An editor's notebook

...Judaism's instinct for separatism is basically sound...

...Quindlen goes out of her way to laud the church as a socialservice agency...

...Fair enough...

...that is certainly the world in which we all live...

...This movement away from symbolic action to ethics and philanthropy represents a fatal diminishment of sacramental faith...

...After all, isn't "holy" water a little primitive, and bead counting a bit infantile...

...An unfashionable belief in the efficacy of symbolic action remains Roman Catholicism's distinctive—and most lovable—feature...

...But that is merely tautological...

...However, Quindlen seems to assume that our liberation from the liturgical and moral pieties of the past—"I have no wish to resurrect any of those forms or rituals"—has enabled us to embrace a more authentic Christianity...

...She reiterates the world's weariest cliché, that modem Catholics belong to "a church of choice," one that is "much healthier than the old strictly obligatory church...

...That's another way of saying you can't have a Catholic faith without a Catholic culture...

...Quindlen seems to equate choice with health...

...Her notion of moral authority seems to depend, not on the covenanted and sacramental values of the Catholic tradition, but on the contractual and individualistic assumptions of contemporary American culture...

...For Quindlen to pronounce so unambiguously on the nature of the true church as it is manifest in her heroes the Reverend Charles Curran and Archbishop Rembert Weakland (good men, to be sure) is about as quirky as the perpetual sightings of the BVM in Bayside, Queens...

...Religious sensibilities inhere in specific social contexts...

...But Catholicism's claims have always been more fantastic—in both senses of the word—than that...

...But I am saying that the Eucharist cannot survive outside a rich (I don't mean rococo) symbolic vocabulary, and that dismissing the coherence and beauty of those forms and rituals, including a hierarchical polity, is a sure symptom of a deepening insensibility to Catholicism's defining doctrine...

...I would be very much surprised if the spectrum of opinion among Quindlen's fellow '74 Barnard graduates on abortion, on what constitutes success, or on the nature of marriage, is any wider than the spectrum of opinion on those same questions among the Italians of her ancestral South Philadelphia...

...The church of the people," she asserts, "in some ways has never been stronger because the church of the people is a church of choice...

...to preserve your God you must preserve the cult (lex orandi, lex credendi...

...I doubt it...

...The sixties were a time of unparalleled economic opportunity and social mobility for Catholics...

...Quindlen seems embarrassed by such claims to truth or authority, and takes refuge in a "personal" relationship with Jesus while enthroning the superiority of good works over symbolic actions...

...Its sole mission seems to be to keep alive the teachings of Jesus," she says...

...In short, although I feel free to dispute the validity of the prohibition against contraception, the rule of priestly celibacy, and the practice of meat-filled Fridays, I think traditional forms should be strengthened, not abandoned...

...Commonweal 28 February 1992: 5 Given the kind of qualms Quindlen has about old Catholic forms and rituals, how can she accommodate the extravagant symbolism that locates God in a particular piece of bread and cup of wine...

...Requiring women to wear hats in church may be seen as a superstition or an example of patriarchal excess...

...PAUL BAUMANN 6: 28 February 1992 Commonweal...

...The old neighborhoods and extended families broke up, and with them the old matter-offact allegiances...

...Does our emphasis on choice mean we are any more successful than our grandparents in acknowledging the social influences on belief...

...Quindlen's "brain wave" notion of resurrection, her congregational ecclesiology, and her wholly personalist morality, especially her views on abortion—all expounded in the interview seem an idiosyncratic Catholicism, to say the least...

...Where reformers go wrong is in their dogmatic adherence to this subjective understanding of religious obligation...

...Indeed, why bother with this stuff at all...

...The modern world is filled with moralists, from hunger strikers to exuberant free-market maximizers to stern feminists...

...Quindlen's description of the social change she experienced growing up in her Irish-Italian family in the sixties was revealing...

...Shouldn't we all be out working with the poor...

...I think it self-evident that Catholicism cannot coherently reconstitute itself—as the church of choice, or the People of God, or the New Jerusalem—in the whirlwind of modernity if deprived of those forms...

...Why keep that old—and most "obligatory"—form when discarding the rest...

...Doubtless we have shed the piety of the past, but whether that is an emancipation or whether we have merely exchanged custom for the empty iconoclasm of popular culture is the nagging question...

...the more choice you have the healthier you are...

...Healthier by what measure and to what end...

...AN EDITOR'S NOTEBOOK ANNA QUINDLEN'S CHURCH OBJECTIONS FROM A MAD HATTER I find Anna Quindlen to be a remarkably representative liberal figure, and never more so than when expatiating on the future of Catholicism...

...But can the values of "choice"—absolute autonomy, personal achievement, and materialistic salvation—be superimposed on a church that has always seen the self in conimunitarian terms and whose sacramental integrity is so at odds with the anemic positivism of our times...

...Alexander M. Santora's interview with the New York Times's popular columnist (Commonweal, February 14) reminded me how engaging and infuriating she can be...

...This largely uncritical veneration of choice leaves out a good deal of human experience, and disguises how much we benefit from opportunities not earned but provided for us...

...In embracing the moral and social categories of secularism the meritocracy, the ultimately subjective nature of morality perhaps we have only smuggled into the church the seeds of the alienation that pervades modem life...

...Modernity will win every time...

...What the modern world abhors, and what the church defiantly embodies, is the reality of mystery—the mystery of human nature and destiny, and the mystery of God's presence in this world...

...But, I would argue, such a view blinds one to the elegance and utility of symbolic actions, and to how such nonverbal gestures feed into a larger symbolic language...

...I am not saying that women have to keep their heads covered in order to believe in the Real Presence...

...Her simple but effective image, that of no longer having to wear a hat at Mass, is meant to suggest how far Catholics have come from the putative nonsense and authoritarianism of the immigrant church...

...If you invest authenticity and ultimate authority in the values of secularism, you get secularism, not an enlightened Catholicism...

...For me," says Quindlen, "the sixties were the beginning of this staid sense of a fault line in all kinds of established institutions and extended families....The fault line has now given us an entirely, radically different society ...in terms of the roles of women, the roles of the church, the roles of the community and family...

...Moreover, it is not what Christ taught, but who Christ is that constitutes the quintessential "mission" and meaning of the church...

...As Lumen gentium succinctly states, the church is "the kingdom of Christ now present in mystery...

...I think that a very sentimental notion...

...Quindlen's disregard for symbols of communal conformity and of traditional authority "I see very clearly in America now that there are two Catholic churches: the church of the people and the church of the hierarchy" is entirely too pat...

...That this loosening of social ties would be replicated in religious practice and belief should not surprise anyone, although Quindlen seems to suggest that the evolution of more liberal Catholic attitudes toward conscience and institutional loyalty is the extension of civilization to once heathen lands...