What In The World Will be Postmodern Catholicism? 2

Notre Dame du Cap in the
heartland of what was once
French and Catholic Canada 

I am spending a vacation week in French Canada—my first return here in almost fifty years.  The area is stamped with its Catholic heritage.  Place names: Sainte Anne, Saint Benoit, Notre Dame du Cap, Saint Sebastian, Sainte Madeleine, l’Ange Guardien, Saint Luc.  Streets are named after saints, bishops, nuns and priests.  Every significant ville has its Couvent des Ursulines, invariably now a museum.  Driving along route 138 north of Quebec the towns are dotted with their charming 18^th century church steeples.   But the Catholic faith—vibrant only a few decades ago—is now all but dead.  This is not only the story in Nouvelle France, but in Old France as well.  And Spain.  And Germany.  Ireland is falling fast into the crevice of a post-Christian banishment of God from the culture.  And we are not far behind.

This is not simply a Catholic problem.  Calvinist Holland and Switzerland, Lutheran Denmark, Norway and Sweden, Anglican England, Baptist Wales, Presbyterian Scotland all find their empty churches turning into discothèques and restaurants and senior centers.  God simply is not relevant to contemporary culture. 

The problem is not, of course, God.  And while contemporary culture may be the challenge, it is not the problem.  The problem is our reluctance to have enough faith to be able to strip away the cultural accretions we have added to our faith over the centuries and shape the essentials to speak the Good News of the Kingdom of God in the language of our Postmodern culture. 

I write of “accretions” and “essentials.”  The Gospel remains the Gospel across the centuries and cultures.   God so love the world that he sent his only Son that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.  God did not send his son to condemn the world but rather that the world might have live in him.  That message remains ever valid.  The problems are the layers of gilt that we have applied to the lily in God’s name when they really have always been more to our fancy.  We don’t need the gilt.  The Lily is enough the way God made it.  And God has given us a rich heritage that, remodeled to present its best face to our world, can be an invaluable tool for re-evangelizing our Postmodern culture. 

What aspects of our Catholic heritage speak best to the contemporary world?

1.    A sense of mission.  Mission challenges people today.  Many feel a need to make a difference in bettering the world.  For some this may be the challenge of turning back the negative impact we have had on our environment.  For others it may be making a difference in third-world nations.  For still others it might be making a difference in our inner-city public schools.  The campaigns are as varied as are the interests.  One Catholic Church that has been enormously successful in attracting people of all ages and backgrounds is the Church of the Nativity in Burke VA.   A huge part of the glue that binds this community of faith is the passion for the people of Haiti which their late pastor, Father Richard Martin, encouraged.  They have made a huge difference.  The parish’s Operation Starfish has, since 1998, built over 1300 homes along with schools, clinics, sewing co-ops, fishing co-ops, small businesses, and vocational training centers in 10 “Nativity Villages” in Haiti.  Under Father Martin’s leadership and with his drive to make a better world in some very concrete and demonstrable ways, the parish tripled in membership.  This is only one example of how a sense of Mission can energize people and give them a reason to be plugged into Church. 

