Reflections Upon the Passage of Issue 1 in light of the Feast of St. Leo the Great

Legend alleges that when Atilla the Hun marched upon Rome after invading Italy and sacking Milan, Pope St. Leo the Great rode out alone to confront him. At Leo’s command, Atilla reversed his barbarian hordes, and left Europe. Leo’s courage seems inconceivable today. We are afraid to share our faith with the clerk in the grocery store check-out line (if we are even brave enough to shop for groceries in person, rather than avoid human contact altogether and use Instacart), let alone single-handedly confront an entire army of rapists and murderers. 

Leo did confront the enemy army single-handedly, nor was he the only saint to have done so. St. Claire likewise repelled a marauding horde. Though less momentous, but with equal courage, St. Teresa Benedicta (Edith Stein) boldly and simply replied “Praised be Jesus Christ” to the Gestapo officer’s greeting of “Heil Hitler” when she was summoned to the headquarters of the SS.

History remembers Leo primarily as a scholar. He wrote the Tome of Leo which defined the orthodox doctrine of the Incarnation. He knew Who Jesus is. Further, he knew who the Church is; he was instrumental in developing the orthodox doctrine of the papacy. And importantly, he knew who he was and what he was called to be: a Christian. That enabled him not only to know doctrine about Christ, but also to make Christ’s life present in the world in and through his own. And he taught his flock that they all shared that responsibility and that dignity: Christhood.

The saints act with courage because they know who they are. They have an identity. They can face down an army because they are who they know themselves to be. This gives them conviction and steadfastness. They are not conflicted nor confused within. They say what they mean, and they mean what they say, and that interior harmony and coherence resonates with the structure of being itself in a meaningful and powerful way. 

On the other hand, when human beings do not know what and who they are, they act without resoluteness and influence, sometimes substituting the facade of tyrannical force for real authority, and are themselves easily dissuaded from action, and convicted of their inability, and paralyzed by doubt, because the internal conflict vitiates their will. External influences capture and exacerbate the dissonance within.

It is cliché to speak of crises in the world today. Furthermore, it is cliché to speak of an identity crisis. But it remains true, nonetheless. The crisis which we face today is a crisis of identity. St. Leo the Great knew who he was. We do not. And therein is the true crisis. The fault does not lie with the radical left. It does not lie with the transgender provocateurs. 

In fact, I would submit that the transgender movement hits closer to the mark than traditionalistically* minded Catholics. St. John Chrysostom once said, “if Christians were real Christians, there would be no pagans in the world.” 

The problem we face today is not increasing paganism. It is not the barbarian hordes.  It is not deceptive and manipulative propaganda. The barbarian hordes can be repelled by a single person who knows himself and remembers his dignity. The problem for the world today is that the people who should be confronting the barbarian hordes are the ones who are most confused of all, and the people they could be helping feel lost and resentful as a result.

The barbarians have a better grasp on their own identity than the self-proclaimed Christians do. It is real. The barbarians are unimaginably lost, broken, and suffering. Their lives are a living Hell. And they know it. Their cross-gender hormones and surgeries and therapies enact this visceral hellishness in an embodied way. They are right to say that they are questioning, queer, and confused. When they say that they don’t know fundamental elements of their personal existence–like whether they are a man or woman– they are being honest. Hell acknowledges no such distinctions, and they are suffering something akin to Hell. They might be able to offer an intellectual definition of a woman, or they might not, but that’s really beside the point. 

The fact of the matter is that without God, only nothingness and chaos reign. Therefore, those who live as if God does not exist, and express confusion about their identity are consistent and honest. 

In contrast to this honesty, self-proclaimed Christians have become increasingly confused and conflicted. It should come as no surprise that Christians have been unable to defeat ballot initiatives such as Ohio’s Issue 1. Only 17% of Catholics in America go to Mass. Of that 17%, 87% believe that contraception is morally acceptable. 

Of the faithful few who go to Mass on Sunday and adhere to the Church’s teaching on contraception, the vast majority still bind themselves to serious habitual sin, especially those who seek to compensate for their addictions by their professed allegiance to traditionalism. They do not live like Christians; they do not know who they are. 

St. John the Apostle writes, “We know that anyone born of God does not continue to sin; the One who was born of God keeps them safe, and the evil one cannot harm them.” Yet so-called Christians continue to sin, and worse yet, they blame the problems of the world on sinners other than themselves. 

Yet as Pope St. Pius the Fifth said, “all the problems of the world are due to lukewarm Catholics.” One either earnestly strives for sanctity, or succumbs to apathy. In the latter case, any attempts at evangelization fail at accomplishing anything more than signaling the false virtue of the pseudo-evangelizer.

We have forgotten what Pope Leo said: “Christian, remember your dignity, and now that you share in God’s own nature, do not return by sin to your former base condition. Bear in mind who is your head and of whose body you are a member. Do not forget that you have been rescued from the power of darkness and brought into the light of God’s kingdom.”

