The Church Militant: Semper Parata?

Preparedness is the native stance of any organization which knows its ultimate purpose. Many famous persons and institutions are well known and regarded for their ability to tackle various challenges, in accord with rigorous training and discipline. To be truly prepared is to be ready for any eventuality that may arise, no matter how unlikely, no matter how remote. It should come as no surprise that most our maxims for preparedness come from martial contexts. Si vis pacem, para bellum, is of course the famous Roman maxim: ‘if you desire peace, prepare for war’. The United States’ Coast Guard motto, Semper Paratus, ‘Always Prepared’, also embodies the noble stance of guarding the borders of one’s country from those who would harm its citizens. Preparedness not only helps us to avoid disaster, but helps keeps us engaged in a common cause even when the threat level is low.

This morning an article in the Wall Street Journal appeared which asks the question, If War Comes, Will the U.S. Navy Be Prepared? I have been asking myself that question repeatedly as I hear the latest stories from young men and women who serve in our Armed Forces, especially those whose Nuptial Masses I have celebrated prior to a long deployment. If stories coming out of the military, one of the last bastions of discipline and institutional honor, are true, then we are all greatly impoverished as a nation, and will rue the day we allowed the fighting side of our civilization to lose its edge. As I wrote on my essay on the Israeli concept of ‘Rosh Godol‘ in the military, all institutions are always in need of individuals with big ideas and even bigger virtues in order to carry them forward. The U.S. Navy is only the most recent victim of the ‘risk-insurance complex’. The Church has long since been the victim, with similarly dire consequences.

Just like our aforementioned Latin maxims on preparedness, there is Ecclesia semper reformanda est, which may be translated ‘the Church must always be reforming.’ The Church, lest we forget, is a society with a martial element. It is no mistake, then, that the Church on earth is called the Church militant. In that vein, it makes sense to say that the Church’s stance must also be Semper Parata: always prepared for the ‘marching orders’ given to her by her founder, Our Lord Jesus. Yet the parallels between the contemporary Church and the contemporary military are extremely significant, and also very troubling.

The first thing militating against our universal preparedness for mission is the fear of error and human frailty. The WSJ article by Kate Bachelder Odell has a paragraph which is very illuminating, and worth quoting in full:

Commanders have less authority and brutal accountability…sailors expressed “near universal disdain” for a “one mistake Navy” that defenestrates leaders who make an error. It’s a “drag on retention, lethality and morale.” Former Navy Secretary John Lehman ticks off in the report the five-star generals who won World War II and their mistakes: Bill Halsey “was constantly getting in trouble for bending the rules or drinking too much”; Chester Nimitz “put his first command on the rocks”; Ernie King was “a womanizer.” They were punished at times, but Navy leadership always realized “these were very, very promising” officers. None, he concludes, could have made it past captain in today’s Navy.

If War Comes, Will the U.S. Navy Be Prepared? By Kate Bachelder Odell

Ever since the rise in the use of psychology and psychotherapy in the 1960s, the Church has slowly but steadily adapted to an anthropology and an understanding of the Priesthood that is more secular and less Biblical than ever before. Although the tools of psychology are helpful to determine the suitability of candidates for the Priesthood, it is not an infallible tool. As psychologists and lawyers became more involved in offering liability insurance (and assurance) to Diocesan Bishops terrified of lawsuits, we have seen a concomitant shift from a virtue-based understanding of leadership to a more therapeutic model. There are many saints and other outstanding men and women in our Church who have had serious flaws. In many of these cases, they became outstanding leaders as they strove to overcome those flaws and sinful tendencies. A Church which is always prepared for her mission knows how to apply necessary discipline, but also how to apply the power of divine grace to persons and situations. Many commentators on Church affairs over the past few decades have lamented how much the Church’s response to her multiform crises have been more about how to manage ‘scandal’ (in the secular, misused sense of the term) and not how to inculcate excellence. Priests, like laity, should not feel as if their human sinfulness and imperfection ipso facto ‘undoes’ their sacred calling. The fear of failure and falling, of being embarrassed, is now so universal that it now has a name: ‘cancel culture’. But cancel culture started a long time ago in the Church, and this ‘culture’ will continue to discourage excellence because it destroys our ability effectively to learn from mistakes. For easier is it for us to forget the problem and to erase the people involved from our collective view and memory. The combination of “less authority and brutal accountability” in the ecclesial context means that all too few people will be invested with the power to do anything of note, and those that are, will find themselves at the mercy of forces and players which do not have the mission of the Church in mind.

