Catholicism in American Society at the Dawn of the 21st Century
Scott Appleby, University of Notre Dame
Archbishop Gerety Lecture at Seton Hall University, March 1, 2000
The germ of this lecture goes back to the first televised press
conference of the newly appointed archbishop of Chicago, Francis George.
Of the many questions asked and answers given, two stand out as
particularly witty and illuminating, leading me to think "This is going
to be interesting!"
To relentless questioning, "Will you be another Bernardin?" Archbishop
George responded: "The Catholic Church does not believe in cloning."
Catholics who don't attend mass or otherwise participate in the
sacraments may be affected, the archbishop allowed, by "epistemological
dissonance."
It is the notion of epistemological dissonance that provides the
structure of the following remarks: epistemological dissonance, by which
I understand to mean a fundamental break between Catholicism and
American popular culture, in ways of knowing, in what counts as and for
knowledge, in the understanding of the relationship between information
and wisdom. This fundamental discontinuity between Christian answers to
the question about the good, and our society's way of asking the
question, is at the root of our present situation; it is what led the
theologian Karl Rahner and many after him to speak of ours as a
neo-pagan or post-Christian culture; it is a reality the priest is
called to resist—the priest as Catechist and Evangelizer to a
know-nothing, seek-everything generation.
What world confronts Catholics at the dawn of the twenty-first century?
In the United States, it is not one "world" that awaits, but several
brave new worlds. More than ever before, the hallmark of American
Catholicism is diversity—in ethnic heritage, social class, family
structure, educational level, spiritual formation and theological
orientation. Readers even casually acquainted with the history of the
American church will recognize the phrase "more than ever before" to be
a significant, almost startling claim: Catholicism, which helped
establish the nation's reputation as a "melting pot" of diverse peoples
has been the leading American "community of communities" since the
mid-nineteenth century. A more mongrel church could scarcely be
imagined.
Never before, however, have the pastoral challenges posed by the
Church's ethnic, social and cultural diversity been compounded by the
proliferation of so many differing (and often competing) theologies,
worldviews, and models of what the Church is and ought to become. No
previous generation of American Catholics, it could be argued, inherited
so little of the content and sensibility of the faith from their
parents, as have today's Catholic youth. At no point during the previous
150 years of Catholic life in America has a need for the widespread
catechesis and re-evangelization of broad segments of the Catholic
community coincided with so dire a shortage in the number of priests,
religious and seminarians.
Both the challenges and the resources for meeting them come from the
dizzying variety of peoples that constitute the Church. Several distinct
communities and cultures co-exist within the American church, each
needing "purifying and strengthening," each requiring its own
specialized pastoral ministries and programs of theological education
and spiritual formation. With their radically different historical
experiences and patterns of assimilation and "Americanization," these
various Hispanic, Asian, European and African American communities face
the new century from their separate social locations and at various
degrees of cultural and psychological distance from their ancient
homelands. Moreover, there is considerable diversity within each of the
various ethnic and "post-ethnic" Catholic communities, divided as they
are into generations with differing levels of education, language, and
differing attitudes toward the Asian, Latin American or European country
of origin.
The Hispanic "community" in the United States, for example, includes
millions of native-born Americans as well as first-generation immigrant
populations. Those called "Hispanic" or "Latino/a" hail from Cuba,
Puerto Rico, Mexico and elsewhere; they do not constitute a single
Hispanic-American subculture in the United States. Nor do Asian
Catholics, who began to arrive in the late sixties from the Philippines,
the Koreas, Cambodia and Vietnam, constitute a unified Asian-American
subculture. Yet through baptism, the eucharist, the hierarchy and other
visible signs and means of Roman Catholic unity, all of these peoples
belong to one Church.
If their calling to be active members of the Body of Christ binds
together these various American Catholics, another common experience
threatens to pull them apart. Like all Americans of religious
conviction, Catholics find their faith and morals put to the test by the
secular ethos of mainstream U. S. society—by its rampant materialism and
hedonistic lifestyles. Thus the ministers of the Church, priests and
laity alike, encounter not one but two major threats to Catholic
identity: the threat to unity posed by ethnic, generational, and class
diversity, and the threat to religious belief itself posed by a
consumerist society which has attained unprecedented affluence for some
but remains mired in moral and material poverty.
The Euro-American Catholics: A Tale of Three Generations
White middle and upper-middle class Catholics are "post-ethnic"
Americans, to borrow the historian David Hollinger's phrase. No longer
segregated into coherent subcultures, these Americans of Irish, German,
Italian, Polish, Lithuanian or other European descent have formed
multiple associations with one another and with non-Catholics in social
locations far removed from the traditional formative triangle of home,
church, and ethnic neighborhood. If the enclave has disappeared,
however, another set of boundaries and barriers has taken its place in
the widely differing religious sensibilities of the three adult
generations comprising these 40 million white American Catholics of
European descent.
