Catholic Propaganda

Sigrid Undset on the Protestant reaction to faithful Catholicism

In March of 1927, an article titled “Catholic Propaganda” by Sigrid Undset appeared in the Norwegian publication Vor verden. In the piece, Undset addresses the Norwegian reaction to the ousting of fellow author Lars Eskeland from the Lutheran school he started 32 years earlier due to his conversion to Catholicism. There had long been arched eyebrows and whispered disappointment in Norway following Undset’s conversion to Catholicism, and as a second acclaimed Norwegian author crossed the Tiber to Rome, these whispers grew into feverish tirades against the Catholic propaganda flooding the country. In the article, Undset with characteristic dry humor examines the nature of Catholic propaganda and the source of the Protestant fears surrounding it.

Undset argues that most fundamentally, the fear of Catholic propaganda stems from the uneasiness Protestants hold in regards to the Catholic’s perpetual pursuit of perfection. She begins by pointing out the difference between the Catholic and Protestant experience of conversion, writing:

“Well-known cases show that the normal and expected result of evangelical “conversion” is the feeling of safety. Catholic “conversion” results in a feeling of repentance. If a thoroughgoing Protestant is asked, “Are you saved?”, and he has experienced a “conversion”, he will without hesitation answer affirmatively. But no Catholic would dare to say more than he hopes for salvation.” ¹

I myself have always found this question amusing - during my first stint in grad school, I had to walk a mile from where I could park my car for free into my philosophy building, and I regularly ran into the same evangelical missionaries who would stop me to ask, “Are you saved?”. My thought was always, “How much time do you have for my answer?” quickly followed by my realization that I didn’t have enough time to discuss that; I had a class to teach in ten minutes.

The question, “Am I saved?” is not one that ever naturally occurs to a Catholic, as there’s not much point in considering it unless one is on the brink of death. It’s certainly good to reflect on one’s relationship with God, mortal sin, virtue, humanity, etc., but to ponder “Am I saved?” would be like a child asking, “Will I be six feet tall?” You might, you might not, and you could examine different indicators that suggest a greater or lesser likelihood of such a height, but a child can’t know with certainty while they are still developing.

Catholics do carry a unique energy or insecurity, but Undset notes in her article that, “the Catholic feeling of insecurity is not directed toward God but toward oneself.” ² We are absolutely sure that God has saved humanity; we are not altogether positive that we ourselves have accepted that salvation. Therefore, Undset notes that Catholics hum with the hunger to continually conform one’s heart to the heart of Christ, with an absolute knowledge that this activity will never be complete, since, “Floating in the infinite personality of God, the human personality rests, an infinitesimal speck in infinity … The earth, men, atoms, become almost equally small when measured against infinity.” ³

This energetic drive is the Catholic propaganda Undset believes her Protestant compatriots despise, and this dislike is understandably human. It is the same disgruntled annoyance felt by any spouse trying to relax and unwind while their own beloved busies about the room, having the gaul to be productive during your relaxation time. One’s own quiet and placid complacency can be quite ruined by another who loudly goes about trying to improve everything and everyone, and this appetite for continual growth is the propaganda Undset feels Protestants want Catholics to shush up about.

In her article however, Undset explains how completely impossible such a silence is for Catholics due to their understanding of human nature. She writes,

“Man was created for blessedness - the vision of God as he is. With the fall into sin, man loses the ability to see supernaturally. In the supernatural world, which has become an invisible world to him, he proceeds like a blind man, using the sense of touch. Not everything he feels is wrong but only imperfectly understood…Through grace, man receives back his supernatural vision – inherited sin is really taken away. But the power of sight which now should teach us to endure the full strength of the light of God is still weak… For Catholics, grace is a medicine which sinners may ever inhale and bathe in, that they might grow up rightly – become saints.” ⁴

She’s elucidating how Catholicism understands the relationship between original sin, baptism, and grace; while baptism removes original sin and gives us back our capacity to be in relationship with God, to see Him, we are terrible at it, i.e. have extremely weak vision. We need His grace, His own Divine Life, for our soul’s to be made whole and strong, and this grace is not something we receive all at once but slowly over time.

Importantly, the reason we cannot receive all of God’s healing grace at once and be perfect is not due to an imperfection on the part of God grace, but rather a weakness within our own hearts: God can only heal the parts of ourselves we give Him, and we can only give to Him that which we are aware of and truly desire to give.

Undset acknowledges the difficulty of coming to this awareness and desire, and notes that this task alone gives Catholics more than enough perpetual work in coming to know themselves. When I was young, I scoffed at the pithy phrase, “Learn about yourself”, thinking it made too much of a task that was easy for those who weren’t weak and overly emotional. Oh how I ate that attitude later on in my life. So much of growing is truly learning how little you know, and that includes your own self-knowledge – I have found myself praying in tears to God because I don’t understand myself more times than I can count – as St. Paul himself notes in Romans 7:15 “I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.”

