Franciscan at Home

Geek culture is a true culture. “Geeks”—as I am applying the term—are not simply a group of people who love sci-fi, fantasy, or horror genre media; rather geek culture represents a social grouping of those who make that love a major part of their identity and community formation.

Some members of geek culture are not open to the Gospel because they perceive a hostility and rejection by the Christian community. Yet this culture expresses aesthetic and psychological needs that can only be fulfilled in the Catholic faith. Geeks not only belong in the Church, as all belong in the Church, but the Church itself can be seen as the apotheosis of geek culture.

Some geeks feel alienated because they may be socially awkward and different, and are drawn to genre media because it often expresses profound alienation and loneliness. Another reason geeks can feel isolated is that their genre media reinforce their social isolation by making it into a common identity-point. To remedy this sense of isolation, they will look for a community of people with similar speculative media-passion and a similar sense of alienation. If geeks see the Church as a manifestation of that exclusionary mainstream culture, they will be very difficult to evangelize.

The remarkable number of Baptisms, First Communions, and Confirmations among Hispanics/Latinos in Catholic parishes across the nation is perhaps the most eloquent statement about their emergence as a majority population within the Catholic Church in the United States.

The idea that “cultural capital,” in the sense of cultivated dispositions of mind and body, might play a role in catechesis is often resisted from two extreme positions. First, there are those who argue that faith formation is merely propositional. We simply need to teach people the Catechism. This we might call the opposition from the right. Second, there are those who instinctively tie the concept of “cultural capital” to the class-war and are aggressively hostile to the idea that some cultures and what we call “cultural formation” might be superior to others. This we might call the opposition from the left. It is often found in liberation theology circles where, for example, knowledge of more than one language or an ability to play a musical instrument, is associated with having had a bourgeois education.
In my first book Culture and the Thomist Tradition,[i] I was critical of the opposition from the right and did not really address the opposition from the left because I thought that battle had been won by Josef Ratzinger in the 1980s. The central principle of my book, which might be called a synthesis of the philosophy of Alasdair MacIntyre with the theology of Josef Ratzinger, is that if you want to catechize people, you need to give them an experience of a fully functional Catholic culture and not merely present them with doctrinal propositions (though these are important and have their place) and certainly not try to market the Catholic faith to them by transposing it into the idioms and practices of contemporary popular culture. Ratzinger described the latter practice, which was hugely popular in the 1960s and 70s and has been making a come-back among liberation theologians, as treating the Church as if it were a haberdashery shop with its windows needing to be re-dressed and decorated with each passing fashion season. What MacIntyre and Ratzinger have both argued, in different ways, is that the ethos of Christian institutions needs to be governed by practices that embody a Christian logic or meaning. If you feed people doctrine but the whole realm of praxis is running on a different logic (for example, a utilitarian logic or an economic rationalist logic), then the Holy Spirit can’t breathe, grace is suffocated, because there is a logical disjunction between the theory and the practice. God created us in such a way that even a five-year-old can sense that something is not quite adding up, even if the five-year-old is unable to explain the problem in terms of the relationship between logos and ethos. In theological language distinctions are often made between the “logos of love” (which is inherently Christian) and the logos of the machine (which is inherently atheistic). So, a preliminary MacIntyrean point is that if you want to catechize people it helps to expose them to a milieu where the set of social practices are running on the logos of love.

Angelo Cardinal Scola wrote of conversion to Christ and conversion to reality.[1] Just as conversion opens our eyes to the ugliness of sin and the beauty of grace, so it overflows in opening our hearts to the many and various splendours of creation.

The significance of place, geography and archaeology were subjects, I have to confess, that I accepted in principle—but, you might say, without enthusiasm and insight. In this brief reflection on a recent visit to the Holy Land, I want to consider the catechesis of place. The Holy Land is a testimony to the living interrelationship of archaeology, geography and the incarnation of the history of salvation. Just as God “in his wisdom … brought it about that the New should be hidden in the Old and that the Old should be made manifest in the New,”[2] so, simple as it might seem, there is an interplay between the events of Christ’s life and the historical locations in which they took place.

