Catholic culture

In The New Pantagruel archive I found a link to Christopher Shannon's 2006 Christianity Today review of God and Man at Georgetown Prep: How I Became a Catholic Despite 20 Years of Catholic Schooling by Mark Gauvreau Judge. American Catholics need to read books like this and discuss them in their parishes:

In God and Man at Georgetown Prep, Mark Gauvreau Judge writes as a survivor not of abuse, but of neglect. Coming of age in the 1970s, Judge missed out on the gory/glory days of tough-guy priests and ruler-wielding nuns. Drawing on the theological spirit, if not the anglophile cultural posturing, of the conservative Catholic William F. Buckley's classic God and Man at Yale, Judge exposes and indicts the functional atheism that has shaped Catholic educational institutions in the decades following the Second Vatican Council (1962-65). Judge's book is an unabashed plea for Catholics to recover the world they have lost and reclaim the birthright they have sold for the material comforts and cultural respectability of mainstream, middle-class American life.

Ben Gibbard was still harping on bruised Catholic knuckles in 2005. I wish it was more than a means to the end of saying, "I never went back." Campaign mailers can't criticize conservative Christian politicians without using a Catholic palette [see the comment section here]. Popular culture can't talk about "the dark" without bravely ("I held my tongue") rejecting "fear." (But then they're not really talking about the dark. "Hands clasped so tight" are hands that are not yet in the dark. Though it might be worth finding out for sure if one of the hands is Zooey Deschanel's.)

Anyway, a parish discussion of education should focus on whether an American age characterized by the "functional atheism" of its Catholic institutions fulfills what Gaudium et spes calls the "right to culture." In the second issue of The New Pantagruel, Jeremy Beer reviewed Tracey Rowland's important book, Culture and the Thomist Tradition:

[Rowland] concludes that the Liberal tradition as embodied in the practices of the culture of modernity actually operates so as to impede the exercise of prudential judgment in favor of decision-making by reference to bureaucratic norms, subjectives the transcendentals of the true and the good and in its bourgeois form marginalizes the transcendental of beauty, fosters an anti-historical “culture of forgetting” rather than a “culture of celebrated recurrence” and resists the horizontal incarnation of grace by its vacuous mechanical forms.

Another angle is the American Catholic hierarchy's view on illegal immigration. In a radio segment a couple years ago, John Zmirak argued, perhaps a little uncharitably, that the relevant bishops, since their primary self-serving aim in supporting illegal immigration is to disguise cultural failure with demography, will preside over the flight of the new generation of American Hispanic Catholics just as they did with the post-Vatican II generations of American Catholics. Of course, that's already happening. In 2009, Archbishop José Gomez wrote:

The number of Hispanics self-identifying as Catholics has declined from nearly 100 percent in just two decades, while the number who describe themselves as Protestant has nearly doubled and the number saying they have “no religion” has also doubled.

Why is this happening? Why does the "American mainstream" have this effect? Gomez gives a few reasons. First, reminiscent of Stanley Hauerwas' observation that "America is the exemplification of modernity [because it] produce[s] a people who believe they should have no story except the story that they chose when they had no story," Gomez points to America's "shopping around" culture and its justification in the "Gospel of Wealth." Second, of course, is racism:

We cannot underestimate the impact — let’s be frank — of racism, both in American society and unfortunately in the church. Our ugly, unproductive and unfinished national debate over immigration has exposed that. If our people feel scapegoated in society and marginalized in Catholic life, it’s only natural that they would look around for someplace that might welcome them and treat them with the dignity they deserve. And unfortunately, some people are going to reject Christianity altogether because they experience Christians treating them in ways that are not very Christian.

And, finally, it's secular culture:

“[P]ractical atheism” has become the de facto state religion in America. The price of participation in our economic, political and social life is that we essentially have to agree to conduct ourselves as if God does not exist. We can’t talk about religion or faith in the workplace or in the public square. Sure, people still do, but those people are dismissed as zealots or “the Christian right.”

This is especially difficult for Hispanic immigrants because "they face severe demands to fit in, to downplay what is culturally and religiously distinct about them." What doesn't happen anywhere in Gomez's speech -- with the possible exception of a slight criticism of a tendency within "Hispanic ministry" to concern itself more with programs and bureaucratic power than with "bringing Hispanic people to encounter Jesus Christ" -- is criticism of the American Catholic hierarchy or recognition of its complicity in Catholicism's decline. Or of the various institutional impediments to generational continuity (i.e., culture), such as the "living room liturgy." Or of the constant explanatory recourse to sociology.

There's really only one thing that can be said to parents of parochial school students and to still-Catholic Hispanics with respect to most of the American Catholic Church, and that is the despairing repetition of the old wry remark: "Come on in . . . it's awful!"

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Update: John Allen wrote on Friday that "a key question facing the church . . . is how to manage [the] tensions [of Catholic identity] constructively." His solution:

What the church needs instead are spaces in which relationships among Catholics of differing outlooks can develop naturally over time. The plain fact of the matter is that such spaces have been badly attenuated by the ideological fragmentation of both the church and the wider world.

This space is the parish. To a certain extent Catholic presses, magazines, television programs, Internet forums -- even sometimes organizations like Opus Dei -- cause a "Here Comes Everybody" effect that is harmful to the Church as a cultural institution. The effect undermines what Rowland, via Weber, calls "charismatic authority" (something of a paradox, since it is the default of "bureaucratic authority" that causes parishioners to seek spaces outside the parish) and reduces the value of the parish community by offering more "ideal" forums in which Catholics can articulate perfectly valid tribalism. Allen anticipates this response:

Many parishes, for instance, have become virtual gated communities. Walk into any diocese in America and find a Catholic in the know, and he or she can tell you in five minutes where the “Vatican II” parishes are, the neo-con parishes, the traditionalist parishes, and so on. The same point could be made about Catholic colleges and universities, Catholic media, and other institutions, all of which tend to have clear ideological alignments. Catholics aspire to be evangelizers of culture, but in many ways we have been thoroughly evangelized by culture. Smuggling the divisions and animosities of secular political life into the church is a classic case in point.

Allen's solution is to promote the "hybrid vigor" that, in one exemplary instance in Britain, offered young Catholics "crash course[s] in both communications techniques and issues facing the church, and then offer[ed] them as interview subjects to media outlets from around the world." What really animates Allen is the fact that "nobody in authority" started or hindered the group. I think this just perpetuates the problem. "Communication techniques," "crash courses" in "issues," and around-the-world-ness can only obscure the problem of space that is the rejection of the limits of the parish.

Catholics should be encouraged to smuggle "animosities of secular political life into the church." Only, they should generally refuse to give in to the desire to switch parishes. (Allen is partially right about the parish as gated community.) The sort of knowing that is practiced by the local "Catholic in the know" has the virtue of being good human knowing. It's certainly more real than the information communicated via crash course and regurgitated along with youthful impressions as a sound byte intended for global consumption. Everyone involved in the parish from the pastor to the most reluctant tither must be encouraged to attend first of all to the life of their parish.