Only a dwindling minority were formed by "the old Church"— the "church
militant" of the preconciliar era (1920-1960), with its supernaturalist
theology, liturgies and architecture saturated by the smells, sounds and
images of the sacred, and its burgeoning subculture sustained by the
thick associational and devotional bonds of the immigrant community.
These Catholics, fifty-five and older, came of age late in the immigrant
era. Unlike their children, they believe that the magisterium, not the
individual, is the supreme moral judge in matters of personal and sexual
morality such as abortion, homosexuality and birth control.
Approximately six of ten pre-Vatican II Catholics polled in a 1996
survey of Laity: American and Catholic said "the Church is important,"
whereas less than one-third of their children thought so. The older
generation attended Mass twice as frequently as did their children, and
were more familiar with Church teaching. In addition, a larger
proportion of preconciliar Catholics tended to think of the Roman
Catholic Church as the privileged or exclusive vehicle of salvation.
Catholics formed during the Vatican II era (1960-1980), by contrast,
were taught to think of themselves as "the People of God," a pilgrim
people sinful and flawed but redeemed in Christ and joined by other
peoples of different religious traditions in the journey of faith.
Change came most powerfully for this generation through the trickle-down
impact of the new theologies which emerged after the Council. In many
Catholic colleges and universities and seminaries Thomism was
supplemented or supplanted by narrative, feminist, liberationist and
other inductive theologies grounded in the communal and personal
experiences of the multicultural People of God. The pluralism of method
and persepctive which characterized postconciliar American Catholic
theology eventually made its way into the theology and religion courses
taught in Catholic high schools and Confraternity of Christian Doctrine
(CCD) programs. Lost to most American Catholics amidst these rapid
developments was the sense of belonging to a church whose unity was
based on an underlying theological and liturgical homogeneity. No longer
did the Tridentine Latin Mass and widespread popular devotion to the
Holy Father and the Blessed Virgin (both powerful symbols of the
universal church centered in Rome) provide even the illusion of
uniformity.
Indeed, the exercise of the Church's universal governance from Rome
allowed and even seemed to encourage expressions of the integrity and
(limited) autonomy of the national and local Catholic churches. These
churches, in turn, participated more fully in the "inculturation" of the
faith—the adaptation of Roman rites and understandings to local idioms,
indigenous cultural forms, languages and symbol-systems. Coinciding with
a new wave of immigrants who came to the United States from Latin
America and Asia, this process of inculturation and localization was
accelerated by the growing availability of the new experience-based
theologies and spiritualities. The result was the emergence of a U.S.
Catholicism more complexly catholic than ever.
New theologies and spiritualities were not the only developments
competing for the attention of the middle-class white Catholics born
between 1946 and 1962. As members of the Baby Boomer generation, they
enjoyed upward social mobility and access to public as well as Catholic
institutions of higher education. Taking their cues from their
professional colleagues, the marketplace, the law, the
health-and-recreation industry and other relatively autonomous zones of
public life, they made their own way, constructing their identities at a
greater distance from the institutional church than did their parents.
Adopting a deinstitutionalized and democratic view of the Church, Boomer
Catholics reserved the right to make up their own minds on religious and
moral as well as political and economic issues. The aforementioned 1996
sociological study reported that Boomers placed a higher priority on
being a good Christian than being a good Catholic and were more likely
than their parents' generation to disagree with the Church's teachings,
about which they were generally uninformed.
Less religiously literate than their parents, Boomer Catholics did a
poorer job in handing on the faith to their own children, the so-called
Generation X Catholics, who lack a recognizably Catholic moral and
religious vocabulary. In fairness to the millions of Boomer parents who
sought to keep the faith, they were trying to raise Catholic children at
a particularly difficult time in history for both Roman Catholics and
Americans. As the first generation of American Catholics to enjoy the
full benefits of cultural acceptability and economic prosperity, the
Boomers possessed the capacity to lose themselves in the seductions of a
"culture of narcissism" that took American fondness for "rugged
individualism" to solipsistic extremes. Some Boomer Catholics were
influenced by a personally expressive mode of religiosity, based in part
on a consumerist model, that encouraged Americans to create their own
spiritual identities by picking and choosing, mixing and matching items
from an eclectic menu of disembedded cultural practices and philosophies
that were advertised as "self-help" or "New Age" religion. The
sociologist Robert Bellah described this highly privatized style of
religion as "Sheila-ism." He borrowed the term from Sheila Larson, a
nurse who described her faith ("my own little voice") as a personal
construct, an amalgam of her own religious backgrounds, spiritual
experiences, and cultural preferences.
