Catholicism’s Ghost

Today's “new spirituality," often found within the Church, is an ugly caricature of the millennial truths of union with God set forth by the Church, her saints, and her Doctors.

Published in Crisis Magazine on December 2, 2024

One of Hollywood’s more sybaritic starlets solemnly announced the other day that she was embarking on a 30-day “spiritual cleanse” in India. Since neither ecumenism nor eco-enthusiasms are my métier, I was bewildered. Could it be some novel Gnostic excrescence? Or a twenty-first century variation of Stoic apatheia? Perhaps a new twist on commonplace pantheism? Knowing Hollywood, it is most likely some terribly au courant exercise in self-absorption.  

No doubt it is indeed that epiphenomenon of Modernity—namely, being spiritual without being religious. But without religion, the spiritual is a vain voyage into the self. Common error sees the spiritual as merely the non-physical. That is like saying a Titian is merely the absence of white. Both are missing the fuller picture, in fact, missing it entirely. When “spirituality” departs the moorings of religion, it becomes anything that suits one’s fancy. Chesterton pointedly remarked: “Anytime one speaks about the spirit of Christianity, they are speaking about the ghost of Christianity.” Same song, in a different key.

This parlous error is not confined to the pampered denizens of Hollywood. It has long taken up residence in the Church herself. No surprise, since it is the softer side of a hard-knuckled Modernism which has been galloping through the Church for over one hundred years, now reappearing with a greater virulence than ever before.  

What are its signs? 

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