The Lessons of Louvain

Clarity is the courtesy we owe to those who, while they may reject our views as mistaken, nevertheless evince enough curiosity to ask why it is we believe the things we do. And now and again—not always, of course—it may happen that having plainly told them, they may actually come round to believing those same things as well. 

But only if there is an equal respect for the truth on either side. For others, however, such clarity serves only to confirm the fact that the chasm looming between us is both real and unbridgeable. Which, in the absence of any openness to change, not even the grace of God can overcome. 

Take, for instance, the issue of ordaining women to the priesthood, which has long been one of those hot-button issues dividing Catholics from practically everyone else. In fact, the divisions are happening more and more inside our own household of faith, which has become a source of considerable grief and confusion to the faithful.

Including, one would imagine, the current pope, who was rudely assailed recently by a group of so-called Catholic students at the University of Louvain, who dismissed both him and his arguments as “deterministic and reductive.” This was followed by no less a rebuff than that issued by officials of the university itself, who announced that not only had they “disapproved” of the positions taken by the Holy Father but that they were reduced to a state of sheer “incomprehension” on hearing so reactionary a presentation.

Indeed, so alien a presence to the august University of Louvain were the pope’s teachings on the role of women in the Church and in the home that officials featured a jazz rendition of Lady Gaga’s LGBTQ+ anthem “Born This Way” as an entertainment interlude to further augment the point.

How acutely painful the circumstances must have been for Pope Francis! Invited by the University to help celebrate its 600th anniversary, an occasion meant to highlight the importance of honoring a great center of Catholic learning, of its long history of fidelity to the Church’s faith, and no sooner does he show up than a gaggle of feminist idealogues swarm all over him to demand an immediate “paradigm change” on all issues relating to women.

And if all that wasn’t enough to cast a pall over the party, he finds himself early on in his visit to Belgium positively lambasted by the nation’s prime minister on the Church’s alleged mishandling of the clergy sex abuse scandal. Not to mention the Church’s continuing refusal to bend the knee before the shrine of reproductive freedom, the exercise of which not only robs God of children made in His image but Belgium and the rest of Europe of a future.

So, why won’t the pope just join hands with the rest of Europe in its collective Death Wish? Why cling to a past everyone else seems to have cheerfully left behind? Instead, what does he do? In the face of so systemic and widespread a rejection of life, he goes into the basement of the Church of Our Lady; there, before the tomb of King Baudouin, he venerates the memory of one whose refusal to give royal assent to a bill in parliament authorizing abortion will very soon result in his being declared a saint. And notwithstanding the pope’s praise for the king, for his heroic refusal to sign into law the murder of innocent children, the learned and the clever remain horrified by the gesture. One disaffected young scholar declared,

We had expectations, even if we saw that he disappointed us in just a few hours. His position on abortion—by saying that the abortion law was a murderous law—it is extremely shocking to see even if we did not expect great moves toward modernity.    

How quaint the young can be on the subject of the pope and the Church. Did they really expect that by coming to Louvain, to Belgium, and seeing firsthand the marvels of modernity, that he would simply acquiesce and elatedly embrace the entire feminist agenda? Do they not know that, for all his evident sympathy for them, for the frustrations they express, he remains quite powerless to effect any essential change on the subject? Certainly not change of the sort feminist ideology would welcome. “Francis said he liked what they said,” according to an ABC News reporter covering the story, “but repeated his frequent refrain that ‘the Church is woman,’ that she “only exists because the Virgin Mary agreed to be the Mother of Jesus and that men and women were complimentary.”

So that’s the warhead? And by unleashing it upon the unsuspecting women of Belgium, the pope is to be reviled? What were they thinking? That Pope Francis would simply walk away from twenty-one uninterrupted centuries of teaching whose origins trace directly back to the Person Jesus Christ Himself? That paradigms more ancient and binding than those of the current moment would be tossed blithely aside? And that because of a loose cannon or two on why we shouldn’t mind “making a mess,” there is to be no limit to how many or serious the messes we make may now be?  

“Woman is fertile welcome,” the pope said, reminding his audience of certain ontological facts that, were we to forget or suppress them, would instantly undo the whole meaning and mission of being a woman, of the core of her identity, which is that of “Care. Vital devotion.”

And to what, finally? To the mystery of life itself. And to the Lord and Giver of life, whose command to the rest of us is that we reverence life, including especially the life in the womb, which is meant to be the fruit of the love between a man and woman in the Sacrament of Holy Matrimony. “Let us be more attentive to the many daily expressions of this love,” the pope pleaded with the young women of Louvain, lest their fixations upon ideology cause them to sin against life:

from friendship to the workplace, from studies to the exercise of responsibility in the Church and society, from marriage to motherhood, from virginity to the service of others and the building up of the Kingdom of God. 

Whether or not the young incendiaries of Louvain heed his words will depend, of course, not on arguments from the Church but from the witness of her own children, quickened by divine grace to show by example the joy and resolution that come from giving everything to God, who is the Father of us all. And to Christ, His Son, who is our brother. And, yes, to His mother Mary, our mother, who is the fount of all our hope.