The Church Wields the Ultimate Force of Truth

A few weeks ago, my editor sent an email describing a recent anti-Catholic encounter he had in a local coffee shop.  It reminded me of a few such instances in my own past.  Most occurred when I was volunteering at a soup kitchen in a Pentecostal church in Brooklyn or in conversations with a relative who had become an Evangelical. None of these were personal attacks.  Mostly I just heard a lot of blithe statements that were largely based on worn, anti-Catholic, English Reformation-vintage, propaganda.

Basically, I was being confronted with five-hundred-year-old conspiracy theories that were combined with a bit of spectacular ignorance.   In one instance, after being told that the Church was really a continuation of Babylonian demon worship, I was asked: “The Queen of England is Catholic, right?”  I didn’t have it in me at that moment to respond to that one and just grumbled something to the effect that she was not Catholic and walked away.

Conspiracies live large

Most standard anti-Catholic tropes are the stuff of conspiracy theories.  Galileo was put under house arrest more for grandstanding than for his theories about a heliocentric world. Despite the legend about the incident, he was never thrown in a dungeon or tortured.  The Spanish Inquisition was not nearly as cruel or violent as it is fun to believe and was more a tawdry money grab than anything else.  No, the pope never started building a tunnel under the Atlantic so he could secretly move into the White House should Al Smith have become president in 1928.  No, the Vatican is not hiding records about its complicity in the Holocaust – 1,700 years of archives take a bit of time to sift through, and the Church offered copies of its records from 1933 to 1945 to any researchers who wanted them once they were compiled. There were no takers.  Finally, no, the Pope was not arrested last month on child pornography and trafficking charges.

Conspiracy theories have not only been aimed at the Church but have also resulted in some of the darkest and most un-Christian behavior on the part of Catholics as well.  This animus was largely directed against that other perennial favorite target of conspiracy theorists’ ire – the Jewish people.  Accusations of blood libel and desecration of the Eucharist, just to name one example of a Catholic vintage conspiracy theory, resulted in atrocious pogroms, massacres, and expulsions.

Bottom line, Catholics have probably suffered more than almost any other group, save the Jewish people, due to conspiracy theories. Equally, they have tarnished their reputation most when they have acted on unfounded fears based on beliefs in conspiracies.  So why would so many American Catholics and clergy be embracing conspiracy theories when they have done so much harm to the Church?

Value relativism as breeding ground

In all fairness, it is not just American Catholics who have been increasingly looking to conspiracy theories to explain what is happening in a confusing world.  This bigger trend around the globe of rejecting seemingly objective facts in favor of conspiracies belies the hold that the post-modernist mindset has on many people.

In an article on Patheos, writer Gene Veith does a great job of succinctly explaining this worldview and its growing acceptance.  He basically describes how the increasingly common post-modernist mindset rejects the notion of absolute truth and makes everything subjective and amorphous.  The real problem is when this value relativism takes a dark turn as it seems to have done in American culture and politics recently.  When this happens, people start to believe that the truth is unknowable because any supposed facts are biased one way or the other and just reflect the self-interest of the group that is narrating them.

Inevitably, Veith tells us, this worldview results in a growing sense that everything is a zero-sum game in which one group imposes its will on another group.  In other words, post-modernist thought leads to negative identity politics where any sense of positive multiculturalism, or the idea of America as the great melting pot, quickly fades as every aspect of life becomes a zero-sum, winner-take-all, us-versus-them struggle of the will between groups.

When this happens, Locke’s Social Contract, which pretty much forms the bedrock of the democratic experiment in the US, goes out the window.  At this point, it isn’t much of a leap to start to believe the worst about the other side, and all of sudden conspiracy theories start to make a lot of sense.

The continuing power of truth

Liberal democracy is predicated upon the Enlightenment belief in reason and absolute truth which is knowable.  While Catholicism certainly had a difficult relationship with the Enlightenment (17^th and 18^th centuries), the Church pretty much saw eye-to-eye with the philosophes in terms of the importance of reason and a belief that objective truth can be known.  They just differed on what constituted that truth.

