The October issue of First Things contains a very long piece by Jody Bottum: “When the Swallows Come Back to Capistrano: Catholic Culture in America.”
I spent a couple of weeks mulling this piece, trying to figure out what was off about it. There’s much good in it - the central controlling metaphor is perfect and expertly deployed, especially as Bottum returns to it in the examples he pulls out in the last quarter of his piece - the weirdness in the Diocese of Orange County. He goes into some depth trying to explain why things went off in the American church in the 60’s and 70’s, laying the blame mostly in the US bishops’ alliance with the Left - with leftist issues and a sort of shifting of the Church’s energy to leftist modes of thinking and priorities, ecclesial, political and spiritual.
So what’s missing?
(note before you move on - what is lacking in the following post is my end of the conversation about the solutions - getting the swallows back. This about wore me out, so...tomorrow.)
I think it’s this: In reading Bottum’s piece most average Catholics would not know what the heck he was talking about. The events and statements that he describes certainly had an impact on the life of the Church, but they didn’t hit Catholics where they lived, for the most part.
The question is Catholic culture. As Bottum notes, for centuries, Catholic faith has been sustained by and expressed in the richness of Catholic culture. This has been one of my interests for a long time - if we’re talking about passing the faith on to children, good textbooks and even good Catholic schools are just the tiniest piece in the puzzle. The faith was passed on for centuries - centuries during which most Catholics didn’t go to Catholic schools, heck - didn’t even read. It was passed on because of what happened in communities - the structures and traditions that grew over time, that embodied the faith. So that new generations didn’t know about a saint because they read a story about her - they knew about her because the community celebrated her feast, her image was fashioned into the church buildings, little girls were named after her, pilgrimages were made to her shrine, the priest told the story of her life, and novenas were prayed to her.
So much of this - so very much of this is sociological. I heard a bit of Jody’s appearance on the Al Kresta show last Friday, and he made the point that in the 50’s, sociologists were wondering what was going to happen to Catholicism in the United States when the urban ethnic enclaves dissolved, as they were bound to do. Now we know.
The question that has bugged me for ages is different from that I hear asked by others. Others try to rebuild, to recreate that old sense of Catholic culture - which is admirable, but is it possible? No, what I wonder about is how do we reconstruct Catholic life in the catacombs? By that I don’t mean the extremes of persecution, but as Christians living in a culture that is really inimical to the Gospel, at every point, to the celebration of materialism, consumerism, economic success, personal appearance, to the rank hostility to life and the commoditization of sex. Christianity was born and flourished in the Roman Empire, in conditions hostile to it. There was no “Catholic culture” as we associate it with Christendom on. I’m thinking it is more useful and to the point to imagine myself, as a Christian, living in the time of Domitian, than thinking that the answer is to try to recreated 13th century Italy. As I’ve written before, as the witness of Ireland and Quebec show so painfully - is there a shadow to “Catholic culture?” As there is a shadow to everything?
Well, moving back to the article.
There is, Bottum, maintains, a widespread contempt for bishops among American Catholics, and the bishops and their actions are the focus of much of the article. Frankly, I’m not sure if that is a complete anomaly in American, or even more general Catholic history. The current deep, pervasive distrust - sure. But anti-clericalism as well as an attitude to episcopal authority that juggled a little fear, a bit of grudging respect and an implied adversarial relationship are attitudes that have a healthy history in Catholics’ attitudes to their bishops, even if it doesn’t tell the whole story.
The bishops are certainly the focus of the discontent of many Catholics today, and Bottum rightly lays it out, but I think what is missing, as I said at the beginning, is that much of the story he tells is not directly relevant to the lives of ordinary Catholics. They have certainly been impacted, in ways they don’t know, by, say, the original Call to Action conference. But the distrust of the bishops is more than that. It’s a skepticism towards church authority, period.
Not exactly a news flash, I know. But present condition of American Catholicism - there are so many of us, yet we seem to matter so little, relative to our numbers, and we seem to be so relaxed about this faith business - comes from a lot of different places. It’s the fruit of the last half-century, of course - political, social and intellectual forces have weighed heavily into the average Catholic’s sense of what religion is: it is a spiritual path to inner peace and, as a helpful byproduct, greater social functionality, a path that is chosen because it feels right, the people are welcoming or because the institution offering this particular path has good kids’ programs. Religious leaders are relevant only to the extent that they confirm my own choices. God exists, but He is so big that really, you can say just about anything about Him, and you’ll probably be right. So go ahead, say anything. I won’t judge you, as long as you don’t judge me.
Tell me you don’t think that’s how 80% of the people in the pews think about religion - any pews, including Catholic ones.
Obviously the roots of this go deep, and stretch back much longer than 1962-65. But really…the Church was sort of holding the line for much of that period, even with all the faults and weaknesses of the pre-Vatican II Church.
What happened?
