Ready for Lent?
Not me. I’m never ready for Lent. In fact, I’m never ready for the great feasts the holy seasons usher in.
I keep expecting to be overwhelmed with euphoric joy at Easter or Christmas, but every year, I know I should have fasted more, given more, prayed more—to say nothing of worked more diligently, listened more attentively, and held my tongue more frequently.
Thanks be to God, the Church gives us penitential seasons every year. Ever before us is an opportunity to renew our effort to be a little less of this world and a little more of the next.
And this age in which we live is especially problematic. More than a century ago, Bl. John Henry Cardinal Newman declared that all people in all times have tended to think that that the age in which they live is an age apart, an age unusual for its wickedness. But he added that the modern age—our age—is beset by something new: unbelief. St. Paul could point to the pagan temple of the unknown god in Athens because the Greeks believed in something.
Unbelief is the best explanation for the crisis in which the Catholic Church finds herself mired today, whether it is prelates abusing their offices in the most vile and degrading ways or churchgoing, married Catholics deliberately frustrating their fertility with chemicals. We are no better than the pagans, some will say; but the truth is that the pagans making their way in the darkness before the Incarnation at least understood that children were a positive good. They wanted their lines to continue.
Ours is an age of such self-loathing that we do not want to reproduce. How easy it is to draw the line from the contraceptive mentality to the ever more disturbing revelations about men in high office in the Church, whether active, complicit, or silent.
I spoke last fall at a parish in Texas about the crisis in the Church. I told the good parishioners what I have just told you concerning my thoughts about the origins of the crisis. But I also proposed, in addition to prayer and fasting, a course of action: unplug from the online gossip.
Stay informed as need be, but don’t let a perpetual diet of crisis distract you from your interior life. Pick up a practice that our chaplain, Fr. Hugh Barbour, has brought to Catholic Answers: lauds and vespers. The staff here uses the Mundelein Psalter.
And that brings me back to Lent—give a little more Divine Office and a little less screen a go this Lent, and see how you feel on Easter Sunday.
—Christopher Check, president