the Church is here for people, not people for the Church. People live in various cultures, so the Church shouldn’t force them to global uniformity, but encourage incorporating and expressing faith in context of their culture. Of course, there are some thigs that have to be uniform, like doctrines of faith.
I started the thread out of honest curiosity over the whole question of enculturation. I see it as being potentially very rich, but also potentially problematic.
For example (and because I taught for years in a Native American reservation school), the way we offer incense. We (and the Orthodox) place the incense in a censor that is swung on chains. Native people offer their versions in a variety of ways, including in bowls over which feathers are waved. I don’t see anything problematic about this per se (ie, it is a morally neutral act, indeed, a positively good act when offered at an Altar and to the Blessed Sacrament). Citing the Holy Father’s affirmation that we don’t insist on uniformity, I would also make the same type of observation about liturgical colors. For some tribes (I believe the Lakota are among them), black is the color of joy and white the color of mourning. Could the Church affirm the idea of a priest in such communities wearing black vestments on Easter?
The problem I see (again, particularly in this culture) is that practices that MIGHT have been legitimate (different ways of doing the SAME things that we’ve done over the two millenia) can mingle with things have crept in that in no way could or should be acceptable. When I lived in the diocese of Gallup, I sponsored someone who entered the Church and I attended RCIA with my candidate. The RCIA director was a Laguna woman. She talked about how her mother greeted the sun every morning in the traditional way (an offering of corn pollen to the rising sun) and then said the rosary. She attempted to have us all engage in a “liturgy” that would have involved us facing the four directions, sacred in most native cosmologies, and addressing the winds as though they possessed a personification of themselves, ie, “O Great North Wind, blah, blah, blah” (something I flatly refused to do, there was a stink, and the pastor put an end to it. I was then accused of being a “typical white male with a pre-Vatican II mindset.”) In that diocese, it was possible to be a Catholic in good standing and also be a cacique (a priest) in the Snake Society, among others, of the Zuni people. This is syncretism, where beliefs from one or more systems have been incorporated together, on seemingly equal terms, without regard for the fact that one of the systems is the TRUE way and the other systems are objectively false. I see this as not being simply problematic, but downright dangerous for souls.
In NOT allowing enculturation, however, don’t we also run the risk of cultural elitism and predjudice? Are we not basically restricting the culture of the Church to the norms of western Europe and to a lesser extent the near East? I once heard it said that the highest and best cultures are those that had been influenced the longest by Christianity. I don’t see how anyone can argue with that at face value (though certainly we can point out ways in which those cultures have failed, to one degree or another, to live up to the standards of Christianity), but it seems to lock us into the uniformity the Holy Father speaks against.
In allowing enculturation, where do we draw the line, so that the Church does not become like the world? Are we to have a “rap Mass?” If you think that’s unacceptable or unlikely, remember we’ve had the joy of the “Polka Mass!”