Those Boomer Catholics who turned instead to the institutional church
for guidance sometimes found priests and women religious preoccupied to
varying degrees with their own personal and professional problems. Not
least of these were the career and vocations crises provoked by the
wholesale rethinking of the Catholic priesthood and religious life that
actually preceded Vatican II but accelerated in its aftermath. The
Council charted new directions in Catholic self-understanding and in the
Church's relation to the world that were overwhelming in their
cumulative impact. The bishops, priests, nuns, and newly laicized
priests and religious of the conciliar era had little choice but to
focus their energies on the daunting challenge of comprehending "the new
Church" in order to reinvent their ministries around it.
It took many years, in fact, for "professional Catholics" to work out
the practical pastoral and institutional implications of Vatican II's
People of God ecclesiology, its dramatic development of Catholic social
teaching and defense of religious liberty, and its retrieval of
Scripture as a primary source of Catholic theology. What, for example,
were the limits of the Church's new openness to the sciences and secular
knowledge in general? How should the hierarchy respond to the Vatican
II-inspired call for a deeper involvement of the laity in the pastoral
ministries and public witness of the Church? Which of the proposed
liturgical reforms—and innovations— were to accompany the introduction
of the Novus Ordo Mass in the vernacular?
Reformers and would-be reformers of Catholic religious education did not
sit idly by while these and other fundamental questions were being
raised and debated. Inevitably, perhaps, the late sixties and seventies
was a time of experimentation in parochial school and CCD curricula.
With noble intentions but decidedly mixed results, textbook authors
attempted to wed traditional Catholic doctrine to Sheila-like borrowings
from pop psychology, secular values and non-Catholic religious precepts.
Adult education programs were overhauled, eventually for the better, but
not before years of hit-and-miss experimentation. At every level
fundamentals were ignored or subordinated to the instructor's
"interpretations" of Church history; these sometimes radical revisions
of the Catholic past were often drawn from the personal faith journey of
the instructor rather than from a more objective study of the subject.
Influential Catholic educators questioned the compatibility of
"education" and "formation," concepts which preconciliar Catholics had
understood to be intimately related. Some reformers downplayed
content—i.e., doctrine and morals— in favor of "independent" reasoning
and formation of conscience, while others attacked the very concept of
formation, preferring educational methods supposedly more in keeping
with inductive secular models of learning and with the new Catholic
emphasis on ecumenism.
The Catholic Culture Wars
While priests, women religious and laity were busy constructing and
inhabiting new religious and political identities and revising the
curricula and pedagogy of Catholic religious education, they did not
command the resources to battle the irreligious trends building in
American society during the last decades of the twentieth century. Nor
were they prepared to pass on to the younger generation a synthesis of
old and new Catholicisms, old and new Americas, that they themselves had
not yet achieved.
Instead, the social thinning of American Catholicism—the virtual
collapse of the old associational networks fostered by the immigrant
neighborhoods, devotional societies, ubiquitous parochial schools, and
family religious practices—was accompanied by a theological and
institutional de-centering of the faith. Symptomatic of the
fragmentation that followed was an ideological struggle that came to
resemble a Catholic version of America's "culture wars." The assortment
of professional interpreters and expositors of the faith—the religious,
the lay and clerical theologians, the public intellectuals of the
church, the catechists and directors of religious education—split into
"liberal" and "conservative" camps, with reforming movements of
spirituality and activism such as Call to Action, Womanchurch and Pax
Christi positioned on the left, and Cursillo, Catholics United for the
Faith, and Opus Dei, among others, occupying the right half of the
ideological map.
The disputes about the legacy of Vatican II that have colored the life
of the Church are mostly the concern of preconciliar Catholics and their
Boomer children. That these disputants and disputes seem increasingly
irrelevant to the coming generation seems not to lessen their capacity
to absorb the time and energies of Catholic publishers, educators,
diocesan administrators, pastors and parishioners.
Not all points along the spectrum are equally represented—or equally
vocal—in most post-ethnic parishes, colleges, and other Catholic
organizations. Ultra-conservative or traditionalist Catholics, who deem
the pastoral application of Vatican II a disaster, like to cite
authoritative (usually papal) teaching against their insufficiently
vigilant co-religionists. But most abandoned their parishes and migrated
to an "orthodox" parish, chapel, college or seminary after their
response to Sheila-ism—the restoration of the Tridentine Mass,
preconciliar devotional practices and traditional theology—failed to
appeal to more than a small minority of American Catholics.
