The Befuddlement of American Catholicism

...Just as artists and writers can get so close to their work as to be blinded to its beauty, impervious to its symbols, so too can priests and nuns lose their perspective, taking the drama of life for granted...

...one way to acquire roots is to plant trees...

...It also comes out in cases involving political apostates like Michael Novak, vilified as a sort of Yankee Antichrist nol~ because of any doctrinal differences with the Church but because of his refusal to sing the praises of collectivism...

...The next line of defense is his circle T. John Jamieson, a frequent contributor to these pages, is landless but secluded in Evanston, Illinois...

...The reason men want us in a habit," Sr...

...On a local level, weary parishioners force themselves Sundays to Mass, where they are subjected to spectacles ranging from the sentimental to the sanctimonious...

...Why tell people things they don't want to hear (but will listen to) when it is far less taxing to make lofty proclamations in favor of peace, justice, and mercy...

...But among the Fundamentalist contingent, for whom faith in the correctness of their political opinions is absolute and unquestioned, experience is rigorously excluded...

...Less than answers, what the laity need are guidelines, a special way of looking at and evaluating the world, a perspective on life...

...Oils, vestments, candles, wine, water, bread--truly they are all preposterous things from which to fashion worship...

...So when Archbishop Hunthausen of Seattle can "say with deep consciousness of these words that the [U.S...

...I mean to expound here the theory of the conservative hedge...

...the neorevivalist fervor as woman after woman jumped up to share her own personal experience of sexism, all to nodding heads and silent "Amens...

...What the American Catholic Church needs to recover most is its unique sense of the world, that of a sacramental Church whose legions are of sinners, a Church of the flesh, rooted in the earth the Lord created and found good but not of it...

...For another, it is increasingly observed that those nuns who do make the front page or the evening news present at best an unflattering spectacle: Not plain (which would lend them a sort of charm), an unhealthy percentage appear, as Tom Bethell has noted in these pages, downright dykish...

...Catholic laity sometimes have the same problem, albeit to a lesser degree...

...The layman's earthl~ domain is never as neat and precise as the moral theologian's textbook would have it...

...The bishops consequently plan to preach next on the American economy, and after that--who knows...

...For many of these people their greatest peace and consolation derives from the quiet dignity of the dally Mass, a small but invaluable refuge from the carnival-like stmosphere of the contemporary Sunday big-top...

...There, in humble side chapels of often appalling design, they are able to worship God without distraction from a thousand liturgical gimmicks, ranging from the insipid ("Happy Birthday Jesus" birthday cakes on Christmas), to the polemical (hellfire sermons against tuna factories in Peru), to the distasteful (obese liturgical dancers in tight pink leotards bounding up the aisle at the Offertory...

...Miss Reuther's fiery words were addressed to a conference called "Women Church Speaks," which included Catholics for a Free Choice (a pro-abortion group) and a caucus from the Conference for Catholic Lesbians, piqued because there was no specifically gay topic on the official agenda...

...To prate of the "political implications of the Gospel" in terms of specific policy is sheer rubbish...

...Today these nuns (the ones remain ~ing) together with their feminist allies are speaking openly of a "Women's Church...

...They aim to stamp out iniquity no matter what the cost...

...So when commentators on the Catholic Left accuse their nonradicalized coreligionists of having no more than a misty hankering for pomp and circumstance, Latin and incense, black habits and organ music, they completely miss the boat...

...McCarthy did not stick to his vow of silence...

...Michael Harrington, an agnostic who now calls himself a "cultural Catholic" (he wasn't" always so scrupulous), no longer believes in God but retains that wonderfully childlike faith in federal soup kitchens...

...The degree of clericalization here is unprecedented...

...Yet the worst danger is to the religious themselves, the tendency to equate their own specific policy choice--practical interpretation of principle--with the only legitimate moral choice...

...No one seriously disputes the obligation of the clergy, especially bishops, to speak out on contemporary problems, which occasionally must have some political ramifications...

...Everyone, it turned out, was either oppressed or repressed, or both...

...In fact, a faith in a Messiah born of a Virgin Jewess is preposterous as well...

