Turbulent Times in Need of Timeless Wisdom
Introduction
Turbulent Times in Need of Timeless Wisdom
Turbulent Times in Need of Timeless Wisdom
Help, Lord, for there is no longer any that is godly; for the faithful have vanished from among the sons of men.
— Psalm 12:1
He who walks with wise men becomes wise.
— Proverbs 13:20
Our Turbulent Times
I strive to write positive, uplifting books that inform and inspire readers with the kind of love of God and His Catholic Church that was restored to me after twenty-five years in the atheistic wilderness, courtesy of the stirrings of the Holy Spirit and the writings of St. Thomas Aquinas. I certainly hope to do the same in this one, but the last thing I want to do is offer haloed-smiley-face Band-Aids to place over the festering sores of our individual souls, of our culture, and, alas, of elements within our holy Church. All times have been turbulent in the two millennia of our Church’s history, as the Church consists of sinners seeking holiness, but today the waves of ambiguity and aimlessness, of confusion and chaos, of scandal and secularization, are cresting at all-time highs into a very imperfect storm that puts all our souls at serious risk of spiritual shipwreck. These issues cannot be ignored.
There are all kind of indices of these troubled times within the world at large. You need only turn on your television, your computer, or even your cell phone, to see new examples of turmoil and conflict every day, but alas, such bad news is found not merely outside in the world of the worldly, but within the very bosom of the Catholic Church.
The Church in America had suffered and shrunk in so many ways decades before the clerical sexual abuse crisis reared its ugly head again in 2018. Since my childhood in the 1960s, the number of priests has decreased by one-third, while the U.S. population increased by two-thirds. We have more than 40 percent fewer Catholic schools, while parish after parish proceeds to shut its doors.
We’ve seen similar catastrophic drops in the numbers of male and female religious. Of those who are left, some remain gallant defenders of the Church, while others gave up the habit of boldly proclaiming unpopular Catholic truths, such as the sanctity of life and of marriage, at the very same time they gave up the habits they wore on their backs, becoming more like social workers or political and economic activists than servants of God seeking the salvation of their souls and of the souls of others.
In Europe, vast numbers of majestic cathedrals sit nearly empty. To the present day, the number of U.S. Catholics has risen pretty much in keeping with our rise in population as a whole, largely due to Catholic immigrants, yet the largest Christian “denomination” in our country comprises “former Catholics.”
I came to realize only in the last few years how often during the years of my childhood and adolescence within the Church and my young adult years outside of it that we were told again and again how the Church needed aggiornamento, serious changing and updating, to adapt to “modern man” or “contemporary man,” to come to “speak our language today” and become “relevant to the complexities of our time.” Since my return to the Church in 2004, those winds of change have reached almost gale force, and yet, ironically, those “modern men” (and women) of the ’60s and ’70s are certainly no longer very modern.
Their winds of change brought us barn-like churches, dislocated tabernacles, and laity-crowded sanctuaries and blew away high altars and altar rails, Latin, chants and bells, and statuary and religious art. It is no pretty thing when the winds of modernist wolves huff and puff and blow through the houses of God, and less pretty still when we breathe them into our souls through ambiguous, novel doctrines that seek to conform the eternal Spirit of the Church to the spirit of the “modern” world.
This deterioration of the Church within my lifetime can give rise within me to feelings of sadness, and even anger at times, prompting me to call out like King David: “Help, Lord, for there is no longer any that is godly; for the faithful have vanished from among the sons of men” (Ps. 12:1). Still, as a Thomist immersed in St. Thomas Aquinas’s philosophy, theology, and knowledge of human nature, I remind myself that we are never completely at the mercy of our feelings, even if they appear justified to some extent by external circumstances. God made us in His image with intellects and wills. He gave us both the intellectual capacity to understand the gravity of any problems that we face, and the will to try to make things right, if like David, we ask God for His help. So, although there is no need to be overly pessimistic, even in our turbulent times, we may legitimately ask ourselves where perennial, eternal truths have gone, and where saintly and godly men and women are? Can we find them again? Can we become them again?
Thankfully, St. Thomas Aquinas reminds us that “the Universal Church cannot err, since she is governed by the Holy Ghost, Who is the Spirit of Truth” (ST, II-II, Q. 1, art. 90).1 The Holy Spirit does not make mistakes because, as Christ told us, “he will guide you into all the truth” (John 16:13). The Holy Spirit does not retire, expire, or resign; rather, as Christ told us, the “Counselor” will “be with you for ever” (John 14:16). The Catholic Church was born on that Pentecost Day when the Holy Spirit descended with tongues of fire upon Peter, our first pope, on our Church’s Blessed Mother, and the apostles, the first bishops (Acts 2).
