Tim Glemkowski’s recent two part series on the Word on Fire blog, “Catholic Call To Be theSoul of the World,” urges Catholics to imitate the early Church by focusing hyper locally. He articulates pressing cultural questions that weigh on so many of us today and asks the essential question that each generation of Catholics must ask: What is the best path forward? As Catholics, we don’t fit neatly into existing political categories—a point he illustrates by citing the famous passage from the Letter to Diognetus describing Christians as the soul of the world.
I have long admired Tim’s work, especially his leadership of the National Eucharistic Congress. But I am now even more grateful for his courage in grappling publicly with the crisis in American civic life: “polarization, declining trust, and the erosion of local communities—conditions that leave many Catholic citizens feeling alienated and powerless.”
Catholics, he observes, often reduce their faith to one of two extremes: a tool for advancing partisan political agendas or (in reaction) something kept entirely private. This false dichotomy leaves “little room for a vision of civic renewal rooted in the deepest wells of our cultural heritage.”
His solution is a “third way”: “not withdrawal, not partisan combat, but the rebuilding of civic life through solidarity and subsidiarity. ”What struck me most is the careful balance Tim maintains. He warns against privatizing faith yet refuses to dismiss “grand, nationally oriented efforts—launching organizations for great causes, significant thought leadership, nationwide media, national political campaigns, or large scale intellectual and cultural contributions.”
Instead, he insists that being “the soul of the world” is primarily hyper-local: “first the family, then the neighborhood, then institutions like schools and small businesses, then local government, and finally local apostolates. ” He even identifies a “tipping point” in Catholic ministry: “nationally oriented efforts have reached critical mass, and what is now needed are more deliberately local ones.”
I concede without hesitation that nothing Tim says is wrong. Everything from this point forward assumes the truth and urgency of his analysis. Yet there remains a tension between his argument and his own recent history: it was the national Eucharistic Congress—not a local one—that he led with such stunning success, and it was that national event that ignited the Church in America.
I still recall Bishop Barron describing the Congress as one of the great highlights of his priesthood, overwhelmed by the visible reality of the national Church and inspired by what might yet become of our nation because of it. What he was catching a glimpse of was faint hint of the sanctification of the temporal order and the world.
Here is the imbalance we must acknowledge: for every ten articles urging Catholics toward local ministry and personal holiness, there are virtually zero calling us to take the National Eucharistic Congress seriously as a sign of what remains possible at the national—and even global—level.
Scripture itself refuses to let us evade the political and national horizon of the Gospel. God set Israel apart as a nation precisely so its laws and the wisdom of its rulers would draw the nations to the true God—providing the context for evangelization. Evangelization was always political. Even Deuteronomy’s calls for “circumcision of the heart” are not a retreat into private piety but a means to ensure Israel fulfills its national vocation: keeping the covenant, remaining in the land, and becoming “a kingdom of priests and a holy nation” whose justice causes the nations to exclaim, “Surely this great nation is a wise and understanding people.”
God called Abraham to a land and promised him a royal seed that would rule nations, so that “all the families of the earth shall be blessed” through him. The scepter would not depart from Judah; David’s throne would endure forever. Through the political reality of Israel—and later David’s and Solomon’s empire—the Queen of Sheba and others were drawn to worship the true God.
From the beginning, evangelization was ordered toward a rightly ordered political community—Christendom where “the kings of the earth bring their glory” into the city of God (Rev 21:24). The apostolic mission is not an alternative to that end; it is the means toward it.
This, I believe, is what so many experienced at the National Eucharistic Congress: a foretaste of Christendom—a glimpse of the Church refusing permanent exile and daring to act once more as a nation set apart.
Local renewal, down to the conversion of individual hearts, is indispensable—no one disputes that. Yet Moses himself insists that the ultimate purpose of such renewal is greater national allegiance to Yahweh as King, so that, through a rightly ordered political community, Abraham’s descendants might bless all nations as promised.
Everything Tim proposes is true, good, and necessary; we must affirm it wholeheartedly. But we also need balance: embracing both the hyper-local imperatives of the Gospel and the inescapably political, national, and global horizon revealed in Scripture. All of this was reawakened at the Congress. It’s just that Catholics didn’t know and indeed, still don’t!—know what to do with it. It was a strange experience for them; exiles hearing of sudden rumors that the temple is being rebuilt in Jerusalem but not know which way to go. Where is Jerusalem again? What were the promises made to our fathers once more?
God desires to reign first in our hearts (as St. Margaret Mary Alacoque saw so clearly), but precisely so that his Sacred Heart might reign over every dimension of the world he created and redeemed: political, social, cultural, and global.
What Tim led gave the national Church an experience not just of what once was, but of what will inevitably come—a fulfillment of Genesis 12, where God’s people inherit and sanctify the world. Yet without a framework for understanding it, many naturally default to the hyper-local vision Tim outlines. Tim, like a prophet of old, told the Church in exile to come atop a hill and look out at see afar off what once was and what could be! But then, he took us back down the mountain only to never really tell us the way home! This is where the whole body of Christ comes in. I’m convinced the growing number of people being drawn to the Cristero party in particular or a fuller recovery of Catholic political doctrine more generally are those who have done what Jeremiah and Tim have told them to do—to settle down, build houses and love their neighbors—but they have also sensed that Daniel’s time is almost up.
They have sensed the promises of old, and within those same promises the vocation that is truly theirs. Catholics are preparing to run for office. Not as Americans, but as Catholics. For those who experienced Congress firsthand or saw what went on and got the message, they have gone back down the mountain and have begun to pack their bags.
This voyage cannot come by everting to the past—with its hereditary kings, corruption, greed, envy, or strife—nor through today’s partisan power games, lobbying, and lies. It demands a new breed of Catholic statesmen: disciplined, faithful, willing to lose seats for grace, to cast down crowns of gold for crowns of thorns.
It will unfold through the lay offices Christ established parallel to the priesthood: the roles of politician and ruler. Over the coming months and years, this vision must spark a national and global discussion among the Catholic laity. It will be a collective effort: we will vote ourselves into office and hold one another accountable before Christ the King.
If Tim’s two articles were an attempt, in the midst of a crisis, to tip the scales a bit in the direction of the local, I hope my article helps shift us a bit to thelocal-to-national-to-global to-cosmic. As Jesus said immediately after his resurrection, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me” (Mt. 28:18). The point of apostolic mission, lest we forget, was always Christendom.
The discussion begins now—here, on this website.
