Timeless Truths vs. Timely Ones

As President Trump himself has said—including on the campaign trail—one of the purposes for his massively popular political movement was to stop a deeply entrenched ruling class bent on leading the world into World War III. Trump even repeated many times, more somberly and urgently than any other world leader, that recent years have brought us closer than ever to that catastrophic outcome.

And yet, despite the best efforts of peace advocates everywhere, including many of us who advocated peace from within the Trump movement and worked hard to deliver his decisive election victory last year…here we are today, even closer to the brink of a global thermonuclear war.

It’s a jarring thing to wake up to, and many of you are likely searching your minds and hearts in much the same way I am. In that search, here’s the main thought I have arrived at.

It’s been more than ten years since I remember hearing we were entering a new golden age for Catholicism.

Bishop Robert Barron would become our Archbishop Fulton Sheen—spreading the Faith so winsomely and convincingly that the younger generations would wholly embrace it. 

Fr. Mike Schmitz was also a rising star, and surely his unassuming manner and quiet Midwestern character would prove irresistible to millions. 

Even Dr. Jordan Peterson, whose brave truth-telling skyrocketed him to fame, would soon become a Catholic himself, and his fatherly, conservative-leaning rhetoric already seemed to be transformative—captivating virtually every young man who came across it.

What’s happened since?

Bishop Robert Barron launched the Word on Fire website, where he and a growing team introduce orthodox takes on Scripture and the timeless wisdom of Catholic saints to a global audience of millions.

Fr. Mike Schmitz has reached an almost iconic status, bringing the timeless tales of the Bible and the truths of the Catechism to literally hundreds of millions.

Dr. Jordan Peterson, meanwhile, has collaborated with prominent Catholics and spoken beautifully on the Faith (though he has yet to convert himself), has published another book, and now hosts numerous lecture series and Socratic discussions on the timeless truths found in the Western tradition of thought.

But what else has happened in the same span of time—during this golden age of Christian witness? To name just a few significant events:

• The rise of numerous new cells of ISIS affiliates—continuing and, in some cases finishing, the mission of murdering and de-Christianizing the Middle East.
• The ethnic cleansing of Artsakh by Azerbaijan, which drove out over 100,000 Armenian Christians.
• The rounding up, torture, murder, and “disappearing” of countless underground Christians in China and Hong Kong; the disappearance of at least 12 Catholic Bishops; the imprisonment of Jimmy Lai; and the often even more brutal treatment of millions of Uyghur Muslims by the officially atheistic Chinese Communist Party.
• Hideously dehumanizing Hindu nationalist attacks on Christians and other minorities in India.
• Russian attacks on Christian communities in Ukraine, together with secularist efforts to use the force of the Ukrainian government against other Christian groups there.
• Christians in Nigeria being hunted, kidnapped, and sold into slavery by radical Islamist militias.
• Authoritarian Islamists of the Sudanese Armed Forces brutally persecuting, publicly torturing, and indoctrinating countless Christians and others, including many children.
• Increasing hostility toward Christians in the Holy Land, including the West Bank, where the location of Jesus’ birth is now under the strict control of the secular Israeli government, and Palestinian Christians—descended directly from the Jews who first received the Gospel—are prevented from traveling freely to see their families.
• Many brutal killings and maimings of Christians, including women and children, in Gaza, as well as bombings of churches and Christian hospitals there.
• Of course, the rise in almost unprecedentedly shameless tribalism and bloodlust that has led us to the threshold of global war that we face today.

And throughout all of that, what timely truths have the cultural leaders we put so much hope in had to offer us? 

None.

You see, they were too busy providing the world with timeless truths to offer any timely ones. 

I’ll show you what I mean by timely truths with a sorrowful illustration from my own life about how our love of “timeless truths” can lead us to a cowardly neglect of the heroism the truly great men of the past exemplified.

During my recent trip to the West Bank, I spent my downtime listening to guided readings, lectures, and homilies from both Fr. Schmitz and Bishop Barron. I asked a young Palestinian Christian woman I met and worked with there if she ever followed their work. “Yes,” she told me, hanging her head. “But never anymore.”

She told me that she felt “betrayed” by them. 

Why? Because these great new leaders of Western Civilization had said nothing about the urgent plight and suffering of her people—the founding and most ancient Christian community on Earth—as they suffered worse and worse abuses. 

That’s right, for all the great truths our leaders have offered to the world, none of those truths was a timely application of the beating heart of Christianity (the heroic and self-immolating Love of Our Lord with which He commanded us to “love one another”) to our Christian brethren in the Holy Land.  For all the great truths our leaders have offered to the world, none of those truths was a timely application of the beating heart of Christianity.Tweet This

And I have to admit, they have failed to offer that kind of timely truth-telling to any other vulnerable group of people when they stood most in need.

“Knowledge is one thing, virtue is another,” Cardinal John Henry Newman warned in his book promoting a Catholic approach to education. “Good sense is not conscience, refinement is not humility, nor is largeness and justness of view faith.” 

“Liberal Education makes not the Christian, not the Catholic,” he went on, “but the gentleman.” (I’m tempted to think Newman might add today that it is one thing for Jordan Peterson to teach young men to clean their rooms and make their beds and another thing entirely to inspire young men to become like St. Francis of Assisi—who gave up his bed, who kissed lepers, who served widows and orphans with his whole strength, and who opted in the end to die half-naked on a cold stone floor.)

Newman’s words ring truer than ever today—over ten years after the launch of our empty golden age—because it’s an age not of Catholics, not of saints, but of mere gentlemen. It is an age not of heroic and ingenious speakers of timely truths but of Catholic leaders and followers who have dedicated their time and energy to feasting on “good sense,” “refinement,” and “largeness and justness of view.”

I am deeply pained by this realization. But I’m glad to have arrived at it. And I invite whoever reads this to experience the same pain and perhaps find some inspiration in it—inspiration that can only come with suffering, the suffering that Christ promised His followers would face.

It is, after all, an honor to experience this suffering insofar as it might, to some small degree, be a suffering like His own—a suffering born of a desire to share in the lot of the other, and especially of those with whom Christ most intimately associated during His public ministry and, finally, during His Passion: the “least of these brethren,” the orphan, the widow, the leper, and all of the rest of those most directly under threat by the powerful and most ignored by their busy fellowmen.

And it is also the suffering of the heroes and saints on whose names our current leaders have made their own.

But here is perhaps the most sorrowful thing about our age: the great heroes and saints our current conservative cultural leaders speak about the most—Socrates, Blessed Franz Jägerstätter, St. Maximilian Kolbe, and even Venerable Fulton Sheen—are people whose words we only think of as timeless because they were, in the context of their own lives, timely.

And what’s timely in the eyes of Christ is often exactly what is “untimely”—even “rough,” “unrefined,” “imprudent”—in the eyes of the world.

In Terrence Malick’s beautiful movie A Hidden Life, which tells the story of Blessed Franz Jägerstätter, one scene features Franz holding a brief conversation with an iconographer as he paints saints inside a local church.

“We create admirers, we do not create followers,” the painter admits. “Christ’s life is a demand. We don’t want to be reminded of it. I paint their comfortable Christ with a halo on His head; someday I’ll paint the true Christ.”

We have placed too much hope in leaders who paint pictures of saints for people to admire. Now let’s pray for leaders who will present people with the true image of Christ—a vision of saints not merely to admire but to be.