We’ve discussed this frequently before, pointing out the mystery that things probably couldn’t have been so perfectly great if, in a matter of 5 years, we went from Tridentine liturgies to consecrating bread in baskets with Blowin’ in the Wind wafting around our heads. Things don’t happen that fast without some foundation, ironically, for the collapse. (I would suggest, though, if you read some honest accounts of most of the priests, and particularly diocesan priests, and many of the women religious in those decades preceding Vatican II, it will become clearer. The rules were many, with little rationales offered or built into the system. In that context, it is a little easier to see how poorly understood structures could be quickly tossed aside. Even Frank Sheed, in The Church and I fretted over the abysmal level of theological and spiritual knowledge among American religious women, for example. )
But Call to Action and other political moves aside, here’s what did it. Here’s the moment that expresses the point of departure, and a piece of the puzzle of what laid the groundwork for the present. A seemingly small thing, a minor point of Catholic identity: dispensing with the obligatory abstinence from meat on Fridays. I am actually rather surprised that Bottum doesn’t even mention this.
Does it seem too trivial? It’s not, as Eamon Duffy quite eloquently writes in his book Faith of the Fathers. You can say all you want that no, it’s not that Friday penitential practices were eliminated - we’re still obligated to perform some act of penance on Fridays, and it just is left up to us to determine what that should be, and oh, no people weren’t told they were going to Hell if they ate meat on Friday, that’s just a myth, and it really wasn’t such a big deal.
Duffy’s words on abstinence are worth repeating:
In abandoning real and regular fasting and abstinence as a corporate and normative expression of our faith -- by making it optional -- the Church forfeited one of its most eloquent prophetic signs. There is a world of difference between a private devotional gesture the action of the specially pious, and the prophetic witness of the whole community, the matter-of-fact witness, repeated week by week, that to be Christian is to stand among the needy. ...
It’s important because this single branch of the Catholic culture tree, the one that was so visible, shared and such an identifier - was gone, for the most part. The intent was to help Catholics develop a more mature faith, one that was not dependent on an institution laying down rules, because that is not what the individual’s call to a personal relationship with Christ should be based on. Perhaps there is truth to that. It is certainly true that the Western church’s attitude to fasting and abstinence has not been cast in stone, has developed over the years in an ever-laxer direction, in stark contrast to the East. Perhaps this was just the latest step…but to what?
If this was up for grabs...what next? The Church's teaching on contraception?
Oops.
Bottum addresses this:
And yet, I’m not sure that the problem was really the laity’s disagreement. It may have been instead the laity’s great shrug—the widespread feeling among normal, everyday Catholics in the 1970s that they couldn’t figure out, and perhaps shouldn’t much care, where the Church stood from one day to another. The feeling had cause. In the years after Vatican II finished in 1965, nearly everything seemed up for grabs, and nearly everyone was uncertain what would end up licit and what would end up illicit in Catholic teaching.
In the early 1970s, it was not unknown that reputable Catholic theologians and even bishops would, in ecumenical settings, concelebrate the Eucharist with liberal Protestant clergy. Such events were unusual, of course, but those participating thought they were only a step or two ahead of where the Church was going. If you cannot imagine this happening today, that’s partly because the old mainline Protestant churches matter so much less than they used to. Besides, their sharp anti-Catholic turn in recent years—much of it occasioned by the battles over abortion—has made this kind of unfocused ecumenical gestures pointless. Mostly, however, you can’t imagine bishops or theologians of stature concelebrating the Eucharist with non-Catholics because the doctrine of communio, with all it entails for Christian unity and division, has grown firm again.
Back then, however, nearly every element of Catholic doctrine appeared as tentative and changeable as figures in wet clay. Indeed, insofar as anyone could tell at the time, the emerging shape seemed to be the separation of Catholicism even from Catholic communion. Why not consecrate the elements with almost anyone who wants to join in?
These were the days, you remember, when popular writers such as Father Andrew Greeley would speak of “cultural Catholics,” vaguely identifiable by their social sense rather than by their actually assenting to Church doctrine or going to Mass. Sociology in the 1950s had predicted the assimilation of American Catholics as they crossed the crabgrass frontier to suburbia, or melted down their ethnic heritage in intermarriage, or rose to middle-class respectability. For the next generation of writers, Catholicism itself was on the chopping block. Left or right, everybody piled on, and the discount-book tables were littered with copies of The Decomposition of Catholicism and Runaway Church and Can Catholic Schools Survive? and The Devastated Vineyard and Bare Ruined Choirs and Has the Catholic Church Gone Mad?
Well-worn material, I know. But the warp and woof of ordinary Catholic life has collapsed, not just because of sociological shifts and intellectual currents, but because the institutional church, personified first by bishops, misunderstood John XXIII’s hopes. He wanted the Council to “open the windows” to the “world,” not to let the Church be permeated by that world, but so that the Church might better understand the world, and share Christ with it all the more powerfully. But that’s not what happened, so instead what we got was, with the full consent of the bishops - who do the hiring and approve the policies - a Catholic world in which Catholic pedagogy decided it had to mimic secular pedagogy, Catholic schools of all levels made accreditation and approbation by secular and state bodies their first priorities, in which liturgical life was reshaped by the conviction that what people really wanted was to be put at the center of the spiritual quest, because that’s how the world defines spirituality, in which at every level, in almost every diocese, the people in charge were full of excitement because it was in their hands to breathe a New Spirit into the Church.
