The Church’s Manliness Problem

A Few Thoughts...

Photo by Josh Applegate on Unsplash

The Roman Catholic Church today has more problems than it can count. That’s the bad news. The good news is that the Church has often had more problems than it can count. Deep trouble seems to be a common state of affairs for the Catholic Church, and yet it always seems to avoid ruin. One might even be tempted to conclude that, despite all the failings of the flawed human beings who run it, the Church is constantly rescued and renewed by a higher power.

I’d like to consider the crisis nearest and dearest to my heart: the Church’s manliness problem. It doesn’t know what to do with manly types.

Any observer could look upon the Church and not unreasonably determine it to be an institution for women, seniors, children, and maybe a few bureaucrats. What Leon Podles said of all modern American churches is no less true of Catholic ones: they are essentially “women’s clubs with a few male officers.” “All are welcome!” we repeatedly hear—except it’s not at all clear that those with heroic longings and top-20% testosterone levels have any business here.

As a result, spirited men are increasingly likely to turn elsewhere for their religious longings—to paganism, to Islam, or to the Eastern Church. What’s even more distressing is the nonchalance with which many Catholics meet this fact, as though it’s much of a problem. But it’s a big problem. I don’t know why we think we can do without spirited men. We need them.

If we are going to fix this, we need to start with a good accounting of why we find ourselves in this mess. Let us be the kind of men who don’t just gripe for the sake of griping but instead have an eye toward understanding the problem and fixing it. With that said, I want to look at a few reasons why the Church alienates spirited men—not a comprehensive list, just a few thoughts.

1) The rage to “update,” “modernize,” and become more “accessible” has been a total disaster.

Despite the proclamation of our recent reformers that we need to “engage the culture,” the changes of the last half century seem to amount mostly to a relaxing of standards. Wayward shepherds insisted the faithful wanted this. One staggers at the impoverishment of understanding on the part of these shepherds if they think that’s how human beings actually work. It might be what people say they want, but it’s not what they actually want. Real men are hit hardest by this relaxation of standards. They long for high standards, not ease and accommodation. They take low standards to be an implied insult. Pandering is something a real man despises.

Fasting is one of the most obvious examples. Once upon a time, the Church demanded that the faithful fast 2x/week. Now we fast twice a year. And those fasts are pretty undemanding: one meal with two “collations” or snack-meals amounts to a minor inconvenience. If fasts make a man formidable—and they do—our Church seems unwilling to ask men to be formidable.

The rage to update also spells the dismissal of the beautiful history and tradition and liturgy that might have made the Church uniquely capable of countering the ugliness and idiocy of the modern consumer existence. Instead we are now looking at a classically beautiful woman who deliberately tries to uglify herself with the most unflattering procedures and fashions. And all the while we are told that she is making herself ugly because we wanted her that way.

The Church has lost confidence in its right to ask anything of people. A lack of confidence is never an attractive thing. Why would men want to follow a commanding officer who apologizes whenever asking anything of his men?

2) Christians are terribly confused about the term “meek.”

We all know Jesus calls us to be meek in the Sermon on the Mount. The problem is that we don’t we don’t know what meek means. We know it rhymes with weak. We know that people increasingly use it as a synonym for weak. We know the dictionary seems to confirm this. But this understanding is a recent development which inserts a different meaning into Jesus’ mouth than the one he actually uttered.

Jesus does not mean we should be weak. Meekness is instead the check a man places on his anger so that it doesn’t own him. He doesn’t deny it, suppress it, or wish it away, but he does assert that his better judgment will prevail and not his hot temper. According to Aquinas, meekness “restrains the onslaught of anger” and “properly mitigates the passion of anger.” The meek, according to Msgr Pope “are those who have authority over their anger, who can command and control its power, moderating and directing its energy to good rather than destructive ends.”

Meekness is unequivocally good. And, contrary to the degraded modern understanding of it, meekness serves the purpose of making a man strong. He who is controlled by his anger is easily provoked, easily sidetracked, burning his energy on trivialities. In other words: he is weak.

But the overemphasis on meekness has lead us astray because overemphasis leads to distortions and rips a virtue out of the larger context of virtues.

3) Similarly, we have lost all concept of magnanimity.

I find people look puzzled whenever I use this word. “Magna-what?”

Magnanimity means great-heartedness. A person is magnanimous, in the words of Josef Pieper, “if he has the courage to seek what is great and becomes worthy of it.” Both Aristotle and Aquinas call this the “jewel of all virtues.” Magnanimity orients us toward the greatest possibilities.

Spirited men need to hear the call of greatness, and they need to know that the Faith encourages these ambitions rather than scolding them. But, like anything, proper direction is needed. Perhaps the most important thing to understand about magnanimity is that it is a tandem virtue to humility, not a contradiction of it. Just as humility protects us from presumption, magnanimity guides us away from laziness, complacency, and despair—that vortex of viciousness which once went by the term acedia. Humility and magnanimity cooperate to keep us directed toward what is both attainable and great.

The Church has sabotaged its appeal to spirited men by frowning on talk of greatness and attaching suspicions of pride to it. We must understand that pride is not the only danger in the spiritual life, especially not in our time. Despair and laziness are every bit as dangerous—and this is why magnanimity is so crucial, especially now.

Please understand: as sons of the Living God, you are called to greatness. Anything less is beneath you.

Conclusion

The time for complaining is long past. We need now to seek to understand why we find ourselves in these troubles, as I’ve tried to do here, however incompletely. And then we need to work toward solutions. Next time I will aim to offer a few proposals for fixing this brokenness. Spoiler: it is time to Make Catholicism Lionhearted Again.