By David G. Bonagura, Jr.
We have reached an incredible cultural moment. The seemingly unstoppable drumbeat in favor of unlimited progress that for so long has characterized Modernity has lost its rhythm. Technological advancement and social engineering have not delivered the promised and still elusive “good life.” Instead, rapid change without a compass has generated widespread dissatisfaction, anxiety, and disillusionment. The latter adjective has lately been the favorite of more than one cultural commentator.
The ancients would have used a different word to describe the situation of our secular world: disordered. For St. Augustine, peace is the end of all creatures, and peace, he writes in The City of God, is the “tranquility of order—and order is the disposition of equal and unequal things in a pattern that assigns to each its proper place.”
Disorder occurs when the facets of life become dislocated so that lesser things or even evil things displace the proper goods of life and community. When societies exalt sins as goods, when politics consumes everything, when technology swallows every dimension of human life, disorder reigns not with peace, but with anxiety, anguish, and suffocation. For individuals, the suffering is internal. As Augustine writes in his Confessions, “every disordered mind is its own punishment.”
Sin is the primary cause of disorder, and the disorder of our age is born of violations of the First Commandment. The secular world speaks and acts as if God did not exist. Without God as the foundation and goal of order, man and his sinful will take the place of God as the supreme good. Fallen human will is consumed, in Augustine’s memorable phrase, by the libido dominandi, the lust to dominate others, which is the source of all conflicts and all disorders in this City of Man.
The only way to correct our present disorder, short of the Second Coming of Christ, is to reorder our lives and societies upon God. This requires, first, that we recognize God as our rightful king and open our hearts to His grace, which alone can redirect our wills away from dominating others and toward serving others. The remarkable increase in conversions to Catholicism in recent years attests that men and women are increasingly finding the antidote to secular disorder in the saving truths and divine grace housed in the holy Catholic Church.
Yet this great cohort of converts comprises only a fraction of a wider population that is disillusioned with today’s disorder but is not inclined or ready to seek remedies in religion, and certainly not in the Church. How might we persuade them to move from secular disorder to Catholic order?
First, we must dispel any fear that “Catholic order” is in any way synonymous with tradwives, The Handmaid’s Tale, authoritarian government, theocracy, oppression, or social uniformity. It is none of these things. Catholic order is not a political program or a social intervention. It is rather, in the words of the great historian Christopher Dawson, the disposition of “the whole of life toward unity, not by the denial and destruction of natural human values, but by bringing them into living relation with spiritual truth and spiritual reality.”
The goal of Catholic order is not the establishment of structures. Rather, it transcends existing structures of many kinds to harmonize them with divine prerogatives. In the language of St. Paul, Catholic order aims to “recapitulate all things in Christ,” because “if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has passed away, behold, the new has come.” (Ephesians 1:10; 2 Corinthians 5:17)
Catholic order is a way of living that allows the Holy Spirit, who is intimately near to us, to penetrate every aspect of life and direct it toward communion with God. It helps the individual to restrain his wayward will and leads society to elevate the common good above factional divisions.
With its firm faith in God, Catholic order offers a re-enchantment, that is, the hope in God’s redemption that can be discerned within a world marked by evil. By contrast, do secularists offer any hope at all? Can a world without God, which is the Modern world, provide the joy, confidence, and stability that Catholic order promises? Can a world without God offer the adventure and excitement that comes from knowing that God is acting among His people right now and is sanctifying so many persons and places that only days ago seemed hopelessly lost?
When we realize that the dynamic love of God ignites Catholic order, we can see that His laws—which secularists fear because of the caricatures of religion they have absorbed—are the foundations for its establishment. They are the supporting beams of order that prevent sin from unleashing disorder and allow the proper ordering of the constituent parts of life. When God’s laws are observed, grace moves more nimbly in souls and bears more fruit of the Spirit.
To the disillusioned I make this appeal: do not wait for a seat on Elon Musk’s rocket to Mars as a ticket out of worldly disorder—there will be disorder there too. The answer to the needs of the modern world is hidden in plain sight; they need only the eyes of faith to see it. Catholic order will bring the dislocated or dysfunctional elements of their lives into harmony with God, and He will send His grace to help them reorder it. Then they will feel enchanted once more because they will know that the world, with all its problems, does not belong to the powers, to technologies, or to evils, but to God.
About the Author
David G. Bonagura, Jr. is the author, most recently, of 100 Tough Questions for Catholics: Common Obstacles to Faith Today, and the translator of Jerome’s Tears: Letters to Friends in Mourning. An adjunct professor at St. Joseph’s Seminary and at Catholic International University, he serves as religion editor of The University Bookman, a book review founded in 1960 by Russell Kirk. His personal site is here.