Specifically regarding the papal office handed down through Peter, St. Thomas notes that to the pope belongs:
authority which is empowered to decide matters of faith finally, so that they may be held by all with unshakeable faith. Now this belongs to the authority of the Sovereign Pontiff, to whom the more difficult questions that arise in the Church are referred. Hence our Lord said to Peter whom he made Sovereign Pontiff (Luke 22:32): “I have prayed for thee,” Peter, “that thy faith fail not, and thou, being once converted, confirm thy brethren.” The reason of this is that there should be but one faith of the whole Church, according to 1 Corinthians 1:10: “That you all speak the same thing, and that there be no schisms among you”: and this could not be secured unless any question of faith that may arise be decided by him who presides over the whole Church, so that the whole Church may hold firmly to his decision.” (II-II, 1, 10)
In the recent decades of the Church’s decline, we’ve heard much about “ecumenism” and finding common ground in search of unity with non-Catholic Christians, and indeed with members of other world religions. Yet, within the one, holy, Catholic, and apostolic Church we have come to speak of “traditional Catholics,” “sedevacantist Catholics,” “conservative Catholics,” “liberal Catholics,” “neo-Catholics,” “dissident Catholics,” “Vatican II Catholics,” and more. Where has the “one faith” of the whole just plain “Catholic” Church gone?
Timeless Spiritual Wisdom
So, where can we go for some of the clearest answers to some of the most important questions about the Faith, questions that bear upon our eternal lives? To quote a previous sovereign pontiff: “Go to Thomas . . . to ask from him the food of solid doctrine of which he has an abundance to nourish their souls unto eternal life.”2 St. Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) is among the very greatest Doctors (i.e., teachers, from the Latin docere, “to teach”) in the history of the Church.
Almost every pope since that time has heaped praise upon praise upon Thomas, and a main reason is that Thomas’s wisdom, like truth itself, is timeless. At the time he lived, nearly eight hundred years ago, Thomas was, of course, a “modern man,” but he did not write merely for his “contemporary man,” but for us and for our descendants as well. He wrote about fundamental, unchanging truths of God, of the Trinity, of all creation, including man and the angels, and of the Word Incarnate and the Church and the sacraments He left us.
Further, Thomas’s genius did not at all lie in novelties or surprises. He always fully heeded St. Paul’s words to all the faithful to “stand firm and hold to the traditions which you were taught by us, either by word of mouth or by letter” (2 Thess. 2:15). The Common Doctor did this by preserving, clarifying, synthesizing, and sharing with us the wisdom of the Catholic Church laid down by Christ, the apostles, saints, and Doctors who lived long before his time.
Skim through the pages of the Summa Theologica and you will encounter quotations from Sts. Ambrose, Athanasius, Augustine, Cassian, Chrysostom, Gregory the Great, Gregory Nazianzen, Hillary, Jerome, and Church Fathers, Doctors, saints, and theologians of the rest of the alphabet too. Thomas was also well-versed in the strengths and the weaknesses of the greatest pagan philosophers: of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Seneca, and others, and was literally far more well-versed in the verses of Holy Scripture. You’ll see plenty of examples in the pages ahead.
The turbulent world of our times needs Thomas’s timeless spiritual wisdom as it never has before. Our Church needs it too, and so do we as individual members of the Mystical Body of Christ. We need to learn to focus on what matters most, to set our hearts, minds, and souls upon God, and to order our lives in accordance with His will as expressed in the two books He wrote for us: the book of nature, which we read with our senses and reason, and the book of revelation, which we grasp in Scripture through the gift of faith.
Inspired by the goodness of God’s creation and in humble gratitude for the powerful intellect with which God blessed him, St. Thomas wrote many books from which we could cull countless holy lessons to help lead us not only to better lives on earth but to unspeakable bliss of an eternity spent in the Beatific Vision of God. In these pages, we’ll narrow these eternal-life lessons down to a simple twelve, a heavenly dozen that, God willing, will help lead us to Him.
We will peer deeply into the wisdom of the Angelic, Common, Humanitarian, and Eucharistic Doctor and let him show us how, through five “lesson plans” of penetrating fundamental principles of the Faith, pulverizing sin, practicing virtue, praying, and participating in the sacraments, we can live out these eternal-life lessons.
St. Thomas Aquinas is eminently well suited to help us achieve these goals if we are willing to walk with this wise man, listen to his wisdom, and put it into practice in our daily lives. I invite you now to put on your walking shoes and join us in this book’s journey.
1 I will be citing St. Thomas’s great Summa Theologica (or Theologiae) hundreds of times in these pages. To keep things simple, from here on, I will omit the abbreviation “ST” and provide only the part, question, and article numbers cited. For example, “II-II, 1, 90” would indicate that I’m citing the second part of the second part of the Summa, question 1, article 90. Further, to keep footnotes to a minimum I’ll make these citations in the body of the text.
2 Pope Pius XI, Studiorum Ducem, 1923.