SMILE WHEN YOU SAY, 'STARBUCKS' In these pages, an unmellow church
McCarraher, The Editors, Mary C Segers, James Heft, Una M Cadigan, Patrick Allitt, Michael Baxter, J
Introduction We confess: The editors had a stiff argument about publishing Eu-gene McCarraher's polemic on Starbucks Catholicism ("Smile, When You Say 'Laity': The Hidden Triumph of the Consumer...
...Hagiography often got in the way of real history until talented, sharp-eyed laity like Gene McCarraher himself took over the writing of Catholic history from priests and nuns...
...But before the "self-help, inspirational crowd" is anathematizedand some of them should be-might we ask about our ordained co-religionists, historically the leaders, inspirers, and motivators of the rest of us...
...Judgments about loss or gain, accommodation or liberation, turn on what we have done with the economic security, educational opportunity, social status, and access to power that our parents gained for us and that make us responsible for our lives, our church, our history...
...It is fraught with contradictions: paternalism, appreciation, cooperation, accommodation, neglect, and abuse...
...Una M. Cadigan teaches in the history department at the University of Dayton...
...In technical terms, mystique integrates the eternal and the temporal, while politique separates them...
...There is also a parallel in that conservative Christianity, Catholic and Protestant, actually includes many of the kinds of people McCarraher describes, who ought by his logic to be liberals...
...Is this worth the effort of a rational response...
...Moreover, the actual profile of this strong and rapidly growing movement of lay ministers (20,000 already employed with over 20,000 now at various stages of preparation) is much more diverse than McCarraher suggests...
...I suggest he visit more parishes than he seems to have done, discover in the process many more diverse groups of lay Catholics, and be less shocked by the ways in which our culture has influenced and, as history shows, will continue to influence all of us, even as we stumble and struggle, opposing its excesses and learning from its achievements-all in order to be faithful to the gospel...
...And while they tactfully skirt the issue of such an uncomfortable topic as institutional affiliation, I make no secret of my Catholicism...
...Still, I cite the extenuating circumstance of Ong's insouciance toward corporate power, a posture that I would argue is a defining feature of liberal Catholic cultural criticism in the 1950s...
...This chapter appeared originally in French in the monthly Etudes (Paris, May 1952...
...I am not at all certain I agree with McCarraher's notion that there has been a lay-inspired "techno takeover" of the ancient church, but if that is the case, I would think we have passed from a "technology" of morals to a technology of "management" without passing through reality...
...good bishops isolated, weak ones promoted, depressed priests no longer recruiting successors, shrinking religious orders, justifiably frustrated women, and the near-complete disappearance of Catholic intellectuals much interested in the real church...
...Of course in a free society, where people eventually realize they can in fact choose, things will get difficult for those who want "good"choices: theological coherence, corporate discipline, engagement with tradition, mobilization for mission...
...One thinks of Michael Baxter's effort to find a critical nonliberal path at Notre Dame, or Mary Ann Glendon standing with women and yet against narrower feminisms, or Paul Bau-mann's clairvoyance into the cant of James Carroll...
...Aren't the Pauline texts a window onto those very issues in first-century Christianity...
...There, at last, he names several perceived specific problems: choice and diversity, the erosion among Catholics of a sense of history and tradition, and the inadmissibility of doubt in the continued growth in faith...
...Perhaps his final paragraph holds a clue...
...Among poor and marginalized peoples the victory of the laity is hardly assured, yet ministry is needed and there are not enough priests to provide it...
...They seem to be almost interchangeable as rural Midwestern societies, but they are at polar opposites from each other in religion, not because of anything about the laity in each place but solely because of the episcopal leaders they have had for thirty years...
...Paul Wilkes is a filmmaker and author, most recently of The Good Enough Catholic (Ballan-tine...
...or that the amiability of the people Allitt and I know in our daughters' lay-run schools counters the ever-more uncharitable world of corporate capitalism...
...The other night a familiar face popped onto the television screen...
...Iowa...
...As I read, I found myself returning to the substance of the research and the tone of the discussion of our May colloquium...
...Moreover, he focuses on that part negatively, caricaturing it as the embodiment of an "upscale, therapeutic agora in values and ethics...
...Jack Deedy A "Starbucks Catholicism embodied in a Church Mellow...
...mixed messages in the present are still being sent by Jesuits who believe that the priest shortage is a myth and that priests "will always be with the people," and by other Jesuits like myself who do not believe there will be resident Jesuits or other priests on every reservation and in every urban community from eastern Montana to western British Columbia...
...Father Ong properly chastises me for misinterpreting his call for a business apostolate as a replacement for the working-class apostolate...
