How Can You Still Be Catholic? by Christopher Sparks, Marian Press, £11
Christopher Sparks, an American blogger, asked his Facebook friends to finish the question: “How can you be a Catholic when … ?” The replies came thick and fast, Sparks set to work on his answers, and this book is the end result.
Sparks writes because he loves Christ and his Church. He encourages fellow Catholics to take heart, to be secure and confident in their possession of ultimate truth. And he encourages others to remain at least curious about the claims to the truth made by the Church (though, if they are not true, Sparks observes, these claims are “arrogant, impossible, insane and demonic”). He comes across as kind-hearted, bright, honourable, sincere, relentless. He is unflinching in his adherence to traditional teaching on faith and morals. He can be lyrical at times, rousing too, and near-ecstatic when writing of God’s love for all.
Sparks certainly cannot be accused of not “fronting up” (as rugby players like to say) to the challenges put before him. He makes a staunch and imaginative defence of Church bureaucracy and paperwork (things no one normally defends in any context). His arguments for the rightful place of the Church and tradition alongside Scripture are spot on. His case for the Catholic faith as something both highly simple and highly complex – rather, that is, than the needless complication of a simple message – is compelling and liable, I would have thought, to give some sceptics pause.
He also has the power to stop us readers in our tracks occasionally, as, for instance, when he asks us to “savour the weirdness” of the Holy Family. Mary and Joseph taught Jesus “how to walk, how to talk, how to live in their society, how to obey the law, and so on. They taught Him. They taught God.”
Naturally, over the course of 50 answers, there are dips in quality and a certain amount of repetition. After all, Sparks can’t have found all of those Facebook questions equally inspiring. Sometimes he pushes the boat out a very long way: the Spanish “were probably such bloody and brutal conquistadors in the New World because they had become a people of blood and iron after a seven- or eight-century war of Reconquest, fighting to regain their lands from the Islamic invader”. Ahem?
To be fair, Sparks knows better than to exculpate Christian warriors on these or similar grounds. He knows there is a lot over the course of history to ask pardon for. People are “doing us a favour when they make plain our failings”.
The whole project is a tribute to Sparks’s stamina and enthusiasm. How Can You Still Be Catholic? is an invigorating read, to be taken at a gallop – but there are downsides to the Sparks approach too. At times, his book reads like the transcript of a YouTube video in which a passionate, animated young apologist stares down the lens, fires out provocative questions and then answers them himself.
Does the sinfulness of Catholics and the corruption of some Catholic leaders not matter? “No! It does matter. It matters a lot.”
Have many Catholics fallen short in the past? “Yes. Should this drive me away? No.”
This device grates on the nerves eventually.
Sparks also has a tendency to exclaim “Heck!” as he unfolds an argument, and he indulges in occasional bouts of anodyne joshing: Catholics don’t need to support Pope Francis’s favourite football team, apparently. The upshot is some awkward elisions between argument and practical advice, between lofty exhortation and chummy banter.
Needless to say, all of the thorniest issues are here. But my guess is that non-Catholics, if they possess a sufficient portion of goodwill to have picked up Sparks’s book in the first place, won’t dismiss out of hand his defence of Church teachings on, for instance, sexuality. They will give it a hearing, however grudging; they will sense that there is a debate to be had, at least – and they may even find elements of it they can agree with, almost. (Though they will probably feel that all of this “dying to self” stuff goes too far.)
But I predict that what readers will struggle with most is Sparks’s apparent certainty that the mercy of God is finite. It will run out for some of us at the moment of judgment: “people really can go to hell for all eternity” (and he isn’t just talking about Adolf Hitler or Ian Brady).
Yet the one thing Sparks wants the reader to remember from his book is that “God loves you” and that he loves you “endlessly”. It would be fascinating to read his answer to a very different question, once posed by Hans Urs von Balthasar: dare we hope that all men might be saved?
How Can You Still Be Catholic? boasts a great cover, by the way. It shows the face of a young woman who has fallen asleep in what looks like the waiting room of an urban train station at night. Her face is bathed in soft reddish light. And smudged on her forehead is the cross of Ash Wednesday.
The Books in Brief column which appeared here will, from now on, be incorporated into the Spiritual Books column
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