Latest / The Catholic Current / Kneeling Before the World? (Dr. Darrick Taylor) 8/27/26

Transcript

Kneeling Before the World? (Dr. Darrick Taylor) 8/27/26 · The Catholic Current

0:00
This is The Catholic Current with Father
0:03
Robert McTague. She's like, I'm a Christian, but I'm
0:08
not a nut like Matt. You wouldn't know it from the way I act.
0:12
And I was just like, oh, that is the worst thing.
0:16
And I was actually worried about her, like, don't, don't even say that, because I,
0:20
I just feared that'll play on, on the movie screen of your life.
0:24
Yeah, when the judgment comes, that— yeah,
0:27
wow. I, I'm a vegetarian, but you wouldn't know it by what
0:32
I eat, you know. Praise be Jesus Christ.
0:36
This is Father Robert McTeague of the Society of Jesus, your daily host for The
0:39
Catholic Current, where we bring Christ to the world and the world to Christ.
0:42
You're listening to us from the Station of the Cross Studios, your local radio station,
0:46
and the iCatholic Radio mobile app, where we proclaim the fullness of truth
0:50
with clarity and charity. As always, let's start with prayer. In the name of
0:54
the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit. Almighty God, through the intercession of Saint Ignatius
0:58
Loyola, we ask that you pour forth your Holy Spirit upon us, a spirit of
1:02
discernment that might hear your voice and your command. In the name of the Father,
1:05
Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen. Well, friends, if you're
1:09
a regular listener, a regular reader of my work, you've heard me speak of McTagg's
1:13
axiom, which states that most institutions would rather die
1:17
than admit that anyone ever made a mistake. And then there's McTagg's corollary,
1:21
which states that most people haven't matured past the age of
1:25
15 and are still desperate to be invited to sit at the cool kids' table
1:29
at the high school cafeteria. In other words, there's an adolescent desire
1:33
to be liked, and that's a bad look for morally mature
1:37
adults. I think it's also a bad look for senior Catholic
1:42
cadres of the people who should really know better club, and I think sometimes
1:46
they act like they don't know better. And so, I want to talk about this
1:49
with someone who's written about it recently. He is a professor
1:54
of philosophy at Santa Fe College in Gainesville, Florida, and he's a great friend of
1:57
the show. Dr. Derek Taylor, welcome back to The Catholic Current. Thank you
2:01
for having me on, Father. Dr. Taylor, I saw your recent article in Crisis
2:05
Magazine, which I'll link to in the show notes, called Kneeling Before the World: 60
2:08
Years On, and I had a flashback. When I was first ordained in 1997,
2:13
I was directed to go to an international conference of Catholic
2:18
ecumenists outside of Rome, and the hosts
2:21
of this program said that what the Catholic Church needs to do
2:25
right now and to remain for the foreseeable future is
2:29
to sit in silence at the feet of
2:32
the world's religions. That struck me as odd.
2:37
That was 30 years ago. Are we to believe that it hasn't gotten
2:41
better in the past 30 years? I think all the
2:44
evidence is that it's probably gotten worse. Yeah.
2:48
I, you know, at the beginning of my essay, I came
2:51
across in Jacques Maritain's book this passage where he talks
2:55
about this, this sort of, this idea that the church Just,
2:59
I get, I don't know, it's like a flip switched in the 1960s
3:03
where before there's this idea the church has all
3:07
the answers, now we have none and we need to,
3:11
we need to adapt to everything that comes along in secular
3:15
society, I guess. I, I, I, I, it really is baffling.
3:19
And what struck me about Maritain, what he was saying, is just how
3:24
like contemporary it felt. This book was published in 1966.
3:28
But it's about, you know, your experience in 1997 is about
3:31
the same. Mine, just, you know, hearing things coming,
3:34
you know, from official channels in the church is almost exactly
3:38
the same. It simply has not changed. We have to go and,
3:42
you know, there's, I guess one way of explaining it is it's
3:46
this, I guess, putative act of humility that you're now listening.
3:50
We didn't listen before. We're going to listen now. That's going to
3:53
make us better. It's going to be something. It really is.
3:57
And of course, if we're just merely listening, maybe it's not merely listening.
4:01
Of course, it never, it's never, it never stops with listening.
4:05
It's we go and adopt all these things. We do all these things. We imitate,
4:08
you know, well, the modern, modern society especially, which was
4:12
something, you know, to go back to your point with
4:16
ecumenism and stuff like this, so recent,
4:19
so new. And yet, you know, there is this,
4:22
you know, I, I think Maritain had it right. There's almost like
4:26
this sense you're worshiping the world. Very strange.
4:29
And let's be clear that Jacques Maritain was a
4:34
great friend of Pope Paul VI and was himself very enthusiastic
4:39
about at least the stated intentions of the council,
4:42
and then in the immediate aftermath, he found to be quite
4:46
alarming. I don't know how much longer he lived after the council
4:50
was concluded. It seems to me that one of the great discoveries
4:54
starting in the 1960s was that there was a new species of
4:58
human being called Modern Man, capital M in
5:01
both cases. And Modern Man was absolutely,
5:05
positively different in every significant way from
5:08
whatever came before him. And so, therefore,
5:12
the church would have to retcon,
5:15
retool itself absolutely to appeal to
5:19
this new species of Modern Man. Is that
5:23
a— yes, it's a caricature, but is it also a fair summary of what's
5:27
been going on for the past 6 60 years? I don't think it's a caricature.
5:31
I think that's exactly— oh no, I mean, I,
5:34
I, I do think there is this sensibility that some people think
5:38
like the church, like its answers, the answers it had in
5:42
the past just don't apply now for whatever reason, for whatever justification.
5:47
And there are lots of different versions. It's true, it's— there's more complexity
5:51
to it than that, but the church just has to sort of— and yes,
5:54
you're right, and I put that in the essay— modern man we have
5:58
to catch up to modern man. And I just
6:02
don't know. I, you know, I get that. I get there are certain things about
6:05
contemporary society that are very new. They're very hard to deal with.
