Original Video - https://youtu.be/DWH1cYTT4PA
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Hilaire Belloc who was a friend and intellectual accomplice of GK Chesterton once famously, or perhaps infamously, wrote that Europe is the faith and the faith is Europe – which would have been controversial enough in his own day but would be an extremely provocative thing to say or write today, or make the title of a YouTube video. The objections, at least the sane ones, would be something like, the faith is universal, and therefore cannot be reduced to any nationality or ethnicity. And if that’s what Belloc meant, that would be a valid criticism, but what if he was talking about culture instead of ethnicity – because those things aren’t synonymous?
When Jesus spoke of nations in the gospels, as in, “Go and make disciples of all nations,” his use of the word nation would be close to what we mean by ethnicity. In fact, the Koine Greek word that is translated as nations is actually ethne which is where we get, ethnic from. The Israelites were a nation that God had raised up in a covenant with Moses, but in the incarnation of Jesus, God was establishing a new covenant with every nation, that is a universal covenant that isn’t limited to any one nation or ethnicity.
So, on the face of it, it would appear as though Belloc had missed an essential point of the gospel. And whenever anyone, like myself, tries to defend traditional cultural elements of the Latin rite of the Church as intrinsic to our Catholic culture, like chant, polyphony, traditional sacred art, and gothic architecture, many people will push back with the same objection that this is trying to reduce the faith from something universal to something national and ethnically limited to Europe. But this kind of reply fails to make the distinction between ethnicity and culture. It is based on the belief that multiculturalism is a good thing and since European culture is only one of many valid cultures which deserve inclusion within what we think of as Catholic culture, it doesn’t deserve the kind of prominence it enjoyed in the past.
When people say that traditional fixtures of the Catholic faith, which orthodox and traditional Catholics, like myself, try to promote, are too Eurocentric, they are harboring a belief that the universality of Catholic culture is due to its own cultural emptiness which it fills with whatever culture it happens to encounter through the proclamation of the Gospel.
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