...And, yes, many of us, not just bishops and religious, continue to be concerned about the diminishing numbers of priests and religious...
...Some respondents are annoyed, irritated, perplexed...
...He does not detail these challenges nor the strategies by which we might "come to grips with" them...
...Where did they go...
...Of course, careerists, who attend to the organization, won...
...Everything," he says, " would be geared to knowing the needs and desires of [parishioners] and responding to those needs...
...These competent lay men and women have been diligently working over the years for realistic world unity as well as Christian unity...
...Such people are only too aware of the ways in which they themselves have helped promote the "lay revolution," which they see as richly ironic...
...Today, we-the Jesuits and the Native Peoples-find ourselves in a state of Catholic schizophrenia concerning leadership roles in the faith community...
...The Reverend Francis X. Meehan is pastor of Saints Simon and Jude, West Chester, PennsylWalter Ong In his perceptive and stimulating article, Eugene McCarraher interprets my advocacy in Frontiers in American Catholicism (1957) of "an apostolate of the business world" as a proposal "to replace the working-class apostolate...
...In a perfect world, a structure which allowed for locally ordained Native men and women would be supportive of lay formation programs...
...As well, there are the drawbacks (this is the perfect Commonweal article, after all...
...Una M. Cadigan During John Paul II's recent visit to France, NPR interviewed a young Louisiana woman who was clearly fervid in her acceptance of the pope's challenge to young people...
...For example, Saint Thomas More parochial school in Decatur, Georgia, where my daughter Frances is a fourth-grader, founded in 1950, was run entirely by sisters at first, but is now run almost entirely by laity...
...John Deedy was Commonweal's managing editor from 1967 to 1978 David L. Schindler By happy coincidence, I was occupied with the work of Charles Peguy at the time I received Eugene McCarraher's "Smile, When You Say 'Laity.'" As is well known, Peguy struggled vigorously with clericalism in the church, and with the political Catholicism that extended "clericalist" modes of thought into the world (for example, the inte-gralism of L' Action Franqaise...
...McCarraher is right to deplore the ideology of choice ushered in by this revolution...
...There are positives and negatives in McCarraher's analysis...
...McCarraher says that "unless we recognize and come to grips with this revolution, we are in danger of misunderstanding and misconceiving the challenges facing the U.S...
...The emerging laity of the Vatican II era had too much cold-war Americanism, true enough, but they sensed a great truth: the movement of millions of poverty-stricken immigrants from margin to mainstream in a few generations was an experience of self-liberation, not of passive cultural accommodation...
...And I'm not sure exactly what, precisely, is McCarraher's point...
...I submit that a major challenge for the laity of the twenty-first century is to keep at it, to sustain commitment to "an ecumenical process of continuous interaction among whole bodies of believers, lay and ordained...
...I had trouble relating this experience and my understanding of the laity to Eugene McCarraher's portrait of a "lay revolution" fed mainly by a therapeutic spirituality that has created "a Starbucks Catholicism embodied in a Church Mellow...
...I'm not sure...
...Too many have become behavioral embarrassments...
...These are new...
...Jesuits have ministered among Native Americans in the Northwest since the mid-nineteenth century, and the history of our interaction with the various tribes and bands is complex...
...McCarraher is onto something...
...Catholicism is a religion of the head as well as heart...
...How should we proceed with prayerful, educated, and trained lay people who feel a calling to serve and are acknowledged as leaders in their local Catholic communities...
...The evidence is everywhere...
...But no one has attempted a systematic sociology of conservative American Catholicism, inquiring into who exactly makes up the various movements which go by that name...
...It resulted in large part from an almost total absence of leadership...
...is university professor emeritus of humanities at Saint Louis University...
...The working-class Catholicism of a bricks-and-mortar church, with its emphasis on social and political change, has been replaced by a new American Catholic religious culture which values expertise, consumption, and a "therapeutic spirituality...
...But Wills missed the point in that wonderful book, as McCarraher does now...
...However, most lay people-and even most seminary students-have not been trained or educated for this task...
...He serves as vice-chair of the Association of Catholic Colleges and Universities...
...Whether or not this young woman has ever bought a latte at Starbucks, any church enleavened by such passion as hers will be anything but "mellow...
...James Hitchcock McCarraher's understanding of American Catholicism, which is largely correct as far as it goes, raises a fundamental question: Is it possible that the kind of culture he describes is inherently secular, and that attempts to create a "Catholic" version of it cannot but diminish any kind of faith...
...His job...
...The data supporting his argument are admittedly thin...
...The unfortunate reality is that American priests as a group have not risen above the mediocrity mistaken as intelligence and leadership before an educated laity discovered the shallowness of those supposedly possessed clerical qualities...
...corporate culture entirely on the laity...