Undset wrote,

“For the Catholic Church it is important always to find the center of each complex of feelings which react against the grasp of Christ. Weakness and sensual enjoyment can join together in a spiritual laziness just as in sensitivity before the experience of pain or in the desire to be admired; sensitivity or love of gossip can join in a lack of courage or in misplaced self-criticism or in unrighteous overestimation of other poor sinners.” ⁵

Undset is noting here how complex human emotion and intention can be – she gives the example of the difficulty of discerning whether various spiritual vices (laziness, avoidance of pain, the desire to be admired) could be rooted either in excessive weakness or excessive love of sensory pleasures. In order to combat the spiritual vice of the desire to be admired, one needs to understand where that vice is coming from - if it stems from excessive weakness, an individual might need to grow in an awareness of God’s love for them, or their identity as rooted in the goodness and love of Christ, so they can gain confidence and fortitude and cease looking for inordinate validation. If conversely though, it stems from an excessive love of sensory pleasures, like flattery, popularity, or power, an individual might need to instead look for ways to grow in humility and find opportunities for them to serve others. Similarly, a person may struggle with the vice of gossip out of a deep insecurity of their own (they like talking of the faults of others to feel better about themselves) or because they have a heightened view of themselves (they believe everyone else less than them and want others to understand their own superiority). The same vice can have two very different means of combatting it based on the individual, and therefore deep self-knowledge is vital.

In “Catholic Propaganda” Undset points out a distinction between the Catholic attitude and the Protestant attitude towards sin that often arises, namely that,

“For the Catholic, after “renewal”, sin is clearly not natural but a weakness after an unnatural life; each faithlessness shows how much he falls short of coming to full health – the wholeness of sanctity,”. ⁶

The Protestant view of sin often becomes that it’s natural and unavoidable because we are fallen and cannot be otherwise; the Catholic view is that it’s utterly unnatural because we are made for sanctity, and although we can never be perfect here on earth, we can and ought to do our utmost to avoid whatever leads us to sin. It’s the perfectly sane attitude that, though we are under no illusions that we will again get dirty over and over and over, we should shower daily, wear shoes outdoors, avoid mudpuddles, use napkins, etc., anyway.

Undset wrote further that the Protestant view of sin led to an equation of sin as a civil disturbance:

“the sin, from which conversion must first take place, is seen not as an inescapable infection but as sins – against other persons or the criminal law or civilized drinking habits, etc…. In Protestant lands one often meets both young and older person who say, Why should they be converted? They are not worse than others. For them, civil propriety is the same as righteousness,”.⁷

Here Undset is arguing that viewing sin as an unpleasant but natural part of life on earth leads to other natural but unpleasant things being lumped into the category of sin as well - loud neighbors, bad drivers, the DMV, waiters who are too chummy, or more sinisterly, poverty, illiteracy, disability. All can acquire either the explicit label of sin, or the implicit assumption that one who struggles with such unpleasantness must be a sinner.

Undset drew connections between this attitude and majority-Protestant countries whose governments had started creating state programs meant to eradicate such unpleasantries. Catholicism has long held, as Christ Himself did, that such brokenness cannot be eradicated, but should be approached as an opportunity to love. Undset writes that the Church has always sought,

“to point to the fact that, just as a man can be a criminal because he is poor and oppressed, he can be the same because he is rich and powerful; he can be repulsive because he is poor, but he can be even worse if he is rich; he can be superstitious because he is uneducated, but enlightenment can make him many times more superstitious. It was the Church’s program for the unfortunate rich to be helped by the unfortunate poor, and conversely; the taught and the untaught should help each other to become wise”. ⁸

True evil is not poverty or lack of education, but rather spiritual vice and the rot of sin; and, recalling Undset’s earlier points regarding individuality and the vitality of self knowledge, poverty or simplicity may just be part of the healing solution to a particular person’s vices as exemplified in various religious orders.

Undset argues in “Catholic Propaganda” that part of the Protestant outrage at her and Eskeland’s conversion is Catholicism’s belief that personal sin is the malady that all people need to be continually addressing and examining, not civil maladies, which implied that the Norwegian government itself was acting in a backward manner. To this notion that authorities ought to be repenting of their own sin and pursuing personal virtue instead of opining how they will create perfect systems to fix the imperfections of their country, said authorities predictably puffed up with outraged cries of propaganda and superstition.

After all, the Catholic spiritual life can involve a whole lot of hubbub; Catholics run around with a busy agenda of things they’re engaging in in an effort to more fully immerse themselves in God’s grace. We have the Sacraments, Mass, prayer, devotionals, rosaries and chaplets, feasts, solemnities, pilgrimages, rites, penances, disciplines, retreats - you’ll never find a lack of things to do within Catholicism, which is quite right and just seeing as it is part of the job of the Church to give her children many avenues whereby they can receive God’s grace - to place a limit on such an inherently good thing is absurd.

