Revolution & alienation in the American church
O'Rourke, David K.
MAINTAINING CATHOLIC CULTURE IS NO LONGER PRIMARY Revolution & alienation in the American church DAVID K. O'ROURKE THERE IS a revolution going on in the American Catholic church that will make "....
...Today the schools are almost a minor issue...
...This has come out of the lives of the leaders...
...The church in the United States has a special responsibility to address this question . . . The church needs to say 'no' clearly and decisively to the use of nuclear arms...
...The elderly poor and ill-housed in residential hotels, the shopping bag ladies, the mentally ill turned loose in the cities and, generally, those who cannot cope with urban life but find themselves in it are the beneficiaries of the efforts of the social services regardless of their religion...
...Father Andrew Greeley has said again and again that no one pays attention any more to anything the bishops say because of the Humanae Vitae crisis...
...There have been gaps between the leaders and the people of the church before...
...I recently moved from a term as pastor of a parish involved in the changes Msgr...
...The revolution that Msgr...
...Vincent Yzermans on the Op-Ed page of the New York Times for Nov...
...The focus is on armaments and social order...
...In their recent statements the American bishops have renounced the language of political coercion in favor of well-reasoned arguments...
...Diocesan social services are providing resources to ease the lost of the socially marginal...
...It is from an experience of the church in one of its social or religious renewal programs...
...Today they are hard to believe, and we wonder why our elders put up with such things...
...What is required of Catholics today for consideration as real Catholics is personal commitment...
...The alienation does not come from disagreements on moral or political issues between the leaders and people of the church...
...The purpose of the policies on marriage and baptism is not punitive, it is not just a tightening-up, and it goes far beyond concern for divorce statistics or...
...Some dioceses are changing not only their understanding of what they ought to be doing, but their actual work as well...
...That new sense of membership is written in terms of personal commitment...
...she said...
...Without this commitment not only is the authenticity of the Catholic's faith open to question, but he or she does not have the experiential means needed to understand what is going on in the church...
...A mobilizing clarity of purpose has come into their lives...
...Why did able, aggressive, intelligent Catholic lay people put up with such nonsense...
...The church is leaving the ranks of mainline Protestants and Evangelicals to become, like the Quakers, a peace church...
...They have experienced a conversion which has strengthened their sense of membership in the church...
...The leadership, itself, is coming from a broader base...
...During my years in the priesthood I have worked to see them established...
...Its source is clearer than its purpose...
...What is happening is that the leaders in the American church are changing the church's priorities, and changing them rapidly, from self-interest to social interest...
...There really are significant changes in the leadership and priorities in the church, but they are taking place so fast that they are passing by almost unnoticed...
...So wrote Msgr...
...In the move to a peace church the leaders in the American church are miles ahead...
...But I find the alienation from the church of our religiously wandering or uninvolved Catholics to be a tragedy...
...This focus is changing and the priorities of the American church with it...
...It is especially needed on the parish level, where the relationship to the church or alienation from it most often takes place...
...Human compassion requires that we not allow this alienation to come about...
...And the very existence of a new generation of Catholics requires that this alienation not come about...
...4, 1981 issue of Commonweal, John Garvey cited the trend...
...Religion is not the requirement it was for entrance...
...It would have been easy to dismiss each of these couples on the pretext that what they were looking for was something other than baptism or matrimony as we are coming to define them...
...After having seen the church changed under their feet without ever having been asked about it, they now see it walking away from them, leaving them behind...
...Yzermans, and it is being done for the very same reasons...
...It is, I believe, the key to understanding what is going on in the church today, both the revolution and the alienation...
...The move to a church of peace requires the support of our Catholic people, not isolation from them...
...Yzermans says is the most significant event in the life of the American Catholic church is passing American Catholics by unnoticed...
...On a global scale, the most dangerous moral issue in the public order is the nuclear arms race...
...TO GRASP the significance of this involvement we have to recognize that it has provided many a priest, bishop, sister, and brother with their answers to very real and very personal questions about their lives and their vocations...
...There is a reluctance to marry people who are not personally committed to living their faith...
...Sadly, it is this renewal that is at the root of the alienation of people from the church...
...Not at all...
...And they are bringing about the changes in diocesan policies on the sacraments...
...He ended up on my doorstep not as much angry or hurt at the reaction that that statement provoked as bewildered by it...
...As Archbishop Roach said at the November, 1981 meeting of the bishops, "The proposed expenditure of 1.5 trillion dollars for defense over the next five years stands in stark contrast to budget cuts which threaten the food, the health care, and the education of the poor.'' The basic morality of war stands out as the prime issue...
...14, 1981...
...Leadership is passing into the hands of the "converted...
...Garvey writes about...
...This difficulty in definition is no small matter...
...Writing in the Dec...
...According to Msgr...
...The operational definition now involves conversion of some kind and personal commitment...
...Why is this...
...Maintaining a presence in the inner city gets a high priority because of what is called its witness value, and despite financial problems and the fact that the percentage of Catholics is lower than in other schools...