6:09
And, and yeah, some of the things the church used to do
6:13
in practice, some of the ways it used to try to live out the faith,
6:16
might be more problematic or something like that. I can at least accede to a
6:19
little of that. Right. But that wholesale, you have to make this
6:23
it is almost like a blank slate. It's almost like we need to wipe everything
6:27
clean and start over for modern man and start with modern man.
6:31
This again, it's like a— you say it's a char— it's, it's like this some
6:35
sort of like abstraction that people talk about to justify this
6:39
or that sort of change they want to see in the church. It doesn't seem
6:42
real to me. I know there are people who— I, I know people in my,
6:45
you know, in my job that are secular who talk like that, but most
6:49
of them don't. They don't. They'll talk about living in a modern world,
6:53
They don't go around, well, there's this modern human being that has nothing to do
6:56
with his ancestors. You just don't hear it that much. But you hear
7:00
it all the time from a lot of authorities in the Church.
7:04
And again, you didn't hear it as much when John Paul II
7:08
was the pontiff or Benedict XVI. But you hear it
7:11
all the time now. And you heard it then. I mean, it was there.
7:15
It's in seminaries, it's in Catholic universities,
7:19
it's in Catholic schools. I mean, this idea is
7:23
dominant. In the church, this way of thinking.
7:26
And it's, you know, it is
7:30
a baffling phenomenon in so many ways. I want to
7:34
make a couple of distinctions. You know, my Friday podcast, I've been doing a
7:38
series now called Novel Prophecies, and I've
7:42
been reading pretty much in chronological order Catholic authors and eventually non-Catholic
7:46
authors who were writing dystopian or apocalyptic
7:51
literature. And I said, look, it's not because I want to predict the day or
7:54
the hour, only our Heavenly Father knows that.
7:57
But to make clear that human nature doesn't change
8:01
and God doesn't change. Our circumstances may
8:05
change, the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves and God may change,
8:08
but human nature and divine nature are persistent.
8:13
And no matter what circumstances we find ourselves in
8:16
going into the future, we're still human and God is still
8:20
God. And it's astonishing how prescient these authors
8:25
were And that's what I shake
8:29
my head at, this idea of modern man. I mean,
8:31
modern man, if you're human, you need truth, beauty, goodness,
8:36
and salvation. And that's what I
8:40
think— there seems to be a lack of urgency
8:44
for talking about truth, beauty, and goodness, and the need
8:47
for salvation. Or, Dr. Taylor, am I just looking in the wrong places?
8:51
No, I think that's absolutely correct. And there's a—
8:55
well, put this way, if there's an urgency, it's an urgency not
8:59
to talk about these things. And I suspect it's because it might offend people.
9:03
I suspect that certain truths definitely would offend
9:07
certain people. And so I suspect that's a big part
9:11
of it. I think certain truths are not being emphasized
9:15
because it might embarrass some people. Draw an analogy. When my niece
9:20
was old enough to sit in a high chair and eat finger food— however,
9:24
I don't know anything about children, so I don't know how old that is,
9:27
but under a year or so— and she's got her dry Cheerios
9:31
in front of her on the tray, and she's grabbing it and stuffing it in
9:34
her mouth, and she runs out and she wants more. And my sister didn't have
9:38
any more of the plain Cheerios, so she put out the apple cinnamon
9:42
Cheerios, which is a major upgrade to Cheerios because Cheerios
9:45
taste like cardboard. And she grabbed a fistful of them and stuffed
9:49
them in her mouth, and her eyes widened, and she said,
9:53
wait, this is a thing? You, you knew about this
9:57
all along and you didn't tell me? What else didn't you tell me?
10:01
And so now we jump ahead to the time of the COVID interruption where people
10:05
were quote unquote going to Mass online or on television,
10:08
and people started to see very beautiful liturgies with
10:12
nobility and, and solemn music and chant
10:16
and so on, and it wasn't always necessarily in
10:20
English, and it was the older form that
10:23
saints had taken for granted for centuries. And a lot
10:27
of people said, wait, this is for real? Why, why didn't
10:30
I hear about this? And it seems to me some people
10:34
are very committed to, to use the Orwellian term,
10:38
memory hole the past, because we've
10:41
got this new and improved original flavor,
10:45
and we don't want you to think about anything that existed
10:50
before before year zero. The French Revolution did
10:54
that. Pol Pot did that in Cambodia as well. And some people say that year
10:57
zero for the church was not Pentecost but 1965.
11:02
Friends, welcome back. We're going to continue our conversation with Dr. Derek Taylor,
11:06
historian, friend of the show, and we are talking about the
11:10
church's odd relationship with the world.
11:13
Remember, our rallying cry here at the Catholic Current is Christus Mundo, Mundus Christo.
11:17
Bringing Christ to the world and the world to Christ. We do it because our
11:21
Lord says so, for the greater glory of God, the love of our neighbor,
11:23
and the salvation of our own soul. After the broadcast
11:27
today, go to thestationofthecross.com, get our resources list,
11:30
download our audio as podcast, take us to your family and friends.
11:33
Together we'll take it to the whole world. Back in just 2 minutes. Please do
11:37
stay with us.
12:00
You're listening to The Catholic Current with Father Robert McTague
12:04
from the Station of the Cross Catholic Media Network. Stay connected
12:08
with the show and our guests and topics by following the show
12:12
on Twitter and Gab. Just search for The Catholic
12:16
Current.
12:21
Praise be Jesus Christ. This is Father Robert McTeague of the Society of Jesus,
12:24
your daily host for The Catholic Current, where we bring Christ to the world
12:28
and the world to Christ. You're listening to us from the Station of the Cross
12:31
Studios, your local radio station, the iCatholic Radio mobile app, and we proclaim
12:35
the fullness of truth with clarity and charity. Hey friends,
12:38
did you know iCatholic Mobile supports only Catholic causes?
