The everlasting dilemma
Elie, Paul
Catholic leaders' measure of religious maturity, it follows that so many of us, uncommitted less because of age than because of disposition, nonetheless seem so young to them, so...
...Failing to do so, we feel that our faith lacks authenticity, that we don't, can' t, quite belong--not to the churches of our parents, the ones in our neighborhoods, or the one founded in Jerusalem...
...While older Catholics, recalling the preconciliar church and what it taught them, seem able to make their own judgments and adjust- ments, many young Catholics simply find the distances absurd, and leave it at that...
...And the act of passing on tradition, with the act of translation this requires, can spur us to try bridging all the familiar gaps--between younger Catholics and older ones, between the present and the past, between mortality and eternity, and so on...
...and that the pope's triumphal junkets and So-and-So's mike-anxiety both reflect the contemporary priest's dilemma-- whether he should speak as a leader over his people or just go i THIS ISASUBSC ',USE IT...
...Each of these writers became my companion in faith for a while, as I tried to fully enter into his or her outlook...
...In saying this, I don't mean to underestimate the realness of generational differences or the sense among church leaders that what constitutes Catholicism for the church's younger members often barely resembles the faith they know...
...After public high school, a Jesuit university education, which provided all the elements of "Catholic identity": the instruments for navigating in the Christian heritage, a number of exemplary teachers and priests, a sense of the church's intellectual resources past and present, and a life among Catholic believers of all sorts, in a setting where religion was actively practiced and intelligently discussed--a school of, with, and for faith, to put it simply...
...How do we believe...
...In the short term, getting reacquainted with the Catholic tradition would enable us--all of us--to see the present concerns about "Catholic identity" against a transcendent background...
...And in day-to-day Catholic life there is far too little that suggests otherwise...
...As far as church leaders' responsibilities go, then, the first step toward young Catholics' fleshy wholeness is fairly simple...
...Our concerns about how the church should share the Catholic 542: Commonweal faith with its younger members are with us to stay, and they are necessarily many-sided and discursive...
...Maybe...
...Absurd-seeming, shame-inducing----often the Catholic church in America doesn't seem like the way to God...
...Doctrine can help us to understand today's dilemmas--the Fall testifying that the impulse to see the present as inferior to the past is at the core of our nature, or infant baptism showing that the church, confident of "growth in faith," has long been willing to regard the most nascent believer as Catholic, no doubt about it...
...Passive and uninformed as our faith may seem to be, older Catholics should regard it as continuous with their own faith and the one handed down by the Apostles, hoping that keener faith will follow...
...Regardless of whether this was true, it was made so by my sense that it was, and enforced by the fact that my religious flare-ups came during the summers, when I was out of school and pretty much alone...
...But if you don't consider us people who are of the church, we'll probably never come all the way into it...
...I THANKS...
...Today's older American Catholics are the first to have lived in rapproche- ment with the modern world, bodying forth the outward-looking church the council called for in a setting where modernity is particularly aggressive and enchanting...
...And what Merton and Newman and O'Connor conveyed, as no synthesis could have, was the urgency and neces- sity with which the church can represent those workings to the individual soul...
...What alarms, perhaps, is that in doing so they have not set aside their contemporary urgency...
...Mostly, though, we are ashamed because we lack the resources of Catholic tradition that might enable us to reconcile seeming opposites and make sense of the absurdity we confront...
...Or we look to the unifying forces of sociology or core curricula, supposing that once the general outlines are in place we can set about passing the tradition on...
...As a young Catholic, had I been dis- inherited by the council, or given the keys to the kingdom...
...Perhaps, and yet I think that it is representative...
...Scripture can let us say, with the Psalmist, that to "dwell in the house of the Lord" is "to inquire in his temple," and, with Peter in council, that "we believe we are saved in the same way as they are: through the grace of the Lord Jesus...
...Powerful as the influence of American culture upon young Catholics is, in my view the influence of Vatican 1I upon us cannot be stressed enough...
...nor can modernity...
...For example, most young Catholics are painfully aware of the distance between the church here and the church in Europe, historically and currently...
...There will be conflicts--but conflicts, as our tradition tells us, can be the grounds for faith as well as obstacles to it...
...between the soaring, abstruse language of the Confessions and the easy slang of Catholic self-help books...
...J 27 September 1991:541 out and try to be one of them...
...Perhaps we all could learn from the liberation movements to which the church often seems outwardly opposed...
...between the pope's absolute statements on his world tours and Father So-and-So's utter uncertainty about whether to give today's homily with or without a microphone--for us these are constant and bewildering...
...Largely through legend and anecdote and outdated depictions in the media and the arts, that church lingers just over the horizon as the church we never knew--an evil empire, a land of milk and honey, the repressive regime, the real thing, a straw man, the Body of Christ, the source of life or of our parents' compulsions and our neuroses...
...Later, graduate work at a university on the frontiers ofmulticulturalism, which prompted me to explore and assert my own cultural her- itage, if only to set myself apart the way everybody else was doing...
