Divine Persistence

“British Catholicism’s Bright and Various Future” is the title of a recent article published in First Things. For a nation that, in recent years, has been hailed as a center of secularization, the title isn’t one that someone who’s kept a finger on the pulse of such things would expect.

Indeed, the title is the fruit of certain sociological trends that are befuddling sociologists. Catholic converts in the 18-30 age range, often young men, are turning up in (relative) droves. In lots of parishes, “it’s gone from [one or two] adult converts a year to 20-30 each Easter,” the article notes. So what, it wonders, is going on?

In some ways, nothing especially extraordinary. The Church is an institution both human and divine. And the human side of it will tend to follow certain trends that one can begin to predict. Think, for instance, of when a new restaurant opens. At first it’s new and chic and interesting, and everyone’s keen to try it. But then it gets old, and folks are ready to move onto something else. On the simply human level, the general experience of the Church isn’t so different from that. In some ages it feels like fresh and “in vogue”; in others, it seems outdated and boring.

But, by the same token, what is happening in Britain is absolutely extraordinary, in that it signals the divine element of the Church. These human sociological dynamics, however subject to them the life of the Church may be, aren’t all that consequential, when it comes to the Church’s stubborn persistence in human societies. And this is because the Church isn’t just human; she’s also divine, and that’s the reason for her stubborn persistence, her continued “relevance” to lives like these young men’s. It’s not new marketing schemes and more alluring events that are drawing them. It’s something entirely different.

In fact, we could go so far as to say that while the fortunes of the Church would seem to go up and down, in truth, they don’t. The Church is always inhabited by the Holy Spirit – no “up and down” there. She’s always populated by those souls who have won their race and are praying for us now, in Heaven. No changes here, either. And the Church is always winning souls, even if in some ages it’s more souls than others. The Church is immovable, in what’s essential to her, and the only question is: how are people in any given time or place reacting?

In today’s cultural climate, it tends to come as a surprise when the answer to that question is a positive one. But we shouldn’t be surprised when people are reacting to the Gospel with gratitude and hope – First Things’s title perhaps shouldn’t be so shocking. The Church, in every age, is fresh and new when one really sees her. And especially when people are despairing or looking for meaning, it will often tend to be the perennial Church – an anchor for human communities and individual lives for so many centuries – that emerges as a viable, even the best, option.

Some young people, the article concludes, have come to see through the promises of modernity’s “'hyper-individualistic, me-and-my-enlightenment approach' to life and meaning.” The everlasting truths the Church possesses may not always appear innovative or trendy. But they’re what a human heart is craving after, and every now and then, people get close enough to her to see it.