...McCarraher is quite right that the new "techno-urban" lifestyle is not the exclusive domain of progressive Catholicism...
...The question is what should we do, not what we lost...
...But one of the things that the church has been consistently good at understanding is that people search for the holy where they are, and the church had better meet them there or it won't be able to speak to them at all...
...The perfect Commonweal article...
...McCarraher provides anecdotal, impressionistic accounts of three parishes among the more than 19,000 that exist in the American church...
...So of course the dynamic of accommodation by class and culture continues...
...The school has no serious problems and is vastly superior to the local public school in which Frances attended first grade...
...They follow on the next eight pages...
...While McCarraher acknowledges the role of clerics in his account and rightly rounds up some of the usual suspects (Ireland, Ryan, and Kerby), he seems to blame the church's embrace of U.S...
...Its academic venue and its decon-structionist mode of proceeding remind us that increasing numbers of younger Catholics take their frame of interpretation from outside rather than inside the Catholic community...
...Peguy recognized that Roman Catholicism in France in 1910 was probably stronger than it had ever been under the Third Republic-and in this sense Hilaire Belloc was right in his denial that France had been "de-Christianized...
...Their efforts are as large as conflict resolution between warring nation-states (on both official and nonofficial levels), and as small as ecumenical cooperation in tending to shelters for the homeless, or addressing systemic injustice in local communities...
...Catholic church in the twenty-first century...
...I believe it was Henry Kissinger, during one of the gloomier periods of the Vietnam era and hangover, who commented that Americans had moved from shallow optimism to shallow pessimism without bothering to pass through reality...
...It belonged to a priest many states removed from Massachusetts where I now live, and whom I had interviewed a few years ago...
...Peguy's point was rather that the strength of the church had come at the expense of "de-mystification...
...I further take it that when he describes that community he wants its members to recognize themselves in his description...
...Georges Bernanos once said we should presume that intellectuals are imbeciles until they prove the contrary...
...Second, if we do not see this revolution as the result of a mutual failure, we might indulge in yet another round of lay-clergy feuding, and thus avoid addressing a real pastoral crisis: Many young Catholics in the position of having to "choose" their Catholicism are, ironically, choosing a version that favors obligation, service, and love over "choice...
...Eight commissioned papers and the discussion they shaped were devoted to clarifying a theology of the laity, specifically "ec-clesial lay ministry," a theology for professionally prepared lay people who work in the church...
...Born of faith (mystique), the Catholic movement in politics had given way to reliance on power (politique...
...A similar pattern has emerged at Catholic universities where board members or trustees are typically CEOs of major corporations...
...From opposite directions, both groups end up reducing the gospel to an exercise in political power...
...The education previously reserved to priests and religious should be made available to a new generation of lay Catholics-otherwise we may very well end up with a "Church Mellow...
...What we have, he argued, is mostly ecclesiastical cures on the one hand and "lay cures" on the other...
...The group was diverse ethnically and racially...
...The dialogue members recognized how hard this can be...
...However bent this world is, the Spirit still broods over it...
...What turned the American church's own "professional and managerial" class into a body of many chiefs, few Indians...
...Consultation of my text will show that this is not the case...
...Catholics on all sides of the spectrum are content with the old dualism which would marginalize Dorothy Day's way of sanctity as "exceptional," relative to the "realistic" world of professional expertise...
...Catholics and non-Catholics alike are lining up to get in because the school provides a fine blend of academic, moral, and religious education...
...I would take some exception to Eugene McCarra-her's windig allzuwindig characterization of the "velvet revolution" accomplished by the laity...
...There seems to be emerging with ever greater clarity a third force among American Catholics-a force overdue-with Commonweal its foremost exponent...
...If we fail to show them how such a transformation can occur, we will fail them utterly...
...David L. Schindler is professor of fundamental theology at the John Paul II Institute in Washington, D.C., and editor of the North American edition of Communio...
...Michael Baxter, C.S.C., teaches in the theology department at the University of Notre Dame...
...McCarraher may be onto something-a segment of Catholicism that is sophisticated, efficient, but soft and affluent...
...If groups of thoughtful, educated Catholics really started thinking and talking about what it meant to get our hands around (that is, manage) the kind of world in which we want to live, in its entirety, what emerged might startle us all...
...New Mexico...
...As for the "low-intensity disciple" that McCarraher claims I am appealing to in my book, The Good Enough Catholic, perhaps on this account he is onto something...
...Catholic Action witnessed to the fact that if you want to confront massive public evil, you need a strategy, one which combines forming people in an alternative Catholic subculture while deepening a sense of responsibility for the culture shared with others...
...The priest shortage may be good since it forces ordinary Catholics to take some responsibility for passing on a living religious tradition...