...Ironically, too, criticism of an effete priesthood appears most popular among women laity...

...Even more than Pope Paul VI's birth-control encyclical Humanae Vitae, this recent pastoral letter polarized the American Catholic community: Not only is there substantial disagreement concerning the thrust and content of the letter, but a good many citizensmCatholic and nonCatholic alikembitterly resent the bishops' foray into the area at all...

...The first he possesses by virtue of a classical education...

...As a group, the American nuns best personify the confusion in the Church, having succumbed in large number to THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1984 19 the most bizarre male conspiracy theories of feminist ideology...

...During the Vietnam war, for instance, Michael Novak and William Buckley reached different conclusions about its justness, yet both conclusions derived from the same principles...

...This was the vision, after all, that guided the Church through almost two thousand years, a vision that could exert a powerful influence even on an agnostic like Mencken...

...otherwise there would be no dilemmas...

...He may build it...

...Despite the "progressive" label these activist religious are fond of applying to themselves, they in fact appear to be lusting f o r the sort of prestige and authority enjoyed by their predecessors back in the Middle Ages, administering great nations, arbitrating international disputes, crowning emperors...

...Because really quite the opposite is true...

...Believing they have exclusive rights to moral interpretation, what the Catholic Left actually hold, is an exclusive claim on a Fundamentalism that divides people into the sinners and the saved...

...In this his muchtrumpeted era, the layman has found himself pushed aside by eager clerics plunging into the crassest and most moralistic politicking since the Temperance Movement...

...But few religious tod~y are content with "some," forgetting that the Catholic tradition is a rich one, embracing many different peoples and systems and not properly identified with any one (the word of course means universal...

...For one thing, most of these nuns are middle-aged (possibly this is because our progressive orders are starving for vocations...

...It does something for their macho...

...A far more likely candidate is the pastor's earnest and idealistic young assistant, who may be seduced by how easily problems resolve themselves on paper and in sermons...

...his archaic dignity would cause astonishment, and then he would suffer the mortification of having people mention it to him...

...It is not even considered admissable as evidence to point out the way something is...

...Mansour's or Father Drinan's...

...There is Father Drinan screeching to the Nation of the Reagan Administration's perfidy, using language William Jennings Bryan must have employed against the heathen...

...Professor James Hitchcock has noted that far from believing the Church has any real mission in the world, these churchmen believe themselves the world's missionaries to the Church...

...Confusion over roles is also magnified when religious take up jobs like St...

...Yet in the past two decades the American laity has found its role usurped by religious more dictatorial and self-righteous (and far less practical) than any rural nineteenth-century Irish pastor...

...The world is the less for it that Mr...

...He will therefore stay close to club and home...

...How is he to preserve the integrity of his taste when the decadent, demotic twentieth century assaults it on every front...

...Richard P. McBrien describes the present state of the Catholic Church as one of crisis...

...Edward Kennedy is a hero, epitomizing the New Age Catholicism where public posturing substitutes for private virtue...

...The built-up contempt the master has for his mouthpiece will spill forth whenever the latter attempts to assert himself...

...Or to be around during the French Revolution when the Cathedral of Notre Dame de Paris was first sacked and then renamed the Temple of Reason...

...As for the rest, it is up to people's own adaptation of principles according to conscience...

...It is therefore a long way from the Golden Rule to a moral mandate for national health insurance...

...Margaret Trexler speak of the Pope's obvious "psychological problems...

...To claim that we face greater burdens than past citizens have faced is to skate on the edge of a special kind of hubris...

...of both attempting to "create world opini o n " . to "justify aggression" in Nicaragua and preventing "the Church in Latin America from seeing that the revolution and Christianity are the same thing...

...Mass attendance is at an alltime low, as are vocations...

...Indeed, the primary enthusiasm for the bishops' pastoral has come from the clergy themselves, and the warm reception the bishops received from the media (who do not hesitate to excoriate them on such matters as abortion and William McGurn is managing editor of This World magazine and contributing editor of The American Spectator...

...John Barrington Bayley designed an eighteenth-century chinoiserie pavilion in 1968 for Dr...

