Efficacious

This beautiful, precious, unused and underrated word is boundlessly reassuring and inspiring, richly ecclesial, deeply Catholic, Tridentine, anti-Protestant-subjectivism, yet ecumenically gracious.

The dictionary has it as an action that is successful in what it intends; as synonymous with effective. But the later is used normally in regard to human endeavors; the former has, to the Catholic mind, a heavenly meaning.

Opus Operatum

Specifically, it refers to our  "opus operatum" (Latin for "work worked") understanding of the seven sacraments which achieve what they signify and intend by virtue of the very act itself, independent of the performer (normally priest) or recipient. A sacrament has its effect, even when done by a vile priest and received by an indifferent, inattentive Catholic.

A Case Study

Imagine two mafia hitmen are both mortally wounded in a murder attempt. They mutually confess that each has secretly believed in Christ and desired baptism and the Catholic life. They know about efficacy. They take turns baptizing each other, gasping for life, with correct intention (union with Christ in his Church, absolution of all sin, infusion of grace), proper matter (water, however dirty), and form (the words "I baptize you in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.")  Whatever the depth and purity of their intentions, the baptisms are absolutely valid and efficacious. They are saved. They are Catholics in good standing. They are on their way to heaven. God's grace is active within them for as short or as long as they live. It is likely that with whatever strength remains, they make acts of contrition, forgiveness, amends, kindness, thanksgiving and praise.  Should they miraculously recover from the wounds and return to their life of crime, they remain Catholics; the effect of the act cannot be removed or retracted; as it cannot be repeated; it leaves an indelible seal on the soul; it will be acting in their conscience in regard to their sins; it will be drawing them to conversion.

Magic or Miracle?

We see here an entirely different meaning from the effectiveness or efficiency of a human endeavor. This is not about human control. It appears, certainly to the secular mind, like an act of magic, something out of Harry Potter. But it is not magic. Indeed what distinguishes magic from the miraculous is that magic is a human performance, like that of the engineer, but the miraculous is an action from heaven. It is supernatural. An action of God, who uses human intentions and words as well as creaturely things.

Encounter of Finite with Infinite Freedom: Neither Subjectivist nor Objectivist

Magic is mechanical, external, coercive, and purely objective. In this it resembles science in its mastery over the material in medicine and surgery. The miraculous, the efficacious and mysterious, is organic-spiritual, interior, liberating, and engages the subjectivity of the recipient, without falling into subjectivism. It is dramatic, interplay of two freedoms, in the manner of a romance. 

Imagine a man crazy in love with a woman who has no interest in him. Patiently, sensitively, gently he courts her. Learns all about her: her fears, preferences, desires. He is fierce and persevering in his pursuit, but tender, courteous, diplomatic, patient, hopeful, prudent, generous, confident and entirely delighted in the adventure. If he is a gentleman of virtue, his attention will be in some degree efficacious. He will surely elicit respect and affection from his Beloved, as well as her family and friends. Whether he captivates her heart into spousal desire will depend upon the movements of her own heart, intellect and will. It is a dramatic event, an encounter between two freedoms. Nothing mechanical, external, coercive or objective here. Certainly, his love as reverent, tender and true will achieve, if not a romance, a lasting friendship. It will be efficacious, while leaving intact the freedom of his Beloved.

Catholicism, wrongly practiced and understood, can tend to objectivism: follow the program, obey the commandments, receive the sacraments, accumulate merit and you get to heaven. The focus here is on human effort, obscuring the prior-prevenient-ever-present action of grace, efficacious grace.

Protestantism is in large part an disordered subjectivist reaction to an unbalanced objectivism. "Salvation by faith alone" is a disastrous, isolating, introverting program. It opened the path to the modernist bifurcation into the objectivism of the technocracy and the subjectivism of the isolated individual. 

Christ, the Sacrament of Encounter with God, by Hans Kung (1963) precisely outlined the Catholic Vatican II correction by using the dramatic, personalist language of "encounter" to avoid the imbalances of objectivism/subjectivism. The teachings and magisterium of John Paul and Benedict solidified this accomplishment. Unfortunately, progressive theology after the Council (including that of Kung) mimicked the subjectivism, nominalism and individualism of the Reformation. 

Broader Catholic Meaning of Efficacy

Beyond the nature of the seven specific sacraments, this word unveils the Catholic vision of life on every level.

1. Creation. God spoke, efficaciously, and Being and all beings came into existence. Our universe and all of life, all that is good-true-beautiful, is a result of the efficacious Word of God.

2. Salvation. The Passover of Christ, his death and rising, is efficacious for the salvation of the entire world, of everyone (who in freedom accepts), of history, of the universe.

3. Church. The life of the Church in her entirety, quintessentially but not exclusively the Catholic Church, is efficacious in a marvelous symphony of life and love: clergy, family life, friendship, good works, art, culture, industry, and the life of piety. The seven sacraments are efficacious in the highest, purest degree, but all elements (some of which we will mention below) achieve, inexorably, what they intend.

4. Word of God.  We Catholics, of course, accept the infallibility of the Pope (under very limited conditions) and the general indefectibility of the Church in her hierarchy. We can trust, without suspending our critical faculties, the Magisterium. But even beyond the institutional Church, the Word of God, when proclaimed authentically and witnessed to in life is efficacious. This is VERY important. It is here that we learn from our Evangelical/Pentecostal friends, who fail to fully appreciate the sacramental economy, but greatly excel us in their zealous receptivity to the Word proclaimed, to the Word in the Bible, to the primacy of listening with docility. We Catholics tend to a monotony, a boredom, a disinterest in the proclamation of the Word. We have so much to learn from our Protestant friends.

5. The Poor.  D.L. Schindler, echoing Balthasar, sees that the presence of the poor and suffering efficaciously elicits in us poverty of spirit and therefore holiness. This is VERY IMPORTANT. Attention to, acceptance of , empathy for, tenderness towards one who is poor or suffering is efficacious of holiness; it is a sacrament of Christ. It is not that we overcome the suffering; not that we do works of mercy; not that we advocate for an agenda. It is that we receive, accept, contemplate and revere in tenderness. This is efficacious for our salvation and holiness! It is good for us to welcome and seek the suffering and the poor. How unhappy those who associate only with the successful, the healthy, the affluent. How happy those who in their weakness and poverty elicit the compassion, tenderness and reverence of others and thereby efficaciously elicit in them holiness.

6. Prayer.  We firmly believe that our prayers are efficacious. Whatever we request, we know that God listens and responds, always in love for us, not always to our liking. When we pray for a healing, that prayer is heard, in a mysterious manner. The other day on my flight to Antigua I pulled out my Magnificat for morning prayer and the elderly, attractive woman, Ellen, next to me, quietly asked me: "Will you remember my family in your prayers? There are so many things going on!" I continued to read on the flight but was obsessed with praying for her family. We talked a little. As we exited, she said "I feel happy and confident in your prayers." My wife and I have been praying for this family all week. I have no idea of the nature of the problems. But I am certain that in a manner I will only understand in the afterlife they are important, efficacious. 