...Turn-of-the-century Americanism had Isaac Hecker's understanding that eventually freedom means faith will depend on personal conviction: choice...
...I proposed an apostolate to the business world not to replace the working-class or any other apostolates, but to supplement the ongoing apostolates of the Catholic church...
...Garry Wills wrote of loss, Bare Ruined Choirs, a quarter century ago, and his words still move Gene McCarraher...
...Does the "professional-managerial bloc" supposedly ascendant in American Catholicism include African-American, Asian-American, and Hispanic Catholics...
...They get free-standing displays in bookstores...
...Paul Q. Kane, S.J., is co-director of Kateri Northwest Ministry Institute in Spokane, Washington...
...Immigrants watching grandchildren graduate from Notre Dame knew better...
...Baxter rightly maintains that a clerical blessing of the managerial ethos has been and remains a necessary condition for the "lay" revolution...
...And McCarraher, who simply ignores the organization, names the all-too-predictable result...
...It may be true, as he says, that incessant repetition of words like "diversity," "inclusive-ness," and "democratic" soon gets annoying and that Catholicism, if it is no more than therapy, is a bore...
...That's a compliment, by my lights...
...The people attending would come from a wider environment than the area within the classical parish boundaries...
...Lay Catholics would benefit from a deeper knowledge of spirituality, of the history of the sacraments, of church history, of theology, and of the development of doctrine...
...Compunction and healing are necessary aspects of our formation program...
...The rapid growth in lay ministry should not be thought of as a temporary filler until the number of priests and religious can be built back up again...
...That priest whom Andrew Gree-ley saw as a "quarterback" one day directing an array of "spiritualities" in a glorious new church never made it off the practice squad, not in substantial numbers, anyway...
...Rest assured, nobody totally agrees with McCarraher's analysis...
...It is selective in its use of Catholic resources, too, but it always has been...
...I take it when a historian speaks as a believer to the community in which he lives that he wants them to listen...
...The question that keeps coming up for us is, "We are training the laity...
...As a pastor attempting to be faithful to church and respectful to parishioners, I can only be grateful...
...We also receive mixed messages from the dioceses in which we work...
...It is a truism about evangelicalism that it includes a good number of people highly trained in science and technology, and that nuclear engineers, for example, are more likely to be church members than are professional poets...
...I think the clergy had more than a hand in it...
...Similar mixed experiences have been reported by a number of parishes: both helpful and mistaken applications of practices derived mainly from the corporate world...
...But we leave that to you...
...Paul Q. Kane although Eugene McCarraher asks good questions about the role of the laity in our era, after reading his article I found myself wanting more...
...If you want those things, you have to work at them, with the organization and with the people who compose it...
...None of the bishops at the Dayton colloquium seemed threatened by either the rapid growth or the current influence of lay ministers and parish councils...
...Might it be more accurate to talk of clerical default...
...These young people do not seek a Eucharist that "fits their needs," but pray that their needs will be transformed by the Eucharist...
...Each of his three stages of lay emergence contained important truths...
...The reality is that for every book of mine that is sold, these authors sell thousands, perhaps tens of thousands...
...And if the group included that young woman from Louisiana, the laity's victory, instead of being pyrrhic, might just be redemptive...
...at best I have a copy or two lurking nearby, sometimes even properly shelved...
...Marianist priest, James Heft, is chancellor and professor of faith and culture at the University of Dayton...
...Impelled by their commitment to Christ, they try to establish "permeable borders" in society and in the church...
...The result is a curious convergence of mindsets...
...A lay-directed church poses challenges...
...Mixed messages from the past still haunt us...
...Here's hoping that all of us awaken from our undogmatic slumbers, and transform the laity's pyrrhic triumph into a spectacle unto the world...
...Similarly, as the laity have become more prominent within the church, they are applying these norms to parish life...
...This victory of the laity is precarious and is met with ambivalence among some segments of the Catholic population...
...Francis X. Meehan Eugene McCarraher's "Smile, When You Say 'Laity'" was exhilarating...
...Priests sometimes come to the meetings but show no inclination to thrust themselves forward or lord it over the laity-just what McCarraher would expect...
...The recent history of liberal Protestantism seems to bear this out...
...Liberals think it is mainly elderly people who will soon be gone...
...What he meant was that we should not confuse the mastery of techniques with the wisdom which emerges from the prayer and suffering of the little ones of the gospel...
...Lots of things, and for that the laity bears its share of blame...
...It is not pious...
...In other words, they learn about Catholicism in graduate school-a prospect more gruesome than learning about it from Sister Mary Ignatius...
...Likewise, Cadegan and Allitt take me to task for overlooking both the divine presence and the real progress in contemporary Catholicism...
