In one of his informative dispatches from Rome during the
Synod on the Family last fall, Robert Royal remarked with
regret on the extent to which the synod fathers appeared to
have taken their prescriptions for families from a secular
playbook instead of from their own Catholic tradition.
Most synod participants, Royal wrote, "seemed to look at
problems of marriage and family from the kind of thin
rationalist standpoint of politicians in democratic
countries.
That shallow rationalism is precisely
what gave us contraception, abortion, no-fault divorce, gay
marriage and much else that threatens the future of our
societies."
Dismayed though he may have been, Royal, a notably astute
observer, nevertheless was hardly surprised. As his important
new book A Deeper Vision (Ignatius Press) makes abundantly
clear, the secularizing of the synod that he observed last
fall was only a symptom of something that's been happening
for more than a half a century now - the shunting aside of
the Catholic intellectual tradition by people in leadership
positions and academic life who ought to have absorbed that
tradition and worked to promote it.
A prolific author, president of the Faith and Reason
Institute and proprietor of a website called the Catholic
Thing, Royal delivers this critique in a volume that is
encyclopedic in scope yet at the same time eminently readable
- and also entirely realistic about the present state of
Catholic culture.
Catholicism, Royal writes, is "no longer a significant part
of the cultural dialogue, as it was in the first half of the
twentieth century. Indeed rifts have entered the Catholic
tradition itself from the secular world that make it less
coherent and effective in making its own case."
Some people will hasten to say Pope Francis is changing this
state of affairs. But that so far remains to be seen. A
gifted popular communicator the Holy Father undoubtedly is.
But we are a long way from knowing whether his pontificate
heralds a cultural resurgence for the church.
It wasn't always this way. A Deeper Vision sees the past
century as divided into two distinct parts: the era up to the
1960s, when Catholicism flourished as a cultural agent, and
the years since then, which have been a time of cultural
collapse. The causes of that collapse have their roots in the
cultural revolution of the '60s and its destructive
absorption into the church, abetted by a false but alluring
view of Vatican Council II as a definitive break with the
church's past. (The correct view, Pope Benedict XVI wisely
insisted, stressed continuity with the tradition alongside
openness to change.)
Royal's book is not just an analysis of a process, however.
More important, it is an attempt - a remarkably successful
one - to introduce (or reintroduce) Catholics to some recent
high points of their own tradition. Distinguished figures
like Maritain, Guardini, Chesterton, Belloc, Greene, Mauriac,
Bernanos and others receive close and illuminating attention.
Royal's leanings can be seen in the fact that he considers
Evelyn Waugh perhaps the greatest English novelist of the
past century and Waugh's World War II trilogy Sword of Honor
as the author's finest work. Since these are judgments I
share, I naturally applaud them.
Note that A Deeper Vision focuses on Catholic culture in
Europe. There will be another volume, Royal tells us, devoted
to American Catholic culture. Here is good news, for this
first volume deserves to be read not only in its own right
but as an exciting introduction to an extraordinary tradition
with which many Catholics today have largely lost touch.
Shaw is a freelance writer from Washington and author
of American Church: The Remarkable Rise, Meteoric Fall,
and Uncertain Future of Catholicism in America (Ignatius
Press).