This is the first article in the series “Spiritual Challenges.” 

Recently there have been various attempts to address the polarization in the Catholic Church in the United States. Last month, Cardinal Pierre gave an address at Loyola University Chicago discussing present problematic views of the Church. The Editors of the National Catholic Register published an article requesting Pope Francis to come to the United States to get to know the how American Catholics really live their faith, and a panel discussion hosted by Gloria Purvis made up of Cardinal Robert McElroy, Bishop Daniel Flores, and Bishop Barron tried to go more deeply into this question of polarization.

I began writing for Where Peter Is in November 2021 in order to present some facts about Pope Francis’s articles concerning contemplative nuns, Vultum Dei Quaerere and Cor Orans. I found that my experiences in my own Order helped me to understand some problems affecting the Church at large, especially the tension between two seemingly opposing viewpoints — those who try to follow the teachings of Vatican II and those who are more comfortable with the way the Church was before the Second Vatican Council.

I was born before Pope St. John XXIII was elected and I remember the Church before any of the changes of Vatican II. I lived through the turmoil following the Council, both in this country and in Europe. In my own Order, I have been deeply involved in the tensions arising from the two viewpoints, and I think that the source of the present problem of polarization can be found in the challenge inherent in the word “interiorization.”

We in the United States are a very legal-minded people. That is inevitable: we have no common culture, no long history, no link to a place on the continent on which we and our ancestors have lived for centuries. There is nothing to bind us together except the system of government established by our Founding Fathers. We are trained to think in terms of legality, and this has influenced our understanding of the Catholic Church.

Europe is a very different matter. Europeans have lived on that continent for hundreds, even thousands of years. They have been held together by the bond of various cultures: Roman, Gallic, Germanic, Slavik and others. This gave them cohesion throughout the many conflicts that rolled over and devastated the lands. Poland disappeared as a country for 150 years, yet Polish culture survived and held the people together. Alsace and Lorraine were swept back and forth between France and Germany, yet Alsatians and Lorraines remained. Rome first united the continent, and then Christianity made it a unity with a faith that could be expressed in various ways in the different cultures. Unfortunately, the faith became too identified with the cultures, and instead of the faith nourishing the culture, it became a means by which the culture strengthened itself. We saw this in Fascism and early Nazism, when those ideologies used Christianity to bolster their power. On a less political level, a friend of mine, a citizen of another country living in Switzerland, was once asked, “Why don’t you become Catholic? It would be the first step towards becoming Swiss.”

Catholics arriving from Europe brought their faith with them. Originally, they kept close to their own ethnic and cultural groups, and with this support, they continued to live the faith they had grown up in. With passing generations, their descendants moved beyond their cultural frameworks, but without losing the Catholicism they knew, for the Church had set up cultural expressions that could be applied to many different ethnic and cultural settings. These expressions included the essential practices of the faith, the sacraments and the various devotions that were common to all Catholics. Certain practices, such as the sacraments, were necessary to maintain a living relationship with God in the Church. Others helped to express various aspects of the faith, for a faith that is not lived out in ordinary life cannot be considered a living faith.

One example of such practices was the injunction to abstain from meat on Fridays. Each Friday is the commemoration of Jesus’ death on the cross in expiation for our sins. Each of us can truly say that it was my sins that caused Him to suffer and die that I might be one with Him. It is only right and just to remember this at least once a week and to express my sorrow for my sins by some act of penance. The Church established abstinence from meat as a suitable expression of sorrow on Fridays.

Every practice is an outward expression of an interior attitude. We teach our children to say “thank you” when they are given something, to help them to develop an attitude of gratitude. They are not entitled to a gift. It is a free offering, and the generosity of the giver should be acknowledged. Hopefully, as the child grows older, they will come to recognize this, and their “thank you” will cease to be an action enforced from without and become a genuine expression of their own gratitude to the giver.

This is known as “interiorization.” All of the Church’s practices are aimed at interiorizing the faith that is acquired by hearing so that it becomes a living relationship with the God who lives within us. But interiorization is not an automatic development. A child can, for one reason or another, never develop the gratitude for gifts that makes a “thank you” an expression of friendship. A believer can stop at the expression and fail to grow in the friendship with God that Jesus offers to us. I have developed this in my article “Can the Faith Be Traditioned?”

Let us apply this approach to the practice of not eating meat on Fridays, a practice that was mandated up until the Council. Most people around the world agree that meat is a good thing! In fact for those who live below or close to the poverty level, it is a luxury that is only enjoyed on rare occasions. Globally, most poor people cannot afford to eat meat daily. For this reason, there is nothing penitential for them in abstaining from it on Fridays since they would normally not eat it anyway. The Church recognized this and changed the instruction of abstaining from meat on Fridays to the practice of some other expression of sorrow for our sins. The exterior expression should be the incarnation of an interior attitude.

The practice of the Catholic faith can easily get stuck at the level of externals. St. Teresa of Jesus discusses this in her masterpiece, The Interior Castle. This book studies the various stages of interiorization of the faith, from the extremely superficial level of Catholics who pray from time to time, possibly going to Church only for Christmas and Easter, to the total transformation into Christ in the spiritual marriage. She divides the spiritual life into seven levels, beginning with the first, very superficial level in the First Mansions.