12:42
iCatholic Mobile offers unlimited 5G data, text, and talk, and iCatholic
12:46
Mobile gives a portion of every dollar earned Station of the Cross Catholic
12:50
Media Network. By subscribing to iCatholic Mobile, you help fund
12:54
programs that defend our Catholic faith. Talking today again with a historian,
12:57
Dr. Derek Taylor. We're talking about the Church's
13:01
odd relationship with the world in the past 60 years.
13:04
Dr. Taylor, words matter, as we know, and on the
13:08
one hand, you know, we have the writings of St.
13:11
John in the New Testament who talks about not being friends with the world.
13:15
We talk about worldliness, etc., and yet we also
13:20
read God so loved the world.
13:23
Can we make a distinction between the world that God loves and the
13:26
worldliness we should avoid? That's a good— that's a good distinction to
13:30
make. And I think one of the things about, you know, when I complain about,
13:34
you know, kneeling before the world and stuff like this is it is this undifferentiated
13:38
world, right? It's the world. It's a world in which we
13:42
don't make that distinction. We don't make distinctions between true and false, you know,
13:46
between beautiful and ugly, between good and bad.
13:49
And in the Bible, they make those distinctions. God does
13:53
love the world. He doesn't— you know, I cited when
13:57
I first read this, I was like, I couldn't believe even, even Saint Augustine said
14:00
this in like the 5th century. But in one of his,
14:03
one of his homilies to his— one of his homilies,
14:07
he actually says that it was so— oh, you know,
14:10
he says, God doesn't love you as you are. He hates you as
14:14
you are. He loves you as he wants you to be,
14:17
right? Yes. And we love the world. We don't love the world
14:21
as it is. We love the world as God wants it to be. Right.
14:24
That's a good way to think about it. Again, it doesn't mean everything's hateful in
14:27
the world as it exists right now. Not even close. We know
14:31
that there are good things in the world. But there's a sense in
14:34
which, you know, and this is something I guess it's revealed by Christ,
14:38
is about that ultimate plan for it, right, for the world.
14:42
And it's not going to remain in this same state one way or the other,
14:45
right? The world doesn't remain stay. It's going to either get better or worse.
14:48
And so just like, you know, our ultimate destiny is
14:52
either heaven or hell. Same thing with the world. It can't— it can't, you know,
14:56
ultimately will be redeemed. But for our purposes, it can't be this undifferentiated
15:01
thing we have to sort of adapt to or just accept.
15:05
That seems like an abdication of our duty as Christians
15:09
to me. Yes. Yes. See, here's the way that
15:12
I make it. I mean, you know, God made the world and saw that it
15:15
was good. And, you know, the eternal Word of the Father,
15:19
the Logos, the second person of the Trinity,
15:22
Christ our Lord, the Word made flesh, it is through him that all things
15:26
were made. He is the Logos. The Logos, we get things like, you know,
15:30
logic and logical and order. So anything that shows
15:34
purpose and rationality,
15:37
anything that indicates truth, beauty, and goodness,
15:41
that is all from God, and they are expressions
15:44
of God's goodness. And of course he loves it because he rightly loves himself.
15:48
But then, you know, you throw some free will and some disobedience
15:53
in there, and when we talk about worldliness, we're talking about
15:57
creation in rebellion against
16:01
God. Man made in the image and likeness of God spitting
16:05
in the holy face of God and saying, no, my will
16:09
be done. Isn't that a better account of what worldliness
16:13
is, and maybe that should sober us up as we get kind of
16:17
moist-eyed about how wonderful we ourselves are.
16:21
Yeah, I mean, that, that's clearly more realistic that we,
16:24
we choose things that are not good for us because we want them, and then
16:28
we, we, you know, depart from— we disobey the intention
16:32
God had for us, right? And so that's, that's part of— that's
16:36
not— that's basic for us. It should be basic for us. Um,
16:39
I recognize that in my everyday life, and it doesn't— it seems like
16:43
second nature to me. But again, the way some people talk,
16:46
act, yeah, that they think that that aspect of the world doesn't exist,
16:50
that somehow we can't— I don't know, we can't do that, or we're not capable
16:54
of doing that, or something. It's very strange to take that
16:57
out of the Christian message, that yeah, we, we were given—
17:01
we're made in the image and likeness of God. It means we have free will,
17:04
but also means we can, we can, you know, misuse that in
17:08
really severe, serious ways. Right. I think what
17:11
we've been losing, at least in my lifetime,
17:16
is any sense of a high horizon.
17:20
You know, we've lost a vertical sense of space.
17:23
Here's what I mean. For example, when we talk about,
17:26
you know, the environment, look, I like breathing clean air. I like
17:30
drinking clean water. I like eating healthy food. I think it's
17:35
a bad stewardship to treat the earth shabbily.
17:39
But when we go from that to talking about caring for our common
17:43
home, I have to take a deep breath because, you know, when I read
17:47
Aquinas's essay on kingship, the purpose
17:50
of community is for us to reach our common
17:54
home, which is heaven, and the common good
17:59
is building a community that makes it easier
18:04
to live and die as saints.
18:07
And to try to do that in a world that's in rebellion against
18:11
God means we're not going to be liked, and Caesar
18:15
will inevitably view us with suspicion, and the cool kids
18:19
at best will have contempt for
18:23
us. So my question becomes, is it just
18:27
me? I mean, do you see it too, that we've lost the sense
18:31
of transcendent. We don't— we're not taking the eternal perspective these
18:35
days. Uh, yeah, absolutely. I mean, the reduction— like,
18:38
when we talk about the world, like, it's a reduction of the world that
18:42
doesn't point to anything beyond itself. Doesn't point— it should
18:45
point to God. It should point upward, if you can put it in your terms.
