Fulton J. Sheen: “the temptation for the Church in the twenty-first century will be to conform to the world.”

On Not Taking It Anymore

By Regis Martin

“Do not conform yourselves to this age.” ∼ St. Paul, Letter to the Romans (12:2)

It is time to stand athwart the excesses of the age and to urge everyone to return to theological bedrock, to recover and renew the springs of truth and life.

Living in a world where much has been laid waste by forces hostile to faith and hope, the challenge becomes that of finding evidence for the things that one loves. Or simply going mad in the face of all that conspires to deride and deny those sacred tablets on which is written all that we revere. It is then, I imagine, that one is tempted to think that there are simply no sane or pious people left on the planet. You come to see yourself as the poor melancholy prince, for whom all Denmark “is out of joint,” while you alone are left to rail: “O cursed spite, / That ever I was born to set it right!”

The temptation to see oneself perched upon some austere and lonely peak of heroism, like the Hamlet of Shakespeare’s play, has got to be resisted. Why agitate at all against the aberrations of the age unless you are prepared to assume that others are equally appalled? Is the coarsening and corruption of the culture not evident to them as well? There’s got to be somebody out there harboring suspicions about the world in which we live. It is scarcely endurable that no one else is outraged by the hokum and humbuggery.

In the meantime, if things get much worse it will be too late to inoculate ourselves against the stain of toxicity threatening us all. Great numbers appear to have succumbed already. People who, while they profess to believe in nothing, seem quite willing to fall for anything. Like that crowded throng ceaselessly flowing over London Bridge, “so many,” as the poet Eliot would say, “I had not thought death had undone so many.” The image is lifted from The Waste Land, that great landmark of modernist verse, which Eliot himself had lifted from the immortal Dante—an exercise in poetic poaching that tells us how long the theme of death-in-life has been in circulation.

Why is it, I wonder, that the fashionable nonsense people glibly parade nowadays, for all that it wears the stylish disguise of enlightened opinion, is nothing more than sheer cowardice morphing into mindless conformity? “We will never know,” wrote Charles Peguy more than a century ago, “how many acts of cowardice have been motivated by the fear of not seeming sufficiently progressive.”

How prescient Peguy was! Also Fulton J. Sheen, who predicted that “the temptation for the Church in the twenty-first century,” which he did not live to witness, “will be to conform to the world.” And then of course one thinks of Chesterton, of that lapidary line reminding us that there is no slavery more complete than to be a child of one’s own age. Like all those suffragettes of whom he wrote, that in their full-throated frenzy of not wanting to be dictated to, promptly went out to become … stenographers. What an impoverishment it is when we substitute Groupthink for the failure to work things out according to the mind of Christ. Or even our own minds, for that matter, when set free from the snares of ideology.

Free, therefore, to attend to the timeless wisdom of Mother Church, who not only teaches the truth about faith, but reason as well. Because God having entrusted her with transmitting the life of grace, which opens up limitless horizons of glory, she is entitled to uphold and defend nature. What could be sillier than to imagine grace without some nature to perfect? Or sillier still, what about faith in the absence of any sort of reason to inform it?

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