A new orthodoxy is making strides in Church circles

There is nothing a columnist enjoys more than seeing letters about his work appear in the newspaper. It doesn’t really matter whether the letter-writers are for you or against, as long as they are motivated to write. Not that a good journalist would write a column merely to provoke, and those who do soon become known. I could name some myself.

So it’s a pleasure to see supportive as well as extremely critical letters in this newspaper. Some of the latter confuse me however. Not that people disagree with me — entirely understandable — but that Catholic people disagree with me. There is, naturally, plenty of room for disagreement within the Church about any number of issues, but there is no room for manoeuvre on the fundamental truths. To put it another way, once someone denies basic and absolute Catholic teaching they are no longer believing Catholics.

This isn’t difficult stuff. If I believe, for example, that Tory principles, policies and philosophy are all wrong, I’m not a Tory. In a free world I have the right to be whatever I like. But in the world of logic and honesty I also have an obligation to be consistent and genuine. For a Christian who refutes papal authority, the teachings of the magisterium and the integrity of the sacraments there is an obvious alternative. It’s called Protestantism.

Not that I wish anybody to leave the Church, but it would be more courageous and moral than trying to change the Church to fit that person’s individual desires and ideas, because that does harm to the health of the faith and can lead other Catholics to stray. This, after all, is about eternal souls and not government child care programs or women demonstrating because they want to dress up as clerics. It is the body of Christ, it is the priesthood, it is the papacy.

But in defence of the confused, some of them have never been told what they’re supposed to believe in the first place. A new orthodoxy is now fitting into place, but for some years we’ve often had to look hard for faithful teaching rather than have it waiting for us at our fingertips. By orthodox teaching I don’t mean silly affectation and self-conscious traditionalism. Good lord, there are some believers who seem more Miss Havergal than dynamic Catholic, some churches where the miasma of languor and lace is positively choking.    

At the centre of the new Church is reverence, a reverence once disregarded and misplaced in the ridiculous race to be “relevant.” We are in the world but not of the world, we use the new media but do not allow it to seduce us, we embrace the best of modernity but are aware of its threat, we look for dignified and precise English rather than an archaic language that excludes, we change the present rather than live in the past.

An image that comes to mind is of the post-Reformation Church in the 16th century. There were some Catholics who wanted to restore medievalism, something that could never occur. Then there were the younger, reformed and educated Catholics who worked for an intensely faithful but refreshed Catholicism. We know many of them now as saints, and sometimes misunderstand them, but they were the new orthodox of their time. We are not made for the bunker or the ghetto, but for the shining light on the hill.

This is arguably one of the most important and exciting stages of Catholic history. The Church of the future will look back to the first decades of the 21st century as a time of immense change and a new dawn. As such it can be frightening and challenging to older and older-thinking conservatives as well as liberals. One of the ironies here is that laypeople, often championed by critics of Church authority, are some of the leading figures in this return to orthodoxy and truth. Then again, they were after the Reformation as well. Some things, I suppose, don’t change at all.

(Michael Coren’s new book Why Catholics Are Right will be published in April.)