The Marian Option

God's Solution to a Civilization in Crisis

Carrie Cress

• Publisher: TAN Books
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781505109115
• Topic: Theologie & Religion
• Subtopic: Marianische Theologie

As the world descends into chaos, Christians are thinking deeply about how to stem the tide. Many options and suggestions have been presented to deal with Christian persecution and cultural decadence, but none can hold a candle to The Marian Option.

Dr. Carrie Gress provides a thoroughly researched bird's eye view of the significant cultural and military events mediated through Mary on behalf of her spiritual children. From miraculous victories to the soaring heights of culture, you have never seen Mary like this before.

Until now, books on the Virgin Mary have generally focused upon one apparition or various theological elements of this mysterious woman. But the scope of The Marian Option is far greater. Drawing from a vast array of dogmas, Vatican approved apparitions, and writings of the saints, Dr. Gress has pulled together the remarkable story of Mary's overwhelming influence and intercession.

This enthralling chronicle of Mary's intercession makes clear that Christ's mother is indeed the most powerful woman in the world, and the answer for how we can save the world and bring us back into her Son's heart. Not only is she keenly interested in assisting Christians, she has the ability to do so, even in the face of the gravest odds. We just have to ask.

The Marian Option will leave you with a new perspective on the Blessed Mother and a renewed hope in the future of the Church and the world.

PART I

Mary and Creative Minorities

CHAPTER 1

The Benedictine Model

Two thousand years of Christianity have supplied scores of stories about how to respond to persecution. The first response to Christian persecution took place in 1 A.D., when Mary and Joseph fled with the child Jesus to Egypt. Families who did not flee, however, had their infant sons brutally murdered by King Herod’s soldiers. Still today, we honor their sacrifice, the Holy Innocents, as the first martyrs for Christ every December 28. It is fair to say that Christian persecution has been with us since the very beginning. Jesus told us to expect it (see 2 Tm 3:12), so we shouldn’t be surprised to find ourselves facing it yet again.

We have thousands of examples of saints dealing with persecution—some who remained in and some who fled from their respective civilizations. In both cases, many were martyred. There are even saints who did both, such as St. Polycarp, who journeyed from farm to farm until his hiding place was finally betrayed, only to be martyred in Rome’s coliseum. Or St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross (Edith Stein), a Jewish convert who was moved to a convent in the Netherlands during World War II, only to be discovered and sent to Auschwitz, where she perished. We also have examples of those who were going to flee but then changed their minds, like the first pope, St. Peter.

But what can we learn from those who have gone before us? The most obvious answer is that there is more than one way to deal with persecution.

Christians today are facing not only persecution but also the threat of civilizational collapse. When St. Benedict of Nursia founded his first monastery, he wasn’t trying to escape persecution per se. Having lived in Rome, he knew the depth of its corruption. Not only was it crumbling as a civilization, but it was shot through with paganism, making it an incredibly difficult culture to renew because every cultural symbol—every flower and cloud—carried with it some sort of association with pagan imagery. What made Roman persecutions so aggressive was that the Roman Empire lacked anything resembling Christian roots. Humility, suffering, charity, monotheism, and the Cross were a scandal to Romans and contrary to the very things the Romans believed made them a great empire.

The parallels between America today and the crumbling Roman Empire are striking and have been pointed out by historians and cultural critics for decades. It seems only natural, then, that St. Benedict, who was the civilizational savior of the post-Roman world, should be invoked for similar times. But today’s situation is complicated by weapons of mass destruction, globalism, technology, drones, surveillance, and unwieldy states with bloated government regulations shaping even the most mundane details of our daily lives. As a result, a true retreat from the world and its threats seems next to impossible. Even so, it is important to consider our options.

Creative Minorities

Civilizations have a life-span. A cursory look at world history reveals this truth, from ancient Egypt and Persia, to Greece and the Roman Empire, to the British Empire, upon which the sun never set. They have all waxed and waned. As historian Arnold Toynbee (1889–1975) noted, civilizations rarely die simply from external assault; they are first hollowed out by internal moral decline. “Civilizations,” Toynbee wrote, “die from suicide, not by murder.”¹ They are weakened from the inside out, like an old tree rotted to the core and knocked down by the slightest wind.