...and again, when she tangled with Cardinal Francis Spell-man over the grave-diggers' strike...
...So if a cup of Starbucks helps-Amen...
...Fortitude, patience, and lots of prayer are required here...
...Mary C. Segers is professor of political science at Rutgers University...
...What strikes me, however, is how well they do it...
...What we have here is a hot-off-the-presses example of McCarraher's "velvet revolution...
...Some real incomprehension, some genuine disbelief, some utter perplexity, and, naturally, some genuine disagreement along with an insistent suspicion that maybe-just maybe- there was something here...
...Most conservative Catholic movements have little clerical support, but where would Call to Action be without its nuns...
...In the age of the laity, a bishop can still place his stamp very firmly on his See, if he chooses to do so...
...A tradition that can turn statues of fertility goddesses into statues of a virgin mother can surely baptize TQM without half trying...
...There is also continuing suspicion between many religious conservatives and political-economic conservatives...
...Focusing on the responsibility of both laity and clergy for this "velvet revolution" is important for two reasons...
...Far be it from me to pooh-pooh the sacrifices and aspirations of the grandparents David O'Brien invokes: However ambiguous their descendants' success, the brick-and-mortar ghetto was no city of God...
...Has McCarraher missed much of the contemporary theological conversation, to say nothing of the fact that Therese of Lisieux has been named a Doctor of the church...
...Where has "the Church Mellow" triumphed...
...for example, whether Word and Communion services are appropriate for Native communities...
...James Heft This past May, I participated in a two-day colloquium on lay ministry in the church here at the University of Dayton...
...McCarraher seems distressed both by the ethos of the corporate culture in which the triumphant laity live and by their attempts to find authenticity and transcendence therein...
...New Jersey...
...Eugene McCarraher To all the respondents, I raise a cup of Wawa's early morning swill...
...And if Michael Novak's "theology of the corporation" belongs to a Starbucks "bazaar"-well, maybe that isn't so bad given reports that his theology directly influenced John Paul's social encyclicals, which just may prove this pope's most enduring legacy...
...Baxter's acuity counters the stale rehearsals of 1950s' liberalism in Leckey and Deedy, especially the latter...
...All of this led to the telling question: If we were arguing so heatedly about this, wouldn't the rest of the Commonweal crew out there find it provocative...
...First, it should remind us that our present predicament derives not from an emergent laity, but from an emergent Americanized laity "empowered" by an Americanized clergy...
...Nearly sixty people attended, including twenty bishops, as many theologians, and lay leaders...
...It is enough to give the managerial middle classes a good name...
...Peguy sorts this out in terms of "clericalism...
...I thank Schindler and Father Baxter for their noncorporate endorsements...
...Instead of a lecture on theology or spirituality, we are to hear about "gifting strategies" and "minimizing probate...
...What he sees is a "professional-managerial" laity with a "wrestler's hold on the clerical imagination" attempting to force the church into the mold of their own unreflec-tively corporate-therapeutic values...
...Catholicism, and we don't yet understand all its implications...
...The contrast between the dioceses of Lincoln, Nebraska, and Saginaw, Michigan (see Commonweal, June 6, 1997), illustrates a neglected reality...
...Dolores R. Leckey 0fter reading (and rereading) Eugene McCarraher's article, words attributed to Eleanor Roosevelt flashed repeatedly across my mind...
...The prominence of the laity in today's church is not to be denied, but is this a "victory," or have laity moved into a void created by the failure of the church's own "professional and managerial" class, its ordained clergy, to measure up to the standards of "clerical excellence" noted long ago by Dan Callahan...
...At issue, in Peguy's famous phrasing, was the collapse of mystique into politique...
...Haven't choice and diversity, in the context of unity and communion, been an ongoing church debate from the very beginning...
...Since most of us now know that priests are fallible human beings, we can move on to confront today's troubles...
...I am just not convinced either that we should want to baptize TQM (as Elliott Gould cried out in Little Murders, "what the hell ever happened to standards...
...Patrick Allitt is associate professor of history at Emory University and author of Catholic Converts: British and American Intellectuals Turn to Rome (Cornell University Press...
...groups too are welcoming, prompt, well-attended, and full of energetic, well-read members who show every sign of initiative...
...Further reflection here in the editorial office leads us to think that "Smile, When You Say 'Laity,'" has this to recommend it: Its economic and cultural analysis of a triumphant laity stands outside the shopworn questions: When can the laity (that is, women and married men) get ordained...
...Dennis O'Brien At the risk of being a crank or a regular columnist (there is a difference...
...Dolores R. Leckey is executive director of the Secretariat for Family, Laity, Women, and Youth of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops...
