The Hour of Testing:
Spiritual Depth and Insight in a Time of Ecclesial Uncertainty
by fr. donald haggerty
ignatius, 342 pages, $19.95
Early in the book, Fr. Donald Haggerty complains about the summertime crowds of tourists who pass through cathedrals and never notice the purpose of the places. They “enter and depart . . . without a single phrase of personal prayer whispered within those walls.” Knowing that Haggerty preaches at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City, it is easy to call to mind the scene. Every day of the year, great crowds of exurban tourists circumnavigate St. Patrick’s nave, stopping to read the printed biographies of the saints in the cathedral’s side chapels. They bring with them iced coffees and shopping bags from the Rockefeller Center across Fifth Avenue. They chat and snap photos. There are, as Haggerty points out, men and women bent in prayer, but it would be dishonest to pretend that knowledge of Christ’s presence in the tabernacle is universally acknowledged. As he says, “God [is] dishonored inside his own house.”
His complaint is not new. Joseph Ratzinger, then a young theology professor, wrote in 1958 that the churches of Europe were occupied by baptized pagans who did not hold Christ in their hearts. They submit to the sacraments but do not believe. And like Ratzinger, Haggerty sees a problem within the Church beyond merely the headwinds of a hostile culture. The symptoms are manifold but can be condensed to the decline of faith in the West, made manifest in disinterest more commonly than outright atheism, and the Church’s silence on doctrinal truths. Haggerty joins others in identifying these symptoms with a common cause; the many crises are really one crisis. Catholic commentators ascribe the problem to nominalism, technology, the nation-state, Vatican II, screwy anthropology, the sexual revolution, or even Freemasons and satanists. But Haggerty’s diagnosis is different: The crisis is a sign and symptom of the end of the world. The Church has entered what Christ promised would be an “hour of testing” preceding the eschaton.
While Haggerty does not make chronological predictions, he believes that humanity is closing in on catastrophe, and his book is spiritual prep for the windup. According to Haggerty, the Church will suffer, endure humiliation, and be divided between a spiritually martyred faithful remnant and a faithless majority. Anti-Christic forces will ascend to the highest reaches of the Church. It’s dark stuff. Eschatology is mixed with implicit, allusive critiques of the hierarchy. For example, Haggerty defines the belief that religious plurality is the positive will of God as a “successful satanic ploy.” As he surely knows, the late Pope Francis has expressed this position. (The chapter is titled “Ecclesial Tension.”)
The book’s second half contains interesting discursives, autobiographical or anecdotal—experiences won from a long career in ministry—but the body is purely spiritual, combining positive descriptions of the spiritual life with normative exhortations. From these, two themes emerge.
First, man can wound God. In his humanity, God made himself vulnerable to harm for the love of man. This is something intrinsic to the gift-love C. S. Lewis ascribed to God: a willingness to suffer for the other, a taking on of vulnerability. From Lewis: “To love at all is to be vulnerable.” From Haggerty: “[W]e are fully committed to love only to the extent that we will not refuse to suffer for love.” God’s assumed vulnerability extends to the present era; history is cruciform, and those living within it have access to the cross. While on Calvary it is a physical woundedness that is apparent, Haggerty would rightly argue that Christ’s suffering was psychological and spiritual, too. Man wounds Christ crucified in his indifference. What is more hateful to the ears of a lover than silence? To the eyes than a turning away? This description is met with the exhortation to be mindful of the effect one has on God. In prayer and action, man has the opportunity to delight God or to strike at his heart. Choose the former.
Second, the spiritual life is not a mere pursuit of spiritual experience; God withdraws at his own choosing and there is great value in simple, persistent desire for him. The Christian is not a spiritual epicure. Rather, “Be like men who are waiting for their master when he returns from the wedding feast, so that they may immediately open the door to him when he comes and knocks” (Luke 12:35–36). Haggerty does not gloss over this period of waiting in the darkness of spiritual night; it is central.
Is Haggerty’s eschatological prognostication too pessimistic? Perhaps not. Indeed, Haggerty follows in the footsteps of saintly theologians. Consider the following from Newman:
[I]n the early centuries of the Church the expectation [of impending catastrophe] extended to the learned and the saintly. It was the posture of mind of confessors and doctors. As St. Gregory looked out for Antichrist in the sixth century, so had the Martyrs of Lyons in the second, St. Cyprian in the third, St. Hilary and St. Chrysostom in the fourth, and St. Jerome in the fifth. It was the sober judgment of the wisest and the most charitable, that the world was too bad to mend, and that destruction was close upon it.
The Hour of Testing offers potent spiritual guidance without succumbing to end-is-nigh histrionics. Formed and bounded by the cloisters of orthodoxy and tradition, it could not but do so.
