Signposts in a Strange Land

by Walker Percy

  What is happening, I think, is that the Church is emerging from the stable, perhaps somewhat closeted community of the past into the dangerous and exciting atmosphere of a world community, a global village in which the Church and her people are no longer an exotic enclave but very much a voice among world voices, exciting because the Catholic presence is felt and the Catholic good news is heard and evaluated in its own right and not merely as a pleasant, quaint cultural item like that kindly old movie priest, Father Pat O’Brien, or the swallows at Capistrano.

  Radical changes are occurring in the world into which you are graduating and which you may find yourself serving as a priest. It is like no other world in Western historical experience, both in its opportunities and in its perils. Of course, it is now a commonplace that the Church itself is shaken by unprecedented internal stresses. Given any social or political issues, whether it be the arms race or liberation theology in Latin America, the Church finds itself badly divided. But is this such a bad thing, a falling apart of the happy consensus of older, safer times, or is it a sign of the maturity of the Church emerging into the clamor of the marketplace, however seriously disordered it is? And here, surely, is the most difficult challenge of all: to proclaim the Good News in a world whose values seem increasingly indifferent to the very meaning of the Good News. It is a strange world indeed, a world which is, on the one hand, more eroticized than ancient Rome, and yet a world in which the Good News is proclaimed more loudly and frequently than ever before by TV evangelists and the new fundamentalists. There occurs a kind of devaluation of language, a cheapening of the very vocabulary of salvation, as a consequence of which the ever-fresh, ever-joyful meaning of the Gospel comes across as the dreariest TV commercial. How to proclaim the Good News in a society which never needed it more but in which language itself has been subverted? Salvation comes from hearing, according to Scripture, but what is the bearer of the Good News to do when the hearing becomes as overloaded as the circuits of an $80 TV set?

  Your task is very simple. As the Lord said: “All you have to do when you go out among the wolves is to be wise as serpents and gentle as doves.” But the wolves these days are of a very different order from the ravening wolves of former times or the totalitarian persecutors of the present day. They are of a far subtler sort and perhaps more dangerous than the ravening species.

  There are, as I see it, three enemies of the Good News in American society, wolves in sheep’s clothing, for they are not overtly hostile, and yet the upshot is an indifference more subversive than hostility. They are the new idols of society.

  The first is a consumership mentality, a bland but nonetheless tenacious addiction to the diversions of the media and the manifold goods and services of a technological society. It is difficult to see how the man, woman, or child who watches TV eight hours a day, in which the good triumphs every half hour on sitcoms, cops, and hospital shows, can be open to the Good News.

  Another idol, even more subtle in guise, is the growing fascination with what can only be called the occult, the magical. Though it often masquerades under the honorable title of science, it is in fact anti-scientific. It hungers after any new curiosity or puzzle or mysterious phenomenon but is altogether indifferent to the vast mystery of life itself and the human condition. Sustained by an insatiable appetite for the superficially mysterious, it mistakes religion for its own credulity toward such things as astrology, the Bermuda triangle, UFOs, reincarnation, this or that self-appointed guru with mystical powers. I can remember when the traditional foes used to be science versus religion—which never made sense to me, because both lay claim to a certain order of truth, and truth can never be contradictory. But one does not have to be a seer to see what is happening before our eyes: a loss of interest in science in favor of pseudo-science. One happy outcome of this turn of events may well be a new alliance of science and religion such as existed in medieval times against the old and the new Gnosticism which periodically threatens the openness and catholicity of both science and Christianity with its appeal to the occult and mystical powers of the elite few.