...McCarraher's thesis is distinctly against the American compromise, which Commonweal has preached, with some notable exceptions, these many years (and which we continue to favor in the absence of anything better...
...the editors Mary C. Segers Metaphors are fine, but after reading Eugene McCarraher's essay three times, I'm still trying to decipher "Starbucks Catholicism" in his September 12 article "Smile, When You Say 'Laity.'" I finally began to understand his point when I received in the mail this week a church flyer announcing that Merrill Lynch was coming to our parish to discuss estate planning...
...it included liberals and conservatives, men and women whose names the readers of Commonweal would recognize...
...When will they be allowed to preach...
...I am left with a number of questions, though, most of which have to do with the goals of McCarraher's analysis, the end to which his characterization of contemporary Catholicism is the means...
...Similarly, the adult education group at Atlanta's Christ the King Cathedral and similar parish groups in the Atlanta area are all run by lay men and women...
...The point is responsibility: there's no one to blame...
...Nonetheless, I believe he overstates both its influence and its negative characteristics...
...Like most "revolutions" this one seems to me more a change in the direction of the breeze than the underlying current...
...Rather, we see this valued evolution as a providential development, a talented and generous group of dedicated people meant to share in the leadership of the Catholic church in the coming century...
...I was making the point that the church (less in the United States than in Europe) had not been sufficiently evangelizing the business world, not addressing it as such, not making it aware of the gospel and of Jesus' teachings...
...But it seems to me that this "velvet revolution" has not been a triumph of an accommodated laity alone...
...If that accommodationist Catholicism is the result of a lay revolution, as McCarraher argues, it was unintentional, a revolution by default...
...It has also been a triumph of an accommodated clergy...
...It goes over the top rhetorically, especially at moments when it needs to clinch its argument...
...Recently I saw an ordination class of two flanked by four, or was it five, bishops...
...Thomas P. Sweetser, a Jesuit priest who directs the Parish Evaluation Project, recommends a "filling station" model for an effective parish...
...Thus I agree with McCarraher that contemporary Catholics need a sense of history and tradition...
...We really do think the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church is a better church because of its encounter with the American experience...
...What evidence does McCarraher offer to support this assertion...
...Finally, I hope that Father Meehan is right in discerning a "third force" rising among American Catholics...
...Do we blame assertive laity and the national secular culture for clerical flight and the drying up of vocations...
...The issue needs to be addressed openly in the church in the United States to assure a more coherent and just policy with regard to lay ministry as a necessary part of developing a "vision beyond the glittering imperium of consumer culture...
...As co-director of a lay-ministry formation program among native peoples of the Northwest, my involvement raises another set of concerns about the future of ministry in the community I serve...
...We want to be the generation," she said, "that embraces the Cross...
...James Hitchcock is professor of history at Saint Louis University...
...Might the church's own professional class have something to answer for intellectually-and morally...
...It comes from a younger Catholic (McCarraher appears to be under forty) apparently free (or innocent) of the quarrels over pre- and post-Vatican II Catholicism, and looking to the kind of Catholicism we will need in the next millennium...
...it's just that today's choices and emphases are different from those of 1897.I agree that Catholics should preserve their sense of history and tradition, but that's more likely now than it used to be...
...In this respect, conservative Catholicism is similar to militant evangelical Protestantism, which whatever else it may be, is a "revivalist" movement, not merely the survival of the old...
...In the absence of the political analysis that judgment requires, criticism of fluff risks adding...more fluff...
...I used to try descriptions of this movement, "progressive but not liberal," or "critical but not conservative," but new articulations are putting flesh on the labels...
...Discussions were candid, vigorous, at times a little tense, but ultimately very positive...
...And he is right to argue that the process was already under way before Vatican II...
...No pushing or shoving-of course...
...My point is this: Sweetser's church-as-fill-ing-station approach is a recent instance of a long history of clerical accommodation to the mores of the managerial class...
...In North Dakota...
...Diocesan director of vocations...
...The liturgy would have to be adjusted and adapted to a variety of situations and circumstances...
...Other critics focus on what they perceive as my facile dismissal of American Catholics' economic and educational achievements...
...And then there's the problem of whether it's true or not...
...But alas, it is not deserved, and the Sisters of Notre Dame, Marianists, and Jesuits who did their best to form me throughout seventeen years of Catholic education would feel they had failed totally if I blithely accepted such praise...
...He mistakes a part for the whole, a much more complex whole...
...David O'Brien is Loyola Professor of Roman Catholic Studies at the College of the Holy Cross and author of Isaac Hecker: An American Catholic, among other books...
...Walter J. Ong, S.J...
...some comprehending and sympathetic...
