MAKING SENSE OF AMBIVALENCE: THE AMERICAN CATHOLIC LAITY SINCE
VATICAN II
Dr. David O'Brien
Archbishop Gerety Lecture at Seton Hall University, October 14, 1993
Recently I gave an informal talk to a group of Catholic graduate
students about the relationship between the church and the academic
vocation. All of them had experienced the conflict between a church
which at times seems to have little use for independent, critical
thinkers, and an academic community with little respect for religion or
religious people. Several had told me of the ambivalence they felt about
the church: Catholic faith was woven into the very fabric of their
lives, yet they often felt distanced from the church as they found it,
distanced enough to wonder if they were really Catholics.
I tried to explain that their difficulty in integrating their faith with
their passionate commitment to their work was a common lay Catholic
experience. Perhaps they could find in their family histories the hand
of Providence bringing them to the intersection of faith and
intellectual life in this historical situation of the church and
society. Contemporary pastoral theology encourages people, married
people, poor people, people of all sorts, to search for God in their
everyday experience. There is no reason why middle class people cannot
do the same. And if married people come to think about God as the love
they experience, and if poor people come to locate God in the experience
of overcoming oppression and injustice, perhaps middle class Christians
will find God in their experience of ambivalence, their often
unacknowledged care for their Catholic heritage and their often unspoken
love for their country and their work.
In perhaps the most widely quoted passage in the literature of
African-Americans, the great W.E.B.DuBois once wrote: "One ever feels
his two-ness, an American, a negro; two souls, two thoughts, two
unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose
dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder." Fourteen years
later, during World War I, DuBois told his fellow citizens: "This is as
much our country as yours, and as much the world's as ours. We
Americans, black and white, are the servants of all mankind and minister
to a greater, fairer heaven." The American dilemma-and tragedy-is our
failure to allow the reconciliation and Americism DuBois, Martin Luther
King and other of our African-American prophets dreamed of. For people
of serious religious faith in this American land, I believe, "two-ness,
two unreconciled strivings" always mark the location of our vocation.
Ambivalence is built in. To be an American middle class Catholic today
is to be an insider in an American culture which is surely ours, but by
no means Catholic. It is also to be an insider in a Catholic church
which is also ours, but by no means American. It is to be part of a
society that cares little for serious religion, and often does not
respect religious people, especially if they are too religious. It is
also to be part of a church that seems to care little for lay
experience, and often does not really respect lay people, especially if
they are really lay.
But insiders have nowhere else to go. There are no preferable
communities of meaning and value, religious communities,that we could
join if we wished to do so, and there are no subcultures composed of a
people who are our people, as there once were. ours is what Cardinal
Bernardin of Chicago once called a "precarious posture" and it is there
that I propose we begin our discussion tonight. It is an appropriate
spot, this always bifurcated world of the laity, I think, particularly
appropriate in this setting and on this occasion. In this setting, on
the campus of a Catholic university, because Catholic higher education
is about the business of producing middle class lay American Catholics.
On this occasion, because I knew Archbishop Gerety through our work on
the Call to Action, an event which for me exemplified a church renewed
and reformed in ways which affirm and support lay Catholic life.
Accordingly, I will try to do three things tonight. First I will offer a
lay centered interpretation of U.S. Catholic history. Then I will
examine some aspects of the post- Vatican II church from the perspective
of middle class lay Catholics. U.S. Catholics today are at the center
and the edge of American society. I speak tonight of those at the
center, with full knowledge that many have been left behind and many
stand outside. That is another paper. And finally I will offer some
suggestions about how a lay perspective might reshape our understanding
of some issues in contemporary Catholic life.
I. The Laity in American Catholic History
John Carroll, the first bishop of the United States, once stated that
the revolution in his nation's religious affairs was even more
remarkable than the revolution in its politics. Long subject to civil
disabilities, Catholics were now able to worship in freedom;
disestablishment and free exercise made the church a voluntary
organization. Roman Catholics may have been heirs to a Church almost
eighteen centuries old, but now on western frontiers and the even more
challenging frontiers of commercial, later industrial, cities, they had
to create churches where none had previously existed.
At first it was a typical Republican enterprise, marked by lay
leadership, considerable non-Catholic support, careful accommodation of
clergy to the egalitarian spirit of the age, a piety that stressed human
responsibility, and an apologetic aimed at making Catholicism
intelligible to an enlightened public. But, with the arrival of
increasing numbers of European immigrants, this "republican interlude"
ended. What historian Jay Dolan calls a "plain undemonstrative style of
religion" gave way to an "emotion packed religion distinguished by its
emphasis on the practice of external rituals, communion with a host of
heavenly relatives, and devotion to a suffering savior, all mediated
through a sacramental system controlled by the clergy." In the aftermath
of conflicts over ownership of church property by lay trustees, clerical
and lay roles were sharply distinguished, religion was segregated from
other areas of life, and within the realm of religion the priest was
supreme.
