Evangelical Catholicism and the Emerging Church

It has been awhile since I did a posting on Evangelical Catholicism.  As you may remember I had been reading George Weigel’s book by that name and was taken by his proposition  

The Catholic Church is being invited to meet the Risen Lord in the Scriptures, the Sacraments, and Prayer and to make friendship with him the center of Catholic life. Every Catholic has received this invitation in Baptism, the invitation to accept the Great Commission, to act as evangelists and to measure the truth of Catholic life by the way in which Catholics give expression to the human decency and solidarity that flows from friendship with Christ the Lord.

Unfortunately as Weigel fleshes out what this means, I think he betrays his ideal for something that is anything but evangelical, but that is somewhat beside the point I want to make today. 

I was at a wake last week and speaking with a Protestant pastor who was there when someone with little ecumenical sensitivity said to him: “you guys need to have a Vatican II.”  The minister good naturedly replied: “We did, it was Vatican II.”  His point was that the Second Vatican Council has impacted most of the Protestant Churches as much as it has Catholicism.  This is obvious enough in the mainline Churches—the Episcopal Church, the Lutheran Churches, the Methodists and Presbyterians, all of whom have revised various liturgical practices and even some church polity to harmonize better with one another and with us Catholics.  But when one gets to the so-called Evangelicals, it is not always so obvious. 

I say “so-called Evangelicals” as I think a lot of people who refer to themselves as “evangelicals” or call  their denomination “evangelical” are anything but.  Evangelical comes from the Greek word, εὐαγγέλιον, which means “good news” and specifically the news of a victory.  The Greek word for Gospel is εὐαγγέλιον because it is the Good News of God’s Victory in Christ over sin and death.  But so many people who call themselves evangelicals are about bad news of judgment, condemnation, and the defeat of Grace and in reality they are anything but bearers of Good News.  

There is a movement among some evangelicals, however, that shows a remarkable move away from the gloomy Calvinism in which many of the so-called Evangelical denominations were rooted towards a faith that is more in line with the New Testament optimism that God’s Saving Work in Jesus Christ may actually be a victory over sin.  This movement, which is not a Church or a denomination but a loose-knit connection of Churches and individuals who have realigned their theological thought in some dramatic ways, parallels much of the shift that has gone on in Catholicism over the last sixty years and has received a fresh new impetus under the direction of Pope Francis.   It is called the “Emerging Church” and it has drawn a wide range of Christians from Lutherans to Methodists to Baptists to members of the Free Churches and to Christian fellowships who decline to identify with any particular denomination.  The main characteristics of the emerging Church seem—from what I have read—to be:

1.     an emphasis on a personal spirituality that calls the individual to be conformed to Jesus Christ—to live a life in which he or she learns to model himself or herself on Jesus.

2.     A belief that God is vitally concerned about this world and has given us, both as communities and individuals, a mission in this world to infuse the world with Gospel values and thus transform it.

3.     To be an inclusive and welcoming Christian fellowship in which each is called to personal conversion but in which no one is judged.  (Sounds familiar, Pope Francis?)

4.     A model of leadership in the Church that does not involve power or control.

5.     An openness to dialogue that sees the faith of the Church as a progressive appreciation of the truth rather than inflexible and dogmatic axioms that are imposed in the name of an ahistorical and immutable “Tradition.”

6.     An openness to the contributions of the various cultures in which Christians find themselves rather than an Euro-American cultural hegemony. 

7.     An ability to live with ambiguity that helps us realize that God us ultimately a Mystery in whose life we are invited to participate and that defies our ability to define and delineate. 

This type of Christian faith requires a spiritual maturity that permits us to walk in faith through a darkness of the intellect that was described by Saint John of the Cross: to come to the knowledge you have not, you must go by a way in which you do not know.  In other words, to come to know God we must give up whatever knowledge we think we have.  When we are confident in our “knowledge” of “God,” the god we think we know is invariably a god of our own imagination.  To come to know God, we must let the slate of our knowledge be wiped clean and be willing to start over with an “unknowing,” the term that many of our Catholic mystics have used to talk about the direct encounter with God in which the human faculties, including the intellect, fall silent. 