Those who usually call themselves conservatives, by contrast, tend to
work within the parish, where some function as self-appointed guardians
of orthodoxy. Others join or support organizations such as the Catholic
Campaign for America, or the Catholic League for Civil and Religious
Rights, where they contest anti-Catholic and irreligious forces in
mainstream society. Conservative activists acknowledge the decline of
support for traditional religion in the larger culture, but they believe
that Catholics, if not entirely impervious, should rise above the
situation and provide leadership toward the moral regeneration of the
Church and nation. They feel a profound sense of regret, shading into
outrage, over certain postconciliar developments, including the rise in
moral relativism and fundamental theological illiteracy on the part of
significant segments of the laity; the blurring of the distinctive
features of religious identity, making it difficult to distinguish
Catholics from mainline Protestants in mutually useful ways; the flight
from ordained and religious life; and the weakening of the status and
authority of the institutional church.
Those who call themselves "progressives" or "liberals" expend their
energies on preserving and extending the reforms of Vatican II. Some
pastoral leaders and parishioners in this camp worry that the hierarchy,
with some notable exceptions, has been insufficiently attentive to the
pressing task of empowering lay leadership. The bishops, they charge,
have been slow to provide adequate financial and moral support to laity
seeking advanced degrees or other training in ministry. Progressives
tend to support or staff advocacy groups pursuing internal church
reform, such as Call to Action, Women's Ordination Conference, and
organizations dedicated to promoting the rights of homosexuals, retired
priests and other aggrieved minorities within the Church. They seek to
move the Church toward positions consistent with the spirit of the
Council as articulated by feminist, liberationist, and ecumenical
theologians in recent decades.
Progressive Catholics are also defined by their commitment to raising
parishioners' awareness of Catholic social teaching and increasing their
moral sensitivity to the concrete demands of justice. Activism on behalf
of the poor and the dispossessed is their forté. Some join or support
lobbying and policy organizations such as Network and Pax Christi; many
commit themselves to advocacy in pursuit of the elimination of racism,
human rights violations around the world and other forms of social
discrimination.
While the articulation of "liberal" and "conservative" perspectives may
have been a necessary and even healthy means of coming to terms with the
most important ecumenical council in four hundred years, the internal
disputes distracted some of the Church's best minds, thereby weakening
its public presence at a time when American society needed strong and
unified religious and moral leadership. No simple cause-effect
relationship explains these simultaneous developments: the advent of a
post-Christian America cannot be blamed on the intramural squabbling
that preoccupied Catholics and other Christians; nor, on the other hand,
can the turmoil of the American sixties, the disillusionment of the
seventies, and the hedonism of the eighties be held entirely accountable
for the dissension and divisions in the American church.
Future historians will address the question of cause and effect. For our
purposes it is the results of the simultaneous revolutions in Church and
society that matter. In this regard, the besetting preoccupation of
American Catholics as the new century dawns will not be the clash of
postconciliar visions of authority, lay involvement or women's rights in
the Church. Rather, the Church will be engaged by a far more profound
and disturbing crisis of belief and meaning. In light of the extent and
depth of this crisis, the attention given to "Catholic culture wars"
will come to be seen as an unaffordable luxury.
Beyond the Culture Wars, A Crisis of Meaning
By way of summary, let us consider the world which the upcoming
generation of Catholics is poised to inherit. For theists—for
believers—living at the end of the twentieth century, the secularization
process has reached an alarming stage. The operative agnosticism of the
majority of professional, corporate, artistic, and intellectual elites
in the United States has decisively penetrated mainstream media,
political, educational, and cultural institutions, and shaped popular
sensibilities to such a degree that American culture, while not
systematically or comprehensively hostile to religious faith,
nevertheless undermines its plausibility structures, erodes it ethical
foundations, and debases its public manifestations.
Contemporary popular American culture, driven by the secular media and
Madison Avenue, trivializes religion, commodifies the spiritual,
confuses accidents for substance, absorbs and flattens potentially
subversive ideologies, promotes a consumerist approach to traditions of
wisdom, glamorizes artifice, scorns self-denial, creates need and
exploits desire, celebrates superficiality, and courts violence.
Otherwise, it poses no serious threat to Christian faith.
This familiar litany of cultural complaints notwithstanding, I perceive
no conspiracy against religion by secular humanists or anyone else.