Yet the immigrant church was a people's church, as much as any that
Catholicism has known. Hasia Diner's pioneering study of Irish immigrant
women, Erin's Daughters in America, revealed the extent of drunkenness,
desertion, industrial accidents and schizophrenia in Irish immigrant
neighborhoods, a portrait of cultural declension repeated among
successive immigrant groups. In the midst of fragile communities, lay
leaders appeared, usually people with intact families and steady
employment. They began to organize, in part to enhance their own life
prospects by overcoming the stigma attached to their nationality, in
part to preserve the continuity of their families and express national
and religious traditions they valued.
Nativism and anti-Catholicism reinforced the conservative impulse of
immigrant groups, but ethnic communities and their churches were centers
of hope as well as memory. Migration to America, according to Timothy L.
Smith, involved a "redefinition of the boundaries of peoplehood as folk
memories were brought to bear on new aspirations". Folk memories: from
the outside ethnic parishes seemed like ghettos filled with archaic
devotions and anti-democratic values, but things are rarely as they
first appear. Based on persuasion and commitment, ethnic parishes
provided centers of order in a disordered environment, and principles of
authority in a world of conflicting voices and multiple temptations.
Conservative piety, with its relatively pessimistic understanding of
human nature and its less than revolutionary approach to social
conditions, was quite functional to the situation in which newcomers
found themselves. Preachers stressed again and again that people were
free to choose: the possibilities of freedom could be realized, and its
dangers to personal integrity and family life avoided, one pastor said,
if people would place themselves "willingly under obligation." They
should join the church, contribute to its support, receive its
sacraments, follow its moral teaching, turn away from drink and
boisterous behavior, and fulfill their family responsibilities. To those
still close to their pre- industrial, peasant roots, it was no surprise
to learn that people were sinful, the world a hard place, and
self-control the key to solving life's problems. After generations of
study of cultures of poverty, it should not be a shock to learn that
conservative theology worked better than liberal, that order, authority,
clear moral rules and family stability could help, not hinder, the
process of liberation.
Folk memories, but brought to bear on new aspirations, Smith told us.
For all their determination to hold on to old world ways, the immigrant
Catholic creation of community around churches, schools and devotional
and charitable societies was a uniquely modern adventure. Routines of
religious practice instilled habits of order and restraint appropriate
to the new industrial discipline, but at the same time the experience
opened horizons of new possibility, evident in the obvious pride which
marked the dedication of a new church or the opening of a new school,
the arrival of the first sisters or the celebration of first communion
for long lines of scrubbed, well dressed children marching in procession
behind the cross and, as often as not, the American flag. The piety, at
first glance world denying, in practice was a kind of pastoral theology
of liberation, for if it taught anything it taught that what had been
need be no longer, that ago old notions of deference and ascribed status
could give way to a new life of personal responsibility and self-making.
And evidence for these new ideas was right there, in the progress of
this parish of which this person was a part.
Then, as now, on that edge we mentioned, the bottom up process of church
formation existed in some tension with the imperatives of the Catholic
church as an organization. To survive in the context of pluralism, the
hierarchy had to make the immigrants practicing Catholics, eliminate or
coopt traditional family and communal devotions, and draw people to the
sacraments. They had to persuade people to offer personal and financial
support, so they had to clarify the boundaries between the church and
competing organizations. Gradually the universalism of faith became
focused exclusively on the church itself, pastoral strategies of
maintenance gradually replaced those of community formation, missionary
and evangelical responsibilities were rendered secondary to
organizational considerations.
It is almost impossible to overemphasize the degree to which
organizational priorities shaped the ideology of twentieth century
American Catholicism. "The teaching of Christ was not left to drift with
the centuries" one bishop said. "The Savior promulgated a complete
organization." At its center was the hierarchy, which had kept
"inviolable the direct revelation that God gave personally to it in the
person of his first priests." Another bishop told a lay audience in 1925
that "the church is the happiest and most peaceful society that history
records and the most perfect organization the world has ever known. 11
Forty years later the bishop of that diocese told an assembly that the
parish, the "church in miniature" needed three things, a school, for
teaching was "not the greatest privilege of the priest but his greatest
responsibility", an altar, where the Mass could be celebrated by the
priest, and, of course, the priest, "the dispenser of the mercy of God
(and] the grace of the redeemer." By then the people were not left out,
but taken for granted.
