Some Western European clerics are again singing the praises of secularization. The latest, according to Stefano Fontana, is Cardinal Matteo Zuppi, the president of the Conference of Catholic Bishops of Italy. (His November 17 opening address to the bishops’ meeting in Assisi is linked below.) That song, however, is hardly new. It was the inspiration of the German and Flemish bishops at Vatican II.

Likewise, the American counterpart is the “Catholic Left” that continues to blame the USCCB for prosecuting a “culture war” after the last pontificate was said to have abandoned that trope. It’s why they think the Catholic bishops of the United States are (still) out-of-step with Rome and why ongoing “reform” is needed.

There’s something to Fontana’s charge (his essay, in Italian, is here), not least of which is its distortive impact on Catholic theology. It was already found in the theological rewrite of Karl Rahner. Its contemporary expression seems to be what I call an “inverted pneumatology,” an arrogant attribution of the works and pomps of secularity to “the Holy Spirit” who is supposedly using it to “teach” His “backwardist” Church to get with the times (for more, see here).

The core of the problem lies here: When you examine the phenomena of contemporary life, do you start by saying they are first to be assessed in the light of the Gospel (the traditional Catholic approach), or do you start by asking what these signa temporis are teaching the Church, the implicit assumption being it is something positive?

During this 33^rd Week of Ordinary Time, as the Church year moves toward its close, the readings at Mass take an eschatological tone. This week’s First Readings are from Maccabees.

The Maccabees arose c. 180 B.C. in reaction to attempts by the Seleucid Empire to secularize Israel. The Seleucids were Hellenophiles, devotees of pagan Greek culture, which they deemed advanced and intended to impose on various peoples, not unlike Alexander the Great had tried to do about 150 years earlier. The fiend in the Books of Maccabees is Antiochus IV Epiphanes, ruler of Israel, who defiled the Temple and sought to destroy Jewish religious practices.

In the readings this week, we have two episodes — with a nonagenarian named Eleazar and a Jewish mother with her seven boys — whom the rulers are trying to force-feed pork, in violation of Jewish kosher laws. We will also have an apostate Jew who offers pagan sacrifice on the altar and is slain by the zealous Jew, Mattathias. After hearing all those readings, we declare “thanks be to God!”

Now, in the case of Eleazar, the pagans and their collaborators were not so much interested in Eleazar violating the dietary laws as in appearing to violate the dietary laws. The reading from Second Maccabees (https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/111825.cfm) makes clear that “those in charge of that unlawful meal ritual” took Eleazar quietly to the side and told him to bring his own beef brisket sandwich. They’d say it was pork and everybody’s happy, including the ruler who wants to compromise Jewish religious practice, and Eleazar who will know he didn’t. Eleazar refuses. He speaks a truth (here) applicable to all times: that when a man reaches a certain age, he ought to know what he stands for and not fudge it. That response stings the compromisers, who return to making Eleazar an offer they can’t believe he refuses: a ham sandwich or death. Second Maccabees succinctly reports: “This is how he died; leaving in his death a model of courage…”

The pagans were not so much interested in Eleazar as in Eleazar as object of scandal, as another example to be used to teach the rest of the “basket of deplorables” clinging to religion how out-of-step with the best contemporary thinking they were. Why hold to those Jewish practices, which only ruled out a good lobster dinner?

The Maccabees were “culture warriors.” They fought for Jewish culture not because it was Jewish culture but because it was the cultural expression of Jewish religious faith. Pace today’s secularizers who babble about an “interiority of religious commitment” devoid of the “court trappings” of Christendom, they recognized — as apparently eludes secularizers who otherwise cannot tolerate things like “private” devotion — that people are not isolated individuals. God, as Vatican II reminds us, is pleased to save people not just as individuals but as “a people” (Lumen gentium, 9). A “people’s” common faith is not simply the aggregate individual faiths of Moishe, Shmuel, Miriam, and Rebbekah. That common faith, in normal human life, becomes a “culture.”

That’s why the secularists who applaud secularization, who call the individuation and ecclesial privatization of faith a “moment of grace,” are wrong. Yes, they’ll claim “ecclesial privatization of faith” is an oxymoron — and it is. But it’s also the model their lauded secularization in fact leads to: a “faith” safely locked away in sacristy and church, protected from “infecting” the public square.

As we read the Lectionary this week, one wonders whether a 2nd-century BC Matteo Zuppi would have counseled poor old Eleazar that his witness was exaggerated and that, given the overall circumstances, his BLT might at best be indirect material cooperation. One wonders whether a 2nd-century BC religious Left would have told the mother of seven sons not to be so extreme, certainly not to “accompany” them to martyrdom. And would those arranging the contemporary synagogue readings cycle have politely left 1 Maccabees 2 (https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/112025.cfm ) on the cutting room floor, lest it be taken as praising the fanatical “proselytism” of Mattathias? After all, how can a modern Catholic respond with “thanks be to God!” to that? N.B.: I’m not advocating violence; I am attacking squeamishness.

[A link to Cardinal Zuppi’s Nov. 17 address to the Italian bishops, in Italian, is here.]