This essay is a Cover Story selection, a weekly feature highlighting the top picks from the editors of America Media.
Taken as a whole, the online Catholic world can look more like an abstract pointillist painting than a coherent landscape. To borrow the imagery of Isaiah Berlin, the internet environment encourages us to think like foxes rather than hedgehogs. Virtual discussions roam over many small things (e.g., the kerfuffle last spring over Harrison Butker’s graduation address at Benedictine College), rather than one or two big things. And there is no bigger question for Catholics today than this: Why should anyone become or remain Catholic?
Before the Second Vatican Council, the answers commonly given to this question focused on individual well-being in the afterlife. As many Catholic characters in movies and novels attested, a basic reason to be Catholic was “so I won’t go to hell.” The Catholic faith, in their view, is the best guarantee that they will not spend eternity suffering the excruciating flames of eternal torment. Instead, they will enjoy heavenly paradise. Catholic teachings provide a roadmap of the best route to heaven, and the sacrament of penance was a sure way to correct course if you lose your way.
This position is easily caricatured in several ways. First, heaven and hell are often depicted as destinations external to the soul, corresponding to external rewards and punishments. The soul is the same soul in heaven or hell—but it is happy in the former and miserable in the latter. Second, sacraments and other religious devotions are portrayed as external sources of energy that are used by the soul, but do not change its fundamental character. I go to Mass on Sundays in order to fill up my spiritual gas tank, so that I can drive my soul-car to heaven. But it is still the same old me that is driving the soul-car. Third, the system is presented as both predictable and arbitrary. Suppose I commit a mortal sin on Friday and intend to go to confession on Saturday. If I am hit by a car leaving church on Saturday, I go to heaven. If I am hit by a car walking into church, I go to hell. The sacramental system is depicted as an elaborate set of machinery, almost a soteriological Rube Goldberg machine. The rules are clear, even if they are not always fair.
The actual theology, however, has always been far richer than the caricatures. Catholic theologians would say that the process of moral living itself transforms you, because it is an encounter with God’s grace. You adopt good habits out of fear and obedience. Then you begin to see the holiness and beauty of God, and you continue those habits, which gradually allow you to love God and want to live in God’s presence in eternity. A famous question in The Baltimore Catechism asks “Why did God make you?” The answer is that “God made me to know Him, to love Him, and to serve Him in this world, and to be happy with Him forever in the next.”
Heaven and hell
After Vatican II, however, the more individually oriented account of the reasons to be Catholic began to be supplemented—if not supplanted—by a different view that approached questions of salvation in a somewhat different way.
One difference was the reduced emphasis on the details of eternal punishment. With the advent of mass media creating widespread exposure to the atrocities of war, people in the 20th century understood well the horrors of torture and suffering. Theologians and ordinary believers alike began to question the depictions of hell found in poets like Dante and lesser writers. How anyone with a shred of compassion could subject any creature to torture or torment, much less eternally, was beyond the grasp of many both morally and existentially. For a divine, omnipotent being to inflict such pain on any sentient creature is monstrous; such a god might reasonably be placated, but would never be worthy of worship.
Consequently, the God who became fully human in Jesus Christ could never behave in such a fashion. Even the more sophisticated notion of hell, as a state of the soul entirely separated from God, love, truth and light for all eternity, began to seem morally and existentially problematic. How could a good God, who sent His only begotten son to save us, who pursued every lost sheep, allow any of his creatures to be definitively lost?
On a more terrestrial plane, it could sometimes seem that the defenders of hell were (like Dante) too inclined to populate it with their own enemies, while reserving heaven for themselves and their friends. Pope Francis recently critiqued this danger when he wrote that heaven is for everyone (“tutti, tutti, tutti”) and warns against imagining it as a gated community for self-proclaimed upright souls.
Building the kingdom
After Vatican II, however, the chasm between heaven and hell receded from both academic theology and the popular imagination. The post-Vatican II worldview did not so much bridge the chasm as sidestep it, by reframing the issue. Drawing upon the council’s “Dogmatic Constitution on the Church” (“Lumen Gentium”) and the “Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World” (“Gaudium et Spes”), many Catholics envisioned their predominant duty to be helping to build the kingdom of God. This kingdom of God is already in our midst, inaugurated by the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, but it is not yet fully complete. With the grace of Christ, who is the cornerstone, our task is to cooperate with other Christians and all people of good will in bringing it to fruition.
The focus on building the kingdom of God displaces the heaven-hell chasm in two ways. First, it suggests that we already are where we are going to be for eternity—in the emerging kingdom of God. Second, it assumes that our task is not to please God individually and alone in order to obtain divine favor, but instead to cooperate with God and one another in the necessary work of construction on the basis that we already have a secure relationship based in God’s gracious love for us.