Of course, there was been another voice, not often speaking of lay
participation in church affairs, but pointing the church beyond itself.
In the United States it was called Americanism. In the late nineteenth
century, Archbishop John Ireland and others argued that the church
should expand its agenda and engage the great problems of modern
society. It could do so by constructing here in the United States a new
Catholicism, an American Catholicism, native to this land, as Irish and
German and Italian Catholicism were native to theirs.
How would that be done?
First, by affirming in word and deed the goodness of American society
and its institutions. This was good public relations, combating
anti-Catholic propaganda. But it also represented a choice, for
participation over separation, assimilation over the preservation beyond
a generation of particular ethnic institution. Americanists thought it a
good thing for immigrants to learn English, risking the loss of
traditional culture but easing access to the newer and larger culture of
America. They thought it a good thing to pursue material advancement, a
truly new idea for most immigrants, and a good thing to get an
education, therefore available only to the few; a good thing, too, to
organize for their rights, as if they were as good as any others, and a
good thing to love the new nation, to love it strongly enough to kill or
die on its behalf. In other words, Americanism, belief in the
providential role of the nation, required, and gave meaning to,
Americanization, the fuller participation in American life. Without at
least a touch of it, it is unlikely that those new aspirations would
ever have been fulfilled. And it made the lay experience of work and
school and sacrifice and organizing and political action religiously
important.
Second, one could also construct an American Catholicism by doing the
ordinary work of the church in parishes and schools, empowering
immigrants and their descendants to participate in the American
experiment. Unions, ethnic associations and bread and butter liberal
politics at first seemed to people unfamiliar with pluralist democracy,
including some Catholics like Ireland, to represent an ethnocentric
separatism at odds with Americanism, but eventually it became clear that
these were means of extending and deepening American democracy, enabling
outsiders to move inside and claim a place at the tables where decisions
were made, and to do so while remaining authentically themselves. Making
American democracy work was an authentic Catholic responsibility;
citizenship was important..
And, finally, making American Catholicism meant encouraging a missionary
apostolate among lay Catholics, especially those Americanized, educated,
middle class Catholics who were the product of the church's remarkable
pastoral work among the immigrants. What would happen when the children
and grandchildren of the immigrants, marrying and working and
socializing outside their group, no longer felt the automatic pull to
Catholicism that came with their ethnic identity? They would remain
Catholic if they could only see their family journey from impoverished
immigrant outsiders to educated and affluent insiders as a providential
story whose meaning could be found in the promise of American life. They
would be the instruments by which God's spirit would renew the ideals
and the mission of America. To do so, Catholics would have to learn to
speak the truths of their faith in a language Americans could
understand. If they could do that, then they might persuade their fellow
citizens that their personal hopes and those of the nation could be
fulfilled by becoming Catholic.
Paulist founder Isaac Hecker said it best. Although his age had its
"martyrs, recluses and monastic communities," Hecker thought these would
not be its "prevailing types of Christian perfection. 11 Instead, "our
age lives in its busy marts, in counting houses, in workshops, in homes
and in the varied relations that form human society .... This is the
field of conquest for the heroic Christian of our day. Out of the cares,
toils and duties, afflictions and responsibilities of daily life are to
be built the pillars of sanctity of our age". Ireland put it more
forcefully: "Let there be no room among us for the lackadaisical piety
which lazily awaits a zephyr from the sky, the bearer of efficacious
grace, while God's grace is at hand entreating to be made efficacious by
our cooperation", Ireland thundered. "We are certain of failure if we
are on our knees when we should be fleet of foot, if we are in the
santuary when we should be in the highways and the marketplaces"
Catholics continued to enter the highways and marketplaces, but their
presence was not experienced as an occasion to make God's grace
efficacious. In America as in Europe liberal Catholicism like Ireland's
and Hecker's lost out. Pope Leo XIII told American Catholics to
associate as much as possible with other Catholics, to avoid the
suspicion that there were some among them who desired "a church in
America different from the church in the rest of thew world" , and to
take steps to preserve "in the multitude a submissive spirit." He
worried that the so-called Americanists wished to introduce into the
church "a certain liberty" so that "limiting the exercise and vigilance
of its powers, each one of the faithful might act more freely in
pursuance of his own natural bent or capacity". Leo's idea was quite
different: "We ardently desire that this truth should sink day by day
more deeply into the minds of Catholics: namely that they can in no
better way safeguard their own individual interests and the common good
than by yielding a hearty and submissive obedience to the church."
