I am not a dedicated follower of fashion. When I became a Catholic sixteen years ago, bookshops were full of bestsellers by the so-called New Atheists, men like Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins. In books with provocative titles like The End Of Faith, God Is Not Great and The God Delusion, they denounced religious faith as stupid, violent, cruel and damaging. An outside observer might have concluded that when I boarded the Barque of Peter I was attaching myself to a doomed and ludicrous enterprise, wholly unsuited to the modern world and perhaps even likely to disappear entirely over the course of the twenty-first century. But Christianity has a way of burying its undertakers, as the saying goes. Although the numerical decline of the faith has continued in Europe and the Anglosphere, the last two decades have seen robust growth in Africa and Asia, and the rise of social media has enabled a great flowering of apologetics, catechesis and evangelisation.
Perhaps that is why we have now reached the point where trend journalism in the New York Times identify Catholicism, of a decidedly traditional bent, as the Big New Thing among the cool kids of Manhattan and Brooklyn. Last month an article, written by Julia Yost of the First Things, appeared in the NYT, noting an upsurge of interest among young people on “the scene”. Apparently they praying the Rosary and going to Confession, and discovering other time-tested devotions.
Such pieces can probably be taken with a pinch of salt. It would be wonderful if there was a great wave of conversions among hip youngsters, but the evidence is anecdotal at best. However, Yost’s argument did suggest something interesting about why those individuals who are moving towards Catholicism might be doing so.
Her hypothesis was that full-blooded Catholicism was especially attractive to people who have become disillusioned with the decadent shallowness and unforgiving moralism of contemporary society. Among a generation that have seen at first hand the damage inflicted by family breakdown and sexual chaos, strong opposition to abortion and divorce is a kind of rebellion. At a time when the most trivial of offences against an endlessly fluid ideology can result in banishment from public life, and personal ruin, the clarity and coherence of the Catholic moral code, and the well-defined pathways to restoration and reconciliation, must surely have a certain appeal.
Yost didn’t mention the ongoing arguments over gender that have become so prominent in the last few years. But in addition to her reasons for the attractiveness of the Church to modern people, I would imagine that our stable, well-grounded and cohesive account of the meaning of men and women, and the relations between them, are also attractive to those who are alienated by the transgender ideologues, and frustrated by the sometimes inadequate responses of those who intuit the wrongness of transgenderism but lack the concepts to fully explain their objection.
It is interesting, in the light of the Yost article, to reflect on the reports that the Hollywood actor Shia Labeouf had converted to Catholicism. Mr Labeouf seems to have found in the faith a stability and order that had hitherto been severely lacking from his life. In a long interview with Bishop Barron, he outlined how his chaotic and controversial personal life over the last decade, which has left him facing allegations of assault, had left him feeling empty and purposeless. His now-famous comments on the spiritual depth and lack of pandering in the Traditional Latin Mass – “it feels like they’re not selling me a car” – sound like the testimony of someone who has been searching for depth, for something that is larger than himself – that is mysterious and strange, and makes demands on him – and has finally found it. I was reminded somewhat of the lines from TS Eliot’s poem Little Gidding, concerning the small chapel of St John the Evangelist: “You are not here to verify, instruct yourself, or inform curiosity, or carry report. You are here to kneel / Where prayer has been valid.”
TS Eliot was himself an adult convert, of course, albeit to Anglo-Catholicism in the Church of England rather than to the Catholic Church, and he was just one of a long line of artists and writers who have become tired of the false values of the societies around them, and found inspiration and rest in the unchanging demands and proposals of the ancient faith. The New York Times article mentions the Decadents, a loose grouping of late nineteenth century painters and poets, including Oscar Wilde, who pursued hedonistic lifestyles but more often than not ended up converting to various forms of Christianity later in life. Wilde himself was received on his deathbed. Bosie Douglas, his one-time lover, ended up a Catholic; so did Aubrey Beardsley, who had made his name as a creator of erotic prints but requested in his will that all his obscene pictures be destroyed.
In the twentieth century, Catholic converts as various as the English journalist Malcolm Muggeridge, the American activist Dorothy Day, and the art historian Sir Kenneth Clark, all came into the Church having previously had complicated private lives, and after pursuing all sorts of ultimately unsatisfactory alternative worldviews. It seems likely that what attracted them was the same thing that is attracting curious, restless young people in our own age: the Church’s blending of mercy and grandeur, the insistence that human failure must be treated with due weight and seriousness, but never seen as unforgivable.
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