Today I would like to talk about events that may one day, in hindsight, prove to have been of apocalyptic proportions. I hesitated over whether to put these observations into words and say them out loud, but I have come to the conclusion that I should.
I am well aware that public revelation is closed and that nobody can add anything to it. There will be no new prophetic books added to the Bible; we ourselves have defined it that way. But that certainly doesn’t mean the Holy Spirit is no longer active in His Church. I can attest that He very much is: He animates the mystical body of Christ, which is made up of many individuals, me included. And I can feel it. There have even been later private revelations that some of us take seriously, the Pope among them. The Fatima apparitions are one example. They are hard to dispute, even for someone like me, who is in the habit of disputing everything.
But even Sacred Scripture has not yet spoken its last word. There are almost certainly passages we have not yet fully understood, because we still lack the context needed to read them. And such progress does not have to wait for some apocalyptic cataclysm. In my book I give many examples of how the information age sheds fresh light on important parts of doctrine, offering a natural understanding of things that once seemed puzzling or mystical. If you are willing to take seriously all the stages of development mankind has gone through, and to consider that not even the technosphere came about by accident (that it may have arisen on God’s watch, perhaps even partly in accordance with His will), your perspective may shift. You may begin to see something like an infrastructure now taking shape, one that binds the body of Christ more tightly together into something resembling a higher organism: a new kind of creature, or creation, emerging at a new level of organization, in which individuals are like cells. We now even form many more specialized organs than at any earlier point in history, and in the most recent stages of this evolution a nervous system has begun to emerge. One can’t help seeing a clear analogy with how single cells once came together into multicellular organisms, which later developed specialized tissues and organs, and eventually became bodies in which information travels as electrical impulses. If you believe in God, it will almost inevitably occur to you that what God has done once, He may do again, in a slightly different context and on a new level. As I say in almost every article, our God speaks in parables, in which one part of the world speaks about another. Creation, too, is His way of expressing Himself. And this is also how to read Scripture: by seeing what He is doing now in light of what He has already done.
Here I would like to focus on the Holy Spirit. The Magisterium speaks quite clearly of the Holy Spirit as the soul of the Church. To many, such a statement may seem rather abstract and intangible, as hard to grasp as the gifts of the Holy Spirit we are supposed to receive in the sacrament of Confirmation. Is the Holy Spirit really and truly in me, you may ask, or is this just a pious saying that refers to nothing real in particular?
And yet we know perfectly well that the Holy Spirit is not some vague presence spread evenly over everyone. Scripture and tradition both testify that He can come to some and depart from others, and both His coming and His departure can be well documented.
The coming is easier to point to. At Pentecost, the Spirit descended on the apostles gathered in Jerusalem in the form of tongues of fire, and a group of frightened fishermen suddenly stood up and preached to a crowd from many nations, each hearing them in his own language. Nobody present took it for a metaphor. Something arrived, and everyone around could see and hear the difference.
What I find truly astonishing is that the departure is talked about so much less often, almost as if nobody had noticed. To Catholics, what follows may seem mind-boggling, too strange to be a coincidence. And it is well documented too, by Jewish tradition itself. The rabbis of the Talmud state plainly that when the last prophets, Haggai, Zechariah and Malachi, died, the Holy Spirit departed from Israel, and from then on only an echo remained, which they call the bat kol, literally “the daughter of a voice.” They also list the things the Second Temple lacked compared with the First, and the Shekhinah (the Presence) and the Holy Spirit are among them.
It didn’t happen all at once. Ezekiel had already seen the glory of the Lord leave the Temple in stages: first to the threshold, then to the east gate, then to the mountain east of the city, as if hesitating, as if giving people time to notice. Centuries later, the same pattern reappears. The Talmud records that for forty years before the destruction of the Temple in AD 70 – which takes us back to around AD 30 and the time of the Crucifixion – the signs that used to accompany the Day of Atonement ceased, the western lamp would no longer stay lit, and the Temple doors would open by themselves. What a coincidence!
Josephus, a Jewish priest and an eyewitness to those years, writes that priests entering the inner court at night felt the ground quake, heard a great noise, and then a voice as of a multitude saying: “We are departing hence.” Even the Roman historian Tacitus, who had no stake in the matter, records that a superhuman voice was heard announcing that the gods were leaving. And the feast on which Josephus places that voice is Pentecost: the same feast on which, a few decades earlier and in the same city, the Spirit came down on the apostles.
Even more astonishing, and yet in plain sight for two millennia, is what followed – not only mystically but in very practical terms. The Jewish people did not disappear, but they are no longer on the front line where the main story of mankind’s life with God unfolds, and they themselves do not claim to be. Rabbinic Judaism lives by interpreting what it received before the Spirit departed, and it waits for His return. The influence that once swept the world, the prophecies you and I still draw on, the Psalms prayed on every continent: all of it comes from the time when the Spirit was there. And He is there no longer. It seems to me that a thing should be no less stunning just because it happened in plain sight.
Of course, none of this means that God has revoked His covenant with the people of Israel. On a personal level, the Holy Spirit can certainly be present in individual Jews, just as in people of any other nation. Yet, to borrow from physics, such a presence needs an interpreting resonator. Without one, it never sounds at its full strength.
Of all the news I receive each day, the Gospel is what captures most of my attention. This says nothing about how sinful or saintly I am. It is simply so interesting, so fascinating, and it makes my life such an adventure that no other news comes anywhere near it. My interest is so intense that, even if there were reason to believe the story of Jesus did not happen as recorded, I would rather spend the rest of my life searching for errors in how the facts and events were interpreted than settle for that conclusion. What makes it all the more captivating is that after endless attempts to find a flaw in the narrative, I always arrive at the unbelievable conclusion that it is most likely all true. A passionate atheist might say I’m running a bit of a fever over my God, and the metaphor wouldn’t be entirely wrong. But if it is a true story, then it has objectively been the biggest news every single day for the last two thousand years. That much follows.