Toynbee, in his exhaustive research of twenty-six great civilizations, saw that they arose not from easy situations or in places that offered the least resistance to the needs of humanity—quite the contrary. He found that it was the rough edges of resistance, persecution, and challenge that brought forth new civilizations from the ashes of the old. These emerging civilizations rose not from massive populist movements but from the virtues of small “creative minorities.” According to Toynbee, these creative minorities stretch the boundaries of a crumbling empire and transform it into something new. They are “no more than a leaven in the lump of ordinary humanity.”² The creative minority is generally led by creative individuals. Toynbee explains, “The creator, when he arises, always finds himself overwhelmingly outnumbered by the inert uncreative mass, even when he has the good fortune to enjoy the companionship of a few kindred spirits.”³

Toynbee suggests two ways in which creative minorities effect a shift in culture. The first is to drill a message into the minds of the unthinking masses, perhaps through something like social media; the second is to use what Toynbee calls a mystic. This second way comes from those creative individuals who are able to enter the world but also exit it through prayer. In prayer, the mystic draws strength and inspiration that they then carry back to the world to transform communities and culture in ways unimaginable. The mystic’s retreat allows an individual to return to the world transformed and ready to transform it.

The reality that civilizations are expanded by a relative few should offer great hope to us as we watch what appears to be the crumbling of Western civilization before our very eyes. A mass movement isn’t needed—only a very few who know the true source of strength, grace, and genius to transform the world. Among Toynbee’s examples of the geniuses behind creative minorities are Moses, St. Gregory the Great (who spent three years in seclusion before establishing order in the Church and a peace with the barbarians), and of course, St. Benedict of Nursia, to whom we will turn next. Others have pointed out that St. Thomas More and his stand against Henry VIII was a one-man creative minority. A most obvious example of creative minority is Christ and the twelve men He chose to transform the world through the spread of Christianity.⁴

Pope Benedict XVI was a proponent of creative minorities, offering the idea as his vision for the Catholic Church’s role in contemporary Europe. Pope Benedict’s model of the creative minority did not suggest a full-scale retreat or ghettoization of Christians. Like Toynbee suggested, the German pope was talking not about circling the wagons and cutting oneself off from the world but about engaging the world after dowsing oneself in prayer.

St. Benedict’s Model

Among the many types of creative minorities, St. Benedict’s model is one that stands out. It is unique in that it has a retreating characteristic to it. Yes, it certainly can involve the building up of local community, but by its nature, it is not actively engaging an urban population directly. Through St. Benedict, monasticism eventually spread to all of Europe, transforming education, economics, theology, and the arc of history. Benedict’s famous dictum—ora et labora, “prayer and work”—is really the embodiment of the creative minority by emphasizing both communing with God and acting in the world.

Before looking closely at St. Benedict’s model of dealing with Christian persecution, we first need to look at who St. Benedict was. Benedict (480–547 A.D.) was born into a wealthy noble family in Nursia, Italy, a couple hours’ drive outside Rome. Raised Catholic, he had a deepening of faith when he went to study in Rome. You can still visit the church in Rome, San Benedetto in Piscinula, that is on the site of his family’s palazzo in the Trastevere district of the city. This church today features a small chapel where the servants’ cloakroom had been, a place Benedict used as a prayer cell.

Benedict eventually left the filth of pagan Rome and lived as a hermit in a cave in Subiaco for three years, where he was mentored by another hermit. He was then invited to lead a community of monks, which ended badly when one monk (or perhaps all) tried to poison him. Benedict went on to establish twelve monasteries with at least twelve monks in each, guided by the Benedictine Rule, which is a detailed explanation of how to live monastic life. He later established Monte Cassino—known as the most famous monastery in all of Europe. All the monasteries Benedict organized were devoted not only to their own work and prayer but also to evangelizing and taking care of the needs of local populations. This monastic system gave him the title father of monasticism even though monasteries were not a new phenomenon during his time. His monastic system is also credited with saving the remnants of Western civilization that surely would have been lost during the Dark Ages without the care of monks throughout Europe.

