Dr. Larry Chapp is a retired professor of theology. He taught for twenty years at DeSales University near Allentown, Pennsylvania. He now owns and manages, with his wife, the Dorothy Day Catholic Worker Farm in Harveys Lake, Pennsylvania. Dr. Chapp received his doctorate from Fordham University in 1994 with a specialization in the theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar. He can be visited online at “Gaudium et Spes 22”.
Sitting and watching the June 10th event in St. Peter’s Square, surrounded by nearly no one at all, I noticed how completely absent was any mention or image of Jesus Christ.
If there is one common denominator that links all of the various forms of Catholic progressivism together it is their allergy to the scandal of Christ’s particularity and the Christian claim that this particularity represents an absolute and universal in-breaking of God into history. This allergy is directly linked to the fact that most Catholic progressives have antecedently bought into the false modern definition of “religion”, born of the Enlightenment, as a generic category that can easily be defined as that “thingy” dealing with “spiritual stuff”. One then places the various “species” of religious expression under this genus and Christianity quickly becomes merely one religion among many and Christ is demoted to simply one “religious founder” among many others.
The claim used to be made by Catholic progressives that Jesus Christ is merely one savior figure among many; then the academic gurus who controlled this conversation realized that not all religions have saviors or even a general concept of salvation. Therefore, in order to fit Christianity into the formal logic of modernity’s view of religion as a kind of safe space of domesticated sentimentalisms, the whole Christian eschatological and soteriological edifice had to be deconstructed as a Pauline invention, wherein a radically Hellenized version of messianic Judaism, centered on the freshly minted cosmic savior Christ, supplanted the real historical Jesus.
Who was this “real” historical Jesus whose outlines could only be detected by the proper academic sleuths possessing the historical-critical decoder ring? Well, take your pick, since like all modern forms of intellectual consumerism the historical-critical boutique shop of reconstructed Jesus action figures (accessories sold separately) offer us a wild set of options: the Che Guevara Jesus of liberating political praxis; the gnostic Deepak Chopra Jesus, who is a dispenser of cracker barrel spiritual nostrums; the rainbow Jesus of sexual libertinism and “love is love” antinomianism; the anti-Judaic Jesus, who hated “religion” and its “silly rules,” like an early Marcionite who came to replace Judaism with his new religion of dive bar inclusion. And now we can also include the “synodal Jesus” of Chatty Cathy liberalism, where the pull-string that generates the speaking is controlled by the magical invisible hand of accompaniment and dialogue.
Of course, it does not take any sane person very long to see that most of this reconstructing was just Rorschach inkblot projection onto Jesus of the favored intellectual and political hobby horses of the academic reconstructors. Therefore, the entire progressive Catholic project of attempting to ground their cause in some version of the historically reconstructed Jesus has floundered on the shoals of its own deconstructive and transgressive methodology. Because once the only real Jesus that truly exists – the Jesus who comes to us via Scriptural and ecclesial mediation – is deconstructed, the “Jesus” that remains after the autopsy is completed is a jumbled pile of bones devoid of flesh. In other words, once we destroy the notion that Jesus was, and is, “The Christ”, then the Jesus that remains is simply one long dead “used to be the important dude from the past” of dubious ongoing significance.
This is precisely why wherever Christianity has undergone this process of progressivist demolition of Jesus as Christ and sole savior of the world, it dies in short order. Because people are not stupid. They understand that the only Jesus worth paying attention to is the Jesus of traditional faith and that if Jesus is not the Christ of the faith, then to hell with him. And to hell with the Church and the Bible, and that entire way of viewing reality, which now seems like so much Iron Age myth-making. They understand that Jesus may have been an interesting figure in his time – if he even existed at all – but that liberal Christianity’s various intellectual gesticulations and gyrations are empty and, quite frankly, a bit desperate looking. Like octogenarian Cardinals dancing to rap music at a “synod on youth” in order (I guess) to show how “relevant” Jesus still is.
Which brings me to my main point. Recently, the Vatican co-sponsored an event that was essentially a celebration of precisely these kinds of empty ecclesial gesticulations and gyrations. Devoid of any mention of Christ as the savior of the world, but long on the gaseous buzzwords of anodyne, bureaucratic secularity, the end result was predictably disastrous and pathetic. And the fact that those in power at the Vatican seem so smitten with the therapeutic dreck of their own bland, Mueslix aggiornamento of Christless Christianity that they could not see the fiasco that was looming, says about all one needs to say of the spiritual acumen, not to mention the Catholic faith, of so many currently ensconced in power there.
I am referring to the “World Meeting on Human Fraternity (Not Alone)” which was held at the Vatican on Saturday, June 10th in St. Peter’s Square. Organized by the curia Apparatchik Cardinal Mauro Gambetti (Archpriest of St. Peter’s Basilica and Vicar General for Vatican City), the “Meeting on Fraternity” was linked via satellite video to several other locations around the world, and was to be loosely based upon the theme of human fraternity developed by Pope Francis in Fratelli tutti. The high point of the meeting was the signing of a document developed by thirty Nobel Laureates called “The Declaration of Human Fraternity.” According to the Vatican News account of the event, “Representatives of the group of Nobel Laureates, Dr. Muhammad Yunus and Dr. Nadia Murad, presented the Declaration on Human Fraternity during the event, with Cardinal Pietro Parolin, Vatican Secretary of State, putting his signature to it.”