What is particularly interesting about the Emerging Church movement is that it does not show the fear of spirituality and mystical experience that has characterized much of historical Protestantism. This is one of the tensions in Christianity—in Catholicism as well as Protestantism—the need for an orthodoxy that is rooted in doctrinal objectivity and the need for a personal encounter with God that transcends (though does not contradict) that doctrine.  Paul Tillich spoke of this tension, or at least one aspect of it, with the Protestant Principle and the Catholic Substance.  For too long perhaps we Christians, in our desire for doctrinal objectivity have substituted an embalmed deity for the Living God.  The Emerging Church movement is a call for us all to go again on the search for the Living God.  This is not a new call.  Read the Documents of the Second Vatican Council and you will hear the same summons.  Pope Francis has made this call a theme of his papacy which has rekindled the light of Vatican II among some and the anger over Vatican II among others.  

Evangelical Catholicism--the Church's Great Potential II

St. Ignatius Loyla

Weigel says in his book Evangelical Catholicism that we are to meet the Risen Christ in the Scriptures and in the Sacraments and become friends with him.   I think he is “right on” but I suspect that we would mean different things by “friendship” with the Risen Lord.  In Evangelical Catholicism I don’t see the traces of the sort of intimate relationship with Jesus Christ to which the too often overlooked heritage of the Church’s mystics refers, but instead I see a rather heady and in-the-doctrinal-box Christ that is all too prevalent in 20^th and now 21^st century Catholic piety. 
 When we encounter Jesus in the Scriptures and in the Sacraments it is a mediated encounter.  I would like to explore this idea of evangelical Catholicism more deeply over a series of postings.  In yesterday’s post I gave the opinion that a genuinely evangelical Catholicism would draw on the prophets and the Gospels to root within itself a firm commitment to Social Justice.  I want to return to that idea, but first I think there is a need for establish a more explicit foundation for what Evangelical Catholicism demands of—and, at the same time, offers—us in our appreciation of the Scripture.  And to begin, I want to go back to Weigel’s statement:

The Catholic Church is being invited to meet the Risen Lord in the Scriptures, the Sacraments, and Prayer and to make friendship with him the center of Catholic life.

When we encounter Jesus in the Scriptures and in the Sacraments it is a mediated encounter.   Christ comes to us, not directly, but through the Word read or preached, or through the Eucharist or through the Absolution or through the Anointing.  We encounter Christ through the grace of a Sacramental agent.  Christ’s presence is mediated by a third party.   Now, it is Christ we encounter—don’t get me wrong—but the human soul always wants more, wants a direct and unmediated encounter.  The mystics all speak of these direct encounters: Gregory the Great, Bernard, Teresa of Avila, Sister Faustina, Francis de Sales, Ignatius of Loyola, John of the Cross.  While the mystics tell us of such encounters, such experiences are—by God’s grace—not beyond our capacity.   Indeed I think that most of us have, on the somewhat infrequent occasion, had such a direct encounter when we became suddenly aware of our being in the Divine Presence.  The search for this direct encounter is, according to John Cassian, the raison d’etre of the monastic life, but it is by no means the sole prerogative of the monk or nun.   Cassian knew from his own experience that it is possible for the human soul to encounter God directly, however briefly, in this life in anticipation of the unending enjoyment of his Presence in eternity.  We call this direct encounter of God during the span of our life here on earth “contemplative prayer.”  It is always an infused gift—not something that we can manufacture by our efforts at prayer or our moral behavior or our charitable works (though these can prepare us for his presence)—but God’s choosing to bring us, albeit somewhat momentarily, into his Presence. 