Briefly, then, I want to touch on three categories of place: first, those graced by the presence of the Holy Family, Christ and His disciples; second, the place of the Transfiguration, Mount Tabor; and, third, Jerusalem, the City of King David and the place of the Paschal Mystery of Christ.

I know what they are thinking. Most of the seminarians and lay students that follow my course “Catholic Social Teaching” in our seminary/school of theology begin with the assumption that this is the “social justice” course. Some like this reduction of “Catholic Social Teaching” to “social justice.” Others dread it. Few question it. I savor the guilty pleasure of playing off of this supposition, building it up in crescendo-like fashion, until at last it is obliterated by the logic of the Church’s social documents themselves. I do enjoy this, but I also do this for pedagogical reasons: I want the assumption that Catholic social teaching reduces to social justice so utterly razed in the minds of my students that when it falls it can never rise from the ashes of its ruin. No resurrection here, please.

Social justice is a part of Catholic social teaching, and an important part. However, it is only a part and it cannot be equated with the entirety of Catholic social teaching without doing serious harm to both. Social justice is that form of justice that regulates one’s relationships according to the standards of law. Typically, it is taken to be about society’s larger institutions like business corporations, political structures, and forms of the market. Catholic social teaching, on the other hand, includes social justice and much, much more. Catholic social teaching covers each of our relationships and socializations in general and, most importantly, does so in a manner where the demand of justice (what is due to another) is not the sole focus. This also means the Church’s social teaching can reach to those forms of relationships that in whole or part elude the categories of justice and law, such as the relationship of friendship. The social teaching of the Church is capable of this wide perspective because, first and foremost, it begins not from law, but from God’s Trinitarian love as manifest in Jesus Christ.

And so, this clarification is an important one. Catholic social teaching is not first about the state of one’s nation, and then somehow extended to other realms of life in a secondary, derivative manner. Catholic social teaching is as much about the living room as it about the halls of Congress.

An old pastor sits in the front corner of his small country church one autumn evening. The lamps are coming on outside, the children are hurrying home for supper, and each chime of the bells above brings the priest a moment closer to the time when he must deliver his Sunday sermon. But he is at a loss for words. He has drilled into his parishioners the proofs for God’s existence, the reasons for the immorality of abortion, and the importance of prayer. Time and again he preached about the need to live a life of stewardship, the significance of the confessional, and the wrongs of gossip. And the fruits of his work are visible. The children recite the catechism with diligence, the women’s guild prays the rosary with devotion, and the young men can reason through disputes over the saints and Blessed Mother with their protestant co-workers. Yes, his flock has been given a toolbox. What more then is there? What further work can he do?

Suddenly he hears the creaking of the door to the church open behind him. “Somebody has got to oil that one,” he thinks to himself, making a mental note of this task for the custodian. The quiet patter of feet passes him and then stops. As the priest lifts up his head, he is taken aback at the site of the scene before him. A little child is there, kneeling before the crucifix. Father recognizes the lad from Sunday school, a quiet fellow from a good family. His hat in his hands and his eyes fixed upon the mangled body of Christ hanging limply on the tree, the child’s lips move slowly, reverently. The priest leans in, trying to hear what soft sounds are exuding from the boy’s mouth. He is quietly uttering the Anima Christi, each powerful word taking on new meaning in this child’s sweet voice. With that, the priest falls to his knees. And then the answer comes…
In order to reconcile his people to himself, God became seeable, hearable, touchable, and reachable, taking on true human flesh. “By nature incomprehensible and inaccessible, [God] was invisible and unthinkable, but now he wished to be understood, to be seen and thought of,” writes St. Bernard of Clairvaux.[1] In a sense, he became concrete and graspable, yet at the same time mysterious and unknowable, bridging the imminent and the transcendent. Preface I for Christmas so beautifully reads, “By the wonder of the Incarnation, your Eternal Word has brought the eyes of faith a new and radiant image of your glory. In him we see our God made visible and so are caught up in love of the God we cannot see.”

