Today is Debbie Reynolds’s birthday. She is the most energetic woman I’ve ever seen on screen. What strikes me whenever I’ve watched her dance is this: her mastery of technique is what makes her energy so intense and infectious. Her poise and carriage are never tense nor slack; she is an icon of the (apparently) effortless channeling of the potential into the kinetic.
Articles under Jottings
Anxiety as Byproduct of the Rejection of Natural Law
Saturday, my host family took me to visit the town of Ely, which is near Cambridge where I’m enjoying a short sabbatical. Much of the medieval cathedral and its monastic buildings are still in existence. While I was there, the Worchester Cathedral Chamber Choir offered a short concert of pieces by Elgar, Handel, John Ireland, and others. Afterward, we all had tea. It was a splendid day.
Hitchcock and the Power of Anti-Expertise
We have the custom of watching one movie a month in the monastery. I pick out the movie, which is to say, we watch a lot of Alfred Hitchcock.
Opportunity and Outcome…and Fortuna
Kurt Vonnegut’s prescient short story Harrison Bergeron begins:
THE YEAR WAS 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren’t only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else.
On Precursors and Crumbling Walls
A few weeks ago, I compared Jordan Peterson with the medieval theologian Peter Lombard. I didn’t go into great detail on my own intuition in this matter. After some ill feelings about the analogy, I’ve come to reaffirm it in my own mind.
Come, Holy Spirit!
“With great power the apostles gave their testimony to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus [Acts 4: 33].”
This power that the apostles had was the gift of the Holy Spirit. Just before the Ascension, our Lord instructed them, “You shall receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you shall be my witnesses…to the end of the earth [Acts 1: 8].”
Who “Owns” the (English) Augustine?
Fresh takes on towering historical icons like Saint Paul and Saint Augustine are rarer than book publishers would like to claim. This is in part because of the stubborn presence of actual words that any interpreter must confront. Many moons ago, I discovered all of this to my dismay as I labored over a thesis on the Letter to the Romans. I felt decidedly less clever at the end of it all than at the outset. The text of Paul’s epistle had this funny way of funneling my fresh insights back into the common stew of Pauline studies. In other writers, I have sometimes discovered apparently novel interpretations, only to find later on the very same interpretation lodged in a patristic tome of old.
Eventually, one finds this general sense of agreement a comfort, at least if one believes in and is searching for Truth. It would disconcerting, to say the least, to find that the Church has been misreading Saint Paul for nearly twenty centuries, even if one were himself or herself the Vessel of Correction. Most new ideas about the Bible or the Church Fathers have in common a willingness to ignore counter-evidence from those same stubborn texts that rerouted my barque back into harbor.
So it was with no small delight that I read Sarah Ruden’s Paul Among the People some years ago. Amidst teaching assignments at Harvard, Yale, and the University of Cape Town, Ruden has been a prolific author and translator for nearly a decade. What makes her work on Saint Paul so compelling is her awareness of classical culture and her sympathy for the earthy realities of life in antiquity. She is able to depict Paul as a great champion of love and freedom by stripping away the anachronisms accumulated over five centuries of interdenominational debate. She writes with a light touch, an assurance that avoids the preachy or polemic tone.
The reader can imagine how excited I was to see that, after tackling Virgil’s Aeneid and Apuleius’s The Golden Ass, she turned her Latin skills to a Christian classic, Saint Augustine’s Confessions. I’ve begun making my way through it, and so far Ruden’s quirky but compelling take has won me over. I’ve read chunks of Confessions in the original Latin, and I’ve read four or five different translations. Most translations tend to err in the direction of pious seriousness. In my opinion, this is a disservice to Augustine, whose poignant observations on boyhood games and love of puns have slowly charmed me away from the early impression I had of him as a dour, mitered scold. Being not much more of a Latinist than I am an expert in Saint Paul’s Greek, I had been keeping my arriviste opinion to myself. Then I was emboldened by the endorsement of the “unsurpassed biographer of Augustine,” Peter Brown.
