Rebuilding Catholic Culture, Ryan Topping - Summer 2020
Introduction to this blog.
I’ve resolved to start keeping a blog about the non-fiction books that I’m reading. Here I’ll offer something like a summary, critique, recommendation, or reflection about a book that I just finished. They will be BRIEF. I have a timer running on this task (literally) I must complete each entry in 90 minutes spread over three days. This blog will help me synthesize and (hopefully) retain what I have read and might serve as a source of recommendation for good things to read. My current reading pace is approx 80 pages per week, and I read a mix of theology/ministry books. So, now you know what to expect.
Rebuilding Catholic Culture: How the Catechism Can Shape our Common Life
Ryan N.S. Topping - Manchester, NH. Sophia Institute Press, 2012
Author, Ryan Topping with the cover art for this book.
This may seem like a strange book for me (your plain-old Protestant preacher) to pick up. Admittedly, it is one I would have never pulled off the shelf at a book store, but it was recommended by my very good friend, Daniel Cummings, Esq. This is a 240-page book that is on the borderline between an academic and popular level work. It was an enjoyable, enlightening, and inspiring read that i am glad to have picked up.
Thesis (SUMMARIZED:
Catholic culture has been in some state of decline since the post-enlightenment era, and this decline has accelerated in the Catholic Church with certain developments relating to the (mis)implementation of the Vatican II council.
The Church must cease the improper compromise of humility that it has displayed in the face of modern and post-modern culture and be more confident/assertive with the traditional worldview/praxis (culture) of Christ’s Church
The Catholic Catechism, divided into 8 sections, provides the best structure through which a rebuilding of Catholic Culture can be proposed.
Reflections
Introduction
My favorite part of the whole book was the introduction. Not because the rest of the book was bad, but because of the ambitious and fresh claim that Topping makes there. His challenge to the church is to go on the cultural offensive in what he describes as a reversal centuries-long trend towards retreat. Here’s where i’ll drop some of the best quotes from the book on you:
(on the true effect of the Faith in the development of western civilization) Once the faith took root in the West its effect was not like a weed where soil is robbed and light choked, but as a lilac tree, emitting a fragrance and atmosphere within which culture has flourished. The Catholic claim is that faith makes you truly human; nobler, more just, lovelier than you could have been otherwise. And not only you and me. Nations likewise are elevated by their contact with this living creed. the faith defines and so limits through through its dogmas, its institutions, its traditions, but by these the faith also liberates. By imposing limits faith frees through and action from futility and can render them divine. (Introduction, xxii)
Thus Catholic culture refers to that excellence in thought and manner of life which properly accrues to a people, namely, the Church. .. touching as it must upon the artistic, economic, philosophical, and communal dimensions of existence…
For a generation already, Christians in the developed nations have lived amid the rubble of a ruined culture. The long litany of indicators - the collapse of religious life, vanishing church attendance, banal liturgies, abortion – are familiar enough on our horizon. We in the North Atlantic nations marvel at the fantastic growth of the Church in the South. Missionary priests now come to us. We wonder how this happened. Whatever the causes of this decline, What Catholics in Western nations most lack is not goodwill; nor have we – until recent days – lacked political freedom or money. What we lack is confidence. We lack confidence in the World-transforming character of our creed; we lack confidence in the potency o the faith to shape and redefine the culture of an aggressive modernity that confronts it. (introduction, xxiv)The Church in the west must learn anew how to master and muster the resources of its own tradition. This will be done not through endless accommodation to contemporary thought but through renewal and recovery of its own mind. And in those parts of Western culture where the Church is making advances, this is what she has done. No other institution has been thinking about thinking as long as the church has. Intellectual humility is a great good, but self-imposed humiliation before our medical, moral, and political masters is unbecoming. (Introduction, xxvi)
Vatican II
One area of insight for me, as a plebeian protestant reading this book, was a glimpse into the battle or dialog over how the catholic church regards and implements the hugely important Church council, Vatican II (1962-65). Within this book you’ll find Topping navigation a fine line by which he endorses and adopts the documents of the council, but decries the post-conciliar developments in the Catholic Church resulting by what some leaders in the Church have enacted while claiming this council as their licence. Topping assigns much of the decline of the North American and European Catholic Church over the last several decades to these misappropriated changes that resulted from The Council. These ill born progressive readings of the council lead to a multi-directional departure (or trajectory change) from tradition in the Church which gave modern and post-modern secular society/philosophy/art/architecture (i.e. culture) undue influence over the thought and praxis of the Church which has shown to be destructive.
By my own observation of the narrative which Topping provides, I wonder if the out-of-control effects of the council occurred because the readers of the conciliar documents possessed a far lesser familiarity-with, and affinity-for, the millennia-long tradition of the Church which should have* served as the guide-rails and firm-foundation for the implementation of Vatican II. Where these men who authored the document had thoroughly internalized that background, they confidently built upon it in such a way that assumed it would remain. What they produced was picked up by those who had not-so-thoroughly internalized this long tradition and thus used as licence to depart from Church dogma/tradition in a way that the authors would not have considered.
Path Forward
I can feel myself butchering this paragraph before i even write it. Just read the book. Topping’s vision for a path forward is a remaking of internal Catholic practice and thought in the shape it had before it was illegitimately subjected to the rule of modern and postmodern culture. His reforms are inward pointed changes to Church practice and thought which are meant to fix the compression in the sputtering engine of 21st-Century North American and European Catholicism. His path forward reads similar to Josiah’s temple cleansing. He is advocating for a restoration and, in some sense, an exorcism. He does this by marching through the eight sections of the catechism, Identifying where the Church has lost its way in that particular area, and imagining what it might look like to have that particular sphere restored. Again - these reforms are internal. Topping does not envision a culture war on the steps of a capitol building or outside CNN. His front-line is somewhere between or within the narthex and the apse. His vision is that these internal reforms are what will propel the Church forward and outward.
“I conclude with a strategy with four components. Let us end abortion; have more children; teach them Latin; and build better churches. These correspond, so it seems, to the most pressing social, educational, political, and liturgical needs of the Church in West” (page 236)
RECOMMENDATION
This book is a wonderful tool for two purposes:
A reflection on and inspiration for the challenge of the Christian faith to assert itself confidently against a society which expects it to cower quietly in the corner.
an exploration of how the Church’s thought and practice has been damaged by the undue influence of secular society, and what it might look like if we attempt to recover the culture of the Church which conquered the world.
There are distinctly Catholic elements to the latter (as one might expect from the title). However, these can be reformed (see what i did there) with relative ease to applications for Protestant Church leaders and thinkers. Doing so, will not only provide important insights for one’s own ministry, but confer a healthy dose of mostly endearing information about our brother in the faith - the Catholic Church. I believe it is a worthwhile exercise for those who wish to consider how to shape the future of the Church in our world.