Another reason why I am no longer a Catholic

Charles J Chaput castigates Christans and secluarites alike for the sorry state of society in FirstThings:

Unfortunately, I think the current American debate over religion and the public square has much deeper roots than the 2006 and 2004 elections, or John Kennedy’s 1960 election—or the Second Vatican Council, for that matter. A crisis of faith and action for Christians has been growing for many years in Western society. It’s taken longer to have an impact here in the United States because we’re younger as a nation than the countries in Europe, and we’ve escaped some of Europe’s wars and worst social and religious struggles.

But Americans now face the same growing spiritual illness that J.R.R. Tolkien, G.K. Chesterton, Christopher Dawson, Romano Guardini, and C.S. Lewis all wrote about in the last century. It’s a loss of hope and purpose that comes from the loss of an interior life and a living faith. It’s a loss that we can only make bearable by creating a culture of material comfort that feeds—and feeds off of—personal selfishness.

You would think that pointing out the people who were describing the West's spiritual illness and loss of hope in the last century would clue Chaput in to the observation that despite such gloomy lack of purpose Western society's surviving another century and thriving to boot puts paid to the notion that those sages of yesterday were on to something. Either they were crying wolf or the presence of wolves in our social pasture is an expected and livable condition.

Bernanos had an unblinkered vision of the “signs of the times.” Remember that, just after the Second World War, France experienced a Catholic revival. Recovering from a global conflict and the Holocaust, the world in general and France in particular seemed to turn back—briefly—to essentials. It was during that hopeful season that the Fathers of the Second Vatican Council gave us Gaudium et Spes.

But Bernanos always saw the problems beneath the veneer. He wasn’t fooled by the apparent revival of Catholic France. And so his work is a great corrective to the myth that our moral confusion started in the 1960s. As Bernanos makes clear, our problems began with the machine age—the industrial revolution—but not simply because of machines. They were the fruit of a “de-spiritualization” that had been going on for some time.

Well, we aren't going to de-industrialize. Any spiritual regimen that can't survive the technological progress of society just isn't useful enough to keep around. This isn't far from Richard Weaver's contention in his critique of Western society "Ideas Have Consequences" that the West's moral decay can be traced to the victory of nominalist over realist theology in the Medeval church. If our doom rests on such remote and unavoidable developments, then any prescription for same is undoubtedly futile.

Bernanos argues that the optimism of the modern West is a kind of whistling past the graveyard. The Christian virtue of hope, he reminds us, is a hard and strong thing that disciplines and “perfects” human appetites. It has nothing to do with mere optimism. Real Christian hope comes into play as the obstacles to human happiness seem to grow higher.

Bernanos takes it upon himself to show us just how high the obstacles to real human freedom have become, even in liberal democracies. He argues that our modern optimism is a veneer over a despair bred by our greed and materialism. We try to fool ourselves that everything will turn out for the best, despite all the evidence to the contrary—crime, terrorism, disease, poverty—and we even concoct a myth of inevitable progress to shore up our optimism. American optimism in particular—Bernanos refers to the United States bitterly as “the Rome, the Mecca, the holiest sanctuary of this civilization”—is really only the eager restlessness of unsatisfied appetites.

The problem is that there is little evidence to the contrary. The evidence largely supports American optimism. Bernardos' singling out of America's deleterious influence on the world through the spread of optimism reinforces two negative conclusions that I have made about the Catholic Church: one, that it promotes a worship of suffering; the second is that, at the institutional level at least, it does not sit well with Americanism.

It seems that the Catholic faith that Chaput is arguing for is the opposite of a "hothouse flower". It can only exist in the worst, the most hopeless of social conditions. Once a society gets the crazy idea in its head that conditions can be improved by the application of hard work and human ingenuity, the intense focus on suffering necessary to keep this faith alive becomes harder to maintain.

Christians are always proclaiming the "good news" of the Gospels. But Christianity has always been a bad news, good news proposition. The good news is only revelatory after one has bought in to the bad news. And the bad news brought by Christianity is very bad. Man is universally fallen, corrupt and irredeemable. People aren't naturally born with such a negative disposition toward themselves, it has to be drilled into them. Chaput and Bernardos are complaining that Christians have been lax at drilling in the bad news. They've been too distracted by the "false" good news of human progress. Once the terrible news of inherent, irreversible and irredeemable human depravity is no longer widespread across society, then the good news of the Gospel becomes superfluous.