Category: The Church

John Allen has an interesting interview with Cardinal George which, for some idiotic reason,the NCR folks decided to put online in pdf form.

FIRST, HERE’S A BACKGROUNDER ON THE INTERVIEW.

AND HERE’S THE INTERVIEW ITSELF.

In the interview, Cardinal George has a number of things to say that have a bearing on the thesis that a broader cultural shift among Catholics is significantly responsible for declining Mass attendance and other religious practice, yet he also faults the leadership of the Church for contributing to the problem out of a sense of sociological naivete.

Rodney Stark and William Bainbridge talk about the distinction between “high tension” and
“low tension” religion, arguing that over time low tension groups tend to dissolve into
secularism.

That’s right. In the 60s, it was very important to show you could be American and Catholic.
Whole magazines were devoted to that. There was a collective sigh of relief at the Second
Vatican Council, with human freedom being so much in the forefront of the conciliar concerns,
that the tension wasn’t there anymore. I think some of the moves of the church in that period
now seem sociologically naïve, in their long-term consequences.

What do you have in mind?

Catholicism as a distinctive way of life was defined by eating habits and fasting, and by days
especially set aside that weren’t part of the general secular calendar. They were reminders that
the church is our mediator in our relationship to God, and can enter into the horarium [calendar]
that we keep, into the foods that we eat, into all the aspects of daily life, into sexual life. Once
you say that all those things can be done individually, as you choose to do penance, for example,
you reduce the collective presence of the church in somebody’s consciousness. At that point, the
church as mediator becomes more an idea for many people. Even if they accept it, it’s not a
practice. So then when the church turns around and says ‘You have to do this,’ then resistance is
there to say, ‘How can you tell me that? I’m deciding on my life for myself, and you even told
me I could!’

Cardinal George also comments on the situation with the new translation of the liturgy being prepared and notes that, while the new translations are better and the right thing is being done in preparing them, it’s still going to be a significant adjustment for people:

Bishop Donald Trautman and others worry that when that Sunday comes and you have to
explain to people that from now on they will be saying “and with your Spirit” rather than “and
also with you,” there will be a negative reaction. Do you share those concerns?

Hopefully, there will be a lot of good catechesis, which is already being prepared in all the
English-speaking countries. That [a negative reaction] will happen if it’s not well prepared. It
will be a lot harder, as we all know, to go from English to English than from Latin to English.
The Latin was foreign anyway, and this was our language. Now we’ve got something that is our
language, and we’ve got something new that is also our language with a slightly different cast.
That’s going to be hard. Beyond that, we’ve memorized. I can say the canons by heart. We can
enter into them and pray them. Even if they’re not great translations, they’re not bad, and in
many ways they’re quite beautiful. I’ve made them my own. It’s good when you say “We
believe,” and people go down the line through the Creed. We’re changing four lines in that thing.
It’s going to be difficult. People will go back again to reading it, whereas for 20 years now we’ve
just been able to remember it. That’s not going to easy, and nobody’s looking forward to it.

Is it worth it?

Oh yes. I think the translations are superior. There’s a lot of the richness of the Roman rite, and
therefore our faith, because our liturgy reflects our faith, that we will have present in our hearts
again. But it will take 20 years, maybe, before we have it memorized. I mean, I’ll probably go to
my death fighting not to say, “and also with you,” because it’s so second nature by now. People
know immediately what to do. That’s great, that’s a sign of unity. So we’re introducing a
discordant note in our unity, for a good purpose. I think the reason is very adequate, but it’s
going to be work.

GET THE STORY. (PDF WARNING)

So the Dutch Dominicans have put out a pamphlet calling for local churches to pick their own ministers, men or women, married or single, straight or homosexual, to celebrate the Eucharist, and hopefully these will be ordained by the local bishop and everyone will join hands and sing Kumbaya, blah, blah, blah.

GET THE STORY.

Doesn’t this stuff ever get old to them?

Actually, it’s the people who are getting old, according to some.

EXCERPT:

Wim Houtman, religion editor for Nederlands Dagblad, a major Dutch newspaper, told NCR
that the booklet reflects the views of an aging generation in Holland,
many of whom are active in their local parishes, and disappointed by
what they see as a conservative turn under Popes John Paul II and
Benedict XVI.

Yet such debates, Houtman said, “mean nothing … to the people in
their twenties and thirties who increasingly make the music in the
Dutch Catholic Church.”

