by Scott Hahn

The following is an excerpt from Scott Hahn’s new book The First Society. Posted here with the kind permission of the author.

The Western world has spent much of the last few centuries trying to find or form a replacement for the unifying catholicity of the Catholic Church. But the project has always been doomed to failure. No purely human idea or institution can replace the sacramental solidarity of the Church.

This is not to say that a society that rejects the authority of the Church can’t exist, even for quite a long time. The United States was founded on an explicit denial of any particular religious authority over public affairs, and we’ve had a nearly two-hundred-fifty-year run–and counting! And yet the list of sins against solidarity we’ve committed in that time–including the American “original sin” of chattel slavery and a generally poor record with regard to racial and ethnic minorities, from indigenous Native Americans to Chinese railroad workers–is long and damning. To be sure, every nation, like every person, has its sins; it’s important, though, that we regard them with clear eyes.

Every political order degrades under the influence of sin. As we read in Hebrews, “For here we have no lasting city, but we seek the city which is to come” (13:14). There is no perfect system. Even a political order founded and sustained by the Church cannot last forever; while the bride of Christ is indeed inspired by the Holy Spirit, she is managed by sinful men. And yet we mustn’t fall into despair and accept unacceptable compromises in the name of “political pragmatism.” There is no “greater good”–whether prosperity or order or stability–that justifies acting against a precept of Jesus Christ and His Church. We never have to acquiesce in sin. And we do have a duty to our fellow men and women to create and order that is as stable and sustainable as flawed human beings can muster.

As the present age of secular liberalism grinds along falteringly, we are presented with a historic opportunity to rediscover and to reanimate the truth about Christ and society. The Church is more than just a salve for the alienation and ruination wrought by modern politics. She is even more than the central institution or organization principle of a good society. Under the lordship of Jesus Christ and through the power of the Holy Spirit, constituted by the members of the Body of Christ on earth and in heaven, the Church is the perfect society.

Our duty, therefore, as the universal family of God, is to advance the liberty of the Catholic Church to fulfill its fully catholic mission in all areas of life.

It should feel strange–and maybe a bit thrilling–to read these words. They don’t just challenge secularism; they challenge the classical foundations of liberal democracy and much of the postmodern West. But this shouldn’t dissuade us from speaking up on behalf of this truth about Christ and the Church. In fact, it is precisely the radicalism of this claim that will make it appealing to more people than we think.

The questions we must ask ourselves are these: Do we really believe that human beings have a natural desire for truth, and that the Catholic Church and her Magisterium, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, preserve the truth? And do we really believe that secular liberalism cannot fulfill the deepest longings of the human person?

If we answer “yes” to these questions, as we should, then we should proceed with confidence in asserting not just that the Church should influence politics, but that politics simply is the community living for and in Christ. If we really believe what we say we believe about the incoherence and inhumaneness of secular liberalism, then of course we shouldn’t worry about accommodating Church teaching and authority to the status quo. Rather, we should be trying to fill the void left by sterile secularism in the hearts of every person.

Around the Western world, people are looking for something with substance and rigor to believe in. The cosmopolitanism of our elite only works for the elite–those with power and privilege who can access the benefits of the apex of the social hierarchy. (But even there, of course, unease and emptiness dominate.) Some have latched onto national and ethnic identities as a source of transcendent meaning. Other have found community and structure in fringe-but-growing cults, such as Scientology and Neopaganism. Still others have found in political Islam a feeling of certainty and security that eluded them in the always-skeptical but never-committal West. (A significant number of Islamic State recruits were European young men.)

So we shouldn’t be trying to piggyback on the dying liberal order. If there was ever a time when accommodating secular liberalism might come with some benefits–and there probably wasn’t–that time is long past. Secularism and liberalism and relativism and postmodernism and all the other inhumane -isms of our age have left an entire civilization dazed and confused. Now is the time to speak Catholic truth with clarity and boldness. It’s what the people want, and more importantly, it’s what they need.

And the Catholic Church has an advantage over all the other ideologies and factions jockeying to fill the current vacuum: the Church actually has the truth. But it gets better. “The truth” is more than an abstraction: the Church offers the opportunity for relationship with the Person who is “the way, the truth, and the life” (Jn 14:6).

Remember the words of Jesus at the Sermon on the Mount:

A city set on a hill cannot be hidden. Nor do men light a lamp and put it under a bushel, but on a stand, and it gives light to all in the house. Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven. (Mt 5:14-16)

The faith is the light we have to offer the world, and Jesus is light itself. Let us not hide Him under the bushel of shame in the radicalness of His message. He can give light to our civilization just as He did to a dying and decadent Rome. But we have to do our part to spread that light.

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