  And here in the South particularly, you will encounter a third force, not quite enemy perhaps, who ought in fact to be reckoned friend and ally but in these peculiar times may not be. So confused indeed are the battle lines these days that one can almost envy the Catholics in Communist countries where the enemy is plain to see and to rally against. I am speaking of some of our co-religionists and co-believers in Jesus Christ our Lord, not our brothers the mainline Protestants, but the new fundamentalists. They need to be mentioned because, here in the South at least, it is they who utter the name of the Lord loudest and most often, who are most evident both in media and in marketplace, whose schools are proliferating at a rate exceeding both public and parochial schools. In my opinion, they do a disservice by cheapening the vocabulary of Christianity and pandering to a crude emotionalism divorced from reason. I know that St. Paul said that the Gospel was a stumbling block to the wise, but it does not follow that in order to save the faith it is necessary to believe that the universe was created six thousand years ago. And it is not necessary, to save the integrity of man’s soul and its likeness to God, to believe that God could not have created man’s body through an evolution from lower species.

  The crisis of the Church and the crisis of our youth often manifests itself in young Catholics rebelling against what they perceive as the dryness and ritual prayers of the Church and turning to the emotional appeal of the new evangelicals. Catholics have a lesson to learn here, I am sure, but I give myself permission to indulge my own prejudice—as a cranky novelist I can do this—and to say that the young person who turns his back on the apostolic Catholic faith with its two-thousand-year-old synthesis of faith and knowledge, art and science, with the sacramental presence of God Himself on the altar, to take up with some guru or Bible-thumper who has no use for sacrament or reason, this young person has in fact sold his birthright for a mess of pottage—or, as some wag put it, a pot of message. But, very well, let us leave off the criticism and recognize our own failings.

  Some of us older Catholics, I know, take pleasure from the very things many young people find missing: the very understatement of emotion in the quiet corporate worship, and, above all, the ancient, enduring liturgical form of the Mass.

  And, of course, at the opposite extreme from the young Pentecostal, with whom I have no quarrel, there is the older parishioner—and I know several—who are convinced that most of the troubles not merely of the Church but of the entire modern world can be traced to the abandonment of the Latin Mass after Vatican II. These are the types, God bless them, who look straight ahead during Mass, glowering, and put their hands in their pockets during the handshaking. Actually, we’re not quite as bad as Auberon Waugh, Evelyn Waugh’s son, who was so outraged at what he saw as the barbarous liturgy and the atrocious English renderings of the Mass that he departed for the Anglican communion, only to find the Book of Common Prayer so butchered by revisions that he came back, still disgruntled, to the Catholic Church as the lesser of evils.

  To tell you the truth, despite all the cries of havoc, I don’t find things all that bad. I have mentioned a few well-known difficulties and contretemps only to illustrate the general thesis that the cultural manifestation of the Church often gets confused with its historical and apostolic mission. Being human, which is to say creatures of a particular culture, we don’t like changes. So, having taken note of what is commonly called the crisis of the Church, let me make a final personal observation: that if one judged only from the media, the national press, or network news, one would conclude that the Church is washed up, hopelessly divided politically, the Holy Father hopelessly behind the times. Yet one goes to Mass on any ordinary Sunday and there they are, the Catholic people, more than ever, at five, six, seven Masses a day. And there is the priest still, thank God, holding aloft the body of Christ. And let the Holy Father, this marvelous man, appear anywhere and there occurs all over the wor
ld a tumult not of despair and division but of rejoicing and hope, and not merely among Catholics.

  That is why it is such a pleasure to see you here. I don’t know how many of you will become parish priests. But I know how welcome you will be. I have mentioned the challenge only to emphasize the opportunities. The opportunity is simply this: that never in history has modern man been in greater need of you, has been more confused about his identity and the meaning of his life. Never has there been such loneliness in the midst of crowds, never such hunger in the face of satiation. Never has there been a more fertile ground for the seed and the harvest the Lord spoke of. All that is needed is a bearer of the Good News who speaks it with such authenticity that it can penetrate the most exhausted hearing, revive the most jaded language. With you lies the future and the hope. You and the Church you serve may be only a remnant, but it will be a saving remnant.

  I salute you and congratulate you. God bless you.