2.    A sense of community.  The old sitcom Cheers featured a bar “where everyone knows your name.”  The increasing isolation in today’s society is counter-balanced by a longing people have to belong to groups where others know them and they know others.  Really know.  Connect.  So often today people are no more than a cog in the impersonal wheel of life.  Gone are the days when one worked for an employer who knew them and cared about them and their families.  Today people migrate from employer to employer, leaving no impact and forgotten within days after their leaving.  The Church needs to be far more personal.  As Catholics we have maintained the heritage of community over the individualism of Protestantism, but too often community is only a theological concept and not a tangible reality.  I have seen churches that are genuine communities.  Within the last year I attended the funeral of a friend at an impossibly large church in Northern Virginia.  The sanctuary seats over 1200, though the funeral was held in the more intimate “Day Chapel” that holds maybe 200.  I was amazed to see how people rallied around my friend’s husband and children.  The chapel was packed.  There were a full set of volunteer ministers: Extraordinary Ministers of Holy Communion, readers, cantors, servers.  A squad of parishioners prepared and served a lunch for us—all 200—after the Mass.  People milled around, talking to us out-of-towners and welcoming us to their “parish family.”  Given the size of the parish, it is not rare for such funerals to happen three and four times a week but an inclusive community makes this possible.  And I want to highlight inclusive.  I noticed that at this parish there are regular meetings for AA and other 12 step programs including for those with compulsive sexual behaviors.  “And we have gone out of our way to welcome the LGBT community,” the pastor told me when, writing this blog, I called for more information.  There are support groups for the divorced and remarried as well as for singles, widows, and others who need the affirmation of a Christian fellowship.  While many of their neighboring parishes are withering on the vine, this Church (the pastor asked me not to reveal it’s name because of its gay-friendly policy in a people-hostile diocese) is growing steadily. 

3.    A recovery of our mystical tradition.  The fine points of doctrine do not interest most people under sixty today but there is a deep interest in the spiritual journey.  X-Catholics are turning to Buddhism, Hinduism, Wicca, and New Age gimmicks when we have an incredibly rich and far more sound spiritual heritage in Francis de Sales, Teresa of Avila, John of the Cross, Ignatius Loyola and his Spiritual Excercises, Meister Eckhart, Thomas à Kempis and his Imitation of Christ, Brother Lawrence, Elizabeth of the Trinity, and a host of other spiritual writers.  How many of our clergy or religious today know anything substantial of this heritage?  I have had dinner at Wolfington Hall with the Jesuits at Georgetown University, an experience nonpareil in both gastronomy and lively conversation.  Jesus did figure in the conversations; Ignatius did not.  Pity.  There is a light here not to be hid under a bushel.  For all the academic vigor of the Jesuits, please remember your first and most needed gift is the spiritual tradition of Ignatian Spirituality.  You can educate the best but what we need you to pass on—that which only you can pass on—is that experience of Jesus which Ignatius has revealed.  And you Carmelites—the rigors of your silences and fasts are wasted if you don’t pass on the profound path to heart where Jesus waits that Teresa and John have shown us.  And who hears anything today of Francis de Sales and the Introduction To The Devout Life?   I don’t want a Salesian pastor administrating my parish or a Visitation Nun teaching French—they need to bring out the treasures that belong to the Church and make them available to a world that wants to find meaning in their lives.   I wish I could say that I knew any parish that was doing this, but the popularity of Richard Rohr and Richard Rohlheiser and Joan Chittester and Thomas Keating and the late Thomas Merton and John Main all testify to the powerful draw that the spiritual path has today. 

4.    We need a new path in worship.  The Second Vatican Council called for the Liturgy to be adapted to the cultures it encounters in its outreach to the peoples of Asia, Oceania, Africa, as well as the indigenous peoples of the Americas and Australia.  We are now encountering a radically shifted culture in the Developed World and we need to be open to adapting our rituals and prayers to that new culture.  I am going to write more on this specific topic in a future posting but suffice it to say that neither a return to the frozen-in-time (which is radically different from “timeless”) farce of liturgical restorationism and the reestablishment of the baroque rite of the 1570 Missal, nor slapping the Band-Aids of “being hip” on the 1970 rite can meet the crisis.  The central core, not of the ritual but of the Mysterium Fidei, can and must remain but we must not be afraid to deconstruct the edifice and from its ancient stones build anew. 

There is an urgency in proclaiming the Gospel in the cultural vernacular.  Saint Paul did it in the first century when he encountered the Greek Culture of the Mediterranean world.  Patrick did it bringing the faith to the Irish as Bonfiace did to the Germans and Ansgar to the Scandinavians.  Matteo Ricci tried to do it to bring the Gospel to the Imperial Court in Beijing and had he not been undermined by the Dominicans and Augustinians who were so locked in the prison of religion that faith was no longer a living reality, China today might be Catholic.  The acculturated Gospel has made the Dancing Church of Africa come alive in faith, has sustained the Vietnamese in their years of limited freedom, and has shifted the center of gravity in the Catholic world from the tired North to the Global South.  It can fan the embers of European and American Christianity in life again.  