Rather, among too many Catholics there exists a widespread attitude of
indifference, whether inspired by convictions as to the irrelevance of
the Church or, among younger Catholics, by disillusionment with its
unfulfilled promises. Outrage at hypocrisy on the part Christianity's
supposed practitioners, surveys indicate, also has a powerful alienating
effect.
One result of the social thinning of American Catholicism has been a
lowering of the religious literacy of younger Catholics. Hastened,
ironically, by the extended period of experiments in religious
education, the dumbing down of Catholic Americans qua Catholics left the
generation born after the Council—people who are now in their teens,
twenties and thirties—groping for a way to integrate a Catholic
sensibility into their lives. That sensibility now must be achieved, in
other words; it can no longer be taken for granted.
Religious educator Thomas Beaudoin describes the anxieties of his
generation of Catholics, who constitute slightly more than one-fifth of
"Generation X," the 80 million Americans born between 1962 and 1982:
While we are a multicultural generation, racism still infects our
relationships. While we are a generation that has been generally open to
the equality of women, sexism still works subtly even among our most
intimate friends. While we are more progressive than any previous
American generation in accepting various sexual orientations, the roots
of homophobia still run deep, and run religious. We inherit
homelessness, illiteracy, spousal abuse, drug abuse, and a hypersexual
culture from our parents.
America's 13th generation, the most diverse yet, is approximately 70
percent white, 13 percent African American, 12 percent Hispanic, 4
percent Asian, and 1 percent Native American or other ethnicity. (Young
Catholics are somewhat more Hispanic-American and less African-American
than their generational cohort.)
The majority hails from a middle class background, and is the most
well-educated in American history, but it came of age in a time when
real wages were declining, despite the fact Americans worked an average
of one month more per year than they did in the sixties. Nearly one in
three college graduates of the nineties took a job that did not require
a college degree—up from 1 in 10 in the 1960s. In 1993 AIDS was the top
killer of young adults in 64 cities and five states. Every day of that
year twenty-five percent of all African American men in their 20s were
either in prison, on probation, or on parole; there were more than 2,500
divorces or separations; ninety children were taken from their parents'
custody and committed to foster homes; thirteen Americans aged 15 to 24
committed suicide and another 16 were murdered; 3,610 teenagers were
assaulted, 6,530 were robbed, and 80 were raped; 500 adolescents began
using illegal drugs and 1,000 took up drinking alcohol; 1,000 unwed
teenage girls became mothers and 2,200 kids dropped out of school. While
young Catholics accounted for a relatively small fraction of these
statistics, they were nonetheless shaped by the urban and suburban
environments which produced them.
In this milieu a crisis of religious meaning binds GenXers together. In
surveys conducted from 1990 to 1992 statistician George Barna found that
while 53 percent of Xers defined themselves as "religious," seventy
percent said that "absolute truth does not exist." Young Catholics are
less cynical, writes Beaudoin, but many join their generational cohort
in feeling alienated from their parents' world of affluence and
"modernity." They evince far less trust in reason and "progress," and
are skeptical of grand narratives which attempt to enfold within one
philosophical vision or worldview the diversity, competitiveness and
acquisitiveness, chaos and violence of the world they know.
More so than for their parents or grandparents, young Catholics'
religious sensibilities have been affected by morally unsettling trends
in the secular mainstream culture. The generation is coming to maturity,
Beaudoin explains, in a media-driven and cyberspace culture which trades
in images, symbols, and simulations. Radicalizing an insight inherited
from their Boomer parents, many young people suspect that the
constructed self is the only self. Almost half of the GenXers, Barna
found, "believe that the values and lifestyles shown in movies,
television programs, and music videos are an accurate, representative
depiction of the way Americans live and think these days."
The GenXers tend to ask not "What can I do for my church and my faith?"
or "What can it do for me?" but "Is there any discernible purpose to
this existence, to the madcap rush for material riches and 'success'?"
Whereas preconciliar Catholics and their Boomer offspring shared,
beneath their surface animosities and contrasting pieties, a simple
trust in the holiness and permanence of the Church (despite its manifest
temporal flaws) the generation coming to maturity today has not
internalized this assumption. From her perspective as a self-described
GenX Catholic, a thirty-something lawyer comments:
Catholics formed prior to and even during the Council seem to take for
granted that the Church has always been, is now, and forever shall be a
historical force, a relevant institution in American society, and of
course much more—the means of their salvation in Christ. Catholics of my
parents' and grandparents' generations feel this to the tips of their
fingers and toes, it's bred in their bones, they exude Catholicism and
speak unselfconsciously from its depths. There is such a
taken-for-grantedness about it all that is so foreign to me and my
peers. My generation is not asking, what should we do about the role of
women in the church? what about the creeping infallibility of the
papacy? They are asking: Is Richard Rorty right?
