To: ultima ratio
I am not making a fetish of the rosary, but I AM rejecting the wholesale breakdown of Catholic devotion and culture. But my point is that what you consider a "wholesale breakdown" is actually an exaggeration. Most Catholics don't live in the USA. And what you consider "catholic culture" is a local peasent culture based on immigrants customs.
Sorry, but perhaps you should move to a different diocese, and see the regrowth of a vibrant Catholicism.
Even in liberal Washington state, several parishes in Seattle have weekly Eucharistic adoration, and two parishes in small towns have perpetual adoration. Do you go?
Do you go to daily mass?
Do you pray the rosary in reparation for the sins of abortion and euthanasia?
Do you care for your sick loved ones in your family, or are you able to help out in the local food bank or food kitchen?
Mother Teresa once visited the USA and was asked by a taxi driver how he could serve Jesus, and you know what she answered? Smile at your wife and children.
So go smile at your wife and serve the Lord.
30 posted on
11/10/2002 12:50:56 PM PST by
LadyDoc
To: LadyDoc
Catholicism In America and the Century Ahead (Part II):
(Guest Editorial Series by George Weigel)
Part I can be read HERE. Ahead (Part I):
(Guest Editorial Series by George Weigel)
No, George Weigel has no idea he is doing an editorial series here. But as I am in a
good mood after the elections, I am in the mood to post something which is positive
as we hear so little of it - about the Catholic Church in America. So I will run a
series on this throughout the week.
The following is the first part of a speech from George Weigel given in 1999. I hope
you find it interesting especially the part about over 150,000 new Catholics in 1997
excluding infants baptized. (And the excellent criticisms of the stupid
"liberal/conservative" categories whereby faith issues are framed in inadequate
political terms.) But without further ado, Mr. Weigel has the floor:
##################################
The Roman Catholic Church in the United States is the nation's largest and most
complex religious organization. Its 61.5 million members live in nearly 20,000
parishes, served by more than 400 bishops and 47,000 priests. Religious
professionals also include some 85,000 sisters, 6,000 brothers, and 4,500
seminarians; among the para-professionals are some 12,000 permanent deacons,
usually married laymen, who are reviving a ministry that had lain fallow in the
Church for many centuries. In 1997, more than a million infants and some 73,000
adults were baptized into the Catholic Church, while another 88,000 men and women
already baptized in other Christian communities were received into full communion.
The Catholic Church in the United States maintains an extensive health-care system
(some 600 hospitals), a large network of social-service agencies, and the world's
largest independent educational system (with roughly 240 colleges and universities,
1,300 high schools, and 7,000 elementary schools). These 61 million Catholics speak
dozens of languages and espouse the full range of political views on offer in the
American republic. They are probably the most varied, multi-hued religious community
in the nation. Yet for almost forty years, the Catholic story has been reported in
starkly black-and-white terms.
The story-line was set in the fall of 1962, when The New Yorker published a series of
Letters from Vatican City written by the pseudonymous Xavier Rynne. Rynne
described his New Yorker reports on the Second Vatican Council (later expanded into a
series of books) as essays in theological journalism. Their urbanity, wit, and
literary elegance, combined with what seemed to be the author's intimate familiarity
with the mysterious Vatican, made Rynne a literary phenomenon during the Council
years (196265).
On Rynne's reading, the Council was the Gettysburg of a civil war between liberals
and conservatives that had been under way in Roman Catholicism since the late
eighteenth century. For the first 170 years of that conflict, the forces of
reaction had been largely successful in controlling the Church, which they saw as a
fortress protecting the faithful from the onslaught of modernity. Now Vatican II had
been summoned by Pope John XXIII to change the terms of the relationship between
Catholicism and the modern world. The pope's blunt criticism of those prophets of
gloom who in these modern times. . . can see nothing but prevarication and ruin
signified that the forces of progress had been given a new chance.
Rynne (who turned out to be an American Redemptorist priest, Francis X. Murphy)
clearly favored the liberal forces of light over the conservative princes of
darkness. He provided a framework in which otherwise arcane issuesfor example,
whether divine revelation proceeded from Scripture alone or from Scripture and
traditioncould be grasped by reporters and made intelligible, even fun, to a mass
audience. This was like politics. There were good guys and bad guys, and the division
ran along familiar liberal/conservative political lines.
