Don't tear down fences Boundaries bestow benefits
Jr, David R Carlin
DON'T TEAR DOWN FENCES DAVID R. CARLIN, JR. First ask why they are there In the world of real estate, ev-eryone understands the im-portance of boundaries. The same is true in the world of...
...The same is true in the world of governmental affairs, where everyone (at least almost everyone) understands the importance of paying attention to bor-ders, not allowing unauthorized per-sons to cross over...
...Neglect the boundaries of any church for a few generations, and the church will begin to wither away-a process already far advanced among Protestant denomi-nations and visibly underway in Ameri-can Catholicism...
...But so is the need for bound-aries...
...Boundaries and markers, however, are necessities of organizational life, and woe to the church that forgets this fundamental truth...
...It showed where the boundary line was drawn...
...The former favors a policy that leads to gradual ec-clesiastical suicide, the latter a policy tan-tamount to jumping off a cliff...
...This is not to say that a church's bound-aries should never change...
...If fish on Friday was a minor bound-ary marker, the all-male, celibate char-acter of the priesthood is a major marker, distinguishing Catholicism not only from the Protestant world but-what is more important nowadays-from the world of secularism as well...
...From a secularist point of view, the only thing more absurd than a priesthood is a priest-hood that excludes women...
...The trouble with this, as noted above, is that religions need boundaries...
...nor is it to say that the church must always utilize the same boundary markers...
...The nation was a kind of church, and the na-tional territory a precinct sacred to the gods...
...My conclusion is not that the Catholic priesthood must therefore remain celi-bate and all-male...
...But there was something un-American about all this...
...That Protestants disap-proved of all these things was all the more reason to cling to them...
...From time to time there may be good reasons for ex-panding or contracting boundaries, or for discarding one set of boundary markers and replacing it with another...
...So here's a challenge for the priest-hood reformers: Tell us what you have to offer as new boundary markers once we eliminate the all-male, celibate priest-hood...
...but eventually, around A.D...
...But in the modern world-or to speak more exactly, in the world of religious pluralism that dates back to the age of great Eurasian kingdoms and empires that began with Alexander-the bound-ary line that divides a religion from the outside world is rarely territorial...
...and the only thing more absurd than a priest-hood that excludes women is a priest-hood vowed to celibacy...
...In the world of Protestantism, drawing sharp boundary lines was a monopoly of the sectarian mentality, a mentality, found among fundamental-ists, that was looked upon as narrow, illiberal, and unlovely (not to mention that such a mentality had, during the hey-day of the Reformation, led to persecution and civil wars...
...But now that we've thrown out so many of the minor markers, it becomes risky business in-deed to remove the major markers as well...
...These are certainly themes worthy of consid-eration...
...While American Catholics in gener-al have tended to forget this fundamental truth during the past thirty years, the most forgetful among them have been "liberal" or "progressive" Catholics, for example, the kind of people who write letters to the editor of the National Catholic Reporter...
...It would have been safer to amend the priesthood back in the pre-Vatican II days of meatless Fri-days, when there were still plenty of minor markers in place...
...Accordingly, when Catholicism in the United States decided, at the time of Vatican II, to become fully Americanized, it accomplished this by becoming de-nominationalized, dropping many of the old boundary markers that had set Cath-olics apart from their Protestant fellow citizens...
...Not so long ago American Catholicism used to have an elaborate set of "bound-ary markers" that clearly defined the line between itself and Protestantism: Latin Masses, frequent confession, fish on Friday, rosary beads, Mary and the less-er saints, adoration of the Sacrament, Thomism, etc...
...A broad and genial tolerance, a deep reluctance to draw boundary lines, is characteristic of the denominational mentality...
...As long as liberal Catholics remain oblivious to this need, they mustn't be surprised when some people suspect them of not having seriously thought through the consequences of their pro-posals...
...This was frequently so in the ancient world, when there was no sep-aration of church and state, rarely even a differentiation between the two...
...At some eras in history, boundary maintenance has meant that a religion, like a state, must defend a geographical territory...
...Religions, no less than property own-ers and states, have to maintain bound-aries if they don't want to be appropriated or inundated by the outside world...
...My point is, rather, that if we mean to get rid of these major boundary markers, we had better re-place them with new markers that are equally effective...
...The dominant form of American religion for the first two-thirds of the twentieth century was denomina-tional Protestantism, which was any-thing but enthusiastic about erecting and maintaining walls of religious sep-aration...
...In short, the authentic American religious mentality was the de-nominational mentality...
...For centuries Rome did a fairly good job of protecting, at great expense, its German border...
...Latin turned into English, con-fession largely disappeared, you were free to eat meatballs on Friday, rosary beads grew rusty from disuse, Mary and her fellow saints were rarely at-tended to, adoration of the Sacrament was neglected, Thomism fell into dis-repute, etc...
...The sad experience of the Roman Empire in Western Europe is a cautionary tale...
...But all tended toward the same end: tearing down the wall that separated Catholi-cism from the outside world...
...400, the border defense sys-tem collapsed, and so, very largely, did the empire in the West itself...
...Instead it is a line that is social, psychological, moral, doctrinal, ritualistic...
...Progressives who want to reform the priesthood usually talk about justice, power, and a "priest shortage...
...If the average Catholic has adopted a denominational mentality, the liberal Catholic has adopted a hyper-denominational mentality...
...Some of this was done with the permission of pope and bishops, some by spontaneous lay initiative...
...To lose the territory was to lose the religion...
Vol. 124 • July 1997 • No. 13
