In a recent post, English priest-blogger Fr. Ed Tomlinson likened the threat of secular modernism in the church to Tolkien’s Balrog. You may remember the great demon pursues the members of the Fellowship as they are fleeing the mines of Moria. The final confrontation is at the Bridge of Khazad-dum.
Gandalf defies the Balrog crying, “You shall not pass!”
“With a bound the Balrog leaped full upon the bridge. His whip whirled and hissed…at that moment Gandalf lifted his staff, and crying aloud he smote the bridge before him. The staff broke asunder and fell from his hand. A blinding sheet of white flame sprang up. The bridge cracked.
Right at the Balrog’s feet it broke, and the stone upon which it stood crashed into the gulf, while the rest remained, poised, quivering like a tongue of rock thrust out into emptiness. With a terrible cry the Balrog fell forward, and its shadow plunged down and vanished. But even as it fell it swung its whip and the thongs lashed and curled about the wizard’s knees, dragging him to the brink. He staggered and fell, grasped vainly at the stone, and slid into the abyss.”
Fr. Tomlinson compares the battle between secular modernists and conservatives in the Church to Gandalf’s stand off with the Balrog, writing,
“Modernism… threatened Catholic orthodoxy in the second half of the last Century. In many ways it was and is like a spiritual Balrog which has, in truth, been defeated though its danger is still present and felt.
The defeat is clear because modernists… have not produced fruit that will last. Mass attendance is down where their ideas played out, their concrete churches, stripped bare by their passions, look tired and ugly today… [their ideology] has emptied seminaries and religious orders. Put bluntly they have not convinced the next generation of their ideals. It is therefore only a matter of time before they vanish. For those who follow watered down religion lose faith altogether. Hence the young raised on a modernist diet have largely given up on God and the church and simply vanished into the secular culture around them.
So Modernism is dying as we enter the 21st Century. Seminaries are now housing men more orthodox than their tutors and it is the religious orders that value tradition that are growing. And the few young people who have not abandoned church now hunger for orthodoxy where it has been introduced to them.”
Fr. Tomlinson’s vision from England echoes Benedict XVI’s 1969 prophecy that the church is going through a great battle, and that it would emerge leaner and simpler: “It will become small and will have to start pretty much all over again. It will no longer have use of the structures it built in its years of prosperity. The reduction in the number of faithful will lead to it losing an important part of its social privileges. It will be a more spiritual Church, and will not claim a political mandate flirting with the Right one minute and the Left the next. It will be poor and will become the Church of the destitute.”
Certainly the whole church is going through a tectonic shift from European and North American dominance to becoming the Church of the South, the Church of the poor, persecuted and marginalized.
If Fr. Tomlinson is right that secular modernism in the church has had its day, we must still beware the Balrog’s whip. There is a sting in the tail of the world’s powers, and like an angry wasp at the end of summer, the Balrog of secular modernism can still crack the whip that curls and clings to bring us down.
That last crack of the whip is likely to come in an unsuspected and unexpected way. I would not be surprised to find that faithful Christians are pushed into Benedict XVI’s slimmer and poorer condition through a wave of persecution. At first in the United States and Europe, the Balrog’s whip will manifest in legal and financial aggression. It will move on to exclusion, denial of equal rights, and then imprisonment, and even martyrdom. Those who doubt this possibility are the ones who most need to be alert.
Times are dark, but hope is never lost. History shows that this is precisely the pattern of the battle and the plot line of redemption. After the long defeat and death, a victory and a resurrection—and every time in such a way that it is completely unexpected and a sheer delight.
As when Gandalf the Grey returned as Gandalf the White.
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Balrog’s just been elected pope. Enough said.
So true the tide of the perennial battle for the soul of man and the Church. Chesterton once observed that in each age the Church presented itself as a counter to the particular excess or evil of that period. Perhaps the staff of humility will serve as a counter to the sting of modernest pride. Let us pray.
“Certainly the whole church is going through a tectonic shift from European and North American dominance to becoming the Church of the South, the Church of the poor, persecuted and marginalized.”
In many places of the South the Catholic Church is neither persecuted nor marginalised; in Latin America and the Philippines it has always been a part of the ruling oligarchy .
It will certainly be the Church of the poor, and the (non-formally) educated; the question is what if what happened in Europe and North America- and is happening in parts of Latin America now- happens there: the people stop being poor and uneducated?
Thank you profoundly for this post, Father Dwight. I am so grateful.
Wonderful article that is equally applicable to main stream non conformist Protestantism. Most of my contemporaries at Theological College were charismatic evangelicals. The writings of John Spong have been read and are seen to lead to nothing. Young people have all but disappeared but the ones coming back are hungry (yes, even the older ones left are hungry for spiritual reality). And oersecution looms for those who oppose the march of sexual and gender “liberation” or uphold the uniqueness of Christ over against the march of life denying Chris-lam. It says it all…
I live in a small Texas town with a very large Catholic parish. We moved here twenty years ago from a parish in a neighboring town that was losing a majority of its young people, including our own children, to other churches or to none at all. Here the youth group is dynamic and inspiring, and we have been blessed to see many young men enter the seminary and othery young adults continue to spread the faith. I see evidence all around of Pope Benedict’s vision here in the Southern states. We travel frequently in our business and have attended Mass in numerous parishes that are much smaller than ours, but strong in faith. Too many still seem to have older populations than ours, though. I pray daily for reconversion of our friends and family and that my grandchildren will see a resurgence of faith and be baptized. Where we are I see my fellow parishioners, especially in the ministries I serve, growing stronger and deeper in faith and service to the community around us. Persecution is real and may reach us all, but the Church has always overcome and overwhelmed those who would destroy it. The gates of hell will not prevail against it.