Yeah. Same graying of the dissident movement that’s happening here. Dissidentism fails to reproduce itself effectively, leading to an aging of the dissident population.

It’ll be interesting to see if the Vatican intervenes on this one or if they just leave it up to the Dutch bishops and the leadership of the Dominican order.

That includes, especially, all of the members of the Society of Jesus!

Though it may be somewhat impolitic to say so, I’ve often remarked that Jesuits are like the "little girl with the little curl, right in the middle of her forhead." When they’re good, they’re very, very good, and when they’re bad, their horrid.

But I just got an e-mail from some of the good ones.

He writes:

I visit your website and I just wanted to drop you a note
and let you know about something:

July 31st is the feast of Saint Ignatius of Loyola, founder of the
Society of Jesus – a.k.a. the Jesuits. For his feast day,
www.companionofjesus.com (my website) is launching Jesuit Review, a 10
installment set of internet videos focusing on Jesuit/Ignatian
spirituality, Jesuit history and contemporary Jesuits. You can find
the first installment by clicking the Jesuit Review link at
www.companionofjesus.com.

Carlos Esparza, SJ and I have created the series of internet videos
that hopefully will give some insight into Jesuit/Ignatian
spirituality. I think you’ll like them. Given all of the press that
Jesuits get, we thought it would be important to offer some basic
introductory material about what Saint Ignatius hoped would drive the
Society of Jesus.

I have to admit, Carlos and I are amateurs. Neither of us had ever
been in front or behind a camera before and we had certainly never
played around with video editing software. But, in the 4 weeks we had
to complete the project, I think we came a long way.

I’m writing you in hopes that you will help spread the word about the
videos. If we are successful in getting people to learn
more about Jesuit/Ignatian spirituality, I expect that the New Orleans
Province of the Society of Jesus will encourage us to work on more
projects of a similar kind.

Thanks in advance for any help you can give.

CHECK IT OUT.

John Allen had an interesting piece today regarding how the Holy See’s relationship with Europe is likely to change in coming years. There are a lot of interesting things in the piece, but I’ll call attention to and comment on a few.

First, the growing secularization of Europe (resulting in an unwillingness to take into account or adhere to Catholic values) will result in the Holy See taking a less pragmatic and more principled stand in its dealings with the European Union. That’s a good thing, because if you don’t stand up for your principles, problems result. A singificant part of the problems we find ourselves in today are due to an excessive pragmatism in the past. If bishops had started excommunicating pro-abort Catholic politicians back when Catholic identity mattered to the politicians in a substantive way, there’d be a lot fewer pro-abort Catholic politicians than there are now.

It also seems to me that there’s a sequence in which pragmatism and principle are likely to alternate as an entity’s fortunes wane. If an entity (like the Church) is in the ascendancy in a culture–if it’s substantially running the show culturally–then it’s going to be very pragmatic in its approach because it’s trying to hold a culture together and that involves countless difficulties of a pragmatic nature. But if it’s lost that influence (as the Church in Europe has) then it’s going to be much more principled in its approach since it (a) no longer needs to run the whole culture and (b) needs to shore up its own identity contra the culture. If the culture begins to actively persecute it, however, a shift back to pragmatism occurs, only this time the pragmatism isn’t directed toward running a culture but toward survival. This is what we see in Christian communities in the Middle East, where Christians have to be extraordinarily diplomatic and careful in order to prevent Muslim reprisals. Ultimately, though, if persecution goes far enough, a return to principle will occur–or not. There is a point, known as martyrdom, where you have to decide whether you will ultimately stick with your core principles or not, and you either do or don’t.

We have Christ’s assurance that the Church as a whole will survive, but it may fare very ill in Europe and we might actually get martyr popes one day, which leads to one of Allen’s points:

Vatican policy on Europe will be more uncompromising and less amenable to Realpolitk solutions which aim to make a separate peace with secularism. This will have consequences across the [board], but one area likely to be especially combustible is same-sex marriage and gay rights. A more identity-driven Catholicism may run up against the growing legal protection of homosexuality in Europe to produce legal action against the church under hate speech and anti-discrimination laws. One under-40 Catholic priest I know, in this case a Canadian though he might easily be European, tells me that among priests of his generation, it’s taken for granted that some may go to jail for defending Catholic teaching on sexuality. It’s reminiscent of the way Catholic priests in Eastern Europe used to realistically accept that some of them might end up in Soviet gulags.

