My reflections this semester on the New Evangelization have taken the track, in case you have not noticed, that we might learn something new by looking back at the past. In doing so, we have been looking at Catholic authors who have contributed to the conversation about how the Church understands itself.

In the first conference, I looked at the work of Tolkien, and in the second, the writings of Flannery O’Connor. In this conference, I would like to examine an important issue, the cost of New Evangelization. I doing so, I will draw on the writings of an undeservedly, near-forgotten Catholic author of the early 20th century, Robert Hugh Benson.

What is the cost of the New Evangelization? Recently, I have been invited to a number of parishes to give talks on the New Evangelization. They have no idea that they are asking for something about which I know very little. Yet, they want to know. Our Catholic people, our priests and deacons, want to know. There is an excitement about the idea of the New Evangelization even when there is little highly formulated knowledge of what it is.

We think it’s a program. We think it is a matter of offering some sort of adult formation, or parish renewal. We think that it is something that can be accomplished and perhaps put aside. I think not. I hold that the New Evangelization must be understood as a reorientation of Church life. It is our finding not a new program, but a new way of being.

At the recent faculty gathering at New Harmony, I was involved with quite a spirited discussion of the place of the Church in culture. No one will deny the real challenges that confront the Church in contemporary western culture. Some would hold that the key to gaining credence, if you will, for the Church is in the denial of culture as a prevailing medium. That is not possible. Too strong of a “divinization” or exclusivity of Church life is to deny the essential incarnational character of the Church.

Not to challenge the culture carries the opposite problem: too great a humanization of Church life. The Church cannot exist without culture, but the question is whether it will merely engage the culture as a collateral flotsam or whether it will guide the culture to an authentically Incarnational spirit. These are some of the challenges we face today, challenges far more sophisticated than whether or not we will serve soft drinks at the first CRHP meeting of the year. It is a challenge that requires intelligent leadership. It is a challenge that cannot be realized without facing the cost.

What is the cost of the New Evangelization? Here I would like to begin by looking at our guide for considering this question, Robert Hugh Benson. Benson was born in England in 1871. He died in 1914, on the cusp of the First World War. Benson was the youngest son of Edward White Benson, the Archbishop of Canterbury. Ordained as a clergyman of the Anglican Communion by his father, he later converted to the Catholic Church and became a priest. He wrote many novels, touching upon the English reformation, spiritualism, his own challenges in the Anglican Communion and, perhaps, most notably, the end of the world, a subject he explored in The Lord of the World.
Benson’s writing has been largely forgotten today, a truly sad circumstance when his works, written over a century ago, still speak timeless truths for those trying to navigate a new world. The height of Benson’s literary output was in the critical years of the early 1900s. Benson presents an almost prescient appreciation for the character of modernity. His conversion, his exercise of the priesthood and his writing, however, did not come without personal cost.

In most of his works, he uses the various characters in the novels to address the question of the cost of discipleship. Some critics have remarked that Benson’s characters are often merely variants of himself. Certainly, most of his novels display the real consequences of discipleship, consequences that can perhaps offer us some insight, struggling as we are with the cultural question in a new century.

What is the cost of discipleship? First, I would say it is a personal cost, a cost to self. The core of self-understanding in our time, I believe, is highly in doubt. Never in the history of humankind has there been such a focused and intense reflection on the self. Almost every received value of the culture offers us the ability to reflect upon ourselves. We are constantly thinking of ourselves, how something impacts me, how the world must revolve around me.

Values are judged by self-understanding. Everything in our culture, from educational methods to advertising, is geared toward the promotion of self. And yet, in spite of this tremendous focus, we understand ourselves very little. We are constantly bombarded with a message that we cannot seem to incorporate: the message of selfishness.

We cannot incorporate it because, in fact, it is inimical with human being. In a word, the morbid self-regard perpetuated by culture is unnatural. We are not made for ourselves; we are made for others. We realize ourselves only when we realize ourselves in the presence of the others. The others do not tell us who we are, but they help us to discover who we are by the very fact of their being present to us, by our engagement with them, living with them, loving them.

I would say the New Evangelization is a kind of Self-Evangelization – that is, reintegrating the self into the group. The New Evangelization touches at the very core of personhood, before we find the need to postulate specific doctrine, etc. The New Evangelization calls us back to an authenticity, alone in which we can make our progress toward renewal. We cannot have renewal of the Church as long as the human condition remains compromised by false ideologies.

