Register columnist Andrew Bennett, prompted by a Cardus institute survey showing Catholics’ woeful grasp of their own faith, recently asked what it means to be Catholic, and how we are to act as Catholics. We invite readers to respond.

Deacon Andrew Bennett’s question is one I live every day. It invites a thoughtful response. 

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The query jars and jangles when paired with dismal findings of unbelief across the Christian traditions that has been reported in Cardus’ recent study—authored and cited by Bennett. (Full disclosure: I’m a member of Cardus’ board, a fellow parishioner of Bennett, and someone who has been helped in my journey into the Church in 2015 by Bennett’s friendship, counsel, and example.)

Over the past near-decade of belonging to the Church, I have received an indispensable education through the charism of the movement Communion and Liberation (CL), and the witness of its founder, the Servant of God, Msgr. Luigi Giussani. This response, nevertheless, is personal. 

The great Ernst Gombrich begins his The Story of Art by proclaiming: “There really is no such thing as Art. There are only artists.” Gombrich’s insight is foundational, even if at first reading it sounds misleadingly exaggerated, in that it anchors human endeavours and experience into human personhood. Bennett is right to say, “Our baptism marks us.” The notion of ontology, the question of who we are, as both preceding and being the bedrock of ethics, our beliefs and praxis, how we live them, is a primary point of departure for Catholic and Orthodox Christianity. 

Yet there is a danger in perceiving baptism as something imposed from the outside, without our consent. Instead of receiving the givenness of our lives with gratitude, it is perceived either as a burden or as something of little or no relevance. For Giussani, Christian conversion and ecclesial adherence is based on a three-fold factor: that of encountering an objective fact outside of ourselves; being given the grace to adequately perceive the meaning of this encounter; and sensing a deep correspondence and harmony between the encountered fact and its meaning with our own existence and our purpose. An integral part of this dynamic is being faithful to our own humanity, and not being coerced or brainwashed. To illustrate this, Giussani quotes a dialogue from James Baldwin’s play, Blues for Mister Charlie in his seminal book, The Religious Sense:

RICHARD: You know I don’t believe in God, Grandmama.

MOTHER: You don’t know what you talking about. Ain’t no way possible for you not to believe in God. It ain’t up to you.

RICHARD: Who’s it up to then?

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MOTHER: It’s up to the life in you—the life in you. That knows where it comes from, that believes in God.

What is poignantly revealed through the African American matriarch is that structurally, within our very life, the human person is one who thirsts and expects something beyond ourselves. Consequently, faith is a response to these authentic needs already ineradicably embedded in us. If faith loses this connection to our humanity, it will always remain remote and prone to being discarded. And yet, the awareness of the encounter with Someone beyond us does not simply overwhelm and disarm us, but rather invites our participation and engagement. Giussani would write in The Risk of Education,

Even the most brilliant piece of evidence will never become conviction if the “I” does not become acquainted with the object, if it does not open itself up to the object with care and patience, does not give it time, does not live with it; if it does not love it, in short. …[E]vidence…is becoming aware of an unavoidable presence.

What marks a Christian distinctly is that the response of God to our human needs is a human presence. Giussani’s biographer notes how the Nobel laureate, Czesław Miłosz was moved when he read the following quote in CL’s Easter poster in 1988, from Vladimir Solovyvov’s A Short Story of the Anti-Christ: “Starets John rose up and said in a quiet voice…‘The thing we value most in Christianity is Christ Himself—He in his person. All the rest comes from Him, for we know that in Him dwells bodily the whole fullness of Divinity’.” On hearing about Miłosz’s reaction, Giussani would emphasize, “This was what makes Christians different from all other people: not their moral coherence, their intellectual capacity, or their projects for changing the world, but only their faith, that is, the recognition that God became man.”

This Christ is not reduced to an interior experience but is present carnally through the sacraments. How often are we tempted to instrumentalize the sacraments, stripping them of their concrete embrace of our fragility. How often have I treated confession as a checklist item rather than a chance to be cleansed and grasped by Christ? 

The late Jim Forest in his spiritual gem, Praying with Icons, re-introduces the central idea that it is not simply us who look at icons as we pray. They — Christ, the Mother of God, and the saints close to them— in turn look at us and through their gaze transform us and our gaze on others and the world. When Bennett writes about the all-too-frequent “incoherent Catholic lives,” I’m struck that in my own incoherency, what I most need is not a reapplication of my will or a redoubling of my efforts, but first to allow myself to be looked at, to be seen, and then receive the emergence of a coherence that comes from the gaze of Another. 

This is what helps me to have a relationship with anything and anyone as a sign and invitation to wholeness, to abundant life, to perceive, in Giussani’s words, “the incisive permanence of the Mystery of Christ in history.”

The data sets of surveys are useful. But no amount of measuring, and ensuing results, bleak or bright, relieves us of the perennial responsibility to make the same personal journey the disciples themselves had to undertake, which is depicted so well by Bishop Erik Varden in a recent homily:

The Apostles bore testimony, rather, to an encounter they’d had. They spoke of One they had known who was possessed of an authority unlike that of any other man; who by word and example had shown them a new way of being human, not by affirming them in their present excellence but by showing them what they had it in them to become; who had revealed the sense of ‘love’ and ‘mercy’; who had effectively dispelled evil wherever he went; and who had vanquished death. They had reached the certainty that this Man, Jesus, was the Son of God; that communion with him let us be reckoned as God’s children; and that this process is realised through participation in Christ’s sacred mysteries, instituted the night before he suffered in elements of bread and wine, accessible to all who have been baptised in the name of the Blessed Trinity.

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We do not, thankfully, make this journey alone, but like the disciples on the road to Emmaus, we walk with others, always accompanied by a Presence that makes “our hearts burn within us.” (cf. Luke 24:32) 

(Daniel Bezalel Richardsen is a contributing editor at Comment magazine.)