I haven’t done one of these in a few weeks; I scaled Christendom Reborn back to skeletal mode while I wrapped up all the summer stuff. This week I’m back up and rolling! I’m going to talk more these next few weeks about Christians and politics, and how we should think about ourselves right now vis-à-vis the chaotic political order. I’ll say more about that tomorrow. But for today, just a few thoughts on the readings.
Funny story about that. I looked them up yesterday, which I sometimes do on Saturday mornings, just so that I can muse a little on the passages and what’s worth saying about them. It actually happens quite often that I think, “Wow, these readings are so incredibly relevant to my theme for this week. It almost feels Providential!” Maybe divine grace is guiding Christendom Reborn! Or maybe I’m highly prone to confirmation bias. Maybe Scripture is just very rich and applicable to many things.
However you want to see that, I found myself reading about Ruth. I like Ruth, but the passage didn’t seem particularly applicable this week. Oh well.
Then I went to Mass today and realized I’d gotten the wrong readings somehow. Today’s readings are on the theme of:
You are Peter, and upon this rock I will build my Church, and the gates of the netherworld shall not prevail against it.
Somewhere out there, I hear my integralist friends cackling. “Take the hint, Rachel!”
I can’t ever see myself identifying as an integralist. That term just has way too much baggage. For those unfamiliar: it’s a strain of Catholic political theology that emerged in 19th-century Europe, drawing, of course, on earlier sources, but positioning itself very self-consciously against aggressive forms of secular liberalism that were sweeping across the continent at the time. I suppose it’s understandable, given that context, that some 21st-century people have wished to recover “integralism,” but there are some very good reasons not to. Let’s just say that it fell into most of the traps one associates with traditionalists and reactionaries of that period—among them, serious strains of antisemitism and some fairly enthusiastic support for fascism.
Some defenders argue that we should be able to separate the core ideas of a movement like that from its prudential missteps. Sure. We probably can. (In some cases “prudential missteps” might be an excessively charitable description, but we’ll set that to the side.) But I think, at the very least, a significant rebrand is in order. And in any event, 19th-century integralism involved a level of rejectionism toward the modern order that just seems unhelpful and unconstructive.
Nevertheless, I do believe in the authority of Peter. It is, to my mind, immensely significant that the Church Jesus founded is now the oldest actively operating institution in the world. It has remained while innumerable earthly kingdoms have risen and fallen, to the point where Jesus’ promise that “the gates of hell will not prevail” seems thoroughly plausible. It did that, in part, by not hitching its wagon too tightly to any particular political star. We’ll get into that more in these next few weeks.
For now I’ll just say: politics is by nature a messy, angsty subject. It’s constantly shifting and changing, floundering over human weakness. It has neither the grace nor the gravitas of philosophy. One wonders at times why the world should be so complicated and hard. At moments like that, I try to remember Romans 11:
Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God!
How inscrutable are his judgments and how unsearchable his ways!
Let’s just keep that point in mind as we proceed.