One cannot engage in any reflection on the crisis of the Catholic Church without understanding the broader context of the crisis of the West as such. The shape of the world we know is passing away before our eyes — the world of liberal democracy that twenty years ago seemed quite appealing to many Polish Catholic intellectuals clustered around Znak or Wiez (I refer to all these circles to illustrate a certain lack of preparedness, even anachronism, in thinking about the Church in Poland) — and today it is at a dead end. The Catholic way of being in this world is passing away, or perhaps the Catholic vision of how we should function within this world, within this political system.

Christian democracy is dead

Christian democracy has long been a dead letter. It has always been something of an intellectual provocation for me — the Jagiellonian Club's plan to keep building a "new Christian democracy," a Christian democracy that never truly took hold in Poland and is, in fact, quite alien to Polish political culture (the only other Western country like this is the United States). Maciejewski is entirely right that Maritain's theses about conducting an intellectual dialogue with the world — rational ethical arguments that were supposed to serve as "pre-evangelization" — have failed.

I do not, however, wish to say that they had no application or that they were a dead end from the very start. This way of being in the contemporary West, which in its pop-cultural progressivism has exceeded all possibilities of rational debate, has simply burned itself out. It is well known that French or German Christian democracy today is Christian in name only, yet even within it — and at many academic centers in Poland — there are still plenty of intellectuals who believe in it more fervently than in the power of the Gospel itself. These "old Christian democrats" will be the first bone of contention vis-a-vis twenty-first-century Christianity, which has been functioning in a somewhat audacious manner for years as "that dark brother who must be buried, because... he ruins good relations with atheists and liberals." We saw this during the Jubilee Act of Enthronement of Jesus Christ as King of Poland, which was met not only with a complete absence of intellectual reflection by most centers gathering the Catholic intelligentsia, but outright with an (irrational — sic!) attack on this allegedly superstitious Catholicism.

Maciejewski is entirely right when he says that contemporary Christian democracy is distasteful owing to its insincerity, its desire to take "the pattern of this world" and, in its original intention, to baptize it — though we have long known (the example of French Catholics, for one) that Catholic democrats will always choose democracy and the constitution over Christianity, unlike other socially engaged Catholics.

Dariusz Gawin had much more to say years ago when he observed that the Church and religion are the boundaries of liberal democracy, not its elements. If Christian democracy is indeed a stay of execution, then its most docile, mercy-focused revolution of tenderness — with its turning a blind eye to truth and natural law (which are supposedly kept in the back of the mind, while publicly mentioning them would be a sin crying out to heaven for vengeance, on the sound principle that one must start speaking from the letter A before moving on to more serious Christianity) — then it is precisely left-liberal progressivism, led by woke culture, that is the final fruit of such Christian democracy, the crown jewel, the pinnacle of ethical activity washed clean of anything that can directly be called Christ's, because the time and place, even in individual evangelization, for that serious Christianity somehow never arrives.

On the one hand we have dreams that a moment will come when we convince the vast majority of Poles of Christianity, which will then be embraced "in freedom"; on the other, I fear that if this vision were (miraculously, of course) to be fulfilled, most Christian democrats would not know what to do with themselves...

In the Church, the pinnacle of this ethical thinking consists of multi-year pastoral plans, reflections on "how to reach contemporary man" (browsing Gosc Niedzielny, we get new, newer, and newest ideas every few years for the past decade) and, of course, the Synod on Synodality — essentially a meeting about how to make a good vegetable soup without using any seasoning. That is what this Christian-democratic personalism is today — an ideology of dialogue with the world brought to theoretical perfection. In practice — something dead...

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Apocalyptic conservatism

In this context, Pilawa's formulation is interesting: "True Christian democracy was never created — we are the ones who want to build it." I was surprised by a statement suggesting some great inspirational power in what we call Christian democracy (which, like the word democracy itself in our times, means everything and nothing). Pilawa proposes not to flee far from corrupt civilization in order to get to know one's own Tradition in seclusion, so as to rebuild the world in the future (which Maciejewski supposedly proposes), but rather to participate in what is honorable, in "deferring the end" of humanity, so that politics does not fall into absolute darkness. One must concede that this is Christian democracy par excellence. Pilawa, in a refreshed form, still tries to function fully within this world and on this world's terms. In my view, this is flawed thinking, because this world has collapsed, and the rules of liberal democracy no longer hold in the sense of a political order in which one can move freely today and wage an honorable battle with the angels of darkness as the Church-katechon.

