What In The World Will Be Postmodern Catholicism?

Tibetan monks with their 

dunchen or Dharma trumpet; 

now that guitar Masses are 

passé, can we look forward 

to hearing these in church?

One of my former students came by to visit a few weeks ago.  Tran is now ordained and has been sent to Rome to the Pontifical Gregorian University to earn a Doctorate in Systematic (Dogmatic) Theology.  It was great to catch up and I was fascinated by what he had to say about his studies.  He was all afire about the problem of God in Postmodern thought. 

Now, Postmodernism is something that has always baffled me.  As a medieval historian, I never really understood Modernism, much less Postmodernism.  Modernism is a school of thought, prevalent in the second half of the 19^th century and into the 20^th, that like so many of the intellectual movements before it, rejected the received tradition and insisted on radically new interpretations of whatever phenomena it was considering.  In theology then Modernism questioned the received tradition of the faith and its doctrines.  Modernist thinkers discarded central ideas of the Christian faith such as the Divinity of Christ, the immortality of the soul, the Divine Source of Scriptural Revelation, and even the relevance of any idea of God. They attempted to reduce the faith to Myth without understanding the function of Myth to encapsulate levels of Truth that transcend articulation.  Unfortunately the Catholic Church was no better at appreciating the superior levels of Truth contained in Myth and in reaction to Modernism encouraged not only a retreat into re-constructed thought processes of the past (e.g. Neo-Scholasticism) but even an abandonment of serious intellectual fields such as Scriptural Criticism to a morbid anti-intellectualism, even a rabid fundamentalism that it took the Church decades to reverse. 

In theology, as in other fields such as architecture or literature, Postmodernism is a reaction to Modernism.  Unlike the intellectual freeze imposed by Leo XIII and Pius X, however, Postmodernism does not retreat into the embalmed remains of the past but seeks to find ways to express the essence of our faith in modalities that speak intelligibly to our contemporaries.   

Maybe we can look at it more concretely.  The familiar concept of “heaven” has lost any credibility for thinking men and women today.  When we were children heaven was “up there”; hell was “down there.”  That—and especially regarding heaven—was pretty much a literal conception.  But within my lifetime (I am in my mid-sixties) our understanding of the “up there” has shifted radically and allows no place for heaven. While we have known for several centuries that space is a vast and almost limitless entity, over the last five decades it has sunk into our consciousness that there really is no “up there”; only an “out there” that could not be transversed in a hundred million lifetimes.  And not only is heaven a spatial improbability, but reflection on Sartre’s play No Exit has confronted us with how much a hell it would in fact be with a relentlessly eternal existence from which we could never find an end.  (Sartre’s play is set in hell but the problem of a relentless eternity transcends the particularities.) The sort of a nightlessly eternal picnic in the park afterlife, an unending family reunion as it were, becomes not only improbable but terrifying.  So what do we do about an afterlife?  How do we make sense of it?  And would it really be blissful without Häagen Daz Vanilla Swiss Almond?  And Fido.  What about Fido?  I can’t leave Fido behind.  I would only suffer an eternal melancholy without Fido.  We need to find new ways to talk about our conviction that life transcends this mortal coil and when we shed it there is a life in God. 

It is not only Heaven and Hell but a huge range of religious symbols that need to be rethought and re-expressed in ways that make sense to people of the 21^st century.  Indeed, as Tran pointed out to me, even God needs some new clothes if s/he is not to appear dated.  But the task is not to invent faith new from whole cloth—though some have tried to do this with rather bizarre results—but to retrieve and reinterpret the essence of what has always been at the core.  We need to look at the past and realize that the doctrines and dogmas and even the biblical text with which the Truth has been revealed are all simply the reliquaries or ostensoria that permit us to see the Truth and are not themselves the Truth.  (Go and look up ostensorium—the singular of ostensoria—and you might be surprised.  I chose to use the fancier term so as to avoid the connotations the more normal word would convey.)  We do not necessarily abandon or reform those doctrines and we cannot abandon or change the scriptural text but we can seek new interpretations and historically contextualize them in an effort to separate the wheat of the impermeable Truth from the chaff of variable intellectual constructs. 

This cannot be done lightly.  In my series on the History of Anglicanism I have “taken some shots” at what I think has been some very sloppy abuses of sound Theological discipline, not only by those in the Episcopal and Anglican Churches, but by liberal Protestantism in general.  On the other hand when I look at our Catholic Church confronted by the challenge of a world in which, for example, gender roles and an understanding of human sexuality has so rapidly changed, I see our theologians stunned like deer in the headlights or a rat caught in the stare of a cobra, transfixed and unable to move for fear. 