A second thing discouraging our institutional preparedness is the fact that modern communication has made the bureaucratization of leadership almost impossible to avoid. As the Navy report states, whereas in the past the captain of a ship had near complete autonomy to react in regard to split-second decisions on the open waves, now they know that every decision they make can be counteracted, negated and superseded by a superior “from the comfort of terrestrial headquarters”. How all too cruelly familiar this sounds to many Pastors today, who constantly have their duly-conferred canonical prerogatives counteracted or micromanaged to the point of irrelevance, as the central bureaucracy in many cases continues to grow. The life of a Priest is full of split-second decisions, like many other vocations: what to say in a confessional, how to be an effective steward of financial resources, what to say to the bereaved, and far more. These are instances among many where on-site, decisive leadership is absolutely necessary. Yet in many places, the Priest feels hamstrung and ineffective because he knows that it is easy, far too easy, for him to be denounced to his own superiors, and thus lose not only his livelihood, but his reason for living (lest we forget, as some do, that the Priesthood is an identity, not a job). To borrow from the line of one intelligence officer, “[admirals] hide in foxholes at the first sight of Military.com and the Military Times”. How many Bishops and Priests likewise run for the hills before the barrage of negative press. As the report prepared by Marine Lt. Gen. Robert Schmidle and Rear Adm. Mark Montgomery admits, “the senior ranks are perceived as quick to sacrifice junior personnel to save their own tails.” The unwillingness to accept true, mature responsibility is inter-generational, and becomes a vicious cycle. Priests who manage risk by avoidance, by deflection or by placation realize that sycophancy can be a one-way ticket to promotion, because their superiors, who also usually manage risk by the same methods, want to maximize good press, and minimalize bad press. Eventually most Priests get the message that the best way not only to advance, but even merely survive the institutional experience, is to be mediocre.

If individuals cannot exercise leadership in their apostolates because a culture of risk aversion, rather than risk engagement, we will find, as we currently are finding, that we are broadly unprepared for the work of the Great Commission. We lack the spiritual, moral and institutional discipline necessary for great achievements. An encouraging trend in the past few decades has been the proliferation of initiatives to educate and to ’empower’ the lay faithful to fulfill their mission of proclaiming the Gospel in the world. But these fervent lay Catholics are then exposed to a bitter irony: when they return to their home parishes, on fire with a deeper desire for sound teaching and reverent liturgy, they find that their shepherds are held hostage to fear. These Priests, especially younger ones, are suspended in midair between their knowledge of what ought-to-be, and what the informed faithful desire, and their terror of the wrath of officialdom. How many Priests hear from predominantly young, engaged Catholics that they want to experience a Church which is fully prepared to live out her theological commitments? That is to say, if the Mass is the representation of the Sacrifice of Christ on Calvary, and is our participation here on earth in the Heavenly Liturgy, is the quality of our Liturgy reflective of this? Ask the average parish Priest what reaching that point means, and the years it takes to form the minds and hearts of the people to receive that understanding after years of deformation. Even if the Priest pours his heart and soul into the work, the fact remains that even he may not be there long enough to see the task to completion: and his successor may completely undo what took years to achieve.

In the conflict of the World, the Flesh and the Devil against the Church of God, in many places, we are ill-prepared to fight the good fight. With the collapse in discipline in morale in Law Enforcement and in the Military, some of the last surviving pillars of the old order begin to falter. However, their failure was bound to happen, because the Church as an effective moral and character-developing force, rather than a mere therapeutic association, largely disappeared from the public square. The Church, and religious belief in general, is the great foundation at the core of our civilization. To return to the subject of an earlier essay, this is also the root of so much angst regarding debates on ‘Eucharistic Coherence’; either we want a Church that proclaims the greatness of her Savior and convicts the world of sin, or we want a Church that simply confirms us in our complacency. We cannot have both.

The process of psychological maturation, from adolescence into adulthood, always involves the development of the individual’s initiative as independent from, yet while informed by, the authority of parents or parental figures. An adolescent psychology is characterized by creativity, experimentation, and risk-taking. When guided by wise and virtuous parents, these tendencies in nature can lead the young person to blossom into a mature adult, capable of asserting his or her own personality and interests (and those of Christ) in the world and in their milieu. A mature adult is capable of responsibility, and of making hard decisions, even if some of those decisions may turn out to be wrong. Risk-aversion as a lifestyle truly puts us at risk of becoming perpetual children, unwilling or unable to leave the confines of the nursery playpen. The infantilized mind cannot tolerate, let alone engage robustly, foreign and challenging concepts. The infantilized will cannot withstand rejection and the perception of being “unlikeable” without dissolving into tears and wails of self-pity. A boy who grows into a man, and a girl who grows into a woman, both know that in the real world, blame cannot always be shifted, it must be assumed. But if the young person is trained and prepared adequately for life, they can take up the mantle of enterprise, not only for themselves, but for their progeny. Often times no one knows how prepared (or unprepared) they are for something until a crisis arises. Is the Church on earth prepared to meet the challenges she faces with spiritual arms and with resolute will? Or is she stuck knitting her white flag?