The Mystical Church and the Institutional Church

Adventures in Alternative Christianity

I know my theological opinions confuse a lot of people. This week, for instance, I received a heartfelt and sorrowful plea from a friend from Ireland who just found out that I have not been attending Mass (or the Divine Liturgy, since I am “technically”—such a telling term—a Byzantine Catholic). I understand her sorrow. But she’s not the only one who’s confused. My youngest child, Daniel, aged 12, approached my wife and me in the kitchen this week with a question: “Are we Catholic, or are we Orthodox, or are we Protestants, or what?” We unhesitatingly affirmed that we are Catholic, though we haven’t stepped foot into a Church (with the exception of our son’s wedding at an Orthodox church last fall) since 2020. But it’s not that we haven’t celebrated the Holy Mysteries.

When all the churches across the “Western Democracies” closed at governmental decree at the beginning of the COVID pandemic, we went along. For a time. Then Easter was canceled. Then Christmas. Then Easter again. Then enough was enough. Then Pope Francis declared getting the experimental gene therapy was an “act of love.” Then employees at the Vatican could no longer keep their jobs if unjabbed. And it wasn’t only the Catholic Church. Metropolitan Hilarion of the Russian Orthodox Church, for example, declared that those refusing this experimental therapy were committing “a sin for which they will have to atone throughout their lives.” Francis and Hilarion are but two examples of Church leaders speaking power to truth. There are legions more. To my knowledge, like the governments to whom they were kowtowing, not one of the them has apologized for their emotional and sacramental blackmail.

Now, to be clear, these COVID policies were not alone responsible for my disenchantment with the Sacramental Machine. Such had been growing for a while. For example, while my book Transfiguration was in production in summer of 2018, I, like so many others, found myself profoundly angered and dismayed by the revelations of the scandal concerning Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, who had been grooming seminarians as his own personal sex toys for decades. Though this shocked many of the faithful, insiders knew about it for a long time. My friend Larry Chapp, for instance, knew about it as early as 1981 when he was a seminarian. And, trust me, the seminarians weren’t the only ones who knew what game McCarrick was playing. Another friend, a self-described “McCarrick guy” until the scandal broke, was so outraged that he left the Catholic Church entirely and is now on his way to becoming an Episcopalian priest. The subtitle of Transfiguration is “Notes toward a Radical Catholic Reimagination of Everything,” but I was so ashamed of having my name associated with the Catholic Church after this scandal erupted that I wanted to take the word “Catholic” off the cover. I resisted because I didn’t want to interrupt the publication process and trouble my publisher. And I also was as yet unsure about where this was leading me. But I still regret not doing something.

Then there was the time Pope Francis, in righteous indignation, defended his friend, Chilean Bishop Juan Barros from charges of harboring a(nother) priest pedophile. Now, don’t get me wrong, I was as enthusiastic as anyone at the beginning of Francis’s pontificate. I even wrote a piece on Laudato Si for Artur Sebastian Rosman’s late-great blog Cosmos the in Lost (Artur and I used to be friends, but we’re now seeing other people). But the Barros affair and Francis’s subsequent trajectory completely soured me on him. This happened a few months before the McCarrick scandal broke; but after McCarrick, the Pope’s complicity in the rot that is the Catholic hierarchy became all the clearer.

I pass over the many hurts I have experienced from alleged Christians over the past three years, including that guy at Patheos projecting very pious vibes online but who habitually harangues my friends for posting things related to me and my work on social media. I also pass over the Orthodox priest, whom I thought of as a friend, but who completely ghosted me when I reached out to him for spiritual counsel when my daughter was going through a very difficult time related to having been sexually molested by the adopted 50-year-old son of our former priest—all because my Orthodox friend didn’t like my opinions (which turned out to be 100% correct, by the way) concerning the gene therapy propaganda. That one hurt, and still does.

So, what was I doing by remaining in this Institution? (I don’t mean just Catholic, Inc., but Institutional Christianity writ large). Where was my integrity?

I know all the arguments for remaining in the Institution. They really don’t hold up under scrutiny, though, at least not for me; at least not when I am being intellectually honest. The argument from authority has lost its savor. Nevertheless, I still call myself a Catholic. “When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.”

In this tension, I find myself perhaps haunted by one of my intellectual and spiritual lares, the French mystic and philosopher Simone Weil, who, though deeply drawn to the Catholic Church, could never submit to baptism. Her hesitation had to do with the Church as a social structure, as she wrote in a letter to a French priest, Fr. Perrin:

“I am well aware that the Church must inevitably be a social structure; otherwise it would not exist. But in so far as it is a social structure, it belongs to the Prince of this World. It is because it is an organ for the preservation and transmission of truth that there is an extreme danger for those who, like me, are excessively open to social influences. For in this way what is purest and what is most defiling look very much the same, and confused under the same words, make an almost undecomposable mixture.”

I am also inspired by the example of the primitive Celtic Church, so far at the edges of the Empire that its Christianity was able to grow and flourish in a healthy way, dispersed as it was in the wilds and far from urban civilization and the structures of control that come with it. As H.J. Massingham observed, the early Celtic and British churches were relics left from the time before “Christendom began to depart from Christianity.”

As a result, and by necessity, my family and I have been holding house church on Sundays, using an abbreviated version of the liturgy of the Book of Common Prayer (my doctorate is in Early Modern English Literature—in particular the Metaphysical Poets—so the BCP, based on the earlier Sarum Missal, is comfortable territory). To be clear: I am not “playing priest,” and it is in no way liturgical cosplay. But I could not in good conscience allow my children (the youngest were 9 and 11 at the beginning of the pandemic) to be starved of the Holy Mysteries because some prelates were afraid of crossing the Archons and held the Sacraments hostage in the exercise of their own power. You could say, in all honesty, that we are rewilding the Church. This, in a way, is a mystical understanding of the Church—but it is not at all mysterious. ’Tis common as the wind and the rain, the sun, moon, and stars. And I’m not recommending this as a path for anyone, so I don’t condemn anyone for thinking otherwise or for condemning what we do. But we did feel called to this Alternative Christianity. The good news (note the metaphor) is that we’re not alone.

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A song we often sing in house church at this time of the year.