Leo's directives corresponded quite well with the perceived requirements
of the church as an organization in pluralistic America. Gradually, with
the help of parochial schools and an ever multiplying set of
associations designed to culturally and socially segregate Catholics,
the American church became a subculture, powerful in things religious,
effective in preserving the church, but draining much of lay life of
religious meaning. Bishops and priests took pride in the economic
success, social advancement and localized political power of Catholics,
but they could give no religious or spiritual meaning to the experience
of social mobility. The poor could expect assistance and working people
who joined unions could expect at least moral support, but salvation was
largely a matter of sacramental practice and personal and family
morality.
Even liberal Catholics had little sense that economic betterment was the
key to the independence and empowerment essential to a democratic
society, much less that such mundane preoccupations had anything to do
with the pursuit of sanctity. In politics the immigrant church
experience of mutual aid and self-help shaped a style of practical
deliberate action aimed at achieving concrete objectives for a
particular group. The experience of ethnic community formation was
similarly part of an adjustment to the American marketplace in which
rewards came to those with the organized power to participate in the
give and take of pluralism. This ethos was reflected as well in Samuel
Gompers' "business unionism" which Catholic skilled workers embraced so
readily. The same hard headed association of organization and economic
stability with freedom and dignity informed the machine politics and
bread and butter liberalism which attracted Catholic voters. But all
this was activity apart from church, necessary, sometimes useful, but
devoid of religious meaning, and in fact regarded with some suspicion as
perhaps a bit selfish and materialistic by idealistic reformers and
conservative churchmen alike.
Nevertheless, as we have noted, the subcultural strategy was empowering,
instilling the self-discipline and moral restraint required for success.
By the 1950s American Catholicism had become one of the world's great
success stories. With the help of the GI Bill, the new unions and the
general prosperity of the period, American Catholics began that
accelerated movement into the middle and upper classes which Father
Greeley has documented so well. By then, however, the self-understanding
of the church had deprived that dramatic story of religious
significance. Lay success did not enrich Catholic culture and church
teaching had little impact on the lay lives of the laity. Church leaders
had confined the church to church, they had defined religion in terms of
sacramental practice, organizational unity and group loyalty and settled
for a subculture in which the highest responsibilities of church members
were to attend Mass, support the parish and school, and denounce the
church's enemies.
But, as the Catholic middle class grew in numbers and self- confidence
after World War II, the long muffled Americanist voice revived. Priests
like Louis Putz, Reynold Hillenbrand and John LaFarge and lay leaders
like John Cogley, Pat and Patty Crowley, Joseph and Sally Cunneen and Ed
Marciniak saw in the evident progress of Catholics some Ireland-like
possibilities. When they read Teilhard de Chardin they glimpsed the
possibility of a theology of work; in John Courtney Murray they found at
least the beginnings of an American Catholic politics, and in the living
rooms where CFM couples gathered, there was hope for an understanding of
sex, love and marriage which might overcome the impersonal character of
modern bureaucratic life. All were far less Americanist than their
nineteenth century predecessors: they rarely challenged clerical
authority and most saw lay people as ambassadors from the church to
secular society. Even then, though a small minority, they were pushed in
most places to the margins of parish and diocesan life.
II. Vatican II and Beyond
Still, this new breed rekindled the dream of an American Catholicism and
they came into their own in the age of John Kennedy and John XXIII. Then
Vatican II, to everyone's astonishment, all but baptized the vision of
an evangelizing laity with its endorsement of religious liberty, its
philosophical personalism, and its positive sense of historical destiny.
Most of all, it affirmed an almost Americanist vision of the laity:
But the laity, by their very vocation, seek the Kingdom of God by
engaging in temporal affairs and by ordering them according to the plan
of God. They live in the world, that is, in each and in all of the
secular professions and occupations. They live in the ordinary
circumstances of family, and social life, from which the very web of
their existence is woven. They are called there by God so that by
exercising their proper function and being led by the spirit of the
gospel they can work f or the sanctification of the world from within,
in the manner of leaven.
I was there. For a brief moment from 1958 to, what, 1968, many of us
believed that an American Catholicism was finally taking shape, and that
it would be a good thing for America and a good thing for Catholicism.
For that moment the action was in families and neighborhoods, on the
campuses and in middle class parishes, and in the lay movements which
had flourished in the midwest. Politics was important, but so were
liturgy, family life, community organization, reform movements (like the
CIC, YCS and YCW, and the NFCCS), all helping to give meaning, religious
meaning, to our new status as American insiders. But just at that
moment, something happened, to Catholicism, to Americanism, to the
laity. And the moment passed. By the 1980s, when a briefly united
Americana hierarchy sought a purchase on public life, they spoke the
language of lay sanctity in the daily pursuit of justice, but then they
pulled back.