...Those who could lead the way in this, of course, are older Catholics who are willing to engage younger Catholics and share what they have thought, felt, known, and believed...
...Sensibility is not the stuff of commitment...
...The old medieval and Tridentine syntheses seemed tainted, since I assumed that their essentials had been revised or reversed by the council...
...Making our peace with that church is often a necessary step toward making our peace with the present one...
...As they do this, they will have begun to pass Catholic identity on...
...it can show us that the antipodes of content and practice, of believing and belonging, have characterized the church since its founding...
...and sensibility, as the New Republic's Andrew Sullivan has noted, "is a paltry substitute for revealed truth," a shadow of the spiritual promise that Jesus announced and urged us toward...
...Will it "work...
...In my pursuit of synthetic truth, I ran smack up against Vatican II...
...For the church, too, a reacquaintance with the past is necessary, not optional...
...I mean only to suggest that the best way for older Catholics to minister to "young Catholics," and vice-versa, is for all of us to renounce such a distinction as limiting and divisive, choosing instead to emphasize what we share--our common faith and our long and complex tradition and our contemporary American situation and our bonds to one another...
...as a typically literal-minded young person, I longed for a synthesis that would interpret Catholicism for me and answer all the big questions: What brings us together...
...The editors of "Re-Generating Catholicism" suggested that most observers "too readily credit the council for a generation gap and overlook the powerful pull of American culture in absorbing young Catholics into the mainstream...
...What are we doing here, today...
...Ask St...
...Just as believ- ers like Newman, Merton, and O'Connor linked one era to another through their work, so might older Catholics continue to do so for the Catholics raised after Vatican II, spanning the pre- and postconciliar eras with the bridges that are their own lives...
...It isn't going to go away--but if we don't frankly engage it, it will just make itself felt in less compelling ways, as nostalgia or parody or an antique or a skeleton in the closet...
...we disapprove of the church's doings...
...Tradition can tell us that poured concrete reflects postwar America just as gilt and statuary did Baroque-era Rome...
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...ow might young Catholics' religion of sensibility be fleshed out and made whole...
...that Augustine's intimate first-person address to God was pretty slangy for its time...
...For all of its anachronisms and complications, our heritage is a treasure house of the kingdom of necessity--full of riches, from the patris- tic writings to the purposeful wanderings of a David Toolan, that testify to the urgency and fruitfulness of an encounter with the God who came to earth...
...Thomas and Teresa, along with the social sciences, look at The Idea of a University as well as the academic-freedom guidelines, drawing on each as we translate the other...
...f course, the two churches had much in common-namely, God and Christ and the workings of the Spirit in a fallen world...
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...And tradition can remind us that the church is by its nature less than perfect, with doubt, dissent, and contradiction always as crucial to its project as the celebrated virtues of certainty and authority...
...But how...
...Even as they gave me a sense of Catholicism's essentials, those writers made clear that this is a "multiform Communion" (Newman), with the believer apprehending shared truths through his or her own disposition and obsessions...
...In part we are ashamed for the reasons that Christians have always felt ashamed: we associate faith with childhood and are eager to throw off childish ways...
...Arguably...
...Young Catholics may act as if we're unaware of, or uninterested in, Catholic tradition--but we're grappling with that old church, its Latin Masses and catechisms and Friday fasts and seeming certitudes and its way of affecting those who did know it...
...How might such efforts be made more compelling...
...Ironically, many such leaders, having done everything in their power to bring us up in the church, now would keep us out of it because we aren't Catholic enough, with their sense of our difference from them undermining their efforts to share a faith with us...
...The distance between St...
...Not only is this sense of our difference a self-fulfilling prophecy...
...With all due gratitude to everyone, however, I must say that in understanding Catholicism I came to feel that I was on my own...
...Because Catholicism has a long and continuous tradition, we must encounter it, whether we wish to or not...
...From what I've seen, young people striving for a mature understanding of Catholic faith feel that we must come to terms not only with the present church, but with another, older one...
...we appraise the church by its own standards and it doesn't measure up...
...And which church was the one, holy, catholic, apostolic one...
...Sure, these were shallow impres- sions---but thus deterred, I never read any of those books through...
...Of 540: Commonweal all these books, the ones I found most congenial and moving were those by Newman, Merton, and Flannery O'Connor--the greatest hits of the preconciliar era, I know now...
...But my efforts were thwarted, again, by Vatican II...
...But older Catholics clearly have much to offer us as we come to terms with Christ and the church---if they are willing...
...Paul...
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...A Catholic upbringing that impart- ed a sense of God's presence and the church's importance, in a family that offered the constancies of faith, hope, and love...
...I don't mean to roman- ticize the Catholic past,just to say that it's back there, either to enrich us or to haunt us...
...f course, calling for a reacquaintance with the Catholic tradition is neither a modest proposal nor a novel one...
...How might sensibility be developed, prompting the church's younger members to come more fully into the fold...
...In doing so, we invoke the one element of Catholic tradition that is unlikely to return any time soon, or to be of much use to us: the sense that the church's chief note is its internal coherence, which will answer all questions and dispel all doubts...
