Steve Greydanus has a very charitably diaconal response to Steve Skojec's travails that is worth reading. At the tail end of it Deacon Greydanus asks the following:
What if all of Catholic history has been a struggle of people striving not only to be real Catholics, but to understand exactly what a real Catholic ought to be — and, by the same token, what the Church ought to look like, what the kingdom of God on earth would mean, what a Christian society should be, what kind of society Christians ought to work for?
What if what we have in the deposit of faith is less a blueprint, or an exact road map, than an evocative description?
The longer I teach catechism to school children, the more I have to confront the reality that what I am describing to them is something they can rarely verify outside of my classroom and my dogged faith convictions that I am trying to impart. Materialist agnosticism is coming from a younger and younger set of pupils each year that I am teaching, or from a broader number of them each year.
Saints have always been raised up from the midst of the world, in spite of it. The world is not becoming holier as the number of saints accumulates over the centuries; those heroically striving are fewer and must strive harder.
Or have the principles of the teaching on the Kingdom become more prevalent in the culture and therefore seem less and less axiomatically associated with the Church alone?
The temptation to despair is powerful. Is that a sign of end times, or is it merely always this way and always will be so long as the Second Coming has not yet happened? Is that knife edge precisely where we should remain poised? Half-hopeful and half-in-peril? I am drawn once again to that moment when Sam and Frodo are rescued by the eagles; isn't what Steve describes precisely the moment why we have a Savior?
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