7. Mimetic influence.  We are all of us, all the time (we learn from Rene Girard and Gil Baile), consciously and unconsciously, under the mimetic influence of those around us, those we observe, those we love, and even those we hate. I am who I hang around with. To be around, to listen to, to observe virtuous, holy people is to become good and holy myself. Even without deliberation, decision or effort, I become like those close to me. And so happy are we who find ourselves surrounded, in family and friendship, with the virtuous. Happy are we to seek and follow the same. Just this being with, prior to decision or agency, is efficacious of interior goodness.

8. Catholic life.  The entire universe and apparatus of Catholic life and culture is "sacramental" in the broadest sense. This includes all the sacramentals (medals, crucifixes, statues, scapulars, rosaries, stained glass windows, holy water), and pious practices (novenas, visits to the Blessed Sacrament, sign of the cross, family prayer, spontaneous aspirations, retreats, pilgrimages, etc.), spiritual reading, corporal and spiritual works of mercy, fasting, and habits of daily prayer. To be Catholic is to immerse oneself in an enchanted, miraculous, delightful, mysterious, boundlessly complex ambience.

9. Deliverance from Demons.  The disciples, and we ourselves, were given power over demons. They cast them out. This is not prayer, which is directed to God. It is the command: "Demon, be gone, in the name of Jesus Christ!" It is imperative. It is not done by our will power but by the efficacy of the name of Jesus. At that name, demons must flee. They cannot stand it. But this is not magic; it can take time; it requires the patience an persistence of the woman demanding justice for the evil judge. It works! It is efficacious. (To be clear, this is a charismatic, Pentecostal conviction; not widely held by Catholics.)

10. Beyond the Catholic Church.  God's grace is infallibly, inexorably, efficaciously active always/everywhere in the divine, but always-also-human-sinful Catholic Church. But it is not limited to those institutional boundaries. It abounds wherever there is life. Even in a world wounded and fractured by sin, God's grace has not abandoned us. The drama of warfare between good and evil occurs in every human heart, in every community. God's grace is present, efficacious even where, perhaps especially where, evil abounds. 

11. Being as True-Good-Beautiful.  Existence, life everywhere and in every dimension, coming from the hands of our Creator, as True-Good-Beautiful, is diffusive, manifest, expansive, revelatory. To be sure the hardened, sinful heart-intellect-will is resistant and even hostile to such; but this rebellion is finite, temporary and vulnerable.

12. Truth. In the chaos of the culture wars, in the wanderings of our youth, how encouraging it is to recall the inexorability, the eventual invulnerability of the Real, the Given, the Created, the True. This conviction leaves us with an inner serenity, a freedom from anxiety and rage, a joyous hope. It is not for us to win the argument or convince the doubting. It is for us to merely witness to the Truth. The journey to Truth is durational, slow, long...for all of us. So often, as my friend John Rapinich would assure me, we are "speaking into one's future." Those we love will eventually be captivated by the Beauty-Truth-Goodness that has grasped us. We can rest tenderly in it, as we witness to it gently.   

Clearly, this efficacy does not deny, but engages our freedom. But how comforting strengthening, and encouraging it is to consider the efficacy of God's movements within us and among us!

 

A Sterile World; Our Catholic Response

 In "The Desecration of Man" (First Things, January 2024), Carl Trueman identifies three characteristics of modernity: disenchantment: loss of the sense of the miraculous, the wonderful, the transcendent: fluidity: lack of any stability, permanence, durability, longevity; and desecration: absence of the "sacred" and the subsequent degradation of the human person. This is an accurate picture of our world. I would add another, that gripped our culture violently just over 50 years ago in the Sexual-Cultural Revolution: the sterilization of the person.

Two Meanings of Sterile

In our discourse, this word has two distinct, but related meanings. In medicine, of course, it refers to antiseptic cleanliness of bacteria and other hostile organisms as in the hospital and surgical protocols. It is a good thing. But the primary meaning, in ordinary conversation, is infertile, incapable of generating new life. This is a bad thing. Underlying both, however, is a singular image: barren, empty, lifeless.

In medicine antiseptic sterility is a miraculous practice of protection from lethal infections. What we have recently, unfortunately, in the broader culture is an exaggerated germ-phobia, an inordinate fear of contamination. This exploded, understandably, during the Covid pandemic, but it lingers still. It is an anxiety about the body in its close intercourse with nature, with other bodies, with nature, with invisible microcosms. It underestimates the resiliency and efficacy of the body's natural resources, especially the immune system. It overrates the potency and hostility of the invisible, microscopic world. It seeks protection in distance, chemical sanitation, masking. This is in sharpest contrast to the world of my youth: lots of children close together in homes, play, packed classrooms; sharing each others germs and bacteri (good and bad alike), and exercising vigorous immune systems within the "herd" context.

This fear of life, of the body, of the natural of course mirrors and reinforces the sterilization of sex. 

- Reliance on technological intervention to isolate and thus "protect" the individual.

- Retreat from the natural, the intimate, the concrete, the physical.

- Anxiety related to the natural and the body; isolation; defensiveness. 

- A paralyzing reluctance to engage life, and to give new life. 

Contra-Conception Transformation

The birth control pill, perfected in the 1960s, in tearing sexuality from fecundity, was the most consequential, disastrous technological development in human history. Yes, more important than fire, printing, the internet; Yes, worse than gunpowder and the atom bomb! It refigured, distorted, perverted the human person, who was created male-female to reign over the earth in a sacred communion of fruitfulness, into a sterile, autonomous individual, lonely, isolated, hopeless. The sin of Onan, masturbation, became normative, wholesome sex, isolated with porn or together in contracepted or homosexual actions. The male/female person as partner with the Creator in the generosity-grandeur-dignity of creation was trivialized, mechanize, and sterilized. 

Gen": To Give Life

Gender, generative, generous all come from the proto-European root "gene" meaning to beget, to give life. All created life comes from our Creator, but generously he has blessed us to participate in the giving of life, biological, spiritual, psychological, agricultural, cultural and all sorts of life. We do not do this as isolated monads, but in community, imaging the Eternal Three-in-One of our Creator, especially and prototypically in the union of man-and-woman.

Deconstruction of Gender

The liberalization of sexuality from marriage/children and the marginalization of fruitfulness immediately destroyed both femininity and masculinity as generous, generating forms. Maternity and paternity, no longer the foundation of the family and society, became optional hobbies, but marginal to the techno-bureaucratic economy operated by androgynous units of consumption/production. Our younger people do not "see" the form of masculinity/femininity, they only "see" the isolated, lonely individual, and therefore they see gay and trans identities as perfectly normal. By the logic of sterility, only an ignorant or hateful person would have a problem with trans-athletes or gay marriage.