  1983

  The Failure and the Hope

  THOSE OF US IN the South who call ourselves Christians have come face-to-face with the most critical and paradoxical moment in our history. The crisis is the Negro revolution. The paradox lies in this: that the hope for the future—and both the hope and the promise, in my opinion, and for reasons which shall follow, were never greater—requires as its condition of fulfillment the strictest honesty in assessing the dimensions of our failure.

  What lies at issue is whether or not the South will bring to bear its particular tradition and its particular virtues to humanize a national revolution which is in the main secular and which is going to be accomplished willy-nilly with or without the Christian contribution—or whether it will yield the field by default.

  The failure of the Christian in the South has been both calamitous and unremarkable. And perhaps that is the worst of it: that no one finds the failure remarkable, not we who ought to know better, not the victims of our indifference who confess the same Christ, and not even the world who witnessed our failure. No one was surprised. The world which said many years ago, “See how the Christians love one another,” would presumably have been surprised if these earlier Christians had violated each other or turned their backs upon the violation. Now as then, the children of the world are wiser than the children of light: they witnessed the failure we concealed from ourselves and found it not in the least remarkable.

  The world, in fact, does not think badly of us. It holds us, generally speaking, to be good, an asset to the community. The sickness of Christendom may lie in fact in this: that we are judged by the world, and even to a degree have come to judge ourselves, as but one of a number of “groups” or institutions which have a “good” impact on society. One thinks of those panel programs and seminars on educational TV which set out to explore the means of combating juvenile delinquency, crime in the streets, drug addiction, and so on. Someone on the panel usually gets around to listing the forces for good in the community which can be enlisted in the battle. There is the home, the schools, the labor unions, the business community; and there are the churches …

  And in the matter of racial injustice, the churches are treated with the same respectful impartiality. The media approvingly report the news that such-and-such a bishop has integrated the parochial schools or that this or that minister has joined a bi-racial committee, in much the same tone with which they report that IBM has set up its own Fair-Employment Practices Committee. The bad behavior of Christians is not treated as any worse or more scandalizing than bad behavior anywhere else. When God is invoked by the Klan and the Citizens’ Councils, when ministers open the meeting with a prayer; when white Catholics in Louisiana get in fistfights with Negro Catholics on the church steps, nobody cries shame. The world does not laugh, and in fact is not even pleased. Because, as everyone knows, churches are, generally speaking, on the list of good institutions and do in fact make valuable contributions to the community—along with the home, the school, the media …

  Christians in the South should, of all people, know better. Or perhaps it is more accurate to say that, if they don’t know better, then Christendom is indeed sick unto death. But in their heart of hearts they do know better. Because the South, more so than the rest of the country, is still Christ-haunted, to use an expression of Flannery O’Connor’s. Whatever the faults of the South, it is perhaps the only section of the United States where the public and secular consciousness is still to a degree informed by theological habits of thought, the old notions of sin, of heaven and hell, of God’s providence, however abused and shopworn these notions may be. Flannery O’Connor, a Catholic novelist, counted it her great good fortune to have been born and raised and to work in the Protestant South. In the Catholic novel, she claimed, “the center of meaning will be Christ and the center of destruction will be the devil.” The South has always known this, even when its morality was mainly concerned with sex and alcohol, to the exclusion of ordinary human cruelty. And the Southerner is apt to inherit, almost despite himself, a theological turn of mind. More likely than not, he has grown up in a place drenched in tragedy and memory and to have known firsthand a rich and complex world of human relationships which are marked by a special grace and a special cruelty and guilt.

  Our region, I submit, is to a larger degree informed by theological habits of thought than is the rest of the country. And those of us who are professing Christians have better reason than most to understand the theological basis and consequences of our actions and less excuse to fall victim to the sociological heresy which sees the Church as but one among several “good” institutions which can be used to engineer a democratic society.

