In early 2015, our Archdiocese like many others was offered a 47-question open-ended survey in order to gather information about what people throughout the world understand about the Church’s teaching, her pastoral practice, current conditions, and the reality of marriage and family life. The survey was probably a poor translation, and the questions were ill-structured, so I ended up writing about 15,500 words in the one week window for completing it. I have chosen to share a few of these, here, as well, for your comments. I will quote the question, and what follows is my answer. I have edited the answers slightly for brevity, politeness, and clarity.
5. How does the Church respond, in her pastoral activity, to the diffusion of cultural relativism in secularized society and to the consequent rejection, on the part of many, of the model of family formed by a man and woman united in the marriage and open to life?
“I charge you in the presence of God and of Christ Jesus who is to judge the living and the dead, and by his appearing and his kingdom: PREACH THE WORD, BE URGENT IN SEASON AND OUT OF SEASON, CONVINCE, REBUKE, AND EXHORT, BE UNFAILING IN PATIENCE AND IN TEACHING. For the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own likings, and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander into myths. As for you, always be steady, endure suffering, do the work of an evangelist, fulfil your ministry” —What else IS there? Woe unto me if I preach not the Gospel!
But the work of proclamation must suffuse the lives of the faithful and shape their interaction in family, parish, and neighborhood. To do that, we must recognize that the faithful have different gracious abilities, obligations, and understandings than are current in the world at large. When we assess the behavior of the faithful by the standards of the world at large, we invariably suffer the “ideological colonization” of which the Holy Father has so forthrightly spoken. Rather, we must teach the faithful to understand themselves as they are in reality, not as they are construed in the faulty categories of Enlightenment rationalism, Modernism, and post-modern thought. Those who teach the faithful must be conversant in the language of essences, able to differentiate formal principles from subsequent social constructions. They must be able to reason in terms of analogy, rather than constantly wavering between univocal propositions and emotivist mystification. They must be able to interpret Scripture with fidelity to the historical sense unfettered by outmoded skeptical and higher critical presuppositions, but in expectation of a robust spiritual sense that escapes the reductionism of merely historical-critical or historical-grammatical exegesis. They must be able to understand “spiritual” as referring to the manifestation of divinely revealed realities, of manifest relationships between God and other people that might remain obscure to unaided natural reason, and to understand that as having the dimensions that the Church has long held Scripture to unfold: the sense relating to the manifestation of the People of God as those called to realize their union with Christ, their Head and Bridegroom; the sense relating to the individual need to be truly conformed to Christ, to live at the level of His calling; and the sense relating to the incipient fulfillment of all that faith proclaims and hope expects in Christ.
Only when the formation of teachers within the Church, and the formation of the faithful, actually conforms to sound exegetical principles and orthodox hermeneutical and catechetical methods will the faithful be able to see the reality of husband+wife and parent+child in their proper light, the light the Church has always proclaimed and that the Magisterium has continually reaffirmed. Only when the faithful can understand themselves as they really are will they be able to reason with the rest of the world on reasonable terms of committed dialogue (admitting that we come to the table with presuppositions, not as empty notepads) and appeal to common ground (expecting that observation of empirical and sociological evidence will eventually reveal both what is real and how it is distorted by subsequent social construction). And only when the faithful can understand themselves as they really are will they be able to commit themselves to truth, goodness, and beauty as united in Christ all the way to martyrdom without running ahead to foolish political extravagances and futile gestures of defiance or conciliation.
Instead, returning to my interpretation of “how does” as “what have I seen … doing,” I would say that in general I see a shoulder-shrugging fatalism about “secularized society” taken as a starting point for analysis, built on a series of mistakes that lead to “ideological colonization”: the confusion of sociological with empirical method, and thus the conflation of a wide variety of social constructions with “science” as though sociological observations of current habits were material and historical facts or features of Creation; a resulting tendency to treat only the invisible matters of faith, and at that only the interior ones, whether of individual motivation or social sentiment, as the proper domain of the spiritual and of authoritative teaching. Compounding this, the Church appears more afraid of being labeled “fundamentalist” by those hostile to all consequential religious teaching than of being considered unfaithful by Christ.
For all of that, there are many signs of hope! American Catholics seem to have been surprised awake by the Obama administration’s bafflingly unprovoked and consistent efforts to re-enact Bismarck’s Kulturkampf, marginalizing Christians generally and Catholics very specifically across the board. The response has been far too merely political, and rationalized using Enlightenment ideology that cannot actually suffice—that is, in fact, a contributor to the very “ideological colonization” which it should be our first priority to resist. There are efforts to teach, there are many of the faithful who are vocally refusing to be confused or bewildered by the uncertain sound of many dithering bishops in Europe, and there are many who are energized to “cast into the deep” in pursuit of greater holiness. There is a general, effectual resistance to the American regime’s support for abortion on demand, and a broad consensus that the slaughter of babies recognizeably moving, resisting pain, and learning language should be illegal—resisted only by certain hard-liners and the sclerotic politics of a decadent nation. If we are willing to teach our own the truth, and to commit ourselves to martyrdom on its behalf, there is every reason to think that God may yet send us days of joy and triumph.