On the third level, she described that faithful Catholic who lives out the prescriptions of the Church and practices the virtues and has various other devotional expressions of the faith. Of such persons, she says,

“What shall we say to those who through perseverance and the mercy of God have won these battles [of the first two Mansions] and have entered the rooms of the third stage, if not: Blessed is the man who fears the Lord? … Certainly we are right in calling such a man blessed, since if he doesn’t turn back he is, from what we can understand, on the secure path to his salvation…for the Lord has done them no small favor, but a very great one, in letting them get through the first difficulties. I believe that through the goodness of God there are many of these souls in the world. They long not to offend His Majesty, even guarding themselves against venial sins; they are fond of doing penance and setting aside periods for recollection; they spend their time well, practicing works of charity toward their neighbors; and are very balanced in their use of speech and dress and in the governing of their households — those who have them. Certainly, this is a state to be desired.”[1]

We can easily recognize such good, exemplary Catholics, and we do right to envy them. They live what they believe, and that is no small thing. Yet St. Teresa, while admitting what they have accomplished, recognizes the danger that they are in: they have not interiorized the faith enough. St. Teresa compares such believers to the rich young man who asked Jesus what he must do to be saved: “From the time I began to speak of these dwelling places I have had this young man in mind.”[2] He sincerely followed the precepts of the law, but when he was offered a deeper relationship with Jesus, he “went away sad.”[3] Like the rich young man, these believers are upheld by their practices and depend on them to live the faith:

“I have known some souls and even many — I believe I can say — who have reached this state and have lived many years in this upright and well-ordered way both in body and soul, insofar as can be known. After these years, when it seems they have become lords of the world, at least clearly disillusioned in its regard, His Majesty will try them in some minor matters, and they will go about so disturbed and afflicted that it puzzles me and even makes me fearful… With humility present, this stage is a most excellent one. If humility is lacking, we will remain here our whole life — and with a thousand afflictions and miseries. For since we will not have abandoned ourselves, this state will be very laborious and burdensome…What it seems to me would be highly beneficial for those who through the goodness of the Lord are in this state (for, as I have said, He grants them no small mercy because they are very close to ascending higher) is that they study diligently how to be prompt in obedience. And even if they are not members of a religious order, it would be a great thing for them to have — as do many persons — someone whom they could consult so as not to do their own will in anything. Doing our own will is usually what harms us.”[4]

Let me give another example of interiorization. The Carmelites of Compiegne are well known, even to non-Catholics, thanks to Poulenc’s opera, Dialogues of the Carmelites. These Carmelites were 16 nuns of the monastery of Compiegne in France, and when the French Revolution broke out and Catholicism was outlawed, they all vowed to offer their lives for the faith and for France. They repeated this vow each day. At first, they were allowed to live their religious life, but then they were evicted from their monastery and ordered to take off their religious habit and to cease living as religious. They broke up into small groups of 3 or 4 and lived in apartments, keeping in touch with one another and doing their best to live their Carmelite life as best they could. They were arrested in June 1794, and a few weeks later, on July 17, they were sent to the guillotine. They sang on the way to the scaffold, and each repeated her vows in the hands of the Prioress before she mounted the steps to the guillotine. The usually raucous, jeering crowd was totally silent as the nuns died one by one. Two weeks after their death, the Reign of Terror ended with the fall of Robespierre.

We rightly admire the martyrs, who give themselves totally to God even to the offering of their lives. I once asked one of our novices, “What was the greatest moment of the Martyrs of Compiegne?” She replied, “When they set their foot on the steps of the scaffold.” “No,” I said. “When they were evicted from their monastery, forced to take off the habit and forbidden to live as religious. Yet even without any exterior supports for their religious life, they continued to live as Carmelites.” They had interiorized their charism. From that time on, the charism would sustain them from within.

I believe that the great miscalculation made by the Fathers of the Second Vatican Council was that they vastly over-estimated the degree to which the faith had been interiorized by many of the faithful. They assumed that all or most Catholics had interiorized the faith and would be able to express it in their lives without the detailed formulas set down by the Church. I think that this assumption was mistaken. Having lived through the turmoil following the Council, I was irresistibly reminded of a Jello mold that hadn’t jelled. Anyone who has seen it will recognize what I mean: you mix a bowl of Jello, pour it into a mold and place the mold overnight in the refrigerator to jell. Then the next day you take the mold out of the refrigerator, upend it onto a plate, remove the mold and watch the unjelled Jello flow sluggishly over the counter as you realize that something didn’t work!

I can sympathize with those who cling to the clear and understandable prescriptions that existed in the Church before Vatican II. I can also sympathize with those who reject all such prescriptions and limitations. Both groups fail to glimpse the deeper life of faith to which we are called and to which all practices point. Interiorizing the faith, passing from an exterior relationship with God to a vibrant friendship with Him, is not comfortable, but it is a glorious adventure! Those who accept this adventure are the living members of the Church. It is they who will carry the faith into the future.

Notes

[1] St. Teresa of Jesus, Interior Castle, III, 1 1 & 5

[2] Ibid. III 1, 6

[3] Matt. 19, 22

[4] “Int. Cast.,” III, 2, 1 & 9 & 12

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Image: Adobe Stock. By Klarion.