Continuing the text of my remarks at the National Pastoral Life Center’s 25th anniversary celebration at St Paul the Apostle Church last week…

Tom Beaudoin

New York City

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Secular Catholics may include the many who call themselves “recovering Catholics,” and who do so because the apocalypses of their lives—physical, psychological, intellectual, spiritual—were not able to be located on the map of the faith they had been taught. And contrary to many Catholic apologists (including my earlier self), this does not necessarily mean that they had a deficient religious education. This is too convenient a story for “us” to tell about “them.” Many “recovering Catholics” know as much of what Catholicism at its best is about as those who still choose the Catholic Church as central to their lives.

Secular Catholics are often more or less trying to get through their lives, like all of us. They often share something important with Paul and for that matter, with Christ: service to the truth. Or at least to “fairness.” They often “scrutinize their motives” and do their own forms of “self-examination,” qualities that theologian Risto Saarinen says should be honored as theologically significant because they remind Christians of the imitation of christus iudex, Christ the judge who himself is in service to truth – as distinct from the imitation of “christus medicus” or “christus victor” (God and the Gift, Liturgical Press, 2005, p. 124) They are in no way simplistically relativistic. They are often judged, however, as cultural victims.

Do we not also notice in Paul his continual reversion to the language and exercises of self-examination, possibly as a way of working through the cultural-philosophical-religious diversities in which he was made, of finding between his Jesus, Moses, and Athenodorus a set of practices that were saving for him, such as we see in his regular invocation of a Hellenistic catalogue of virtues when he wants to help people get through: set your mind, he writes in Philippians 4, on what is true, honorable, just, pure, pleasing, commendable, excellent, praiseworthy. He draws self-examining exercises as a way of faithfully taking the measure of these crossroads that he lived.

Secular Catholics need ways of acknowledging that they are living crossroads of many experiences, relationships, languages, cultures, histories. Many people think that the more diverse and “secular” their lives become, the less Christianity must figure. But then here is Paul in all his many-cultured and multireligious complexity, and perhaps less finally at one with himself and God than we might need him to be or make him out to be. I find the judgment of renowned biblical scholar Abraham Malherbe challenging: “Was Paul a hellenistic philosopher or a Christian pastor? […] It is extraordinary to what degree [his] categories and language are derived from the Greeks… Paul is so familiar with the rich Greek traditions of pastoral care, and uses them in so unstudied a fashion, that it would be wrong to think that he only superficially mined the lode for his own purposes. He is more consistent and unconscious in his appropriation of [this] tradition than most of his pagan contemporaries… As to his method of pastoral care, Paul is at once hellenistic [philosopher] and Christian [pastor].” (Malherbe, Paul and the Popular Philosophers, Fortress, 1989, pp. 76-77) Is there nothing here for secular Catholics today who find themselves multiply invested?