The regular commitment to contemplative prayer is an invitation to a personal relationship with Jesus Christ.  In the Christian tradition, contemplative prayer is always rooted in the Scripture, in the Word.  It is usually tied to some form of Lectio Divina—that cogitatio on the scriptural text. (I hesitate to say “meditation” only because some will interpret this too narrowly, so I am using the more medieval word: “cogitatio” which means “thought” or “reflection.”)  
The reason that our prayer stays anchored in the Scriptural text is that one of the dangers of pseudo-spirituality is the tendency for a person to devise a Christ of their particular imagination.  Rousseau said that “God created man in his own image and likeness and man, being a gentleman, returned the compliment.”  For many people the Jesus they “encounter” in their prayer is nothing other than a projection of their own ideas and prejudices.  When we practice contemplative prayer, we stay close to the biblical text because we know that Word is authentic.  Yet entering into the Word in prayer is a different experience that studying the Word or even hearing it read in the Liturgy.  We can read the Bible for inspiration, for learning, for guidance.  All of that is good. In bible reading, we stay in the text.  But contemplative prayer is more passing through the text as one passes from an outer room into an inner where our most beloved Friend is waiting for us.   Our entrance and our retreat from the Divine Presence is in the Word, and the Word taken in its purity and not as “proof texts” to reinforce our pre-conceived ideas and notions.  In fact, Saint John of the Cross says that one of the signs of the authenticity of our prayer experience is that it challenges the ideas and notions which we brought to prayer.  If we don’t leave prayer somehow changed, we were not in the Presence of the Risen Lord. 
Karl Rahner, admittedly no theological hero for George Weigel, wrote that the Christian of the future will be a mystic or will cease to be a Christian at all.  His point is that living in this post-Christian era, only the person with that direct and unmediated experience of God will have the stamina to remain faithful in a faithless culture.  When we talk about an evangelical Catholicism we need first to ask ourselves what priority we will give to laying the groundwork not for  the piety that is so prevalent in certain circles today, but for a genuine spirituality that brings people into the intimate friendship and knowledge of Jesus Christ.  Piety lets us know about Jesus, but it lacks the ability to give us an authentic introduction to Jesus Christ where he can be the sort of friend Weigel speaks of.   

Of Dark Nights and Depression

Therese of Lisieux 

I mentioned in yesterday’s posting that some people—and in this case Michael Voris, the proponent of modern pseudo-orthodoxy—confuse depression with the Dark Night of the Soul just as they often confuse their own psychological rage for God’s Divine Justice.   One of the questions I am often asked when I speak on the subject of historical spirituality—one of the subjects that I teach—is how can you discern depression from the Dark Night.  Depression is often misdiagnosed, even (and especially) by priests whose lack of training in spirituality does not intimidate them from attempting to serve as “spiritual directors.” 

The simple answer—and beware of simple answers though this one is anything but simplistic—is that in depression the person is turned inward on himself or herself and is occupied in trying to alleviate the psychic pain in which they find themselves, while in the Dark Night the person finds themselves letting go of control and yielding to God.  Why I say that this answer, while simple, is not simplistic is that the director must be very attentive not only to the actions of the directee but the motivations—motivations about which the directee may not be being honest even to himself or herself. 

In the Dark Night the individual finds an increase—often a dramatic increase—in charity (love of God and love of neighbor) in their souls whereas in depression the person is obsessed with themselves and trying to alleviate the pain of the depression.  What makes this a difficult analysis is that one of the ways that people have of “self-medicating” the pain caused by the depression is throwing themselves into comforting pieties.  Another way that people have of self-medicating their emotional pain, and only one and not the most common of ways, is by being “nice” and by doing things for others in ways that will either evoke a positive response from those who benefit from their kindnesses or will win them recognition for their kindness.  I don’t mean to negate such good acts or even the intention behind them, but they are good works being done for a “pay-off” rather than being done as an overflow of the charity that is growing in their souls from the Dark Night. The Spiritual Director must listen very carefully to the experience of the person who is going through this trial to discern whether it is the Dark Night or whether it is depression.  Charity is always the key to the answer as charity is the only infallible sign of the action of the Holy Spirit, but the question will be is the charity authentic or is it, at the root, self-interested.  

I always think of the Night of Faith of Saint Thérèse of Lisieux during the final eighteen months of her life.  Thérèse found herself in terrible darkness of faith—some say that it was not the Dark Night of the Soul at all but something even far more testing.  Yet as subject to trial as was her faith, she never wavered in charity.  Those around her had no idea of her trial for she was as loving and generous as ever.  All of which is to say that if bitchiness accompanies one’s Dark Night, it isn’t a Dark Night and it is time to go for therapy not spiritual direction.  Hear that Janet?  G-E-T  H-E-L-P.