The ancient Church transformed the world because the culture knew that Christians would help anyone in distress. They started hospitals, they cared for the sick and the infirm, and their charity exerted such an influence that pagan Rome persecuted the Church to protect her power from the competing influence of Christian philanthropy. Christians did not publicly or politically condemn or even seek to change the state and the culture; that happened as a byproduct of Christians living like Christians.

Again, Pope St. Leo exhorts us: “Christian, remember your dignity.” If we did so, we could really be Christians. Instead, we are too satisfied by flaunting inanely tautological questions such as “what is a woman?” to demonstrate our superiority over those who are in pain and sincerely and profoundly confused. 

Rather than reaching out an olive branch of understanding and consolation, traditionalistically minded Christians settle for virtue-signaling and self-congratulation. But the reality is that such virtue-signaling and enemy-blaming only intensifies the real problem: the self-deception and refusal to acknowledge one’s own suffering in light of the dissonance between the private lives of the self-identified so-called Christian and the standard set for him by Christ. 

There’s a documentary that is very popular among traditionally-minded Christians called “What is a Woman?” One of the themes of the documentary is that the leftists cannot define what a woman is. Fair enough. 

But it is more important for us to ask ourselves that question. If a Christian knew what a woman really is, he wouldn’t sin. If men knew what a woman really is, they would hold themselves to a higher standard of purity than they do. And if women knew what it meant to be a woman, they would set the world on fire as St. Catherine of Siena did. 

The woman is the ideal; she is the Beatrice of the society, the beauty that inspires courage and the selflessness of purity and sacrifice. Jesus calls Mary, His Mother, “Woman,” to identify her, the sinless one, as the Woman who is the ideal of beauty and virtue. How a society treats women reveals the moral stature of that society. 

To really know what a woman is, therefore, means to set the highest ideal of beauty and courage and self-sacrifice as the standard for personal existence. Evidently, people who claim to be Christians, and yet sin, do not know what a woman is. If they really knew, they wouldn’t sin. Still more fundamentally, Christians ought to be asking themselves, “What is a Christian,” and remember their dignity.

The real identity crisis in the world is that the self-proclaimed confused people are more honest than the people who claim to know all the answers. And thus, the sin of these Pharisees remains, because they say that they know, as the Pharisees of the Gospels said that they saw.

Jesus did not come into the world to condemn sinners but to allow Himself to be condemned by them. When with a sinner, he did not ask questions like “what is a woman, anyway?” but instead took their pain and suffering onto Himself. Christians were real Christians should let the light of their charity shine in the darkness instead of suppressing it under the bushel of self-deceit. Then, instead of thinking of them as judgmental, people who suffer brokenness and confusion could see Christians as the people from whom to seek help. 

Only when Christians again become the compassionate witnesses in the world of the mercy which they have received, will they then be able to authentically and powerfully confront the barbarian hordes. Not only confront, but convert them. 

And so, the Church in Ohio lost Issue 1, and will continue to lose, for as long as the identity crisis continues. We must learn to self-identify as sinners, who have been set free and made Children of God. There is no real culture war. There are not good guys and bad guys. There are only sinners who are lost and do not know the way, and sinners who were lost but have been shown the way. The latter must assist the former, not by separating themselves from them through divisive blaming but uniting themselves to them in recognition of the common brokenness of all.

Only when Christians remember their dignity, and the mission of Christ to seek and to save what was lost, by sanctifying Himself, can Christians exert the influence that the saints possess. And only with such influence can the world be made better. Without Christians sanctifying themselves, the situation results in the blind condemning the blind. And it is no wonder that in such circumstances the Church loses all credibility.

The war between good and evil is real, but it is not in society. The culture war is a façade; the real war rages within. As Alexandr Solzhenitsyn wrote, “the line between good and evil passes through each human heart.” 

Christians who “fight the culture war” are merely another symptom of the evil–the evil that seeks to avoid bearing personal responsibility by shifting guilt to others. The war is not in the culture, nor is it between cultures. The war is within each human heart. 

There is no enemy outside of self. The war is fought by repentance and won by personal sanctity. Recruits are made by the contagious influence of the inflamed human heart speaking to another heart and enkindling it from the common flame. If the war is fought on the level of society and politics, it is already lost, and only contributes to further and deeper defeat. The battles are not in the polls and the ballot boxes, but in the eyes that weep and the hands that soothe and the hearts that forgive.

Put another way, the barbarian hordes are within. Within the self there is turmoil, confusion, exile, rebellion, self-deception, and tumult. 

To face and confront this chaos, and win it over to peace, the tranquility of order, requires the heroic courage and compassion of a saint. If and when we achieve the tranquility of order within ourselves, then we will have begun to achieve the destiny of our identity as Christians, other Christs, the Children of God. May we always remember and act according to our dignity as sharers in the Divine Nature and thus heal and reconcile the lost and broken hordes.

*I fabricate this word “traditionistically” intentionally to distinguish the attitude I am critique from that of reverence for tradition. It is one thing to be traditional; to be a Christian requires a reverence for what has been handed down. In contrast, traditionalism is an ideology which substitutes structures for truth.