Allen also makes the point that the Holy See’s relations with Europe are likely to shift from supporting particular short-term policy outcomes to articulating matters of fundamental principle that will (hopefully) bear fruit in the longer term.

To my mind this is also a good thing. Bishops around the world, out of a commendable desire to help their flocks, have been tempted to engage the Church in supporting particular political projects that stray too far from matters of principle and too far into matters of application. It’s one thing to say "No homosexual marriage!" It’s another thing to say "This farm bill has it’s subsidies misallocated!" The first is far more within the Church’s brief than is the second.

As is illustrated by one of Allen’s final points, which–although he doesn’t say it this way–shows that Catholics have different perspectives on these matters, and the globalization of the Catholic Church is going to make these differences felt in Europe:

Not only does a multipolar Vatican diplomacy leave Europe a bit out in the cold, it also promises sharper conflicts with Europe, and this time not just on gay rights. Catholic leaders from the global south are often bitterly critical of Europe and the United States on matters of economic justice and militarism; for example, many southern bishops talk about the World Bank and the IMF the way American bishops do Planned Parenthood, that is, as the church’s central bête noir. Perceptions of unfair trading practices in Europe, especially its massive agricultural subsidies, are a matter of deep southern Catholic resentment. Under the impress of multipolar diplomacy, we might anticipate a future in which the flashpoints of church/state relations in Europe could be expressed as "sex, secularism, and subsidies."

GET THE STORY.

John Allen had some interesting commentary last Friday on lay ecclesial ministry and the feminization of the Church.

GET THE STORY.

He describes the basic phenomenon of increased lay ministry well (for good or ill), and much of what he has to say is quite insightful.

I’d like to write a longer commentary on what he has to say than I can at the moment (perhaps I can revisit the subject another time), but I’d call attention to at least a few points, briefly:

Allen notes (correctly) that in both the Catholic Church and in Protestant churches (even those that allow women ministers), the top level of leadership consists of men, but the level below this is largely women. That’s to be expected for several reasons:

a) Women are–in all cultures and times–more religious than men, meaning that they’re more likely to sign up/volunteer/whatever. However,

b) Men are not biologically equipped to bear and nurse children the way women are, which makes them the natural primary caregivers for children, which takes women out of the work/volunteer pool for a considerable length of time (at least until the children don’t require constant supervision). In humans, bearing and raising young requires an intense personal investment (compared to some species, where the young are on their own from the moment they’re hatched), which means–and this is especially true historically–that if a human family has to make a choice about who is the primary caregiver for the children and who is the primary breadwinner, the choices that most families will make, and have made historically, are obvious. This has an impact on human psychology, specifically:

c) Women are on average more psychologically oriented toward caregiving within the family and men are more psychologically oriented toward interacting with the outside world, which means things like pursuing a career (income for the family), fighting wars (protecting the family), and pursuing leadership (securing a place for the family in the broader social situation). Men have an innate leadership instinct that is stronger–on
average–than the same instinct is in women.

Because of factors (b) and (c), men disproportionately form the leadership of almost every institution: the family, the state, the business world, and the religious world. Men have a stronger drive to achieve in these areas, and because of their biological inability to bear and nurse children, they aren’t taking time off to do those activities and can devote themselves more fully to their careers.

You might even expect men to be even more dominant in the religious world than they are except for factor (a): Women are more religious than men, which ensures them a prominent place in religious institutions.

What I have said thus far, of course, is based on the law of averages.
It’s not true of every individual. Some women are more driven to lead
than some men and some men are more nurturing than some women in the
same way that some women are taller than some men and some men live
longer than some women (greater height being a male thing on average
and greater longevity being a female thing on average). Similarly, some men are more religious than some women. It’s all averages.

So the pattern that we actually see is to be expected: Men outnumber women in the top leadership roles in religious institutions, but women outnumber men in the next layer down.

In the Catholic Church, this reality has been reflected from the very beginning: Christ appointed apostles (leaders) who were all men, but we then read about there being a group of women (not men!) who ministered to their needs in turn.

Based on this defining, founding experience, the Church recognizes that the priesthood is something that can be held only by men, but it allows for a prominent place for women religious (think: priests and nuns).

In contemporary Protestant churches there have been some that have allowed women ministers, but the same pattern holds: Senior ministers are disproportionately male, while other church workers (including junior pastors) have a higher female representation, and sometimes are disproportionately female.

That’s just the way the human species is. This pattern is straight out of human biology and psychology. It’s part of our species’ reproductive strategy. It’s how God designed us.

