Our vocation among the elites in First World societies
I was at my 25th college reunion this past weekend, and my collar got a lot of attention. You’re a priest! That’s a surprise. How’d that happen? As you do when you have to talk about yourself over and over, you package your story so that your life sounds like it has a clean narrative. I decided to become a priest in Boston, even though I’m not from Boston, because I had wanted to be a university chaplain, that actually I felt being one a was a part of my vocation to the priesthood, and that the Boston area has a lot of universities, so it seemed a fit. I said that a lot. But with a few classmates who had grown up to be more interesting people (at least to me) than they were when we were all in college, some conversations went deeper.
One evangelical Christian who’s a professor at a med school in California wondered, Isn’t it hard to spread the Gospel not just at a place like MIT, but in Boston after the scandals and all that? And I said, yes, but that’s why it’s worth it. Just like it’s worth it to spread the Gospel in a place like LA. From there the conversation broadened to discuss how to do Christian apostolate today.
The Church already knows how to evangelize pagan cultures which have not yet heard the Gospel, and primitive cultures, where the missionaries and clergy are among the most educated people in society (and therefore are impressive in worldly terms). In the U.S., the Church knows how to take in immigrants and help them make progress here, both spiritually and as productive citizens. We’ve done these things before, there’s an existing playbook, and so that sort of apostolate just involves making a few tweaks to adjust to the new immigrant groups, and from there it’s just a matter of organization and will.
What we’ve not figured out how to do is evangelize a post-Christian or post-Catholic culture, a culture that believes it has heard the Gospel already, that is bored by Christianity and has moved beyond it, a modern and intellectual place like France or Boston. And unless we crack that nut, unless we can re-evangelize the First World, all our successes in the Third World will be rolled back as over time people from those cultures progress and they too come to think that they’re too educated and sophisticated to believe in Christianity.
So that’s one way to look at our vocation today. God has given us the opportunity to be in a post-Christian society, to be at elite places like modern universities, so that we can run experiments on our friends and colleagues, testing different approaches to discover the best ways to help them encounter the Gospel with fresh eyes. We have to have as a part of our prayers, that all the people around us, including those who seem farthest away or most hardened, may come to know what Christianity really is; and that at least some of them may come to share our faith. That’s the task of Christians who find themselves with access to modernity’s elites.
