

What can we say about evangelization today? What should the Church do in a time of apostasy and decline? And what is the relation of the Traditionalist movement to all this? Two noted apologists of the establishment – defenders of the Faith – recently wrote on the interaction of Evangelization, Traditionalism and Christendom.
In From Christendom Times to Apostolic Times, George Weigel tells us in First Things that:
Look around you and recognize that ours are apostolic times, not Christendom times. Christendom, as Fulton Sheen said in 1974, is over.
“Christendom” connotes a situation in which society’s cultural codes and the manner of life they endorse help transmit “the faith once delivered to the saints” (Jude 1:3). Places like that existed within living memory; I grew up in the last, fleeting moments of one, in the urban Catholic culture of 1950s Baltimore. That form of “Christendom” is now long gone. Throughout the Western world today, the cultural air we breathe neither transmits the faith nor is neutral about the faith; the cultural air is hostile to the faith. And when that hostility captures the commanding heights of politics, it aggressively seeks to marginalize the faith.
In Christendom times, a “missionary” is someone who leaves a cultural comfort zone and goes to proclaim the Gospel where it’s not been heard before. In apostolic times, Redemptoris Missio (John Paul II’s encyclical on the missions -SC)teaches, every Catholic is a missionary who has been given the mandate to “go, make disciples of all nations” (Matthew 28:19). In apostolic times, “mission territory” is not an exotic travel destination; it’s everywhere. Mission territory is the kitchen table, the neighborhood, and the workplace; the mission extends into our lives as consumers and citizens.
Now I fully agree with Mr. Weigel that ours is a culture hostile to the faith – that Christendom is no more. After all, apologists both Catholic and friendly to Catholicism have been making that point since at least – well, Novalis’ Christendom or Europe (1801). I should mention, however, that his characterization of today’s culture does conflict sharply not only with the rapturous embrace of modernity by the Second Vatican Council as well as recent popes and bishops but also with the de facto “neutral” assessment of the Opus Dei movement. Does not Redemptoris Missio, Weigel’s “blueprint” for mission, also, here and there, still reflect this optimism?
It’s also undeniable that every Catholic needs to be a missionary today and his mission territory is all around him. But after making this most valid observation, Mr. Weigel then draws a contrast between such an “apostolic age” and the “comfort zone” of Christendom. Our author has indeed often critiqued in the past the alleged inadequacy of Christendom and its pre-Conciliar pockets and successors. The source of such views is of course the ferment leading up to the last Council with its attacks on the “Catholic Ghetto,” and the ”Constantinian Church.”
Internal and external mission, however, was always integral to Christendom. Now by this term I mean a society where the religion of the Gospel is made the defining constitutional element of state and society. In such a society, the Catholic, Orthodox religion gradually informs all aspects of life: the social structure, the arts, the economy, the laws, the cuisine, the technology, the dress of the people – nothing was exempt from Christian influence. It resulted in a transformation that took generations, even centuries. A new Christendom cannot be recreated or restored by our efforts in our own days – after all, it took over 700 years to form the first one. And the task is never complete – total conformity of the World to the gospel is never achieved – not even in the 13th century Europe, not even in the baroque age of Italy and Germany. Christendom is inherently never static and is always in need of renewal. Catholic culture, however marvelous, of itself is insufficient: Prague is one of the most perfectly Catholic cities in the world yet it is now inhabited by a people largely atheistic.
A brief review of history bears this out. It was, after all, from Christendom, both East and West, that the territories and peoples outside the Roman empire were converted – starting with Ireland in the West, then Anglo-Saxon England, then Germany, the Slavic and Hungarian peoples and, by 1050, Scandinavia as far as Greenland. During and after the crisis of the Protestant Reformation, new missionaries – Jesuits and others – converted many in Asia and in the new world – concluding with the California missions of the second half of the 18th century. And after the intervening chaos of the French revolution, after which Christendom was, so to speak, on life support, we encounter the great missionary revival of the 19thcentury.
The external activity was matched by internal evangelization. The Benedictine monks of the 7th century were eventually succeeded by Cluny and the Cistercians – all three representing not withdrawal from the world but the launching of mighty spiritual movements within it. In the 13th century, the friars of the new mendicant orders evangelized the rapidly growing cities – and advanced as far as China. Later, the Jesuits acted not just as apostles to the heathen – an even greater focus of their efforts was education and internal mission in Europe. These missionary endeavors left a stamp on many landscapes of Europe that lasted even until the Second Vatican Council. Even in 19th century New York City – increasingly remote from Christendom – we read of the many missions preached by the Paulists and the Redemptorists in the city’s parishes. Finally, the catalogue of the saints and blesseds of Christendom shows that internal evangelization was not just the province of monks or priests but was shared by the laity: kings and servant girls, high court officials and peasants.

