Catholic Culture Part 3
Author Alex Long
Father preached pretty recently about the importance of recreating a distinct Catholic culture. I wanted to unpack that a little bit, because there's a lot there.
In the first part I explained what Catholic culture is. In the second I talked about it as a tool for the New Evangelisation. In this third post I'll talk about it as a way of preserving our own faith.
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If Catholic culture has an outward-facing evangelistic purpose, it also has an inward-facing formative purpose.
For most of history, humans have been super busy. Between wars, famines, plagues, and eking a living from the soil, most people had little or no time for culture. Visual art and music were encountered in church on Sundays, and that was mostly it. Generally speaking, it wasn’t until the market revolution and the Victorian literacy boom (thanks to Christian advocates who brought free public education to the working class in England and America) that regular people in the West became consumers of culture.
The situation we’re in now, two hundred-ish years later, is historically unheard of. We have way way way more time on our hands. Which isn’t a bad thing. We should be grateful for accomplishments in medicine and technology that make our lives longer and less difficult. But, these advances do create a vacuum in how we spend our time. Without good cultural artifacts to fill that leisure time, and to direct our thoughts in a positive direction, pointless distractions and toxic junk can gain a foothold in our heads.
My marketing studies talked about the modern “attention economy” where most people are exposed to more voices vying for their attention than their brain can handle. And most of those voices are bad. Political extremism, pornography, violent video games, and vapid lifestyle and entertainment videos on TikTok and Youtube are designed to waste hours of our day, and they can be as addictive as narcotics. They’re available to most of us for free on phones we carry around everywhere, which is a degree of exposure to near-occasions of sin that our spirits are unprepared for. So it’s important to protect ourselves by keeping our minds focused on things that are good for us.
Also-
Catholicism requires a type of thought that people whose spirits have been formed by commercials, political rants on Facebook, video games, and dance competitions on TikTok can’t accomplish. People don’t just reject Catholicism because they disagree with specific teachings, they reject it because they can’t process it. If we don’t find better things to fill our minds with, that teach it how to think logically and lovingly, not only will we lose the ability to evangelize others, but we risk losing the capacity to remain Catholic ourselves.
