"[I]t seems that something has happened that has never happened before... / Men have left GOD not for other gods...but for no god": these words are from the choruses T.S. Eliot wrote for a 1934 pageant called 'The Rock.' Eliot was the great poet of modernity (cf. 'The Waste Land'), and his conversion to "Anglo-Catholicism" was his great personal statement against a world that chooses no god over God. In his 1935 play 'Murder in the Cathedral', those mourning the death of medieval Christendom proclaim that "the heathen shall build on the ruins [of the Church] their world without God." Eliot's own solution (offered in his 1931 essay "Thoughts After Lambeth") is to patiently "renew and rebuild civilization and save the World from suicide."

To anyone keeping up with today's intellectual currents, it's commonly known that we are living in a postmodern era which is, significantly, post-Truth. This, of course, sounds like nonsense to Christian ears because Christianity is a religion which worships the Truth Incarnate (as in John 14:6), and, however much society changes, the Bible is quite clear that Jesus does not. In broad strokes, then, the problem is exactly the same as it was when Christians were a minority persecuted by pagan Rome, when Eliot became an Anglican, and when Catholics today are distressed by people making a mockery of the Faith: the World does not know God, and the Church is in the World but not of the World.

All of this is anticipated by Jesus' many statements in the gospels against anxiety in the face of persecution. The problem, nevertheless, invites some more discussion heading into the new decade.

As I mentioned in a previous article, there is a significant minority of young Catholics today who have reached the conclusion that, in order to be faithful soldiers of Christ, one's life must be one great concerted effort to overthrow the pernicious effects of modernity. They want to bring back the good old days of Catholic civilization, which in reality is not very different from the fascist dictatorship set up in Spain by Francisco Franco in an attempt to bring back the golden age of Hispanic Catholic civilization. That this golden age had meant the destruction of Native culture in the New World, the exile of Jews and Muslims, and the stifling of intellectual progress was, of course, not problematic. When Franco bombed cities loyal to the liberal Republic, that was no crime: the liberals were not true Spaniards.

Likewise, for the "rad-trads", it is no problem if this renewed Catholic civilization means the exclusion of Catholics who love the Ordinary Form or want to listen to gay people tell their own stories or think that Constantine was a disaster for the Church. To them, Pope Francis is a harbinger of the Anti-Christ; to them, there is no room for reasonable dialogue, because this is an era of apocalyptic upheaval.

The recent Synod on the Amazon, so bitterly attacked by Pope Francis's opponents, took an entirely different approach to the Church's interaction with (post)modernity. Rather than attempt to rebuild the Catholic civilization lost forever on the pages of history, the Synod coalesced around the desire to re-evangelize Amazonia by dialoguing with a culture that Catholic civilization had failed to effectively evangelize the first time around.

I am not saying that "liberal Catholics" have the key to the Church's future; neither am I saying that "conservative Catholics" are the sole guardians of orthodoxy. What I am saying is that the Church's interaction with the world today is tremendously complex, and, while the pursuit of sanctity indeed needs to be childlike, undertaken with the utmost simplicity, the Church's policy in evangelizing the modern world needs careful thought, discernment, and inspiration. It cannot be reduced to the simple worship of a past golden age that so characterizes fundamentalists today. An ossified Church is not from God.

There are likely many young Catholics who have not interacted much with companions caught up in hating today's world to the point of hysteria; there are also likely many who have. It is naturally worrying to come of age at the present moment, in a world beset by so many crises. Jesus, who tells us to be the light of the world, does not want our outlook heading into the new decade to be the despair of fundamentalists.