No, this is not a GQ ad.
I would not expect many people to know who the person in the picture above is. If I was just shown a photo of him, I would not know who he was either. He is Dr. Francis Beckwith. Now some are asking, “Who is Dr. Francis Beckwith?”
About a month ago there was some, actually a lot, of gasping and shock in the Evangelical community. Dr. Francis Beckwith, the President of the Evangelical Theological Society, announced that he was swimming across the Tiber, and returning to the Roman Catholic Church of his youth. His wife is also preparing to become a Catholic. This was so shocking for many of our Evangelical Protestant brothers and sisters, because Francis Beckwith is one of the finest philosophers in the U.S. He has published extensively, particularly in the area of Pro-Life ethics, but also providing a philosophical defense for the Constitutionality of teaching Intelligent Design theory in schools, as an alternative to Darwinian evolutionary theory.
I am sure that you can find several good articles about his “reversion” to the Catholic Faith — there is a good interview with him in the June 3, 2007 issue of National Catholic Register — but there is one thing, from that “good NCR” interview that I would like to comment on. In discussing why he originally drifted away from the Catholic Church in his teens and early 20s, Dr. Beckwith says:
For someone like me, who was interested in both the spiritual and intellectual grounding of the Christian faith, I didn’t need the “folk Mass” with cute nuns and hip priests playing “Kumbaya” with guitars, tambourines and harmonicas. And it was all badly done.
After all, we listened to the Byrds, Neil Young and Bob Dylan, and we knew the Church just couldn’t compete with them.
But that’s what the Church offered to the young people of my day: lousy pop music and a gutted Mass. If they were trying to make Catholicism unattractive to young and inquisitive Catholics, they were succeeding.
What I needed, and what many of us desired, were intelligent and winsome ambassadors for Christ who knew the intellectual basis for the Catholic faith, respected and understood the solemnity and theological truths behind the liturgy, and could explain the renewal movements in light of these (National Catholic Register, “In Person: He Could No Longer Explain Why He Wasn’t Catholic” June 3, 2007, p. 10).
AMEN!!! I have been saying pretty much the same thing for years. Too many, in a misguided attempt to attract young people to the Church think we have to copy the dominant youth culture. We have gone from “folk Masses” to “Rock n Roll Masses”, homilies have too often been turned into “father’s weekly stand-up routine”, and the liturgy has become focused on us, on the horizontal level. And the thing is we do contemporary music poorly most of the time. Don’t get me wrong, I really like Contemporary Christian Music. I listen to Jeremy Camp, MercyMe, Switchfoot, Tree63, and Casting Crowns. But their music really is not appropriate for the liturgy.
The Mass is suppose to be our entering into the God’s work of salvation. The focus is suppose to be on God, and not on entertaining the congregation. Besides beauty is something all people can appreciate. Whether it is in music, art, architecture, or intelligent speech, people respond to the Good, the Beautiful, the True, and the One. If we make the Mass just like any other bit of entertainment and the Church just like any other social group, we will continue to lose so many people. Today less than 25% of American Catholics go to Mass every week, and we are not as bad as Europe. Yet when the Mass was more noble, more sacred, and not trying to be “popular” well over 75% of American Catholics went to Mass every week. People ARE too busy today for more of the same. But they will respond to the sacred, they will respond to the deepest desire of their hearts — God.
Hopefully we will learn from our past. Instead of lowering the bar we will keep it high, and focus more on helping people rise up to it.
