Catholic in the age of decline: a personal coda

I had meant to slow down with this blog.  If I am ever going to produce anything of enduring value, I must focus my dwindling energies.  In fact, I am exhausted by my ordinary commitments to my children and students, quite apart from any increasingly-unrealistic intellectual ambitions.

But then, I kept reading on the internet, and no one was expressing my opinions.  It’s the thing that drives a man to blog, against his better judgement.

I am, as readers know, a tribalist, and a good part of my elemental survival instinct is (no doubt because I am not now in physical danger) devoted to the survival of my tribe, so that the collective conscience of which I am a part, and hence a part of myself, might survive my personal death.  The prospect of the Catholic Church being defeated and brought to the brink of destruction–and in such an ignominious way!–is a source of continual anguish for me.  I should keep it to myself, I know.  I am driven at least in part by a selfish desire that someone will prove to me that I’m wrong and thus ease my anxiety.

Much that I read irritates me, but nothing enrages me as much as when I read about “getting their own house in order first”.  You see, I, as a Roman Catholic, and hence presumptive child molester, have no moral standing before the world, my moral betters, whom I should never speak against, but before whom I should waste my wretched existence in groveling apologies and self-recrimination.  This is why the null hypothesis matters.

“If God cared about us, He would not have abandoned us to such a shameful end”, I sometimes think to myself with as much bitterness as you would expect, but that’s not quite right.  Even if, suppose, Catholics aren’t God’s favorite people, we still fall within His ubiquitous providence.  There must be a reason he chose us, you and me, to live at this time.

Perhaps there is something about us personally that we are better off, more virtuous or something, for living now.  One thinks of the calls of conservative Catholics, interspersed with their destructive advice, to pray and fast.  Perhaps some of their readers will end up being more conscientious in their spiritual lives for having lived in such bleak times.  I’ve sometimes speculated that I owe my faith, such as it is, to the world’s apostasy.  Religion does not come naturally to me.  Disagreeing with the majority of my peers on the other hand…

Another possibility is that God will allow us to do some noble thing in these days.  Not that we will “reform” or “save” the Church, but that in our fidelity to what must look like a hopeless cause we might do something worthy in itself.  This is performative conservatism.  The goal of performative conservatism is to get me to stop thinking about the long-term, large-scale future and to focus only on my own performance.

This is why I should be using my energies better.  There must be some way I can identify with the Church in her decline and share in a bit of her disrepute.  And yet, I’m such a mediocrity.  Plenty of people know I am a Catholic, but if more knew, would that just be another embarrassment for the Church?  “Oh, look.  The least productive, least intelligent member of the Physics Department is a Catholic.  Figures.”  That’s what they’d say, right?  Should I rather try to improve myself in visible ways first, become a credit to my people?  But that might never happen, might just be an excuse to avoid the performance when its chance comes.  And what could this worthy thing be, anyway?  Probably not any of the things I would like it to be.  I can only hope that God will arrange and make it clear when the time comes.  In the meantime, I should prepare myself intellectually and morally.  Serious reading, intensive thinking, getting my ass off to Confession, doing Lent right this time.

But I’ll probably end up posting here again tomorrow instead.