...The Latin 20 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1984 Church," he once wrote, "which I constantly find myself admiring, despite its frequent astounding imbecilities, has always kept clearly before it the fact that religion is not a syllogism but a poem...

...Official Church teaching, where it is not misunderstood, is ignored...

...The ridiculous spectacle of a crotchety old pastor attempting to remove The Catcher in the Rye from his school's bookshelf pales when placed against the manifest folly of a bloodless Sidney Webb or the lugubrious intonations of a Carl Sagan...

...And the ubiquitous Father Hesburgh, celebrated for his independence by everyone from Ann Landei's to Cardinal Bernardin, has a distressing history of basing his independence on yesterday's New York Times editorial...

...The conservative must own at least enough property to place a hedge, wall, or wrought-iron fence between his house and the infidels...

...the second he recalls constantly because of a faculty for music and without an absurd electronic headdress...

...But against the old notion of reaching out to convert the world, our American churchmen today are intent only on prostrating themselves before the boot of Mammon--the least likely way of getting its respect...

...The proper and highly important role of the clergy, then, is to enunciate such principles clearly so that anyonemsoldiers, bankers, housewives, clerks, and so onmcan apply them to the myriad difficulties that crop up daily, with all the attendant contingencies...

...I propose, therefore, to discuss, quite literally, the planting of hedges and the cultivation of the conservative d~cor...

...Apparently, they believe politics is the way to do this...

...Their claims on behalf of "the people" notwithstanding, the sobering truth is that God forbid the people ever did come to power most of these nuns would find themselves in jail...

...In the United States, the confusion surrounding the Church moved into the front page when the bishops released their pastoral on nuclear arms last May...

...certainly the spectacle of a nuclear holocaust is frightening...

...Colman McCarthy envisions a one holy Church led by brothers Berrigan and excommunicating insurance salesmen and FBI agents...

...submarine] Trident base is the Auschwitz of Puget Sound," he is blissfully impervious to pleas that some important (and obvious) distinctions be made, not only between the nature of the Third Reich and the United States but also between the flesh-and-blood victims of Auschwitz and the alleged "victims" of the Trident...

...the THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1984 2 1...

...Explaining her refusal to obey Archbishop Szoka, St...

...But what must it have been like to hear with Augustine about the fall of Rome, and all it stood for...

...Detroit Archbishop Szoka, for example, was depicted as a hidebound reactionary when he insisted that St...

...The vaunted teaching unity of the bishops is mocked, as American bishops issue letter after letter at odds with those of their brothers in other countries, on issues from El Salvador to nuclear arms...

...During his visit to the United States, John Paul II was publicly rebuked by Sr...

...This is what gives life its complexity, makes it difficult...

...For what is the Bible if not great literature, its people--Abraham, David, Joseph, Mary, Judas--all characters in a divine plot, fashioned in the image and likeness of their Creator...

...How impossible to imagine a similar statement issuing from the lips of Mother Teresa--or, for that matter, from the lifelong radical Dorothy Day, who always maintained she would shut down the Catholic Worker were her bishop to request it...

...Moses' flight from Egypt, the eloquence of the Song of Songs, the Christ born in a Bethlehem manger, Paul's exhortations to the Corinthians, each has in common with great art the sense of something timeless and transcendent yet taken from the things of the earth...

...The essence here is that the Hunthausens cannot be argued with, because while they have all the answers they have no rational framework for reaching them...

...Most people (possibly because they have no, choice) learn to accept this...

...Non-Catholics understandably have great difficulty separating the postures of individual Catholics (especially of priests, brothers, and nuns) from official Church teaching...

...it is a pleasant enough place to await the end of the world...

...But our nuns have crusader blood in their veins...

...But in the "more fully developed" tradition of obedience, rendering unto Caesar means first and foremost getting on his payroll...

...The difficult and frustrating job of keeping a grade school afloat or even listening to confessions can seem tame next to the glitter of life as a silk18 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1984 stocking lobbyist for Network (a liberal nuns' group) or director of some diocesan Peace and Justice Commission...

...The crisis of the Church today has nothing to do with politics and everything to do with poetry...