They are asking, that is, whether we must abandon the notion of an
objectively ordered universe and all claims to knowledge which appeal to
the authority of universal and abiding principles. In staking out his
position within the company of thinkers known as antifoundationalists,
Rorty, an influential philosopher at the University of Virginia, argues
that metaphysics has finally run its course. Modern science, he
concludes, has undermined the Cartesian claim that we find an
ineluctable truth and basis for certainty of knowledge by turning inward
and examining the process of thought itself. Accordingly, moral "truth"
remains merely subjective; neither religion nor morality has the
authority to imposes limits on the possible results of empirical
inquiry. Philosophy is, for Rorty, continuous and coterminous with
science. Thus the philosopher must abandon belief in "the mind" as an
independent and transcendent reality, just as he must abandon
"knowledge" as something about which one ought to have a "theory" and
which has "foundations."
In this way of thinking the quest for certitude and common first
principles is quixotic. It, too, must be abandoned in favor of an
open-ended dialogue in which hermeneutics (theories of interpretation)
are not a method for uncovering "the Truth" but a style of philosophy
that enables an ongoing exchange of views about what is meaningful in
individual lives, in disciplines and cultures. Rorty has described such
a dialogue as a "way of coping" with the realization that we no longer
sit atop a pyramid of knowledge built on rock-solid epistemic
foundations but, rather, are marooned on a raft tossed about by the
churning waters of history, context, and contingency, our goal being to
keep the fragile life preserver intact, presumably by constantly
chattering about it.
Imagine a generation, naive yet cynical, that inherits a world, the
ground in Being and transcendent meaning of which is denied by its most
influential interpreters. Imagine, also, the havoc antifoundationalism
visits on the Catholic orientation to reality by denying any
transcendental standpoint from which one can judge human belief and
behavior. Such skepticism undermines the plausibility of belief in the
existence of an Objective Moral Order—a phrase by which the Catholic
bishops have indicated that the Church's moral teaching is rooted not in
historically contingent philosophizing but in the very fabric of being.
Yet, for Rorty and the company of modern thinkers influenced by
antifoundationalism, the "Objective Moral Order" and other metaphysical
assertions have no place in public discourse because they cannot be
demonstrated empirically. Such notions, Rorty has written, are "a
religious conversation stopper."
How, then, is the Church to respond to an end-of-century nihilism that
finds voice not only in public philosophers' esoteric debates but in the
lyrics of the popular rock bands, in the current cinema, in the cynicism
of our political discourse and in our own unexamined personal attitudes?
In this milieu, is it really surprising to observe younger Catholics
raising to the level of operating principles the suspicion of authority
and tradition entertained by their skeptical and metaphysically
challenged but still believing Boomer parents?
The challenge for priests and ministers of the gospel in the current
era, then, is to re-contextualize Christian images, symbols and
doctrines for believers of all ages, thereby (re) initiating them into a
coherent and profound worldview and set of practices that serve
authentic human flourishing. Pastoral and intellectual leaders in
tomorrow's church must speak to the metaphysical doubts and superficial
samplings of Boomer and Buster Catholics alike. They must be
sophisticated evangelists to a Catholic diaspora. This is not a call to
abandon the fight for justice in the church and in the world; but it is
to remind priests and ministers in training that a new set of
fundamental educational and pastoral challenges await them. People want
to belong, but are shy of making commitments that would distract them
from other pursuits they mistakenly believe to be more life-enriching.
In our time it is not Spirituality that is in danger but Religiosity—the
spiritual life lived in communion and community with others. The
Catholic life imposes certain obligations on the individual—to observe
binding norms, practice shared disciplines of prayer and self-sacrifice
in service to others and meet the bracing demands of moral
transformation. Such challenges, the preparation for which have
perpetually defined the task of religious education and spiritual
formation, must be encountered in startling new ways by the assimilated
white middle-class Catholics.
On this point, at least, much the same could be said of the Hispanic
minority, which is projected to grow toward majority status in the next
century, and of Asian and African-American Catholics, whose attitudes
and sensibilities have been shaped not only by the dominant white
American culture but by their own distinctive ethnocultural traditions,
some of which remain strongly influential. These various groups are
assimilated to different degrees to the overarching American culture; in
that respect, their pastoral needs differ somewhat from those of
post-ethnic Catholics, who had blended decisively into the mainstream by
the 1960s. The rise of theologies of inculturation coincided with
heightened political self-awareness on the part of American minorities
and their growing sophistication in articulating and advancing their
claims to political—and pastoral—attention. During the decades following
Vatican II each of these religious subcultures sought to strike the
proper balance between developing its own distinctive theologies and
fostering distinctive Mexican-American, Korean-American,
Filipino-American, etc., communities, on the one hand, and seeking
greater fellowship and unity with segments of the broader Church, on the
other. Pastoral and intellectual leaders of the Hispanic communities,
for example, have been engaged in developing theologies that both
reflect and bridge the differences between the various Latino cultures.