Demographic Winter

Most of our world...the West, Russia, Japan, China, but not Africa and most of Islam...is undergoing a severe decline in population. We have lots of old people and not enough young people to take care of them. The extravagant benefits enjoyed by the now retiring American boomers will be paid for by our grandchildren. There really is, right now, a generational war, which no one (except Ross Douthat) talks about. Things are much worse across Europe and Russia. In the long term, Russia, notwithstanding its oil and aggression in the Ukraine, is demographically a weakling. The breathtaking failure of our current administration to control the border is partly due to an unacknowledged calculation that we need these workers. 

Despair

If the birth of a child is always a sign of hope, than the decision for sterility...masturbation, contraception, abortion, gay or trans identity...is an expression of despair. The deliberately sterile life is isolated...as on an island...alone, disconnected from a past and tradition, detached from the Eternal, without hope in the future. It leads into indulgence, narcissism, resentment and despair. It is the suicide of the community.

Catholicism's Fourfold Response to Modernity

1. Disenchantment.re Creation, to the Catholic mind, is radiant, enchanted, and fascinating: a symphony of beauty-truth-goodness, the entirely gratuitous love of the Creator for his work, an eternal community of love, the miraculous, spiritual warfare of heaven and earth, the dramatic engagement of freedoms culminating in heaven and hell. 

2. Fluidity The Eternal has taken flesh, become The Crucified/Risen Protagonist of history, in Jesus Christ and remains with us in this time and space, durationally, steadily, reliably, until the end of time, in the Eucharist, from which flows a stream of life and grace, extravagant and serendipitous, for every person, place and thing.

3. Desecration. Springing from the hand of the All-Holy-God, Creation is itself sacred, especially in the image of God, the human person, however little and powerless, including the generating-generous-gendered male-or-female body.

4. Sterility. The Ultra-Generosity of the Trinity resounds through Creation and history and quintessentially in the receptivity-gratitude-responsiveness-agency of the person-in-community. 

The lifeless, anxious, threatened sterility of antiseptic germ-phobia and contraception is itself, I suggest, a counterfeit of genuine purity, as generous, fecund, beautiful. All primitive religions are obsessed with purification, with protection from contamination. Secular modernity is based upon rituals of protection from infestation, intimacy and fecundity. By contrast, purity as closeness with the Holy, as seen in Mary and the saints, is a genuine cleanliness springing from our salvation on Calvary, and brings with it freedom from fear, conjugal comfort in the body and with nature, an intensification and deepening of love as generous-romantic-charitable-erotic-fruitful.

Such purity-as-holiness-and-wholesomeness takes, within Catholic life, two forms: spousal love of man and wife in marriage, and the virginal and celibate surrender. Particularly striking, and entirely unintelligible to the secular, sterile modern, is the fecundity of virginity-as-maternity and celibacy-as-paternity. In each, intimacy with God...exclusive, free, faithful, fruitful...is an extravagant pouring forth of life, graces and blessings. This is a great blessing. The maternal-paternal nuptiality of the virgin and the celibate itself illuminates the interior form of marriage as chastity, loyalty, fertility, and attachment-within-detachment in tender reverence.

Conclusion

Within a world that is dying of sterility, self-abuse, futility and despair, we look with delight to the Church, the Bride of Christ, our Mother, steadfast and yet fluid, tender and reverent, chaste and fruitful, intimate and so fertile. Every family, friendship, endeavor, organization and community...even outside of the institutional boundaries of the Catholic Church...to the degree that they draw to the Eternal, enfleshed Body of Christ, in all its mystery...close, trustful, free of fear, loyal...share in that joyous, hopeful, thriving fecundity. 

 

 

Freedom from the Tyranny of Expertise: the Dignity, Primacy, Sovereignty of the Ordinary Layman

Disclosure: I am not a professional in any sense, but an ordinary layman, bereft of expertise. As such, I exercise "first order" knowing, common sense, prudence, which is superior to all specializations.

What follows is not a Luddite ingratitude for the miracles of our advanced, complex society. But a realistic recognition of temptations, dangers that come with those marvels.

By "profession" we here mean a financially compensated expertise in a specific area, entailing training and certification, within a community with an elaborate body of shared beliefs, values, practices. It brings with it as well social status, authority and power.

By "first order knowledge" here I mean the personal, experiential, concrete, integral encounter of the person with the Real. By "second order knowledge" I intend specialized, abstract, especially scientific knowledge that is not the actual experience of a real person. So for example, Artificial Intelligence is incapable of first order knowledge.

Anecdote: Over 20 years ago, a friend was describing the battle of his lawyer with that of his wife over alimony in the impending divorce. He had destroyed his career, reputation, marriage and family by a bad habit, caressing the breasts of his female medical patients. He went on to jail. He was working a 12-step program including "amends." He valued my counsel. I suggested: "Overrule your lawyers. Direct them to give your wife everything she wants...as part of your amends to her."  He laughed dismissively. Did not honor the suggestion by engaging it or addressing it. Why was this unthinkable, indeed ridiculous, to him? Because he valued his money and wanted to keep as much as possible? Yes, I think so. But I think there was another, possibly stronger motive. His personal identity was deeply invested in his medical expertise. In the parallel realm of law, it was inconceivable that he, a mere layman, would contradict his lawyers, the experts. He had forfeited the freedom, dignity, sovereignty of his own intellect and conscience, as well as the primacy of his spiritual life and that of his family, to the dictatorship of expertise.

Anecdote:  Frank, parish deacon and retired social worker making about $95 hourly as a consultant was positive about our residence, in the convent, for low income women until there was an incident and he told me what he really thought: "What you are doing is crazy, reckless, dangerous. You have no professional social workers, nurses, psychologists, security system! You take women directly from the psych ward! Anything could happen here! This is not good!" I said nothing but thought to myself: "Professional!"

We inhabit a complex, elaborate social universe of interlocking mega-techno-bureaucracies. Almost all human work is performed, not by the personal agent, within a convivial community, on a human scale; but by enormous, powerful, science-based, machine-like systems. This mega-machine-universe produces astonishing results in medicine, law, production, services, travel, communication, entertainment and every field. Highly educated "professionals" maintain this overgrown, largely impersonal universe.  Economic and social (status, power, authority) rewards are distributed according to a hierarchy of what is considered most valuable to "the machine." We have become a two-tiered society, with the upper class, especially professionals, enjoying rich rewards and the lower very few. 

The problem: a dependency upon "the machine" for all human needs has induced an impotence, a paralysis, a loss of agency in daily life, for all of us. Indeed, it is likely that the more "successful" among us, higher up the social hierarchy, with more money, access more goods and have even less agency (aside from their narrow expertise) than the poor, who must fend for themselves and rely more on ingenuity and solidarity.

Work, we learned from John Paul II, is a quintessential action for the human person, it is transitive as it moves from the actor to recreate and reorder the world. The capacity for work, we learned from Freud, is a sign of psychological health. Work is a flourishing of the human body and spirit; it is communal; it is generous and generative; it is physical, concrete, specific in time and place. But the malignancy of our technology is a cancer that disables us, persons and communities, in our agency and potency.

And so we do well to cherish and cultivate all forms of work that are non-bureaucratic and non-technological: gardening, child rearing, reading, conversing, cooking, decorating, home schooling, walking, sports, prayer, liturgy. The more concrete, simple, small, local... the better. The less elaborate, technical, regulated, certified...the better.

