i knew you to be a hard man

We all recognize that the Church’s productivity has been unimpressive recently. We all recognize that what we have been doing is not enough. We have known for a long time now that something has needed to change.

We’ve had this knowledge for years, so have we made any changes? If the Lord were to call us into his office right now and ask us what concrete changes we’ve made in response to this decades-long state of embarrassment, what would we be able to point to?

I suspect most believers would be stunned that the Lord should be asking them that question.

“What changes have I made? I’m just a parishioner, I don’t have any power to make changes. Ask the priests and bishops! I raise my children in the Faith, I continue to show up for Mass on Sunday, and I give money at the collection, how about that? Everyone else in my life left the Church years ago!”

The bishops (and the priests, too, depending on how old they are) might point with excitement to the movement toward synodality, but they would probably struggle to name any fruits that the synodal process has borne so far. The synthesis document from the last synod session was sleep-inducingly tame; it would require some boldness to bet that this drawn-out iteration of synodality will produce anything of consequence whatsoever.

I don’t think the Lord would be satisfied with either group’s answer. I don’t think He would be satisfied at all. But it is true that the Spirit does not give everyone the gifts of the reformer, the gifts of vision and of ideas. There is a group in the Church that does seem to love engaging with ideas: the socialists of the Body of Christ, the LeftCaths. What kind of work have they been up to these days?

None. No work of note. Helped by their generally high levels of education and privilege, they seem to have comfortably settled into the perennial worthlessness for which the Worldly Left is known and loved. The leftcaths read (or pretend to read) their books. The leftcaths might participate in what the Worldly Left earnestly calls “actions”, where they walk down a street together, and where they Get Mad At The Cops, and where they themselves don’t quite get to acting, but where they do angrily shout demands that others act on their behalf.

Most importantly, by far most importantly, they scroll on Twitter and make Twitter-ironic posts through which they can signal their bookishness and Worldly Left allyship. Now, when the cozy Weird Catholic Twitter home they built for themselves seems to be dying or dead, we can see that they have changed nothing.

There is maybe only one group in the room who would immediately have concrete changes to point to; perhaps that is why this group has more vibrancy than many others and has the biggest voice on the World Wide Web right now and has Associated Press articles written about them.

The traditionalists can say, “Yes, Lord! We noticed that after the modernists ruined your theology in the nineteenth century and after Bugnini and Friends ruined your liturgy in the sixties, people started to stop caring about You, so we have been working diligently, even in the face of opposition, to retvrn everything to how it used to be!”

You have tried something, so I applaud you. You have considered the problem, come up with a solution, and tried to implement it. I think the Lord will be gentle on you for this.

Your solution, however, and your analysis of our predicament’s causes, are absolutely, laughably stupid. I believe more than anybody that teenagers can be great in the Spirit of God, but you, though many of you are in your twenties and thirties and beyond, are spiritually and mentally juvenile, spiritually and mentally stuck in high school. You are Cameron and Ferris putting dad’s Ferrari in reverse and a brick on the gas pedal. You are Joel Goodsen trying to buy mom’s egg back from Guido. Your brilliant plan is to act as though the Second Vatican Council never happened, as though the Spirit of God had nothing much to say to the Church at that gathering.

You’ve driven an hour to your regional Tridentine Mass which is decently-populated with other people who’ve driven an hour, you’ve looked at your Trad Discord server hopping day and night with Rhodesia memes, and you have, in the immaturity of your thinking, deluded yourselves into the belief that the trad movement has wide appeal beyond the small set of dudes who Alt-Tab between 4Chan, Pornhub, and Crusader Kings 3. You have deluded yourselves into thinking that what the world is Really Looking For, what will Really Fulfill Them, is to wear a suit or a pretty chapel veil and silently watch on Sunday while some males on stage speak Latin to themselves. You think that in your authoritative references to Substances and Potential and Causes, the world will find satisfying answers to their most important questions. And though you have talked, avoiding the name of Jesus and referencing His Gospel only obliquely, the great swell of seekers has yet to come. You hook a fish here and there, but your net will never bring in the Big Catch. Many of the fish you do meme in will flop back out.

Though you think yourselves separate, your disease is the same one that affects the rest of the Body right now: a pathetic moderation of expectations and a contentment with sameness. You lack boldness, and this because you lack trust in the power of God and His Spirit.

This sickness is not unto death, of course. There are healthy cells in here, cells that can heal the Body of its lethargy and myopia. There are cells here who will strengthen it, who will get it back out into the field where it’s meant to be, working its significant muscles on the soil, altering the Earth in whatever way is needed to make fruit grow.

Please, Father, link together the disciples who truly trust in You. Bring your children together who have greatness of vision, who do not fear death or ridicule or poverty, who have no tolerance for the suffering of the poor, who long to set this world on fire. Please bring us together so that we can do Your work, so that we can multiply a hundredfold the gifts you have given us, so that the World may know that you have sent us and loved us even as you loved your Son, Jesus.