18:49
This is, again, go back to Saint Augustine in the Confessions. He talks about,
18:53
you know, in nature seeing, you know, reminders of God,
18:57
right? It should point you to that transcendent horizon. Of a
19:01
personal God who cares about— yes, cares about creation, cares about human beings.
19:05
But he cares. The sign of that care is
19:08
to draw you out of it, to draw you upward, not to make—
19:12
you use the phrase coming home because that's become a buzz
19:16
phrase, right? Buzz phrase, whatever. You get the idea.
19:19
And that's— no, no, that's not— that's not— it's—
19:23
and again, it's not like there's no truth in that, but it's a half-truth at
19:27
best. Right. If you take out, like I said, the larger
19:31
plan God had for us. And it doesn't mean— people want to erase that.
19:34
You know, I'm very tight with the curmudgeon
19:38
community, and I think I may be curmudgeon adjacent myself.
19:42
First curmudgeon I want to mention is Dr. Samuel Johnson visiting the Palace
19:46
of Versailles. And he said, the trouble with places like this is that it makes
19:50
it too hard to die because it appeals to the senses so comprehensively.
19:55
But a contemporary curmudgeon, Dean Abbott, said this. He said,
19:59
The widespread desire to make the world a better place is
20:03
really only a marker of how meaningless people
20:08
feel their lives to be. I mean, if you know that you
20:11
are a citizen of heaven, then the idea
20:15
of the world becoming your pet project
20:19
doesn't make a lot of sense. Now, if you know that you are a citizen
20:23
of heaven, then you want to be a steward of creation,
20:27
because God's going to ask you about that. You want to love your
20:31
neighbor and alleviate suffering, because God's going to ask you
20:35
about that. But to act as if this is all that
20:39
there is— and this is where the People Who Should Know Better Club really get
20:43
under my skin. I know of an ordinary diocesan who has since
20:47
retired and perhaps will write his memoirs, but he insisted for several years
20:50
that whenever he went to a parish for confirmation the closing hymn
20:54
had to be, and here I quote, go make a difference.
20:58
Can you comment on that, please? Yeah, this goes back to
21:02
what you've said about this reduction to the world itself,
21:06
because, you know, you mentioned, you know, about having that transcendent,
21:10
not being, you know, not thinking that the world, this world as we live it
21:14
right now on Earth is our purpose, you know, talking about making it, improving it.
21:18
The thing is, if you don't have that idea
21:22
that God is leading us toward heaven, toward eternity,
21:26
then you don't actually make the world better. You become so fixated on it,
21:30
it becomes like an idol or something, right? If you
21:34
are focused on something, it's weird. Like, this is the way we think
21:37
a lot of things in life, just generally speaking. A lot of times you do
21:40
your best work when you're not thinking about it, like you're just taking care of
21:44
other things. And again, it's not like you don't pay attention to the environment
21:48
or things like this. But if you make this sort of everything is a mission,
21:51
not everything can be a mission. We ultimately have one mission, that's to
21:55
get to heaven. But if you do that, other certain things follow in train.
21:58
And I think we've definitely forgotten the order and the priority.
22:02
Right, right. And gosh, I'm just going to speculate
22:06
here. What if, for example, the church
22:10
and its prayer and its worship really
22:14
emphasize the transcendent and the eternal?
22:17
What do you think might happen then? Well, I mean, this is— there's—
22:22
we were talking about it. You know, I'm setting you up. Yeah, that's okay.
22:26
We were talking about this off air, and a certain comment— I
22:30
don't name names. Um, yeah, me neither. A certain commentator,
22:32
um, recently released an article in which he basically said he hated the
22:37
old Latin Mass. I think people would hate it because a lot of them don't
22:40
want to be reminded of that. They don't want to be reminded they have a
22:43
destiny, you know, more than improving things or more than, you know,
22:47
rising up the corporate ladder or, you know, getting— going on that great vacation vacation,
22:51
getting that big house, right? I, I think, I think it,
22:55
you know, people just resent it as an imposition on their freedom.
22:58
Other people, they have lots of reasons, right? There's always reasons.
23:02
Uh, I, I know that, by the way, I'm not accusing anybody. I know this
23:06
because I, I do this. I've done this. I get fixated on this project,
23:09
or I want to accomplish this, or I haven't accomplished this, or,
23:13
you know, somebody's giving me the, the recognition I thought they should, that sort of
23:16
thing, right? You lose that horizon.
23:20
And that's why you have to keep struggling. And I think people
23:23
just have, it's almost like they've given up. Right. Yeah. I mean, that is
23:27
the damning thing, I think, about the church today.
23:31
Right. I myself, you know, I get involved in a
23:35
project, especially involves writing, and I can get tunnel vision.
23:39
And the building could be on fire and I wouldn't notice it.
23:43
And by analogy, I I think the building is on fire
23:47
and we're not noticing it because we're working so hard
23:52
to celebrate us in all of our us-ness. And the idea
23:56
that someday we're going to have to eval— have
24:00
our lives evaluated by a standard not of our own
24:04
making, I mean, that's, that's a tremendous and terrifying prospect.
24:08
I also think that it happens to be true. And I,
24:12
I know me. I've been with me my whole life, Dr. Taylor.
24:15
I've been a sinner as long as I can remember. I dare not
24:19
be left to my own devices, trusting my own judgment,
24:23
wisdom, goodness, etc. All that nonsense. I know
24:26
how I get. I've seen me do it. I have
24:29
to be conformed to Christ. That is my
24:33
only hope of salvation. That is the path to healing and to peace,
24:37
freedom, All the good things we were made for are had
24:40
by carrying one's cross and following Christ and
24:44
walking in his bloody footsteps and entering through
24:48
the narrow gate. And a lot of contemporary church
24:51
language doesn't seem to acknowledge that.