...This one is more serious because it is being institutionalized on the level of the sacraments which, heretofore, have been one moment at least in which divided peoples have come together...
...They were successfully self-centered, wealthy professional people from Catholic families...
...What they have in common is not ideological, it is experiential, an experience of conversion and commitment...
...Two years ago, while still a pastor, I spent the better part of a day at a meeting of the county board of supervisors lobbying against a reduction in the mental health budget...
...towards a stricter administration of the sacraments of baptism and matrimony" and his concern that this new policy is going to be turning people away...
...religious organizations should be subjected to the same standards of rational, rigorous presentation of their views as any other participants in the public debate...
...The marginally Catholic couple who come to have their baby baptized and have no good reason for it other than thinking that they should will be effectively put off...
...GOOD leadership requires that the leader not get too many steps ahead of the people he or she is leading...
...I want to discuss this change, especially as it affects the priorities and leadership in the church in the United States...
...What is perhaps most significant is that they have come out of a definition of church and a theory of ministry that are different from the ones used in the American church until recently...
...Interestingly these movements cannot be classed together under some political banner...
...The communications for the last few years are from the senate of priests as well as the bishop, they report salary, health, and retirement decisions arrived at between the diocese and the superiors of sisters' congregations, the policies on marriage and baptism being debated in the senate, and the social justice priorities of the diocese...
...It is due more to a gulf between them...
...What are the new priorities...
...There,is at least as great a need to explain this revolution to the American Catholics as there is a need to impress its merit on the government...
...No Latin...
...The experience of conversion and commitment that is common on the leadership level of the church is simply not part of the experience of many Catholic people...
...Well dressed, well educated, well heeled birds of prey...
...Pastoral care requires that we tolerate the gulf between Christian ideal and human achievement, the same way our failings are tolerated...
...Success, power, prosperity...
...The change in priorities is not just talk, it is being institutionalized...
...Equally significant is the fact that these changes are being brought about by a new kind of leader in the American church...
...The two couples came that afternoon hoping for understanding, knowing they fell short of the ideal, and fearing rejection...
...But we are in danger of doing just that...
...And within these groups are individuals, men and women, who have assumed a directive role in them and in the church...
...I use this word because it seems to be the common mark among those now providing leadership...
...I do not find the establishment of policies for baptism and marriage to be inappropriate...
...The maintenance of Catholic culture among traditionally identified American Catholics, while still important and even the chief function of many a parish, is no longer the prime issue it once was...
...This is what I mean by conversion and the individual as converted...
...It gives far too little credit to the older generations...
...This is the language of moral leadership, and moral leadership is very much needed...
...They are spearheading the move to involve the church in discussions of armaments, nuclear disarmament, and in third world issues...
...But there is, I believe, another reason, one also documented by Father Greeley although not enlarged upon by him, which allows for an explanation more in accord with the dimensions of the situation...
...Across the board in the American church the cost of membership is being raised...
...MAINTAINING CATHOLIC CULTURE IS NO LONGER PRIMARY Revolution & alienation in the American church DAVID K. O'ROURKE THERE IS a revolution going on in the American Catholic church that will make ". . . the abortion issue, the school-aid controversy, and the tax-exempt status of churches look like a child's sparkler on the Fourth of July...
...It is part of the revolution he described...
...Most of us who come from Catholic families whose religious life was marked by a healthy dose of anti-clericalism can recall the family's favorite clerical horror stories, usually tales from the past of high-handedness and autocracy...
...Put simply, the welfare of the poor and the matter of armaments...
...A dozen years ago the Catholic bishops devoted a significant part of their annual meeting to the question of federal funds for Catholic schools...
...The fostering of peace, international order, and nuclear disarmament are becoming more important to the American bishops and the other leaders in the American church than the maintenance of a strongly unified and institutionally solid community, concerned primarily about self-preservation and growth...
...It also allows for the fact that the leadership in the American church now goes beyond the bishops...
...I explained...
...Father," he said, "I don't want to get religion, I just want to get married...
...The communications from the bishop's office from the late '60s and early '70s were directives, they were from the bishop himself, for the most part, and they dealt with the parish school, the repair and maintenance of buildings, and some implementation of the liturgical changes decreed by Vatican II...
...The very consideration of a commitment that might involve a joint bank account caused great anxiety...
...I left the meeting early in order to keep two appointments, one with a couple planning marriage, the other with a couple who wanted their three children baptized...
...To move away from them at this time would be an action as mad as the proliferation of nuclear arms...
...Catholic family life...
...I believe that each of these writers is correct...
...Yzermans describes to a sabbatical year I spent studying the new, stricter sacramental programs Mr...
...That, I believe, is the wrong question...
...Significantly, many of the families, often single-parent families, who send their children to these schools are not Catholic...
...That is not the language of moral persuasion, that is the language of law...
...There is no doubt in my mind that they are part and parcel of the same change in the life, leadership, and priorities of the American church...
...There are dioceses that operate and subsidize schools in urban centers for the children of the urban poor...
...The real question, and one which makes much better sense, is to ask what they got out of it...
...I do not disagree with the change in the church's priorities...