Which means, essentially, they got to make stuff up.
(A reader writes - shall we call it "Pandora's Window?")There are many reasons people don’t trust bishops or the institutional church. Sexual abuse and financial outrages are a huge part of it. But there are other factors: sending your children and your money to Catholic schools for 12 or 16 years only to see them either not know a thing about Catholicism or lose their faith. (although I always listen to those stories with skepticism. There’s usually more to the story that goes beyond the schools). People don’t understand why all sorts of wackiness goes on in their parishes and Catholic institutions. They hear what’s coming from Rome, see it ignored, undermined and treated with contempt at the local level.
There is this huge disconnect between the church on the ground in the US and the past 2000 years or so. This Catholic culture of which Bottom speaks embodied, in flawed and limited ways, to be sure, but it did embody and express so much of that Catholic history, spirituality and life, in symbol, gesture and word. The idea was this: the Church existed to be Jesus in the world and to do this by faithfully preserving the Tradition and passing it on, a Tradition that was enriched and expressed in various traditions, some of which had to be periodically and regularly cleared out and evaluated (don’t delude yourself into thinking that this never happened before 1962), thought through and refashioned (again, if this were not the case, there would have been no theologians since St. Paul, right?)
. But the basic assumption remained: Deposit of Faith - faithfully preserved - handed on.
So the “spirit” that breathed through in those post-Conciliar years was a spirit of judging everything by contemporary values and subjective experience, and it’s a spirit that was aggressively applied to everything, via the work of diocesan chanceries and Catholic educational institutions and religious orders. It sounds crass of me to call it The Spirit of Making Stuff Up, but honestly, if you go back and read, say journals related to parish ministry, catechesis and liturgy, that’s what strikes you the most. It’s a frantic frenzy of applying anything to liturgy, catechesis and the preaching of the Gospel except anything that came from the Roman Catholic tradition prior to 1962. Except de Chardin, of course.
It’s still here, although a different spirit is, as Bottom notes, a borning. But if you look at, say, the programs for professional lay ministry groups - catechetical, pastoral and liturgical - the disassociation is just weird. It is all about applying the latest trends to Catholic activities, constantly remaking it, constantly trying to find the new thing that will be just the thing.
It is, if you think about it, an attempt to rebuild Catholic culture, indeed. Except the branches now are reiki, personality tests, Native American spirituality, Buddhist concepts, evangelical church-building techniques, self-help language, and what middle-aged people think is youth culture, although usually, tragically, lamely - it’s not.
Wow. Does this have anything to do with Bottum’s piece? I’m not sure, and I’ve not even dealt with the signs of life he sees - I will try to get to that tomorrow.
Here is the point, and it relates to the Dreher Drama of last week, although I hesitate to even bring that up, lest this thread get derailed on that. But they’re related.
Agree or disagree, Rod Dreher’s first point of separation from the Catholic Church came as he noted the apparent disconnect between what the Catholic Church is and the way that we experience the Catholic Church in the United States. It was not just the sinfulness of its members and leaders, which took its toll, certainly, but are, as Rod knows, a part of every church.
No, it was Rod’s experience of knowing what he knew about the Catholic Church - what it teaches, has taught, the richness of its spirituality and tradition and cultural patrimony - and not finding that richness anywherein the churches and ordinary Catholic life he was a part of. Of being in parish after parish in which Church teachings were ignored, never mentioned, or directly contradicted from the pulpit, in classrooms and other settings. Of seeing institutional concerns - about “being involved in the parish” or “feeling welcomed in the parish” or “giving money to the parish” or “preserving the reputation of the diocese and the bishop” overwhelming, drowning out any focus on Christ. Of living and trying to pass on the faith to children in local institutions that didn’t reflect that broader, deeper faith and were happily driving down the faith-sharing road, passing out handouts with newly composed prayers thanking God for me which would be prayed with a top-40 song in the background right before we cover our unit on the rainforest.
I’ve spent my time discussing and arguing with Rod about where he ultimately took this experience, so I really, as I said, don’t want to make that the focus of this discussion. I'm not saying that's a normative experience, I'm saying that's his account of his experience. But I think his experience - expressed through my own prism here - puts Bottum’s article into the light it needs to be discussed.
I suppose what I'm saying is that Bottum's piece certainly hits some great points, but it doesn't go far enough into why and how it all happened: it happened because of the way priests were taught in seminaries, the way lay ministers were taught in their programs, the way catechetical offices and offices of worship were staffed, the way that liturgists were taught and passed on their wisdom, etc...
We’ve spent 40 years making stuff up. The bishops and other leaders paid lots of people to make stuff up, thinking that all they were doing was making the faith more accessible to modern people. And judging from the numbers - the packed churches, the bustling Catholic schools - maybe the argument could be made that it worked.
Or did it?
As you can see, this is lame. And I knew it would be, which is why it’s taken me 2 weeks to get myself to sit down and write it. But I’m sure your comments will clarify my own head, as well. I have a bit more to say - but I’ll save it.
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