I just happened to be in Rome on vacation with my wife, and so we got a direct view of both the preparations leading up to the event as well as the event itself. What struck me initially was that it was clear the Vatican was expecting a very large crowd indeed. For days leading up to the event workers were busy setting out thousands of chairs, erecting barricades, and building tents and booths for various vendors and cafeterias all along the full length of the Via della Conciliazione. Large towers were erected with loudspeakers generating music that I can only describe as the kind of soothing soft-blues piano tunes like the kind found in posh lounges that accompany brandy in a sniffer and fine Sherry. Banners were everywhere declaring the need for “inclusion and solidarity,” as well as green agriculture.
But nowhere did one find a single banner that mentioned Christ, as one might expect from a Vatican-sponsored event. But, then again, the cosmopolitan progressive Catholics that are currently in power are most likely embarrassed by such public displays of Christological affection. Such a Christological particularism, as noted above, is viewed as “exclusionary” since it presumes that Christ is the Absolute singularity who is the fulcrum upon which our finitude teeters and is thus the critical pivot point for the entirety of human history. And such Christological affections also run afoul of polite faculty room chit-chat since it implies that there is a path to human fraternity not grounded in the universal acid of secularity that dissolves all such religious particularisms into the Esperanto of a hopeful and smiling nihilism.
It must have been quite a disappointment to Cardinal Gambetti and his curial courtesans that hardly anybody showed up for the big event. And the few people who were there were mostly folks who were wandering across St. Peter’s Square in flip-flops and shorts, looking quite exhausted as they returned from a day of experiencing those parts of Rome that still spoke, in stone and image, of Christ and his Church. I guess the theme of the day was not as gripping as the good Cardinal thought it would be, and that the message of “nice to be nice to the nice” did not send an existential thrill up anyone’s leg.
At one point in the festivities, I remarked to my wife that the whole thing had a “We are the World” vibe to it. And, sure enough, right on cue, there ensued on the video screen a performance of “We are the World”. I thought that perhaps we were also about to be serenaded with the catchy tune from the old Coca-Cola commercials, in which people sang “I want to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony…”. Because that would have been entirely appropriate as an expression of the soda pop solidarity that was being promoted – a kind of new and secular Pentecost of globalist chic that is a counterfeit simulacrum of the real thing.
Jesus can then be safely reinterpreted as an itinerant hippie preacher of philanthropic banalities whose open-table fellowship with sinners shows us that he really did not care that much about sin — so we should not either. In this view, concern over the pesky trifle of the so-called moral law is precisely the kind of “backward rigidity” that stands in the way of the true fraternity and inclusion preached by Jesus. Therefore, if you are against the progressive agenda of better living through chemicals, then you are against Jesus. QED.
I have been told by a reliable source, who is in a position to know such things, that the entire event cost around 700,000 Euro. There were most likely co-sponsors that donated money to the Vatican for the event, but it cannot be accurately determined right now just how much that amounted to. And 700,000 Euro seems reliable on its face since some of the talents that performed normally require a hefty fee, e.g. Andrea Bocelli, whose fee can run as high as 150,000 Euro. And even some of the lesser performers, such as the bare-torso dancer Roberto Bolle, who performed a predictably campy and “brave” avant-garde dance on the steps of St. Peter’s, probably took home around 30,000 Euro.
I guess the takeaway is that it costs a lot of money to pretend to be inclusive in a hip, modern register. However, one could perhaps critique the decision of Cardinal Gambetti to spend this kind of money on theatrics instead of using it to clean up the extended and growing homeless encampment that the area surrounding St. Peter’s has become. That money could have been used to establish a house run by the Missionaries of Charity or similar order, right near the Vatican and to commission them to minister, in the name of Christ, to the homeless and the destitute who have flocked to St. Peter’s Square as a refuge. That would send the powerful message that inclusion and solidarity start at home through concrete acts of corporal and spiritual mercy, not via the vacuous abstractions of virtue signaling document signings with rich and important people, all of whom now agree that “violence is just such an awful thing and somebody really should do something about it.”
Finally, I could not help but contrast in my mind the emptiness of St. Peter’s Square on that day with the overflowing crowds of some rather traditional Catholics in France who were on a Eucharistic pilgrimage from Paris to Chartres, and in the many other public Eucharistic displays that took place all over the world this past week on the Feast of Corpus Christi. My wife and I were privileged to have Mass on Corpus Christi in the grotto of the papal tombs under Saint Peter’s with the wonderful Dominican priest Father Benedict Croell. And as our Mass was ongoing we could hear the singing of many other Masses that were taking place in the various side altars of the grotto. It was a truly moving experience of the universal Church in practice and of the power of the Christ she preaches in Word and Sacrament.
I will never forget that experience. I will, on the other hand, quickly forget about the “Meeting on Human Fraternity”.
The faith lives. Christ lives. He is the heart of the world and inclusion in his Kingdom is the pearl of great price for which we run the good race and fight the good fight. My friend, the theologian Michael Baxter, once taught a wildly popular undergraduate introductory theology course at Notre Dame called, “A Faith to Die for”. And it was popular because there is a Samaritan woman at the well in all of us; we have all been married more than once to all manner of idolatries. Therefore, we all still seek the living water that only Jesus who is the Christ can bring.
But nobody thirsts for soda pop solidarity. Nobody.