Signs of new life - James Preece on raising the next generation

They say that time flies by when you're having fun so I must be having a whale of a time because about two weeks ago I was a student at university and now my eldest kid just turned sixteen. David Tennant's incarnation of Doctor Who once explained that time is not so much a strict progression of cause and effect but, “more like a big ball of wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey stuff”. Whatever it is, we understand that God is outside of it. With the Lord, one day is a thousand years and a thousand years is one day. More on that later.

I mention my student days because it was as a student that I first read G.K. Chester ton's TheEverlastingMan- a phenomenal must-read of a book in which Chesterton responds to some guy called H.G. Wells, an author whose science fiction novels have brought a lot of joy but whose Outline of History did not impress Chesterton one bit.

Wells presents a history in which Man is just another animal and Christianity is just another religion. For Wells, religion is, “a tangle of ideas about commanding beings and spirits, about gods, about all sorts of ‘musts’ and ‘must-nots’” which grows up among human communities “to bind them together mentally and emotionally in a common life and action”. Christianity is just another one of those tangles. It serves its purpose in so far as it unites us to a common life but isn't actually true. Somebody made it up. It’s fiction, like Zeus and Odin.

Chesterton is having none of that of course and spends much of The Everlasting Man demonstrating how Man is not just another animal and Christianity is not just another religion. In the final chapter Chester ton discusses what he calls, “The Five Deaths of the Faith”. He does not mean that the faith has really died of course, rather that the Catholic faith has often appeared to die and somehow been found alive again. “The Faith has to all appearance gone to the dogs,” but in each case “it was the dog that died”.

There are a few ways a religion might be expected to die. Something linked to a particular culture or civilisation might be expected to end when the society ends. Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire and we might expect Christianity to end when the Empire ended but it didn’t. Religions can also grow old and tired, “to all appearance hollowed out from within by doubt and indifference”.

I would say that the latter is happening in our age. Ageing congregations, closed seminaries, clergy shortages. You can plug some of the hole with migrants but sadly, the faithtoxic environment of modern Britain doesn’t discriminate. When Catholicism becomes too tied up with cultural identity you have the perfect recipe for lapsation in a generation or two. Polish friends of mine tell me it’s already happening, thousands of baskets to bless at Easter but only a fraction at Mass every week.

Further afield the German Bishops look close to schism and even Cardinals are denying the truths of the faith. You might be forgiven for thinking that the Catholic Church has had it, yet once again, “the sons were fanatical for the faith where the fathers had been slack about it”. Those who know where to look see signs of new life everywhere. Young Traditional Catholics with growing families are busy raising the next generation of Catholics and Traditional Seminaries are bursting at the seams. There are a lot of reasons to be hopeful. For now…

Which brings me back to my thoughts timey-wimey. We may laugh when the progressives tell us that it’s time for X, Y, Z moral change because it’s 2023 (you might as well say it was okay to steal your brother’s sandwich because it’s ten past three) but all the while we find ourselves looking to the Church for some kind of gradual linear development which is never going to happen. Hope in Christ isn’t founded on this year being better than last year but on his victory over death on the cross. The road from here to there isn’t a linear progression but, well, sort of wibbly-wobbly.

So next time you feel a bit of despair coming on at the latest bit of miserable news to come out of Rome, take a deep breath and remember that these things are temporal, this too shall pass. You may wish that this had not happened in your time - though to be fair I’d take this crisis over living through the reformation any day - but at the risk of going all Gandalf on you, that is not ours to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.