A seminarian friend from Cameroon and I used to discuss the tension he often felt with the incredibly individualistic culture of the United States. He told me in Cameroon they had a saying: “I am because we are. We are because I am.” It captured something he wished to see more of in America: a deep sensitivity to our communal calling and felt responsibility for where we have been placed.
This is what I think all Catholics can do to rebuild culture. We have been marked, since the early Church, by a hyperlocal emphasis. Our economic and social theory, our ecclesial structure in parishes and dioceses—all of it—puts a primary emphasis on the community of people we can engage face-to-face. Paul writes letters to Ephesus, Colossus, Philippi, and others: local communities of Christians, not “to all Christians.” The angel in Revelation directs messages from God to seven local churches. The local emphasis and communal calling has been present from the beginning.
The push of our social life today is increasingly away from the local. Our food is sourced nationally and mass produced. We focus more on national elections than local ones. Our jobs are for companies whose headquarters we may have never visited and we have coworkers whose heights we may not even know because we only see them on Zoom. We are globalizing and nationalizing at the same time, and we risk missing the call in front of us to build up our local communities.
The good news is that the local community provides contexts where certain universal calls to rebuild culture can be present and available to all of us as lay Catholics.
The good news is that the local community provides contexts where certain universal calls to rebuild culture can be present and available to all of us as lay Catholics, splitting the tension between the micro and the macro. I would like to suggest five areas where we can be the “soul of the world”: families, neighborhoods, institutions, local government, and local apostolates.
1. Families
Amid a culture of self-invention, family life becomes a radical witness. “If you want to change the world, go home and love your family.” This quote often attributed to Mother Teresa does not mean to domesticate the call of the laity to focus exclusively on our own families; it speaks to the potential for family life to be a channel of grace for the entire world.
As a married lay person, your vocation to marriage is, to quote Bishop Barron, “not about you.” It’s not first about your own holiness:
Two other sacraments, Holy Orders and Matrimony, are directed towards the salvation of others; if they contribute as well to personal salvation, it is through service to others that they do so. They confer a particular mission in the Church and serve to build up the People of God. (CCC 1534)
You aren’t called to marriage primarily for your own holiness, just as a priest is not called to the priesthood for his. That is what the sacraments of initiation—baptism, Eucharist, and confirmation—are for. You are a gift to your family, and if I could take it a step further, your family is a gift for the world.
Family life is not something we do to participate in polite society. It is an invitation of God outward: first outward from ourselves in self-gift, then outward from our families as a mission to the world.
This gift needs to be lived and talked about. We need to both live the vocation to married life as one of radical self-gift and proclaim it to a world at risk of losing itself in a culture of self-invention. The culture needs to witness how the human person finds himself in a sincere gift of self.
Catholics need to peacefully and humbly remember we are not on the losing team. Whatever becomes countercultural as our lives become more conformed to Christ is something each human heart is wired for. Holiness is attractive if it is authentic. Generosity of spirit should compel us outward into relationship with those around us, not afraid to engage for fear of being different.
2. Neighborhoods
Catholics can be the “soul of the world” through the relationships they engage in, and these cannot be limited to the common life shared with fellow faithful Catholics. By all means, have a small group with other faithful Catholic men or women. But also coach your kids’ sports teams, get to know your physical neighbors, host parties at your home.
The growing suburban substructure of American life has an inherent push toward anonymity. We drive into our neighborhoods, park our cars in our garages, and live atomized lives. “Bedroom communities,” we call them—places where people sleep in between their commutes to and from an urban center where their business is held. This anonymity is further exacerbated by the advent of remote work. Now, all life can happen online.
I recently gave a talk to a group of ex-convicts, active addicts, and those in recovery on the loneliness pandemic in our culture and the Christian call to community, rooted in the quote from St. Teresa of Kolkata: “If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other.” I could not believe how well it landed, the honest conversations that took place afterward, the brotherhood and sisterhood present in that room. We had found a common language and a place from which to talk to one another: The aching isolation we all have and our need for each other.
I believe Catholics can be uniquely engaged in rebuilding three particular categories of institutions around which local communities are built.
3. Institutions
In Yuval Levin’s A Time to Build, he argues that the erosion of trust in institutions in our time does not mean that we should eschew them all together. Instead, the task to save culture is to rebuild and recommit to institutions—to restore their trustworthiness, formative character, and place in structuring individual and communal life.
A long time ago, a mentor convinced me that leaders are characterized by the impact they leave on the institutions they found or built up. Institutions, he said, allow leaders to extend their impact beyond their own personal influence. I believe Catholics can be uniquely engaged in rebuilding three particular categories of institutions around which local communities are built: parishes, schools, and small businesses.