Why were Americanist hopes unfulfilled?
First, some internal reasons. Catholic Americanists, bent upon the
constructive integration of Catholicism and Americanism, took too much
of each for granted. The church was more human and more political, more
in need of reform, more disorderly and messy, and certainly more badly
managed than anyone had believed. And the American church rested on a
whole range of social and cultural assumptions that grew from immigrant
outsiderness and ultramontane anti-modernism that had lost their
credibility. One wanted to be a Catholic pursuing holiness in the world,
and trying to offer Catholic angles on contemporary culture, but simply
being a Catholic proved problematic. Americanists like John Courtney
Murray had not paid much attention to the democratic impulses of
American religious culture at the popular level, so Catholics were
simply unprepared for the appearance of evangelicalism and
pentecostalism in their own ranks, for the radical changes which
overcame religious communities, or for the poor leadership of so many
church institutions. Finally liberal Catholics underestimated the degree
to which a church, any church, needs to emphasize those things that make
it distinctive if it is to enjoy warm support. In short, they took too
little note of what makes Catholics Catholic. There is more to be said
here but let one thing be clear: the church, like other institutions is,
under God's providence, made by human beings like us, and we must attend
to the politics of its making. Too many have failed to do that.
Second, America too was not the way it was supposed to be. In ways which
corresponded almost exactly with the experience of middle-class
Protestants in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, middle
class Catholics of the sixties and seventies found themselves liberated
from a self-defined oppressive subculture to participate in a society
which it turned out was not at all sure it wanted to be God's instrument
for creating the beloved community, as Martin Luther King still thought
it should be. America made our own turned out to be filled with all
sorts of problems, we were quickly disillusioned, and we were not alone.
Catholic activists had long built bridges between their church and
American reform movements, from the social gospel through labor, peace
and social justice movements. After 1968 it was hard to find movements
which needed or wanted them or which Catholics could in conscience join.
America needed conversion, too, it seemed, conversion to the vision of
its own providential significance and responsibility, but Catholics were
no longer sure they could or should help do that. William Halsey
entitled his brilliant book on American Catholic culture between the
wars The Survival of American Innocence. What remained of that innocence
died in the sixties.
A third reason for Americanist failure was that Americanist Catholicism
lost touch with one of its original and fundamental precepts, the
conviction that Catholicism is good for everybody. Isaac Hecker, unlike
most of his Americanist disciples, really did envision a Catholic
future, a Kingdom, really a Commonwealth, of God composed of free men
and women, because he truly believed that Christianity was the way to
fulfill human aspirations: the Gospel really was good news. For most
Catholics, the rhetoric of Americanism sometimes masked another, more
ecclesiastical dream, of a secure, organized subculture, conquering
enemies abroad, winning a secure place at home, maybe eventually
converting a few people, but not very soon, only occasionally interested
in resolving the major problems of the times and always putting the
church, the church we were making, first.
Once Americanism as a religious and spiritual enterprise was abandoned,
the dramatic Catholic story of liberation from poverty and
marginalization, that journey from margins to the center, a story of lay
people and their families, lost its meaning, for meaning, real meaning,
could only be found in church. That is what the young Father Andrew
Greeley was driving at when he said his church had nothing to say to its
first lay president. Even the Americanists at their best were reluctant
to suggest that their own lay experience, outside of church, was
normative. When they tried to do so on birth control, they were sharply
corrected; that is why the episode was so damaging. The Chicago
Declaration on the Laity in 1976 spoke with anguish of a new, counter
cultural radicalism led by priests and nuns, but it betrayed a nostalgia
for the old Catholic subculture, in which lay people were sent forth as
ambassadors to the world and the Americanist ideal of the holy community
was confined to church. So powerful was our sense that God is only
really with us in church, that we could hardly imagine our lives without
it.
But Pope John restored the vision of a church in service to the human
family, and for Vatican II the church was "truly and intimately united
with humankind and its history. Indeed, "the joys and the hopes, the
griefs and anxieties, of the men and women of this age, especially those
who are poor or in any way afflicted, these too are the joys and the
hopes, the griefs and anxieties of the followers of Christ. These words
of a worldly faith, of a church bonded in love with all humankind, which
begins with no us and them, Christians and the others, but with
everybody, that vision shook the church of Latin America, where religion
and culture are more integrated, but here in the United States it was
hard to penetrate the shell of live and let live toleration, the
marginalization of religion to private and family life, and the
preoccupation of the voluntary church with its own concerns, with
religion, with its specific and distinctive religion. Yet, in the
absence of Catholic universality and a sense of mission, that is in the
absence of confidence that what the church believes and teaches is
authentic good news for everybody, Americanism becomes what its enemies
say it is, a way of becoming comfortable in modern society by
legitimating our new found wealth and status.
