Beware Feral Catholics
16th Sunday of the Year
When he disembarked and saw the vast crowd, his heart was moved with pity for them, for they were like sheep without a shepherd; and he began to teach them many things.
I wanted to learn more about the history of sheep herding and discovered that there is a difference between taming an animal and domesticating a species. To tame a wild animal is to condition or modify its behavior so that it no longer fears humans. You can go find a lion cub, bring it home, care for it like a puppy, and one day you just might end up with a 300-pound carnivore sleeping on your couch.
To domesticate an animal is very different: domestication means a permanent genetic modification to a species that gives these animals an inherited predisposition toward humans. Lions need taming if you want to approach them without getting attacked, but sheep are genetically hardwired to live with humans. The best research we have tells us that dogs were the first animal to become domesticated, about 15,000 years ago somewhere in Europe or north Asia; a few thousand years later in the Middle East, sheep became the first domesticated species of livestock.
Maybe you are like me and want to know even more about domestication. How does a wild species of animal develop a genetic mutation that makes them hardwired to live with humans? The scientist and author Jared Diamond spent years studying the history of animal domestication in ancient cultures and discovered that some animal species are more likely to become domesticated than others. He identifies six ‘behavioral preadaptations’ that make an animal suitable for domestication:
(1) Efficient diet: you can’t domesticate an animal that you cannot feed easily.
(2) Quick growth rate: you can’t wait years before being able to use an animal on your farm.
(3) Ability to breed in captivity: animals that won’t reproduce on your farm won’t become domesticated.
(4) Pleasant disposition: a fearsome or aggressive animal is not suitable for domestication.
(5) Tendency not to panic: animals that scare easily cannot enter into a relationship of dependency.
(6) Social hierarchy: all species of domesticated animals in ancient cultures were defined by dominance hierarchies that humans learned to control for the purposes of domestication.
The basic idea is that if you find an animal marked by these six characteristics or preadaptations, you can capture some of them, keep them on your land, and modify the behavior of these individual animals. But then these individual animals produce offspring and over time genetic mutations take root in one generation or another; the species becomes increasingly conditioned to live with humans in a relationship of dependency; domesticated animals no longer need to forage or hunt because humans provide whatever is needed for survival.
I wanted to learn more about the domestication of livestock because in the Gospel today Christ says that the crowds are like sheep without a shepherd. He compares the crowds to domesticated animals, just like the prophet Jeremiah did about 600 years earlier. The way that sheep have become genetically modified and behaviorally conditioned to live in a relationship of dependency on a shepherd, Christ wants us to live a life of dependency on him—Christ wants a conversion that goes all the way down, that gets into our DNA, making us into a different kind of human.
You can look at that list of behavioral preadaptations and see why humans are not a species well-suited for divine domestication: we have a lot of needs when it comes to food; it takes us a long time to grow up (decades now) and become mature; we often lack a pleasant disposition, and in fact are often very aggressive creatures; we scare easy and tend to panic; and we favor equality over the kinds of social hierarchies that make domestication take root. Go ahead and throw free will and a whole lot of pride into the equation, and you can see why humans are going to have a tough time wanting to live life in a pasture.
Maybe you think I am stretching the limits of Christ’s metaphor, but the language of domestication is a constant theme of God’s revelation. The Lord wants us to live like sheep, there in the pasture, completely dependent on our shepherd for survival, wanting nothing he does not give us, needing nothing he does not have to offer, and never looking to leave the pasture for some other kind of life. Christ wants a conversion that goes all the way down, gets into our DNA, making us into a different kind of human.
St. Paul talks about that kind of conversion in his Letter to the Ephesians today. He says that the blood of Christ is our peace; Christ has broken down the dividing wall between gentile and Jew, male and female, slave and owner. Paul says, really, that Christ is the pasture in whom we can live our lives, creating a new person in place of whoever existed before. Maybe what St. Paul talks about seems strange to you, but to me it makes a lot of sense. If what everyone cares about the most is the kind of divine life that the blood of Christ makes possible for us, then the dividing walls between us get broken down, peace takes root in our culture, and we become new creations in Christ—a conversion that goes all the way down, getting into our DNA.
The problem is that humans are not the best species for domestication; life on the pasture is hard for us. What I want to do now is identify three further dangers that make the life of dependency on Christ even harder for us; if we know what we are up against, then we can do a better job of fighting back against our instincts and staying right there with Christ in the pasture.
The first danger is us, and the fact that no matter how hard we try, we will never be as dumb as sheep. Sheep are not self-aware; no sheep looks on the other side of a stone wall and wonders if life would really be better on the other side. Sheep don’t wake up in the morning with a deep sense of dissatisfaction with life, wanting to go find another pasture some place better, or another shepherd who promises better food or water or whatever else it is a sheep is looking for in life.
From the metaphor, you can see that what matters the most is that we stay in the pasture. You can be a bad sheep, causing problems with the other sheep in the flock, living a disordered sheep-life, getting upset with your shepherd and wanting to strike out on your own sometimes—but what matters is that you never leave the pasture. Your desire to wander, to go your own way, that is the instinct that needs to die in you. You can spend your whole life begging the shepherd for mercy, and you’ll live a fine life so long as you never leave for other grazing lands.
The second danger, often flagged by Christ, is wolves. A wolf is a different kind of animal that gets into the pasture from outside and scatters the flock, and usually takes a few lives while he (or she) is at it. What does a wolf look like in the 21st century? The answer is whatever drives sheep out of the pasture: cell phones, yoga classes, sports culture, career opportunities, a society defined by a shattered understanding of human dignity, our national obsession with politics. The wolves of 2024 look different from the wolves living at the time of Christ, but they are out there, jumping stone walls to get into the pasture, taking the lives of sheep in the flock.
The final danger, particularly insidious today, is sheep that have gone feral. A feral animal is an animal that is no longer domesticated and has returned to life in the wild. A feral sheep no longer lives in the pasture completely dependent on the shepherd for his or her survival; a feral sheep has broken off on its own and become a wild creature. The danger that comes from feral sheep is that they look like the sheep in the pasture, sound like the sheep in the pasture, and usually want some of the other sheep in the pasture to come with them out into the wild. A feral animal is still social—what it rejects is domestication, the shepherd, and what the shepherd teaches, but not life in community.
We certainly live in an age of feral Catholicism. There are plenty of people out there who look like Roman Catholics, talk like Roman Catholics, but for one reason or another have pretty much returned to the wild, and would love for you to jump the wall with them. The rejection of authority from within the flock—the authority of Christ, and the authority of the Church that speaks for Christ—is one of the defining features of our time. At the end of the day, you can worship on Sundays, serve the poor, live a life of charity, go into the inner room of your heart and pray, but if you are closed off to the words of Christ who today sees the crowds looking like sheep without a shepherd and begins to teach them many things, then you are not a domesticated animal; your conversion has not gone all the way down, getting into your DNA, making you into a different kind of human.
The point of my homily is that the life of domestication is hard for us; it is not easy for us to live like a sheep. We are not made for a simple life in the pasture. We lack the kind of behavioral preadaptations that would make modifying our behavior something almost natural for us. We are a danger to ourselves, there are wolves out there who want to harm us, and feral Catholics who want to lead us from our shepherd.
But life in the pasture is good; we should want to live there. There is peace in the pasture because Christ is our peace, the only real peace we will ever find, having put enmity to death through the blood of the cross, reconciling us with God. Or as a young David says to us in the psalm today: the Lord is your shepherd, there is nothing you shall want.
Homily preached on Sunday, July 21st, 2024 at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary.