Walking among the ruins of St Andrews Cathedral may lead one to make the often taken for granted conclusion that the forces of the Enlightenment and modernity have made the Christian faith a bizarre artifact of the past. Perhaps we should just regard it as an odd medieval superstition that we modern individuals can look at with bemused curiosity. After all, aren’t people like Richard Dawkins right to say that science has finally done away with religious delusions? Aren’t the teachings of the Catholic Church too stuck in the past to be relevant for the contemporary world? Even if God does exist, can’t everyone just agree that all religions are different but equally valid ways of getting to him?
Upon arriving in St Andrews on my first day abroad, I attended a barbecue hosted by the university’s Catholic Society. After an evening of enjoying the company and laughter of my newfound friends, we prayed Compline in the chaplaincy’s very own sanctuary. Reciting the psalms and singing the Salve Regina led me to briefly reflect on the timeless transcendence of the Church. Every time we say that we believe in the communion of saints at the end of the Apostles’ Creed, we are expressing a profound truth about the sociality of the church—Christians are not simply united to each other here on earth, but also share communion with those who have gone before them on their pilgrimage here on earth.
Thus, we can have confidence that the prayers we say are united with those recited by the thirteenth-century Christians of medieval St Andrews. Although we live in a world that often seems disoriented and out-of-control, Christians can take solace in the knowledge that our petitions and praise are united with those of the saints who walked with faith before us. While empires, ideologies, and nations may come and go, the unchanging faithfulness and truth of God and his Church are things that we can hold on to with sureness.
The people of faith at St Andrews have also taught me what it means to remain loyal to one’s intellectual and religious commitments despite living in a world that is increasingly pluralistic. My theology classes are filled with Catholics, evangelicals, liberal Protestants, Muslims, and atheists. Yet, in spite of our deep theological disagreements, the students I’ve met at St Andrews are intellectually mature enough to engage in interreligious dialogue that earnestly engages the profound differences between our traditions. Acknowledging and responsibly considering our serious disagreements allows us to more authentically honor people’s deeply held religious loyalties, as opposed to diluting them in an attempt to focus exclusively on what we hold in common.
One may still reasonably ask, however, if the West’s increased pluralism and secularization relegate Christianity to an irrelevant historical artifact? Are the crumbling ruins of St Andrews Cathedral emblematic of a wider modern phenomenon? Yes and no. Europe is undoubtedly more secular now than in any other time in the history of Western civilization. More and more people identify as atheist, and the vast majority of those who do believe in God or even identify as “Christian” certainly do not assent to notions of ecclesial community and authority; in other words, the forces of modernity have increasingly privatized and domesticated religious belief and practice.
As Pope Benedict XVI has, I believe, rightly noted, the West is at war with itself—while economic rationalism has brought material prosperity, and the Enlightenment’s appeal to reason has achieved a degree of liberty, the very foundations of Western culture are threatened by an overly techno-scientific outlook that neglects moral objectivity in the name of a perverted notion of freedom. Unable to realize objective truth or the existence of basic human goods, modern relativism has led to a “confused ideology that leads to political dogmatism”; Pope Benedict points to the growing ostracization of those who question same-sex marriage as an example of this phenomenon.
Many postmodern critics have grasped this and realized that the logical consequence of moral relativism is an intellectual nihilism that ultimately leads to self-destruction.
Yet, there is certainly hope for the Church, if we continue to take St Andrews as a makeshift model for the West. Despite the rising rate of secularism in our world, the Christian worldview offers an invaluable source of intellectual capital. Amidst the disorienting confusion of the modern world, Pope Benedict holds up St Benedict and Europe’s monastic tradition as examples of those who preserved the faith in an age of widespread barbarism.
Thus communities like the St Andrews Catholic Society serve as enclaves where the faith is articulated with intellectual rigor, and where community and charity are nurtured with the constant intercession of the saints.
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