14th Sunday of ordinary Time "I thank you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden
these things from the wise and the intelligent and have revealed them to infants;
[Matt.11:25]
One of the aspects of Christ's teaching that is anathema to the secular intelligentsia is the truth contained in these lines from Matthew's Gospel, that often the truths revealed by God are easily understood and lived by the simple and uneducated, while the learned and the clever are often left in the dark in their regard. Given that pride is the cause of man's rebellion against God, and the growing result of that same rebellion, we ought not to be surprised that the learned and clever in the world would be closed to the teaching of Christ, not simply because it often contradicts their own views, but also and perhaps more so by the simple fact that the simple and uneducated are drawn to it. In this sense, knowledge is seen to be like a cultural artifact, the more widely it is distributed among people, the less value it has, and the less worth possessing. If simple and uneducated folk can grasp the essential teaching of Jesus sufficiently well to base their life upon it's wisdom, then what kind of wisdom can it be, of what value to those who make their livelihood by peddling their own wisdom to other learned and clever people like themselves, not the rabble who seem to follow Christ.
The essentially popular character, what we might call today the egalitarian character of Christian revelation, the fact that it is addressed to all as a wisdom all can and really must come to possess in order to attain human fulfillment, has always been a stumbling block to the intellectually gifted who are also suffused with pride in their own intellectual superiority. In the early Church, this can be seen in the gnostic sects which tried to hijack Christianity and make it into a two tiered community, the first composed of the ignorant masses who clung to the simple, public teaching of Jesus, and the smaller elite who were graced with the hidden manna Jesus supposedly never proposed publicly to the crowds but revealed privately to the chosen disciples only, who were thereby made a kind of illuminati within the Church, with their own secret doctrines intended only for the wise. This arrangement allowed the intellectually proud to be both Christian and respectable among their secular intellectual peers at the same time. Of course these secret teachings led these gnostics (the learned ones) into an intellectual and spiritual blindness which inevitably ended up in heresy and extraordinary moral perversion, and they ended up in a worse condition than had they remained simply pagans.
Intellectual pride always leads in this direction of unbelief. After all what self-respecting intellectual wants to be forced to mingle with, let alone stand shoulder to shoulder with, the ignorant masses? The Pharisees thought that way and that is why they were cut off from the saving message of Jesus. Recall how they responded to their being stood up to by the simple man who was born blind, after he was cured by Jesus: "They answered and said to him, "You were born totally in sin, and are you trying to teach us?" [John 9:34] How dare that wretched man to act like he was somehow their equal when it came to teaching anything! And they hated Jesus for just the same reason - after all, who was this uneducated son of a carpenter to be competing with their teaching office! But Jesus knew them well, and it was as much a chiding of them as a praise of the Father when he said that day: "I thank thee, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that thou hast hidden these things from the wise and intelligent and revealed them to mere children..."
The Church has always been wary of the intellectually proud in her midst, even while she promotes learning in so many ways. Today the Church operates schools from elementary to university, and in certain past ages provided the only secure place for learning in her monasteries. She has long been a patron of the arts and promoter of human culture. And yet never loses her founder's healthy suspicion of the intelligentsia in general, and knows that the deepest rebellions against her teaching and discipline are always led by those who place themselves above the common lot and see themselves as the vanguard of the truly enlightened.
The troubles that have plagued the Church following the 2nd Vatican Council, the intellectual rebellions against the Church's moral teaching and discipline all had their roots in the Church's own centers of learning, her universities, her seminaries. The Church has long suffered her own version of the "trahison des clercs," the betrayal of her intellectual elites, who first denied her teachings in the academies, and then took to themselves the leadership of the popular rebellion based upon the theological and moral dissent of the academicians.
The result has been much suffering, the shipwreck of the ecclesial mission of Catholic intellectual institutions, the breakdown of Christian family life, and now the scandals involving the disgraceful actions of some clergy and the disgraceful inaction of the Church's leaders in dealing with these problems. But none of this can ultimately shake the faith of the simple believers. The unbelievers are astounded by the refusal of the ordinary Catholic to abandon his faith and the Church, because they never have understood the faith of the little ones. They cannot see what the little ones with faith do see, that the truth of the faith and the truth of the Church does not depend upon the sanctity of the messengers and shepherds, but upon the sanctity and absolute fidelity of the Lord who sends them, the same Lord whose Church it is that they only serve, for better or for worse. It surprises the unbelievers, especially the unbelieving intelligentsia that the simple can make these distinctions and ground their lives on them, because they are the ones whose faith Christ marveled at, the simple faith which enables them to grasp what the learned and the clever cannot, the truth of God's revelation, including the truth about the Church, what it is, and where it is.
In Franco Zeffirelli's movie, Jesus of Nazareth, this great director chooses to portray only one apostle as a self absorbed intellectual, and that apostle commits the ultimate "trahison des clercs," for this apostle was Judas. There is no biblical evidence that Judas was a learned man, but this portrayal of the betrayer says something about Zeffirelli's own understanding of what went wrong after the 2nd Vatican Council, and what has always been a problem for the Church, beginning with the rebellion of the Pharisees against Christ himself. The present Roman Pontiff is a very learned man, but he has an affinity for the simple faithful that is unmistakable, and for that he is loved by the masses of Catholics, and often is despised in the Church's own academies of higher learning. That speaks volumes about what is wrong today in the life of the Church, but it also holds out much hope for the future. In the end, it really is the simple who are blessed, as Jesus himself testifies in today's Gospel, and they really are the bulwark of the Church. After all, they have the numbers to survive even the "trahison des clercs."