It is poetry that most fully takes on these characteristics, creating images that rouse our senses and help us to understand reality, yet always leaving a sense of the unknown, an aura of mystery. It is poetry, that theology (as St. Anselm defined it, “Faith seeking understanding”) so desperately needs, else it turn into the mechanical “study of God.” It is poetry for which the faithful long in order to come to know Christ, the Divine Poet himself. It is poetry, which this priest’s preaching is lacking.

A source of great hope to the very young can be fairy tales. For this reason they should really be part of the essential reading for pre-school children and beginning readers. For any who need convincing of their value in offering solid moral formation and encouraging the necessary values and help essential for enabling children to find ‘reasons for living and hoping’ I would recommend an excellent book by Bruno Bettleheim: The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales.[i] What I write here owes much to the wisdom contained in that book.

Fairytales offer hope first because they are realistic about evil

Because of this they enable children to face the things that can destroy hope. Despite popular identification of the term ‘Fairy tale’ with make believe and the avoidance of reality, the very opposite is true - fairy tales are full of ogres, giants, witches, wicked stepmothers, indifferent fathers, spiteful brothers and jealous sisters. They are filled with death, grief, danger and struggle. The pages teem with characters who are prone to all the basic human vices and weaknesses - fear, cruelty, hard-heartedness, greed, stupidity, disobedience, anger, thoughtlessness, cruelty, cunning and deception - all of these are found in the basic repertoire of stories. Fairy tales, then, do not shield a child from all that he knows about the world and about himself - including the basic facts of ugliness, evil, sin and death.

Alan Schreck concludes his summary of the vital teaching document of Blessed John Paul II on family life and family catechesis.

As we approach the thirteenth anniversary of Familiaris Consortio (Nov. 22, 1981), Blessed John Paul II’s concerns and direction for the family appear even more relevant and urgent today. As he taught in 2001 (NMI, 47), ‘At a time in history like the present, special attention must also be given to the pastoral care of the family, particularly when this fundamental institution is experiencing a radical and widespread crisis.’ In FC, John Paul presented four major tasks for the family in the modern world:

1. forming a community of persons;
2. serving life;
3. participating in the development of society;
4. sharing in the life and mission of the Church (no. 17).

In the last Sower, we discussed the first task, so now we must ask: ‘How does the family serve life?’ This is ‘the fundamental task of the family’ (no. 28). Echoing Pope Paul VI’s encyclical letter Humanae Vitae, FC teaches ‘that love between husband and wife must be fully human, exclusive, and open to new life’ (no. 29).

Fr. Peter Conley highlights the importance of saints in catechesis and calls on us not to overlook some of their more unexpected sides.

Cardinal John Henry Newman, in his Fragment of a Life of St Philip, has left us an unexpected (and often overlooked) hermeneutic key to unlock the nature of holiness in both canonised saints and those in the making.

‘…a saint’s life may often have in it things not directly and immediately spiritual. To find a saint sitting down to cards, or reading a heathen author, or listening to music or taking snuff, is often a relief and an encouragement to the reader, as convincing him that grace does not supersede nature, and that as he is reading of a child of Adam and his own brother, and he is drawn up to his pattern and guide while he sees that pattern can descend to him; whereas that shadowy paper-Saint, as I may call it, bloodless, ideality which may be set up in the mind from the exclusive perusal of a roll of unconnected details, may, from the weakness of our hearts, chill us unduly, lead (us) to shrink from the Saints and to despond about ourselves. The lights and shades of the saintly character are necessary for understanding what a Saint is.’1

Blessed John Henry challenges us to admit that we can become susceptible to a diet of bland, lifeless accounts of holiness which emphasise the ‘sublime’ without ever delighting in the ‘ridiculous’ or, at least, the quirkiness about a saintly character. The passage pulsates in its appeal to search for a person’s humanity because it is in and through this that we encounter the kindly light of Christ’s divinity shining out from them.