Published October 3, 2024
Credibility, Sanctity, and Beauty
Subtly in the Instrumentum Laboris, and quite openly in the formal announcement of the October 1 synodal “Penitential Celebration” in St. Peter’s Basilica, the managers of Synod-2024 suggest that the Catholic Church has a credibility problem that impedes its mission of proclaiming the gospel.
Institutional Catholicism certainly has credibility problems in many parts of the world.
The Church parts of North America and Europe continue to forfeit credibility due to revelations of clerical sexual abuse, mishandled (or in some cases ignored) by ecclesiastical authorities.
The unresolved Rupnik case is a bleeding credibility wound at the Roman center of the world Church.
The Church in Latin America is only beginning to come to grips with what seem to be widespread, even massive problems of sexual abuse, including the use of remote Latin American dioceses as points of exile for clerical abusers from other parts of the world.
But the ongoing abuse crisis is not the only Catholic crisis of credibility today.
Isn’t current Vatican policy toward the thug regimes of Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua creating a credibility problem for the Church?
Hasn’t the ongoing scandal of allowing the Chinese Communist Party a role in the appointment of Catholic bishops created a credibility problem, not only in China but also in those parts of the world that look to the Holy See for moral leadership?
Then there is the sad, unnecessary, but all-too-real credibility gap that exists today between the suffering Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church and the Vatican, the result of intemperate and ill-informed commentary on Russia’s imperialist war of violent aggression in Ukraine by leading Rome-based churchmen.
So yes, institutional Catholicism has a credibility problem.
But does the gospel?
Throughout a multiyear synodal process, it has been suggested by many of the main protagonists of this Synod on Synodality that the Church’s credibility problem is also a gospel credibility problem that can only be remedied by various changes, some of them dramatic, in the Church’s teaching, pastoral practice, and authority structures.
At the level of pastoral practice, there are surely solvable problems.
One of them is clericalism. Diaconal, priestly, and episcopal fraternity is one thing, and a good thing. That is not clericalism, which may be defined by reference to the Hindu caste system. Clericalism is the notion that those in Holy Orders, especially the priesthood and the episcopate, constitute a supreme caste of Catholic Brahmins, who can and should function autocratically. Where it exists, that problem can be remedied by a closer reading of Vatican II’s Dogmatic Constitution on the Church (Lumen Gentium); by a deeper reflection on St. Augustine’s Sermon on Pastors, which appears annually in the Liturgy of the Hours; and by reforms in seminary training and ongoing priestly formation. In many parts of the world Church, wise bishops and pastors already consult with their people on a host of questions—a fact that goes largely unrecognized in the Instrumentum Laboris. That experience of effective consultation and collaboration can be extended globally as particular circumstances allow. Solving the problem of clericalism need not involve any change in how the Church understands its sacramental system and structures of authority. All it requires, really, is a deep and thorough understanding of the meaning of the sacrament of Baptism for both individual Catholics and the Catholic community.
There is another way to address this question of a Catholic credibility crisis, however, and that is by attending to a particular teaching of Pope Benedict XVI—now buried in the Vatican grottos, and, alas, seemingly buried in the minds of many.
When he died, Joseph Ratzinger, Benedict XVI, was arguably the most learned man in the world. His remarkable intellect ranged over theology and biblical studies, to be sure, but he was also a gifted linguist and a close student of philosophy, history, and literature. And to top it all off, he could explain complex things without over-simplifying them. His capacity to teach the truths of Catholic faith was truly an exercise in the simplicity that lays on the far side of complexity.
For all that he was a world-class intellect, though, Professor Ratzinger and Pope Benedict consistently taught that the two great warrants for the truth of Christianity—the two realities that underwrite the Church’s credibility—are sanctity and beauty: the holy men and women who conformed their lives to Christ and the gospel, and the beautiful music, art, sculpture, and literature that the gospel inspires. Yet as noted in “LETTERS FROM THE SYNOD-2024: #1,” “sanctity” and the “saints” are largely absent from the Synod-2024’s Working Document (three citations, with “holiness” mentioned ten times), while “synodality” and its cognates get 215 citations, and “process” and its plural get 58 mentions. Something is out of kilter here.