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.  

More Thoughts on Pope Francis and A Bridge Too Far

Empty Pews: the Challenge 

of a Post-Christian world 

I mentioned in my last posting that the failure of the Church to introduce and insist on a single theological model, the neo-Patristic model that underlies the Decrees of the Second Vatican Council, has led to the development of a Church within the Church, each Body having a distinct and unique—though not contradictory—understanding of our Catholic identity and heritage as it is found in the doctrines and praxis of the faith.  While the vast majority of the Church has accepted—though very often passively—the neo-Patristic model, there is a significant number of Catholics who, rooted in the neo-Scholastic model that predominated in Catholic seminaries in the four centuries before Vatican II—and in the century immediately before the Council was given an official status—are distrustful of the orthodoxy of those Catholics who do accept the Conciliar vision of the Church.  The two models provide some very different—though not incompatible—understandings of the key mysteria of our faith including the nature and mission of the Church, the nature of the Mass, the Sacramental nature of the Holy Eucharist, the nature of the priesthood, the nature of Divine Revelation, and other key dogmatic questions.

A reader brought up a very interesting factor that complicates the tension significantly and to which I need to give serious consideration.  According to this reader the Council attempted to consolidate its theological positions and move beyond the modernist crisis that had challenged it in the late 19^th and early 20^th century.  You may recall that I had written that Leo XIII endorsed the Neo-Scholastic philosophical and theological systems because they seemed at the time to provide the best answers to the challenges of “modernism.”  Modernist thinkers took a rational and scientific critique of religious doctrines and even of the Bible itself, often looking at the Biblical texts and the historic dogmas of the Christian faith in the context of their historical development and not considering any supernatural influence of “Revelation.”   This method was responsible for the emergence of liberal Protestantism which Catholics usually looked on as vulnerable to a certain theological softness on the key issues of our faith.  In fact it was the proponents of the Nouvelle Theologie who believed and demonstrated that a return to the Biblical and Patristic fundamentals, rooted in a rigorous scholarly and historical analysis, provided the best defense against modernism.  Neo-Scholastic thought proved to be too much an intellectual closed circuit to answer credibly the modernist objections to historic Christianity and it was for this reason that the Church began under Pius XII to move away from Neo-Scholasticism and embrace the theological insights of the Patristic and Biblical Scholars.  By the time the bishops gathered under John XXIII for the Second Vatican Council, the Neo-Scholastic faction would lose out to the Neo-Patristic figures such as Congar, Daniélou, von Balthasar, de Lubac and others. (It should be noted that the young Josef Ratzinger was a junior member of this set.)  Let me say at this time that there were brilliant Neo-Scholastics, or more precisely neo-Thomists, who had influence at the Council especially Étienne Gilson and Jacques Maritain and the Council was not a rout of the Neo-Scholastics but rather a retreat from Neo-Scholasticism into a more historical use of the Ancient Christian Fathers to reshape the doctrines of the faith in a way consistent with the Church before the Schism of 1054 which divided Eastern and Western Christianity. The Eastern half of the Church had always retained the Fathers as the basis of theological discussion and this conciliar turn of methodologies opened up the common language for dialogue. 