Triumph of the Conventional Story-Line
By 1965, the liberal/conservative framework had become the matrix for reporting and
analyzing virtually everything Catholic. There were liberal and conservative
positions on worship, doctrine, church management, philosophy, spirituality, and
theology. There were liberal and conservative theories of mission, ecumenism,
preaching, religious education, inter-religious dialogue, priestly formation, vowed
religious life, marriage, sexual morality, and social ethics. Popes, bishops,
priests, dioceses, theologians, lay organizations, seminaries, newspapers, magazines,
and parishes were categorized as either liberal or conservative. When someone didn't
quite fit the categoriesfor example, when political radical Dorothy Day, founder of
the Catholic Worker movement, attended Mass wearing a black mantilla and praying from
a Latin missalthis was chalked up to personal eccentricity rather than to a possible
flaw in the taxonomy.
Now there was something to all of this. Vatican IIthe Council itself, and the
processes of debate it set loose in the Churchwas in fact the moment when the
long-delayed encounter between the Roman Catholic Church and modern intellectual,
cultural, and political life took place. Those who had urged the Church to leave the
fortress and sally forth to confront modernity did gain control of the Council's
machinery and agenda, and were largely vindicated by the Council's formal product,
its sixteen documents. And there were in fact forces of reaction at Vatican II that
fiercely resisted the Catholic encounter with modernity, deeming it lethal to the
maintenance of orthodoxy and institutional vitality. The problem was that the
liberal/conservative framework was thought capable of explaining everything, and it
could not do so.
Reporting within the standard account focused excessively on the Church as
institution. But the Church is, more importantly, a mystical communion of believers,
a sacrament of God's presence to the world, a herald making a proposal about the
truth of the human condition, a servant of suffering humanity, and a community of
disciples. The institution exists only to facilitate these other aspects of the
Church's life. Thus the Church cannot be identified exclusively or even primarily
with the ordained hierarchy; to do so is, in a word, clericalism. And although it is
usually thought a particular sin of Catholic conservatives, an intensified
clericalism in coverage of the Catholic Church has resulted from the dominance of the
standard account. The standard account also led to distorted analysis in other ways:
1. Once the liberal consensus in favor of incremental social change shattered (in
1968 or thereabouts) and political liberalism was radicalized, the
liberal/conservative taxonomy proved even more incapable of accurately describing new
ideas and movements in the Church. A prime example was the world media's coverage of
liberation theology. This complex intellectual and pastoral phenomenon was reduced to
a view of liberation theologians as the Latin American version of the good forces
of Catholic progress, doing battle for the future against the reactionary
conservatives who controlled the Latin American hierarchy in cahoots with repressive
Latin American regimes. There were, again, elements of truth in this analysis. For
far too long the Church in Latin America had been allied with local oligarchies and
had not been effective in empowering the poor, socially or politically. Vatican II
had rejected classic Iberian Catholic altar-and-throne (or, in the Latin American
variant, altar-and-junta) arrangements. This conciliar teaching did presage profound
changes, religious and political, throughout Latin America, and those changes were
indeed being resisted by the usual suspects.
But the standard account was hopelessly inadequate for grasping the more complex
truths of the situation. Among the distortions it induced were: (a) Liberation
theology was seen as an indigenous phenomenon, an authentic Latin American
inculturation of Vatican II. But in reality liberation theology was invented in
Louvain, Münster, and other Catholic intellectual centers where the European
fascination with Marxism and neo-Marxism was at its height, and then carried to Latin
America by Latin American theologians trained in those European centers. (b)
Liberation theology was seen as the Latin American expression of the liberal
reformism implied in the Vatican II Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern
World. But in fact by 1969 virtually all liberation theologians had flatly rejected
liberal incrementalism and were openly committed to various radical reconstructions
of social, political, and economic life, usually Marxist in inspiration. (c)
Liberation theology was seen as the intellectual expression of a popular, grass-roots
movement throughout Latin America. But in fact liberation theology was an elite
movement that eventually had an impact on both popular and institutional thinking in
Latin American Catholicism.