Rethinking God VIII

York Minster

Years back I heard the story of a Catholic priest who was studying at Cambridge under the famous New Testament scholar, Bishop J.A.T. (“Honest to God”) Robinson.  This particular priest was quite an Anglophile (and Anglican-ophile), often affecting Anglican styles in dress and liturgy, and Bishop Robinson allegedly said to him one day: “Joe, why don’t you just become an Anglican.”  The priest’s response was: “Your Lordship, I am not one to jump from a sinking ship into a sinking lifeboat.”  Wise answer.
Last week I heard an Anglican bishop charge that the Church of England had a lot of explaining to do to contemporary society in the refusal to consecrate women as bishops.   The Church was in danger of becoming “outdated.” 
Now I am not opposed to the Church of England—or any religious body—ordaining whomever they please to whatever ministries they are called.  But this particular bishop is delusional if he thinks that the Church of England is outdated because they won’t let women be bishops.  The Church of England is outdated for many other—and I believe more pressing—reasons than an all-male-episcopate.  It has been outdated for a long time now—long before the question of women’s ordination ever came up.
I remember being in York about five years ago for a ceremony at the famous Minster (cathedral)—one of the splendors of medieval Christian faith.  That particular Sunday morning I wandered through the medieval city to see the ancient churches.  But most of the churches were now community centers or museums and only two or three were open for worship.  And those who were open for worship had maybe twenty or thirty worshippers attending Sunday services.  Less than 5% of the Anglican faithful attend Church regularly in England.  Of course that is not much different than the percentage of Catholics attending Mass in Spain or France or Austria or the Czech Republic.  And the number of Lutherans attending Church regularly in the Scandinavian Kingdoms is about the same.  The Church—Catholic and Protestant—has become irrelevant to the lives of many in Europe—and what is frightening, to increasingly more Americans as well.  But we should not be surprised.  The way God is talked about in churchy circles is simply peripheral to the lives of an increasing segment of our population.
When people say: “I’m not religious—I am more, well, ‘spiritual’,” I have to laugh.  Ninety-nine times out of a hundred this translates as “I’m too lazy to get out of bed on Sunday morning  but I do like the occasional warm fuzzy I feel when I think of some cosmic power that beats the heart of the universe for me.”  Not that I don’t think that one can be spiritual without being religious: I do.  I know deeply spiritual people, holy people, who don’t cross the threshold of a church except for the social obligation of an occasional wedding or funeral.   I just meant that most of the people who make this claim have no idea of what it means to be “spiritual.”  What they are is colossal narcissistic ingrates who think everything is for them and about them.  But what is there that does draw emotionally and spiritually healthy people to Church?  It certainly isn’t the preaching in the average Catholic Church.  The god we hear about from too many pulpits is no more than an embalmed dogma dressed up in the rags of old religious pieties and tricked out to rule over the fears of those who have never been taught to think critically and for themselves.    
Liberal Protestantism has its own issues and they have been a long time a-breeding.  A half century and more ago C.S. Lewis described the deity that was to kill Liberal Protestantism by irrelevance:
We want, in fact, not so much a Father in Heaven as a grandfather in heaven—a senile benevolence who, as they say, “liked to see the young people enjoying themselves,” and whose plan for the universe was simply that it might be truly said at the end of each day, “a good time was had by all.”
Who wants to go to Church to be patted on the back and be given the insufferable pabulum of happy-clappy religiosity that makes no demands for critical self-reflection?  The Church of England and other liberal Churches have had their guts sucked out by an insipid moral relativism that is afraid to hold up the mirror of truth for us to look into and see what disfigured creatures we who once were the image and likeness of God have become. 
On the other hand, in so many Catholic churches today a neo-Jansenism has taken over where the Good News of Salvation has been corrupted into the Bad News of judgment.  God is the insufferable parent whom there is no pleasing except for a rigid and unquestioning crushing of the will.  Heavy burdens are tied up and laid upon the shoulders of men and women too fearful to resist by men who arrogantly suppose themselves to be the arbiters of the Divine Will.  The priesthood that once preached the Gospel of setting captives free is being turned into a race of orcs that seek to enslave the minds and souls of the faithful by a petty legalism that would embarrass the Pharisee and stupefy the scribe.  I am not surprised that religion is losing its hold on people who seek spiritual health as too often what we find in church is nothing less than toxic.
And it doesn’t need to be this way.  We Christians—and Catholics in particular—have a rich history of spiritual writers that point the path to a healthy religious practice.  Ignatius Loyola and John of the Cross and Francis de Sales and Teresa of Avila and Thérèse of Lisieux all point the way to spiritual paths that bring people to spiritual, emotional, intellectual, and mental maturity.  But we rarely hear of such in the pulpit because few of the clergy, and the secular clergy in particular, know the spiritual tradition of our own Church.  We need a spiritual revival that begins with recovering not the legalism and pomposity of the pre-conciliar Church but the genuine Tradition that has been handed down as our heritage and birthright.   

