Scottish Catholic Observer

By Gerald Warner

SINCE the Reformation the Church has long ceased to enjoy the unchallenged, universal acceptance that it commanded in the Middle Ages. Previously, the great intellectual figures who devoted their lives to exploring and expounding the Church’s doctrines—pre-eminent among them St Thomas Aquinas—had been theologians, pure and simple. Once the seamless heritage of Christendom had been sundered by Luther, Calvin and other heretics, the stalwart champions of Catholicism changed their character.

Many of them were still theologians; but their ranks had been reinforced by a new breed of militant Catholics, often laymen, who were generally termed ‘apologists.’ There was, however, nothing remotely apologetic about their promotion of the Faith: on the contrary, they aggressively proclaimed the eternal verities of the One True Church in the most challenging terms, especially after the catastrophic experience of the French Revolution had carried forward the poisoned legacy of the Reformation to create a new, violent force of secularism that sought the total destruction of Catholicism. The earliest such post-Revolutionary apologists appeared on the continent in the immediate aftermath of the revolutionary upheaval, notably Joseph de Maistre and Louis de Bonald (whose writings on the theme of divorce have acquired a poignant new relevance today, in light of the policy of destruction of marriage pursued by governments in the so-called developed world).

By the mid-19th century, a school of Catholic apologists had sprung up in Britain as the Oxford ‘Apostles,’ including such luminaries as the Blessed John Henry Newman and Frederick Faber, spearheaded a new evangelisation that was not only highly intellectual but also embraced the wider artistic landscape, notably the architecture of Pugin.

This established a Catholic intellectual tradition that was both aesthetic and polemical and which endured up to and slightly beyond the Second World War. In the late 19th to early 20th century, GK Chesterton (above left) and Hilaire Belloc were the leading lights in Catholic apologetics. They were followed by a plethora of supporters: Fr Martin D’Arcy SJ, Douglas—the variety of whose contributions to the Catholic cause was one of its strengths. At the time of the Spanish Civil War, when the British ‘intelligentsia’ fatuously supported the murderous Red regime that sought to exterminate the Church in Spain it was the vociferous and articulate opposition of the Catholic polemicists that helped the public to understand the true nature of the conflict.

That was the situation until the 1960s. British Catholics constituted a minority of the population, but with a formidable public profile, punching above their weight.

There was fierce antagonism to the Church, as there had been since Elizabethan times or the era of John Knox when the Black Legend of ‘Popery’ was first disseminated. But the opponents of Catholicism were wary because they recognised the strength of the Church’s defenders, their coherence and intellectual articulacy.

Then came the Second Vatican Council and the call that the Church should ‘open the windows’ to the world. In fact, the Church had always been open to the world in an outgoing way, otherwise evangelisation would have been impossible; but at the same time it took care that it should influence the world with its truth, not leave itself vulnerable to the untruths of external secular forces. This new naif outlook, coupled with a false notion of ecumenism, created a situation in which, for half a century, the world has evangelised the Church, rather than vice-versa. Most Catholics no longer know their Faith, let alone have any capability of imparting it to others.

Where are the informed apologists, the eloquent laymen who once formed a force of shock troops defending the truth? Richard Dawkins, an anti-Christian Coalition Government and devolved administration at Holyrood, a hostile media, the entire zeitgeist, are all arrayed against the Catholic Church. But who is fighting back from among the educated Catholic laity?

In Scotland, James MacMillan (left) has fired some effective salvoes into the ranks of the ungodly; but he appears a fairly isolated figure. A crippling diffidence has paralysed Catholics, used more to an ethos of apology (for the Crusades, for the Inquisition, for breathing) than apologetics. This cowardly passivity must be abandoned. If Dawkins et al were dealing today with the likes of Chesterton and Belloc they would be blown out of the water, their superficial thinking and narrow intellectual horizons ruthlessly exposed and derided.

It is not just polemics that are required, but an entire Catholic culture. Evelyn Waugh achieved more with his novel Brideshead Revisited than he could have accomplished by debate. We need to reassert a distinctive Catholic cultural identity, to stop paying deference to the anti-Christian ‘values’ of the world, which is the domain of Satan, and to seek to build a Catholic polity that embodies the secular Kingship of Christ.