...Reading these writers required an ongoing act of translation, as I compared the church they described with the one I encountered, which seemed to give the lie to so much of what they set forth--whether Newman's idea of the church as "a supereminent prodigious power sent upon earth to encounter and master a giant evil," or O'Connor's praise of its "absolute values," or Merton's evocation of a Sunday when the priests were young and the church was full and the sermon was "clear and solid," carrying "the full force not only of Scripture but of centuries of a unified and continuous and consistent tradition...
...For the of-the-church outlook I've described is a religion of sensibility...
...Though the broadest of the newer books (such as Rahner's and Kting's) seemed shorn of Catholic language and history, they presupposed the very knowledge of Catholic tradition that I sought from them...
...Is my experience unique...
...And I don't mean to chastise the Catholic leaders whose intelligence and compassion have so animated their discussions of young Catholics and our religious identity...
...As an aspiring writer, I naturally looked to books...
...it also obscures what we all share--our Americanness, for example, and our place on this side of Vatican II...
...or we appraise ourselves and realize that we don't live up to what Christ and the church demand of us...
...We must consult Sts...
...No doubt many Catholic leaders have been trying to bring such a reacquaintance about, with disappointing results...
...Tradition alone cannot answer our questions for us...
...Here a snapshot of my own spiritual gropings might help to illustrate the point...
...rather, they have unabashedly brought it to their appraisal of history, so that they might bring the past to bear on their current concerns, which, however forward-looking, need a longer perspective to inform, guide, and inspire...
...And then, of course, there were the Gospels and Epistles, bound pocket-size or in massive study versions with their involuted commentaries and tiny notes...
...And in the analyses of the council's effects, the key one is often under- played...
...Such a measure of religious maturity is a fundamental reason why so many of us will never get there...
...In reversing this trend, a reacquaintance with the Catholic tradition seems especially promising...
...As such they have a great deal in common with young Catholics, whether they think so or not...
...Most important, my ongoing "translation" of those writers compelled me to actively engage this religion, past and present, and as a result to see ways in which the old church and the new church are one church after all--Newman's principle of doctrinal devel- opment laying the groundwork for the council, or Merton's life joining monastic contemplation to contemporary social justice efforts, or O'Connor's Catholic vision focusing on characters who are practically unchurched, and so must grapple toward God through a terrible aloneness...
...Partly as a result, among the church's younger members Catholic guilt has been supplanted by Catholic shame--a deep embarrassment about our church and its presence in the culture...
...History can remind us that the challenges of passing on faith are abiding ones, thus disallowing us the modem solipsism which exalts the present as a time unequaled in its despair and sense of loss...
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...The outlines of it are the kind that Catholic leaders have held up as ideals...
...It alone cannot regenerate any church or transform any culture, and a generation of Catholics who consider themselves merely "of the church" won't invigorate their religion, much less usher in any kingdom of God...
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...And the church, too, has got to bring to the past an urgent sense of the present, starting with the hump on the land that is the Second Vatican Council--a grassy knoll, but one that can be hard to see over...
...Lacking authorized, institutionalized examples of their own heritage, women, blacks, and homosexuals for example are reconsidering history with a fervor that can seem alarming...
...Is this a deal with the devil...
...Instead, while I waited to discover the big book that would make sense of it all, I read little ones of all sorts--old and new, Orbis and Ignatius, Penguin and Paulist, skeptical and devotional, from Augustine to Chesterton to Copleston to Berrigan to Pelikan to all sorts of "Catholic" fiction--Waugh's, Endo's, David Lodge's How Far Can You Go...
...For older Catholics, in their embrace of Vatican II, have in many cases forfeited the resources of the larger tradition, and as a result often seem to be making things up as they go along...
...This is our sense that there are two churches the church as it is now and the church as it was before Vatican II...
...What did that church have in common with the shifty and self- doubting church I knew--its values uncertain, its everyday tra- dition going back to 1955 or so, its sermons inspired by M. Scott Peck and Phil Donahue...
...Recognizing this, we should resist simplifying them in order to make the going easier...
...Catholics young and old sense this, so there are diminished expectations on both ends, grounded in a fear that this religion can't be efficacious, much less necessary...
...Peter's Basilica and the poured-concrete structure down the road...
...Catholic leaders' measure of religious maturity, it follows that so many of us, uncommitted less because of age than because of disposition, nonetheless seem so young to them, so reluctant to come into our inheritance, with all its demands and rewards...
...What do we share...
...Too often Catholics try to pass on tradition untranslated, handing off The Long Loneliness or The Everlasting Man as if its ability to speak without commentary is a mark of its timelessness...
...Even as they conveyed the tenor of an earlier era's Catholicism, they exploded my view, a common one among young Catholics, that a monolithic and changeless church preceded Vatican II...
...Clearly our acceptance or rejection of this religion is ultimately our own responsibility...
...The long-term value of getting reacquainted with tradition speaks for itself, through the babble of voices that somehow have been heard as one, harmonized by the grace that is their common source...
Vol. 118 • September 1991 • No. 16