This is not to reject modern technology tout court in the manner of the Amish and the Luddites. But it is to recognize the toxic consequences of mega-technology and compensate for them. It is to deliberately prefer the concrete, the local, the immediate, the small in scale.

The professions and the techno-universe they inhabit have inherent biases, some very bad. There is an assumption of knowledge as control, rather than contemplation and grateful reception of the Real as already/always Given as True, Good and Beautify. There is an exaggerated confidence in human achievement over much that is uncontrollable: suffering, death, guilt, sin. There is a presumptuous compulsion to engineer and save ourselves by our efforts and expertise. There is a righteous rage when this expectation is, inevitably, frustrated. There is immersion in a network of practices and institutions that are technical, mechanical and not inherently receptive, contemplative, grateful.

A second foundational bias of the professions is a compulsion to protect, to defend, to avoid risk, to detect and combat threats. Safety is the reigning value in the professional world. The lawyer is attuned to liability. The medical professional deals daily with serious sickness and is quick to suspect it and eager to diagnose and treat. The insurance salesman...need I go on?

Immersion in any profession, years of training-testing-certification followed by 40-60 workhours weekly, involves an immense concentration in a narrow second order of knowing specialty (tax law, heart surgery, etc.) and can easily unbalance one's first-order of knowing, prudence. In particular, service within the mega-technology leans into a preference for control, a defensiveness about danger, an aversion to risk, a loss of agency outside of that expertise, and a diminishment of wonder, reception, serenity and gratitude.

And so, increasingly we find ourselves subservient and obedient to the experts in child rearing, diet, health, legal matters, fitness, mental wellness, housing and almost everything. With diminished agency, we are more prone to depression, discouragement, anxiety, addictions, and a quiet nihilism. Work becomes mechanical, vacuous, oppressive rather than fluent, creative, refreshing and convivial. And the more affluent and prestigious among us are possibly the most effected as they labor abstractly, removed from the real, the concrete, the physical.

My Lay, Non-Professional Resume

I have made my living as a Catholic religion teacher, a UPS supervisor, and director of a residence for low-income women. Happily, I have cherished my lay agency and independence.

In teaching religion I was always the protagonist in my classes. I used the text and curriculum freely, treating a range of topics (liturgical seasons, current issues, saints). I benefited from the support of those, usually religious sisters, who ran the schools. I enjoyed community, agency, freedom, creativity an serendipity.

In 25 years at UPS, most as a supervisor, I was indeed a cog in the "big brown machine," an exemplar of bigness, technology, regulation, and industrial engineering. Early on, I was warned by a priest: "Do not sell your soul to the company." I retained always a lively sense of the impersonality of the system, and so maintained an interior detachment. Yet, my family  benefited (good salary, benefits, etc.); I was  loyal to the company; and always proud of our work which was a genuine, if mundane service within a generally wholesome moral context. 

However, there were always two management cultures, often contradictory of each other. The "by the book approach" upheld all the protocols, rules, laws, industrial engineering standards, safe work and driving methods, and so forth. On the other hand, the "get the job done" culture was the "macho" willingness to throw away the rule book and do what it takes to get the packages where they had to be. If a trailer load was late for the train, we would exceed the speed limit; if it had bad brakes but no time to be repaired, we would pull it anyway (exercising extra caution.) I recall as a pack car driver seeing a little, fragile lady in the rain with groceries falling all over the place in wet bags. I carefully helped her into the truck and drove her home,  all the time nervous and cautious but also laughing that the safety committee, human resources, lawyers and tons of others would have heart attacks if they knew about it. And so, while I observed and taught the rules with fair diligence, I retained my "lay" autonomy to throw the book out when prudence and common sense directed such. This "can do," entrepreneurial, confident approach was a triumph over the mechanical, engineering, impersonal nature of the "big brown machine." 

Finally, I have delighted in my work in our boarding home because of the large space for initiative and agency.  No we are not social work professionals; we are entirely lay, vernacular, lacking in expertise but guided by our paternal/maternal intuitions. The rules and the inspectors are reasonable. We comply with laws and regulations but we do not go crazy about it. Our operation is simple, lay, uncomplicated...nothing complex or elaborate about it. We enjoy collaboration with staff, volunteers, contributors, along with state health insurance and social security, as well as the police, ambulances and fire department. It is a happy world: convivial, organic, synergistic, dramatic and active.

The Joy of the Layman

I can happily report that all our seven children are professionals; I am proud of them and the good work they do. But I am not jealous. While I lack the deep, rich body of expertise each has in a specific field, I am happily a lay man, an amateur, in the sense of one who pursues an activity out of love. Primarily I see myself as a catechist, echoing the voice of Christ within the Church, but along with that I am an amateur theologian, psychologist, philosopher, blogger, and student of culture. This leaves me free of the inherent obligations, bonds, and biases of a profession (especially control and protection) to move in and out of various disciplines in the spirit of joy.

In addition to freedom from a profession and the amateur's privilege in exploration and learning, I have benefited in other ways in growth towards prudence and wisdom. I have lived in close contact with the urban working class and poor and their humility, simplicity, piety and gratitude; at a remove from the affluent and powerful. I have lived in the heart of the Church, the place of reception of the Word, sacrament and worship. Here I treasure a deep connection with Tradition and thereby an enhanced immunity from the bourgeois delusions and pretensions of techno-progressivism. I delight in  the benefits of our amazing society, but strive always to live simply,  gratefully, locally, reverent before and attentive to The Given, here and now.

"THE SYSTEM": There Ain't No Such Thing. On Personal Freedom and Agency in Christ.

"Beloved, who indeed is the victor over the world but the one who believes that Jesus is the Son of God?"  1 John 5:5 

When St. John Paul II visited Cuba in 1998, Fidel Castro harangued the crowd for four hours in the tropical sun, endlessly lamenting victimization by American Capitalist Imperialism. Then the Pope spoke, for three minutes. He succinctly, respectfully, directly, diplomatically, firmly, clearly contradicted Castro, telling those assembled "You are not victims! In Christ you are free, you are the agents, the protagonists of your own destiny."

The irony: Castro, deep in the victim complex, has created a system of almost total control. Consider: John Paul was speaking to thousands trapped, possibly weak with dehydration, by a vicious despot, in one of the worst totalitarian regimes in the world. Recall: he had spent most of his adulthood under Nazism and Communism, the two great demonic "systems" of the century. His message: "You are not the victim of any system! You are the protagonist of your own destiny, in Christ!" This is what we call encouragement.

"THE SYSTEM" is not real. It is a mirage of the paranoid imagination. It is a myth, a false dogma, a lie of Satan. It is the conviction of being a victim of a massive, omnipresent, omnipotent, invulnerable, evil Empire. It is the delusion that you are a helpless, passive victim; a clog in the machinery of society; that a greater, hostile conspiracy is in control and there is no freedom.

