Editorial – March 2021

As I read through the articles for the March issue of Position Papers the phrase “lean in” kept coming to mind. The phrase was coined by Facebook executive Sheryl Sandberg in her well-known 2013 book Lean In encouraging women to “get stuck in” in the workplace, and not allow themselves to be pushed aside by the more dominant males. It struck me how that encouragement could equally be applied to browbeaten Catholics, both men and women, struggling in the hostile environment that is the secularised West. We – like Sandberg’s women – are daily tempted to “lean out” of a world increasingly dominated by those espousing a neo-pagan vision of life. The environment appears at times corrupted beyond redemption. 

But this is not an option. When Christians “lean out” – or allow themselves to be pushed out – from society and its institutions, from the schools and universities, from trade unions and parliaments, from the media and the arts, from the military and from hospitals, the results are catastrophic. World War One is a case in point, and the descriptions of that first great neo-pagan conflagration of the twentieth century in James Bradshaw’s review of Alistair Horne’s The Price of Glory: Verdun 1916 are heart-rending. This is a tragedy which would never have happened had European leaders been truly inspired by the Christian vision of man. Instead Europe’s leaders regarded “human lives as mere corpuscles”, and ignored the pleas and initiatives of Pope Benedict XV to prevent what he termed “the suicide of civilized Europe”.

The same worrying absence of the Christian vision of human life now dominates most universities in the Western world. We carry a piece called “Wokeism” in France by Bishop Barron in which he describes how the ideology of “Wokeism” – which is tearing apart the social fabric of the USA – has its roots in French Theory, in particular the philosophy of Michel Foucault. This postmodern assault (“deconstruction”) on objective norms now reigns supreme in the Humanities and Social Science faculties in universities across the USA and further afield, and by now has traded in mere words for bricks and Molotov cocktails. If Christian intellectuals do not, or cannot, “lean in”, we will certainly see the complete “intellectual suicide” of these institutions. 

Margaret Buckley’s review of Abigail Shrier’s Irreversible Damage shows that the perennial victims of social collapse are children, and in the case of transgenderism, largely young girls. The review shows that when “scientific research and the integrity of the educational and medical systems are so in thrall to political correctness” then social activists are left free to impose the most monstrous policies on a supine society. Without the opposing voices of courageous men and women (and Shrier is clearly one such woman) the juggernaut which is transgenderism will continue to destroy the lives of young girls unabated.  

On a more positive note, several of our offerings this month show precisely what can happen in a society when the Christian vision of things is a dynamic presence. The Church patronage of the arts which made possible the Renaissance is a wonderful example of this. Niall Buckley in his review of Raphael’s World by Michael Collins, quotes Kenneth Clarke’s description of Raphael as “one of the civilising forces of the Western imagination” And as Buckley says: “Pope Benedict on many occasions has reaffirmed that the example of the saints and the artistic beauty that the Church has produced are her greatest witnesses to the faith. The Church today needs to once more rediscover this creative energy.” 

Even the Enlightenment, despite all its hostility to revealed religion in general and Catholicism in particular, was not without the positive influence of men of faith as seen in Fr Donncha Ó hAodha’s review of Joseph Stuart, Rethinking the Enlightenment: Faith in the Age of Reason. This study points out how more recent historical re-examination of the Enlightenment has brought to light the contribution of many Catholics to the Enlightenment. Illustrious Catholics, such as Prospero Lambertini (1675-1758) who became Pope Benedict XIV, really managed to engage the culture in a manner both positive and critical. Fr Ó hAodha quotes the author’s injunction to Catholics to continue in this tradition of critical engagement with our own culture: “Conflict without engagement is senseless. Engagement without conflict is weak. Either strategy without retreat lacks wisdom. Retreat without conflict or engagement is stultifying” (p. 351).

James Bradshaw in his review of Conservatism: The Fight for a Tradition by Edmund Fawcett shows the same dynamic at work in the development of capitalism. This work shows how Christians were present during the social upheaval first brought about by the rise of capitalism in the eighteenth century: “Rather than standing aloof however, committed Christians opted to engage in helping to shape the direction of their countries for the better.” Men such as the French priest Father Felicité de Lamennais and the German Bishop Wilhelm von Ketteler played key roles in introducing the Christian dimension of social mission into nascent capitalism. In doing so they laid the foundations for the political movement which became Christian Democracy, which proved of such crucial importance to postwar Europe. Correctly I think, Edmund Fawcett considers as worrying the trend within modern-day Christianity and thinkers such as Rod Dreher, to retreat from ever-more secular societies.

As we approach Easter Week it is good for us to consider how God himself “leaned in” taking on our poor human nature and redeeming this fallen world of ours from within. Christ could have at any moment given up on us, wiped the dust of this sinful world from his feet and abandoned us to our miserable fate, but not so: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16)