Brown’s NYRB review of Ruden’s translation focuses not so much on the changed tone of Augustine himself, but on the effect that this change of tone has on the depiction of God. Since the 1981 publication of previously unknown letters of Augustine by Austrian scholar Johannes Divjak, Brown has made a point of softening the adamantine image of the bishop of Hippo. If you read Brown’s biography (you should!), be sure to read the revised edition that contains Brown’s reappraisal. Browns’ influence is such that scholarly opinion has been following his lead. I want to emphasize here that the interpretation of Augustine as a proto-Puritan with Jansenist scruples is, like the Saint Paul of Luther’s imagination, a modern production. Anyone familiar with Saint Augustine’s “afterlife” in the Western Middle Ages will quickly become aware of the love that both monks and schoolmen shared for Augustine’s prodigious output, and for the man himself. As was the case with Saint Paul, Ruden’s new translation of Confessions is a vindication of the bulk of Catholic testimony regarding Saint Augustine, a genuinely fresh take that succeeds in restoring, in a modern idiom, an older appreciation for his humanity as well as his genius.
Calvin College’s James K. A. Smith will have none of it. I found it a bit disheartening when an intellectual of his status and caliber gave up on Ruden literally after one line. He claims to have been chastised by Brown’s review into questioning himself. This probing self-doubt seems to have lasted about two minutes before he’s back trying to burnish the statuesque, seriously pious Augustine. His big beef? Ruden’s decision to translate dominus as “Master” rather than as the (supposedly) traditional “Lord.” Smith seems to concede that “master” is a legitimate option–for a classicist. But the rest of us, he believes, want not accuracy but a “devotional classic.” It is telling that Smith begins his review openly admitting that when it comes to translations his preferences are nostalgiac and emotional and not rational. And, frankly, it is irrational to insist that Augustine say what Smith thinks he ought to say, based on his queasiness with the (modern, American, contextual) connotations of the word “master.”
Smith does ask two important questions: “which afterlife of words is most germane to the project that Augustine himself is engaged in? Which history of connotation overlaps with Augustine’s endeavor?” This gets at the heart of my difference from Smith on a number of related issues. Different confessional traditions will answer these questions differently. I would like to think that Benedictines, whose Rule of Life is deeply influenced by Saint Augustine’s own experience as a monk, who read large portions of Augustine’s work–ranging across the different genres of treatise, Biblical commentary, homiletic, and personal letters–at the daily liturgy, and whose institutional history includes at least two centuries of direct engagement with international politics, have as good a claim as anyone to bearing the standard of Augustine’s project/endeavor. From my (Catholic, monastic) perspective, Jean Calvin’s interpretations of Saint Augustine are just those sorts of “new” interpretations that can only exist by suppressing counter-evidence and dissenting voices.
And, in fact, English-speaking Catholics readily use the word “Master” to address God, for example, in the misattributed “Prayer of Saint Francis.” “O Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console…” English-speaking Orthodox will be familiar with this translation of the prayer of Saint Ephraim, “O Lord and Master of my life, take from me the spirit of sloth…”
But more to the point, we are arguing about a word choice in a modern language. Before the Reformation, and for plenty of Catholics since, God is Dominus. It is understood, at some level, that whether we use Lord or Master, what we mean is Dominus or Kyrios (perhaps even Adonai). Whatever connotations have attached themselves to Lord or Master in the past five hundred years, a span in which the English language has largely developed apart from direct influence by Rome or Constantinople, they may well be part of the shared distortion that has afflicted the memories of Saint Paul and Saint Augustine. More power to Sarah Ruden for inviting us to step back from our allegiances and question ourselves.
Thoughts Determine Our Lives
St. Ignatius of Loyola died on this date 561 years ago. He did not set out at first to be a saint, but a soldier. Then Providence intervened. A cannonball shattered his leg, and as he was recovering from this terrible compound fracture, he underwent this remarkable experience:
He asked for some of these books [of knight-errantry] to pass the time. But no book of that sort could be found in the house; instead they gave him a life of Christ and a collection of the lives of the saints written in Spanish….When Ignatius reflected on worldly thoughts, he felt intense pleasure; but when he gave them up out of weariness, he felt dry and depressed. Yet when he thought of living the rigorous sort of life he knew the saints had lived, he not only experienced pleasure when he actually thought about it, but even after he dismissed these thoughts, he still experienced great joy. Yet he did not pay attention to this, nor did he appreciate it until one day, in a moment of insight, he began to marvel at the difference. Then he he understood his experience: thoughts of one kind left him sad, the others full of joy.