But there can be fluctuations in how this gender dynamic plays out. Different religious bodies may have a more masculine or a more feminine orientation, and it’s not hard to see how some churches have become so oriented toward one gender–by tilting toward a masculine spirituality or a feminine spirituality–that the environment becomes uncongenial to the other sex.

At one time there was much more of a stress on masculine spirituality in the Catholic Church than there is now. That’s why we still speak of the Church militant as its earthly embodiment. But today the situation is changed, and it raises questions about how congenial an environment the Church is today for men.

Allen writes:

[S]ome recent writers have voiced concern that Christianity actually alienates men. David Murrow’s Why Men Hate Going to Church (Nelson Books, 2004) and Leon J. Podles’ The Church Impotent: The Feminization of Christianity (Spence, 1999), illustrate the point. Murrow is a Presbyterian and Podles a Catholic, but both have noticed something similar about their respective denominations.

As Podles put it succinctly, "Women go to church, men go to football games."

Podles believes that Western Christianity has been feminizing itself for the better part of 1,000 years, beginning with medieval imagery about the church as the "Bride of Christ," which he associates with St. Bernard of Clairvaux and exhortations to "fall in love" with Jesus. While that kind of imagery has a powerful impact on women, Podles wrote, it’s off-putting for men. Podles argued that Christian men have sublimated their religious instincts into sports, soldiering, fraternal organizations, and even fascism. When they do engage in religious activity, he wrote, it’s more likely to be in a more masculine para-church organization such as the Knights of Columbus (note the martial imagery) or Promise-Keepers.

Even reviewers who didn’t buy Podles’ historical arguments generally conceded that he was onto something in terms of Christian sociology.

On a less theoretical note, Murrow, a media and advertising specialist, said he looked around after attending weekly church services for almost 30 years, and drew what to him seemed an obvious conclusion: "It’s not too hard to discern the target audience of the modern church," he wrote. "It’s a middle-aged to elderly woman."

This was never anyone’s intention, Murrow said, but it’s the inevitable result of the fact that these women have two things every church needs: time and money. In that light, he said, it’s no surprise that "church culture has subtly evolved to meet women’s needs." Murrow agreed with Podles that "contemporary churches are heavily tilted toward feminine themes in the preaching, the music and the sentiments expressed in worship."

"If our definition of a ‘good Christian’ is someone who’s nurturing, tender, gentle, receptive and guilt-driven, it’s going to be a lot easier to find women who will sign up," Murrow wrote.

I don’t agree with everything Allen says in the piece. In particular, I have some qualifications that I’d make in his final section regarding salaries and gender, but the dominance of feminine spirituality today in the Catholic Church is a concern to me. As a former Evangelical, I have an experience of what it’s like to be in a church that has a more masculine spirituality, and the Catholic Church’s early zeal to evangelize was driven by a masculine impulse ("Convert those heathen!"). I have a concern that the Catholic Church today is in danger of–and, indeed, has already become–too oriented towards a feminine mode of spirituality.

Both modes are essential for the Church to function optimally, just as both a man and a woman are essential for a family to function optimally.

It’s how God designed us.

After all, in the beginning there was Adam and Eve. It was "not good" that man should be alone, and it also is not good that woman should be alone. God meant for mankind to exist with the two sexes working together–bringing both of their viewpoints to the experiences they encounter–and when one viewpoint begins to crowd out the other, it’s not a good thing.

Recently there was a story in the Catholic press about a speech in which an Italian churchman apparently referred to things like abortion and euthanasia as "terrorism with a human face."

Now there’s this story about L’Osservatore Romano referring to an Italian commedian’s jibes at B16 and the Church as "terrorism."

The paper is quoted as saying:

"This, too, is terrorism. It’s terrorism to launch attacks on the
Church," it said. "It’s terrorism to stoke blind and irrational rage
against someone who always speaks in the name of love, love for life
and love for man."

I don’t know what all the commedian said, but the story refers to him saying:

"The Pope says he doesn’t believe in evolution. I agree, in fact the Church has never evolved," he said.

He also criticized the Church for refusing to give a Catholic funeral to Piergiorgio Welby, a man who campaigned for euthanasia as he lay paralyzed with muscular dystrophy. He died in December after a doctor agreed to unplug his respirator.

"I can’t stand the fact that the Vatican refused a funeral for Welby but that wasn’t the case for (Chilean dictator Augusto) Pinochet or (Spanish dictator Francisco) Franco," he said between musical acts at the open-air concert.