Why Retreat?

St. Benedict did not leave Rome for his own safety. Christian persecution had come largely to an end by this point after Constantine made Christianity the state religion of Rome with the Edict of Milan. Benedict left so he could follow Christ more completely. The long-term dry martyrdom of the ascetics replaced the violent and bloody martyrdom of the persecutions. The whole idea of Benedict’s monastery was to find a way to follow Christ more closely and to engage in the battle for good and evil according to God’s will. The monastery was and remains a strategic effort to save the world and souls. St. Benedict and his companions recognized that they could offer the world more by retreating from it instead of engaging in it; in other words, they retreated from the world precisely to save the world. It is in the monastery that they helped wage spiritual warfare against all that is evil—through prayer, intercession, penance, and atonement for sin. If the only reason for their founding was to save Western civilization after the collapse of Rome, then the monastic system would have ceased to be needed centuries ago. St. Benedict and every Benedictine who has followed (one prays) understood that the monastery is not a place to hide from problems; it is a place to face them, whether they are personal sin, human brokenness, persecution, or civilizational collapse. Through the ordered and penitential life of monks, the disorder of the world can be tamed, silenced, and renewed.

What St. Benedict was able to promote through the monastery system and his rule were the basic elements for building a wider community and civilization. Monasteries were able to address everything from basic human needs (food, clothing, and shelter) to the spiritual necessities (evangelization, education, common sense, hospitality, prayer, gracious manners, and self-discipline). The monasteries also jump-started local economies through the massive expansion of agriculture and technological innovations while affirming the value of hard work. None of this could have been done in an urban center; a remote and protected site was necessary to ward off invading barbarians and other enemies.

St. Benedict is truly a source of inspiration and hope, but the question remains: Is St. Benedict’s model best suited for contemporary concerns?

A New St. Benedict?

As noted earlier, the current discussion of St. Benedict’s model has been made popular by Rod Dreher in his book The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation (2017).⁵ Dreher says that his idea originated with philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, best known for his book After Virtue (1981). In it, MacIntyre takes a pessimistic view, arguing that the Enlightenment project has failed and the West is already lost and hopelessly corrupted down to its intellectual roots. The last lines of MacIntyre’s book read as follows:

What matters at this stage is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us. And if the tradition of the virtues was able to survive the horrors of the last dark ages, we are not entirely without grounds for hope. This time however, the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have already been governing us for quite some time. And it is our lack of consciousness of this that constitutes part of our predicament. We are waiting not for a Godot, but for another—doubtless very different—St. Benedict.⁶

As we have just seen, the notion of following in the footsteps of St. Benedict is very appealing, but MacIntyre says something very interesting. He says we are waiting for “another—doubtless very different—St. Benedict.” Mac-Intyre made it clear that the St. Benedict of old didn’t need to be reincarnated; rather, something or someone new was needed. While it is always difficult to conjecture what Mac-Intyre might mean because he is a challenging writer and thinker, looking at Christian history offers a few clues.

The first clue is to consider what St. Benedict was called to build on: the Roman Empire. While there are dramatic parallels between ancient Rome and our day, there are also a lot of differences. The first difference is the deep imprint paganism left on the Roman mind. It’s hard for us to comprehend the extent to which paganism influenced how Romans perceived every natural element of the world. While most of us think of the Dark Ages—those murky years of history when barbarian hoards, chaos, ignorance, and superstition ruled—G. K. Chesterton explained that this period had an altogether different reality and purpose. Of the Dark Ages, he says, “It was the end of a penance; or, if it be preferred, a purgation. It marked the moment when a certain spiritual expiation had been finally worked out and certain spiritual diseases had been finally expelled from the system. They had been expelled by an era of asceticism, which was the only thing that could have expelled them. Christianity had entered the world to cure the world; and she had cured it in the only way in which it could be cured.”⁷

That cure was through amputation, so to speak. The old Hellenic/Roman w...