Ignatius’s circumstances didn’t change. His joy and sadness did not depend on the healing of his leg, or on his future prospects as a soldier and a dandy. In other words, our contentment in life, or lack thereof, is not, primarily, a function of the external circumstances of our lives. What determines the emotional shape of our lives (and therefore, that aspect of our lives that really matters!) is our thinking.
This profound insight of Saint Ignatius comports with ancient monastic wisdom, both in Christian and Buddhist forms. The difference between Christianity and Buddhism, in this regard at least, is that traditional Christianity does not aim at avoidance of suffering by the elimination of the ego. Rather, the Gospel allows the newly, intentionally reborn self [in the image of Christ] to embrace joyfully the suffering that comes from standing out to the full, which is to say, the suffering that comes with sainthood. Our suffering is embraced “for the sake of the joy that was set before” us [Hebrews 12: 2]. We do this by changing the way we think, by the “renewal of our minds [Romans 12: 2].” How is this done? By, among other things, faith in God’s promises.
This future-oriented, eschatological thinking finds yet another interesting corroboration in the insights of Jewish psychotherapists Viktor Frankl and Rabbi Edwin Friedman. Both men asked this question: “Why is it that, under experiences of extreme stress, some persons not only continue to function but even thrive?” It’s good to note that Frankl himself was a Holocaust survivor. Both men experienced quasi-Ignatian moments of insight. Frankl’s very language echoes the experience of Ignatius [my emphases in bold]:
Hiding his mouth behind his upturned collar, the [prisoner] marching next to me whispered suddenly: “If our wives could see us now! I do hope they are better off in their camps and don’t know what is happening to us.”
That brought thoughts of my own wife to mind. And as we stumbled on for miles, slipping on icy spots, supporting each other time and again, dragging one another up and onward, nothing was said, but we both knew: each of us was thinking of his wife. Occasionally I looked at the sky, where the stars were fading and the pink light of the morning was beginning to spread behind a dark bank of clouds. But my mind clung to my wife’s image, imagining it with an uncanny acuteness. I heard her answering me, saw her smile, her frank and encouraging look. Real or not, her look was then more luminous than the sun which was beginning to rise.
A thought transfixed me: for the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth – that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which Man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of Man is through love and in love. I understood how a man who has nothing left in this world still may know bliss, be it only for a brief moment, in the contemplation of his beloved. In a position of utter desolation, when Man cannot express himself in positive action, when his only achievement may consist in enduring his sufferings in the right way – an honorable way – in such a position Man can, through loving contemplation of the image he carries of his beloved, achieve fulfillment. For the first time in my life I was able to understand the meaning of the words, “The angels are lost in perpetual contemplation of an infinite glory.”
Frankl and Friedman both challenge us to change our thoughts, to substitute thoughts of love, hope, purpose, and meaning for thoughts of hatred, anxiety, frustration, and resentment. I will be returning to Friedman, whose overall insights are especially counter-intuitive in our present world (which, from the perspective I’m adopting here makes them actually more persuasive). For today’s feast of Saint Ignatius, let me offer one more example of a change of thinking, this time a literary one. As Sam Gamgee and Frodo Baggins trudge their way through the soul-killing terror of Mordor, Sam experiences this moment of insight. It changes nothing of the external horror to which he and Frodo have been consigned. But it does something quieter, yet more radical. It changes Sam’s heart, and, in Tolkien’s story, this small, hidden change of heart changes the world.
There, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tor high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach. His song in the Tower had been defiance rather than hope; for then he was thinking of himself. Now, for a moment, his own fate, and even his master’s, ceased to trouble him. He crawled back into the brambles and laid himself by Frodo’s side, and putting away all fear he cast himself into a deep untroubled sleep.
Silence: Scorsese and Endo
“The crosses were set in place….Our brother, Paul Miki, saw himself standing now in the noblest pulpit he had ever filled. To his ‘congregation’ he began by proclaiming himself a Japanese and a Jesuit. He was dying for the Gospel he preached. He gave thanks to God for this wonderful blessings, and he ended his ‘sermon’ with these words…’I tell you plainly: there is no way to be saved except the Christian way. My religion teaches me to pardon my enemies and all who have offended me. I do gladly pardon the Emperor and all who have sought my death. I beg them to seek baptism and be Christians themselves.’
