A Friday at the end of the world

And so, we arrive at the ultimate Friday of this Year of Grace. The end of time, as it were. It seems a good day to reflect on the Church. Needless to say, the Church, whether you conceive of it as the Catholic Church or, like me, much more broadly to include churches, denominations, and congregations of baptized Christians, is experiencing difficult days. Most, perhaps all, of the difficulties the Church is experiencing are self-inflicted. Rather than returning to our first love, Jesus Christ, much of the time we seem to want to double-down on what landed us here. Christendom is over and done. Thanks be to God!

Despite Christendom being a thing of the past, many Christians in the West, especially in the United States, confuse the loss of political hegemony as persecution. It surely is not. As I approach the end of Born From the Gaze of God: The Tibhirne Journal of a Martyr Monk (1993-1996), which is the published journal of Blessed Christoph LeBreton, OSCO, who is one of seven Cistercian martyrs of Tibhirine, Algeria, who were kidnapped and killed by Islamist forces in 1996, I read something that Bl. Christoph copied from another book.

The book from which he copied it was L'honneur de la liberté by one J. Sommet. Christoph copied these words into his journal by hand during Advent 1995, which proved to be his final Advent, his final period of waiting and preparation for the Lord. He even noted that the title of the chapter of the book: "Dachau...Typhus." Here are is the passage that I think relevant on this Friday at the end of the world:

There I assist at what I call the birth of the Church. It is more a matter of reconstituting a community that gives meaning to each individual's freedom, and that also remains an authentic source of that same freedom, because it does not accept being in a situation of power... This is what constitutes a true Church, a society of gratuity and powerlessness, a community without the means of physical or biological resistance, without hidden arms. These men jump in the fray with bare hands. Here we are before a Church that reinvents herself as a place of the heart and of the freedom of people together, each one existing by virtue of the others[...] Such a Church refuses to become a locus of power, of damnation, of constraint imposed on other groups (197)

I shudder to think where the Church would be today without the witness, ministry, and teaching of Pope Francis.

When Francis became pope, much was made of him perhaps being the first "post-secular" pontiff. What is meant by "post-secular"? Stated simply, maybe overly so, post-secular refers to the persistence or resurgence of religious beliefs or practices in the present. The "post" in post-secular, in this instance, refers to after the end of secularism. "Post-secular" goes hand-in-glove with "post-modern." For those who keep up with the magisterial teaching of the Holy Father, his body of teaching is a great guide for being Christian in our post-secular, post-modern world, a world in which institutions are in decline and held in suspicion by most people.

Being awake means not retreating into dreams of what once was intending to make it that way again. Kierkegaard was quite right in his unsparing criticism that insisted Christendom was the worst thing that ever happened to Christianity. Kirkegaard was adamant that Christendom was a betrayal of the Gospel because it robbed the teaching of Jesus of radicality.

Jesuit theologian Jon Sobrino, who is best known as one of the leading lights of liberation theology, in an essay entitled "The Kingdom of God and the Theological Dimension of the Poor" insisted "Forgetting the poor has gone hand in hand with forgetting the Kingdom of God." Circling back to Christendom, specifically to its origin in the Church's early conciliar period, Sobrino rightly notes: "By the time of the fourth-century conciliar debates it is clear that the Kingdom of God plays no role whatsoever in Christology" (essay in Who Do You Say That I Am?: Confessing the Mystery of Christ, 109-145).

One of the things I am going to do this holiday weekend is set aside time to listen to my favorite U2 album, The Unforgettable Fire, in its entirety. Therefore, it seems fitting, at the expense of too much U2, that our traditio for this ultimate Friday of the liturgical year be a cut off that album. I am going with one of the less well-known tunes: "Promenade."

In the short entry, written on the Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception of the Most Blessed Virgin Mary, that is, 8 December 1995, Bl. Christoph simply noted: "Guileless MARY, born free" (196).