Father Donald Haggerty is a diocesan priest in Manhattan, a professor of moral theology, and a spiritual director to Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity.
He has written numerous books on contemplative prayer and is especially drawn to St. John of the Cross.
His most recent title is named “The Hour of Testing: Spiritual Depth and Insight in a Time of Ecclesial Uncertainty” (Ignatius Press, $19.95).
The book is dedicated to Father Paul Mankowski, SJ (1953-2020), the Jesuit who was silenced by his order purportedly for hewing a little too closely to the magisterium.
Father Haggerty’s first chapter lays out the current state of the Church, which, in his view, without going full apocalyptic, is dire.
We’ve had rampant corruption, depravity, nepotism, hypocrisy, and egregious abuse of power. But never in the history of the Church have we had a culture that considers God so wholly irrelevant: “The rabid obsession to protect a legal right to kill the innocent in the mother’s womb bears witness to a societal godlessness beyond all other signs.”
Never, as a consequence, have we seen the almost complete disintegration of the human person. “The significance of such aberrations as gender identity choice in our day is not simply the descent into arbitrary interpretations in conflict with reality. … The true question confronting our time is the virulent effort to kill God as Creator. … The human individual has arrogated to itself the role of creator.”
Many in the Church today are indistinguishable from secular humanists. They have the same disrespect for the sacraments — the Eucharist, holy orders, confession — the same progressive politics around marriage, birth control, abortion, and gender; the same disdain for the very notions of obedience and authority; the same idea that the Church should be a kind of progressive democracy with whichever-way-the-wind-blows “articles of faith” its members should have the right to propose and vote on.
Why don’t such people leave the Church, one wonders? The answer can only be that they want to change her from within. They may be succeeding.
Christ has already triumphed, Father Haggerty points out again and again. The Church cannot and will not be defeated. Still, if things continue as they have been, he goes so far as to imagine the rise of an anti-Christ. The ultimate horror, he points out, would be having such a person installed in the Chair of Peter.
But the point is not to focus on the end times. The point is that such a state of affairs can only be a terrible wound — in the Church, and in the Body of Christ. It may be that Christ will undergo, is already undergoing, a kind of second Passion, a fresh Calvary.
And that means the people who love him will undergo a Passion, too.
It may be that the Church is reduced to a remnant, a relative few such as these who are faithful to the body and blood of Christ and the teachings of his Church. Such people — unseen, unheard, unremarked upon — will suffer a deeper exile than ever.
Never, says Father Haggerty, has dedication to a life of prayer been more needed and more urgent. Most of his book focuses on the vulnerability, total oblation of self, and divine humility required to stay the course.
It’s no accident that so much of the push for change within the Church centers on sexual matters, for perhaps no area of human life emblemizes more clearly the inseparable divide between the secular humanist and the follower of Christ.
The former may serve the poor, be concerned with climate change, and decry discrimination of all kinds. But when it comes to sex, the credo is “My body, my choice, my rules, my desire, my pleasure.”
The follower of Christ, by contrast, is also concerned with the poor, the marginalized, and the planet. She consequently offers up her very body — along with all her mind, all her strength, all her heart — in love to Christ: to do with as he wills for the well-being and salvation of mankind, in full communion with the Church he built upon Peter.
Such has been the way of the martyrs, the saints, and the apostles of prayer through the ages. As Simone Weil observed, “One cannot imagine Saint Francis of Assisi talking about rights.”
One also wonders if the riches of the rich young man in the parable were not some form of sexual irregularity, wound, or unconfessed sin: the sticking point beyond which he could not or would not go.
Maybe what the rich young man — and we are all the rich young man — was really thinking when he refused to give up his “riches” was: I couldn’t bear the loneliness.
Following Christ has always been a lonely business. Haggerty often comments on the solitary souls he sees at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York, where he lives and works. There they will be, he observes, silently fingering their rosary beads before an early morning Mass, or bowing their heads after confession, or sitting in the shadows on a winter afternoon, kneeling before the tabernacle “like monks and cloistered nuns in solitary cells overcome by love.”
It’s just as wrong to become a bitter, judgmental, finger-pointing Pharisee, of course, as it is to treat the Church like our personal town hall.
But to deny ourselves an ideological tribe; the approval of the well-meaning but godless world; a comfortable if not exalted reputation among our non-believing family and friends; possibly even a spouse and children, is, like Christ, to have nowhere to lay our head.
Let our prayer be, says Father Haggerty, “I am longing to receive what you are desiring to give.”
And let the words of Jesus ring in our ears: “When the Son of Man returns, will he find faith on earth?”