2. A similar deficiency could be observed in coverage of the emergence of feminism in
the Church. Here, of course, the most visible issue was that of women and the
priesthood. As usually reported, this reduced quickly to another struggle between the
forces of progress and the forces of reaction. The real question, which was not
whether the Church would ordain women to the priesthood but whether it could do so,
was rarely considered. That there were profound issues about the Church, the ordained
ministry, and indeed the nature of created reality itself engaged in this debate was
almost never acknowledged. Further, the growth among Catholic feminist theologians of
a far more radical critique that opposed the very notion of a hierarchy was not
well understood; it didn't fit the conventional framework, any more than unabashedly
Marxist liberation theologians did.
3. The standard account has also proven seriously deficient for understanding the
pontificate of Pope John Paul II. For nearly two decades, reporters and analysts have
struggled to portray a pope who seems to occupy several positions along the
conventional spectrum. Much has been written about John Paul the doctrinal
conservative, who relentlessly underscores the most challenging aspects of the
Church's sexual ethic and refuses to ordain women to the priesthood; yet little has
been reported about the pope who describes marital intimacy as an icon of the
interior life of God, who teaches that the Church symbolized by the Virgin Mary is
more fundamental to the Christian reality than the Church symbolized by the Apostle
Peter, and who insists that, in making its case to the world, the Church proposes;
she imposes nothing. Then there is John Paul the social progressive, extolled as
the great defender of human rights, the reconciler of the Church with democracy, the
social democrat greatly concerned about the impact of a triumphant capitalism on the
postCold War world. But little has been reported about his empirically sensitive
approach to economics, his celebration of entrepreneurship, his affirmation of the
business economy, and his sharp critique of the welfare state. The attempt to
confine John Paul II within the conventional categories really short-circuits when
the great papal defender of democracy blasts the functioning of contemporary
democracies and warn gainst a thinly disguised totalitarianism (Centesimus Annus,
46).
In an attempt to resolve these seeming contradictions, analysts have portrayed the
Pope as an angry old man incapable of understanding a world he helped create, or as a
kind of uniquely Polish schizophrenic, doctrinally rigid but socially progressive
on at least some issues. In both cases, the tendency has been to set this pontificate
against Vatican II. But in fact the Pope, who played a significant role at the
Council and as archbishop of Kraków conducted one of the world's most extensive
implementations of Vatican II, sees himself as the particular heir of the Council.
4. According to the standard account, churches and movements that have identified
with the inevitable triumph of the liberal side should be prospering. But that is
not what has happened. In a striking parallel to the experience of world
Protestantism, liberal local Catholic churches are dying or struggling in prosperous,
free lands (such as Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Canada, Australia, and New
Zealand), while self-consciously orthodox Catholic communities are flourishing in
Africa, usually under conditions of poverty and sometimes under serious persecution.
In the United States, Catholic practice tends to be lower (and in some cases
dramatically lower) in self-consciously progressive dioceses than in conservative
ones.
A similar pattern prevails among religious professionals. The only communities of
nuns that are growing in the United States are communities that have broken ranks
with the liberal consensus among religious women, as embodied by the Leadership
Conference of Women Religious. The seminaries that are growing are replete with
candidates for the priesthood who identify with John Paul II. Dioceses that are
self-consciously liberal have a difficult time attracting candidates for the
priesthood.
Since Vatican II, world Catholicism has seen a historically unprecedented explosion
of lay renewal movements. Although considerable ink has been spilled on reporting
such activist organizations as Call to Action, We Are Church, and the fraudulent
Catholics for a Free Choice, the numbers involved in these liberal enterprises
are simply dwarfed by the numbers involved in renewal movements that identify with
the Church's center of unity, the Bishop of Rome.
Rerum Novarum, So to Speak
A good model suggests how to organize our understanding of a complex reality and
what to expect from that reality in the future. When a model cannot account for large
portions of the relevant data and cannot trace a plausible outline for the evolution
of what it attempts to describe, the time has come to discard it.
I have no substitute model to propose. Rather, what I would like to suggest is
something both old-fashioned and quite compelling: real reporting on the lived
experience of American Catholics, concentrating on those aspects that have been
under-reported or ignored and that bid fair to be major factors shaping the Church's
life and impact in the next several decades. Ten such new things suggest
themselves...
