the first-century Pope Clement, the Church is like the phoenix rising from the ashes. Look carefully, and you will see it. And it’s happening today. Before our very eyes.

With the headwinds of crisis still whipping against our faces, many might miss it. Moreover, its beginnings are small, like all great things. But it possesses remarkable strength. It is showing itself on every continent—but, surprisingly, strongest in America.   With the headwinds of crisis still whipping against our faces, many might miss it. Moreover, its beginnings are small, like all great things. But it possesses remarkable strength. It is showing itself on every continent.Tweet This

First, and most importantly, this renaissance is manifesting itself among the faithful—especially the young. They have witnessed Recreational Catholicism and find it like feasting on sawdust. Many of them have awakened and are discovering the riches of the Faith in classic theology and philosophy once thought to be safely buried by elite mandarins of Modernism. They are thrilling to such old authors as Fathers Garrigou-Lagrange and Ambroise Gardeil, Msgr. Ronald Knox and Fr. Gerald Vann, Fathers Basil Maturin and Edward Leen. To say nothing of Lewis, Chesterton, Pieper, Daniel-Rops, Gilson, and Maritain. Add to these Msgr. Robert Benson, Fr. C.C. Martindale, and Hilaire Belloc.

Other Catholics are founding publishing houses (such as Sophia Institute Press, Ignatius Press, Os Justi Press, Emmaus Press, Cluny Press, and Angelico Press, to name a few), online magazines (like Crisis, LifeSiteNews and OnePeterFive), creating routine podcasts and daily radio shows (like The Catholic Current with the imitable Fr. Robert McTeigue)—all of whom can be likened to the pre-Soviet era Radio Free Europe. With skill and ingenuity, they are broadcasting the message of Doctrinal Catholicism over the heads of the cadaverous ecclesial bureaucracy that sits like a massive beached whale on the Mystical Body of Christ. These dynamic New Catholics have become the lean and diminutive David, slinging the tiny polished stones of the Victorious Christ against the massive and dollar-bloated Goliath of the conventional leadership.  

This high-powered group of young Catholics is impassioned with an electrifying love of the Old Faith, and they are aborning a renaissance before our very eyes. Coming from their numbers are priests. Scores and scores of them. Many are entering the Traditional orders of the Fraternity of St. Peter or Institute of Christ the King. Both seminaries are at their maximum capacity, training young men in the fashion of the seminaries from the Council of Trent to 1965.  

Catholics owe it to themselves to visit these impressive battlegrounds of sanctity and learning. Their superiors appreciate that they are sending newly anointed priests as sheep in the midst of wolves. To that end, their training has the feel of Parris Island, with order and discipline sitting upon the crown of their ascetical/theological/philosophical formation like jewels set in a golden diadem. After eight years of this blessed rigor, they are launched, in the words of Henri Daniel-Rops, to bring to the world and the Church “a revolution of the Cross.”  

Even some dioceses have begun to imitate the seminary classical program, and they are reaping astonishing results. Discretion prohibits naming them due to the present climate in which the Church finds herself. But Catholics can rest their heads more securely upon their pillows at night knowing that legions of young men are being summoned by the Holy Spirit to lead this New Renaissance.

It should not surprise us that these newly ordained priests are becoming pastors in record time. A proper supernatural attitude can see how the vocation dearth acts as a blessing. It permits priests who normally would wait decades to be pastors to take on that role in seeming minutes. 

Unafraid of the spiritual, doctrinal, and liturgical ruins that face them, they meet the challenge with creative, careful, and heroic swiftness, sometimes verging on the dramatic. A very young pastor in southern New Jersey recently read that a local church was shuttering its doors. He wasted no time in hiring engineers to devise a plan to transport all of its marble sanctuary altars and altar rails and reset them in his church. After several months of meticulous moving and repositioning, a church conceived in the seventies to appear like a dentist’s waiting room underwent a miraculous transformation in marble. In fact, the extraordinary pastor named his renaissance “Faith moves Marble.” But he is not finished. He is now in the planning stages of constructing a medieval tower to adjoin his church.  

This new phalanx of wondrous priests does not act in half measures. They recognize that the faithful have hungered without bread long enough.

Amid this astonishing good news, there is still more. The Traditional Mass grows in leaps and bounds, all the more striking given the circumstance of its three-year suppression. Again, only a supernatural attitude will do. In many ways, this explosive growth depended upon scores of young Catholics exploring the internet to investigate what they were told was a malignancy growing in the womb of the Church. Investigate they did. What they found did not fit the cautions of malignancy about which they were cautioned. And they rushed to the Traditional Mass. In fact, very soon in the Washington, D.C., area a group of young Catholics will march for the preservation of the Traditional Mass.

All this to the consternation of these young people’s betters. To quote Graham Greene in Brighton Rock: “I cannot understand, nor can you, the appalling strangeness of God’s Mercy.”

Sorrow and wrath over the wreckage of the past sixty years will not do.

A New Springtime is about, albeit so very small; but a Springtime, nonetheless.

[Photo: Chartres pilgrimage (Credit: OSV News photo/courtesy Notre-Dame de Chrétienté)]