There is a very telling moment in By What Authority?, one of his historical novels, when Benson describes the conversion of mind of a man named Antony, employed by the Archbishop of Canterbury during the reformation in England. He seeks with all of his heart the renewal of the Church, but finally comes to realize that the renewal cannot happen until he is renewed, until his household is renewed. He cannot find conversion until he gives into the conversion of the whole, rather than the conversion of the one. This tension of group over singular conversion seems to be an essential component of the New Evangelization.

What is the cost of discipleship? Second, I would say it is a cost of ideals. That is, it is the cost of false ideals. The New Evangelization is a re-evangelization of ideals, what we find most important in life. Sometimes this can be hard to gauge in a consumer economy. At a recent meeting I attended, there was a discussion of the question of marketing and consumerism. It was noted that, years ago, the way to sell anything was through some sort of sexual connotation. Today, there is a greater likelihood of marketing being geared around nostalgia, particularly a nostalgia for “American values.”

What we see consistently is a desire to manipulate the ideals of a culture. Ideals, however, are not really able to be manipulated. True ideals are revealed. They are innate in the human person. We seek that which is true, beautiful and good. We “naturally” perceive falsehood, the innate and that which is evil. Our dilemma is being socialized into a set of circumstances that we naturally perceive as false. We begin to doubt our instincts. Everyone is doing it.

An example of this is modern communication technology. We are told we live in the information age. We have at our disposal a vast array of digital data. We can find out anything by Googling it. And yet, we have to ask ourselves: Are we better educated? Are we better informed? Or perhaps more substantially: Are we better people than in the “bad old days” when we depended upon the World Book Encyclopedia for information.
Please note that I am not a technophobe. I believe in the value of technology. I, in a sense, believe that technology is living up to its promise. What I doubt is that we are very wise in our use of technology. Are we better people because of a Facebook culture? Are we closer to our friends because we have a snapshot of what someone had for dinner? I believe that technology can help us to live up to our authentic ideals. The real question is: Do we want it for that?

There is a wonderful moment, again in Robert Hugh Benson’s novel, By What Authority?, when a very well-educated Protestant young lady named Isabel comes as a neighbor to a recusant family in England at the time of Henry VIII. She is very knowledgeable about Scripture and yet, under the influence of a local family, willing to suffer for their faith in a time of persecution, she begins to see the inner logic of the Church, which touches the inner longing of the person. She acts contrary to everything she “knows” in accepting a faith that seems most natural to her, yet it is a dangerous faith. Benson anticipates the thought of Pope John Paul II. The Catholic faith fulfills the inner longings of the human person, a longing often repressed by the cacophony of external false prophets.

Third, the cost of discipleship is the cost of duplicity, or rather the relegation of duplicity. We are told of our responsibilities in the faith from the earliest days of our formation. We are also told about the responsibilities we bear to the social or secular order. In our time, these two are finding an increasingly distant rationality, or relationship. In his work, perhaps his greatest work, The Lord of the World, Benson has two decisive moments that touch very readily upon our modern condition. He has a character named Mabel who is a typical product of her time. She is married to a government bureaucrat. She is an unbeliever. She never really asks deep questions of herself, her marriage or her world. She has a mother-in-law, however, who is an old-fashioned Christian. The old woman is a source of embarrassment for her clever, modern son and a source of confusion for Mabel.

When the old woman dies, however, Mabel is thrown into a state of questioning. Can she believe all that she has been told by the social order? Is there more to life than the secular and the political? Did her old mother-in-law have some older wisdom that may have taken her to a place of peace after death? These questions haunt Mabel to the point that she checks herself into an institution, where she is offered an out – euthanasia, a common practice among folks of her time who are confused and doubtful of the received wisdom of the time. The time comes. She accepts her medicine, but at the moment of death she has a vision. Benson tells us:

Then an amazing thing happened—yet it appeared to her that she had always known it would happen, although her mind had never articulated it. This is what happened. The enclosure melted, with a sound of breaking, and a limitless space was about her—limitless, different to everything else, and alive, and astir. It was alive, as a breathing, panting body is alive—self-evident and overpowering—it was one, yet it was many; it was immaterial, yet absolutely real—real in a sense in which she never dreamed of reality...

