A packed audience attended The Times conference last Tuesday entitled ‘Is the Church 200 Years Behind the Times?’ Why 200 years? Why not 300, 400, or 100, or just 20 years, behind the times? Who and how is creating this time measuring rod? Or are we just gripping with a point in time which may just have happened to be casually mentioned by one person?
In a certain important sense ‘time’ is immaterial to the Church. It’s essential inspiration from the Lord, in all its actions, can never be expected to be tied to the changing exigencies of any so-called ‘times’. Its dogmatic fundamental basis does not change with ‘the times’, even if many increasingly seem hellbent on pushing their own brands of a la carte doctrinarianism or relativistic theology.
This is not a question of ‘refusing’ to move with the times. The essential characteristics of the Church (its concepts and beliefs as coming from the Lord, and put into practice by the magisterium) cannot be expected – like some piece of elastic – to be ‘simply adapted’ to just satisfy what the mores of any continuously changing society may at any point in time be saying.
Yes, there is of course a continuous risk of alienating chunks of what is often described as an ‘increasingly liberal society’. But hasn’t that been the situation, a risk, that has been with the Church right through its history?
At one point in time Christ turned, even to his Apostles, and bluntly put the question to them: “Do you too want to go?” In so doing he was clearly telling them that any possible departure by any of them to outside of His Church would not mean any apocalyptic end to it, but merely the advent of others more replete with quality rather than quantity.
So who cares about the Church ever being ‘in a minority’, as opposed to being one of quantity? Indeed who cares about this obsession of some of trying to make a Church that ‘fits in with the times’? So, in a sense, The Times’s question is one of total irrelevance, or, at best, indicative of a very poor sense of awareness of true religious concepts in the corridors of that institution.
Contemporary man will, yes, often find this hard to understand, as he faces the realities of divorce, pressures on the family and developments of science. But to expect the Church to change its essential ‘above-and-beyond-the times’ nature to merely accomodate and satisfy these realities is simply a failure to understand the real nature of the Church.
For those who really know and love the Church the argument needs to be reversed. It is the realities of this so-called liberal contemporary society that must be changed to fit the essential characteristics of the Church, and not the other way round.
Editor’s note: If The Times has a very poor sense of awareness of Church matters, it seems that it is in good company.