The Church Somnolent

By Robert Royal. But first a note: The Church needs to be woke - in the right way, as explained below - and here at TCT we're working on it. If you'd like to see that happen too, now's the time to help us move things along. We're in the last days of our funding campaign this week. We know you come here because you value what we do. What are you waiting for? Now for today's column... Among the many things that the current Church seems no longer awake to is a crucial trinity: the Church Militant, the Church Penitent, and the Church Triumphant. If you didn't learn about those three growing up, they're not so hard to understand. The Catechism of the Catholic Church puts it, simply, under the rubric The Communion of the Church of Heaven and Earth: "The three states of the Church. 'When the Lord comes in glory, and all his angels with him, death will be no more, and all things will be subject to him. But at the present time some of his disciples are pilgrims on earth. [i.e., Church Militant] Others have died and are being purified [i.e., Church Penitent], while still others are in glory [i.e., Church Triumphant], contemplating 'in full light, God himself triune and one, exactly as he is.'" It's worth noting, among other notables in this passage, that the Church Militant is not just out for a stroll; it's headed in a definite direction and, given the threats within and without, is engaged in what used to be called spiritual combat. It would be hard to say that the recent focus on "walking together" gets all that. The Church Militant pilgrimage includes much more than endless conversation, in which the process itself is more important than the final destination. It's about the literal - and in the deepest possible sense - struggle to arrive, in the end of time, at the unity of Heaven and Earth. All this used to be understood as the very reason for the Faith and the Lord's coming into the world, as we will remember at Christmas: to redeem us from sin and death. Perhaps the present writer has spent too much time lately contemplating the eccentricities in Rome. But all this came, unbidden, to mind when I saw recently that Pope Francis, as part of his Borgo Laudato Sì Project is building an "eco-village" near Castel Gandolfo for the 2025 Jubilee. That eco-village will provide an "immersive experience" in order "to share with as many people as possible the beauty that there is in caring for creation." I'm a fervent believer in the general direction of Pope Francis's efforts at an integral human ecology, which is to say, waking people up (the right way to be "woke") from the obsession with screens to the fact that we live within a Creation, an order designed by God. And as many saints and sages have remarked, that order teaches us about the Creator and about ourselves as creatures. Indeed, what we call "nature" has sometimes been referred to as God's second book of revelation - properly understood - alongside His fuller revelation in the Scriptures. But it's in the specifics, as opposed to the general direction, that my worries begin about the eco-village. One report, for instance, explains: Trees will guide the visitors through the park, [Donatella Parisi, communication coordinator of Laudato Si Higher Education Center] said. They will be greeted by Mathusalem, a 700-year-old oak. "Trees have a lot to teach us about human relations," she said, pointing to how they communicate in a horizontal model and warn each other of threats. Really? Any lover of Tolkien - indeed, any human being who loves the world - should appreciate anything at this juncture in human history that wakes us up to the beauty and value of trees and everything growing on earth. But you can already feel the straining towards a manufactured, almost ideological significance here. Yes, love trees. But as teachers about "human relations"? And it doesn't stop there. We're told that "the Borgo will teach vulnerable groups - including migrants and refugees, former prisoners, d...