By Selwyn Duke

With the election of Pope Francis, there are the usual
complaints about how the Catholic Church has got to get with the times. The Huffington
Post ran the headline,
“Pope Francis Against [sic] Gay Marriage, Gay Adoption,” which is much like
thinking it newsworthy to write, “New Pope Believes in the Divinity of Jesus.” Mother Jones laments the “missed
opportunity to bring the papacy closer to where the people are.” And Forbes’
John Baldoni  dishes the baloney, writing
of “a Catholic Church that is resistant
to change but one that must certainly adapt (and rather radically) if it is
going to continue to attract well-intentioned men and women who adhere to its
faith but also are willing to devote themselves to its perpetuation” (hat tip: Drew
Belsky). Yet this misses the point that it is creatures who must adapt to
their ecosystem, and the Church is
the moral ecosystem. Our modernistic culture is simply a pretender to that
throne.

But calls for adaptation are nothing new; it’s just that
primitives who once demanded it in the name of yesterday’s fashions have
adapted: they now demand it in the name of today’s fashions. The brilliant
philosopher and noted convert to Catholicism G.K. Chesterton wrote about this
phenomenon almost a century ago in his essay
“Why I am a Catholic”:

The other day a well-known writer,
otherwise quite well-informed, said that the Catholic Church is always the
enemy of new ideas. It probably did not occur to him that his own remark was
not exactly in the nature of a new idea. It is one of the notions that
Catholics have to be continually refuting, because it is such a very old idea.
Indeed, those who complain that Catholicism cannot say anything new, seldom
think it necessary to say anything new about Catholicism. As a matter of fact,
a real study of history will show it to be curiously contrary to the fact. In
so far as the ideas really are ideas, and in so far as any such ideas can be
new, Catholics have continually suffered through supporting them when they were
really new; when they were much too new to find any other support. The Catholic
was not only first in the field but alone in the field; and there was as yet
nobody to understand what he had found there.

…[For example,] when Mr. Belloc
wrote about the Servile State, he advanced an economic theory so original that
hardly anybody has yet realized what it is. A few centuries hence, other people
will probably repeat it, and repeat it wrong. And then, if Catholics object,
their protest will be easily explained by the well-known fact that Catholics
never care for new ideas.

Nevertheless, the man who made that
remark about Catholics meant something; and it is only fair to him to
understand it rather more clearly than he stated it. What he meant was that, in
the modern world, the Catholic Church is in fact the enemy of many influential
fashions; most of which still claim to be new, though many of them are
beginning to be a little stale. In other words, in so far as he meant that the
Church often attacks what the world at any given moment supports, he was
perfectly right . The Church does often set herself against the fashion of this
world that passes away; and she has experience enough to know how very rapidly
it does pass away.

…Nine out of ten of what we call
new ideas are simply old mistakes. The Catholic Church has for one of her chief
duties that of preventing people from making those old mistakes; from making
them over and over again forever, as people always do if they are left to
themselves.

So what of the mistake, made over and over again, of
criticizing the Church for being stuck in the past? It is the gripe of a slave of
his age. A relativist sees ideas as either old-fashioned or fashionable, as
being of the past or on the cutting edge, but none of these characterizations
describe the Church. She is not a creature of the age, but of the ageless. She
is not of any one time, but of the one Truth.

This is why I can assert, without being presumptuous, what a
man who died the year a certain child was born would say about that child when
he grew up, became pope, and took the name Francis. The Truth doesn’t change.
And since there also are no new sins, neither do criticisms of the Church
change. They just get recycled by children of time and place who never learned
history and thus think their “old mistakes” are “new ideas.” They might never
imagine that, when Christians refused to participate in ancient Rome’s pagan
festivals, Roman pagans uttered a very familiar line and called them “haters of
humanity.”

Ecclesiastes 1:9
tells us, “What has been will be again, what has been done will be done
again; there is nothing new under the sun.” Generally speaking, there are no
old and new ideas; there are only enduring ideas and flashes in the pan of the
polity. The enduring ideas are incorrectly labeled “old” because they are valid
enough to remain in constant use, so we see them embraced by grandpa; the
flash-in-the-pan ideas are called “new” because it is the fate of fallacies to
be forgotten and then resurrected by the next unsuspecting generation. And the
young will think grandpa knows nothing of them because they’re newly-born, not
realizing that he only knows nothing of them because they wisely were buried
long before he was born.

So, secular left, perhaps your motto should be, “Fashionable
modernism: bringing you yesterday’s mistakes, today.” But have at it with your
criticism and scorn. Just know that Catholics are used to it, for we’ve been
thus targeted for a very, very long time. And we’ll be thus targeted long after
you, and your ideas, are dust.

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