Maciejewski, in my view, is right when he observes that "there is not much left to conserve" — and this by no means refers to faith, family, or values, but to the possibility of Catholic functioning in a Christian-democratic manner. As if there were no other way for a civilized person and Christian to function in socio-political reality? Let us not joke. Do we as Catholics lack the imagination to envision a new European Christianitas? Or perhaps we are afraid? Then let us recall that the most frequently repeated phrase in the Gospels is Christ's words, which we associate with the inaugural Mass of the Polish Pope: "Be not afraid!"

Alongside European Christian democracy there existed a similar current (present, for example, in the Polish PiS party or in parts of the American Republican Party) — that is, the neoconservatives (whose face in Poland is Ordo Iuris). Seeing the hollowness and the draining of truth from European Christian democracy, they bet on democratic, legal avenues of action while firmly and decisively defending natural law. This path turned out to be different from Christian democracy. These are the parties accused today of (post)fascism, dividing society, backwardness, stupidity, whatever... And at the same time, these are the parties that looked favorably upon social groups that contested liberal democracy as such, and which today constitute a significant part of Western societies.

Donald Trump's victory is a certain significant turn for the West, a turn we might call conservative if we insist on finding a label, although neither in the USA nor in Poland has conservatism in the continental sense — like Christian democracy — ever really existed. A significant tectonic shift is occurring before our eyes.

Liberal democracy is dead. Some have yet to receive word of the funeral, but preparations are underway. Surely doctors will appear who, in the morgue, will try to resuscitate this dead body, but they will not succeed. The new conservative Christian democracy should be the first to arrive at the funeral rites, yet many prominent thinkers of this camp foretell the collapse of the Catholic imaginarium.

And I cannot find in the pessimism of Terlikowski or Delsol any inspiration for the twenty-first century. Their world has passed away, just as in the sixteenth century the world of pre-Tridentine Catholics passed away, but it was by no means Christianity that passed away — rather, it was the world of liberal democracy along with the Christianity that had functioned within it in the last century. To the neocons and neo-Christian-democrats I would say: be careful not to overlook Poland's regaining of independence like the Galician conservatives, and not to lose the sober mind that will suggest how to function in the new "gift of Heaven."

Why did neoconservatism fail? People lost faith in the possibility of winning the culture war. Today many right-wingers, "in the name of a higher good," using the rules of this world — law and politics — spend hours pondering which legal loopholes and marketing ploys will allow us to win over, or even beguile, part of society, to lure them, at least temporarily, to our side. All of this would lead us to the place where European Christian democracy now finds itself. The boundary of illusion has burst. People crave truth and authenticity, which is why no matter how much former Prime Minister Morawiecki tries to explain himself[4], many Poles associate his government with consent to the Green Deal — a "deal" that is already becoming history.

Is traditionalism kaputt?

Reconquista, then? A return to the belle epoque? Let us not delude ourselves — the basement of monarchists and most traditionalists in Poland has little potential in all this chaos. Traditionalism will not so much fight "the new shape of the world" as the Christian democrats do, but will fail to notice it altogether. Traditionalists have believed so firmly in the fall (or perhaps death) of the Church that they notice no "movements of Providence," no strong faith, no signs of renewal (about which the former Primate of the Netherlands, Cardinal Eijk, speaks so beautifully: "young Dutch people are gathering around Eucharistic adoration, love for Mary, and the practice of the sacrament of penance"), that when liberal democracy falls in a visible way, they will still be standing in a single line on the Fields of Grunwald, prepared to repel the attack of atheism and modernism. We remember where the Apostle Thomas was after the Resurrection. And yet, "a wise householder brings out of his storeroom things both new and old."

Traditionalists are like Samwise Gamgee and have a certain role to play. They follow this "Church in crisis" even unto death, yet two currents seem to dominate (looking at Polish realities). The first may believe so firmly in the death of the Church — seeing Frodo limp after Shelob's poison — that no other sign from God will reach them; and the second may, like Sam, throw themselves to the aid of Frodo hanging by one hand on Mount Doom (here one must mention the magnificent project of reading the documents of the Second Vatican Council guided by the hermeneutic of continuity, led by the team under Pawel Milcarek, which unfortunately had its ministerial grant for this purpose revoked — a purpose that would have been one of the most important events in the world of the Polish Catholic intelligentsia).

If traditionalism merely believes in being the "remnant of Israel," abandons the cross, and forgets to learn from him "whose heart is gentle and humble" — it will lose.

