According to GC 34, Jesuits have been asked to fight atheism.  I find this difficult.  I see professed Christians, and then I see people who profess no religion, but claim the good in their hearts as their guide.  When comparing what I see of many Christians and non-Christians, I am not altogether stunned by the difference in the “ethical quality life.”  In truth, with very little work the practice of many Christians can come off seeming far more like a superstitious adherence to ritual accompanied by an arbitrarily applied attentiveness to moral law than it does an ordered expression of the “True faith.”  It leads me to ask: What is it that makes us part of the tradition passed on in the Catholic church if not our ability to rationally explain the reasons we choose to act coupled with the capacity to give an experiential account of the passion we feel for Christ in our hearts.  Is this not what we inherited from the writers of the New Testament?  Is this not part of the tradition of great thinkers and mystics that have been with us from generation to generation?  Theresa of Avila, John of the Cross, Teresa of Liseux, and Robert Ballarmine, to name a few, are each exceptional not only for their minds, but for their expression of love for Christ.  Our minds are only there to help us express and create a mental framework for the lived love of Christ that we experience here on Earth.  We are nothing if we are unable to express love: Intellect is nothing, wisdom and power are nothing, and even our free will is nothing if we do not Love.

I believe that many of us rely on stale arguments that have no stake in our hearts.  Mind you, these arguments are not stale because they are poor, but rather they are stale because they are not lived out in our hearts.  Instead, we deny intellect and rely on half-formed expressions of care that end when we get bored with trying to “figure it out.”  We Catholics talk big, and when it comes to making large statements to sway voters, we are out there with the best of them, giving shout-outs against wars (which the conservative Catholics call unpatriotic socialism) and against abortion (which the liberal Catholics call fascistically legislative morality).  The most recent election notwithstanding, for much of the last fifty years I would like to think that, with regard to her public statements, the Church’s epistles have done a decent job expressing our faith to the world.  Unfortunately, we may have done a poor job of receiving them and attempting to live them out.  Many people I know do not wrestle with reading church teaching, but instead just take someone else’s word for it.  In times like these, this often means that we allow fearful interpretations, limited expressions of orthodoxy and systematic nay-saying to be our guide.  There has been a return to ignoring the balance between intellect and emotion, and we have as a result a discrepancy between our professed faith and the faith we put into action.

I want to believe that the Church is into teaching Catholics how to think and develop their consciences by, first, explaining what different theologians think and then using actual events to illustrate the situation.  What appears to be occurring, however, is that the same backbiting excuses for dialogue that we find present in politics are making their way into Christian dialogue.  Just as words like “socialist,” “conservative,” and “liberal” have taken on absurd meanings that feed into gross stereotypes (and are seemingly akin to declarations of war in the political arena), so have like-concepts entered into religious dialogue.  We are told to accept the common interpretations of our political parties with regard to economics, war and sex without understanding what the Church teaches. Many of us do not read the Church’s teachings or adequately understand them.  So rather than entering into thoughtful dialogue rooted in love for one another and for creation, we do what we are told and then level accusations at others who do not do as we do.  We are finding divisions where there should be none, and ignoring opportunities for solidarity.  We are failing to think with one another because we have forgotten to care for one another.  In the end we are left scrapping over caricatures of policies and events that hardly resemble the actual thing.

The adage is “taste and see” not “eat this or else.”  We remember that the goodness of being Christian should be self-evident.  This part of the teaching, at least, is not some cosmic riddle: love one another.  Arguments over orthodoxy and politics will not save us, but rather our expression of love.  We are not forced into acting in one way or another, but rather, once we understand, we actively choose to do the good.  Until we actually choose to do the good, until we internalize care for one another and live out of compassion, we are just professing a truth we do not really believe and giving false witness in world already filled with confusion and lies.  Explanations of a loving God are ignored and arguments for morality fall flat because they are backed up by aggression, not love.  At the end of the day then, the argument against religion is made stronger because, with so much internal strife, we find it impossible to express the love that it is our mission to relate to the entire world.

Related posts:

1. Where Do You Draw the Line
2. The Creed
3. What You Will
4. They all three of them looked down