1. The New Catechism and its impact. Published in English in 1994, the new Catechism
of the Catholic Church is far more than a compendium of doctrine. It is a bold,
coherent, and compelling account of the hope that has sustained the Church for two
millennia. That in itself makes it worthy of serious reporting and analysis. But the
Catechism can also be called a major cultural event in the Western world. To those
who claim that plurality is an absolute in the modern world, the Catechism affirms
the unity of faith over time and the availability of God's word of truth to all. In a
culture convinced that there is your truth and my truth, the Catechism affirms that
we cannot live without the truth.. At an intellectual/cultural moment in which
incoherence is taken to be the bottom line of reality, the Catechism proposes
Christian faith as a coherent framework for understanding what is, how it came to be,
and what its future holds.
Although the Catechism was an international best-seller in the mid-1990s, only in the
future will its real impact become apparent. For the Catechism was a challenge to the
process-oriented approaches to religious education that had dominated Catholic
catechetics in the United States since the late 1960s, approaches that had produced
two sadly illiterate generations of Catholics. Tracking the influence of the
Catechism on the reform of Catholic religious education is one way to look into the
possible future of Catholicism in the United States.
The Catechism is also a powerful populist tool by which parishioners facing dubious
preaching and teaching can challenge claims that strike them as questionable. It is
thus a further antidote to the perennial problem of clericalism, and an instrument of
intellectual accountability of a sort not seen in Roman Catholic circles since the
Counter-Reformation.
2. A Catholic Moment in the New South? The rapidly changing demographics of the Old
Confederacy suggest that Catholicism might be on the verge of great advances in an
area where it has long been virtually invisible. While Roman Catholics make up only
3-5 per cent of the population of the Carolinas, Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama,
Mississippi, Arkansas, and Virginia south of the Rappahannock, prosperous urban areas
of the New South are 15-20 per cent Catholic, and the percentage is growing, mainly
through immigration. Moreover, the Catholic population at the region's major state
and private universities is 20-25 per cent and increasing. At Duke, nominally
Methodist, Catholics are the largest religious group on campus, followed by Jews;
Methodists are third. Similar situations obtain at the University of North Carolina,
Wake Forest, The Citadel, and the University of Georgia. If a sizable portion of
these southern-educated Catholics remain to work in the South, the future
upper-middle-class and upper-class elites of the New South are likely to be
significantly, even heavily, Roman Catholic.
The booming economy of the New South and the region's increasing influence in
national politics also afford opportunities for the Catholic Church. Given the
decline of mainline-oldline Protestantism in the region (as elsewhere), the major
Christian options are Roman Catholicism and evangelical Protestantism of various
forms. And in the future life of the New South, Catholicism has a certain comparative
advantage. Catholic social doctrine is a well-developed approach to the tangled moral
questions involved in creating the free, virtuous, and prosperous society. Moreover,
its natural-law grammar gives it more public traction than evangelical
Protestantism has in an increasingly pluralistic (and secular) society, given the
tendency of some evangelicals to make public moral arguments in ways that seem to
preclude the participation of non-evangelicals in the debate. Catholic social
doctrine can be engaged by everyone. While evangelical political mobilization in the
Old Confederacy during the last two decades has been impressive, the kind of appeals
typically mounted by evangelicals may not remain politically viable in the New South.
3. Converts and the high culture. Gary Anderson of Harvard Divinity School, Elizabeth
Fox-Genovese of Emory University, Paul Griffiths of the University of Chicago, Robert
Louis Wilken of the University of Virginia, Dr. Bernard Nathanson (one of the
founders of the National Abortion Rights Action League), theologian and editor
Richard John Neuhaus, columnist Robert Novak, historian Thomas Reeves, New York
philanthropist Lewis Lehrman, Florida governor Jeb Bushthese are among some of the
more prominent men and women who have, in the past decade, been baptized or received
into full communion with the Catholic Church. Perhaps the most prominent revert is
Justice Clarence Thomas of the U.S. Supreme Court, who has returned to active
practice of the faith in which he was raised. It is surely significant for the
Catholic future in the United States that many prominent intellectuals and public
figures have in recent years joined themselves to a religious community that the
modern secular intelligentsia has often regarded as the great enemy of free inquiry.
