August 2013 AD | Mary C. Tillotson
Maybe I’ve
spent too much time listening to World Youth Day coverage and reading articles
like this one written by a friend of mine who ran our college’s vibrant
Catholic Society. I was surprised to find this article by Hemant Mehta on CNN’s
Belief Blog explaining why young people are leaving their churches for atheism.
If he’s right about young people’s reasons for atheism, we Catholics need to
get our evangelical act together. The Catholic Church has everything they want
(and more!), and we ought to get the word out.
Millennials,
Mehta writes, are finding Christianity to be awfully silly. This seems to be a
fairly common belief: Christianity was useful, say, back in the Dark Ages,
before science, when people believed in elves. It’s unfair to caricature all of
Christianity that way. It shows a thorough ignorance of the substance of
Catholicism, the most authentic form of Christianity, which has been making
consistent claims on faith and morality for about 2,000 years, despite being consistently
unpopular. (Question: How did it last that long?)
“Pastors are no longer the final authority
on the truth, and millennials know it.” – Mehta
Pastors
aren’t the final authority on truth? Catholics never believed they were. I
think most of us have heard the “mountain” analogy – different religions are
different people’s paths up the mountain to God, and who’s to say that one path
is better than another? This is a nice illustration, but misses the central
claim of Christianity: God drove a bulldozer down the mountain, became man,
“like us in all ways except sin” (cf St. Paul), and said, “Follow me.” We’re
not claiming that our favorite path is the objectively best path to God; we’re
claiming that the path God made for us and showed us is the best path to God.
God, “maker of heaven and earth, of all things visible and invisible,” is the
final authority on truth. Our Church protects that truth and our pastors relate
it.
“To believe in Jesus means believing that
he was born of a virgin, rose from the dead and performed a number of miracles.
There’s no proof of any of that ever happened…To be sure, if Christians
followed the positive ideas Jesus had, we’d all be better off, but it’s very
hard to separate the myth from the reality.” – Mehta
This is why
it’s so difficult to separate Jesus’s resurrection (and all the other miracles)
from his teaching. St. Paul notes this difficulty in his first letter to the
Corinthians (chapter 15): “If Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is
in vain and your faith is in vain. … If Christ has not been raised, your faith
is futile.” Separating Jesus’s identity as God from his teaching is like
separating numbers from math. If he isn’t God, if he didn’t actually rise from
the dead, Christianity is stupid, a waste of time and energy, and the best hoax
anyone’s ever come up with. Christianity isn’t just about “positive ideas.”
It’s about a Creator God who entered into human history, who walked with human
feet on the earth he created, and who showed us the way up the mountain.
I’ve been
intending to give more of an explanation than a defense, because I simply don’t
have room for both, but I wanted to comment on Mehta’s “there’s no proof”
comment. The “proof” that we don’t have for the Resurrection is too much to ask
of any historian about historical events. By the same token, we could say
“there’s no proof” that Abraham Lincoln actually gave the Gettysburg Address,
or that Alexander the Great ever existed. We have strong evidence, but no proof
that it wasn’t all forged. Historical evidence for the Resurrection is actually
fairly strong (as Mark Shea, Fr. Robert Barron, Jon Sorensen at Catholic
Answers, and About.com explain), and if Jesus can rise from the dead, I don’t
see anything stopping him from walking on water or turning it into wine. It
would seem to back up his claim to be God, and that would back up his claims
about what’s true and how we ought to live.
Catholics
believe that God became man – Jesus – and it’s on his authority that we know
what we know about God. Our popes, priests, saints, martyrs aren’t necessarily
any smarter, wittier, or friendlier than anyone else. They don’t need to be,
because it isn’t about them anyway. It’s about Jesus, and our pastors are just
passing on the message.
I’d like to
leave you with an excerpt from Pope Francis’s encyclical Lumen Fidei.
How can we be certain, after all these
centuries, that we have encountered the “real Jesus”? Were we merely isolated
individuals, were our starting point simply our own individual ego seeking in
itself the basis of absolutely sure knowledge, a certainty of this sort would
be impossible. I cannot possibly verify for myself something which happened so
long ago. But this is not the only way we attain knowledge. Persons always live
in relationship. We come from others, we belong to others, and our lives are
enlarged by our encounter with others. Even our own knowledge and
self-awareness are relational; they are linked to others who have gone before
us: in the first place, our parents, who gave us our life and our name.
Language itself, the words by which we make sense of our lives and the world
around us, comes to us from others, preserved in the living memory of others.
Self-knowledge is only possible when we share in a greater memory. The same
thing holds true for faith, which brings human understanding to its fullness.
Faith’s past, that act of Jesus’s love which brought new life to the world,
comes down to us through the memory of others – witnesses – and is kept alive
in that one remembering subject which is the Church.
- See more
at:
http://www.ignitumtoday.com/2013/08/12/considering-atheism-try-catholicism/#sthash.XSeiHMPz.dpuf