24:55
And I got to ask them, so how's that working out for you?
24:58
Friends, we come back and continue our conversation with historian Dr. Derek Taylor.
25:02
We're talking about, uh, recent church history and
25:06
its odd relationship with the world. After the broadcast
25:10
today, go to thestationofthecross.com, get our resources list, download our audios,
25:14
podcasts. Wherever you can find audio, you can find us.
25:17
Follow us on your favorite platform, write a 5-star review. We need
25:21
to attract the attention of the listeners so that these conversations get the attention
25:24
they deserve. Everything you need to take us to your family and friends, we give
25:27
to you. Together, let's take it the world. We can do it with
25:31
you. We cannot do it without you. Let's do this good work together.
25:35
Let's strive to be more than merely relevant. Back in just 2 minutes.
25:39
Please do stay with us.
26:00
This is the Catholic Current from the Station of the Cross Catholic Media
26:04
Network. Catch up on an episode you've missed or share them with your family and
26:09
friends. The Catholic Current is podcasted wherever you enjoy listening:
26:13
Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Podbean, TuneIn, and the
26:17
iCatholic Radio mobile app. Praise be
26:20
Jesus Christ. This is Father Robert McTeague of the Society of Jesus, your daily host
26:24
for The Catholic Current, where we bring Christ to the world and the world to
26:27
Christ. You're listening to us from the Station of the Cross Studios, your local radio
26:30
station, the iCatholic Radio mobile app. We proclaim the fullness
26:34
of truth with clarity and charity. Hey friends, if you value
26:38
thoughtful Catholic analysis, help sustain this work at thestationofthecross.com.
26:42
Here on The Catholic Current, we engage issues seriously and faithfully,
26:46
and that intellectual freedom exists because we are listener-funded.
26:50
Support us, please, at thestationofthecross.com. My returning guest today
26:55
is historian Dr. Derek Taylor. We're talking about recent history
26:58
and the church's odd relationship to
27:02
the world. So, Dr. Taylor, as long as I have been
27:06
alive, we've been living in the aftermath of year zero,
27:10
1965 BCE, best council
27:14
ever, and we have been— we are progressing from glory to glory.
27:18
And it is absolutely unthinkable that we retrieve
27:21
anything from the past because modern man won't accept it,
27:26
et cetera, et cetera. And institutionally, there has been a
27:30
mighty and stubborn effort to live accordingly.
27:34
What have the results been? In 2 words, not good.
27:39
Okay. I don't, I don't, I don't think they, I don't,
27:43
this is the thing that gets me. And I'm, I understand people want to defend
27:47
the church and her councils and all these good things. But I,
27:50
I can't for the life of me, life of me, understand.
27:54
I don't know what— I, I really don't know what people are saying when
27:57
they say, well, it's been a success. It just, it just hasn't. I mean,
28:01
and again, a lot of— I'm perfectly willing to stipulate a
28:05
lot of things were going wrong before the council. Sure. Uh, I,
28:08
I can— lots of, lots of qualifications. But the council,
28:12
at a minimum, didn't do much to stop them and probably made them a lot
28:15
worse. Okay, and it just happened. That bigger point is it hasn't been the solution
28:19
to whatever was happening before. It just hasn't been, right?
28:22
That's— that doesn't mean nothing, absolutely nothing good
28:26
came out of it. That doesn't mean you have to go attacking it every 5
28:29
minutes, right? Uh, it does mean, by the way, you should not
28:32
use the council and its authority to sort of blanketly,
28:36
you know, blanketly prevent criticism of all the
28:40
sort of post-conciliar experiments that came after it, especially because
28:44
I think at this point most— not most people, at least some reasonable people
28:48
will admit that they— a lot of times these experiments only had a tenuous relationship
28:52
to the council in the first place. Okay. And there's just— I just don't know
28:56
what— I, I've— every metric I've seen is it just didn't— it
28:59
just didn't work. And that's okay. That happens sometimes in
29:02
history. Sometimes councils, they just don't take. And,
29:06
uh, I don't— I, I, I, I would love to know what measure people
29:10
are, are using when they say these things, but I never get an answer when
29:14
I ask them. They just kind of keep reasserting that it's been a success.
29:18
I once did a broadcast on how we
29:21
haven't had the real Council of Lateran V yet, and if we just Lateran
29:26
V harder, then things will be better. And my good friend
29:29
Father Z even sent me a mug about, you know, the spirit of Lateran V
29:34
and all that. So, I mean, we're in difficulty. You know,
29:38
I grew up in New Jersey, and I just got news that the Diocese of
29:42
Paterson, New Jersey, has sold a seminary with
29:46
school, chapel, grounds, athletic fields, etc., for $13.5
29:51
million to an Islamic school system. I don't see
29:55
that as an example of winning. I know that the Diocese of Buffalo,
30:00
New York, and you know we're headquartered in Buffalo, has not only closed
30:03
churches but sold some of them off to be mosques.
30:07
I don't see that as winning. Either.
30:11
And, and yes, uh, we don't want to give the idea that, you know,
30:15
in the beginning everything was fine with the church from, from Easter Sunday
30:19
until, you know, December 8th, 1965,
30:22
when an evil genius flicked a switch and then it all went sideways. And if
30:27
we just flick the switch back, then we'll live happily ever after. The church has
30:30
always been populated by sinners, myself included.
30:34
No one is well served by a naive
30:38
view of history, but I think it's fair to say that the experiment
30:43
hasn't been working.
30:46
The paucity of religious and priestly vocations, for example,
30:51
the fact that a third of the dioceses in the United States are bankrupt,
30:55
and it's not because of gambling debts. We all know why they had to declare
31:00
bankruptcy. So we go back to McTague's axiom: most
31:04
institutions would rather die than than ever admit that we
31:07
made a mistake. The question becomes, where do we go from here? I mean,
31:11
you and I can see the problems, we can articulate the problems.