...The ecclesiastical cures "remove the temporal from the eternal," while the lay cures "extract the eternal from the temporal...
...The previous regime presented a moral bureaucracy which thought there was a clear casuistical solution to every moral dilemma...
...In the real world, we continue to send mixed signals: inviting people to be leaders in their church communities and then reminding them that formal recognition of their leadership is not yet available...
...Likewise in the forties, when she noted the University of Notre Dame's role in creating the bomb...
...She whose final days on earth were characterized by the two-edged sword of doubt and trust...
...As a result we know far more about Catholic history today than ever before...
...People would be attracted and drawn to the Eucharist because it 'fit' them" (italics mine...
...This would be a tall order for so short an essay, so McCarraher, reasonably, confines himself primarily to diagnosis...
...now what...
...Can they ever be Cardinals...
...While no one should downplay clerical vice and incompetence, I feel that Deedy-like those Japanese soldiers who holed up in caves for years, thinking that the war was still raging-continues to fight the battles of yesteryear...
...After the failure of church reform in the early seventies, all but the restorationists abandoned ecclesiastical politics...
...Uninterested in my generation's arguments with the church, they share McCarraher's anger at the mindless, therapeutic complacency of so much of American Catholicism as they find it...
...McCarraher's perceptive analysis, I believe, confirms and illustrates the argument of Peguy...
...Dennis O'Brien is president emeritus of the University of Rochester and author of All the Essential Half-Truths about Higher Education (University of Chicago Press...
...Dorothy Day thought the same, back in the twenties, when she encountered what she later called "the scandal of businesslike priests...
...The September 12 issue with "Smile, When You Say 'Laity,'" is now posted on our web site (www.commonweal magazine.org) for those who tidied up too soon and passed their copy on to the neighbors...
...Michael Baxter Readers tempted to think that Eugene McCarraher over-states our current dilemma should take a look at an article in America (September 13,1997...
...Can you name a national movement or organization to the left of Opus Dei with a significant influence either on the institutional church or on Catholic self-understanding...
...These mixed messages are reflected back to us by the lay people we work with who desire more leadership roles for themselves and yet want ordained priests stationed in their parishes...
...To them I reply that I have no difficulty in seeing God's face in a middle manager, and that it is both impossible and undesirable to reclaim the "flinty austerities" of the past...
...There is a grain of truth in what Sweetser says, but in the end he presents us with an image of the church as provider-of-consumer-goods-and-ser-vices headed up by Jesus, the greatest marketing consultant of them all...
...The argument seems to be that, as Catholics have become successful in American society, they have absorbed the values and ways of thinking of late twentieth-century corporate America...
...In France, and in the rest of the West where long involvement with feudalism had sabotaged the church's awareness and evangelization of the world of commerce, of businessmen and business women, there was desperate need to bring the gospel to the attention of the commercial world as such and to those whose life was wrapped up in this world...
...The principal is a layman and only one sister now remains as a full-time teacher...
...Where are the lineaments of such a force...
...This was one of the agreements of the recently concluded bilateral Roman Catholic/Reformed Church dialogue whose topic was the laity...
...Paul Wilkes's "good enough Catholic" no more defines a new "disciple" in the American church than Frances Kissling's Catholics for a Free Choice reflects common Catholic attitudes toward abortion...
...This, in my opinion, is the theological lesson to be drawn from McCarraher's wonderfully stimulating reflection...
...In McCarraher's concentration on capitalism's co-opting of American Catholic laity, he has apparently missed the legions of laity who have been (and are) Christ's ambassadors for peace...
...But the more conservative usually lack pastoral skills, or interest, and the reformers, sometimes pastorally alert, lack a Catholic strategy, and even the will to organize...
...Some members of the laity, well-paid and highly skilled members of the corporate world, have brought their managerial skills and habits of thought to parish councils and organizations...
...the new lay technology (as McCarraher characterizes it) dissolves dilemmas in the language of choice, flexible options, and final feelgood...
...And he is right to see Vatican II as a culmination rather than a commencement of the takeover of the church by a managerial elite...
...In the absence of the profound challenge which our American Catholic story poses for middle-class Catholics, of course it's all fluff...
...The witness such a force would provide (one radiantly prefigured in the Catholic Worker movement) could indeed, as Cadegan writes, "startle us all...
...Indeed, Father Heft supplies evidence on that score, asserting that corporate hegemony is a "providential development...
...In this respect, contrast the conservative diocese of Arlington, part of metropolitan Washington, D.C., with the liberal diocese of Richmond, largely rural and Southern...
