THE COMMUNAL CATHOLIC:
Novak, Michael
THE COMMUNAL CATHOLIC Over the years, the Catholics of the East, I think, have sold Andrew Gree-ley short. He never had quite the astringent, reserved and disciplined style we admired; he never...
...He is not abashed to write and think outside his field as an intelligent amateur as though with a nineteenth-century European disdain for mere professionalism...
...Intelligent Catholics are in the midst of an extraordinary re-assessment, even more promising than during the period of the Council a decade ago...
...In the recent eagerness to "outgrow" the parochial Catholicism our generation experienced in its youth, many did not at first give much thought to the culture that would replace it, for themselves and their children...
...Nor is it necessary, finally, to go to ecclesiastical organizations in order to nourish what is valuable in this difference...
...They miss the most important point Greeley is making...
...Catholics, he says, have not as clearly observed this distinction as other collectivities have...
...He may be the most central Catholic writer of our era...
...There are criticisms I would make of Greeley's work, and there are writers of our generation whose talents or achievements in some respects I hold in higher esteem...
...But the years prove a great deal that events of a single season do not...
...We seek now a culture articulated well enough to carry these into the future consciously, not merely haltingly, lamely, voicelessly...
...1], gave final impulse to my re-evaluation of Greeley's corpus...
...today, there are fascinating arguments both on the left and on the right...
...The ecclesiastical center will decline in influence...
...Good people are choosing different battlecries, different allies, and different tactics...
...Rosemary Ruether's extraordinarily large output and range marks her as another on whom future historians will be obliged to comment with more esteem than her contempories have shown...
...Thus something new and large is stirring...
...Some years ago, Greeley's columns used to use an image of me (or of my friend, Daniel Callahan) as a voodoo doll in which to punch needling asides...
...Then, by comparison, matters were easier: It was "rejuvenation" versus "immobilism" and let the fur fly...
...Greeley distinguishes rather sharply between Catholicism as an ecclesiastical institution in America (including subsidiary, independent, laity-controlled institutions like the National Catholic Reporter) and, on the other hand, Catholics as a collectivity within American pluralism...
...It is not so clear where fidelity to the Catholic people, and fidelity to humanity itself, truly call...
...Recently, since I began to write on ethnicity, Greeley has been more kindly...
...Greeley now predicts that other centers of power will arise among Catholics, other centers of self-consciousness and self-awareness...
...John Cogley first pointed out to me that Greeley has, probably, the greatest natural vein of journalistic talent of any American Catholic...
...Mere "drift," mere explicit rejection, will not do it...
...Let me put it in my own words: to be a Catholic is not so much to belong to an organization as to belong to a people...
...What many objectors to Greeley's essay lack is a certain subtlety...
...It is quite proper to be in the world of mobile, affluent, professional America and still not be quite of it-and to be both in it and resistant to it in a specifically Catholic manner...
...Institutional practice has waxed and waned...
...Communal Catholics" may yet produce a family pedagogy, a literature, a history, and institutional forms to do what must be done...
...In all the commotion, what really is worth basing one's life upon...
...The latter is a "Catholic community" in roughly the same way that there is a "Jewish community," "black community," or "Bible Belt Protestant community...
...At about the same time, I began to read Greeley with a new kind of interest and respect...
...Catholics do tend to differ in their sense of ultimate reality, in their version of realism, in their particular passion for justice, in their sense of the meaning of family and children, in facing death, in their approach to education, to suffering, and to personal relations...
...other cultural currents have washed overhead and receded...
...Christopher Dawson once identified more than a dozen major different Catholic cultures...
...His recent essay on Mary in the New York Times is a lovely jewel...
...he loves, as I do, independence...
...he never quite hit the right Eastern notes...
...A recent essay of Greeley's in the National Catholic Reporter, "The Communal Catholic" [Nov...
...It is not necessary even to be aware of the fact that one is, in fact, different from others...
...Communal Jews have done it...
...They fail to grasp the intricacies and depth of culture, sensibility, a set of virtually unconscious instincts, resistances, tendencies, and senses of reality...
...my mother, a little troubled, used to mail them to me underlined...
...But intellectual historians of the future will note with awe the inventiveness and solidity of the central core of his work, and the many brilliant pieces he has fashioned in a staggering number of different areas...
...Greeley's interpretations of the life of the spirit in our age, at least among Catholics (and perhaps especially among the much freer, less beaten MICHAEL NOVAK down, and more flexible Catholics of the Midwest) has often flashed with provocation and insight...
...What makes the Catholic people so historically tough and pertinacious, however, is their realism and their (Continued on page 341)Michael Novak (Cont...
...To love the traditions in which one was born does not paralyze the mind and make it incapable of inventing new expressions, new practices, new adaptations...
...It is, willy-nilly, even without having chosen it, to have a differentiated point of view and sensibility, to have participated in a certain historical way of life, to have become a different sort of human being...
...his books on ethnicity led to others...
...he is a natural-born pamphleteer, a polemicist who writes quickly, crisply, colorfully...
...In his mixture of truly scholarly and, on the other hand, ephemeral and topical prose, the only comparable American figure might be Orestes Brownson...
...That matter does not just "take care of itself...
...Many respondents to Greeley's article suggest that the children of communal Catholics will drift away...
...Are Catholics in Sicily the same as Catholics in Ireland...
...Then it was, so to speak, left-wing versus right-wing...
...Had he chosen a finer brush, he could have identified many other significant variants...
...a human being is measured, after a time, by the full weight of his contributions, by the whole rounded picture of what he has been attempting...
...Today, it is much more a matter of sorting out the wheat from the chaff on all sides...
...capacity for adaptation...
...Francis X. Murphy recently likened him to Belloc and Chesterton...
...It will not last...
...Catholics have tended to let ecclesiastical officials speak for Catholics...
...Each generation, to be sure, is different in some respects from the preceding...
...The context of that essay is important...
...communal Catholics" will grow in influence...
...In other collectivities, many non-ecclesiastical organizations are considered valid spokesmen for the community, within it and outside it...
...Children of Catholics will almost certainly share in these differences for generations to come, unless quite dramatic steps are taken to blot the differences out...
...Greeley's practice of the intellectual life, at least, is rather like theirs: wide-ranging, combative, various, restless, seeking almost always the intelligent general reader...
Vol. 101 • January 1975 • No. 12