On the left it has been known as:  the military-industrial complex, capitalist imperialism, colonialism, systemic white racism, heteronormativity, patriarchy, intersectionality, and yada, yada, yada.

On the right it is known as the deep state, the regime, the red plot, freemasonry and communism, the powerful-affluent-liberal-global-elite class, and yada, yada, yada.

A striking example is the narrative of BLM and Critical Race Theory. Yes, there is a history of slavery and oppression. Martin Luther King and Malcolm X in distinct ways overcame the victim error. But this new "anti-racism" emasculates the young black male by making him powerless, passive but furious before the overpowering white male policeman. This is in fact a more vicious, but disguised racism.

It is a favored movie theme: Three Days of Condor, The Matrix, L.A. Confidential, The Firm, Mulholland Falls, Conspiracy Theory, Enemy of the State and so many more. 

It creates the "I am a victim" complex. Neal Lozano found in his ministry of deliverance from evil spirits that the most persistent, difficult to cast out is the "victim" spirit. When someone is convinced he is a victim, it becomes nearly impossible to change his mind.

The idea is not entirely irrational; there is a real ground for it. As Woody Allen said: "The fact that you are paranoid does not mean that they are not out to get you." So we live in a complex world, embedded among multiple mega-systems involving technology and bureaucracy. This leaves the average person with diminished sense of agency: most activities are performed by complicated, overwhelming systems. We find a niche within this overarching universe of machinery; we perform a narrow, specific task; we are compensated in status and money according to its value on the market hierarchy; but beyond our limited expertise we are dependent upon the megalopolis with little space for spontaneity, creativity, freedom, conviviality, co-partnership and agency.

About 50 years ago, Ivan Illich, Jacques Ellul, Dorothy Day, Peter Maurin, Ernst Schumacher and others diagnosed this bureau-techno-professional-malignancy, without a partisan prejudice. Meanwhile, mainstream politics on both sides of the aisle share a blindness to it: Democrats favoring big government, Republicans big business. 

We might describe our world as a competition between three rival totalitarianisms: Communism, Sharia law, and Western relativism. The last is the most subtle, manipulative, deceptive: it deconstructs faith/family and isolates the individual into an autonomous, lonely unit of production/consumption, dependent upon the mega-techno-market-state-bureaucracy. All three destroy the dignity of the person.

John Paul and Benedict were intimately familiar with Nazism, Communism, as well as the camouflaged totalitarianism of Western, secular relativism. Their message was clear: We are free in Christ; we are not victims of any "system"; we are protagonists of our own destiny.

Scripture talks about the "principalities and powers" that have been disarmed by Christ. These are the dynamics of "the world" understood as all the human systems resistant to the grace of God. An so we are always living in "The World" which is systems, large and small and in-between, often hidden and anonymous, which deny God, overtly or covertly. Every police department, corporation, athletic league, monastery and rectory is under the spiritual influence, not of "The System" but of "The World."

So what we in fact face in the real world is not "A System" or "The System" but a multiverse of systems...millions of them...macro, micro, medium...everywhere we turn. When two people speak on a street corner, when hit men plan their kill, when a boy and a girl flirt, when children play, when old people go to Church, when couples make love or fight or laugh...ALL of these are systems. All day, everywhere, we move in an out of systems.

These systems are fluid, responsive, fungible...they are not static, rigid, rock-like. We bring to each our own spontaneity, creativity, personality, spirituality. They are, all of them, interactive and dramatic. If there are three people on an elevator and a fourth stranger enters, the system changes: bodies rearrange themselves, there are new vibes (good or bad), all four persons are effected, by the mere physical presence, without words or interaction. A dear, hyper-sensitive friend once told me that he got bad vibes from a stranger on an elevator and he had to go home to bed because he felt so bad.

In complex, even contradictory ways, these systems are open to good and evil, truth and error, beauty and is absence.

 (Sidebar: there is no clear antonym or opposite to beauty. Even more than error and evil, its absence is pure negation, and cannot be named. "Ugly" as an adjective describes a subjective reaction; but "ugliness" is not itself an objective form or substance.)

With the exceptions of Adam/Eve before sin and the Holy Family itself, every human system, community, gathering and organization is vulnerable to evil and yet receptive of the good. So every system is a drama in which the good and the bad battle for influence, as every person is. The interaction of person and social organism is boundlessly dense, complex, and eventful.

A defining demonic falsehood of modernity is that each of us is an individual, passive and powerless before an overwhelming system. This can be "the curve of history," progress, the oppressor/victim dialectic, evolution, and yada, yada, yada. 

The Fact, revealed in Jesus Christ, is that each of us is a person, imbued with dignity, freedom, intelligence, free will, personal sovereignty, intentionality, love and liberty from bondages. 

This inherent freedom is exercised, of course, in the midst of determinisms, limits, obstacles, misfortunes, opposition, persecution, violence, conflicts and contradictions. Ours is not a godlike power to overcome these. Rather, in the power of the Holy Spirit, it is for us to preserve our interior freedom and dignity and witness to the Good, the True and the Beautiful...to God in Jesus Christ.

So yes, one living in a Communist Gulag, a Sharia despotism, or the materialist West is free...in union with the crucified/Risen Christ, in the power of the Holy Spirit, in communion with the saints on earth and beyond, and in understanding of the Truth. 

The flowering and fruition of our dignity surrounds us in a million ways: romance, marriage, family life; new life; gatherings for liturgy and prayer; 12-step meetings; new schools and home schooling; lay renewal movements; young religious orders; small business initiatives; little leagues; family traditions; non-profit initiatives; friendships; pilgrimages; spontaneous play; prayer/contemplation and so many more.

Our determinism and negativities are endless: illness, mental and physical; addiction; poverty; inequality; violence; misogyny; abuse; warfare. In the very face of Evil: we are free! We are not victims, powerless and passive! In union with Christ in the Holy Spirit, we triumph...unfailingly...in our faith, love, joy, gratitude, solidarity, compassion, hope, humility, contrition, and generosity!

Come Holy Spirit!

Perpetual, Durational Eucharistic Presence

Christ is with us...small, pure, thin, light, white, quiet, simple, humble, silent...in the tabernacle...perpetually, loyally, durationally, unequivocally, patiently, hopefully, enduringly, generously, ecstatically.

This is the most dense, profound, intense, mysterious, penetrating, gratuitous, absolute fact of Catholic life.

This is the most underrated reality in the history of the created universe...even by otherwise admirable Catholic priests and laity.

This quiet, anonymous presence does not exceed the Eucharistic Liturgy, it is the continuation of it. The two...the act, encounter, event...and the enduring Presence...live within each other. Together, they are the one Eucharistic Mystery, the very presence of Christ among us. Neither are real without the other.

This is the core, the summit, the center, the interior form of Catholic life.

We live as finite, temporal, spatial, historic creatures in time and space: for Catholics, the event of the Eucharist structures time; the presence of the Eucharist, in the local Church, structures space.

The two prime, practical questions for a Catholic, wherever and whenever, are: When do we celebrate the Liturgy? Where is the Eucharistic presence?