It depends on the traditionalists whether twenty-first-century Europe will be Christian in a more continental or American (and Polish?...) fashion, whether a renewal of Europe will take place or something akin to the building of a new European civilization. Let us hear the words of the Apocalypse, which Jim Caviezel so brilliantly delivers in Gibson's The Passion in the scene with Mary, the Mother of the Church — "Behold, I make all things new!"

Twenty-first-century Catholicism

Change is coming. A change toward Christianity. It is perceptible to those who do not stop at a sociological examination of the social surface but reach deeper. This resonated very powerfully in the conversation with Tomasz Stawiszynski in the latest episode of Kultura Poswiecona[5]. It resonates in every broadcast by Professor Andrzej Zybertowicz, who, though he himself has no strong personal experience of encountering the Messiah, points to Christianity as the only force predestined to triumph over the threats posed by artificial intelligence when speaking of those threats. As a lecturer, I also notice a strong shift among the youngest students, who five or six years ago had some arguments in favor of cheap moral liberalism. Today they are empty. As one of them recently told me: "No one has ever asked me questions about who I am and where I am heading."

The younger generations have been washed clean, and they have inevitably found themselves on the desert that Maciejewski writes about. I am not saying it will be easy to fill that void with a green oasis, but it is upon this barrenness that it can be done. And He will do it, as the prophet Isaiah writes. We can point the way to the "spring of living water."

I see three paths today. The first is the John Paul II option, illustrated, nomen omen, by Hollywood's chief scientologist, Captain Maverick (Top Gun: Maverick). It is positive participation in public life, but focused above all on the protection of human life. The second is the Benedict option — John Dutton and the outwardly not particularly Christian defense of "one's home" (the series Yellowstone). It is a posture of a certain withdrawal around one's own family and community, but at the same time with a sense of duty to protect one's own oikos in the political sphere, without waiting for an "inevitable, though dignified death." The third is Frodo — the Francis option, who today wages a mortal struggle on Orodruin with Smeagol[6], is about to fulfill his mission, and will sail to the Undying Lands. If, as Father Tischner used to say, the Church must sometimes walk with this world even unto death, then Pope Francis has walked with it right to the edge of the precipice. How long will liberal democracy agonize over it? I do not know. The Church may accompany it to the very end, which will come — contrary to what we see empirically — sooner than we expect.

The shape of this world is passing away, so let us not take our pattern from it, but let us remember that "the earth turns, and the cross stands." Let us do our part. Let us not lose hope. Let us not accelerate history like the Marxists. Nor let us be Don Quixote. We live in a moment of upheaval, where Truth demands a greater voice in Western societies. It is no coincidence that the Speaker of the House of Representatives recently confirmed the validity of the simplest fact — the existence of only two sexes. There will be no end of the world. All of this, as Chesterton wrote, must end in the triumph of Christianity, which not only proclaims the Mystery of the Incarnation of Him who is the Truth but carries with it the power of God's mercy, the gift of reconciliation, which turned the collision of the barbarian North with the Roman South into Europe.

[1] J. Maciejewski, There Is No Longer a Station That Would Be Ours. Against Christian Democracy. And Against Populism Too, https://klubjagiellonski.pl/2024/11/20/nie-ma-juz-stacji-ktora-bylaby-nasza-przeciwko-chadecji-i-populizmowi-tez/ [accessed: 30.11.2024].

[2] K. Pilawa, Catholic Political Awakening. A Response to Jan Maciejewski, https://klubjagiellonski.pl/2024/11/21/katolickie-przebudzenie-polityczne-odpowiedz-janowi-maciejewskiemu/ [accessed: 30.11.2024].

[3] M. Kedzierski, Church Orthodoxy Is Not the Most Important Thing. A Polemic with Jan Maciejewski and Konstanty Pilawa, https://klubjagiellonski.pl/2024/11/26/koscielna-ortodoksja-nie-jest-najwazniejsza-polemika-z-janem-maciejewskim-i-konstantym-pilawa/ [accessed: 30.11.2024].

[4] Former Prime Minister Morawiecki attempted an extensive explanation of his decision on the platform X. User comments indicate that these arguments were not accepted. See https://x.com/MorawieckiM/status/1858460314737479741 [accessed: 2.12.2024].

[5] Religion vs. Esotericism | Guest: Tomasz Stawiszynski | #KulturaPoswiecona, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uunu46tp7dc [accessed: 30.11.2024].

[6] Incidentally, Tolkien's character Gollum seems to me the best image of liberal democracy.