Finally, there was the failure of organized church reform. I do not want
to rehearse here the standard arguments about the laity in the
post-Vatican II church. For example, we have witnessed the decline of
the priesthood in numbers and morale, the dramatic retreat of shrinking
religious orders from pastoral and educational ministries, and the
dramatic rise of many forms of lay ministry, volunteer and professional.
The latter, so beautifully affirmed by the bishops in their pastoral
letter "Called and Gifted," is one sign among many of the steady process
of renewal. People remain more religious than anyone would have guessed,
movements of spiritual renewal are strong and we have discovered
numerous ways to build vibrant Christian communities in and outside
parishes.
But the Catholic church, that is the organization and its distinctive
culture, is a problem; everywhere we look, there is a huge gap between
renewal and reform. Even deeply committed Catholics often seem unsure
about what it means to be Catholic, as distinct from Christian, and
those that are sure take on an increasingly sectarian tone. Vigorous
ministries again and again run up against unreformed church structures,
bishops and priests who encourage shared responsibility grow defensive,
and conflict seems a chronic feature of what passes for ecclesiastical
politics. In terms I have often used elsewhere, popular Catholicism
grows more evangelical, that is more sciptural, more centered on
personal experiences of God and voluntary communities of the faithful,
and neither church officials nor most scholars have figured out how to
deal with this altogether American phenomenon.
Richard McBrien once wrote that post-conciliar renewal largely had to do
with getting clear on the mission of the church, mobilizing resources
for the pursuit of that mission, and opening the doors to wider
participation in church decisions because the resources consisted of
people who would only be mobilized if they had a voice in deciding what
the mission would be. But Humanae Vitae damaged lay enthusiasm for
church reform, the 1971 synod of bishops demoralized the clergy, and the
anticlimactic outcome of civil rights and peace movements and the spread
of abortion left many wondering whether social action or even lay life
was worthwhile. The 1976 Call to Action conference and the process that
preceded it seemed to its participants to signal precisely the kind of
consultation and shared responsibility centered on issues of mission
required by the new situation of the American church. But those who
should have seen its significance were either frightened by Roman
reaction, or by popular participation, as many bishops were, or unable
to get beyond anxieties created by the messy combination of
ecclesiastical insiders and the new outsiders, women, gays, angry
minorities and evangelical style radicals. The result was the failure of
church reform, and a resulting decline in the quality of personnel in
church bureaucracies, the collapse or demoralization of most national
organizations, the individuation of ministry, the spread of evangelical
forms of piety, leaving almost all Catholics convinced there is nothing
they can, or probably should, do about the church beyond their parish.
A century ago Protestant theologian Philip Schaff noted that Catholics
were to be found at the top (through converts) and the bottom (through
the immigrants) of the American social structure, but they had not as
yet penetrated the middle class. When they did, Schaff predicted, they
would come to resemble evangelical Protestants. What Schaff anticipated
Andrew Greeley now describes as do it yourself Catholicism". Human
freedom, Gospel faith, voluntary community and personal responsibility
are the marks of a free church, and of an evangelical style of religious
life. Whether such a church can also be Catholic is the question, a
question as old as John Carroll.
Voluntary organizations require choices, and organizations, and the
people who love them, usually want the choices to be for themselves. It
is obvious that the immigrant church prospered by concentrating on
religion, endowing church life alone with religious meaning, and forming
its people to a fundamental option (to use contemporary language) for
the church. Without intending to, Catholics participated in the process
of modernization which, in John Murray Cuddihy's terms, "cruelly
sundered what tradition had joined," slicing through primordial ties
between church and state, religion and culture, leaving "wholeness
hunger in its wake." We seek that wholeness in the church, but I believe
we will not find it until we think harder about the question of purpose,
our answer to the question of why the church exists. Among immigrant
Catholics the question of why had clear answers,, linked to family and
group aspirations; among many Catholics, they still do. But for those of
us who have become insiders, the why is not so clear.
III. Lay Catholic Action
How does a lay vision influence that question of why?
First, location: for the laity the center where an answer might be found
is probably outside church. Pope John, and Vatican II at moments, wanted
to decenter our consciousness by moving outside the Catholic subculture
that we had learned to call church. So does the option f or the poor or
reflection on the holocaust. It is out there, in the midst of history,
that we should think about faith and church and mission. And if we do
so, lay people will no longer be ambassadors from church to world but in
their very layness they will be the church. As Archbishop Rembert
Weakland once put it, if we are the people of God, the Body of Christ,
the very presence of Christ in this particular time and place, we are
that all the time, including those times, most of the time, when we are
not in church.