While the requirements of inculturation remain strong in these precincts
of the U. S. church, Hispanic, Asian and African-Americans have the same
basic pastoral needs—for catechesis, religious education, moral
formation, sacramental presence, and so on—as do the post-ethnic white
Americans. Nor is the crisis of meaning restricted to any one group. The
homogenizing effect of the media and the marketplace is far-reaching,
penetrating Hispanic and Asian enclaves in large urban centers such as
Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York. How shall Hispanic and Asian
Catholic subcultures resist the secularizing forces of the dominant
culture in the United States? How will these subcultures become
integrated more fully into one religious body in the years ahead? As a
multicultural, multiethnic community seeking to fend off the spiritual
side-effects of living alongside a "culture of disbelief," the American
Catholic Church must locate and solidify the "common ground" underlying
Hispanic, Asian, African, and European theologies, religious
experiences, liturgical forms, and ideologies. Priests and ministers
must be visible signs of unity, reaching out to incoporate a variety of
Catholic styles and sensibilities.
Lest the picture painted here become unjustifiably bleak, it is
important to acknowledge that historians might judge the turn of the
twentieth century to be the passage to a renewed U.S. Catholicism. The
extraordinary accomplishments of the postconciliar American church give
rise to such expectations. These accomplishments include the
consolidation of a century of institutional growth which has seen the
church become the nation's largest non-public provider of education and
health care; the gains made in ecumenical relations and, more
profoundly, the vastly improved attitudes toward "non-Catholics"; the
development of a broad range of dynamic lay ministries at the parish
level; and the articulation of a clearly defined set of principles by
which Americans might pursue "the common good," at the center of which
is a consistent ethic of life. American Catholics are better educated
than at any time in the past, and at the dawn of the twenty-first
century there are more laity studying for advanced degrees in theology
and ministry than ever before in the history of Roman Catholicism.
The Church remains remarkably active in service to its members and to
Americans beyond its faith community. Perusing the index of Origins, the
weekly publication of representative documents and speeches compiled by
the Catholic News Service, one is overwhelmed by the initiatives taken
at the national, diocesan, and parish levels in 1994-'95. Perusing only
the letters A through C, one notes the impressive range of Catholic
service to Church and society: providing alternatives to abortion;
staffing adoption agencies; conducting adult education courses;
addressing African-American Catholics' pastoral needs; funding programs
to prevent alcohol abuse; implementing a new policy on altar servers and
guidelines for the Anointing of the Sick; lobbying for arms control;
eliminating asbestos in public housing; supporting the activities of the
Association of Catholic Colleges and Universities (227 strong);
challenging atheism in American society; establishing base communities
(a.k.a. small faith communities); providing aid to war victims in
Bosnia; conducting Catholic research in bioethics; publicizing the new
Catechism of the Catholic Church; battling child abuse; strengthening
the relationship between church and labor unions; deepening the
structures and expressions of collegiality in the local and diocesan
church.
These items merely suggest the direction of Catholic energies in the
1990s. They do not include, for example, Catholic Charities' extensive
network of 1,400 charitable agencies serving 18 million people; the
Catholic Health Association's 600 hospitals and 300 long-term care
facilities serving 20 million people; or the Campaign for Human
Development's efforts to organize and empower the poor, with 200 local
antipoverty groups working to improve policies, practices and laws
affecting low-income individuals.
This chronicle of Catholic engagement tells only part of the story,
however, masking concerns about the gradual depletion of the resources
and personnel needed to maintain these programs and their Catholic
identity. The shortage of priests and women religious, the graying of
the leadership of Catholic agencies and institutions, and the apathy of
sizeable sectors of the laity are among the obstacles in the road ahead.
Only a small percentage of the Catholic population actually participates
in or contributes to the range of services and pastoral initiatives
celebrated in the Origins catalogue of activities. By other markers as
well, increasing numbers of lay Catholics seem detached from the central
beliefs, religious practices, and everyday ministries of their church.