Christ is not with us occasionally, randomly, intermittently, periodically, unpredictably! He is with us eventfully, dramatically, historically, at a specific time and place in the Liturgy. He remains with us steadily, reliably, predictably in the Tabernacle.

Not so for mainstream Protestantism for whom Christ comes occasionally, sporadically, intermittently in a discrete, isolated occurrence. For them there is no actual, concrete durability, dependability, perpetuity.

Eucharistic Indifference: the most grave, undiagnosed Catholic malady. Let's do the math: a year has 8760 hours. The average practicing Catholic is in Church for obligatory mass about 60 hours annually. How much time is spent just being with our Lord by this Catholic? Perhaps an hour or two. In fact, almost everything else is more important than relaxing in the presence of Christ.

Christ hungers for us! From the cross he said "I thirst!" This was thirst for water, for sure. But it was also thirst for our love. He came here to suffer and die...to share his love...and to elicit our love. 

Our churches are mostly locked. The unlocked are empty. Christ is alone, isolated, ignored. His love unrequited.

Concluding 2023 on December 31 Pope Francis prayed vespers but, for the second year, dispensed with the customary adoration of the Blessed Sacrament. I am unaware of the reason. This is unfortunate.

On other occasions, Francis has lauded the value of adoration and grieved its diminishment. He has been particularly clear on the connection of such adoration with attention to the poor. With St. Mother Teresa, St. John Paul and myriads of Catholic saints and mystics, Francis knows that love of the humble, poor Christ in the tabernacle is intrinsic to authentic Catholic love of the poor. 

An underlying weakness in the pontificate of Francis has been: a preference for process, change, progress, fluidity and a disparagement of permanence, durability, tradition. It is hard to imagine John Paul or Benedict dispensing with adoration and all it entails of permanence.

The perpetuity of the Eucharist infuses the permanence of marriage, the foundation of the Church and indeed of human society. In the flux, fluidity, and impermanence of modernity, it is before the stable Eucharist that a married couple inbreath a steady, serene patience with each other.

Likewise, the permanence of the vowed and the ordained life flow directly from the Eucharist which they serve and embody.

In our own fragility, finitude, weakness, temporality, historicity, sinfulness, and mutability we are incapable of an appropriate response to the love we encounter in the Eucharistic liturgy. Christ is giving Himself, body and soul, humanity and divinity, in Word and Spirit and in his body and blood...and we are distracted, ruminating, bored, preoccupied, half-hearted. Even the best of us. And so, in kindness to us, Christ remains...never to abandon us. Whatever our wanderings, he remains, present for us, waiting for us, thirsting for us.

Our interior freedom is so fragile, fractured, and diminished that it is rare we are recollected enough to make a full, free, deliberate gift of self to reciprocate what we receive from Christ. Our most solemn vows...marriage and the religious/ordained life...are made in awareness of our weakness, less firm resolutions than pleas for divine help and acts of hope. Rare is the gallant gesture of the martyr or hero. Rather, in God's grace, we work for a happy marriage and family, for virtue and holiness in a succession of a million min-acts, perhaps none of them absolutely pure, but cumulatively, perseveringly, over time through history, always repenting, forgiving and asking for pardon, persevering in what is almost always far from perfection. Echoing the persistent Eucharistic presence, we thank, petition, praise, atone, assist, bear patiently, surrender, donate, accept...over and over and over again. It is the long game: like the farmer who seeds and waits for the harvest, we persist and wait in hope for the harvest of the true, the good and the beautiful. Even as we know that Absolute Truth, Good and Beauty abide quietly for us in the tabernacle.  

St. Elizabeth Seton, leading up to her conversion, sat in her Anglican Church and prayed to the Eucharist she knew to be alive in the Catholic Church across the street.

Bishop Fulton Sheen made an hour of adoration before the Blessed Sacrament every day.

Arguably, the gravest casualty of the "Spirit of Vatican II" was the loss of reverence for the Eucharistic Presence. The sisters who taught us did us a great service: taught us to reverence Christ physically present. Our generation has largely forgotten this.

The Eucharistic Revival, now celebrated with our bishops, will bear fruit if aligned with a recovery of two other basics: confession of sin and adoration of the Blessed Sacrament.

And so it is for us to emulate the durational, persevering, patient love Christ pours on us. Not for one hour a week. Not for half an hour a day. But enduringly, patiently, perpetually...visits, adoration, sign of the cross when passing a Church, holy hours, the rosary, daily office, frequent aspirations, periodic retreats and pilgrimages, and habitually directing our attention periodically to a nearby Church. Longing to sit...unproductively, "wastefully," affectionately...with our Great Lover.

Draw us to yourself, Lord Jesus, in the Eucharist, your gracious act,  your abiding presence, the communion in holiness of the saints, the body of Christ, the Church!

Praying for Those in Same-Sex Relationships

 Like most, I know and love family and friends who are in same-sex relationships. I pray for them: for them individually, but also for the relationship itself, that all that is good be purified and strengthened, that all that is bad be renounced and cast out. Happily, I enjoy mutuality in affection and respect with these dear ones, in family, friendship and work. There is an implicit "don't ask, don't tell" agreement. Their relationship is private; not a thing of argument, of pride, of policy. We quietly accept the difference in viewpoint as we delight in all we share.

This is NOT a blessing! A blessing is a public acknowledgement of an inherent good, a blessing from God,  and an invocation that his grace permeate, protect, enhance, and strengthen that good. Our new home was publicly blessed by the priest, with holy water, as was the rear house we rent out. We immensely enjoy our house in which we pray and receive family and friends. The rear house is now a "sober living home" for a dozen precious, lovely, grateful, humble women growing daily in serenity, sobriety and health. The highest forms of blessing are, of course, for us Catholics, the sacraments, all of them. A parent or grandparent blesses the young ones. At an ordination, we seek the "first blessing" and then kiss the hands that will consecrate the Eucharist.

The same-sex partnership often includes immense good: devotion, tenderness, care, loyalty, generosity to each other. This was manifest during the worst of the AIDs crisis when such kindness was manifest. It can also flow beyond the relationship: I know of such a couple that has adopted a large number of disabled, orphaned children. It would be a grave sin to deny, disparage, or diminish such goodness. ALL that is true, good and beautiful comes from God. I myself treasure a vow-like intention to NEVER belittle what is good, however bad the circumstances. And so, yes there is a sense in which I, not as a priest but as a lay, baptized-confirmed Catholic, might privately, prayerfully, recognize and pray for and with such goodness. 

The sexual aspect of such a partnership is significant, indeed grave: toxic, sinful, mutually manipulative and abusive. This also must be recognized and then, not blessed, but renounced, repented, cast out. To approve, however vaguely or ambiguously, something evil is to be an enabler, a collaborator in the evil. This is, of course, what Pope Francis and Cardinal Fernandez have done with the convoluted, deceptive declaration on priestly blessings for gay couples.

