You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hidden. Nor do people light a lamp and put it under a basket, but on a stand, and it gives light to all in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven.—Our Lord Jesus Christ in Saint Matthew 5:14-16.
Young Christians today claim they want an “aura” that “goes hard.” That’s good, but then why do boomer Catholic influencers still insist on being relevant? Older Catholic influencers may claim their “humanity is a bridge to Christ” yet their goofy “New Evangelization” is frequently just a lame attempt at being funny and relatable. They justify expensive colognes, off-color jokes and a constant attitude of people-pleasing in order to gain more followers.
Perhaps these older Catholic influencers do this to win Protestants to Catholicism. But they just end up looking like their tight-jeaned “emergent Church” counterparts who have aspired to be nothing more than junior-pastors with laser-beams and smoke machines. Sadly, some of the younger Catholics are also making this “relevance” mistake in their attempts at evangelization.
The ironic thing is that many decent evangelicals are done with the whole game of relevance. Like Protestant praise and worship, conservative Catholics are yet again twenty years behind the curve of general Christianity in America. In the early 2000s, Catholics learned praise and worship to win Protestants to Mass. But Life Teen just ended up playing Hillsong‘s overdone “Mighty to Save” in a manner much more slow and sloppy than any local evangelical community’s band was capable of doing. Again, I’m talking about conservative Catholics, not leftists or traditional Catholics.
Nowadays, Catholic influencers online may talk like Protestants in order to win Protestants to the Eucharist… and yet many of the most winnable Protestants (yes, I mean that word “winnable” very purposely) want those unusual stories of incorrupt saints and Eucharistic miracles. Not Theology of the Body girls in short-skirts tempting men while trying to make them laugh with giggly jokes and tired reels containing a sprinkling of hypocritical chastity talk.
I am not saying this needs to be an unending contest to see who can go mumbling about, looking at the floor as “God’s special club of weirdos” to show your parish how “holy” you are.
But I am saying that if we claim to follow a crucified slave, namely, Jesus Christ, then we may come to St. Paul’s conclusion that Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks—Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men.—1 Cor 1:22-23.
Yes, please do your best in learning Catholic apologetics, for the Holy Spirit says through St. Peter that you must always be prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you.—1 Peter 3:15. As I frequently say, “Apologetics may not win souls, but not knowing them will lose souls.” Thus, real apologetics are a great defense of the ancient faith. This is true, even if the Holy Spirit frequently uses charity for the conversion of unbelievers more than verse-wars over the Bible.
But notice in the quote from St. Paul two paragraphs above that the true Gospel may at times seem to be nothing more than “folly to the Gentiles.” This means if we have prayed and fasted and done our best to explain Apostolic Catholicism, some people will still reject it. Some things are beyond your control when you share the faith, even when you share it in a charitable manner. And if you’re rejected for telling a hard truth in charity, then you don’t have to come back to your listeners to make it more “relevant.”
The three greatest enemies to getting us to heaven are what the Council of Trent labels “the world and the flesh and the devil.” This is extrapolated from the writings of St. John the Apostle. So that pathway of the world can never really lead to Apostolic Catholicism any more than the pathway of the flesh or the devil.
For example, a priest wearing civvies instead of his clerics at a restaurant might reason he is more “accessible to the people.” Or, an online female influencer might admit to her girlfriends offline that her jeans are too tight, but this is how she can show the world that Catholics are not a bunch of stuffy holier-than-thous.
In the end, all of these strategies fail. Why? Because only God can convert souls. God doesn’t honor a theology that holds to the end justifying the means. God is not going to convert our friends by us committing sins of immodesty, strategic as we might think it is.
Rather, Christ insisted that true Christian salt is going to severely sting a rotten world: You are the salt of the earth, but if salt has lost its taste, how shall its saltiness be restored? It is no longer good for anything except to be thrown out and trampled under people’s feet.—Matt 5:13.
I know you’ve heard that line a thousand times at Mass, so don’t check out in boredom quite yet! Let’s briefly see what the Church Fathers say about it. St. Hilary of Poitiers wrote this about the above verse:
And thus are the Apostles, seeing that they are the preachers of the kingdom of heaven, and in a certain sense the sowers of the seed of life everlasting, since that Word of God which they scatter has power to make this mortal put on immortality. Rightly then are they called salt, the savour of whose teaching keeps sweet the receiver thereof even unto life everlasting. But the nature of salt is to be ever the same, and unchanging, and, on the other hand, the nature of man has this weakness—to be changeable. He only is blessed who has continued even unto the end in all the works which God has commanded. Therefore does the Lord warn them whom He call the salt of the earth, that they are charged to remain strong in that strength which He has given unto them, lest, becoming themselves savourless, they should be impotent to season others losing the freshness of their own saltness and be unable to stop the corruption around them.
Notice above that the false Christian will always aim towards that which the saint describes as changeable in the world. But the true Christian’s salt will reflect that which is unchangeable in doctrine, liturgy and lifestyle… above and beyond the current fashions of the world.
This means it’s completely impossible for a true Christian to make peace with the world or the flesh or the devil. Most lukewarm Catholics would admit they don’t want to make peace with the devil. But very few Catholics today want to be at war with the world. Most Catholics today think that making peace with the world in a state of “relevance” is how they enact the “New Evangelization.” Of course, they fail at both conversions and looking cool. This is because (ironically) nothing is more uncool than a Christian who wants to be admired by unbelievers.
St. Hilary himself faced the Arian crisis in the fourth century, so he knew Catholics were “charged to remain strong in that strength which Christ has given unto them.” But if Catholics were ever to aim for relevance instead of holiness, then they would be “unable to stop the corruption around them.”
Today, I keep finding that the Byzantine Divine Liturgy and the Roman Rite Traditional Latin Mass are currently growing so rapidly probably because they are transcendent, not relevant. The TLM is so attractive to young people precisely because it transports them to something other-worldly. It pulls them out of the shallowness inundating young people every hour at home, in school or online. In fact, now in the 21st century, the TLM may be that weird city on a hill that convicts and cleanses a world falling into all the traps of the world, the flesh and the devil.
The fact that the modernist heretics running the buildings incessantly persecute the TLM is all the proof you need to know that we traditionalists comprise a huge percentage of the very small percentage of Catholics still swimming upstream against the general apostasy. This is especially true, considering all world religions (except real Catholicism) are promoted by the modernists.
Heretics with miters want to play patty-cake all day with the world, but not with traditional Catholics. Why not? Because the latter convicts the former who they were originally called to be.
Again, I’m not saying we need to have a contest to see who can do the least amount of eye contact or shuffle about while mumbling about St. Thomas Aquinas. But I am saying that the world hungers for “fools for Christ” who swim upstream against all of the world and the flesh and the devil. Now, more than ever, this fleshy world of materialism strangely hungers for holiness more than relevance. This is especially found in tradition, so it might look a little more weird (or at least countercultural) than we all want to admit.
For I think that God has exhibited us apostles as last of all, like men sentenced to death, because we have become a spectacle to the world, to angels, and to men. We are fools for Christ’s sake, but you are wise in Christ. We are weak, but you are strong. You are held in honor, but we in disrepute. To the present hour we hunger and thirst, we are poorly dressed and buffeted and homeless, and we labor, working with our own hands. When reviled, we bless; when persecuted, we endure; when slandered, we entreat. We have become, and are still, like the scum of the world, the refuse of all things.—1 Cor 4:9-13.