However, quickly follows the Protestant objection that all of this action and flurry demonstrates how Catholics think that they earn or bring about their own saintly transformation, and this Undset of course dismisses for the error that it is, writing,

“For the silkworm to become the butterfly, it must continually work and spin the case in which the mystical development will take place, but the silkworm gives itself the ability to spin no more than it created the world of leaves in and from which it lives,”. ⁹

God perpetually desires to rain down grace to His children; the Church reasonably encourages His children to perpetually soak in that rainfall in as many ways as possible, but at no point do we believe we are the source of the rain.

Undset points out also that this uncertainty, this endlessly unfinished attitude that Catholics hold in regards to their salvation and relationship with God is also a beautiful promise and blessing. She writes that the Church’s,

“saints have never felt sure of victory before the last minute of death, and she gives the same comfort to the sinner who prays for grace at the last second, purely out of fear of hell, as she gives to one who has all his life grieved over his difference from our Lord with the eternal warmth of love,”. ¹⁰

The truth that one could always, even up to the moment of death, abandon God also means that one could always return to Him, and in this truth lies a deep hope for the salvation of many souls.

Undset concludes explaining why the Catholic propaganda will not cease anytime soon, as:

“Every one of our young Catholic boys and girls who lives a good Catholic life every one of our sisters in orders, every brave and faithful Catholic mother and father and every one of our small children who receives first Communion with a heart of love, a little soul which is still so pure, and who has a good will to let himself be led and taught of the Master – they are obviously of much greater value for propaganda than we can be with wordy writing and educational lectures.” ¹¹

The real source of Catholic propaganda is simply faithful Catholic individuals, living their lives as Catholics. Even should all Catholic publications go silent, should no further words be printed or publicized, the world at large would still growl in hostility at those annoying, bothersome Catholics, spreading their nonsense about through the sheer force of their energetic and messy activity.

I have experienced the truth of this personally. It is a rare breed of atheist or Protestant who can sustain a close friendship with a faithful Catholic without being either pulled into the orbit of their activity or deciding to distance themselves. Over the course of my life, I have consistently witnessed the phenomenon of non-Catholic friends (or friends who are only nominally Catholic) who react with a great deal of discomfort and sometimes even outright anger if I talk about my spirituality or relationship with God. Speaking of going to confession, taking on penances during Lent or otherwise, or taking action to combat certain vices are often met with awkward glances or questions of, “But why do you have to do that?” Even attending Mass on Sunday can become something that introduces tension into a room with non-Catholics when you’re on vacation and they’re wondering why you can’t just similarly ‘take a vacation’ from Church. In conversations where I try to honestly speak about the particular struggles I’m facing in faith at a given time, there’s often a push from non-Catholics to just be fine, especially if I bring up the notion of being pained by my own sin. Often, the non-Catholic attitude is something akin to, “Just stop feeling bad about that.”

And all of it comes from a well-intentioned place of course; the non-Catholics genuinely think a Christian should no longer be upset by sin as long as they’ve ‘been saved’, as to be otherwise suggests you have not, in fact, accepted Christ as your Lord and Savior. But for the Catholic, we ask how could you possibly not be upset? Sin is terrible, it is the absence of God, it is distance in our relationship with the One Being with whom we are made to be in relationship — that is an upsetting thing! And the fact that we are pained doesn’t mean we doubt God or His goodness, but rather presents an opportunity to move us to a humility and childlike dependence wherein we throw ourselves with greater love and desire into His arms. As Catholics we are wracked with the heart-rending ache that stems from being in love with the Creator, but knowing we are not totally united with Him yet - and we would never trade that pain for mere placidity.

At the end of the day, the Catholic propaganda that Undset reacted to in the 1920s is the same that aggravates people today and drives the comments for Catholics to keep quiet about their beliefs or stop expecting so much from people (I once abruptly angered someone when answering questions about the Mass because I began speaking of liturgical ideals, as apparently the notion of an ‘ideal’ was unfair and cruel). A Catholic, via simply being a faithful, practicing Catholic, will draw ire and annoyance from much of the world simply because we can’t be content with keeping still and satisfied; instead, we are ever hungry to receive more of God, more of His Grace, and be further transformed into the saints we were created to be. So here’s to Catholic propaganda - to all the Catholics everywhere carrying out the joyous hum of Christ’s Mystical Body being realized here on earth.

1. Undset, Sigrid. Sigrid Undset on Saints and Sinners: New Translations and Studies : Papers Presented at a Conference Sponsored by the Wethersfield Institute, New York City, April 24, 1993. Edited by Deal Wyatt Hudson, Ignatius Press, 1993. (232)

2. Ibid, 233

3. 233

4. 237-238

5. 240

6. 239

7. 249

8. 243

9. 240

10. 247

11. 267-268