The Powerlessness of Power

I’ve been in Central Europe for the past few weeks for two educational projects, one that will celebrate its twenty-fifth anniversary in 2026 and another that’s just beginning. Both of them, though I left Washington thinking I was too tired to keep it up and really should be taking some vacation time, gave me – to put it simply but truly – hope.

I’ve been teaching in and running the Slovak Summer Seminar on the Free Society for about twenty years. My friend Michael Novak founded it and left it to me when health problems started to hamper him. We both have family ties to Slovakia, and the point of the project at the start was, after the fall of Communism, to help form students in Central and Eastern Europe – but also students from America who make up half of each session – in ideas of what it takes to preserve a free political, economic, and moral/cultural order – the tripartite division of Novak’s classic The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism.

A quarter century later, with the bizarre rise of the Democratic Socialists of America and similar aberrations in the comfortable but precarious societies of Western Europe, the need is, if anything, of renewed urgency. It may seem hopeless with the rise of partisan polarization throughout the West, but in such circumstances, we have to play the long game: to keep reminding people that foundational principles closely associated with the Judeo-Christian tradition are the only things that truly underwrite our freedom and dignity. Not charismatic politicians. Not political parties. Not even sheer military power.

And sometimes the long game – as with St. John Paul II, with the assistance of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher – can turn into the short game, and lead to the sudden downfall of powerful tyrannies, such as bringing about the end of the Soviet Union, which no one, humanly speaking, could have predicted.

The great Czech writer and dissident Václav Havel – later president of the Czechs after Communism – wrote an often-quoted article about the “Power of the Powerless.” But you might refocus that article, too, to say that in the long run, against the power of truth, power itself is powerless. It showed itself in the failure of Soviet power when confronted with moral and physical virtue in the Cold War.

Our European alumni have gone on to influential posts in the European Union and national governments, business and journalism, and even founded educational enterprises of their own. And the Americans typically leave with a much richer understanding of the history of our Western nations and – my even greater hope – with a deep sense of friendship with their fellow students from Slovakia, Poland, Ukraine, Croatia, Portugal, Ireland, Italy, England, Canada, Australia, Latin America, and even as far away as the Philippines.

And this year we moved into something quite new that also has certain resonances even for people in the United States. We tacked on a new program to the old one, what we are calling Enrichment Days, in the Eastern Slovak city of Košice, not far from where Slovakia, Ukraine, and Hungary all come together, with the hope of how Eastern and Western Catholics might mutually enrich one another.

Several interesting themes emerged. We organized this in cooperation with the Greek Catholic archbishop of Košice. Greek Catholicism is loyal to Rome, in union with the pope, but has its own beautiful and strong Eastern traditions of liturgy, prayer, and spirituality.

Their “Mass,” for example, is similar to the liturgy of St. John Chrysostom, like the Orthodox, but it is chanted in the vernacular language – Slovak, and also Ukrainian and Hungarian Greek Catholic parishes, which celebrate the Catholic liturgy in their own languages. There is – notably – none of the bitterness over the celebration of Old vs. New Rite, or the use of Old Church Slavonic vs. the vernacular, such as we see in the Latin Church these days with regards to the Traditional Latin Mass.

And what a liturgy! If you’ve ever attended a Greek Catholic or Byzantine Catholic Mass, you know that – language aside – it never fails to lead you into a depth and sense of the sacred that many find missing in some of the ways that the Novus Ordo Mass is celebrated.

Its repetitions and insistence on petitioning the Almighty and asking His mercy cast a kind of holy spell. (It must be said that it also seems as if the way that liturgy is structured reflects the worry that God won’t hear us unless we say everything at least three times, or that he might have forgotten after a few minutes what, exactly, it was that was already said.) But you don’t perceive these repetitions as unnecessary, but as part of a continual deepening.

Kyle Washut, president of Wyoming Catholic College and a deacon in the Greek Catholic Church, gave an enlightening lecture about how that liturgy draws you into a sacred space, then returns you to the more “secular” world charged with much-needed graces. I’m hoping he develops these concepts into an approachable book.

As we all remember, St. John Paul II spoke, rightly, of the need for the Church to breathe with both lungs, East and West. And Pope Leo has repeated that call, noting that the richness of the Eastern liturgy and spirituality, in their differences with our Western traditions, can enrich us all.  Our Western forms with their linear logic have their value, but why ignore what more could be there?

Our own Dominic Cassella, who will soon be finishing his doctorate in historical theology at The Catholic University of America, spoke to the group about theosis, a concept emphasized more in the East than the West lately (though we’re starting to catch up).

Briefly, it’s how we become “godlike,” which is to say like we were originally made in the image and likeness, before the Fall. I consider that notion better than dignitas, which is being used a lot in Rome these days. Human “dignity” lends itself to any number of abuses, from radical individualism to “death with dignity,” i.e., euthanasia. Theosis has to avoid pantheism and a kind of polytheism (all of us as “gods”). For me, it at least keeps the focus on God, and something more than our place in this world.

But perhaps we need both ideas, together again, given everything we face.

When you’re out of the country this long on such projects, you tend to follow the news less. Coming back, you find that a lot that had you daily agitated before you left hasn’t much changed. Russia still seems powerless to defeat Ukraine. America has dealt Iran a powerful blow, but not a knockout. The midterms loom, with what seem like ever loonier candidates. There is no salvation there.

Power has its place and uses, of course, but it’s quite powerless over needful things. For that, you need something quite different.

I’m always telling staff and colleagues that we need to always be thinking about finding the “new things” needed to respond to the new things we’re facing. We made several steps forward on that this summer. And I’m hoping to continue on both fronts for years to come, if – Deo volente – we can find the moral and material necessities.

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