From Secular Disorder to Catholic Order
The Catholic Thing
By David G Bonagura, Jr. We have come to an incredible cultural moment. The seemingly unstoppable drumbeat for unlimited progress that has long characterized Modernity has lost its rhythm. Technological advancement and social engineering have not delivered the promised yet still elusive "good life." Instead, rapid change without a compass has generated widespread dissatisfaction, distress, and disenchantment. This latter adjective has lately been the favorite of more than one cultural commentator. The ancients would have used a different word to describe the predicament of our secular world: disordered. For St. Augustine, peace is the aim of all creatures, and peace, he writes in The City of God, is the "tranquility of order – and order is the arrangement of things equal and unequal in a pattern which assigns to each its proper function." Disorder occurs when the facets of life are disjointed so that lesser things or even evil things crowd out the goods proper to life and community. When societies exalt sins as goods, when politics become all-consuming, when technology swallows every dimension of human living, disorder reigns not with peace, but with anxiety, angst, and asphyxiation. For individuals, the suffering is internal. As Augustine writes in his Confessions, "every disordered mind is its own punishment." Sin is the primary cause of disorder, and the disorder of our age stems from violations of the First Commandment. The secular world speaks and acts as if God did not exist. Without God as both the foundation and the goal of order, man and his sinful will take God's place as the supreme good. Man's fallen will is consumed, in Augustine's memorable phrase, with the libido dominandi, the lust to dominate others, which is the source of all conflicts and all disorders in this City of Man. The only way to correct our current disorder, short of the second coming of Christ, is to reorder our lives and societies upon God. This requires, first, that we acknowledge God as our rightful king and open our hearts to His grace, which alone can redirect our wills away from dominating others and toward serving others. The noticeable uptick of conversions to Catholicism these last few years testifies that men and women are increasingly finding the antidote to secular disorder in the saving truths and divine grace housed in the holy Catholic Church. Yet this large cohort of converts comprises only a fraction of a broader population that is disenchanted with today's disorder, but is not inclined or not ready to seek remedies in religion, and certainly not in the Church. How might we convince them to move from secular disorder to Catholic order? First, we ought to dispel any fears that "Catholic order" is somehow synonymous with tradwives, The Handmaid's Tale, authoritarian government, theocracy, oppression, or social uniformity. It is none of those things. Catholic order is not a political program or a societal intervention. It is rather, in the words of the great historian Christopher Dawson, the arranging of "the whole of life towards unity, not by the denial and destruction of the natural human values, but by bringing them into living relation with spiritual truth and spiritual reality." The goal of Catholic order is not the establishment of structures. It rather transcends existing structures of many kinds to harmonize them with divine prerogatives. In St. Paul's language, Catholic order aims "to unite all things in Christ," for "if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has passed away, behold, the new has come." (Ephesians 1:10; 2 Corinthians 5:17) Catholic order is a way of living that allows the Holy Spirit, who is intimately close to us, to penetrate all aspects of life and direct them into communion with God. It helps the individual bridle his wayward will and it leads society to elevate the common good over factional divisions. With its steadfast faith in God, Catholic order offers renewed enchantment, that is, h...