A Fear of Spirituality

Archbishop Fenelon

Sorry for the hiatus—every so often I get swamped with things and the blog falls back in priorities, but I want to return to a topic we were discussing a week and more ago—the tensions about the liturgy in the Church today.  I had written in my entry of August 13^th  of the dearth of spirituality in the Church today.  This is tragic in a faith that has a heritage rooted in the personal encounter with Christ by his disciples, male and female, reflected by its scriptures and flowering in a history of mysticism from the profound experiences of Paul and John the Divine through the Desert Fathers and Cassian, Ephrem the Syrian and Pseudo-Dionysisus and John Damascene, Bernard, Francis, and Julian, a Kempis, Ruyersbroeck and Tauler, Teresa, John and Ignatius, deSales, Marie of the Incarnation, and Brother Lawerence, Thérèse, Elizabeth of the Trinity, and Edith Stein—not to mention Gertrude of Helfta, Beatrice of Nazareth, Richard Rolle, Hadjewich, Dom Augustin Baker, and countless others all the way down to Thomas Merton, Jessica Powers, and Mother Theresa.

Some intellectual historians speak of “the suppression of mysticism” as a reaction to the Quietist heresy of the seventeenth century.  I think there is something to this.  Ever since antiquity the Church has been afraid of “illuminism,” the idea that one should be guided by an “inner light” that trumps the faith of the community.  Several of the heresies that tore apart the ancient Church were driven by this passion for radical subjectivity.  The Montanists—among others—embraced this conviction that it was The Holy Spirit that spoke to the individual believer and that such personal inspiration reflect a sort of ongoing revelation that could overrule even scripture.  It was in reaction to this radical religious individualism that the Church early developed a commitment to the idea that the truth resides not in the individual, even the inspired individual, but in the community’s collective discernment.  Here is found the sensus fidelium—the living faith of the faithful—as the guarantor of orthodoxy.  Along with the scholarship of the theologians and the pronouncements of the magisterium, but even more foundational than the scholarship and the magisterium, the sensus fidelium was the bulwark of orthodoxy. 

Illuminism continued to haunt the Church throughout its history.  It surfaced again at the time of the Cathar heresy in the 12^th and 13^th centuries and it haunted the nightmares of the Spanish Inquisitors in the sixteenth century.  There was a revival of illuminism at the time of the Protestant Reformations and indeed it would seize and shape the Radical Reformation—the Reformation of the Anabaptists in Holland and Germany and the Quakers and Shakers and Diggers and Fifth Monarchy Men in Protestant England and its American colonies.           

Despite the Church’s vigilance against illuminism it would raise its head in the sixteenth century in a particular incarnation referred to as Quietism.  Quietism rejected the more extraverted and extravagant manifestations that illuminism had held before.  Indeed it shadowed Catholic orthodoxy so closely that most Quietists though they were secure within the teaching of the Church.  Moreover, many of its proponents were genuinely holy people, just a bit too holy. Quietism can be compared, perhaps, to a good cell gone rogue in the body that becomes cancerous but which had once been a healthy part of the body. 

Classic 17^th century Quietism was so close to Catholic orthodoxy that much of what some of its writers wrote—Archbishop Fenelon for example—is perfectly orthodox, indeed sound Catholic spiritual reading.  Sometimes perfectly sound Catholic spiritual masters, Brother Lawrence for example, were accused, or at least suspected, of quietism when their doctrine is quite sound. 

Quietism’s best description was given by Innocent X in his condemnation of the heresy.  Referring to two leading spiritual writers among the Quietist faction, Archbishop Fenelon of Cambrai and Bishop Bossuet of Meaux, the pope said: “Cambrai loves God too much, Meaux loves man too little.”  Quietism is the heresy which stresses the love for God to the point where love for neighbor becomes unimportant.   One priest described it, in its contemporary manifestation, as “the heresy of the daily communicant.”  It certainly is alive and well today hiding in the pious life of the Christian Pharisee.  But rather than look at its modern manifestations in this posting, I would suggest that we look at the fear that it caused on the part of many bishops and priests that led to a “suppression of mysticism” in the Church from the 17^th through the 20^th centuries.