Seeing God as someone who graciously and tenderly loves us despite, in and through our episodes of confusion, weakness or abandonment, is crucial to postconciliar Catholic theology. As Pope Francis has repeatedly emphasized, this insight directs our attention to those whom God loves and who are ignored by society: the poor, the marginalized, the suffering, the excluded and the unsightly “lepers” of our society. It frees us from anxiety about our own fate in order to concentrate on these victims of our “throwaway” culture. And it affirms a non-dualistic metaphysics and anthropology, by emphasizing the continuities between the world we see now and the world as it will be at the end of time.
So on this view, we don’t so much “go to” heaven as help to build it, reconfiguring our world and our very selves with the help of God’s grace. We become or remain Catholic because we are grateful for the opportunity to cooperate with God and one another in nurturing the deepest truths of reality, with the spiritual and sacramental resources that the church gives us.
In God’s time
The adequacy of this approach has become a point of contention between more theologically conservative and more progressive Catholics in the decades after Vatican II. More specifically, theologically conservative Catholics have voiced three major worries. First, they worry that a post-Vatican II emphasis on social sin minimizes each person’s own need for repentance and forgiveness. Second, they think that framing the Christian task as “building the kingdom of God” risks devolving into secular do-goodism, with the church functioning as just another nongovernmental organization. Finally, they warn that the emphasis on ameliorating the sufferings of this world risks losing a transcendent perspective. It tempts us to forget that this world, at least as it is, is passing away.
I think these points are important. But I also think they can and should be fully integrated into a post-Vatican II understanding of the church and the individual.
First, the reality of sin is both personal and social. The two are deeply connected. Sinful social structures make sinful personal choices much easier. And sinful choices, particularly by those in power, infest social structures with corruption, greed and other forms of injustice. Our own particular sinful choices may not wreck the world, but they can destroy the social ecosystems in which we live or work, particularly our families.
Second, the church cannot be said simply to be an N.G.O. because we keep caring for the poor and the sick and the needy even when there is no measurable progress in secular terms. And often there isn’t. As I get older, I find myself recalling more frequently these lines from the “Salve Regina”: “To thee do we cry, poor banished children of Eve. To thee do we send up our sighs, mourning and weeping in this valley of tears.”
We are not “building the kingdom of God” in the predictable way a big construction company puts up a skyscraper. Very often, the best we can do is wipe away the tears. The fulfillment of God’s kingdom will come in God’s time, not ours. But the fact that we may not see that fulfillment with our own mortal eyes does not excuse us from the need to make our contribution.
I also think that many traditional concerns can be recast into an essential reminder to honor divine transcendence. When biblical scholars explicate the notion of the “fear of God,” they do so in terms of awe, reverence and honor. Fearing God means recognizing that the divine life is ultimately beyond our comprehension. We cannot even grasp the works of creation; both the vast power of the universe and the compact energy of a single molecule are still mysteries to us. And yet these works do not begin to touch the scope of God’s identity, relationships and works.
I think of the passage from the Book of Job where God asks:
Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?
Tell me, if you have understanding.
Who determined its measurements—surely you know!
Or who stretched the line upon it?
On what were its bases sunk,
or who laid its cornerstone
when the morning stars sang together
and all the heavenly beings shouted for joy?
Awe and love
One task for post-Vatican II Catholics, it seems to me, is to better communicate a sense of awe at God even as we emphasize God’s love. But is it possible to perceive God as tender, loving and awe-inspiring at the same time? I think it is. In fact, if we are fortunate, we can draw upon some of our own experiences as children. When we were very young, many of us saw our parents as figures entirely devoted to our quotidian well-being. They constructed the world in which we felt safe and loved. Yet at certain moments, we had an instinctive sense that they had a life beyond us, a life mysterious in its extent and scope. We snatched glimpses of that life when we saw them sitting quietly reading a thick book, leaving the house to go to work, or dressed up in glamorous clothing to go out for an evening together in places unknown.
These are limited, anthropological images, of course. But they help us to see that understanding God’s love does not entail treating God as cozy, predictable and utterly and exclusively concerned with our well-being.
Abject fear and unconditional love are not compatible. But awe and love most certainly are. In fact, being in awe of God reinforces our love. To sense the awesomeness of God, while knowing that God numbers the very hairs on one’s head, is to experience a sense of profound gratitude, safety and joy. This sense can give rise to energy that overcomes despair at the pain we see, because we know that our works are not ultimately futile. In the divine words of the 15th-century mystic Julian of Norwich: “All will be well, and all will be well and all manner of things will be well.”