“Then, according to Japanese custom, the four executioners began to unsheathe their spears….[They] killed them one by one. One thrust of the spear, then a second blow. It was over in a very short time.”
–from the Acta Sanctorum, read at the Office of Vigils on the feast of St. Paul Miki and companions, February 6
It is of no small significance that the universal Church celebrates today the Japanese martyrs. We hear little of the brave European missionaries who brought the faith to Japan. Attention gradually focuses in on Saint Paul Miki, who begins his final apologia by proclaiming himself Japanese. For him, Christianity is not a betrayal of his culture, but its goal, its fulfillment. True, it comes with the trappings of faraway Rome, and yet what impresses me is that in the person of Paul Miki, it becomes Japanese. It is easily forgotten just how deep an impact the Catholic faith made upon Japan in their first encounter.
I’ve been asked to comment on Martin Scorsese’s most recent movie, Silence. I haven’t seen the movie, nor am I likely to soon (I wouldn’t mind seeing it at some point), but I am an enthusiast of the book. Two questions jump out as being pastorally weighty. Should Catholics see this movie/read this book? Are the movie and book anti-Catholic?
[SPOILER ALERT: plot developments will appear in what follows]
I separate these two questions, even though it would seem that they are intimately connected. As I attempt to answer them, my reason for considering them separately will hopefully be clear. Now, there are many excellent reviews of the movie and of the book, and the two I’ve found most helpful are those of Bishop Robert Barron and Amy Welborn. It’s also worth noting the effect of playing a Jesuit missionary had on actor Andrew Garfield. I encourage you to read them. In what follows, I will primarily focus on the questions that have been posed to me, with a few final words about the crucial issues of the novel.
In beginning to answer the first question, I should note that I hold the somewhat unpopular point of view that not all literature and not all art is for everyone. We all know this, in fact. This is why we withhold certain types of stories and images from children. Once we reach some arbitrary age, however, it is assumed that we can read or view more or less anything and derive profit from it. A more ancient wisdom respects that different persons are in different places, and not all of us are prepared to grapple with particularly vexing or troubling ideas. When I first read Endo’s Silence, I’m not sure that I was fully ready for it, even though I was thirty-three and a monk in solemn vows. I found the book quite disturbing because of the dilemma faced by the Portuguese missionaries, and the solution of external apostasy (perhaps at the command of Christ Himself?) was gravely disappointing to me. I wanted some clever escape from this version of the Kobayashi Maru test.
But the novel stayed with me. I felt that I was missing something in it, that my own personal maturity and faith needed developing before I could fruitfully engage with Endo. As I understand it, the movie is largely faithful to the book, and so to the first question, I would say that Catholics should feel no particular need to see the movie or read the book. If you do decide to see the film, it’s important to be aware that aspects of it may try your faith, and depending on where you’re at, you might change your mind and go to see something else. On the other hand, it’s also possible to remember that stalwarts like Bishop Barron have watched the film and/or read the book, and do not find it an insoluble challenge to the faith.
Which brings me to question two. Endo’s book is a great work of art, and as such, it “resists a univocal or one-sided interpretation,” in Bishop Barron’s words. Reading the book to determine whether it is pro- or anti-Catholic is a disservice to the book, and probably to the movie as well.
In fact, I do not believe that the book is anti-Catholic at all, and in the end, I doubt such a thing can be said of the film. While it is true that Endo’s own Catholic faith was strained at different times in his life, he did come to love the Church more and more as life went on. We should, as Bishop Barron warns us, be careful not to overlook the heroism of the Japanese martyrs in the novel and in the movie. It is easy to do. Why? I believe that a major difficulty in understanding the book is roughly equivalent to the major difficulty faced by the missionary Fr. Rodrigues: we read as Westerners expecting a European/American novel written for us, and what we are confronted with is a Japanese novel written for a Japanese audience. Fr. Rodrigues struggles with a somewhat patronizing attitude to the simple, vulnerable folk who embraced the faith with tremendous vigor. He struggles to establish any kind of genuine rapport with the natives (significantly, the one native with whom he regularly interacts is the conflicted Kichijiro). His training has not really equipped him for the culture shock he’s navigating. This makes it difficult for him to see Christ alive and glorified in the suffering of his fellow Christians. He is oddly modern in this way. It is a stretch for him to communicate (or even comprehend) the joy of martyrdom for Christ, in the way that Saint Paul Miki did with apparent ease. “When a Christian in the crowd cried out to him that he would soon be in heaven, his hands, [Saint Paul Miki’s] whole body strained upward with such joy…” Saint Paul has entered into and embodied an understanding of the Gospel that ennobles what it means to be Japanese. This nobility extends from the Emperor down to the poorest peasant. The Portuguese missionary in Silence never quite comes around to seeing their fellow Christians as genuine brothers and sisters, members of the Body of Christ. This doesn’t mean that there were not such missionaries. But it does mean that the trials faced by Fr. Rodrigues and his fallen-away fellow Jesuit Fr. Ferreira are met by men who discover themselves unprepared and out of their depth, a situation that neither anticipated or could have properly imagined.