Yet even this was familiar, as a place often visited in dreams is familiar; and then, without warning, something resembling sound or light, something which she knew in an instant to be unique, tore across it...

Then she saw, and understood...

Is there a way that we can see and understand before the threat of death is upon us? There is another moment in The Lord of the World that also bears a quotation. In the story, we come to the end of time, not just an end, but the end. The Church has gathered in one place together with the Pope. They are having a time of adoration. Then the end comes:

...He was coming—and already the shadow swept off the plain and vanished, and the pale netted wings were rising to the cheek; and the great bell clanged, and the long sweet chord rang out—not more than whispers heard across the pealing storm of everlasting praise...

and once more
PROCEDENTI AB UTROQUE COMPAR SIT LAUDATIO ...

Then this world passed, and the glory of it.

Here Benson hits upon something profound. If there is to be an end to duplicity in the world, it must come through a divine means. We are unable to dig ourselves out of the whole. However, that means has been given, given to us completely, in the Blessed Sacrament. Christ himself is the source of unity, the source of power. And it is only he. He does not share power, except insofar as he empowers those who receive him. The Lord of the World is the unifier of the world. But its power is all hidden, even at times from us.

There is a study I often quote about Catholic perceptions of the Blessed Sacrament. Many in our faith so under-catechized do not appreciate the centrality of the Blessed Sacrament, not only to what we do, but to who we are. That lack of perception, however, does not keep the Sacrament from doing what it does. Christ’s purposes cannot be stifled even by the most concerted efforts of duplicity. He does unite. The New Evangelization is unification. This is our spiritual program. This is our destiny; this is our only hope, our most profound future.

Finally, there is the cost of life and death. What we do here is life and death. One of the great contemporary myths promulgated by much of culture is that what we do here is something nice, something sweet, something, however, that is ultimately accessory to real life. There is a certain twist in the cultural perspective that makes us believe that religion is a luxury for the wealthy. Sometimes misguided voices in our own tradition can promulgate this myth. There is something, however, in this highly secularized society that longs for something. It longs for mystery. When it does not immediately find it in the Church, it seeks it elsewhere.

Here we can mention that desire of modern humanity to find mystery in occult sources. Sometimes we find our modern fascination with things like Wicca, or witchcraft, voodoo, Santería, folk religions, quaint. Increasingly, people are fascinated with esoteric religions in the most rational, most enlightened culture in history. How is it so? It might be comforting to think of such fascination as innocent, as child’s play in the mystical world.

I do not think this is true. Dabbling in the occult world is not only dangerous, it is diabolical. The evil of esotericism does not stem from its positive power; it stems from our reliance on a false power in opposition to a true Power. Benson has a very powerful novel called The Necromancer. It is the story of a young man named Laurie who is very much a product of his time. Born an Anglican, he converts to Catholicism, and finally he becomes ensnared in the world of spiritualism, a movement as much alive in Benson’s time as in ours.

In the novel, Laurie becomes involved with a group of spiritualists. At one level, Benson portrays these folks for what they are – charlatans who play upon the gullibility of the weak and the mourning. In the midst of this play, however, Laurie gets drawn into the world of darkness, not because of its positive power, but because of his weakness of mind and character. He becomes spiritually dead by summoning the dead, necromancy. In the book, Laurie is rescued by a good Catholic young lady.

Benson’s point is well made, however. There is danger in the seeming innocence of the esoteric. It is not, however, a positive danger, but a danger of veering away from the Truth of the faith. There is another point here, however. We may have ceased to see the Church as a matter of life or death because we have devalued the power of its supernatural energy. The Church, its ministers, its followers, its Sacraments are not mere manifestations of a social engagement for the wealthy. The Church is the empowerment of humanity, a power that exercises itself at the most elemental level of human experience.

Perhaps the New Evangelization is a re-awakening of the Church to this Truth. It is not to be found in programs and exercises, in projects calling for the production of cookies and drink. It is not to be found in workbooks. It is not to be found in service projects. It is not to be found in buildings and facilities. The New Evangelization is to be found in the core of the human person. It is to be exercised as an act of human longing. It is to be realized in an authentic reclaiming of self even as we flounder in clouds of delusion. It is the clear day. It is our deepest desire. It is Christ himself alive in us, alive in the Sacrament, alive as the true Lord of the World.