Following the massive Yes vote in the referendum, a strong bout of Catholic atheism is definitively on the rise, though it has not yet reached the stage of an epidemic. As the words ‘Catholic’ and ‘atheism’ do not normally stand together an explanation is due.
There are at least three kinds of atheism. There is the philosophical or doctrinal one. Atheism becomes a religion while a dogma develops out of this unbelief. There are also the practical atheists who live their lives as if God does not exist. God does not feature anywhere in the decisions they make.
The third category is made up of Catholic atheists. They live their lives as if God is not concretely, centrally and victoriously present in human history. They believe that evil is triumphing over good, sin over grace.
Whenever they look around them they see all sorts of footsteps of the Evil One but not a shred of evidence of a living and triumphant God. They act as if sin has the upper hand; they almost get a perverse kind of pleasure out of listing all the sins of the new Babylon while being unable to point to one virtue.
These spiritual masochists emulate one episode from the Gospels and stretch it out to cover most of their life. This is the episode of Peter losing faith when confronted by stormy seas and crying out: “Lord, I am sinking”.
These Catholic atheists bear witness to an absent and defeated God and consequently they feel that all the world around them is sinking in the murky waters of sin. They act as if the Risen Lord and his Living Spirit are nowhere to be seen except in dark corners in churches and sacristies.
I think this brand of atheism is the worst kind of the three types mentioned.
I am not saying evil does not exist. Nor am I saying we should not reflect on the meaning of the Yes vote. What I am saying is that this reflection cannot stem from the mentality that everything is falling around us and that current culture and civilisation are on a large downward chute leading to depravity.
The Tablet on June 11 editorially took such a mentality to task, pointing to many footsteps of the Risen Lord in contemporary Europe. It noted that the underlying principles of the European project, the so-called ‘social market’, came largely from Catholic social teaching.
The long period of peace we have had in Europe is the result of a specifically Christian commitment by post-Second World War European statesmen. “Never before have so many European governments conducted themselves in accordance with the recognisably Christian principles of democracy, human rights and the rule of law.”
The editorial of The Tablet concluded:
“The result – in solidarity between nations, health, civil peace, racial tolerance and sexual equality, education, quality of life, care for the environment – has been extraordinary. Is this not a triumph of the human spirit that ought to be celebrated, not least by Christians? There is room for sympathetic criticism, but dire predictions of disaster are unhelpful and unfair.”
This is the spirit that should lead us forward. The Lord still walks our streets, and today he is a Risen Lord. We have to make His humane, loving and enlightening presence felt in every Areopagus that exists today by dialoging with the millions of men and women of goodwill that populate the world around us.
We are living in interesting times, not dismal ones.
joseph.borg@um.edu.mt