It is also of interest that the ecumenical journal First Things, founded in 1989 by
Neuhaus (then a Lutheran pastor), has within a decade become the most widely read
journal of religion and public life in the country, with a paid circulation of over
30,000 and a core readership of perhaps 125,000. Many prominent converts and
reverts are linked to First Things as authors, editors, or board members.
4. The renewal of devotional life. In the implementation of Vatican II's renewal of
the liturgy, attention was so sharply focused on the Mass that more informal forms of
pietythe devotions that were once a vibrant part of American Catholic lifeseemed
to drop by the wayside. But after many years of neglect, devotional life has been
revived.
a. Eucharistic piety. The devotional practices of perpetual adoration of the Blessed
Sacrament and holy hours conducted before the exposed Blessed Sacrament have
returned to the schedule of many parishes. These practices are intended to promote
deeper prayer during the Mass. Where before Vatican II Eucharistic piety was often
regarded as a thing in itself, its revival today is clearly linked to the deepening
of the Church's liturgical life.
b. Marian piety. The revival of many forms of devotion to the Virgin Mary is
doubtless due in part to the continuing phenomenon of reported apparitions of the
Virgin. But in many parishes the revival of traditional Marian devotionscommunal
recitation of the rosary, for exampleis unconnected to such paranormal phenomena.
Marian scholarship, influenced by John Paul II and by the Swiss theologian Hans Urs
von Balthasar, is also being revived. While Marian piety has generally been regarded
as a barrier to Catholic-Protestant ecumenism, the insistence by John Paul II that
true devotion to the Mother of God is actually Christocentric holds out the
intriguing possibility of an ecumenical dialogue that moves directly from Mary into
the heart of Christian faith.
c. New forms of devotional life. Perhaps the most prominent of these new practices is
the Divine Mercy devotion begun by Sister Faustina Kowalska, a Polish mystic who
died in 1938 and was beatified by Pope John Paul II in 1993. This has become the
vehicle by which many American Catholics have returned to a regular devotional
practice. The intensification of devotional life in the 1990s is both another
indicator of the inadequacy of the conventional story-linewhich saw devotions of
this sort as a pre-modern practice that was bound to disappearand a tale of populist
religion waiting to be reported.
5. A new ecumenism? Theologically intense bilateral ecumenical dialogues were one
important fruit of the Second Vatican Council and the Catholic Church's entry into
modern ecumenism. The Lutheran-Catholic, Anglican-Catholic, and Orthodox-Catholic
dialogues in particular were given ample coverage in the years immediately following
Vatican II. But the difficulties encountered by those dialogues in recent years have
not been so carefully reported. Neither has the new ecumenism that may surpass
these bilateral dialogues in importance in time.
The Lutheran-Catholic dialogue reached its apogee on October 31, 1999Reformation
Sundaywhen representatives of the Roman Catholic Church and the Lutheran World
Federation signed a Joint Declaration on Justification by Faith. The
representatives declared that justification by faith can no longer be considered a
church-dividing matter, as the two communions share a common understanding of the
truths involved in that doctrine. In other words, the core issue that precipitated
the Lutheran Reformation of 1517 has been resolved. But ecclesial reunion is not on
the horizon, because other issues have emerged over the centuries.
PostVatican II hopes for a relatively rapid reunion between Anglicans and Roman
Catholics have also been frustrated, as the practice of ordaining women to the
priesthood and episcopate in certain Anglican churches has raised questions about the
Anglican understanding of apostolic tradition, ordained ministry, and the sacramental
nature of reality. Meanwhile, the leadership of world Orthodoxy has not been
receptive to the suggestion by Pope John Paul II that Rome and the Christian East
could restore unity by returning to the status that prevailed before the Great Schism
of 1054. And while there is widespread agreement on the need for some center of
Christian unity, Orthodox, Protestants, and Anglicans alike have been slow to respond
to the Pope's 1995 invitation to help him think through an exercise of the papacy
that could serve their needs.
But as these bilateral dialogues reached various forms of impasse in the 1990s, a new
ecumenism emerged, with Roman Catholics in active dialogue with evangelical and
Pentecostalist Protestants. This was pregnant with possibility, for evangelicalism
and Pentecostalism represent the growing end of Protestantism throughout the world.