But to the point that my Anonymous reader made, the battles that empowered the Church to move beyond the modernist crisis were too little and too late.  Modernism is long past and we are confronted with the Postmodern.  I look around in Church on Sunday morning, and the millenials are conspicuous by their absence.  Five hundred people at Mass and probably less than a dozen between the ages of 20 and 30.  Yeah, yeah, I know—previous generations were light on Mass attendance at this age but came back when they had kids.  But this has a different feel to it.  The parish I go to: a thousand families.  One wedding on the books for 2015.  35 baptisms in 2014 as opposed to 64 funerals.  This is not an aging community; the public schools are filled to overflowing and the names are Italian and Irish and Polish.  Where are they???  And speaking of Irish and Polish and Italian: I read the Death Notices in the local paper religiously.  Why is there a “celebration of her life” for Deirdre O’Connell at the Harp and Bard and not as Mass at Saint Mary’s?  And the corresponding question goes too for Rafaela Esposito  and Stan Mikulski.   Hey, these folks were Mass goers.  Their spouses who pre-deceased them had a Church funeral.  But their kids—they are in this new generation that is suspicious of organized religion or, at least, indifferent to it.  So indifferent to it that they can’t even face a funeral Mass for a parent who was a practicing Catholic.  What is the problem that we need to address?

When Pope John Paul died I was living in Rome and was hired by several news outlets as a technical advisor, and in some cases as a commentator.  Four million people came to Rome for the funeral. 85% of them were under 35.  I went up and down the Via della Conciliazione with a microphone and a cameraman. “Why did you come to Rome?”  Person after Person: “he was my Pope.”  “I loved him.”  “He made me proud to be a Catholic.”  “Looking at him was like seeing God.”  Ok.  “Do you agree with him about birth control?”  “No, of course not.”    “Do you agree with him about homosexuality?” “No, of course not.”  “Do you agree with him about sex outside of marriage?”  “He said something about sex outside of marriage?”  .  “Do you agree with him about in vitro fertilization?” “No.”   “Do you agree that women cannot be priests?” “Of course not.”

The only area where there was large agreement—though not total consensus, was abortion.  To be very frank, I think if most Catholics, at least Catholics in the developed world, understood Francis’ entire outlook, he would not be nearly as popular as he is.  Like it or not, we live in an age in which people are not interested in theological points and in which they want to make their own decisions based on their own—and I dread to say it—feelings.  We are in a time of great subjectivity where people make all sorts of decisions with a minimum amount of research or thinking things through.  And in this world, despite the charm and popularity of a Pope Francis, people are not going to find the experience of Church, of regular worship in a normal parish community, in any way significant. 

I need more input and I need more reflection before I can say much more about this situation but I think my reader is dead right on to something.  I like the Neo-Patristic approach to Church that is written in the Decrees of Vatican II, but then I am of considerable years and see the world differently than most of the people among whom I live and work.  This much though I think I do know.  Pope Francis has not changed much in terms of rules or doctrines but that is not the interest of the 20 and 30 somethings.  He has made some remarkable progress in changing the perception of the Church from a rigid and doctrinaire institution to a bunch of people who are open, inquisitive, and respectful of differences. That may not be the long-term answer, and it is not bringing people back into the pews, but in the short term it is staunching the growing alienation many people had been feeling from the Church of their youth.  I don’t  know that Pope Francis can turn things around, but the course we were on was only headed for greater disasters. 

The Neo-Scholastic Church is predicated on the predominance of a Christian culture to which there is a universal, or all but universal, consensus.  It has a certain number of unchallenged first principles which must be accepted if it is to serve as the foundation for the theological constructs of a Christian world.  There was a predominant Christian culture at the time of Saint Thomas.  Though its unity was shaken by the Reformations of the 16^th century there was still a Christian culture that defined Western Civilization until the Enlightenment.  In fact, this Christian culture remained—or at least its illusion remained—right up through Dwight Eisenhower and Leave It To Beaver.  In the last fifty years we have seen our Christian society become a post-Christian society.  In this post-modern age in which we live there are a plethora of answers to every question; an excess of values for every decision.  Somehow Christendom vanished.  We are back at step one.  The challenge is a New Evangelization.  I think our Catholic heritage, both in its Neo-Scholastic and Neo-Patristic expressions, has much to contribute to the discussions of today’s world.  I think that the Christian Gospel has the Truth and has it more completely than any other system of belief including the non-belief of atheism. But like Paul on the Areopagus, we will have to argue the Message convincingly to our contemporary world.  And we will have to do it in contemporary language and with contemporary argument.