...This is because the new leadership is re-defining not only its own role as leaders but the meaning of belonging to the church for the average person...
...Their adherents have resolved personal questions, sometimes personal crises, through taking part in these movements, a participation that is personally involving and vocationally clarifying...
...And then a bit more timorously, "What about candles...
...It is often the products of these movements who are the vocal and effective leaders of the priests' senates, the bishops' meetings, and the conferences of superiors for men and women religious...
...This alienation is made concrete at times of baptism and marriage...
...THESE CHANGES in focus and priority are not fortuitous and are not idiosyncratic...
...The requirement is need...
...Even if we challenge Father Greeley's conclusions that American Catholics have made it to the top, and I am aware that his conclusions have been challenged, I think we can say that at least we have done well...
...The couple considering marriage had been sharing the same bed for several years and were now, very tentatively, trying to decide whether or not they could share some of the more important things, like money, in their essentially separate lives...
...since Lord Baltimore's contingent of Catholics disembarked on Maryland's shores in 1634...
...It was, I admit, especially tempting considering the meeting I left in order to meet with them...
...Personal commitment is a clear sounding phrase whose meaning becomes less clear as the need to define just what the commitment is to becomes more concrete...
...There is the national bishops' conference as in the past, but there are also the senates of priests in the several dioceses, the leadership organizations of women religious, and the conferences of major superiors of men religious...
...Ironically it is often the clergy who are most involved in the new directions in church leadership who are most insistent on the new policies for baptism and marriage...
...In their wandering and in their need they are not that different from the generations of people who have been the church in the past, and whose sometimes thread-thin hanging-on accounts for our own presence in the church...
...To describe this self-interest I want to look backwards a few years...
...One young man I know went to his parish to arrange for a marriage and was asked whether he truly wanted to be committed to the Lord...
...Except for our missionary efforts the focus of the American church has been the American church...
...It is common to say that the source of the new priorities in the church is Vatican II...
...Garvey writes that the new policies on marriage and baptism represent a trend to "a stricter administration of the sacraments...
...The two sacraments designed for the regeneration of the church cannot be used for its limitation...
...Many leaders in the church today, and often the vocal and effective members in the groups that are changing the American church's priorities, are men and women who have been active in the civil rights movement, the anti-Vietnam war movement, the current move to resolve the conflict in Central America, the pro-life movement, and in specifically religious movements like the cursillo movement, the marriage encounter, and the charismatic renewal...
...Let me give an example, that might explain why this is so...
...It is a question of definition, a clarification of what it means to be a Catholic...
...It would be very arbitrary and cruel...
...In addition to spiritual ministry and the administration of the sacraments what did they get in return for tolerating such an autocratic church...
...Garvey uses it because, regardless of what might be intended on the decision-making level about renewing the sacramental life of the church, it is perceived too often as another decision handed down without discussion...
...People should understand the meaning of the motions they are going through...
...Yzermans, former information director for the American bishops and a long-time reporter on the American church, this revolution is the most significant event in the American Catholic church...
...The mother of the children admitted, "I haven't been in a while,'' but said that when she did go she felt so much better, "the candles, the Latin, the ceremony, it does something...
...It was a focus backed with commitment, personnel, hard work, and money...
...Vatican II has provided the theological rationale and authority for these changes, but it has not provided the impetus to change...
...What is almost as remarkable as the change in priorities itself is the fact that most Catholics do not know it is taking place...
...The address of Archbishop Roach at the meeting of the American bishops is noteworthy not only because of what it says but because it reflects a point of view that is common in the leadership groups in the American church...
...And it is these same vocal and effective leaders who are becoming the leaders in the American church...
...As I said, they are the converted...
...Involvement in these movements has brought about the individual's conversion and the sense of personal commitment...
...And a lot of people who think of themselves as Catholic do not fit the definition...
...The same is true for marriage...
...Father Greeley gives us the answers...
...What it means to be a priest, or a religious, or even a Christian and Catholic are questions that will come up forcefully in times of turmoil like our own...
...The lot of the poor who have moved into our American cities, and the welfare of third world people, both in the third world and in the United States as immigrants or illegal aliens are, by conscious choice, becoming very important to the leadership of the American church...
...We simply cannot turn people like this away...
...Because of decreasing memberships congregations of sisters are establishing priorities among the schools they staff, deciding which ones they will continue to staff and which they will let go...
...The extent of the difference in priority and in decision-making process was brought home to me when I was in the process of cleaning out my files at the end of my term of office as pastor...
...In a few generations American Catholics have gone from immigrant status to security, and have done so aided by church institutions...
...It is being raised by the very same people who are leading the church in the directions mentioned by Msgr...
...And yet, like the poor people who would have been turned loose on the city's streets to cope alone, each of these couples was in a spiritual desert looking for something better and dependent on others in order to get it...
...And in the passing a significant number of Catholics are being left not only behind but outside the church...
...As Archbishop Roach told the bishops...
...This is possible...
...They have come as a result of considerable thought on both the diocesan and national levels...
Vol. 110 • February 1983 • No. 3