Imagine a case that resembles the same-sex union. A sister or daughter or granddaughter seems happily married to a fine man. But it happens that he suffers a porn-masturbation addiction and has been pressing his bride to perform porn-type sex acts (oral, anal, manipulative) which are sterile, non-unitive,  abusive, and (to her Catholic conscience) mortally sinful. Her dignity is gravely violated. She is disgusted with him. The marriage is in crisis. He is adamant that he is normal and she is rigid and uptight. What to do?

Beat the crap out of him?  Maybe. But maybe not.

Request a priestly blessing for him in his porn use as normal and healthy? I think not.

Intervene to confront his addiction, demanding he seek treatment/healing in therapy and 12-step fellowship, and initiate a separation until he turns around? I think so!

Suggest confession and prayer for deliverance of evil spirits? Absolutely!

Yes the sex lives of the "gays" and the porn-addicted husband are psychologically and ethically similar: self-abuse by using a person for sexual pleasure and release. Sins of the flesh. Must be renounced and cast out. Very serious! (Which is worse? I would argue that of the husband: he is profaning his marriage as well as violating a woman. The gay thing is man-on-man. What is worse: someone beating up your brother or your sister?)

We know of gay relationships in which the partners have grown in pure love for each other and in faith and have adopted chastity with each other. This is possible. It is a beautiful thing. This is what we pray for when we pray for same-sex relationships: renunciation of sin; increasing strength in chastity, purity, generosity, virtue and prayer.

Competing Catholic Spiritualities Since Vatican II

A spirituality is the core of a person's or community's relationship to God, reality and others; it is a way of life; it expresses a theology and a metaphysics in a myriad of practical was; it is a gestalt of beliefs, values, style, tastes and habits. Catholicism since Vatican II (1965) offers a variety of options. The five major players in this field are: generic, parish Catholicism; evangelical-charismatic-communal-nuptial mysticism; progressivism; American neo-conservatism; traditionalism. Smaller, niche countercultures are: Catholic Worker, 12-step groups, and Christian Meditation and Zen.

1. Generic, Parish Catholicism.

 Amazingly consistent and pervasive across all areas of our county, this is the default, normal piety of most Catholics, as found in the local parish. It is a coherent synthesis of standard elements of our faith that are most affirming, encouraging, comforting to bourgeois, middle class, American life. It is:

- Orthodox, loyal to Church teaching.

 - Emphasizes a God of love, pardon, mercy and compassion, as revealed in Jesus Christ.

 - Advocates a moral code to emulate this God of empathy, kindness, and forgiveness. This includes reconciliation and forgiveness in family and friendship as well as concern for the poor and suffering.

 - Clearly affirms a heaven that is broadly welcoming of all of good will. It does not deny but does ignore hell, Satan, spiritual warfare, the darkness of sin and evil.

 - It accommodates the sexual, contraceptive revolution: neither supporting nor renouncing it. You are unlikely to hear a parish sermon address, one way or the other, contraception, cohabitation, masturbation or homosexuality.

 - As in the Culture War, so in politics it is mostly non-partisan, welcoming Republicans and Democrats equally. 

 - Sermons are predictably intelligent, practical, positive, personal, echoing some scriptural or liturgical theme, relatively brief, and normally not erudite, profound, or inspiring. 

 - Music is feminine, drab, lacking virile energy and classical elegance, and distasteful to the masculine pallet. Architecture and artwork (of more contemporary buildings) is sterile, dry, secularized.

 - Catechetics, unless there is a good Catholic school, is shallow and disliked by the young. 

 - This Catholicism is malleable, flexible and receptive: it easily absorbs elements of the stronger contestants. A specific parish might receive a traditionalist, then a progressive, than an evangelical pastor and yet the overall program retains a moderation and continuity.

 - It provides adequate spiritual nourishment for countless Catholics who aspire to live their faith in the normal patterns of American life. It is always there for you: to baptize, marry, bury, comfort and pardon at every stage and circumstance of life. It is the staple, the meat-vegetable-potato of Catholic life.

 - It is a weak soup for the hungry, searching soul. It is an inadequate response to the powerful forces hostile to Catholicism and thus fails to adequately protect, on its own without reinforcement from the stronger actors below, our young.

2. Evangelical, Charismatic, Communal, Nuptial Mysticism

This most fervent, profound, and promising piety was offered in the dual pontificate of John Paul and Benedict, in their authoritative interpretation of the Council in continuity with tradition, and a rich symphony of renewal movements (charismatic, Communion and Liberation, Neocatechumenate.)

- Personal engagement with the Person/Event of Jesus Christ, experiential intimacy with the Holy Spirit, and a rich theology of the Trinity.

 - Small group engagement with the Word and fraternities of encouragement, accountability and support.

 - Fidelity to Tradition, Magisterium and authority along with an open dialogue with the best in worldly culture.

 - Ecumenical fraternity, especially with Orthodox, Evangelical, Pentecostal.

 - A "nuptial mysticism" that roots its ecclesiology in Christ's conjugal embrace of his bridal Church and founds personal holiness and the common good in chastity and loyalty to the vow of marriage or consecration.

 - Directly, firmly and clearly renounces Sexual Liberation and all its consequences.

 - Like Catholicism in general, it pledges allegiance to no ideology of the left or right; but strongly defends, contra Cultural Liberalism, foundational Catholic values including: the right to life, marriage and family, chastity, religious freedom. Against economic individualism it upholds solidarity with the poor, working class and a strong guiding government; against centralization of power it upholds subsidiarity and localism.

3. Catholic Progressivism

Aligning with modernity and especially the Sexual Revolution,,,  this seeks "progress" over a past viewed as oppressive and ignorant. It is hostile to traditional Catholicism but seeks to reconfigure it to approve of the major features of progressive, secular, bourgeois modernity:

 - Sexuality, contracepted and sterile, is torn from fertility, marriage, fidelity. The sacred character of sex/gender is desecrated. Self abuse, cohabitation, homosexuality are all normalized as sex is trivialized and romance fantasized.

 - The gendered, male-female person as iconic of the Trinity is deconstructed and replaced by the androgynous individual as a unit of production, consumption, and recreation.

 - Therapy replaces piety; wholeness supplants holiness. Psychology is the new religion.

 - Consumerism, materialism, careerism, financial security, status and the accoutrements of bourgeois life are all made sacred.

 - It endorses the values and ideology of Western, affluent, secular, liberal, cosmopolitan elites.

 - Science and technology are exaggerated into messianic forces. Authority is no longer located in a Revelation received from the past, but in the future achievements of science/engineering.

 - Religious trust is placed in an expansive Mother State which cares for human needs at every level as the diminishment of the natural family, and all the intermediate organizations that support it, is implicitly accepted.

 - The dominant paradigm of political life becomes the Marxist, but cultural, oppressor/victim binary: white/black; male/female; etc. This shrouds the affluent, limousine liberal in self-righteousness but does not confront the increasing class divide of privileged/poor. 

 - At its core is a decadent, isolating, lonely individualism (which it shares with its political antagonist, libertarian, neo-liberal economics) which finds solace in therapy, romantic fantasy, science and leftist messianic ideology.