The broader heresy, illuminism, had always caused fear on the part of the orthodox in the Church—and not without reason. Attempts to discourage people from a life of deep personal prayer, of contemplative prayer, and to limit themselves to pious practices had long been a common error on the part of some Church authorities.  Both Saint Teresa of Avila and Saint John of the Cross refer to this in their writings.  Teresa tells her readers not to be afraid of contemplative prayer and says that she herself had been dissuaded from it for many years thinking it was for souls more educated, more virtuous, more advanced than hers, but she had eventually understood that Christ calls all of his disciples to the intimacy with him that can be found in such prayer alone.  John of the Cross likewise tells his readers that he is not writing for some select group of spiritual proficients, but to encourage all his readers to undertake contemplative prayer.  The Jesuits have always been anxious to share the profound experience of their founder, Ignatius Loyola, in the cave at Manressa and thus offered the Spiritual Exercises in order to guide others along the path of contemplation marked out by Ignatius’ conversion experience.  Francis de Sales was anxious to bring spirituality to ordinary souls and so we have his Introduction to the Devout Life. Yet at the same time these saints were marking out the path of prayer, there were voices warning people not to go down that road.

While all religious had been ordered to daily periods of “mental prayer” in the sixteenth century by Clement VIII, this time was often filled by one person reading aloud a meditation or at least various points on which all gathered were to meditate.  Sometimes devotions involving meditation such as the rosary or the Stations of the Cross were prescribed for this period.  Mental prayer, for those allowed to practice it, became highly structured with an invocation of the Holy Spirit, an act of contrition to prepare, the formation of specific resolutions drawn from the prayer, the Lord’s Prayer, an act of thanksgiving and other conclusions being prescribed leaving little time for the actual meditation.  What time was left for the individual often turned to more theological reflection than attentive and silent listening to God’s stirrings in the soul.  There was a fear of such stirrings.  One had to report any such stirring to one’s spiritual director for confirmation and directors were aggressively managerial over their subject’s spiritual life. 

Also, and I think under the influence of Jansenism (the other leading heresy of the 17^th century) “spirituality” took an excessive interest, a compulsive interest, in the moral conduct of the individual under direction.  Prayer retreated into the shadows and the spotlight shown on morality, not solely sexual morality but certainly emphasizing that field of behavior.  A relative degree of moral perfection became the sine qua non of the spiritual life so that many people began focusing on sin in their lives rather than the grace being offered in a relationship with God.  The premise was that one could have no relationship with God as long as sin was substantially present.  This false assertion alone locked the doors of the Castle of the Soul against many who otherwise might have advanced far in the spiritual life—and been converted in the process.  More and more, a life of deep prayer was becoming the unique prerogative of the  cloistered nun or monk.  The most the rest of us could do was frequent confession, occasional communion (don’t’ forget daily communion was not allowed until Pius X at the beginning of the 20^th century), and our devotions. 

The suppression of mysticism, the discouraging of people from pursing contemplative prayer, mentioned in my last blog entry, has left a great spiritual shallowness in the contemporary Church.  Moral integrity became a pre-requisite in the minds of many—including clergy—for a relationship with God rather than the fruit of that relationship.  This created an obsessive fascination with sin rather than an emphasis on grace in Christian life and has perverted much spirituality over the last three centuries.  And this, in turn, I think is much the root of what is unhealthy in the life of the American Church today. 