Mainline Protestantism, at least in the developed world, seems to be on an inexorable
course of decline, while evangelicals continue to make great strides in North
America, Latin America, Africa, Eastern Europe, and Asia.
This new ecumenism is not aimed, at least in the short term, at ecclesial
reconciliation, but rather at mutual recognition and cooperation in public life. It
is in part an outgrowth of the pro-life movement, where evangelicals and Catholics
discovered each other as allies in the trenches. And while it faces profound
theological difficulties, the new ecumenism can point to some significant
achievements in the 1990s. It has been little reportedunderstandably so, for it is
hard to find; it operates more through informal structures than through church
bureaucracies. But it is likely to be one of the defining realities of American
cultural life in the first decades of this new century, and it could well have a
major impact on American politics as well.
6. Catholic intellectual life. This is no longer confined to the campuses of Notre
Dame, Boston College, and Georgetown. Several of the converts noted above hold senior
appointments at prestigious research universities, as do such other Catholics as Mary
Ann Glendon (Harvard Law School) and Robert P. George (Princeton). Perhaps the most
notable among the new Catholic intellectual centers is the Washington-based John Paul
II Institute for the Study of Marriage and the Family, which has granted 127
master's-level degrees and seventeen doctorates since 1988. The institute seems
likely to play a major part in American Catholic moral theology in the decades ahead.
A small Catholic college in Texas, the University of Dallas, is widely recognized as
one of the nation's finest liberal arts schools; it has been a pioneer in reviving a
demanding undergraduate core curriculum in the humanities as the foundation for any
professional vocation.
Viewed through the narrowing lens of the conventional story-line, the debate over
John Paul II's 1990 apostolic constitution Ex Corde Ecclesiae and its attempt to
revitalize the Catholic identity of Catholic universities is yet another power
struggle between liberated Americans and authoritarian Rome. Viewed through a wider
lens, the debate is closely related to the revolt against political correctness on
campus, and against the secularist bias that has drained institutions of their
religious identities in recent decades. Moreover, the Ex Corde debate has forced a
shift of considerable consequence in the Catholic university world. During the 1970s
and 1980s, universities asked, How do we disentangle ourselves from the
institutional Church? Today, however confusedly, the question has become, How do we
reclaim our Catholic identity? Much more is afoot here than is usually reported.
7. An unprecedented encounter with Judaism. The Jewish-Catholic dialogue of the past
thirty-five years has been another of the great fruits of Vatican II. The Church has
condemned anti-Semitism and reformed its liturgical and catechetical practice to take
account of the Christian debt to Judaism; the Pope has called on the Church to
cleanse its conscience about historic anti-Semitic episodes and the Holocaust; Jews
and Catholics work together to promote inter-religious tolerance and a civil public
square in America; the Holy See has full diplomatic relations with the State of
Israel. That, it is sometimes suggested, pretty well completes the agenda as
imagined in 196265.
But John Paul II thinks that the real agenda is just now coming into view. That
agenda is theological, not social-political, and it goes beyond the achievements of
the recent past to raise questions that Jews and Catholics have not discussed for
over nineteen hundred years. What people? What is a covenant? How do Jews and
Catholics understand their common moral border, the Ten Commandments? What is the
common content of the messianic hope that Jews and Catholics share? If this new
agenda is addressed anywhere it will be in the United States, where the
Jewish-Catholic dialogue is most advanced by far, the Jewish population is secure
enough to engage in such a conversation, and there are Roman Catholic interlocutors
eager to build on recent achievements. Like the new ecumenism, the new
Jewish-Catholic dialogue is likely to be most intense in off campus settings rather
than in official dialogue groups.
8. Liturgy: reforming the reform. Most Catholics in the United States were
enthusiastic about the liturgical reforms of the Second Vatican Council. The new
question is: is it time to reform the reform with a new emphasis on the
transcendent, the sacred, and the beautiful? Organizations promoting a reform of the
reform include the Society for Catholic Liturgy; Credo, an association, mainly of
priests, working for more faithful translations of the liturgy from the Latin; and
Adoremus, an association of clergy and laity. The way the new liturgical debate plays
out will have a major impact on Catholic life in America. Liturgical prayer is not
just something that Catholics happen to do when other Americans are reading the
Sunday morning papers. Lex orandi lex credendiwhat we pray is what we believeis
one of the oldest and truest theological maxims, and what American Catholics believe
in 2099 will have much to do with the way they pray, liturgically, between now and
then.