Less than one-third of the U. S. Catholic population regularly attended
weekly mass during the nineties. A 1993 Gallup poll found that, of those
who did, only 30 percent believed they were actually receiving the body
and blood of Christ in the eucharist; and only 21 percent under the age
of fifty so believed. Meanwhile one-fourth of Catholics agreed that
Christ becomes present in the bread and wine only if the recipient
believes this to be so. One need not be a stickler for orthodoxy to be
alarmed by such attitudes toward the doctrine of the real presence of
Christ in the eucharist—the central affirmation of the worshipping
Catholic community. To describe the situation as a catechetical crisis
seems warranted.
The enormous untapped financial, personal and intellectual resources of
the laity prompts soul-searching. Is the poor record of resource
mobilization attributable to a lack of generosity on the part of most
baptized Catholics? Given the prodigious record of lay support of
Catholic schools and hospitals, this seems a difficult case to make. Do
pastoral leaders possess the self-confidence necessary to welcome a
diversity of gifts from the laity—including vigorous leadership at the
parish and diocesan levels? Some commentators have suggested that lay
Catholics, especially the significant portion with advanced degrees,
want the Church to become more open to lay participation in
decision-making. Others complain that some pastors' attitudes or
personal styles lend credibility to charges of an inherent sexism in the
Church. Is preaching inspired, liturgy welcoming, spiritual guidance
available? Among the newer immigrant groups, are pastoral leaders
sufficiently attentive to linguistic and other ethnic particularities in
worship and education?
A snapshot of the American church at the dawn of the new millennium
offers a mixed picture. On the one hand, the broad range of pastoral
ministries and social action programs involve informed, dedicated and
faithful Catholics in almost every aspect of society. The Catholic
culture wars notwithstanding, Catholic institutions follow a clearly
defined set of principles by which to pursue the common good. Since the
Council the American bishops have produced a striking series of pastoral
letters, acclaimed not only by Catholic intellectuals working in
universities and the media, but also by influential segments of the
non-Catholic elite in the United States. In its pastoral life, moreover,
the U.S. church embodies compassion, sustains a gentle sense of irony,
and offers a remarkable witness to the possibilities of holiness in
everyday life. Priests, sisters, and lay ministers serving the parishes
continue to baptize, confirm, educate and be educated by a bewildering
variety of American Catholics drawn from dozens of racial and ethnic
backgrounds. Most remarkable, perhaps, they balance loyalty to a
universal church and its pontiff, who is not daily ministering to the
North American cultural environment, with the demands of a lay
population often unrealistic in its expectations of the clergy, or
merely indifferent, distracted by a culture of self-absorption.
On the other hand, one finds a thin layer of dedicated but aging
professionals at the pinnacle of the Catholic organizational pyramid,
priests overworked to the point of exhaustion, and thus an increasingly
unstable base of operations. The Church is relatively ineffective in
mobilizing resources not only politically and socially, but pastorally
and ecclesially. If the challenges to belief and meaning posed by
American society are to be met, Catholic leaders must develop new
strategies for capturing the religious imagination of the faithful and
enlisting them in the Church's work.
The local church remains the great strength of American Catholicism.
Most parishes have a non-ideological core of gifted and dedicated
pastoral and lay leaders who staff an array of programs and activities
that appeal to the various generational and cultural sensibilities
sketched above. Despite splintering of some Catholics into entrenched
ideological camps of "left" and "right," most conservatives and
progressives co-exist rather peaceably within a broad "middle"
encompassing the vast majority of active parishioners. Through their
scriptural, sacramental, educational and pastoral offerings, the most
successful parishes sustain a coherent religious culture—a "world" whose
imagery and symbols bespeak a real (not merely superficial or simulated)
presence of the sacred.
Thus U.S. Catholics have come full circle. Like their co-religionists of
the early American republic, today's Catholics live in a society that
puts their Christian faith to the test on a daily basis, yet they
continue to build and sustain vital communities of shared faith and
common purpose. They do so, increasingly, in the absence of the tight
ethnoreligious enclaves and material interdependence that characterized
the immigrant church. At its best the contemporary parish provides the
space for re-ordering priorities, recommiting oneself to the service of
others, re-integrating partial truths within a comprehensive system of
belief and moral purpose, and rejecting the moral vacuities of American
consumerism, racism, and classism.
If the Church is to flourish in the twenty-first century, a new
generation of priests and lay ministers must emerge to renew the
foundations of Catholic belief and practice. Their work will be
fundamental in that they can no longer take for granted a measure of
religious literacy among those Catholics who do not participate in
formative Catholic institutions, the parish foremost among them.
Depending on one's attitude toward hard work against daunting odds,
serving the People of God as a priest or lay minister in such times will
be either an exhilirating opportunity or an excruciatingly difficult
calling. Recent history suggests that it will be a full measure of both
experiences.
