By DONALD DeMARCO
“The outlook on the future is by no means free from anxiety; on the contrary, there are many serious reasons for alarm, on account of numerous and longstanding causes of evil, of both a public and a private nature.”
What do we make of this sentence? There is an unmistakable contemporary ring to it. It speaks to anxiety in the future, impending alarm, and the presence of evil on both personal and social levels. These are, indeed, concerns that haunt the present climate. Yet, it is the opening sentence of Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical letter, On Jesus Christ Our Redeemer (Tametsi Futura Prospicientibus), issued on November 1, 1900.
The fundamental problems we face are not all that different from year to year, even from century to century. They are never fully resolved and remain to provide challenges for one generation after another.
In stating that “when men’s minds are clouded, both rulers and ruled go astray, for they have no safe line to follow nor end to aim at,” these words of Pope Leo the Great apply very well to the present situation. Neither clarity of thought nor firmness of purpose is a hallmark of either the current governments in North America nor of the minds of its citizens.
Pope Leo chides Christians, in particular, who have devised their own understanding of Christianity which is “very mild, much more indulgent towards human nature, and requiring little if any hardships to be borne.”
Are things substantially different today when so many Christians demand a softer and more agreeable brand of religion? Yet, easy divorce, abortion on demand, sexual license, and a cafeteria approach to Church doctrine do not, as a matter of fact, make life easier.
Divorce often produces embittered spouses and abandoned children. Abortion brings with it a train of adverse effects both for the woman and society. Sexual license produces shame and self-recrimination. The cafeteria Catholic, who places more faith in his own judgment than in Church teaching, deprives himself of the full richness that his Church offers him.
It often happens that people switch from one church to another church that is less demanding. Nonetheless, this church-hopping, in general, does not always prove satisfactory. A survey by Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life indicates that 44 percent of Protestants either change their denomination or leave their religion entirely. The Center for the Study of Global Christianity at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in Massachusetts estimates that in 2012 there were 43,000 different Protestant denominations.
Some churches believe that kneeling is too discomforting and offer their members cushioned chairs. The drive-in church, which has achieved some degree of popularity in California, exempts congregants from the apparent burden of having to get out of their car and walk into their place of worship. The drive-in church, however, logically leads to the drive-by church. The path of least resistance leads to nowhere. Both the unexercised soul as well as the unexercised body atrophies.
Lutheran theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer strongly opposed this tendency among Christians to water down the Gospel and make minimal demands of themselves. He abhorred what he called “cheap grace” which he viewed as “the justification of sin without the justification of the sinner.”
In his landmark book, The Cost of Discipleship, he re-emphasized the redemptive meaning of the cross which he believed had ceased to be intelligible to a Christianity that no longer saw a vital difference between an ordinary human life and one of commitment to Christ.
“The cross is laid on every Christian,” he wrote. “The first suffering which every man must experience is the call to abandon the attachments of this world. It is that dying of the old man which is the result of his encounter with Christ.”
Suffering is unavoidable. For the Christian, sharing the suffering of Christ is mandatory. But, more important, as Pope Leo and Bonhoeffer both agree, suffering is redemptive.
“Man can no more create for himself a life free of suffering and filled with all happiness,” Pope Leo went on to say, “than he can abrogate the decrees of his divine Maker, who has willed that the consequences of original sin should be perpetual. . . . Christ has not promised . . . a life of ease.”
Bishop Fulton Sheen’s trenchant warning applies for all time, that in choosing Christ without the Cross, one gets the Cross without Christ.
Masahiro Morioka, a contemporary Japanese philosopher, would find much to admire in Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical. In his book Painless Civilization, he argues that the ultimate aims of modern civilization seem to be the elimination of pain and the unrelenting pursuit of pleasure.
The consequence of these aims, for Morioka, is a loss of meaning. He contends that advanced countries are drowning in the tide of their own not so painless “painless civilization” and do not know how to escape from it.
Christians who are looking for a denomination that offers them an easier life could learn a great deal from Morioka’s program, which he titles “Life Studies.” Difficulty and suffering are simply part of the human condition. They are ineradicable. To deny them is unrealistic. And being unrealistic, places a person in a most vulnerable situation.
Leo XIII understands only too well the lure of pleasure and how we seek to avoid pain. Yet, the life of an authentic Christian demands far more than choosing pleasure and avoiding pain:
“It is difficult to reject what so powerfully entices and delights. It is hard and painful to despise the supposed goods of the senses and of fortune for the will and precepts of Christ our Lord. But the Christian is absolutely obliged to be firm, and patient in suffering, if he wishes to lead a Christian life.”
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(Dr. Donald DeMarco is a senior fellow of Human Life International. He is professor emeritus at St. Jerome’s University in Waterloo, Ontario, an adjunct professor at Holy Apostles College in Cromwell, Conn., and a regular columnist for St. Austin Review. His latest works, How to Remain Sane in a World That is Going Mad; Poetry That Enters the Mind and Warms the Heart; and How to Flourish in a Fallen World are available through Amazon.com.
(Some of his recent writings may be found at Human Life International’s Truth and Charity Forum. He is the 2015 Catholic Civil Rights League recipient of the prestigious Exner Award.)
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