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COMMENTARY
February 22, 2012
To wear the ashes
Ash Wednesday is upon us again, visibly upon my faithful Christian readers of the western, Catholic inheritance, including all Protestant churches that claim succession from the old medieval trunk - Anglicans, Methodists, Lutherans, most Presbyterians, many Baptists, and those eastern, Orthodox Christians who follow the western rite. (The equivalent in the East is "Clean Monday," next week by the Julian calendar.)I provide this list, which one could fairly easily reconstruct from Wikipedia or a hundred other reference websites (many containing serious errors) not as a public service but to suggest the scale of the enterprise. The season of Lent, nearly invisible today, was once quite outward and apparent, throughout the West. In the "secular realm," where I write this column, that history is forgotten. Religion, according to the most advanced contemporary views, is a "private matter," along with brand preferences for coffee and shampoo, air miles accumulated, websites visited, sexual proclivities, and so forth. At most it is like "race" - a kind of stigma you were born with, and which is "not your fault," and might therefore require some reverse discrimination if, in the opinion of our bureaucratic masters, you belong to one of their scheduled "visible minorities." But so far as I can see, being Christian does not get you any points; you'd be better off playing your race card directly, if you have one. To many nominal Christians it anyway makes no difference. The number of people who state a Christian religious affiliation, in the rare cases when this is asked for in a survey, continues to amaze me. For they are the overwhelming majority. Perhaps their parents had that affiliation, or their immigrant grandparents. It is an ethnic badge. But the claimants are no more likely to be practising the religion than they are to be speaking the grandparents' foreign tongue. I was looking through some ecclesiastical statistics for the Archdiocese of Quebec - the successor to the old Apostolic Vicariate of New France, when our country was a missionary territory. This must have been precisely one year ago, for it was the day when Gérald Lacroix was appointed by Rome, archbishop of Quebec, and Primate of Canada. (Did gentle reader recognize the name?) By the numbers, Quebec is at least 83 per cent Catholic, and more than 90 per cent Christian. The number reporting "pagan" in the last survey I saw was 0.02 per cent. Yet this is passing strange, because I've looked at Quebec and could almost swear the figures must be the other way around. Attending Mass on Sunday is not an option for Roman Catholics, but an obligation, so we might get an idea of the number of practising Catholics by looking at that. From what I can infer from a variety of sources it is, in Quebec, less than 6 percent of the current population. The proportion of those who are "good Catholics" - who take their vocation beyond Sunday observance - I have no idea. The remaining 94-percent-plus must include many "nice people," but if they say they're practising Catholics, they're lying. Compare, if you will, church attendance in the 1950s, which by most accounts approached 90 per cent in Quebec. This included the mostly Protestant minority of anglophones, of course. A little more than half a century ago, Canada had huge, nationally organized United, Anglican, and Presbyterian congregations. Each of these "mainstream churches" has taken a similar hit, so that today the much smaller proportion of practising Christians is dominated by "evangelicals" of both the Protestant and Catholic varieties. In the latter case, a significant proportion of practising Catholics are converts, who could not possibly have been attracted by any prospect of worldly advancement, nor inspired by any Canadian church leader of whom I am aware. They enter a Church that is in ruins; and must arrive by the grace of God, for there is no better explanation. "That you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free." While we are used to getting the upbeat tone from church leaders in all congregations - that sick-making, public-relations blather I find especially irritating in sellout bishops - the Christian teaching begins instead in that assertion of Christ's. The truth may be extremely uncomfortable, and from many angles desolating, but it must be faced. We cannot build our lives or our churches upon pathetic lies. For the truth is indivisible. Little truths matter, as well as big. Little sins matter - hypocrisy matters - and the "either/or" is a choice between truth and falsehood, not a catalogue of "lesser evils." The way forward begins in the smallest of truths, in the here and now. It begins in ashes. Through Lent we are called upon - those who hear the call - to wear the ashes. To wear the truth of defeat and desolation, for there is no other position from which we can hope to rise. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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