...If such a person is marked by having a great affinity for the Eucharist, being a member of a parish, developing a prayer life, looking at work as co-creation with God, reading the next letter from the local bishop, being inspired and motivated by the church's social encyclicals, instituting family prayer and religious rituals, and reaching outside yourself to make a positive impact on all those you meet, all of which I advocate in The Good Enough Catholic, then McCarraher has indeed found me out...
...Introduction We confess: The editors had a stiff argument about publishing Eu-gene McCarraher's polemic on Starbucks Catholicism ("Smile, When You Say 'Laity': The Hidden Triumph of the Consumer Ethos," September 12, 1997...
...Sometimes some of their corporate practices have been misapplied to the university, but at other times, some corporate practices, for example, TQM (total quality management), strategic planning, and budget conventions, have been immensely helpful when they have been applied to some segments of university operations...
...He'd been picked up by police for soliciting a prostitute...
...Pieces here, pieces there...
...But okay, McCarraher's complaints about the seductions of bourgeois Christianity deserve a careful and serious hearing...
...What went wrong...
...I believe that McCarraher's picture of a "velvet revolution" creating a "Church Mellow" is overdrawn...
...But McCarraher's history is only half right...
...Indeed, many have...
...If McCarraher shares these assumptions about a historian's role in speaking to his or her own community, then he may want to modify his cartoon version of contemporary cultural life into something in which people can see themselves reflected both accurately and charitably...
...In neither old casuistry nor new sentiment is there room to face the tragic dimension of life so eloquently evoked by John Garvey in the same issue...
...More to the point, how accurate is it, really, to speak of "the laity's victory" in running the American church...
...McCarraher suggests as much in his "breezy" history of the growth of lay leadership...
...But conservative activists talk about their liberal opponents, such as Call to Action, as "a sea of grey heads," and there are in fact a number of vigorous, intelligent, articulate younger people quite visible in the conservative movement...
...David O'Brien Historian Eugene McCarraher's provocative essay echoes themes heard often from the few sharp young Catholics who really care about the Catholic tradition and its promise...
...No matter...
...The church does not need to borrow corporate jargon to carry out its mission...
...We are witnessing not a velvet revolution, but a valued evolution, one, for the most part, encouraged and supported by the hierarchy...
...Paul Wilkes First off, a humble thanks to Eugene McCarraher for including me in the same sentence with Marianne Williams, Deepak Chopra, M. Scott Peck, and Thomas Moore...
...Permeable borders, wherever they exist, depend on dialogue and shared action, and on participation and partnership...
...After changing the subject to the all-too-obvious sins of the clergy, Deedy winds up making me a defender of clerical Johns and har-rumphing about my "fretting...
...Having failed to go to the theological roots of the problem of clericalism and its twin, integralism, the laity inevitably repeat their basic flaw: namely, technical management in advance of gospel transformation as the way of the church ad intra and ad extra (no matter if the laity's managerial style is now rather more "nondirective" and "non-hierarchical...
...The adult ed...
...Reactionaries then and young Catholics hankering for substance today seem to think that families improved automatically, without sacrifice, and if they did sacrifice, it was to a false God...
...Lay leadership today assumes multiple styles, many more than his narrowly focused portrait suggests...
...The consumerism and individualism of contemporary culture are, indeed, deeply dissonant with the gospel vision of the kingdom of God...
...I'm sure the old tales about Catholic schools and their nuns tempering ignorance with tyranny were often exaggerated, but they were not entirely groundless...
...And McCarraher fingers the laity and frets for the future...
...But if you substitute "charitable" for "mellow," everything looks better, and I think the Catholic church is much more charitable now than in former decades...
...Patrick Allitt Eugene McCarraher is quite right: the laity are more powerful and influential today than at any other time in American Catholic history, just as they are better educated and richer...
...We asked some readers for their comments, from others came the spontaneous remark or letter of question or clarification...
...It may perhaps be more difficult for middle-class believers today (and, a fortiori, for academics) to see the face of Jesus in a middle manager or an infomercial host than in a homeless person or a person with AIDS...
...I agree with much of Eugene McCarraher's analysis-the shift in the laity's role in the church is one of the most important facets of late-twentieth-century U.S...
...McCarraher is uninformed about conservative Catholics in two relatively minor ways...
...The lens of Peguy, however, brings into focus the intrinsic link between the older "clericalist" and the more recent "lay" culture...
...I can't quite understand why McCarraher denigrates the contemporary Catholic situation by calling it "Starbucks" Catholicism and the "Church Mellow," since I know he does not want to revive the flinty austerities of the preconciliar church...
...William F. Buckley, Jr., has never been a favorite of The Wanderer...
...The inadmissibility of doubt...
...Give me a break...
...Even with the hope of impressing my publisher, or my kids...
Vol. 124 • November 1997 • No. 20
