No, this is not about creating a cult cut off from the world, but about orthodox Christians seeking ways to live their faith in communities. It is about having deeper connections with the parish and people who worship there. It is about living in an environment where living the Catholic faith is normal. By living in a positive Catholic environment people are fed spiritually and able to interact with the secular world (going to work, etc.) without being completely sucked into its ways.
Here is a quote by Rod Dreher, the person behind this idea, which explains a few things:
*It may be helpful to say what I want these communities to do. The diagnosis, very broadly, is that we live in a post-Christian culture, the nature of which radically undermines Christian orthodoxy and practice. The philosophical assumptions that undergird secular, liberal modernity are at bottom incompatible with orthodox Christianity. As we are seeing, orthodox, Biblical Christianity (as distinct from Moralistic Therapeutic Deism) cannot endure in a society in which people believe that all truth is thought to be subjective, relative, and individualistic, and religion should be infinitely plastic, so as to better meet the felt “needs” of individuals.
Some contemporary Christians in America already live in “thick” communities where they have a robustly articulated and practiced faith life. Most of us do not. My contention is that if we do not develop these communities, then our faith, over a generation or two, will be lost. Modernity is that corrosive of the faith’s foundations. (I’m not going to explain why that is the case in this blog post; I’m just saying that this is the rationale for the Benedict Option).*
What we need to do is to develop communities based on a shared sense of orthodoxy (right belief) and orthopraxy (right practice), for the sake of forming ourselves and the next generation in the Christian faith — this, as opposed to MTD. I call it the “Benedict Option” because of the last graf of MacIntyre’s book, but I do not want to create new monasteries for laypeople. Monks and nuns are called to be monastics, not the rest of us. But that doesn’t mean that we cannot come up with intermediate structures, or modify the structures we already have — church parishes, religious schools — to be more intentional, disciplined, and “thick”. Whatever we do, it has to be livable by ordinary people.
Here is a story about such a community:
farefwd.com/2014/04/this-is-what-we-do/
They seem to be thriving.
A number of bloggers have been writing about this, offering their thoughts and experiences.
A few examples are to be found on Pahteos (Fr. Longnecker, Leah Libresco, Eve Tushnet) and it is worth having a look because they discuss on the range of possible ways to live this way.