So the layness of lay life is not an arena for interchurch combat or a
culture beset with temptations but the very essence of our Christian
vocation. That relocates the center and rejuvenates Americanism., but it
is also risky for the church as an organization. For if God and God's
church are present outside the organized church, and our best energies
can be given to our work in the world, why do we need the organized
church at all? Our answer will be filled with ambivalence, for it
rejects sectarian isolation but also secular surrender which leaves the
church a role only in personal life. We takes a stand at the edge of
faith and culture, and struggles for wholeness, and looks to our friends
and the ministries of our church for help.
2. Bilingualism and biculturalism. In a free and pluralistic society we
must simultaneously form the church and participate in the larger
society. So we live out two cultural repertoires every day or, as the
bishops put it in the nuclear pastoral of 1983, we participate in two
forms of teaching and learning. With our fellow Christians we speak the
language of discipleship, with others the language of citizenship, in
one community the language of Gospel reflection, in other communities
the language of technical expertise, or the civil language of social
exchange. We need to learn to do both, to speak up in church and to
speak up in public, and to resist the tendency to so separate the two
conversations that we surrender our integrity; we must become
authentically bilingual. That is why we need Catholic colleges and
universities and a vigorous Catholic intellectual life. Without it the
church will slip either into sectarianism, speaking only to itself, or
sentimentality, mouthing pablum and platitutes to a disdainful world.
3. Realism about organization. Institutions and organizations change in
response to internal and environmental changes. When and how they change
is result of organizational politics. People involved with those
organizations are responsible for their conduct. The degree of
responsibility varies. In the church, Pope and bishops do bear enormous
responsibility, well spelled out at Vatican II. People who work for the
church, priests, religious and laity, share responsibility and must find
ways to participate. Ministry without commitment to church reform and
shared responsibility is a contradiction. And some reforms contribute to
enabling Catholic life in the world, others work against it. And choices
must be made. To help make those choices we must seek and exercise power
in church, as we do elsewhere. That sounds harsh, but it has always been
done and it is being done right now.
4. Lay empowerment requires a theology of America.
This land is your land,
This land is my land,
From California to the New York islands,
From the redwood forests to the Gulf Stream waters,
This land was made for you and me.
In 1987 I quoted these Woodie Guthrie words at the start of a keynote
address to the Catholic Theological Society of America. That year the
theme of its meetings was "Catholic Theology in a North American
Context." I argued that we badly needed serious theological reflection
on the historical experience of American Catholics. Indeed I went so far
as to claim that this history might qualify as an historical example of
liberation: millions of poor people, outsiders in a strange land, over
the course of several generations won the economic security, education,
social status and respect and political participation, which one would
take to constitute the specific meanings of what is called liberation.
The theologians were not impressed. Yet I remain convinced that we need
to think about the meaning of the experience of European immigrant
Catholics, we need to tell ourselves the compelling story of our own
history, indeed the telling of that story is essential if we are to find
meaning in our own Catholic experience. Someone once said that to visit
a people who have no history is like going into the wilderness where
there are no maps to direct the traveler. The American church today, and
the Catholic colleges and universities where I spend most of my time,
seem like that wilderness.
5. Reconsidering the people of God. The people may be the church, but
are they really. After all, the people are very secular. Remember the
language of Vatican II: "They live in the world, that is, in each and in
all of the secular professions and occupations. They live in the
ordinary circumstances of family, and social life, from which the very
web of their existence is woven." Thus lay ministers in the church must
remain lay, bringing lay experience to bear on worship and sacraments
and education, encouraging persons to find God in their lives at work
and in family and society. It suggests the need to revive the old
Catholic Action strategies, enriched by new insights into the
theological meanings of our common and pluralistic human life.
"The split between the faith which men (and women) profess and their
daily lives deserves to be counted among the most serious errors of our
age", the Vatican Council declared. "Let there be no false opposition
between professional and social activities on the one part and religious
duties on the other." Fifteen years later the Synod of Bishops argued
that "the Christian's specific contribution to justice lies in the day
to day life of the individual believer acting like a leaven in his or
her family, work, social and civic life." In the first draft of their
pastoral letter on economics, the bishops committee drew on Vatican II
to argue that the universal call to holiness is expressed in the
struggle to enhance human dignity in daily life: "Men and women in
business, on farms and in factories, in government, in scientific and
educational institutions, and in every other field of labor can achieve
true sanctity when they respond to the call of discipleship in the midst
of their work. The church in its ministry has a responsibility to
nurture and sustain this response." Yet, by the third draft, the Vatican
II quotes had been eliminated. Three paragraphs on the lay vocation were
reduced to two sentences, followed quickly by warnings about a "throw
away society". New sections on family life said nothing of nurturing
civic engagement or sustaining peacemaking and just work, but instead
warned against "self-gratification" and urged witness to counter
cultural values. Such countercultural prescriptions consistently
frustrate our announced intention to take lay people seriously.