This kind of thing leaves me scratching my head.

I’m one of the biggest B16 fans there is, but I don’t see how this kind of stuff amounts to "terrorism." Either there’s something missing from the new story that the commendian said that would qualify in this regard or there is something in Italian culture that would allow these statements to be taken as incitements to violence or the word "terrorism" means something different in Italian . . . or I don’t know what.

While people regularly talk about how hard it is to give a rigorous definition to the term, it seems to me that at the core of the idea of terrorism is using either violence or threats of violence to cause fear in order to get someone to do what you want.

If there isn’t at least the threat of violence, it isn’t terrorism. It’s something else. For example, if someone threatens to release damaging information to get someone to do what he wants, it’s blackmail.

If violence or the threat of violence isn’t being used as some kind of coercion (either on the social policy level or on the personal level) then it isn’t terrorism. Violence without the purpose of coercision is just violence. Thus murder–even mass murder–is not terrorism.

So I don’t see how abortion or euthanasia or joking (even joking badly or offensively or mean-spiritedly) about the pope is terrorism.

But like I said, maybe the press reports have left stuff out, or maybe "terrorism" means something different in Italian.

I just hope we aren’t approaching an ecclesiastical equivalent of Godwin’s Law–something to the effect of "The more sharply felt the subject matter of a dispute is, the more likely a churchman is to call it ‘terrorism.’"

That would only rob the word of its meaning.

Would that count as lexical terrorism?

FIND OUT WHY THAT’S MUCH MORE DRAMATIC THAN IT SOUNDS.

Readers of JA.O know about the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith–the universal Church’s doctrinal watchdog group. What many may not know, though, is that the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) has an equivalent body, known as the Committee on Doctrine.

Whereas the CDF is tasked with dealing with global problems in the area of theology, the COD is tasked with dealing with local (i.e., national) ones, and it’s just delivered a stinging warning about the writings of one of our home-grown dissenters, Daniel Maguire of Marquette University.

GET THE STORY.

MAGUIRE TALKS BACK HERE.

It’s interesting how Maguire accuses the COD of being "obsessed with sex" when it was his writings on sexual issues that contained clear contradictions on Church teaching.

Marquette’s response is also interesting.

And disappointing.

Use ’em or lose ’em?

That’s a question facing Church leaders in many parts of the global south. The first ’em refers to lay people willing to take on roles traditionally performed (if at all) by priests. The second ’em refers to lay people in general.

Here’s the dynamic: Many Catholics in the developing world have little access to priests, but they are quite religious and want to be part of a Christian community, and there are all these helpful Pentecostals interested in showering them with attention and pastoral care.

For example (EXCERPT):

One Honduran woman, for example, told me a story about her sister-in-law who had been hospitalized with a form of cancer. She did not belong to a parish that had a resident priest, and the overworked hospital chaplain was only able to see her briefly and episodically. Meanwhile, a local Pentecostal community had members in her room every day, comforting her, bringing her flowers, and seeing to the needs of her family while she was away. It’s no mystery, this Honduran woman told me, why her sister-in-law considered joining that Pentecostal church. In the end, the family persuaded her to remain Catholic, but that’s not how these things often turn out.

That kind of situation may be responsible for why Pentecostalism–and Protestantism in general–is making such headway in Latin America. You just don’t need the kind of rigorous commitment and training on the part of Protestant ministers in that context that you do of priests. All they need to do is hang out their shingle, and with the help of others in their churches, you’ve got instant pastoral workers.

It’s entirely different in an environment where the priest is expected to do everything and it’s very hard to become a priest, requiring a lot of training and commitment on the part of candidates.

So if you want to compete (i.e., retain souls), you’re going to either need to radically up the number of priests–which would likely entail lowering standards for them–or shift many responsibilities from priests to lay people.

In the Sacramentum Caritatis, Pope Benedict spoke against lowering standards for priests, which would point in the direction of increased lay involvement in pastoral work.

Here in the global north, increasing lay involvement has often (not always) been used as a tool to try to strip the priesthood of its uniqueness, along with an associated liberal theological agenda.

But John Allen thinks that’s not the case in Latin America.

GET THE STORY.

Catholic News Service ran an interesting piece interviewing Cardinal Levada that provided a behind-the-scenes glimpse of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, including a look at the mechanics of how it goes about its work.

It’s well worth reading, so

GET THE STORY.