On not skipping the sermon

...In the old pattern that is being played out again on the pastoral letter on economics, they were cheered by those who agreed with them and dismissed by those who didn't...

...No offense intended, Father...

...But even we, serious as we are about our faith and disposed as we are to make our'most important choices in its light, have exceedingly low expecta- tions...

...Why can't these earnest, good men who have such convincing concern for the world and such resources at their command do that...

...Our reserva- tions may have become by now true biases...

...This was in Alexandria, Vir- nia, and the men of our parish were a varied lot...

...Women's and children's lives were what priests knew about...

...At its most superficial level this is the divide between women and men, but it cuts across everything of importance, making opposites of peacemaking and "national defense," child-rearing and business, human experience and the imperatives of science, art, and rampant technology...

...sion between the two great realms of emotion and reason, or as it played out in their lives, between family and work...

...No one needs clarification of the moral issues surrounding abortion more than some Catholic men and women who know both that abortion is wrong and that, in part because of church teaching on birth control, it is inevitable...

...Catholic clergy have long accepted the tenuous hold their authority has over men, but what they can't stomach are uppity women...

...Authority is the moral capacity to compel the minds and change the hearts of those who disagree...

...And what people Catholics have become...

...This deadly pattern --home against the world --is at the heart, I believe, of what undercuts the authority of church figures...

...Despite the fact that their numbers now include some of the boldest and most gifted priests in the world, the American bishops still are not heard as having any such authority...

...Already "Catholic Social Teaching and the U.S...

...And even Father whose sermons were being walked out on knew it, but Father didn't mind because, implicitly, he accepted the dichotomy and his place among the ladies as much as their husbands did...

...No one is more sensitive to the moral bankruptcy of the American marketplace than some of its Catholic managers...

...But because we have in some way come of age as Americans does not mean we have left behind our Catholic faith...

...If their views never carry beyond those who already agree with them (doves on the anti-war issue, right-wingers on abortion, liberals on their criticism of capitalism), then it is not authority...

...In other words many of us Catholics long to hear nothing more than the clear authentic and effective voice on these and other issues of church authority...

...Economy" has been dismissed by many Catholic men, and some have even been moved to publicly rebut it...

...So let women and the preachers have it out...

...The lesson of the sermon-skippers made a profound impres- sion on me, though it would be a long time before i would consciously understand exactly what it taught me...

...we men are gone...

...My generation of Ameri- can Catholic men arrived at positions on contraception in consultation with women, not with bishops, but aside from that noble collection of dissenting priests centered in 2-16 November 1984:603 Washington and various critics writing in this journal and others, ordinary Catholics had no real way of publicly rebut- ting Paul VI on Humanae Vitae...

...That division wreaks havoc everywhere, destroying marriages left and right, preventing rich businessmen from even seeing the poor who are mostly mothers and their children now...

...No one is more perplexed by a deterrence policy that depends on the will to murder the human race than some Catholic generals...

...Some like my father worked in nearby Washington for the federal government, but most practiced the trades or worked at blue-collar jobs which was more typical of the place Catholic men occupied in American society at the time...

...I said before that at its most superficial level the division which undercuts their authority is the one between men and women, but it is so also at its most profound level...

...The church is unapologeti- cally patriarchal, even if its sub-institutions from parish schools to parish councils have long been dominated by wom- en...

...It was true...

...Ah, but birth control, there's a fit subject --unlike economics --for clerical discourse...

...pastoral letter on the American economy --one senses the sermon-skippers 'scooting out again...

...And I, awed by their daring, nevertheless remained in the church, stunned by the discovery that these men, exemplary Catholics who wOuldn't have thought of missing Mass or eating meat on Friday, had nothing to learn from Father...

...Bill graduated from college, found jobs, wives, and houses in the suburbs, and changed American Catholic life forever...

...Because of the achievements of our parents and grandparents and in no small measure because of the triumph of our church itself, we are in the very center of American society now...

...There was nothing to do but slip quietly away...

...That division guarantees that the peace movement which is mostly in the hands of women will remain ineffectual, and it makes possible the mad policies of our government which are created by rigid, unfeeling men and which so threaten the earth...

...But still we give the bishops our attention, for we remain loyal Catholics de- spite ourselves if not them...

...Mater si," William Buckley's National Review cracked about Pope John's seminal criticism of capitalism, "Magister no...

...But before that happened kids like me learned in parishes everywhere that women went to the brightly lit front pews and men hovered in the shadowy rear comer between the purple draped confessional and the car-sized hissing radiator...