31:15
I know certainly in conversation with, with my listeners,
31:19
they see the problems too. But you and I are
31:22
not important, powerful people.
31:25
We don't stride the world stage.
31:29
How do we begin to persevere and
31:34
maintain our sanity? Now, I want to borrow the phrase from
31:37
Josef Pieper. He talks about selfless self-preservation
31:42
because he said that's what chastity is. How do we keep
31:47
ourselves sane and whole while still getting up in the morning
31:50
and going to work? What would that look like in your view? I think
31:54
for us as Catholics, I was thinking about this when you mentioned the selling off
31:58
of buildings and stuff like this, is, you know, you Um, you know,
32:01
that's, that's a, that's a sort of, I almost say
32:04
betrayal, but it's like a, it's a disconnection from your past.
32:08
Like the buildings, the old churches, like people, you know, I remember
32:12
going to, to, uh, to a conference, academic conference one time in Dayton,
32:15
Ohio, and going to Mass at the, the cathedral.
32:19
I don't remember, but it was this big 19th century
32:22
church. And I remember thinking, think about all the people that like contributed to make
32:26
this happen, right? When you, when you, when you cut yourself off from your
32:30
past like that, I think that's part of the problem. I think when you focus
32:33
on, you know, the world as the contemporary world right
32:37
now in exclusion to everything else, that's a big part of the problem. I think
32:41
what you need to do is reconnect with your, your past again. It doesn't—
32:45
it's like you— and it's like you said, it's not like everything was perfect,
32:48
but there are things there that, that can sustain you
32:51
when things kind of— well, they kind of get bad in the church. And you
32:55
can do that as a layman. You don't have to— there's nothing you don't
32:59
need. I, I— you shouldn't need it. You don't need anybody's permission to do that,
33:02
uh, to, to learn about the church's past, to reconnect with older
33:06
forms of devotion, to, you know, um, find devotion
33:10
to older, you know, saints that precede the modern world.
33:13
Those sorts of things, those are things you can, you can build something
33:17
in your life around your busy life, right? You already know you
33:21
work and do all these other things. You can find places in your prayer life
33:25
and your devotional life to do that. It has to start personally. And you
33:29
start there, you seek out other people and start to do that in common.
33:32
And I'm trying to do that more in my life. I know people are trying
33:34
to do that. And you build, you kind of have to build from the ground
33:39
up, right? It is almost like, you know,
33:42
not just the buildings, but a lot of things have been flattened since the
33:46
1960s. And so you just start from there
33:50
and move on, I think. Way, way back when I was a college
33:54
freshman, all the way back in 1979,
33:57
a college freshman, and I went to Sacred Heart Cathedral in Newark,
34:01
New Jersey for the first time, and it was like walking
34:05
into the 13th century. It wasn't just an
34:09
attempt at a copy of French Gothic architecture. It was,
34:13
it was an original. It was made by techniques that have been lost since the
34:17
artists have died. And even at 18, I thought to myself,
34:21
I want to know the God
34:25
who can inspire that sort of effort,
34:29
that commitment to beauty, to excellence, the sublime.
34:33
And I knew that this cathedral was built by the pennies of the
34:37
poor. There wasn't— this wasn't a project financed by George Soros,
34:42
for example. Now, when I go to Our
34:45
Lady Help of Suburbia and kind of that theater-of-the-round
34:49
Pizza Hut church architecture, I don't have similar
34:53
thoughts. I may ask myself, what would
34:57
inspire anyone to commit his life to wearing sweat-stained
35:02
polyester vestments from the 1970s? But that's a
35:05
question that's more in a wondrous
35:09
horror rather than a fascination and awe.
35:13
Uh, I think that one of the healthiest things to do is
35:17
to discover that the church really did exist prior
35:21
to 1965, and there are treasures
35:26
waiting to be rediscovered.
35:29
And I want to be part of, of that search and,
35:32
and rescue crew. Is that— am I just being— I don't know what's the word—
35:36
am I being merely nostalgic, or is there something else
35:40
going on there? Yeah, it was— it's, it's not— you're not ransacking the
35:45
past for like trinkets or something. There are things of permanent value
35:49
that we have lost, jettisoned for some reason.
35:53
For a reason. And that's the thing, it's hard to find a reason in any
35:56
of that. But no, I mean, there are— there's a reason why.
35:59
And you put it the best way, like you, you see that you
36:03
go to Europe and you see the beautiful cathedrals, or, or to, you know,
36:05
places around the state faith. You want to believe, you want that kind of faith
36:09
that can build these things, that motivating— motivates
36:13
people to do that. You want the effect of that. And, you know, to get
36:17
there, you know, you— I don't think you can get there doing modern
36:21
things only. And that is kind of what— that is kind
36:25
of what the quote-unquote pastoral orientation of the church seems
36:29
to— like, we're going to only do this in a modern way and that'll make
36:33
everything better. And I just, I, it just, that's just not true.
36:38
Right. I think that cutting yourself off from, from the
36:42
ages of devotion and faith and practice and all the things you
36:46
can learn from that just seems very wrongheaded to me.
36:49
I think of a very good and noble religious sister I
36:53
knew many years ago, and her province
36:58
was having a big congregation meeting, which they do from time to
37:02
time, and there was a resolution brought to the floor that absolutely,
37:06
positively, never, ever, ever would they admit
37:10
a young woman to their community who had a— and here I quote—
37:14
pre-Vatican II spirituality, end quote. And my
37:18
immediate thought was, well, you know, the Gospel and the Rosary predate 1965,
37:23
so what are they talking about? So my friend stood up and she said,
37:26
well, before we talk about leaving out those people who might
37:30
bring that objectionable spirituality on your terms,
37:34
can we acknowledge the fact that we haven't had anybody apply to our community
37:37
at all in 25 years? Can we have a conversation about
37:41
that? The short answer, of course, was no, we can't have a
37:45
conversation about that. So,
37:48
you know, I mean, here's the irony, Dr. Taylor, correct me if
37:52
I'm mistaken, please. You know, we can sing arousing choruses
37:56
of all are welcome, except if you
38:00
believe the church existed prior to 1965,
38:03
then you're really out on the peripheries and not the cool peripheries,
38:07
but the bad peripheries. Am I getting that right? I think
38:11
that is. I think you have the tune right. Yes, that is what I hear
38:14
a lot. That yes, go to the periphery, but not that way. Yeah, but not
38:18
that way. No, the other peripheries. Not those people. Not that. Yeah, that is.
