Jason Charron

Word has just come down that St. Paul’s Cathedral in London—the second most important church in the Anglican world—has imitated Canterbury Cathedral in permitting “raves,” nightclub-like entertainments, to take place in its confines. The usual reasons for acquiescing to this have been trotted out: reaching out to the young, trying to get with the times, etc. But this development simply shows that the leadership of the Church of England has lost any sense of the crucial distinction between the sacred and the secular. Across the centuries and across the cultures, our ancestors seem to have intuitively grasped the importance of this demarcation. Whereas the secular is the arena of ordinary experience and activity, the sacred is another realm, a different dimension. Accordingly, in the properly sacred space, one is lifted out of the conventional and introduced into the numinous. This is why Christian cathedrals are filled with images of the saints and angels and why their interiors are meant first to disorient us and then to reorient us toward the divine. It is also why, in the initiation rituals of primal peoples, a young person is purposely ripped out of the ordinary and introduced into the mythic and mystic dimension. And it is why, throughout the Bible, sacred spaces are carefully set apart from common spaces. The contemporary West is, quite literally, the first culture in human history that is in danger of collapsing the sacred into the secular, or better, losing any sense of the difference between the two. This is doing enormous damage, especially to young people, whose lives have been flattened into a preoccupation with money, worldly success, and material things. The Church indeed should go out into the secular space to find those who have wandered away from God, but it should then lead those wanderers back to the holy. Having “raves” in the nave of one of the most sacred spaces in the Christian world is, I’m sad to say, another sign of our pitiful surrender to ideological secularism.

In a recent interview, Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia, former grand chancellor of the John Paul II Institute on Marriage and Family Life, confirmed the worst suspicions that many of us had. He admitted that the changes he made at the Institute during the Pope Francis years were designed to initiate a "very profound" reform of the idea of the natural law. Instead of absolute moral norms grounded in a keen understanding of the basic goods, he and his colleagues were proposing a moral theory rooted in historical discernment of subjective and cultural experience--not an "armchair theology" but one operating "within history and within people's lives." This, of course, is the language of trendy postmodernism, and it is dangerous indeed. Allow me to illustrate the principle with one example. Is slavery wrong? Intrinsically wrong? Wrong no matter what public opinion polls say about it, no matter what the current consensus on it might be? I imagine any decent person would say yes. But that yes is predicated upon precisely what the tradition calls the natural law and the basic goods. There are some values so fundamental that acts repugnant to them are by their very nature wicked. If you want a highly articulate presentation of this idea, go to St. John Paul II's Veritatis Splendor. If we say that this is just "armchair theologizing" and that morality is a function of ever-shifting cultural and experiential data, then why couldn't slavery be justified? One of the very smartest persons that ever lived, the philosopher Aristotle, thought it was; extremely bright and morally upright persons in our country, well into the 19th century, thought it was permissible. Who is to say whether the consensus might shift back again? Who is to say that "lived experience" might come to justify it? What any truly coherent moral program requires is the very thing that Archbishop Paglia and his colleagues were endeavoring to eliminate, namely, absolute moral norms. Ridding ourselves of these in the name of freedom or pastoral sensitivity actually renders moral discourse dysfunctional, just as relativizing the basic principle of logic would render any rational conversation impossible. The Archbishop's interview, frankly, reminded me of the discussions I had at the Synod on Synodality with some of my German colleagues. Under the rubric of the development of doctrine, they were eager to relativize or radically change the principles undergirding classical morality. If this was and is truly the game, we have ventured onto perilous seas. Link to the article below.