Is this fascination rare among my fellow parishioners, or across my diocese? Not at all. Is it common among non-believers of good will, or even among devout Jews? Absolutely not. Did it come to me right after I received Confirmation as a convert at the age of twenty-eight? No, it didn’t. It took time to reach its present, everyday intensity. Yet if you ask, in practical terms, how you can recognize that the Holy Spirit is in you, this is a sign that can be observed almost objectively. And it is the root and necessary precondition of the other signs by which this state of the soul is usually described: that your life is no longer about you, or that you recede into the background and become a bystander to God, who is living your life. These last two signs of the Holy Spirit’s presence can be faked by sanctimonious hypocrites who put their supposed holiness on display. The fever cannot be faked.
One can be feverish with the Holy Spirit while one’s sins are plain for everyone to see. This is how you can tell a counterfeit saint from a devout fellow Catholic who is fascinated by the Gospel and yet is a serious sinner, as most of us are, if not all of us. So don’t imagine this state of the soul as some serene wisdom, full of intellectual awareness of how we should be kind to one another. It is much more like the mind of a tabloid journalist who is completely consumed by a single story and keeps talking about it until everyone around him is exhausted (cf. Mt 13:44–46). I admit there need not be any intellectual dimension to it at all. But I must also say that I don’t believe true, loving brotherhood is possible without this fever.
Now, this whole argument of mine has a serious flaw, one I cannot resolve, at least not now. If you happen to live outside the Church, you may rightly ask: What are you talking about, for God’s sake? Where do you see such feverish Christians? I don’t know any. Show me a bishop who radiates heat like this. I haven’t seen one.
I have to agree. Not fully, of course, but to a large extent I understand the sentiment. For me, too, meeting a bishop is most often like having a bucket of icy water thrown in my face. These days they are rarely feverish. That is true in my country, and in other countries too, at least wherever no language barrier keeps them out of my view. It makes no sense whatsoever. According to Catholic teaching, ordination brings a further, special presence of the Holy Spirit to the one ordained. One could perhaps come to terms with a few exceptions, a few bishops in whom that presence doesn’t clearly show. But here it is the other way round: the appearance of absence is the rule, and the appearance of presence is the exception. It is such an eerie observation that I would be tempted to question my faith, and maybe even my sanity, were I not in such an incurable state of fever. It is deeply strange. And priests are not much better.
I recently attended a Mass at which an auxiliary bishop administered Confirmation. He gave a homily, and his words brought a freezing gust of wisdom to my ears. Of course, every single word he said was accurate. Of course, his analysis of society was on point. Of course, he pinpointed exactly what we need to change as a society to reach a sustainable brotherhood lived in harmony. It was a well-crafted speech, one that could easily have been delivered at the UN General Assembly, where it would have had about as much impact as it did in our small-town church. The only part I found completely off was when he said that most of us go to church for appearances, to fulfill our Sunday duty, “because we all want to be saved, all right?” Every preacher ultimately preaches about himself, and usually you can’t tell, because inside we are all very much alike. That holds until he touches on something where he and his listeners are completely different. When this bishop did, I felt as if the church were full of people utterly unlike him.
The following week I heard a homily from our parish priest, and I thanked God for him. He, too, was preaching about himself. He is an introvert, and his words were quite measured. Had the previous Sunday not been so fresh in my memory, I might not have noticed at all. But this time I felt he was like me. Because I know him, I could connect with what he was saying on a personal level, in much the same way I connect with many of my feverish fellow parishioners. It wasn’t a UN-style speech; he touched on the Gospel in that tabloid way, not merely as a mandatory ceremony attached to an otherwise coldly secular management of universal brotherhood. He wasn’t talking like a religious welfare provider, but like someone who just can’t stop being preoccupied with the news. Maybe he instinctively acted as if this were what truly mattered, and the universal religious welfare would somehow be added automatically, or perhaps not at all, depending on how God sees it.
Since that Sunday I haven’t been able to stop thinking about the striking analogy between the people of Israel and the clergy. On a personal level, I have certainly sensed the presence in some ordained ministers. If that were true of most of the clergy, I would likely never be able to tell the presence of the Holy Spirit in them as believers from the special presence given to them through ordination. Yet what I usually sense is not His presence. It is His absence. This may be the most serious argument against the Catholic faith I know of: it seems so unlikely that those who have chosen to give their lives to Christ most fully should end up the most deprived of His Spirit. In a way, it is the example of the people of Israel that gives meaning, and some hope, to what my reason recognizes.
I’m afraid that when your primary focus is building a big, happy tent for everyone to live in, where the seams are hidden, it is exactly the happy tent that you lose. To a non-believer, this claim is unacceptable, even outright wrong; to a believer, such an attitude should be objective evidence of one’s lack of “inspiration,” a word that shares its root with “spirit.”
I don’t know. I may just be a confused programmer with too little theological education, carried away by his own anecdotal experience. Whether the Holy Spirit is indeed slowly and quietly departing from our clergy, neither I nor anyone else can tell for sure right now. Nor can any statistical study capture more than the outward appearance of what may in hindsight turn out to be an epochal change of apocalyptic proportions.
But if there is some truth in it, will the Holy Spirit return? If not, where will He make His new dwelling on this earth?
That is the question.