now's the tme

I have suddenly found myself back in the Catholic Church - after a 12 year hiatus over theological differences. I wasn't away from church, but from the Church.

I have recently been pondering something my friend (insert pseudonym...) George had talked a lot about when we were grad students. One day, he told me that he had figured out the fatal flaw of Western civilization. Dualism. Not the idea that good and evil exist. But good and evil as equal opposites locked in war with each other. (In the manichaean version of this construct, good needs our help because it can't win the battle by itself).

Protestantism, he asserted, was enmeshed in it. Catholicism, on the other hand, recognized that evil was not a substance in itself, but a mere deprivation of good. Good had substance because it came from God. Evil, OTOH, had no substance. It was only a negation. In other words, God had existence in Himself. Satan did not. Evil could not create. It could only mimic.

I found the concept interesting, and I occasionally dug it out in order to try to make sense of the Evangelical obsession with politics. It made some sense of their idea that God NEEDED them to put order into an evil world. It made sense of their notion that they NEEDED to flail around in the political sphere, hurling insults at and creating dehumanizing caricatures of their opponents... rather than seeking transformation of the world through lived holiness (the way that Catholic saints had been doing throughout the centuries).

But it was still more conceptual to me than real... until the past 6 years, when it became painfully real. This was not some philosophical or theological construct. I could see it up close in the Evangelical Protestants that I knew. Frankly, I could also see it in a lot of individual Catholics. But it was not a position that held any credence in the actual Church. Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI were not manichaean-style dualists. Neither were the vast majority of Catholic theologians..

The Catholic Church could not be contained within the manichaean dichotomies present in the American political system. It was neither conservative nor liberal. It transcended labels. It embraced policies dear to the right. It embraced policies dear to the left. And it did so by keeping its eyes on Christ, not on an ideological orthodoxy.

Somewhere, beneath my theological disagreement with the Catholic Church, this was resonating. I was meditating upon it in my heart. The answer was through lived holiness, not - as so many American Christians believe - through making an idol out of party or nation or ideological position.