38:22
That is the verbiage these days,
38:25
right? See it, you hear it, people act on it.
38:29
And it's— yes, it's something to buy. It really
38:32
is amazing. The Church of Rome has always made
38:36
such a, you know, its connection with the apostles,
38:39
antiquity, all these things, then just overnight
38:42
snap your fingers and like it didn't exist.
38:45
It's just— it is— I don't have words. You see, I'm struggling for words
38:50
to describe. How bizarre this seems to me.
38:53
Right. And then what, you know, and I, you know, I think of, you know,
38:57
Cardinal Newman, who said, you know, to be steeped in history is to cease being
39:00
Protestant. I really like that. You know, I just
39:04
finished a writing project where I spent a couple years, you know,
39:07
reading a lot of patristic sources, you know, the Gospel on
39:10
one hand and the Fathers on the other. And it was,
39:14
it was great for my prayer. I hope it was good for my
39:17
preaching. I think it was. And I really hope that my publisher thinks that
39:21
it was good for my writing as well. But I, I don't
39:26
want to be cut off from what the world
39:30
disapproves of. I'll put it that way.
39:34
I think that it's a badge of honor when
39:38
the world looks at me disdainfully when I
39:42
talk about, say, religious vows or
39:45
the value of the transcendent or the indisputable
39:49
nature of marriage, for example. I want
39:53
to wear the world's contempt as a badge of honor.
39:57
Friends, when we come back, continue our conversation with historian Dr. Derek Taylor,
40:01
and we're going to be continuing our conversation about the church's odd
40:05
relationship with the world for the past 60 years or so. We've got
40:09
to figure out what's going on there. Be part of the conversation.
40:12
Follow follow or following by following us on Gab. That's gab.com.
40:17
The channel is The Catholic Current, and you can influence the conversation.
40:21
You can contact us,
40:23
thestationofthecross.com/askfather.
40:26
Comments, questions, suggestions, recommendations— we want
40:30
to hear from you. It's thestationofthecross.com/askfather.
40:34
Be back in just 2 minutes. Please do stay with us.
41:01
Have a question or feedback about today's episode?
41:04
Want to suggest a guest or a future topic? Go to thestationofthecross.com/askfather
41:12
and help influence the conversation.
41:20
Praise be Jesus Christ. This is Father Robert McTeague of the Society of Jesus,
41:24
your daily host for The Catholic Current, where we bring Christ to the world
41:27
and the world to Christ. You're listening to us from the Station of the Cross
41:30
studio. Your local radio station, the iCatholic Radio mobile app. We proclaim the fullness
41:34
of truth with clarity and charity. My returning guest is historian
41:38
Dr. Derek Taylor. We're talking about the Church's
41:42
relationship with the modern world, kneeling before the world
41:46
since 1965. What are we to make of that? So,
41:49
Dr. Taylor, I think we've given a good diagnosis that
41:53
there are even senior Catholic cadres, the people who should really know better,
41:58
who've been recommending a relationship to the world that
42:02
I think is more of an accommodation to worldliness rather
42:05
than the world that God created and loved.
42:08
And you and I, and even if we get our 10 most favorite people
42:13
in the world, we're not going to significantly
42:17
move the needle. So what we've got to do is get
42:21
people in the lifeboats to the degree that we're able.
42:24
What are some best practices that you would recommend for the listeners
42:28
to not be drawn into worldliness,
42:33
to not drink the Kool-Aid, so to speak? Yeah, I think,
42:37
um, in my essay, uh, I mentioned Jacques Maritain.
42:41
He mentions how people instinctively flee, at least
42:44
self-consciously modern people instinctively flee from asceticism.
42:48
I think one of the first things you can do is, is, you know,
42:51
is begin to kind of build up your ascetic muscles,
42:54
as it were. Fast more, do more ascetic practices.
42:58
I think those types of— again, you have to do this little by little because
43:02
we live in such a comfortable, you know, advanced society. I'm not saying go
43:06
crazy. You're not one of the Desert Fathers, but you can do
43:10
that in the first place. Something very basic where you begin to retrain yourself,
43:14
you know, not to think, you know, in terms of the world
43:17
in a non-Christian sense. Also, you know,
43:21
reading again, some of the stuff that inspires me. To that sort
43:24
of thing are, in fact, I have a copy of the Sayings of the Desert
43:28
Fathers. And again, very good. You really shouldn't attempt their level of
43:32
asceticism. That'd be dangerous anyway for a lot of reasons. But they were
43:37
some of the first men to really embody that with their entire lives.
43:40
And I think I always take something away from it when I do that
43:44
sort of reading. But if not that, some other spiritual reading that will sort of
43:47
help you do those things because you're going to have to renounce certain things.
43:50
Things. If you're going to escape from that sense of the world,
43:54
you're going to have to, you know, forego some of those, you know,
43:57
pleasures, conveniences. And, you know, it's hard when you start with
44:01
as much as we have. We have a lot of worldly goods, we have a
44:05
lot of material goods, uh, and that's something, you know,
44:08
it's, it's fine, it's good, but to learn to sort of, you know,
44:12
steel yourself so that you can seek that higher, that higher
44:16
plane seek what God wanted to reveal to us
44:20
in Jesus Christ and not be trapped in our worldly
44:24
routines, not be trapped in worldly slogans
44:27
or programs or things
44:31
of that nature. Yeah, I think we,
44:35
we are so immersed in worldliness that sometimes we
44:39
need the shock of stepping away.