Why are the saints so crucial to the credibility of the Church? Because saints, by living heroically the truths of the gospel, tell the world its true story, which the world has lost or forgotten.
Almost a decade and a half ago, Lutheran theologian Robert W. Jenson penned a brilliant essay entitled “How the World Lost Its Story.” It bears reading and rereading. For the sake of concision, however, let me put the case in these terms: Insofar as anyone learns world history in a linear fashion today, the chapter headings go something like this—Ancient Civilizations; Greece and Rome; the Middle Ages; Renaissance and Reformation; the Age of Revolution; the Age of Science; the Space Age (or the Digital Age). The human story can certainly be told under those headings. To do so is to skim along the surface of history, however.
What the saints remind the world, through conforming their lives to the gospel, is that there is another story. Its chapter headings are these: Creation; Fall; Promise; Prophecy; Incarnation; Redemption; Sanctification; the Kingdom of God.
Moreover, the saints by their example teach the world that these two stories—the linear “world history” story and the biblical story—do not run on parallel tracks. Rather, the biblical story is the linear “world history” story read at its proper depth and against its appropriately ample horizon. The biblical story, unfolding within the linear “world history” story, gives world history its true meaning, and confirms that “history” is neither cyclical nor random but going somewhere. Which is to say that life is pilgrimage and adventure, not just one damned thing after another.
Witnessing to that, the Church’s saints, who are the gospel enfleshed, underwrite the Church’s credibility.
Then there is beauty.
Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI knew that the late modern and postmodern worlds had lost their grip on two of the transcendentals, truth and goodness. Late modernity was unclear on how the truth of anything could be demonstrated at all. (This is one reason why progressive moral theologians came to insist—and some still do—that there is no such thing as an intrinsically evil act, or if there were, we couldn’t know such an act to be such in a particular instance.) Post-modernity concedes that there is “your truth” and “my truth” but insists that there is nothing properly describable as the truth—a prescription for what Ratzinger, in his sermon at the Mass “Pro Eligendo Romano Pontifice” on April 18, 2005, would call the “dictatorship of relativism.” For if “your truth” and “my truth” collide and there is no horizon of judgment against which we can settle the argument, then you will impose your power on me, or I will impose my power on you: and thus is created a tyranny of moral relativism.
As for goodness, well, one person’s goodness these days is another person’s wickedness, as the global debate over the life issues readily demonstrates.
How get out of this quicksand pit and get back onto more solid terrain?
Beauty, Benedict XVI taught, was the often-forgotten third transcendental that, recovered, might help us recover our grip on truth and goodness.
Take the experience of standing in Chartres cathedral as light streams through its dazzling stained-glass windows. In those moments, you’re immersed in beauty. You know that this is beauty, period, not just beauty-for-me. You also experience this undeniable beauty as something indisputably good.
Reflecting on the experience of beauty, therefore, can re-open a credible Catholic conversation with the world about truth and goodness, in a kind of pre-evangelization of the gospel.
The beautiful human creations that the gospel has inspired underwrite the Church’s credibility, as does the witness of the saints. One of those creations is the hymn “Holy God, We Praise Thy Name”—sometimes called the “Team Catholic Fight Song,” but in fact a rendering of the Church’s ancient hymn of praise, the Te Deum, which in its third verse links the holiness of the saints to the beauty and holiness of the Triune God (and which has never been better rendered than by the St. Olaf Choir). Let that noble hymn infuse and inspire Synod-2024, so that, amidst the chatter about structures, empowerment, and “process,” sanctity and beauty are recognized as the gospel-inspired best answers to any credibility problem the Church may have.
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George Weigel, Distinguished Senior Fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, is a Catholic theologian and one of America’s leading public intellectuals. He holds EPPC’s William E. Simon Chair in Catholic Studies.