I had coffee yesterday morning with the son of a friend of mine; an interesting man not much younger than myself. He is a hospice nurse but also produces video documentaries, only one of which I have yet seen.  That particular documentary is on the collaboration of religious leaders from various traditions—Buddhist, Catholic, Orthodox, Jewish, Muslim, Protestant—in their neighborhood on the lower East Side of Manhattan.  It was a very interesting documentary and it revealed much about the religious perspective of its producer.  I might say more about the video on another occasion but I spoke with him—I was already contemplating this posting—on how an educated and fairly sophisticated man of middle years views religion in general and the Catholic Church in particular.  He spoke about his own spiritual journey.  He was raised in the Catholic Church with a devout mother and a father who had been somewhat rigidly Catholic until the late ‘60’s and then went overboard in the other direction.  He had gone to Catholic schools but in his late 20’s drifted away from the faith.  His father had introduced him to Eastern Meditation and that gave him a spiritual foundation as he was on somewhat of a seeker’s pilgrimage (my term, not his) but ended coming back into the Catholic Church but in a very new way.  He said he was drawn back to the Church by just finding churches or other religious spaces to be places where he could sit away from the hubbub of Manhattan.  In particular he said that the vastness of space in churches and synagogues appealed to him as a respite from the city.  But he also uncovered in religion tremendous energy for building a better world.  He is comfortable again with his Catholicism but it is not a Catholicism of doctrine or of rules.  And he also finds himself at home in the various other faith communities around him and with which he has ties.  A Sabbath service in the Synagogue or Vespers in a Russian Orthodox Church or listening to a Tibetan monk sound his dungchen (or dharma trumpet, the long deep bass trumpet used in Tibetan worship) all speak deeply to him of the same Divine Mystery he finds at Mass.  I think he reflects the next generation of Catholics, people for whom religion is more about a spiritual journey than about doctrine, more about experience than intellectualization.  The Dalai Lama speaks to this when he writes: 

“The aim and purpose of religion is to cure the pains and unhappiness of the human mind. …. I would like to point out that the purpose of religion is not to build beautiful churches or temples; it is to cultivate positive human qualities such as tolerance, generosity, and love.  Fundamental to Buddhism and Christianity, indeed to every major world religion, is the belief that we must reduce our selfishness and save others.” 

It should not surprise us that the Dalai Lama speaks more effectively to contemporary Americans 60 and under than any Christian leader, including the Pope.  The sad thing is that with all due respect to His Holiness the Dalai Lama, the Gospel offers us the same insight in even more concrete and (I believe) more profound ways, but so much of our leadership and so many of our co-religionists have forsaken the invitation of Christ to let our hearts of stone become furnaces of the Divine Compassion and focused instead on rituals and ceremonies and are hell-bent on emarginating those who don’t measure up to the Pharisee standards.  It is not that I think we have to abandon the key doctrines of the faith: the Trinity, the Incarnation, the Atonement, and it is certainly not to give carte blanche for any arbitrary morality: but I believe those in Church leadership who have shifted their emphasis from theological abstractions to applied Christianity are breaking through a moribund “faith” into a credible Christianity.  The Franklin Grahams and the Archbishop Chaputs or the Cardinal Burkes and the Pat Robertsons are not the effective evangelizers in this Post Modern World.  You don’t have to preach a loosey-goosey Gospel to be effective: look at Mother Teresa or Archbishop Tutu, but you do have to be a witness to the mercy and compassion of God and not to the severity of dogmatic and judgmental religion.  

The Illiberal Liberals and Pope Francis on Freedom of Expression

Bill Maher: When Anger Dresses
Up as Humor it is no less toxic 

I am a fan of The Big Bang Theory and there probably isn’t an episode I haven’t seen at least once, but I still get a bit queasy and want to change the channel when I see Howard do his imitation of Stephen Hawking’s synthesized speech.   Professor Hawking has been on the show and almost certainly doesn’t mind, but I am not sure where the line is on making fun of a person with a disability or a challenge.  Just because the person being mocked doesn’t mind doesn’t make it right. 