44:43
I mean, I've taken students on retreats and,
44:46
and they're astounded to be in a place where they don't hear traffic noise.
44:51
They're just not used to that. They're startled
44:55
to be able to see stars, uh,
44:58
for example. And I, I think of,
45:02
uh, my brother-in-law who can, who can be a bit of a sage from time
45:05
to time, and he would— he said, you know, you don't make time
45:09
for things. You, you kill other things
45:12
to which you had given your time, and then you rededicate that
45:16
time. So what we're talking about is not,
45:19
you know, trying to squeeze in more time and
45:23
energy for our Catholic hobby.
45:27
That's absolutely not what I mean. Uh,
45:31
God our Lord is not our mascot. You know,
45:34
getting to know the scriptures is different
45:38
from, you know, I, I belong to a book club and we discuss cozy mysteries
45:42
every Saturday at the coffee shop. That's not what
45:46
it is either. It is a way of life
45:51
that is comprehensive.
45:54
I'm going to ask Mr. Engineer if he can find a link from an essay
45:57
by Hilary Belloc about, um, it was a Christmas essay
46:02
and it was about a family home that had decades of Christmases
46:05
and what had, what had been lived through. But it was clear
46:09
that Christmas wasn't just an orgy of consumerism,
46:13
and also it was clear that the faith was a way of life for
46:17
this family in this home. That's what I
46:21
want to see people get back
46:25
to. So I'm gonna make my pitch for families living with other
46:28
families, First Fridays, and and First
46:32
Saturdays, uh, as well. And then just the
46:36
liturgical feasts. And, you know, my brother-in-law and I, when we get together on
46:40
holidays, we have the book Drinking with the Saints. And during Christmas,
46:44
you know, we have a different cocktail for each, each day of the Christmas season.
46:48
The point is this, that the faith is meant to envelop
46:53
and infuse every aspect of our lives.
46:57
How do you think people's lives would be different if we started to live like
47:01
that consistently? I think it would change the way we look at the world.
47:05
I think, you know, one of the things that I've, I've kind of come to
47:09
know about myself is I'm very, very— well, I, I have a PhD and all
47:13
that stuff. You're very intellectual, but it can kind of— you can
47:16
get obsessed with that. You can get wrapped up in that, right? And your faith
47:19
becomes too intellectual. It's like you said, it's supposed to
47:23
affect your, your body and your mind and your spirit.
47:26
And, you know, you Um,
47:30
you, you, you're supposed to engage in the faith with all of your
47:34
aspects of your life. And when you begin to do that, when you, you know,
47:37
again, at first it can be kind of, maybe it's, you know,
47:41
unfamiliar to you, maybe it's a little bit awkward, but it begins to sort of
47:45
shape your behavior more than the things that you get in the world, more than
47:48
like what TV shows you watch, right? I think your brother-in-law mentioned it's really
47:52
good. You begin to kill off those things, right, that you don't want to form
47:56
you. And there's a difference when, again, making the church's
48:00
liturgy a part of your life, making again things like fasting a part
48:04
of your life, making feasting part of your life again, especially with
48:08
family, especially with other people. You need other people. You can't do
48:12
this by— unless you're a really saintly hermit,
48:15
you can't do this by yourself at all. So very important that you do have
48:19
other people around you who are doing that. And seeking them out. But it does
48:22
change you. Like, it does in ways that maybe you won't notice
48:27
at first, but over time it does change you. You'll be different. And I think
48:31
maybe, you know, you don't need to be afraid of that, right? It's okay if
48:33
you don't know what the latest— what the latest movie is, what the latest whatever
48:37
is. Uh, it's okay. It's okay. You can go— uh,
48:40
uh, you don't— you don't need that in your life. You do need Jesus Christ.
48:44
You do need his church. You need the faith he gave And there are ways
48:47
to get there. There are ways to get there. Takes effort, but you
48:51
can get there. Right. And I think ritual and community are so important.
48:55
I'm just going to grab one line from the Belloc essay, which Mr. Engineer was
48:58
so good to find for me without any notice, talking about how Christmas
49:02
and indeed the whole year was lived at this beautiful Catholic family home.
49:06
He writes, indeed, modern men who lack such
49:10
things lack sustenance. And our fathers
49:14
who founded all those ritual observances were
49:19
very wise. Oh, so thank you, Bellocq. I will have
49:23
a toast in your honor, uh, this weekend as well.
49:27
Friends, do not lose heart. What we need to lead
49:31
a faithful Catholic life in this world is
49:35
indeed available to those who
49:39
look for it. Don't do it on your own. Do it with
49:42
your family. Do it with a network of family
49:46
and friends. That is the way forward. Dr. Derek Taylor,
49:50
God bless your very good work. Thank you for a fascinating conversation.
49:53
Grateful for your faith and friendship, and I do look forward to next time.
49:57
God bless you, Father. I'm Jesuit Father Robert McTeague, your host every day of
50:00
The Catholic Current. For sure you want to join us tomorrow because it's a Friday
50:04
here at the Current, and we go through Let's Talk About This. We walk through
50:08
a complex issue together. We're going to be talking about Novel Prophecies
50:12
Part 7. We're continuing our reading
50:16
of prescient dystopian and apocalyptic literature that
50:20
I think can illumine and bring hope and light to our present times.
50:24
We're going to be looking at a short story by E.M. Forster called The Machine
50:27
Stops, published in 1909.
50:31
It's like he had a crystal ball into our own here and now. Through the
50:35
intercession of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, may Almighty God bless you, Father, Son,
50:38
and Holy Spirit. Go in peace, and please do pray for me, for I am
50:42
a sinner.