The Faith Your Don't Find In Catechisms

Saint John of the Cross

I had planned on going back to the subject of Peter Waldo, Cathars, etc so that we could bridge into the Innocentian Reformation—the Reform of the Church under Pope Innocent III which I think was the most successful Reformation of the Church to date, but then I found myself in a fascinating conversation that has made me stop and think anew about some contemporary issues especially as there is a link between this new topic on which I hope to reflect and the success of Innocent’s attempts to restore vitality to the Church in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. 
       This conversation came up at dinner on Tuesday when a Brazilian friend of mine was talking about his doctoral thesis in Spirituality at the Pontifical Gregorian University.  He is writing on a reexamination of the spiritual doctrine of Saint Francis de Sales from the perspective of the personalist philosophy of John Paul II.  His point is that “conversion” must involve not merely an intellectual assent to doctrine but a person-to-person encounter with Jesus Christ.  We had a fascinating conversation as I know relatively little about either Francis de Sales or the philosophy of the late and now Blessed Pope.  I know them both as historical figures, but not as intellectuals, but I was struck by the similarity with the ideas being attributed to them by my friend to the mystical theology of Saint John of the Cross with which I am somewhat famiiar.  I guess I should not have been so surprised, at least in regards to John Paul, as I believe he wrote his doctoral dissertation on John of the Cross and Faith.  In regard to the subject of Faith, John of the Cross makes a clear distinguishing between knowing about God and knowing God. 
       I am struck by how many people know a lot about God without necessarily “knowing” him, or more to the point, without knowing Jesus Christ because no one knows the Father except the Son and those to whom the Son has revealed him.   Faith to them is a matter of an assent of the intellect to theological propositions defined by the Church.  As I am writing this, I think in particular of a woman I had known some years ago when I was frequently in Leesburg Virginia.  This lady  was the local doyen of orthodoxy.  She rigorously critiqued every sermon, taped various priests and religious education speakers who had come to her parish to report them for suspicious ideas, and for years had controlled the religious education program in the local parish.  She had her small group of disciples and she used them to make sure the parish didn’t stray from what she perceived to be sound doctrine.  But alas, new brooms sweep clean and a new pastor displaced her stranglehold on things.  I have no doubt that she was (and perhaps, if yet alive, still is) a sincere person.  The problem was that for her faith equaled orthodoxy, or what she took for orthodoxy.  She could tell you all about what the Church (for her that meant the magisterium) taught about the faith, at least from Trent up to 1960, but I can’t say that I think she was a woman of faith.  She was a person of doctrine—but that is not a woman of faith.  Prayers were something one said.  “Spirituality” was comprised of no more than devotions—we had an argument about that once when she told me that “meditation is dangerous and you shouldn’t be practicing it, much less teaching it.”  Her fundamental moral compass was off in as that she had no scruples of taping a speaker without his (or her) permission, quoting them out of context in letters to the bishop, or even bearing false witness when she thought a religious education director, a speaker brought into the parish, a music minister or liturgical director was going off in what she thought to be a wrong direction.  Faith was orthodoxy; orthodoxy was faith.  There was no evidence of anything more than rigid doctrine and a rigid relationship to a rigid deity in her life.   She fit that description of Henri Bremond regarding Jansenism that I cited two or three days ago:  “Before penetrating into the depth of the mind Jansenism ruins the peace, condition of all true religion.  Before making converts it makes partisans, sectarians, whom it fatally severs from the mystical currents of their time.”  
       Unfortunately this woman is by no means unique.  The fault of classic Protestantism—at least the American variety—has been gross subjectivism: the triumph of emotion  over intellect.  But Catholicism, again at least the American variety, is no better off in its opposite of being strait-jacketed into doctrine.  All the doctrine in the world does not lead one to change of heart that is at the center of Jesus’ call in the Gospels.  That is why I was delighted to hear this Brazilian priest talk about Benedict XVI’s emphasis on evangelization as this personal encounter with Christ that is so transformative of the human person.  It is certainly not to be that raw subjectivism that I just attributed to the American Protestant tradition.  (I will do a few entries some day on John Wesley and how his own crisis of faith brought about this bizarre doctrine-less “faith” that marks American religion.)
       Now as to how this ties into our upcoming entry on the Innocentian Reformation.  The reign of Innocent III was marked by figures such as Francis of Assisi and Dominic de Guzman and others who, working within the perimeters of Catholic doctrine and just on the frontiers of institutional Catholicism  brought their contemporaries to this personal encounter with Christ that revived a religion that had been fading from the lives of everyday people and made Christian faith an exercise in actually shaping one’s life to the demands of the Gospel.  That is what we need today for renewal and that is what we rarely have.   At the end of the day the issue of faith is: do I take the Gospel for my rule of life.  Do I try to live not the Catechism of the Catholic Church, or the Documents of Vatican II, but the Gospel.  All due respect to those ICEL and Vox Clara people but it looks like their latest work isn’t succeeding in bringing faith to life any more than had the Latin Mass or the previous translation of the liturgy,  but if we are to be people of faith we had better find something that will.