“It is the Dogma that is the Drama”
By Father Kevin M Cusick
My thoughts this week turn to the past as I prepare to journey north for my 40th college reunion at Fordham University in The Bronx and revisit my affection for classmates, so many, like me, from intact practicing Catholic homes. Predominantly Irish and Italian, they were, like me, grandchildren of immigrants who built the vast network of Catholic churches and schools which is now collapsing before our eyes.
The human factor of family life and the practice of Catholic faith and morals first had to collapse before the physical plant of Catholic life became vestigial and unneeded, so much mere financial burden to be unloaded as dead weight.
What led to this tragic impasse? The pope, in his recent 60 Minutes interview, repeats the well-worn trope that clinging to dogmas repels seekers away from the faith. But what if dogma is the faith, and the faith is dogma? Have we opened the gates to let in the destroyer by pretending we can jettison “dogmas” without jeopardizing the faith itself?
"Man can be defined as an animal that makes dogmas. Trees have no dogmas." G.K. Chesterton. He also said, to approach the same subject from a different angle, “When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything.”
Dogma is not eliminated in being denied. Man must believe in something, if not in God. Let not the souls of the millions of victims slaughtered to advance of the Communist creed cry out to us in vain.
There is no escaping dogma, just as there is no escaping truth, for they are the same. Those who reject the idea of dogma are prone to accept a lie in its place, a truth so well expressed already by Chesterton. Rejection of dogma as tired, stultifying or lacking in relevance amounts only to entertaining falsehood.
A recent and excellent essay by Father Paul Scalia in The Catholic Thing entitled “The Drama is in the Dogma” points out that Trinity Sunday itself exists for the very purpose of celebrating and teaching a dogma, that there are Three Persons in one God. The title of his piece brings to mind a similar and earlier thought by Dorothy Sayers, “It is the dogma that is the drama”. I stumbled across this convergence while listening to a YouTube talk by Peter Kreeft entitled “Happiness”.
Why Sayers is not often referenced more explicitly may perhaps be for the reason that she never converted from Anglo-Catholic affiliation and conceived a son out of wedlock, who was raised by another woman. She will remain forever in the anteroom of Catholic notoriety much like CS Lewis, oft-quoted but not quitefully celebrated.
A listen to Kreeft’s beautiful reflection on the beatitudes, human flourishing and the truth led to a review of his biography and arealization of convergence between our lives through Fordham University, our common alma mater. He studied under Fr W. Norris Clarke, who I remember from my years there more than a generation after Kreeft’s own matriculation. My philosophy instructors were graduate students, no doubt like the recent convert Kreeft himself while there for doctorate studies under Clarke’s tutelage. Kreeft, unlike Sayers, swam the Tiber. He entered the Church in his undergraduate years at Calvin College after exploring the writings of the Fathers of the Church and contemplating Catholic beauty incarnated in masterpieces like Saint Patrick’s Cathedreal in New York
Here is Sayers on the matter of dogma:
“Perhaps we are not following Christ all the way or in quite the right spirit. We are likely, for example, to be a little sparing of the palms and hosannas. We are chary of wielding the scourge of small cords, lest we should offend somebody or interfere with trade. We do not furnish up our wits to disentangle knotty questions about Sunday observance or tribute money, nor hasten to sit at the feet of the doctors, both hearing them and asking them questions. We pass hastily over disquieting jests about making friends with the mammon of unrighteousness and alarming observations about bringing not peace but a sword; nor do we distinguish ourselves by the graciousness with which we sit at meat with publicans and sinners. Somehow or other, and with the best intentions, we have shown the world the typical Christian in the likeness of a crashing and rather ill-natured bore — and this in the name of one who assuredly never bored a soul in those thirty-three years during which he passed through the world like a flame.
“Let us, in heaven’s name, drag out the divine drama from under the dreadful accumulation of slipshod thinking and trashy sentiment heaped upon it, and set it on an open stage to startle the world into some sort of vigorous reaction. If the pious are the first to be shocked, so much the worse for the pious — others will pass into the kingdom of heaven before them. If all men are offended because of Christ, let them be offended; but where is the sense of their being offended at something that is not Christ and is nothing like him? We do him singularly little honor by watering down his personality till it could not offend a fly. Surely it is not the business of the Church to adapt Christ to men, but to adapt men to Christ.
“It is the dogma that is the drama — not beautiful phrases, nor comforting sentiments, nor vague aspirations to lovingkindness and uplift, nor the promise of something nice after death — but the terrifying assertion that the same God who made the world, lived in the world and passed through the grave and gate of death. Show that to the heathen, and they may not believe it; but at least they may realize that here is something that a man might be glad to believe.”
Over the years Fordham sought to distance itself from creed by adopting the “Jesuit tradition” identity. Growth of influence and internationalization required distancng from the parochial and embarrassing dogmas of “Catholic” faith. And morals. The same Catholic faith and life I saw so strongly represented among my classmates in the Class of 1984 was a liability.
A phrase vague enough, malleable and adaptable to even the impious aspirations, or none, in the anonymous potential student or benefactor displaced the dusty idea of “Catholic”, with its antique connotations of catechisms and unbending creeds.
This week I take a step back in time at the college reunion. I will revisit the past but only through the drama of the present. I must be careful about that which I seek. Some days will never return. Those many classmates who form the object of my affection can never be all together again as they once were. The survivors, fewer in number, will gather, still collecting memories. Deceased classmates will be present only as names in a Memorial Mass program and in our quickly fading memories, 40 years on. The stories that are told of families and careers brought to maturity will imply things unsaid. In the background always, the truth or the lack of it, the dogmas accepted or rejected, will be evident either in sentimental vacuity or of witness to a faith on firmness of rock.
The vague formulations of uncertain and seeking youth ever battle against the sage wisdom of truth engraved on the stone that is dogma. And we witness the selfless love of those who pass it on to friend or foe in daily witness to One in whose care they ever thus entrust themselves and their eternal destiny.
“It is the dogma that is the drama”. In the fight for and defense of truth is found the love and zeal for souls that tells our story before the tribunal of the world, and finally before the judgement seat of God. Love of truth, in the respect for and dissemination of the dogmas of our Faith, is simply love for the souls who accompany us, who have gone before us or who follow. For only the happiness that is unending can satisfy the souls for whom we pray because they live on.
Thank you for reading and praised be Jesus Christ, now and forever.
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