By Gary Topping–
As blogger-in-chief Mike O’Brien eloquently sketched for us this week, change is a constant part of Catholic history (see: The Catholic Church–a history of change). It’s a constant part of all history, of course, but we Catholics are susceptible to the myth that our faith sprang full-blown from Saints Peter and Paul and has been sustained in pristine purity for two millennia.
Like all large historical generalizations, though, this one is subject to certain qualifications. In fact, when I look back to the thirteenth century from my standpoint in the mid-twenty-first, I am tempted to observe, with the French, that “the more things change, the more they remain the same.”
After the cessation of the Viking raids around the year 1000, Europe entered a period of great institutional and intellectual maturation and prosperity. During the twelfth century, one sees the emergence of nation-states out of the disunity of the early Middle Ages, the thriving of great universities in Bologna, Paris and London, the growth of large and prosperous monastic communities, and the construction of the great Gothic churches that are still the glory of European culture.
As Mike points out, though, a consequence of this development was that the church had become wealthy and elitist and increasingly out of touch with the common people. The great work of St. Francis of Assisi was to effect a reconnection between church and people by insisting upon personal spirituality and the dignity of poverty and a simple life. As one of my Medieval history professors observed, St. Francis represented every bit as much a threat to the unity of the church as Martin Luther, but instead of letting him create a schismatic disunity, Pope Innocent III was wise enough to find a way to sanction Francis’s movement by allowing him to create a new religious order within the church. (Leo X, who was Pope in 1517, lacked a similar wisdom in dealing with Luther, as we all know,)
At the same time, Dominic de Guzman, a Spanish priest, became alarmed at the wildfire spread of heresy, particularly in southern France and the Pyrenees as an unorthodox group, the Albigensians, taught a very ascetic doctrine of self-denial that had wide appeal to common people who felt ignored by the wealthy and apathetic clergy. The region of Languedoc in southern France had become, in the term of historian Emmanuel Leroi Ladurie, the “Promised Land of Error.”
To combat this, Dominic received permission to create an Order of Preachers. Unlike the wealthy Papal missionaries who had ridden into the region on blooded horses and wearing their ecclesiastical finery, thus further underscoring the disconnect between church and people, Dominic’s preachers wore a plain black and white habit, partook of whatever simple food and lodging they could find, and lived the same simple life as the people to whom they ministered. Over the years they adopted the motto of “Veritas” (Truth) and lived according to four principles that are still known as the Pillars of the Dominican Order: Study, Preaching, Prayer, and Community Life.
So how do I relate this to the twenty-first century? In two ways. The first is that people are leaving organized religion in droves. They feel that the church is irrelevant and sterile. Its moral standards are too rigid and demanding and its spirituality is barren. Much of this is our own fault, those of us who have stayed in the church. Our religious education efforts have sold the church short; we have failed to introduce our students to the riches of St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas and G. K. Chesterton. Our failure to show them the spiritual writings of St. Augustine, St. Teresa of Avila and St. Catherine of Siena has driven them to Eastern and New Age writings which are much less rich and deep than those classics of Christianity.
The other is that there is in our day an epidemic disregard for objective truth. We have people who are dying in multitudes after disbelieving science and succumbing to the COVID virus. We have people gullibly accepting the most nonsensical conspiracy theories like Q-Anon. We have radio and television programs that promote the most blatant of lies. And we have politicians who willfully dispute the most obvious and empirically demonstrable truths.
Indeed, the more things change, the more they remain the same.
*Gary Topping is a writer and historian living in Salt Lake City, Utah. He is the retired archivist for the Catholic Diocese of Salt Lake City and has written many books and articles. Signature Books recently published his latest work titled D. Michael Quinn: Mormon Historian.
