I hope I am not derailing this discussion, but this phrase caught my attention and I wanted to offer some thoughts on it. Please feel free to reject them if they aren’t in accord with the topic at hand:
Sometimes I feel that his vision of Catholics is pessimistic.
There are many faithful Catholics who see a problem in the Church when we read statistics like some low percentage actually attend Mass, a high percentage contracept, etc. We ask ourselves how we can “fix” it, and many times we look first at pointing a finger at what caused it. The common point of the finger pointing seems to be Vatican II, even though that council didn’t exist in a vacuum. If, as some hold, the 1963 Catholic Church was stoic, faithful, and well catechized, then how do you explain as much change as did happen within only a few years if all the players on the field at the start were such staunch Catholics? And if they weren’t such staunch Catholics, when did they lose that staunchness; suddenly in 1964, or gradually over the late 40’s, 50’s, and early 60’s?
I lived though those changes and I saw them anxiously embraced by most, clergy included. This nixes the notion that it was a handful of liberal theologians waiting in the wings for vague council documents upon which they could pounce. I’ve never met a Pastor, personally, who would make radical pastoral changes in his parish on the words of a few theologians writing opinion articles while never consulting his Bishop.
Back to today - we have had a large change in our culture over the last 50 years where things like expediency and bottom line price take precedence over a long-term goal. We can see this in secular education, where instead of teaching kids to think, we teach them to remember facts. Many years ago when I first received some technical training, we were taught the basic principles of electronics, how test equipment worked, then turned loose to find and fix the problems. We relied on a broad-based understanding of electical principles to decide what wasn’t working. Not so today. Today all that is passed by as too cumbersome and expensive, substituting in it’s place a problem/solution list. Problem is, if the problem isn’t listed, only few have the skills to get in there and figure it out. This is the same with other aspects of education; unless they’ve seen it before, they are lost.
As it applies to faith, we HAD a culture in Catholicism that front-loaded us full of catechism - that broad-based knowledge with which we could figure out what was right and wrong. I can remember when one of my early CCD teachers, a nun, called my mother at home because I hadn’t learned over the previous week to memorize the corporal works of mercy. She (and my mother) made a very big deal over the fact I didn’t remember burying the dead. Imagine something like that happening today? What would you do if you got that phone call?
The fact is, people learn differently today than they did in 1960. In many ways, the current way is easier, because it doesn’t take sitting and memorizing many things you don’t have immediate, clear need for. So our culture has adapted to this mode. We see it in the workplace, where training is based on a response to some present situation, or just enough to give employees a limited set of skills to do a particular task. We see it in our churches and how people practice their faith using this same kind of educational model. Why learn anything about indulgences if I’m not getting one at Mass today? That seems to be the mindset of the ones I myself encounter, and I’m not sure if that represents most or even many.
What I get from all this is that we seem to want those in this mode to suddenly snap out of it into a different mode without some compelling reason for them to do so. That is what is lacking. They don’t see any need to, and we are not giving it to them.
My neighbor and good friend is a New Thought minister, and he likes to tell me all the time about how many former Catholics have joined his “church.” Like New Age, New Thought puts emphasis on Jungian psychological principles and emphasizes the ego in place of the Trinity. It’s anything BUT a long list of doctrines and documents in Latin that even the experts argue over. In fact, they have no doctrines other than Catholic doctrines are excessive and useless. Sin? They don’t see any, so no hassles there, it’s just simple mistakes. Now why, we should ask, do Catholics see that as having a strong pull, and our existing Church as being repellent?
We can point to behaviors, summarizing that if people choose to practice a sinful life full of adultery, contraception, divorce, etc., this at least offers them something. But what of those who don’t practice those and are yet drawn away? What is it about Catholicism that makes it so hard? How much does, say, peer criticism come into play? If one joined a bowling team and was constantly criticized about their bowling, how long would they stick around before thinking, “Well, there is that other league across town…”
Charity has to come into the forefront of play here if we ever expect to stop this leak and for people to recognize the value of this faith. I don’t think it’s healthy to have a large group who, for example (and they aren’t the only example), consider Catholics who practice their faith in accordance with the rules given by their Bishops and Clergy in attending an OF Mass as some kind of defective subspecies of Catholic steeped in heresy. They don’t decide how to conduct liturgy, their religious leaders do, so if they follow those leaders, what then are they? Bound for hell?
We really need to think about these things and how they apply to different people’s perspectives if we hope to be ONE Church.
