A Catholic Approach to Problems

I suggest six characteristics to start a conversation about the Catholic approach to problems:

·         Responsive Actors

·         Collaboration Within Church

·         Person-Centered

·         Educative Intent

·         Slow, Not Stuck

·         Imagination and Infinite Desire

The first step in a Catholic approach to problems (CAP) should be rejection of the problem-solution framework. Replace it with reality-response thinking and you’ll begin to cultivate actors in instead of managers of the world. In The Mind of the Maker, Dorothy Sayers observed, “…the careless use of the words “problem” and “solution” can betray us into habits of thought that are not merely inadequate but false….They falsify our apprehension of life as disastrously as they falsify our apprehension of art.” As a problem, reality looms disastrously large and impenetrable. Its name is Legion, it is faceless and it can’t be beat. In actuality, we encounter those manifold factors of reality in person-sized doses to which we can actually respond constructively, lovingly, freely. Stepping down from the abstraction to the stage of action, we notice that, though all those factors are still present, our own tiny interior light now shows the many fibers of a dense and penetrable reality. We have but to take a tiny step, and the path begins to open.

A CAP should involve us as the Church, through membership in and collaboration with the Body of Christ, in designing responses to realities we face together. When I act, I should be conscious of being, as St. Pope John Paul called me, the ‘way of the Church’ – the means by which the Church acts in the world. This should mean that I respond, even if as an individual, in accord with the mind of the Church as expressed in her doctrines and teachings. To be able to respond, I must study and align with the Church. I must do the work of actually knitting the members of the Body together.

If we act or design initiatives together, we must first be a coherent, if imperfect, community. The world is to know us by our love for one another. Our unity with Christ is to be made visible as we serve others together. If we will not spend time weaving our real lives together into, as St. John Paul prayed during the Jubilee year, “communities of love, growing in Christ likeness,” the frayed fabric of ‘church’ will not support the weight of the world’s needs.

A CAP must be personalist. At the very least this means that we must keep (and help others to keep) the actual needs of real human persons at the center of all our initiatives in order to judge their effectiveness. This involves us in the turbulence and tension of competing goods instead of leaving us smugly invested in the subset of goods we find it easiest to give. We should be challenged to find the bent-ness, brokenness, need, pain, deformity, and worldliness of the world within the microcosm of self, family, and Catholic community. Only then will we beg God to send the comfort the world needs first to, then through us. God’s strength is made perfect in our weakness (1 Cor. 12:9). We are not problems to be solved, but realities. God’s response moves into the world through the subjective, intensely personal reality of one person, to another.

A CAP should be educative. We must recognize the reality of the ‘student’s’ limited capacity to receive, and condescend in love to communicate at his level – without violating the truth. This education must operate in two directions at once. We must ‘teach’ the Church about the realities we face – the cries for God’s response that resonate through our own wounds. We must learn what secular influencers are teaching, sift and honor all the truth we find there, and apply the constant, gentle pressure of interested Catholic critique. We can make excellent corrective material available to Catholics, who may then become bridges to those who respect the work of these popular authors. (For example: Jordan Peterson, Atul Gawande, Brene Brown, Matthew Crawford, Seth Grodin)

We must educate one another in our areas of special interest, so as to multiply the investment we each make in our own continuing education. Some of us may thus make difficult Catholic material more accessible and widely known, or share with others the access our own expertise grants to areas of thought now often sequestered in ivory towers. We must work to antidote the effect of the many lies circulating in the culture, speaking truth to the powers that exercise control over weak minds by manipulative or deceitful use of words. We need to ask questions like, “What are the characteristics of our ‘students’ that interfere with understanding and accepting our message?” and “How is the culture responding to human desires and needs – educating and forming persons – and how well?”

For instance, we might share book digests, offer each other seminars, blog and podcast, convene book study groups, create great explainer videos, co-author tourist guides to the symbolism, art and architecture in our churches, or just share great quotes and articles with friends. People of the Word can make a vitally important contribution to the restoration of hope to those demoralized by the scope of problems they want to solve.

A CAP should be slow, but not stuck: slow enough to begin and end in words fitly spoken, to wait while we wait upon the Lord, to waste time building relationship (among ‘us’ and with ‘them’), to result in small (even symbolic) generative seeds of action, to be filled with freedom and draped in love.

A CAP should be imaginative. Just because (especially because!) God will do more than all we ask or imagine (Eph. 3:20), we should not fail in engaging our imaginations in the service of response to reality. If Elon Musk can get rockets into orbit using 10x thinking, the Church might find its 100-fold thinkers and get them busy cultivating the infinite desire that corresponds, as Fr. Giussani teaches, to God’s resources instead of to our own.

These are a few characteristics of a Catholic response to the realities we find ourselves facing together as the Body of Christ. They are meant to help the Church to cultivate and then mobilize free agents who understand themselves as vital channels of communication – of grace, of goods, of information, and of Christ. We actors distributed all over the world like nerve endings – keep the Church informed and responsive. Where we are, real-ly, light dawns and the Kingdom comes.

This article first appeared in St. Austin Review.