One of Amy Welborn’s most important points is that Endo wanted to name his novel The Scent of a Sunny Place. This title would have placed more emphasis on Fr. Ferreira’s apostasy and its enfeebling consequences. He is a defeated man who puts a good face on his personal failure by…blaming the incurable strangeness of Japanese culture. Endo apparently feared that the title Silence would suggest something about the silence of God in general, which is how many do interpret it.
Here I must say something about the weakness of modern Catholic spirituality. And by modern, I mean roughly post 1350 A.D. Various factors moved the locus of communication between God and man further from the liturgy and world toward the private “cloister of the heart.” There were a few dissenting voices along the way, St. John of the Cross being the most insistent and consistent among them. God’s Logos, His Word, is that through which all things were made. Fr. Rodrigues would know this from the Final Gospel read at the end of every Mass in those days. This means that God speaks through all things, once we learn how to listen. By the early 17th century, the time of the novel’s story, prayer had become routinely interiorized to the point that well-educated priests could plausibly focus on the strained, inward search for the voice of God, especially when tossed into a profoundly alien and dangerously unfriendly culture. Yet, this notion of prayer is profoundly in tension with the attitude of the Church Fathers, including the great monastic founders of the Early Church. St. Ignatius of Loyola, who addressed a genuine need when he urged his followers to find God in all things, also warned about the real possibilities of self-delusion when we depend entirely on inner locutions and extraordinary signs (in his biography, the Devil deludes him into thinking that he is speaking with and adoring God in a beautiful display of lights, and is nearly led to commit suicide as a result). It is realistic of Endo to posit that not all Jesuits had been fully formed by their founder’s insight when so many cultural drifts were going the opposite direction.
It is for these reasons that I am personally not inclined to believe in the authenticity of the alleged voice of Christ coming from the fumie (the iconic representation of Christ, used by the Japanese persecutors to confirm apostasy). That’s not to say it’s definitely demonic, either. The monastic fathers and mothers taught that these sorts of phenomena have three sources, God, the Devil, and us. The voice of the fumie is what Fr. Rodrigues wants to hear. Perhaps a demon gave him a shove, but he was wandering in that direction already. And in my opinion, one main reason for his failure is his inability to see Christ in the Japanese whom he was sent to serve.
Did he go to serve them? Or did he go to prove a point about Fr. Ferreira? This is another important question that Endo implies.
I might sound a bit hard on these two Jesuits. I don’t see them as weak as much as caught up in a situation for which they are unprepared. The missionaries of the New World enjoyed the consolations (and, to be sure, the complications) of an accompanying imperial power. The Japanese missionaries are utterly isolated, and it is not surprising that they struggle to read the signs of God’s Word in such unfamiliar surroundings.
There is one detail from the movie which has come to my attention. Bishop Barron points it out: that when Fr. Rodrigues’s body is shown in his coffin, he is clasping a crucifix. The implication is that he remained inwardly, privately a Christian. As the bishop goes on to point out, “that’s just the kind of Christianity the regnant culture likes: utterly privatized, hidden away, harmless.” I suggested above that in the crucible of a no-win situation, Fr. Rodrigues gave in to what he wanted to hear. One hopes that Martin Scorsese hasn’t done the same in his own reading of Silence.
On the Impermanence of Institutions and the Permanence of Virtue
I wrote several days ago something to the effect that “things are worse in the Church than people think.” This sentiment is worth qualifying and examining.