Today there seems to be an increasing view within certain circles in the Church that liberalism (in the classic sense) is failing and that Catholicism is incompatible with liberal democracy and that the Church is being undermined by a nefarious conspiracy of pagan forces.  This belief formed much of the basis for the controversy over the Amazonian statues that were in a Vatican garden.

At its worst, the conspiracy theories that are being embraced by some Catholics seem more Manichean than Christian and are certainly apocalyptic in their depictions of children of light engaged in a battle to the death with children of darkness.  Further, they seem to belie a certain lack of faith in God, namely, that somehow He is not in control and that the bad guys might actually win.

If we have faith in Christ’s promises that the gates of hell will not prevail against His Church, then the question really becomes not so much what if the bad guys win, because they won’t, but more importantly, what happens if the conspiracy theorists win?

Take, for example, the riot at the Capitol last month in which many Christians were in their own minds trying to take back their country.  Many stated that they wanted the US to be a Christian country guided by the bible.  That sounds just fine until one peers a bit over the horizon to see where these movements usually end up for Catholics, Jews and others.  If the United States were to become a Christian nation, as defined by many conspiracy theorists, it is unlikely that Catholicism would be very welcome for very long.   Many of the same pastors who support conspiracy theories state that the Church is the biblical Whore of Babylon. They send “missions” to Catholic South America to convert Catholics to Evangelicalism.  Given half a chance, they would probably do the same in the US.

There is a scene in the play, A Man for All Seasons, in which St. Thomas More is engaged in a heated debate with his future son-in-law, William Roper, who emphatically states to More that he should have Richard Rich arrested because he may be plotting against him. When More refuses and says, “Go he should, if he were the Devil, until he broke the law.” Roper then responds, “Now you give the Devil benefit of law?”  Roper goes on to state that he would cut down every law in England to get at the Devil.  More responds by asking Roper a simple question of law: When the last law was cut down and the devil turned round on him, where would he hide?  More then states conclusively, “I give the Devil benefit of law for my own safety’s sake.”  Perhaps this is something to ponder for those who would see liberal democracy fail and think that the Church would come out on top.

The Church as a refuge

Catholicism is in a certain way the ultimate anti-conspiracy theorist organization and always has been.  It is global and, by definition, multi-cultural. St. Paul states that there is no Jew or Greek, no slave or free, no male or female, but that all are one in Christ.  While Christianity and the Church are divinely appointed to be universal and multi-cultural, bringing all to Christ, this means that not everyone will look or sound the same.  So the Church often seems strange, foreign, and suspect to those who are prone to believe conspiracy theories.  The Church is also the ultimate anti-post-modernist institution in that it insists on the fusion of faith and reason in pursuit of knowable and absolute truth in God.

Identity politics and conspiracy theories, both left and right, are tearing at the fabric of the United States and the Church.  For Catholics, conspiracy theories have provided the backbone for much damage that the Church has done and much damage that has been done to the Church.  Part of the reason that the Church has been attacked is for its reliance on reason and its insistence on a better way forward for humanity in a universal faith and structure in which all people are welcome and called.

Call this good multi-culturalism (based in Gospel values ,not ideology) that the Church has always championed.  In order to reach those people whose cultures and values look different, the Church has always bent as much as possible to accommodate the local way of life and to find the value in it.  This is how missionaries brought the Word of Christ to many parts of the globe.  The Jesuits, for instance, so immersed themselves in Chinese culture and philosophy in the 17^th century that they were considered Chinese and became the emperor’s official astronomers.

Catholicism is unafraid because it has faith in God and relies on reason.  We are to use the minds that God has given us and expects us to use in His service.  It doesn’t need conspiracy theories to make sense of the world; it has the light of absolute truth and reason supporting it.  That strength in Christ is what can make the Church welcoming and placid in the face of persecution and confusion. That confidence borne of faith in God is what the world desperately needs and what can help bring calm, order, and good sense in a time of confusion.

That the Church stands apart may make it the object of conspiracy theorists, but it is also what can make it a pillar of strength that can heal and enlighten the world with Christ’s peace.  It starts in our own hearts, but this truth is what we are called to put on a lampstand for all to see.  We are not told to cower or seek to uncover the supposed machinations of others.  God has bigger and better plans for us.  Something worth remembering and resting in during trying times.