Nationally oriented ministries are important, but your parish is still the place where most people in a community will encounter the Catholic Church, if they ever do at all. Your parish is worth investing in, whatever its starting point today.
Schools, likewise, are critical bastions of community life. Catholic schools are an excellent solution, but public and charter schools are also worth trying to suffuse with a Catholic imagination, to the extent it is possible. “Rebuilding” is the operative term in many of these contexts, but they are worth fighting for, or at least fighting for alternatives, especially with the prohibitive cost of Catholic education for many today.
A friend was recently elected to the board of a local K–12 free public charter school that places a high emphasis on virtue education and civic responsibility. Another board member, who had held high positions in the federal government and had gone on to become a wealthy real estate developer, said of their work to create an accessible education that formed young people in timeless values: “Even if we graduate twenty students a year who have been formed this way, this will be the most important work I have ever done.”
Another underrated institution critical to cultural revival is the small business. Today, your local HVAC company is as likely to be owned by a New York City–based private equity company as it is a local owner/operator. Small businesses are still the backbone of the American economy, employing roughly 46 percent of American workers and providing vitality to local communities. They are also at risk of being lost.
This summer, my family needed a way to help our two rambunctious boys learn some discipline and get their energy out. We stumbled on a judo school less than a mile from our house and were struck by the peace, rigor, and respect in the sensei, all volunteers. Our experience there had been so overwhelmingly positive that we were later impressed and grateful, but not altogether surprised, to learn that the owner is a very devout Catholic. The kids at this judo club are extremely diverse, with a broad range of socioeconomic situations, and all are being blessed by the witness of a judo instructor sharing both her faith and talents with her community.
Having seen the impact and influence a few friends have had in owning and running small businesses, I am convinced that Catholic small business owners, living out and running their business with a view for their faith, are critical in renewing culture and helping it to stay human.
4. Local Government
I heard a fascinating and instructive story recently: A group of parents were concerned by the books in the kids’ and young adult section of their local public library. So scandalous was the content that they asked how they could get the books removed from the shelves. They were told the library board made those decisions, so they ran for and were elected to become a controlling majority of the library board.
When they ran into another troubling citywide development, they were told the city council was in charge of decision-making. You guessed it: They all ran for city council, eventually grabbing four of the nine spots.
Perhaps we simply have to expand our imaginative categories through the witness of others.
These were just parents trying to work from a Catholic worldview to create a better community, for their kids and for all citizens. So often, we think there is not much we can do beyond federal elections, but we still live in a country where ordinary citizens can have a tremendous impact. Perhaps we simply have to expand our imaginative categories through the witness of others.
5. Local Apostolates
As I meet more mission-oriented young people, I find that many of them are inspired and impressed by the impact of many of the great apostolates that sprang up to address the need for a new evangelization. They want to be Catholic speakers or founders of similarly influential apostolates as a way to fulfill their felt call for mission.
I see us at a tipping point in the Catholic apostolate world where we are actually at a critical mass of these nationally oriented ministries: What is needed are more Catholic ministries with a local focus.
The FIRE Foundation, created in the Archdiocese of Denver, engages the philanthropic community in the area to raise support for local Catholic schools to become more accessible to students with disabilities through grants and training, so that these schools can accept students with significant developmental needs and be places they can thrive. FIRE isn’t trying to become a national resource; it is trying to help individual kids and families in Denver. I have found a particular joy and verve to its events and galas, in part because this worthy cause is directly impacting people in the community.
I would like to see the next wave of new lay apostolates operate along similar lines: founded not to create a program to make disciples in parishes across the country but to bring renewal in parishes in their own particular diocese. The next catechetical initiative should be one like the School of Faith in Kansas City, which didn’t seek to form people across the globe but within parishes and schools in their city. The work of disciple-making needs lay apostolates. Those with a local emphasis can be more responsive and intensive, filling a needed gap.
As lay Catholics, we should not be dismayed by the erosion of the culture around us, but we do not have the luxury of ignoring it either. Real cultural renewal takes time: We have to start today. Bill Gates once said, “Most people overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in ten years.”
As Bishop Barron said at the National Eucharistic Congress, if seventy million Catholics committed to living this way, then “the energy in this room could change our country. What if seventy million Catholics, starting today, began to live their faith radically and dramatically—became body offered, blood poured out. We would change the country.” The need seems to me today even more apparent than it was then.
So, the question remains, to paraphrase Tolkien: What will we do with the time given us?
Read Part 1 here.