neo-paganism

In an “un-Christian” time

Dupes of the occult and the mass media. The eclipse of the Christian feeling about life goes hand in hand with the waning of reason. In an era of neo-paganism, the Church by now stands alone in defending reason. A newness born out of the experience of an encounter

BY LUCIO BRUNELLI*

Chesterton, with his refined British sense of humor, wrote that when people stopped believing in God, it was not that they believed in nothing, but that they would believe in anything. The statistics on the number of people who fall for the ads of television mediums and clairvoyants seem to prove him right. Today, it ought to be the Church that calls for a new Enlightenment against the darkness of superstition, to defend reason from the most perverse deformations of religiosity, and freedom of thought from a system of global information that leaves increasingly limited space to the critical capacity of the individual.

Dupes of the occult and dupes of the mass media. TV networks across the world have made millions of educated Western people believe that all Afghan women, as soon as the “liberators” arrived, shed their burkhas. The great international media circuits showed improbable images of lipstick and spike heels on the streets of Kabul. It was the message that had to be transmitted, in that moment. But it was an offense against reason, because long before being an imposition on the part of the Taliban fanatics, that garment was part of that society’s culture, and only a very few women took it off, perhaps to satisfy the request of some cameramen.

The waning of reason
It is a sign of the times. The eclipse of the Christian feeling about life goes hand in hand with the waning of reason. But Catholic apologists would be wrong to rejoice at this confirmation “a posteriori” of the superiority of the Christian position over the secular one. Negative proofs–of how the world gets on without God–will not bring the neo-pagans back into the Christian fold. “I shall not listen to your reasons, I shall look at your faces,” Nietzsche mercilessly wrote. Today’s paganism differs from the paganism in which Saints Peter and Paul were operating in, precisely because it comes after two thousand years of Christianity. The announcement of the Good News today has to cross an extra line of skepticism: the blurred and distorted image that Christian words evoke in those who hear them. “We are the first ones after Jesus without Jesus,” Péguy noted bitterly. And he added, “Not even our miseries are Christian miseries any more” because there is no longer acknowledgment and grief at the evil acts that are done, and above all there no longer seems to be anyone who embraces and forgives them. Also, for this reason, faced with the advance of the new paganism, no Christian philosophy or theology can stand up to it. “What is missing is not so much verbal repetition of the announcement. Today’s man, perhaps unawares, is waiting for the experience of the encounter with people for whom the fact of Christ is a reality so present that their life has been changed” (Fr Giussani, speaking to the Synod of Bishops, 1987).

The popes of the 19th century saw and denounced modern de-Christianization as a phenomenon imposed from above, by political elites and liberal-Masonic intellectuals who, having captured power, tried to impose on the good Christian people their own world view, their own “unreligion.” The 20th century experience of some Catholic nations in Eastern Europe, after all, is not very different. There too de-Christianization was an imposition from above, through the police state and party structures. Thus, it was reasonable to oppose the uprooting of the popular Christian memory by setting up resistance above all at the juridical level, by asking that the State respect the feelings of the majority of the population in the laws it made.

Today, the situation is radically changed. All that is left of the “good Christian people” of times past is some small, touching remnant in some parish, in some Marian sanctuary. Now growing up is the first generation of teenagers of whom the vast majority has not been touched, not even sociologically, by Christian preaching. A young TV news colleague of mine, very well educated and well informed, did not believe me when I said I had gone to receive the ashes for Lent. She was not at all scandalized, but was sincerely amazed because she thought it was a rite from centuries past; it brought up vague memories of her grandmother, but she thought it was a practice that had been abandoned long ago.

A silent schism
The same can be said about Christian morality, which is ignored and forgotten, even by many baptized Catholics–the “silent schism,” the Australian writer Morris West called it. Is this the fault of the permissive laws of the secular state? The majority of my colleagues are divorced. This is not a scientific study, but rarely have I heard anyone boast of this choice; most of them have suffered because of it and have seen the suffering of their children. They can still acknowledge as an ideal that true love lasts forever, but then it is as though, without the support of grace, what was “natural” is now sadly and fatally perceived as humanly impossible to bring about. This is certainly not a question of legitimizing civil divorce from the religious point of view, but of understanding what Western man “after Jesus without Jesus” is like. And how can he–as things stand now–find again or discover for the first time the gift of faith as a promise of happiness for his life, with all the moral consequences that this gift intrinsically brings with it? “Fewer battles and more prayers,” advised the mild and wise Pope John Paul I, but not in order to pull back in the face of the violence of an anti-Christian mentality, but so as to be more true. Think about the first Christians: few in number, without economic means, face to face with the first global empire teeming with esoteric religions and unbridled immorality. They changed that pagan world solely through a spontaneous network of encounters and friendships that spread by contagion, from one person to another, through an attraction so human as to be inexplicable in only human terms. Then, a long time afterwards–“absent-mindedly,” said Mounier–came Christian civilization too.

*Vatican Correspondent
for Rai2 News