  It is all the more shameful, then, that the failure is precisely a theological failure. How much more tolerable would have been our position if it had fallen out otherwise, if we could have said to the secular liberals of the Northern cities: Yes, it is true that we differ radically from you in our view of the nature of man and the end of man, that we have reservations about your goal of constructing the city of God here and now; further, we don’t like some of the things you tolerate in your perfect city. But we applaud your attack on the perennial evils of poverty, inhumanity, and disease, and we, too, believe that men can be reconciled here and now but that they can be reconciled only through the meditation of God and the love of men for God’s sake. We strive for the same goals; we say only that you deceive yourself in imagining that you can achieve these goals without God.

  But we can’t even say that. The defect has occurred on the grounds of our own choosing. The failure has been a failure of love, a violation of that very Mystical Body of Christ which weave made our special property at the risk of scandalizing the world by our foolishness. A scandal has occurred right enough, but it has not been the scandal intended by the Gospels. The failure, that is to say, has occurred within the very order of sin which we have taken so seriously and the world so lightly. Where we have failed worst is not in the sphere of community action wherein little store is set by theological values. Churches indeed have not done at all badly in discharging their sociological functions, combating juvenile delinquency and broken homes and alcoholism. The failure has been rather the continuing and unreflecting cruelty of Christians to ward the Negro, the Negro considered not as beloved household pet (“Cruelty? No! Why, I would do anything for Uncle Ned and he for me!”) but as member of the same Mystical Body, freed and dignified by the same covenant which frees and dignifies us. The sin has been the sin of omission, specifically the Great Southern Sin of Silence. During the past ten years, the first ten years of the Negro revolution, a good deal was heard about the “good” people of the South, comprising the vast majority, who deplored the violence and who any day would make themselves felt. But these good people are yet to be heard from. If every Christian era has its besetting sin—the medieval Church its inquisitional cruelty, eighteenth-century Anglicanismits Laodiceanism—the twentieth-century Christian South might well be remembered by its own peculiar mark: silence.

>   The default of the white Southern Christian was revealed in its proper ironic perspective by the civil-rights movement itself. When the good people of the South did not come forward when they were needed, their burden was shouldered by, of all people, the liberal humanist, who, like the man St. Paul speaks of in his Epistle to the Ephesians, is stranger to every covenant, with no promise to hope for, the world about him and no God—but who nevertheless was his brother’s keeper. In the deep South of the 1960s, the men who nursed the sick, bound his wounds, taught the ignorant, fed the hungry, went to jail with the imprisoned, were not the Christians of Birmingham or Bogalusa but, more likely than not, the young CORE professionals or COFO volunteers, Sarah Lawrence sociology majors, agnostic Jewish social workers like Mickey Schwerner, Camus existentialists, and the like.

  It is possible for a Southerner to criticize his region in the harshest possible terms, not because he thinks the South is worse than the rest of the country and can only be saved by the Berkeley-Cambridge axis, but for the exactly opposite reason: that, in spite of her failures, he suspects that it may very likely fall to the destiny of the South to save the country from the Berkeley-Cambridge axis. If this should prove the case, it is not simply because cities like Los Angeles and New York are exhibiting an almost total paralysis and fecklessness when confronted with Watts and Harlem, while at the same time Atlanta and Greenville are doing comparatively better. (Truthfully, I think the South is “doing better” for an odd mixture of Southern and Northern reasons, none of which have much to do with Christianity; for example, Southern good humor and social grace, plus a sharp Yankee eye for the dollar and the “public image.”) No, the criticism is leveled and the game is worth the candle because, at least in one Southerner’s opinion, the ultimate basis for racial reconciliation must be theological rather than legal and sociological, and that in the South, perhaps more than in any other region, the civil and secular consciousness is still sufficiently informed by a theological tradition to provide a sanction for racial reconciliation. (By contrast, the Catholic Church in other parts of the country also provides a powerful sanction but it is a purely religious sanction and not necessarily reflected in the habitual attitudes of civil bodies such as legislatures and school boards.) The South can, that is, if she wants to. She can just as easily choose the opposite course, like Protestant South Africa.