9. The movements. When theologians speak of the charismatic element in the Church,
they refer not simply to the charismatic renewal with its characteristic behavioral
elements (such as spontaneous vocalized prayer, speaking in tongues, and healings),
but also to renewal movements that have emerged through the leadership of gifted
individuals. Since Vatican II there has been an explosion of such movements in world
Catholicism. That largely unreported fact is beginning to reshape the face of
Catholicism in the United States, giving dedicated Catholics communal reference
points for the practice of their faith beyond their local parish and diocese.
Among the most prominent of these groups are Focolare, a movement of Italian origin
that takes the unity of the human race as its mission; Regnum Christi, a renewal
movement of lay leaders (most of them professionals) associated with the Legionaries
of Christ, itself a relatively new community of priests; Communion and Liberation,
another Italian-based movement with a marked capacity to attract intellectuals; and
the Neo-Catechumenal Way, which works with the unchurched and re-evangelizes the
poorly catechized. The Sant'Egidio Community, founded in Rome by left-leaning Italian
Catholic university students in the sixties, combines an active liturgical prayer
life with service to the poor and with conflict-mediation in the international
community; it is widely credited with brokering an end to the Mozambican civil war,
for example. Members of L'Arche Community, founded by the Canadian Jean Vanier, work
with and live with the mentally handicapped. Then there is the most controversial of
these movements, Opus Dei, which has its own unique status as a kind of worldwide
diocese.
These groups are pioneering forms of Catholic life that have never been lived before.
Some of them include lay men and women, unmarried, who have taken perpetual vows of
poverty, chastity, and obedience and who live in community, yet have an active
professional life in the world. Interestingly, some of the new lay renewal
movements have proven fertile recruiting grounds for candidates for the priesthood.
In his ease with this unpredictable charismatic element in the Church, John Paul II
stands in marked contrast to some local bishops (and some Vatican officials)
concerned about where these movements and communities fit in the organizational
flow-chart. How such groups will fare in the postJohn Paul II church remains to be
seen, of course. But many of them seem to have achieved enough critical mass to be
ensured of a large role in twenty-first-century Catholicism.
10. The seminaries. Seminaries that have welcomed the attempts by John Paul II to
revitalize the Catholic priesthood tend to be doing much better than those that have
resisted this reorientation. But the story of the priests of the new millennium has
only begun to be told. How are these men being prepared, intellectually, for the
challenge of preaching and providing pastoral care to the best-educated generation of
Catholics in history? How will they help their parishioners cope with the temptations
of abundance? What does it mean for the future of Catholicism in America that many
dioceses now require seminarians to be at least minimally fluent in Spanish before
they can be ordained priests? Will the new immigrants to the United Statesthe
Vietnamese, for examplefollow the pattern of previous generations of immigrants in
recasting the ethnic character of the Catholic priesthood?
A Culture-Forming Counterculture?
Each of these new things in the Catholic Church will have an impact on American
public life, for Christianity is an inherently public business. How Catholics pray,
how they regard other Christians, how they lead their intellectual lives, how their
priests are trained, and the terms in which they understand their dialogue with
modernity and whatever follows modernity will shape the Catholic presence in the
American public square.
One other aspect of that presence requires a brief look: the Catholic Church as the
possible agent of a renewal of American public moral culture. John Courtney Murray
raised this issue in 1960, in what remains the single most impressive analysis of the
Church's interaction with the American democratic experiment: We Hold These Truths:
Catholic Reflections on the American Proposition. Murray argued that democracy could
be sustained only by a consensus on the fundamental moral claims that made
democracy plausible, desirable, and worth defending. That consensus had been
sustained in the United States since the colonial period by the great churches of the
Protestant mainline: Anglican, Reformed/Presbyterian, Methodist. Yet as early as the
1950s, Murray detected cracks in the foundations. The mainline churches were
increasingly unable to articulate the consensus persuasively, particularly in the
face of the secularist/pragmatist challenge associated with Deweyan liberalism.
Moreover, these churches no longer formed a demographic critical mass in American
society.
