Clownishness reached new depths several months ago in the Philippines. Not the Bozo kind, the Catholic kind. Cardinal Antonio Tagle took to the stage, donning a chorus line outfit, microphone in hand, bobbing and swaying as he crooned John Lennon’s “Imagine.”
For those fortunate to have escaped the cultural junk-littered demi-monde of the ’60s and early ’70s, this song was a paean to the consolations of atheism. His Eminence held the Filipino Catholic crowd in thrall as they, too, swayed to this spectral reinvention of Catholicism. Yes, this was in the Philippines, where Roman Catholics reach 78.8 percent of the population.
Disturbing as this should be to grounded Catholics, it should not be considered heretical. Heresy is far too respectable to descend to such redoubts of vaudeville religion. Heresy takes the Faith in great earnest, enough to understand its central dogmas and to calculate fatal substitutes. Heresy is a serious business, and it requires serious thinking.
No, what we have in Cardinal Tagle’s nightclub gig is making the Faith nothing more than a joke. More menacing, it is an embalming of religion, making it a shadow of itself.
For Catholicism’s approved cognoscenti, this approach has become their preferred line of attack for tweaking of the Old Faith. Its ground plan is to infantilize religion to such a degree that it becomes no more demanding than a sandbox exercise. Trying to critique it is rather like attempting to nail down raindrops. Its purpose: that all feel well, all be smiling, no one be unwelcome, and bonhomie fill the room.
Aborning here is no-fault Catholicism, where no one is banned from the reception of the “bread,” God loves everybody, and “love is love.”
Nightmare? Yes, to most Credal Catholics. But isn’t that the aim of most parishes today? In these religious deserts, nothing bespeaks the majesty of God. Every detail is self-referential, viz., the saccharine music along with the swagger of the priest as he descends the middle aisle glad-handing and waving to his fans.
But there is more. The platoons of “ministers” settling in their roles like vendors at a state fair. Not to be overlooked is the modernist design of the new churches which remind one of laundromats. Their sterility would embarrass even Bauhaus and Le Corbusier.
For this comedic enterprise, no detail is neglected. Even the vestments of the priest advertise the message of the banal, the pedestrian, the ordinary, the fatuous. This clowning reaches its peak in the reception of Holy Communion (an expression quite unknown to a deprogrammed laity), where all take a casual stride to the minister to take the bread and drink the cup in a display of good feeling and nonthreatening “connecting.”
But beware, vice makes a furtive entrance in the priest as clown. Where the heretic priest might raise the defenses of alert Catholics, the priest of oozing affections is nonthreatening, leaving most Catholics disarmed. Then what enters the soul is religion as a no-threat zone, easily falling victim to the joking priest with his cloying winks and “have a good day” send-off. Along with his studied casualness at the altar, all of this conspires to be a totalizing reconfiguration of Catholicism. Who cannot love the priest as Mr. Rogers and the makeover of God that he peddles?
The priest as clown shrinks the souls of Catholics by making them content with merely the trivial and meretricious. Then the fatal switch. No longer God demanding obedience but a stroking god, bidding all to be themselves. Belloc’s ominous warning chills the soul:
We sit by and watch the barbarian, we tolerate him. In the long stretches of peace, we are not afraid. We are tickled by his irreverence. His cosmic inversion of our old certitudes, and fixed creeds refreshes us: we laugh.
But as we laugh we are watched by large and awful faces from beyond; and on these faces, there is no smile.
A similar Taglian performance was conducted by the good Cardinal Cupich at a stadium Mass several weeks ago hailing Chicago’s native son as pope. He repeated, like a metronome, the all too familiar, “Jesus loves you just the way you are.” Spliced into that incantation was the obligatory “all are welcome,” especially those who break the law as illegal immigrants. Add to that the swinging mariachi band and you have the big-top feel of a Barnum and Bailey circus.
Witness here the victory of Man over God. The Secular over the Sacred. The Clown over the Consecrated Priest. The Entertainer over Alter Christus.
St. Paul describes priests as the “dispensatores mysteriorum Dei” (1 Corinthians 4:1), an exalted title of transcendent proportions. This sacerdotal status embodies the whole man, body and soul. It would be a truncated Catholicism that sees the indelible mark of Holy Orders as merely interior. This would be a denial of the metaphysical unity of the human person. This unity most surely manifests itself in a kind of resonance, where the soul manifests its highest purposes in the body.
This is why symbols bear such weight in the life of man: they radiate the interior mystery of the human person. So obvious is this truth that the most common man adheres to it reflexively and without question, objecting to its absence. Evidence is ubiquitous: the wedding ring, the policeman’s uniform, the salute to a superior, the erect walk of The Old Guard at the Tomb of the Unknown soldier, or a nation’s flag.
Abandoning any of them would cause protest, if not a riot—and for good reason. The symbol embodies a truth that lies deep in the soul of man. Setting it aside is eclipsing the truth itself, and man finds himself capsized.
