In response to “The Cult of the Imperial Self”

DECEMBER 2023

Peril awaits the man who chooses self over God. A heavenly war raged over an angel who did. All the more peril awaits the man who treats God as a therapeutic or, worse, a cabaret act. Fr. Robert McTeigue sketches for us, with masterful panache, the consequences of this new non serviam, not only for the Church but for society as well. Only man’s humble oblation to God permits him to be himself and to treat others as himself. Otherwise, man becomes, in Fr. McTeigue’s felicitous phrase, the Imperial Self. Or, as Whittaker Chambers put it, Almighty Man.

The Church’s traditional architecture, traditional piety, and sacramental expression provided a home for man, where he could cultivate self-effacement in the presence of the Face of God. This ascent to holy charity found itself translated into that civil filia of which Aristotle speaks in Politics. Put another way, that effortless “friendliness” is the cement of all societies. It allows the spirit of comity that makes possible cooperation, decency, and tranquility.

Fr. McTeigue speaks directly to the issue when he describes the striking summons that traditional architecture, with its effusion of transcendent details, evokes: “Inside [the Gothic church] were delights for the mind and the senses; the colors of the windows, the coolness of the stone, and the sternum-stirring rumble of the pipe organ. At every moment, my eyes, heart, and mind were called upward…. I wanted to pray here. I wanted to worship here. I wanted to see and say, and sing and do…what Catholics have done for centuries and centuries around the world. Those who love the truth, beauty, and goodness revealed by the order and craft of a Gothic church — I wanted to be one of them, one with them, loving the God who inspired it all. I wanted to be like the saints who brought intact to the shores of the new world the perennial piety and costly fidelity their forbears had entrusted to them, and I hoped that in God’s Providence I might take my place in line to receive those treasures and hand them on to the next generation.”

That soaring transport is what made men jealous to steal Heaven and create a society that could be a glimpse of that heavenly society. Tragically, the modern Church, with her new liturgy, leaves men cold, flattened, and bored. How else can a normal man with blood coursing through his veins react to “polyester-clad concelebrants” on the altar, an “alb-clad woman moving obtrusively” about the nave, and a celebrant “performing for his audience”?

Some might say Fr. Mc­Teigue is generalizing in pointing out these things. No, he isn’t. This is the rule in most parishes. The exception is the parish where God still reigns, the priest acts in persona Christi, and the faithful kneel in awe. If you don’t believe me, look at the Mass at this year’s World Youth Day in Lisbon. Chesterton said it perfectly, “Modern theologians put first things last.”

The coarsening of our culture shall continue its descent. That descent shall cease only when the Church announces her raison d’être as the ascent to God, only when every Catholic church and Holy Mass makes present the staggering Face of God.

Only then shall Almighty Man bend his knee to Almighty God.

Fr. John A. Perricone

Secaucus, New Jersey