Murray proposed that the Catholic community, long held suspect for its foreign
loyalties, was now best positioned to revive the consensus and thereby reconstruct
the foundations of American democracy, because it was the institutional bearer of a
way of political thinkingbased on a natural-law approachthat was in touch with the
true moral philosophy and political philosophy that underlie the American experiment.
And those philosophical roots were to be found, Murray further argued, not in the
rationalistic individualism of the Enlightenment, but in medieval Christendom and the
common-law tradition to which it gave birth.
Some think Murray misunderstood the philosophical roots of the American Founding; and
the degree to which the Catholic Church still possesses the natural-law-based
political philosophy of its patrimony is certainly debatable. But Murray's diagnosis
remains prescient. Much of the clamor of current American public life (and no small
part of its degradation) has to do with the fact that Americans are losing the
ability to debate issues in the realm of the public moral culture in a civil waya
point painfully illustrated by the vast moral confusions in the 199899 debate over
the impeachment of the President. Is there a grammar that can bring some discipline
back into this debate? If so, who is a likely public teacher of that grammar?
The Catholic Church may be. In the social doctrine of John Paul II it has what is
arguably the most comprehensive proposal for the free, prosperous, and virtuous
society on offer in the world today. That social doctrine has been articulated in
terms that are genuinely accessible to all men and women of good will, as the Pope
habitually describes the addressees of his social encyclicals. The interest shown by
the national press in the Pope's social teaching may well reflect a widespread
yearning for moral reference points as we face the uncharted territory created by the
sexual revolution, the postCold War world disorder, the cracking of the genetic code
and the subsequent explosion of biotechnologies, and the continuous American struggle
to build political community out of extravagant diversity.
Moreover, in its pro-life activism since Roe v. Wade the Church in the United States
has developed a considerable capacity for the kind of genuinely public moral
argument that can indeed be engaged by all men and women of good will. To say this
is to risk derision, for the Catholic position on the morality of abortion-on-demand
has long been labeled sectarian. Yet I would challenge anyone to find a single
developed Catholic statement on the abortion license whose moral arguments presume
belief in the Nicene Creed. The Church has marshaled publicly accessible and
adjudicable scientific arguments on behalf of the pro-life cause, and publicly
accessible and debatable moral arguments for the claim that there is an inalienable
right to life from conception to natural death. Moreover, in recent years, both the
Pope and the U.S. bishops have begun to link the abortion debate to the wider
question of the moral foundations of the American democratic experiment.
The U.S. bishops have made their pro-life case in moral terms strikingly similar to
those in which they challenged segregation during the 1960s. There, too, public moral
arguments rooted in a natural-law concept of justice were deployedto general
approbation. The fact that many now find the same arguments sectarian when
Catholics address the abortion license (though entirely agreeable when deployed
against capital punishment) reinforces the sense that the capacity for serious moral
debate has been badly attenuated. Whether the Catholic Church can help lead the
country in the recovery of the lost art of public moral discourse at a time when the
Church is embroiled in the most divisive debate in the culture war is a serious
question.
Is a culture-forming counterculture a contradiction in terms? Not necessarily, as the
experience of the Great Awakenings and their subsequent impact on American history
suggests. The extent to which the Catholic Church acts as a culture-forming
counterculture in the twenty-first century is one of the great stories at the
intersection of religion and American public life. And grasping the inherently public
character of the Catholic proposal on the life issues is the first, essential step
toward covering that story adequately.
32 posted on
11/10/2002 1:43:26 PM PST by
LadyDoc
To: LadyDoc
Please don't preach the Gospel according to Oprah Winfrey to me or the Princess Diana Sermon on the Mount. I am well aware of the need for corporal works of mercy, to feed the hungry and clothe the naked and reach out a helping hand. That is not the argument. Social concern for others is not the whole of Catholicism. If it were, we need only all become Democrats to achieve salvation by pushing more and more social welfare programs. But we are also called to personal sanctity and to worship God--and this where our beliefs fit in and our respect for Catholic tradition. What is being preached nowadays is not the Catholic faith. It is a hybid thing, a watered-down belief system that corresponds to ordinary humanistic concern for our fellow man, but not to what has been transmitted from apostolic times, particularly by means of the ancient Latin Mass. But if all the faith means to you is having a social regard for others, then it is no wonder you support the new religion.
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