Faith of our fathers
McCarthy, Abigail
FAITH OF OUR FATHERS HOW ATTENTIVE TO THE SPIRIT? THERE is some reason these days to recall that story about one of Sean O'Faolain's Irish neighbors, who answered when queried as to the author's...
...It is distinguished by an attachment to the liturgy...
...But if, as I have heard it said, he has opted for a return to a more legalistic morality and for a faithful remnant, one must ask whether he looks back to the faith of his fathers and what is meant by faith-full in this context...
...It is very like the equating of nationality and religion which characterized them so strongly in the first and second generations, and the traits of the Catholicism they knew were very similar...
...He continues to fascinate the doubters and the critics as well as his admirers...
...one can accept it and suspend judgment...
...But is it a model for a church which can live in the hearts of the many in shifting societies who no longer . need it, as their forefathers did, for identification or for a rallying point of like with like...
...The price: "when the line between national and religious behavior is erased, religion changes into a social power...
...it symbolizes well-springs of life and loyalty other than, and above and beyond, the state...
...The church in Poland seems strong and vital...
...American Catholics, whose forebears were immigrants from Catholic Europe -Irish-Catholics, German-Catholics, Italian-Catholics, Austrian-Catholics as well as Polish-Catholics- will find deep resonances in this description...
...All good enough for the individual-but in this time between times we must summon all our hope that the church qua church is totally attentive to the Spirit...
...It is illuminating to realize that the militant patriotism of most American Catholics probably had its roots in the same emphasis in their religious education on responsibility to the collective organism-and why we struggle now with the concept of justice for the poor, or any other persons, as a primary demand on conscience...
...These are questions we can ask...
...it is, after all, a human institution, "a hive of generations of men"-and "Catholicism's force lies in its many-sidedness, which is revealed not only in the course of history but also in the successive phases of an individual life...
...It is equated with what John Paul often refers to, as he did on New Year's Day, Poland's "thousand-year-old culture...
...No secular news journal of any reputation ignores his statements...
...Our sympathy with John Paul II's passionate concern for his country does not quite conceal our questions as to whether his view of Catholicism is too limited by the Polish experience and whether the values he sees in the Catholicism there are as universal as he sees them...
...Others -' 'They don't matter as John Paul matters...
...As the New Year dawned, Catholicism was in the headlines...
...Is it a faith which calls out in answer to the anguish at the heart of humanity today...
...Part of the fascination with things Catholic is the deplorable, but very human, fascination with possibly approaching disaster.' 'Is the Catholic church, like the rest of society, finally falling apart...
...Any number of writers have been selling us again...
...But what does all this mean, really mean, about the health and future of the church...
...Religion for the average Pole, he thinks, is rarely an inner experience because of the emphasis not only on collective celebrations and devotions, but on one's responsibility to collective organisms (the church, the country) which "thereby lightens the responsibility to concrete, living people...
...it becomes conservative and conformist...
...We can be grateful for the partial answers of a young and spiritually struggling Milosz: Catholicism is awesome in its immensity...
...a question he could ask even while he affirmed that he stayed there "for my friends, my church, and all those I am one with...
...At the heart of that copy was the pope-our Polish pope...
...Ah, he's in America sellin' us again...
...Is it a faith which teaches us how to be human...
...Catholics can well have had the same feeling this past year...
...And, at year's end, a veritable spate of volumes about the papacy and the church as institution were being reviewed severally or together in journals of criticism...
...But...
...In a benumbed America, an uncertain voice, but a voice, raised to question the headlong rush toward nuclear warfare...
...THERE is some reason these days to recall that story about one of Sean O'Faolain's Irish neighbors, who answered when queried as to the author's whereabouts, "Sean...
...Polish Catholicism had and has distinct traits...
...Is it a faith which answers Thomas Mer-ton's agonized cry from his hermitage: "Where is the church and where am I in the church...
...Polish culture developed entirely as a part of Roman Catholic Europe and within the orbit of the Vatican...
...We do not really know...
...It is a rather large "but...
...Novels with Catholic framework and local color, many written by priests with marvelous imaginations, sell steadily...
...What does it have to do with that core of faith around which each one of us may center life...
...ABIGAIL MCCARTHY...
...Or is it merely undergoing a traumatic transformation, its chaos a harbinger not of collapse but of new life...
...We live with ambiguity and formlessness between two times-a past whose shapes linger but without substance and a future whose shapes we cannot discern...
...After Poland had disintegrated as a country and a wounded nationalism had made its appearance, the notions of "Pole" and "Catholic" came to be equated...
...asks reviewer Paul Piazza and says that it seems to be lying in ruins, its walls breached by new barbarian hordes...
...Writers who deplore his decisions still pay tribute to his intellectual powers...
...It is weak in Biblical tradition and hence, in the conception of Creation as dynamic, in the realization that "all things human not only are but become...
...It has, says Milosz, "a strong tendency to regard sin almost as if it were an offense against Roman law...
...John Paul's concern and his theology transcend his native Catholicism-it would be gross simplification to say otherwise...
...Nobel Prize Winner Czeslaw Milosz, who was born in Lithuania but reared and educated in Poland, points out in his Native Realm that there is a price to pay when religion is deeply wedded to a culture...
...An attempt to separate oneself from the milieu is seen as an attack on religion...
...For the moment, at least, Catholicism was good copy...
...Even Malachi Martin, the title of whose book- The Decline and Fall of the Roman Church - speaks for itself (although he predicts the possibility of the church continuing as a purely spiritual force) sees the pope as the central religious figure of our time...
...Books about current belief, about change, about our dissensions, about our statistics have been rolling from the presses...
...In the dark drama of Poland, a political force, an integrating force...
Vol. 109 • January 1982 • No. 2