...And at this moment when, as it were, the priest is in the act of turning toward us with his sermon --i.e., the bishops are about to read to us their long-promised (or is it threatened...

...They are resigned to considering these two questions, as some women want them to, as the ultimate women's issues...

...In that instant the men around me slipped out the side door like burglars, and for the duration of the priest's sermon they huddled on the steps outside, smoking cigarettes...

...Even the most attractive figures of the Catholic leadership are still sponsors of the great divide that Americans are desperately trying to leave behind...

...Pope Paul's Populorum Progressio, a blast at the most basic as- sumptions of profit and ownerShip, was largely ignored in America, even by the Catholic bishops who felt compelled to promulgate with such dutifulness his encyclical condemning birth control, Humanae Vitae...

...We have been lectured and condescended to far too often.We have come to know that bishops not only do not look to us for answers, but hardly hear our questions...

...Much is made of the enormous changes the Catholic church has undergone in the last thirty years, but one thing hasn't changed --the attitude of the men in the back...

...There was a clue of this in the peculiar anger some leading bishops displayed toward Geraldine Fer...

...Clearly the American bishops want to be heard as having authority on the economy, as they want to be heard as having authority on family, and on war and peace...

...One hardly ever sees us literally in the comer anymore, but the certainty that clergy have little to say to us as men is as implicitly and firmly held by my generation of American Catholic males as it was by our fathers...

...Even now, as some Catholic politicians tentatively suggest that the bishops' position on abortion is insufficiently nuanced, no Catholics challenge their clergy's fight and duty to make absolute pronouncements on the matter...

...T HE TRAGEDY of the American Catholic church today is not that its teachers have so little moral authority with the American public, but that they have so little with their own people...

...The bishops thus acknowledged that serious people can differ on this great issue and the way to resolve it, but in doing so they blunted their own courageous effort to actually affect the arms race...

...The church herself, as my memory of standing in the back with the men indicates, has long been marked by the division between women and men, and some would say the church has been a major cause of it...

...I im- itated them, leaning against the wall, arms folded, then drop- ping to one knee at the Sanctus bells and staying abjectly hunched over until it was time for the women to receive communion and us men to leave...

...I FAITH & ECONOMICS: ANOTHER GENDER GAP On not skipping the sermon I JAMES CARROLL EN ! WAS a boy I loved to stand in the back of the hurch with the men...

...In many ways, precisely because we see up close the numbing and dangerous effects of secularism, we cherish our roots in the humane tradition of religion all the more...

...They found it impossible to address this crisis of the nuclear threat with anything like the authority they habitually exercise on equally complex, though infinitely less threatening, matters of personal and sexual morality...

...The church was concerned with the family, was indeed the bulwark of it...

...Like all mid-century Americans those men took for granted the diviJAMES CARROLL's books include Mortal Friends, Fault Lines, and Prince of Peace, his most recent novel, published this fall (Little, Brown...

...Birth control and abortion fall into the realm that men have already skipped out on in this country...

...We are the entrepreneurs, the tycoons, the Senators, the scholars, the editors, the reformers and for that matter the National Security Advisers, the Secretaries of Defense, State, and Treasury, and the SALT negotiators, too...

...The rebuttal may be new, but the dismissal isn't...

...They allowed that peace may well depend not only on the deterrence of present levels of arms, but on major escalations...

...This was just before that first huge crop of young Catholic veterans on the G.I...

...Not that they were anti-clerical in the style of European men or that they didn't regard the clergy with great respect, but simply that the sermon was considered as addressed to the women and children...

...No one is more determined to stay in touch with the Catholic liturgical and theological traditions than some parents who constantly search out ways to introduce them to thdr children...

...work belonged to the men, however, and the church had even less to say to them about the world of their workaday lives --their real lives --than their wives did, Because they accepted the church's authority over everything having to do with family --that is, over personal relationships, over courtship and marriage, over sex, over the rearing of children -and because their investment in family, however much they loved their wives and children, was subordinate to their investment in work, it was natural for them to feel that the priest's message had its proper relevance to the women...

...One moment in particular stands out in my memory of those Masses, and that was the instant between the priest's finishing the Latin reading of the day's Gospel and his turning around to face us, to read the same passage in English and preach his sermon...

...When the bishops issued their strong condemnation of nu- clear weapons in 1983 they deferred implicitly to the testimony of men whose expertise they had dared to challenge...

...And always, we sense the con- tradiction that permanently underlies the position of the church and that inevitably undercuts its authority with us, not to mention with secular society...

...The.r women, of course, know their places which are the kitchen, the kindergarten, and in church, up front listening to the sermon...