...The resulting structural incentives have operated powerfully on the bishops," Glynn noted, "since to speak of such matters as birth control and priestly celibacy has been to risk a torrent of abuse...

...I n practice the politics that the Catholic clergy and those most prominently associated with the Catholic tag have taken up is almost exclusively of the Left, increasingly the far Left...

...A generation of Catholics, many the products of 16 years of Catholic education and most far more affluent and privileged than their fathers, are today reaching adulthood ignorant of even the bare rudiments of their faith...

...Dissatisfied and unfulfilled, a goodly percentage of those priests, brothers, and sisters who did not outright abandon their vows flocked to the political arena, everything from running for congressional office to issuing policy statements on nearly every conceivable issue ("The Church has a particular responsibility to address the moral questions involved in the issue of stripmining...

...They are used to the idea that any moral decision typically involves undesirable side effects that can only be borne...

...What it needs least is the sort of Fundamentalism that Mencken spent a lifetime attacking...

...In this way people who disagree come to be seen not as mistaken, but as evil, morally callous...

...tuition credits) doubtless must be a pleasant change...

...But the only thing more preposterous than faith in an unseen God is faith in a very visible man, who over his several miUenia on this orb has amassed a pathetic record of cruelty, barbarism, and fanaticism in nearly every place at nearly every time...

...We are not waiting for a call to return to the land of slavery and to serve as altar girls in the temples of patriarchy...

...Others like St...

...Predictably, this has been accompanied by the unfortunate emergence of a Baltimore Catechism of political faith, where everything is spelled out and the wheat is separated from the chaff...

...Though the prophets speak eloquently of a "hidden God," these religious seem to have no doubt where He would stand on rent control...

...Trexler told the National Catholic Register, "is so they can know we're their property...

...Take for instance a sentence from the failed Trappist Colman McCarthy: "Officials of the Reagan Administration appeared determined not to see anything unfair, much less immoral, about the coexistence of bulging warehouses and empty stomachs, nor anything shameful about a nation of food lines...

...In this same sense sacraments are nothing but holy metaphors, inspiring the imagination to understand where the pure intellect comes up short...

...The Hon...

...So the average parishioner with a wife and some far-from-angelic kids is virtually immune to utopian promises of peace and harmony on earth...

...Dinsha of Fairfield, New York...

...Agnes Mary Mansour keep her promise to oppose abortion, one of the preconditions for the archbishop's granting her permission to take the job as Michigan's director of social services...

...Then there is the charming Father McBrien, usually found on CBS explaining to the uninitiated either that the Pope does not mean what he just said or that he really does not understand what he just said...

...What the tired sinners want is not answers but a touch of the transcendent, a glimpse of things hoped for but not expected to be seen...

...Moral dilemmas are not new...

...The controversy over Novak led author Robert Benne to make this point in the correspondence section of the liberal Catholic weekly, Commonweal: "I have found that when Christians of a conservative economic and political perspective disagree with me, they often say that I am naive, sentimental, or utopian...

...There is much less personal risk...

...i . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . T. John Jamieson CONSERVATIVE HOMES AND GARDENS Survival in the modern age...

...The best ~[efense of the principle of private property is owning some...

...the problem is when they equate~the two words, and the deadly complacency and concomitant moralism it breeds...

...Moral reasoningmwhich, after all, has been around much longer than Christianitymis rarely clear-cut with regard to action, involving as it does striking that difficult balance between competing goods and unavoidable evils...

...How opposed this is to the Catholic heritage of 2,000 years, which emphasizes only the right questions...

...A conservative's house is indeed his castle: A Czarist friend of mine points to his threshold and says, "Democracy stops here...

...Mansour's order), who thus achieved instant celebrity status...

...The Rev...

...A Sandinista feminist named Magda Enriquez accused the U.S...

...It is a clerical intrusion into almost all aspects of secular life...

...I am not sure that the majority of lay people wouldn't be in favor of a little male oppression...

...His disgust with modern manners will cause him to avoid the public in general, and to stay out of places where he is likely to be spoken to by strangers...

