Twenty years ago, sociologist Philip Jenkins warned that anti-Catholicism was the last respectable bigotry, but, alas, that was too optimistic. Predictably, a new, anti-Jewish bigotry is on the rise, most violently and mostly ignored in Western Europe. The ambition of Western political elites to chop and clear our Catholic culture always ends up hacking at our Jewish roots. 

Still, we’re no longer in an era of bellowing demagogues stampeding us into Imperial wars. We’re in an age of anonymous clerks and bureaucrats. The last thing they want is a stampede. We’re not stumbling off a precipice onto rocks of anarchy. We’ve already hit bottom, or rather, rolled gently down a long slope into a bed of docile clover. We accept as normal public protocols that 60 years ago would have provoked universal disgust and public revolt: medically murdering our aged and disabled; jailing parents who resist mutilation of their own children; teaching unnatural, despairing sexuality in our public schools.

There’s a huge advantage in hitting bottom. As Alcoholics Anonymous alumni testify, until we hit bottom, we refuse to admit “we’re powerless to change our lives,” and “must depend upon a higher power.” So, whenever lay Catholics groan about the corrupt and autocratic state of our politics, savvy friends remind us, “Politics is downstream of the culture.” Really savvy pastors will add, “Culture is downstream of worship.” 

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So, first prayer, only second, practical projects, “Doing God’s will.” How do we know that? At the personal and cultural level, the answer is meeting the needs of real people. Our sacrifice can’t be simply our treasure. It must be our time. We’re all familiar with that person at the coffee shop or lingering in the church atrium, who really needs to talk. It’s not too difficult to know God’s will if we accept that it will be time-consuming.  

The Church has always transformed cultures with such little acts of love: innumerable, personal and necessarily sacrificial. These acts of love are almost always unnoticed and undramatic. And, like the witnesses outside our abortion clinics, they can always annoy the authorities. 

Living Christ’s love, the Church has always earned an independent moral authority, in stark contrast to Caesar’s coercive authority. This respect is earned, not in spite of the Church’s powerlessness, but because of it. After three centuries of Roman persecution, Constantine finally accepted the reality of the Church at the grass roots. Later, his neo-pagan grandson, Emperor Julian, found the Church’s real charity put it beyond his reach: “These impious Galileans not only feed their own poor, but ours also,” he whined. 

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How do little acts of love transform the culture? Culture is architecture, paintings and sculptures, popular philosophy, literature and drama and, most importantly, music. How does talking to the lonely guy in the coffee shop translate into that? It testifies to the Imago Dei, the image of God, in the soul of each, infinitely valuable person. Truly Catholic culture testifies that Life is Good.   

All our post-modern artifices and artefacts are brutal and nihilistic. Modern hospitals are designed as medical factories, sprouting feed pipes and air ducts. Our visual arts celebrate the unnatural. Much of the best modern literature and drama is sucked into surrealistic violence. Faux-philosophers market a “truth” that is literally psychotic. And our music is formless or adolescent. The secular culture celebrates that Life is Meaningless. Caesar’s bureaucrats look down on us as so many faceless statistics on spreadsheets. No Imago Dei, no wonder. 

We cannot know how the next Catholic Renaissance will look. When Abbot Suger built St. Denis (1125 AD), he couldn’t know he’d invented Gothic architecture, provoking a 400-year building spree of hundreds of Notre-Dames. He couldn’t know the budding Gothic Age would reawaken Gregorian chant, and nurture the philosopher Thomas Aquinas, the poet Dante, and the painter Giotto.  Neither can we know how the new age will look. We can know that it’s already happening. 

Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings may prove the greatest literature since Shakespeare, re-enchanting the world. The new chapel at California’s Thomas Aquinas College is hailed as a model for the 21st century. Milan is home torebirth of Western iconography. John Paul II’s Theology of the Body has inspired a growing school of studies in motherhood and home. With music, a culture’s heart, faithful young priests are renewing Gregorian and Taisé chant, plus the splendid hymns of the Anglican Ordinariate. They will become bishops who renew across North America the hallowed tradition of cathedral choir schools, like Toronto’s St. Michael’s. The Church’s agape will again put it beyond Caesar’s reach. 

Joseph Woodard is a research Fellow at the Gregory the Great Institute.

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