Mainly, I’d like to distinguish what I mean from what Rod Dreher means when he writes similar things. As I understand him, he sees Christian institutions under imminent attack from secularizing forces. He fears that Christians are oblivious to the seriousness of the threat. In my experience, Christians are plenty aware that demographics trends and political developments do not bode well for the Church in the immediate future. What he perhaps is responding to is the fact that few Christians make this their first concern. I don’t think that this is necessarily complacency in many cases. To explain this, let me say something about institutions.
Alasdair MacIntyre, whose famous St. Benedict quote is the inspiration for Dreher’s “Benedict Option,” is a man whose comprehensive thinking on modernity, morality, and faith deserves as much attention as one can afford. He spends almost an entire chapter on institutions in his seminal book After Virtue. Institutions are important, but should always be secondary to practices. An institution like a chess club brings together persons interested in playing chess and fostering its proper enjoyment. The club itself is not a substitute for the actual practice of playing chess. We all know that institutions tend to have their own internal logic that can often interfere with the practices they are meant to foster and protect. Therefore institutions can only function well and in proper subordination to practices if the members are virtuous. And, as MacIntyre makes clear elsewhere, virtues are learned in practices, not in the bylaws of institutions.
In my opinion, most Christians are aware that longstanding institutions are endangered. And I would agree that many of us Christians are not spending lots of time worrying about it. Ambivalence in this regard has two sources. The first is a recognition that our current institutional arrangements are often unable to surface the right kinds of virtuous leadership, and so tend to be self-defeating. The response of American bishops to the sexual abuse scandal demonstrated (and continues to demonstrate) that the institutional arrangement (meaning the current structure and operating modes) of the bishops’ conference is faulty. This is to be distinguished from the theological necessity of the episcopacy or even the virtue of individual members. Bishops could choose to organize themselves differently, but this would require hard thinking about the precise practices that the bishops’ conference is meant to foster and protect. The Council documents that encouraged the formation of these institutions are somewhat vague on this point and were, perhaps, slightly naive about how institutions can corrupt practices.
The second source of ambivalence stems from the typical Christian concentration on real practices. This is to say that the average Christian is more concerned about the practice of virtue at ground level than the institutional backing that supposedly is undergirding it. Another way to look at this is to say that Christians are already developing their own local, ad hoc institutions (which is what the Benedict Option is supposed to encourage). The collapse of larger structures that provide tax shelter for a religious soup kitchen may or may not impact the soup kitchen itself. But Christians will, in one way or another, find a way to feed the hungry. It’s what we do. And I see so much of this in my everyday life, even from the relative obscurity of the cloister, that it seems ungrateful to fret about difficulties to come, even while I do see the need to prepare for them. I’d rather point to the exercise of faith around me and encourage the Christians I know to continue the work of virtue than worry about something that hasn’t happened yet, and may or may not in fact happen. This work is being done by the laity, a visible fruit of the teaching of Vatican II.
Last of all, the mention of virtue brings me at last to explain what I mean when I say that things are worse than people might think. What I mean by this is that our Western culture, especially in America, has been somewhat less-than-fully-Christian for many generations now, and that reviving a genuine, thoroughgoing practice of Christian virtue is a lot more difficult than the average person might think. This is something I can vouch for firsthand. I am a cradle Catholic who has mostly practiced by faith all my life. And yet, I am continually amazed at how far I have to go to be genuinely holy. Now, putting it that way illustrates that this is not pessimism or frustrating, or even necessarily cause for great fear. If you read the lives of the saints, you will discover that most saints had this same experience (which does not make me a saint, by the way). Love of a transcendent God means, in the words of Fr. Michael Casey, being perpetually out of one’s depth. Where I think there is some naivete is in our American optimism that “most people are basically good.” This is a nice, generous sentiment. But it does not help us to gain a lot of energy in the spiritual battle, in which we must first notice that in every heart there are large swaths of unevangelized heathendom. These are, of course, open to hearing the Good News! Which makes them, in their way, “good,” if broken and in need of healing. This healing is what we must first be about, and only if this happens will institutional reform follow in any meaningful way. In the short term, this may mean the tottering and elimination of many institutions. Some may be sad to see them go. But the long-term needs of the Faith may require this purification.