I think we have, at least in the United States and at least among those of us who weren’t raised by wolves (or white trash), a social consensus that we don’t make fun of people with disabilities or with what we often call today “special needs.”  To make fun of a person with Down’s Syndrome or with Cerebral Palsy is called bullying.  We don’t do it; we don’t tolerate it.  Similarly the sort of mockery of people for distinctive racial or ethnic features that was the staple of cartoonists such as Thomas Nast or Friz Freleng would not be tolerated today.  Julius Streicher was the Nazi Cartoonist whose anti-Semitic drawings in Der Stürmer helped turn the German people against the Jews in Hitler’s Reich; we recognize the evils to which he made a significant contribution.   One certainly doesn’t denigrate women in today’s responsible press.  Nor is it acceptable to make broad statements or reinforce stereotypes of the LGBTQ community.  But isn’t it great fun to mock people for their religious beliefs? 

There are people who have reacted strenuously to Pope Francis for saying that people should not be mocked for their religious beliefs.  This is seen as an attack on “freedom of expression.”  What many people today do not realize is the difference between “freedom” and “license.”  Freedom recognizes that it carries along with it responsibility.  License is nothing more than the unbridled indulgence of self-willed egotists.  It refuses to be accountable to either objective truth or to the sensitivities and rights of others.  Those who make fun of others for their religious beliefs are simply schoolyard bullies on a larger scale.

Several weeks ago I saw Bill Maher on Conan.  Mr. Maher is one of religion’s most irresponsible critics and produced and starred in Religulous, the 2008 documentary that pretty much tarred all religion with the same choleric brush.  He also is not a nice man.  Anger, no, actually a discretely muffled rage, best described his performance on Conan.   Rage is no foundation for humor.  Anger in any and all forms, the Dalai Lama says, is poison.  And it is.  Nothing more; nothing less.  It destroys people from within like a cancer, spreading out from the gut into the whole person and becoming an obsession that distorts the individual’s power for healthy relationships and eats away their capacity for joy.  Anger or Rage is also highly contagious and spreads like a spiritual cholera from one person to another by even the most casual of contact.  Just look at how the bias against Muslims has spread in our society and in Western Europe, spread to the point where Duke University had to rescind its permission for the Adhān (the Call to Prayer) to be chanted from the chapel bell tower for fear of violence against the University and its campus.   Of course there are those who want to silence the bells in church towers as well or prohibit the display of crosses on the outside of church-owned buildings.  We must be careful because to undermine the freedom of public expression for one religion is potentially to undermine the public expression of any and all religion.

This is not to say that religion must be above criticism.  Rational argument is far different from mockery whether the mockery is in the form of cartoons, films, jokes, literature, or art.  Religion, like every other aspect in our lives, needs to be put under the microscope of free, rational, and responsible critique.  But the Pope is right.  It is no more legitimate to mock the religious beliefs of some or any or all than it is to bully the developmentally challenged, the transgendered, the economically disadvantaged, the ethnic minority, or the physically handicapped.  It is time we grew up and faced our biases rather than make them clever conceits that massage our egos into thinking that we are superior to others who are different from us.    

Another Sidebar: You Don't Have To Be Katholic To Be A Krazy

Have you read the segment on the baseball game in the first chapter of Chaim Potok’s The Chosen?  It has nothing whatsoever to do with Catholicism but it captures the profound hate that for pious zealots of any creed provides the foundation of their religion.  Thus we have ISIS brutally murdering Yazidis and Christians in Iraq; we have Christians and Muslims killing one another in Nigeria; we have Russian Orthodox and Greek Catholics locked in battle in the Ukraine, we endured decades of Catholics and Presbyterians in the most savage murders in Northern Ireland; we have Israeli Jews and Palestinians Christians and Muslims in a war with no end; we have Hindu terrorists killing Christians in India; and we have Buddhists killing Hindus in Burma. Amazingly all these people have become so deluded by their “religion” that they think that God has blessed their cause.  There is no way that any such cult can authentically claim to be worshipping God.  True religion—regardless of what doctrines one professes is only as true as are pure the hearts of its adherents.  Hearts shriveled and putrefying with hatred cannot possibly be filled with the love of a deity, any deity, but are in the grasp of Satan. 

One crucial example of religion-gone-rogue that is too often overlooked in today’s American media is the rabid conviction of the ultra-Orthodox in Israel that God has given the land of Eretz Yisrael exclusively to the Jewish People and that consequently the Israelis have a right—actually a duty—to drive all others out of this land which is uniquely Sacred to the Lord God.  And so farmers whose ancestors lived in this land and on this land long before Joshua led the Children of Israel across the Jordan find their olive groves bulldozed, their houses leveled, their orchards and gardens seized and the land given to the “settlements” which are nothing less than a patchwork of thievery.   And this robbery—and sometimes murder—is done in the Name of Yahweh Sabaoth, the God of Israel.  What sacrilege against the Holy Name!  The Rabbis and the pious should shudder in a morbid fear at their blasphemy of the Holy Name. 