...One prays it is true that, as one nun said, "Many moderates take refuge in silence...

...Had they ever bothered to ask, they would have found that the single most common complaint lay people have about their priests today is that the latter are not masculine enough...

...The guiding thinker behind the Catholic Worker movement, Peter Maurin, made no bones about the medievalist nature of his proposals...

...Like the proverbial absent-minded professor, he is not the person one wants left w~tching the store...

...The history of theocracies is not a pleasant one, no less so for what a theocracy does to those in charge...

...he l~nows he cannot get it in his own home...

...Because politics by nature is supremely practical, it most closely resembles daily living in that the best one can hope for often is only a lesser evil...

...They need occasionally to step back from the immediate concern to take in the whole, much as the painter steps back from his canvas and the poet reads his words aloud...

...We flee the thundering armies of Pharoah...

...Last year in the New Republic, Patrick Glynn described how after Vatican II it was the political wing o f the American Church that emerged the strongest...

...From the Register accounts it seemed remarkably similar to my own memories of a conference on women's preaching: the ritualistic denunciation of the apparently omnipresent male chauvinists...

...the third defines his spiritual life, from moment to moment, in defiance of an apostate priesthood...

...Or to live through the Plague...

...Yet how characteristic it is of current Catholic discourse in America, from Archbishop Quinn's suggestion that Catholics in the military refuse any order to detonate a nuclear warhead to McCarthy'svirtually accusing Ronald Reagan of personally willing hunger in America...

...Theresa Kane (superior of Sr...

...At least in the United States, it is a confusion among thepoets themselves...

...Mansour stated, "I believe in a tradition of obedience more fully developed...

...Many nuns sported "I'm Poped Out" buttons, and of course the air was thick with charges of sexism...

...The only thing missing was a surprise appearance by Maria Monk...

...More important, who will care...

...Andrew Greeley summed it up when he called Novak a "turncoat...

...He may live in the country...

...When Christians of the left disagree, I am often charged with immorality...

...I f conservatism is the total criticism of modern life, how is the conservative to live...

...How is he to acquire the proper house, since taxes will probably prevent him from inheriting it...

...According to feminist theologian Rosemary Radford Reuther, "We are Woman Church, not in exile, but in exodus...

...Anyone doubting the validity of Glynn's statement has only to look at what happens to bishops who do not toe the media line, for media respect is a costly commodity...

...And all through the choir the chorus is the same: No salvation outside the Democratic party...

...Obviously, the problem with the Church is not that there are liberal, even radical, Catholics...

...The hatred of all things male spewing from their mouths does little to dissuade people from the unsavory conclusions I have heard even schoolchildren make...

...The reason for all this moralism is human nature: When people feel in sole possession of all the answers, dissent must be evil...

...Though I should prefer the term confusion, and others would speak even more strongly, few are so blind as not to sense that something is wrong...

...If corrupt taste is an inlet to moral and theological error, and one hopes to pass through things temporal without finally losing the things eternal, this is no trivial question...

...In that most intimate of interiors, the mind, the conservative carries with him everywhere certain antidotes to modern spiritual ataxia: Among these may be Plato, Bach, and the Book of Common Prayer (the real one...

...But, on the other hand, the amenities of civilization are not to be conceded to the barbarian: The bookseller, the tailor, and the club are in the city, and so the conservative must sometimes be found there...

...Though Catholics must accept much on faith (e.g., the divinity of Christ, the Eucharist) most of daily living is open to various and often opposing interpretations by men of good will (e.g., what constitutes a just war...

...such specifics as the Church does give almost always proscribe rather than prescribe, for example the condemnations of Nazism and Communism...

...More than just the shrine of the lares etpenates, and center of ancestral pieties, the Conservative House is the last stronghold of sacred order...

...What we really have here, I suspect, is no more than the ecclesiastical contingent of the bored middle-aged housewife, who at least had the grace to take up relatively harmless pursuits like bad poetry...

...Nevertheless these nuns do show several recurring characteristics...

...of acquaintances, which will necessarily be small, consisting mostly of men who acquired their ideas in a better age and who are therefore mostly over seventy...