 - It is hostile to core Catholic principles (authority, sex, marriage, sacraments, evil and sin) but remains an enduring temptation to a Church existing in the world. It reigns supreme in Catholic higher education and mainstream theology. It finds expression in prestigious journals: America, Commonweal, National Catholic Reporter.  It has benefited from a surge of influence, status, and power in the age of Pope Francis. 

4. Traditional Catholicism

This school affirms a deep continuity with Church past, specifically the 500 year old Tridentine Church. In its extreme form, it rejects the Council and all its consequences. In moderate form, it accepts that Council but interprets it in a hermeneutic of discontinuity within a greater continuity with the past.

 - A quintessential expression is, of course, the Latin mass. But it would also include moderations of the ordinary mass: facing to the East, quiet in Church, silence and solemnity, adoration of the Blessed Sacrament, balance of the temple-sacrifice nature of the liturgy with the Passover-meal aspect.

 - Accentuation on the intellectual primacy of St. Thomas Aquinas as in the Dominican Order.

 - Populist in nature, surprisingly attractive to young families, a bottom-up movement with minimum support from the upper levels of Church hierarchy and the academy.

 - In its warfare with progressivism, it basically aligns with Evangelical Catholicism and Neo-conservatism. In Pope Benedict we see a perfect synthesis of what is mutually enriching between the two forms of anti-progressivism.

 - It is despised by Pope Francis who sees only arrogant, hateful, reactionary, clerical resistance to the "Spirit of Vatican II and Synodality." More broadly, especially in the USA, it is accepted and appreciated even by liberal-leaning bishops. The papal repression has elicited more fervent support from conservatives and moderates outside of the Latin community.

5. Neo-Conservative, Americanist Catholicism

The marriage of conservative, Republican politics with cultural conservatism, reactive to the sexual revolution, reached its epitome in the Reagan presidency and especially the euphoric triumph over Soviet Communism and the apparent, but short lived, hegemony of Western liberalism. 

 - It embraces the virtues of capitalism, market economics, freedom of initiative, entrepreneurship, small government, low tax and regulation, and business (including global). In this it is out of step with mainstream Catholic sympathy for the poor and the working class.

 - It idolizes the "American Founding" and accentuates all that is compatible with Catholicism but ignores the underlying anti-Catholicism: masonic, anti-sacramental, anti-Marian, anti-Papist.

 - It is largely uncritical of large scale, global capitalism, and it corruptive influence, with materialism and consumerism, on the family and faith.

 - It advocates for traditional values around helpless human life, family and sexuality, and chastity/fidelity against the moral chaos of sexual liberation.

 - During the cold war, against the Soviet Empire, it was especially strong and influential in its three pillars: anti-Communism, pro-Capitalism, pro-family. 

 - It found classic expression in the National Review of William Buckley, First Things of Fr. Richard Neuhaus, and the work of Michael Novak and George Weigel. 

 - It is in crisis in the age of the convoluted, incoherent populism of Donald Trump which is: populist in a resentful mode; strongly pro-life, family, religious freedom; erratically isolationist; and nationalist in a crude, chauvinist manner offensive to the internationalist, "catholic" sympathies inherent in Catholicism. The remnant that remains faithful to this "three-pillared" conservatism coherently become "never-Trumpers," especially in reaction to his vile personal moral character. It remains to be seen if a post-Trump Catholic politics can emerge to unite a populist defense of the cultural and economic underdogs (DeSantis? Vance?).

 - In its underlying libertarianism and individualism it shares the isolating decadence of the cultural liberal.

 - It is compatible with Catholic Traditionalism and feels entirely comfortable in default parish life.

Other Niche, Minor Players

If the above five are the major contenders for the allegiance of the American Catholic, it is worth noting three lesser, but not insignificant actors.

Catholic Worker

Small in size, but large in influence, this "thick" counterculture, as birthed by Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin, is (with large variations) solidly Catholic in doctrine, practice, and prayer and especially admirable in the acts of mercy and identification with the poor. In politics it is radical: pacifist in its absolute rejection of warfare and anarchistic in its rejection of capitalism, and the American state. In these last two "...isms" it is out of step with Catholic social thinking, but as these involve prudential judgements it does not diminish their Catholic identity.

12-Steps

While not specifically Catholic, this path has profoundly influenced countless Catholics and must be recognized. It is entirely coherent with Catholic life, and can be understood as an intensification of elements of our faith which work in a new, miraculous gestalt to overcome addiction in its various forms. Many practice this, to great effect, in harmony with our sacramental life. For others it becomes an alternative, as they forsake Catholic practice but give themselves generously and loyalty to these steps and do great work as they grow in sobriety, serenity and (in my view) sanctity.

Christian Zen and Meditation

There many forms of Christian meditation and contemplation: some sink deeper into Christian love of Christ, as in Centering Prayer. Others move into Eastern traditions and attempt to merge what is best from the West and the East. My observation is that this later is not a contradiction of Catholicism, but an alternative to it.

 -  It tends to be anti-intellectual, dismissing the value of theology, doctrine and cognition in favor of a deeper, mystical awareness. And so, it does not deny, but ignores Catholic realities (incarnation, redemption, resurrection) or reinterprets them in ways mystical or moral. 

 - It does not articulate but draws from an implied pantheism: that we are all united in the good, the true, the beautiful and the divine. The foundational Christian binary of  (personal) Creator and creation is unknown. Rather, there is a primal, incomprehensible union of all in all. 

 - A historical, definitive, actual, concrete Revelation in Jesus of Nazareth is not acknowledged. The Eternal is not seen as taking flesh in a literal sense. Rather, there is an escape from history, a transcendence beyond it. The actual death and resurrection are not central. If anything, they are probed for moral, poetic, and mystical meanings.

 - Sin is not an issue. So there is no need for a savior. Rather, the illusions of the "false self" need to be discarded as the enlightened one enters into a peace and a harmony with the real, free of illusions of jealousy, competition, lust, achievement, and such.

 - It seems to appeal to: the affluent, more women than men, the educated, spiritual seekers discontent with organized Christianity, the more liberal leaning. It attempts to distance itself from the vehemence and passion of partisan politics but surely leans left.

 - It works well with psychology and therapy as upper class rituals.

 - There are some who practice Zen along with Catholicism, but there is no inner coherence between them. They are not mutually reinforcing in the was the 12-steps. It is less likely that a meditator leave a "Zen sitting" and go to daily mass than an addict leave a meeting for the same.

Conclusion

Generic parish Catholicism is miraculously consistent, available, loyal, stable, dependable, nourishing, welcoming, maternal, efficacious. It can be boring, uninspiring, insipid.

It is in itself not an adequate response to the ferocity of anti-Catholic, secular, progressive modernity as it demeans the Church and invades her in the form of Catholic Progressivism.

It requires reinforcement from more intense, profound, militant forms of Catholicism, specifically an alliance between a reasonable Traditionalism and the fervor of Evangelical-Charismatic-Communal-Nuptial Catholicism.