Now, to be fair, the majority of Israelis, much less the majority of Jews around the world, do not subscribe to this violence.  Far from it.  This exclusionary Eretz Yisrael in which only Jews should be able to put their foot to the consecrated land is the doctrine of only a small group, undoubtedly less than 10%, of Israeli Jews.  But given the peculiarities of parliamentary government, the party in power needs the support of the political parties of these extremists to maintain their voting majority in the Knesset (Parliament) and so hatred—hatred in the name of religion—is empowered to work its evil. 

Christians should not be quick to join in the chorus condemning the sins perpetuated in God’s Name in Israel against the native population of that land.  In many regards this precise blasphemy should be well known to Christians.  When the Jews of Europe were driven from their homes and businesses in England (1290) and then from France (1306) and finally from Spain and Portugal (1492), was it any less offensive to Almighty God?  For that matter, was the expulsion of the Muslims from Spain in 1492 any less evil in the Divine Sight?  And what about the pogroms and riots in which, over the centuries, hundreds of thousands of Jewish lives were lost—was this true and authentic religion?  Is God ever honored by hatred?  Is he honored by hatred now in the death of a Muslim? 

When I look at the Katholic Krazy sites, as much as they view the world beyond Catholicism with the contempt of a Hasid toward the goyim,  they save a particularly bitter hate for those Catholics who disagree with them much as Danny Saunders viewed the apikorsim of the practicing but less orthodox Jews on Reuven Malther’s team.  Somehow we cannot bear that Truth or, for us Christians, Grace, could be found beyond the limits of our own narrow religiosity and that God’s favor could shine as brightly, or even more brightly, on those who are different from us.  A sign of religion-gone-bad is when our religion—be it Judaism, Hinduism, Islam, or pre-Conciliar Catholicism—makes us believe that we stand alone in God’s love.   Such religion is rooted in the hatred of others and renders us with hearts far too impure to ever offer God the Sacrifice which is due him.  Our Mass becomes a Black Mass, a Satanic perversion of the Eucharist and our Sacrifice becomes the sacrifice of Cain as our souls are stamped with the sign of his evil hatred of his brother. 

One of my favorite spiritual writers, the Dalai Lama, says:

“the aim and purpose of religion is to cure the pains and unhappiness of the human mind. …. I would like to point out that the purpose of religion is not to build beautiful churches or temples; it is to cultivate positive human qualities such as tolerance, generosity, and love.  Fundamental to Buddhism and Christianity, indeed to every major world religion, is the belief that we must reduce our selfishness and save others.” 

Curing the pain and unhappiness of the human soul doesn’t mean, of course, that we can’t have beautiful churches or magnificent rituals inside them.  No one appreciates Mozart’s Coronation Mass or the Fauré Requiem more than I, though a capella plain song is more beautiful still.   When I am buying vestments as a gift for the parish or for a particular priest, I go to Barbaconi; Gamarelli’s vestments are far too effeminate and foppish.  Gilles Beaugrand were long the best for sacred vessels, but I have heard that they are closing and would not know where to go for a chalice or monstrance now.   I can’t stand sloppy liturgy and believe that worship calls for a gravity and a seemliness that keeps us mindful of God in whose presence we stand.  All that being said, the true worship of God does not consist in the externals of rite much less of pomp, but of a conversion of the heart by which our hearts are conformed to the heart of Christ so that we can be the worthy sacrifice offered to God and transformed by his Holy Spirit into Christ for the sake of the world’s salvation.  The Dalai Lama is spot on and totally in conformity with Catholic doctrine when he says true religion will reduce our selfishness and implant in us compassion for the salvation of the world.  The person whose love is for doctrine and whose devotion is to ritual worships a false god. 

Ultimately the hatred of Danny Saunders for the apikoros, Reuven Malther, becomes a solid and transformative friendship in which their worlds merge in mutual understanding. It is the triumph of grace over the evils of hatred.   At one point the narrow view of Danny and of his father, Reb Saunders, threatens that evil will overcome good and that separation will frustrate and win out over the friendship, indeed the love, they share.  Hatred always seeks to destroy love.  Fortunately grace prevails and the friendship liberates Danny from the life of fear and its consequent hatred that would have otherwise devoured his soul.  We should pray for the soldiers of Isis, for the Israeli settlers, for the Buddhist monks who are killing Burmese Hindus, and not only for those katholic krazies who are driven by a hatred for Pope Francis or for the Church as it has emerged from Vatican II, but also for ourselves lest evil swallow up good, and hatred devour compassion.