The contrast to the evangelization required of us today is not Christendom, but various abuses that developed after it fell. There was, for example, the ultramontane emphasis on a centralizing clerical culture. And then came the “Conciliar Church”: the average US parish that is its product is hardly evangelical. That John Paul II had to devote paragraphs of Redemptoris Missio to defending the very concept of mission only demonstrates its perilous state by 1990. And what are we to make of the repeated utterences of the current bishop of Rome against “proselytizing”?
Actually, in recent years it has been the growing Traditionalist movement that has displayed the greatest initiative in evangelizing those both inside and outside the Church. It has done this primarily by involving Catholics in the liturgy in one way or another. In doing so, it has revived and employed cultural achievements inherited from Christendom: the music, the vestments, the philosophy and the art (insofar as that is possible today ). None of these are ends in themselves but are means to revive the faith of Catholics and lead others to it. The effect is to activate those organizing these liturgies – and then to attract others won over by what they have seen or heard.
As an example, we have these testimonies from the diocese of Brooklyn in the Brooklyn Tablet:
“Our congregation is made up of many professionals, young people. A great number of young families come with their children. I would say that almost every year we’ve had one or two children wanting to make their communions in the old rite. Also, we have at least maybe two or three baptisms during the year. I’m surprised to see, almost every Sunday, we have new faces here. You know, and those new faces are young people,” Cardillo explained.
……
Bongiorni, 28, has been serving on the altar for ten years. He’s part of a close group of about two dozen young Catholics who met at the Traditional Latin Masses and started the Latin Mass program at St. Finbar Church, Bath Beach, along with Father Michael Gelfant, then the pastor, last year.
What is the reaction of the professional evangelizers of the establishment to this? For that, we turn to auxiliary bishop Robert Barron – a would-be modern-day Fulton Sheen. Now Bishop Barron has little use for Traditionalists. Last year he hosted a closed door meeting with “Catholic media professionals” – one wonders who they were – on, among other things, the dangers of “Radical Traditionalism.” Just recently Bishop Barron wrote in his blog on The Evangelical Path of Word on Fire:
(Speaking of the late Cardinal George) Thoroughly imbued with the missionary spirit of Vatican II, the Cardinal knew that a hyper-valorization of any particular period of Church history, be it the American Catholicism of the 1950s or the European Catholicism of the thirteenth century, would seriously undermine the Church’s present capacity to engage the culture in which it finds itself.
In recent years, a fiercely traditionalist movement has emerged within American Catholicism,… In their anger and frustration, some of it justified, these arch-traditionalist Catholics have become nostalgic for the Church of the pre-conciliar period and antipathetic toward the Second Vatican Council itself, Pope John XXIII, Pope Paul VI, Pope John Paul II, and particularly our present Holy Father.
I have argued that the extreme traditionalist Catholicism of the present day is self-consuming, for it attacks the very foundations of Catholicism itself. If both of these characterizations are true, then these two critical movements are essentially moribund. I have tried to situate Word on Fire on the path of an evangelical Catholicism, the Catholicism of the saintly popes associated with Vatican II, a living Catholicism.
So the real problem for evangelization is a “fiercely” “extreme” “radically” Traditionalist movement? Obviously this movement, that Bishop Barron calls “essentially moribund,” is in fact gathering steam, otherwise he would not be writing a diatribe against it.
But how is one to respond to a document like this? To point out the fallacy of a “missionary spirit of Vatican II“? – by the establishment’s own statistics, mission, both internal and external, is in a crisis. That to talk about “the Church’s present capacity to engage the culture in which it finds itself” verges on the ludicrous, given the total alienation of Christianity from the present lords of the media and academia? That the frequent references to the alleged “anger” and “frustration” of the “spitting-mad” Traditionalists is obviously a copy of the rhetoric of the last few years directed against supporters of Donald Trump?
Of course, these same Traditionalists are described as “nostalgic” for things that, given the age of the great majority, they never could have experienced (including the 13th century!). Examining the list of authorities to whom Bishop Barron pledges allegiance, one would never guess that among them exist drastic, unacknowledged differences (e.g. Cardinal George – or Bishop Barron’s’ own ordinary Archbishop Gomez – and Pope Francis). These same greats are all post-Conciliar, demonstrating that Bishop Barron has now adopted the progressive “hermeneutic of rupture” (using Benedict XVI’s terminology) as his own.
Strangest of all from the perspective of evangelization is for Bishop Barron to imply that “the authority of the pope and … the legitimacy of an ecumenical council” are “the very foundations of Catholicism itself” – the most ultramontane, institutional formulation imaginable. This kind of rhetoric is only geared to a closed, internal audience. I can’t see positions like this serving as the basis for evangelizing anyone.
It is disheartening that this post of Bishop Barron – like the recent alleged summary by the French bishops of the responses to the Summorum Pontificum questionnaire – could have been written, but for the references to the internet, 40 years ago. And Bishop Barron is not just speaking for himself. For Traditionalists, the only path is to carry on as before, trusting that divine providence will continue to foster their increasingly thriving communiites. In so doing they are truly accomplishing a great contemporary work of evangelization.
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