In conclusion, the movement of Catholic history and the logic of church
teaching suggest that the church turn its pastoral attention to the
laity as laity. At the heart of Catholic Christianity is the claim that
all men and women are destined for union with God that all of God's
creation will be reconciled with its Creator, that the Kingdom will in
fact come. Through no particular merit of their own some have been
called as Christians to consciously cooperate in forwarding the Kingdom.
As a human creation, the church tends always to mistake itself for the
Kingdom of God, but the promise of a single human family, living in love
and friendship with one another, breaks through particularities,
scatters subcultures, and calls forth engagement with the whole movement
of human history.
Let me be as direct and concrete as possible. If our worship and prayer
features constant harping on the evils of secularism, claiming again and
again that we must recognize the dangers and temptations of our lives in
"the world," then our church is a place of illusion and
irresponsibility. Such language ignores the f act that we have helped to
make that world what it is, it almost always ignores the equal danger of
self-righteousness contained in such claims to moral superiority, it
cuts us off from our fellow citizens with 'whom we share responsibility
for the future of our communities, and it all but insures that we will
never come to grips with the cultural symbols, economic structures and
political systems which keep millions of people in poverty and threaten
the very existence of our planet. If our sermons on ministry suggest we
should become more involved in the church and less committed to our
jobs, our professional and community organizations, then we of course
devalue those among us who devote their time to politics, civic
organizations, and "secular" activity. If our preaching and piety make
it more difficult for us to be fully men and women of our age and time,
if they make us feel guilty about our work, our cultural activities, our
engagement with the problems of our daily lives, then it is, I want to
argue, part of the problem, not part of the solution.
Of course our faith and our church should enable us to get some critical
distance from our society; of course we need to step back and ask what
are we doing and why are we doing it, but the goal is not to build up a
church defined by its opposition to the world, nor is it to enable us to
stand in righteous judgment on a society we have helped to make; it is
to enable us to build a world fit for human habitation, to give us the
inspiration and the courage to become more, not less involved in the
great struggles of our times. If there was a lesson in our church's
tragic complicity in the crimes of war and holocaust in this century, it
was that we must learn that we are in the end one people and there is no
escape from responsibility. The liberalism of American Catholicism at
the time of the Council was undoubtedly naive in its understanding of
the nation and its people; surely it needs a "course correction", a more
chastened appreciation of the demonic potential of power and deeper
concern for the personal, spiritual and organizational dimensions of
church life and ministry. But the answer to the Americanist problem is
not withdrawal to some mountaintop of biblical prophecy and self
righteous desertion of the public arena. Nor is it a new conservatism of
Catholic power and doctrinal orthodoxy. Rather it requires recovery of a
sense of mission, inspired by contemporary church teaching and rendered
operative by close attention to the specifically American character of
our own situation. It means probing the depths of our American
experience to develop a body of ideas which can give meaning to ministry
and work and faith in the day-to- day life of American Catholics. It
means a bottom up strategy of pastoral development based upon the
experience and the responsibility of the people of the church. it means
a theology of mission which gives a central place to the laity, to
politics, to work, to neighborhood life.
Our Americanness is the concrete, fleshy human context of our call to be
Catholic Christians. Like all contexts, it is, in as well as out,
shaping not just the conditions of our public life but our very feelings
about God and one another. Let us unpack our Americanness, probe the
spiritual meaning of our American adventure, find the words, the
symbols, the language that will lead us back to this people, our people,
and with them to the people of the world. Authentic prophecy takes place
within and on behalf of a specific people; do we think that people is
only Catholics, as if we alone are chosen, for God's sake and our own?
We desperately need an American standpoint, sufficiently Christian to
understand and illuminate human experience, yet not so super-Christian
as to claim to be judge and contradiction of all that American means. No
more than you do I know the precise character of our relationship with
our country, but I do believe that we will discover new meaning in our
Catholicity when we make our decision to accept and struggle with the
fact that this is our land and these are our people. It is America, as
much as Catholicism, which has made us who we are; we will not resolve
our problems by making new ghettos but by caring deeply for this new
world we have once again entered.
I end with Woodie Guthrie:
One bright sunny morning, in the shadow of the steeple,
By the relief office, I saw my people.
As they stood there waiting, I looked and wondered,
Whether this land was made for you and me
