Despite the humorous pseudonym in the title, I do not write this review of everybody’s favorite scapegoat, the Roman Catholic Church, to mock it. No, the criticisms of Catholic theology and practice are old news- very old news- and I have no desire to pile on more ridicule or scorn.
I would put it like this: C.S. Lewis famously wrote in Mere Christianity how the essential doctrines of the Christian faith, i.e. the deity of Jesus Christ, the salvation of souls through the death and resurrection of Christ, and the one God being a trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, were the foundation of the metaphorical building of the Church, capital C, and each room within the universal Church was occupied by one tradition/denomination of church, small c, with its own practices and statement of beliefs based on the foundation. I would put the problems of church congregations and traditions, small c, like this, that they are patients in a hospice, and while the Roman Catholic Church is afflicted with a terminal cancer, it would be a great mistake for the other traditions, or hospice patients, to ignore their own tumor or tuberculosis in favor of condemning or “evangelizing” the deathbed Catholics. Physician, heal yourself.
From Isaiah: “The whole head is sick, and the whole heart faint. From the sole of the foot even unto the head there is no soundness in it; but wounds, and bruises, and putrefying sores: they have not been closed, neither bound up, neither mollified with ointment.” This is a word for the modern church. Actually, the modern church needs to prove that it is “church”- big or small c- in the first place. When I survey the congregations and churches today as they are, not as they claim to be, I am not convinced they deserve the name.
But, the situation being what it is, anyone claiming to be a Christian and part of that one Church universal, like me, is inevitably familiar with and following some type of church tradition. And other religious belief traditions, like Roman Catholicism, while loathed in thought, will inevitably interact with one’s own in reality- sometimes in the surprising forms of friendship and alliance. (While some apologists might insist that all Christians are part of one faith in Jesus Christ, “loathe” is a strong word and we don’t loathe any doctrine or person, and that we cannot exclude any Christian or tradition, according to 1 Corinthians, I defy them to give up their own ways and attend Catholic mass and catechism, which teach that the Church of Rome is THE true Church, capital T-H-E and C, or the one metaphorical building which contains rooms for Roman Catholics only. If a Christian does not believe this, will not be a faithful member of a Catholic church, it must be concluded that they loathe this tradition, even if they want to be nice in person.)
So, when Catholics have been in the media’s cross-hairs in recent years, and when they have been used as a byword by every crank looking to deride quote-unquote “religion,” I have been surprised to feel a strange affinity to the Catholic Church. I say strange because I openly loathe the man-made, false traditions of the Catholic Church and I am descended from a line of Lutherans who lived in small Iowa towns where they and the Catholics did not mix.
Growing up, I was jumping out of my skin during confirmation classes when discussing the abuses of the Reformation-era Catholic Church and observing how many people still followed the fossilized beliefs in the pope and inexplicable church laws and hierarchy. But although I was filled with outrage toward the Roman Church, my personal social circle seemed to gravitate towards Catholic friends. And although I attended a Lutheran church every Sunday and Wednesday, I had no real personal ties with the people who should have seemingly been my spiritual community. As the years went on, I noticed that even though the doctrine and terminology of Catholics were bizarre beyond belief to me, their charitable outreach and their public reproach by way of popular media and culture had me taking their side in the ideological divide between them and their secular, progressive taunters. Of course, this is not an endorsement of Catholic belief, practice, or the widespread wickedness of child abuse. I will always protest the Roman Catholic Church for that. This is only an admission of my surprising alliance with a religious group I had assumed would be my mortal enemy.
I quit myself like a man one St. Patrick’s Day weekend and boldly ventured into a local Catholic Church that will be easily distinguished by any Cedar Valley Catholics. I will go ahead and try to obscure the congregation through a pseudonym and by calling the refugee portion of the congregation I refer to as simply immigrants from a southeast Asian nation. It will keep the congregation anonymous to anyone outside the know. My points will still be valid to anyone interested. And those points are not meant to hammer away at the same old problems that everyone has already complained about the Catholic Church, or if a Catholic not lapsed, decided to ignore and accept. I aim to sharply define the problems of institution and culture, gleaned from the crisis in Catholicism, that are relevant to all American Christians, to all patients in the hospice.
Read on:
The people at St. Agnant Catholic Church were sitting separately in two obvious groups. Some wore dress shirts and pants, many were in jeans and sneakers- and most people wore coats or jackets draped over their shoulders because of the unseasonably cold weather that morning. But one block of pews wore clothing that looked like it was bought new from a store, and their hair was mostly light-colored and trimmed in typical middle-American styles. The opposite block of congregants wore brightly mismatched clothes that looked like they had been passed from one person’s closet to a secondhand shop or aid agency to their new, badly-fitted owners. And the pure black hair of the 100-150 Asian immigrants at the Mass, left to grow in long strands or buzzed into a stiff-looking bush growing around their head, on top of their obvious umber-colored skin, clearly demarcated these newcomers from the longtime, white residents with Irish and German backgrounds.
The white congregants, the lifelong Catholics, had come to do their duty. When it was time to respond to the priest, they were mouthing the words with their lips before they had thought them out, bowing at the name of Mary, crossing themselves in unison, and anticipating the time to kneel by pulling down the kneelers four responses prior to the liturgy. I half-expected them to pull out time cards from their jackets so they could punch them on their way out of the sanctuary. They had their parts rehearsed.
The time for Roman Catholic evangelizing is surely over, I thought, no one born and raised outside the rituals and family culture of the Catholic Church could find any appeal in the regimented, arcane traditions. They would be impossible to translate to someone from outside their cultural sphere, and a neophyte would find a long, awkward road of integration in front of him. To persuade someone whose parents weren’t Catholic that the baffling, fossilized traditions and ritual are God’s pure, revealed truth would require unimaginable charisma.
The white congregants repeated their lines without inflection, as a rote repetition to fulfill the burden of their conscience- instructed by the expansive vocabulary, hierarchy, and laws of the Roman Church- or possibly in a devout conceit that these rituals were the genuine article, the God-pleasing service of the faithful. The artwork of the building’s architecture, stained glass, and statuary were more impressive than any other sacred space I have seen in Iowa, yet the spirit of the people’s words and actions had the life of a deflated balloon. The head of this institution used to excommunicate emperors and wage wars. Now its local assemblies couldn’t hope to even stir a person in the pews from his sleepy, mechanical daze.
When it came time for the sermon, a thin, tired priest, who looked like he would rather be thumbing through a periodical alone in his study, quietly and carefully stepped forward to the pulpit. He meekly apologized before his sermon, for its brevity. After reading the account of the woman caught in adultery in St. John’s Gospel, he remarked that some commentators had said perhaps Jesus, when He was writing on the ground as the woman’s accusers questioned Him about stoning her, was writing an account of sins for every man in the crowd. That would be quite a lot of writing, I imagined, even if the accounts were limited only to adulterous sins; an implausible amount of writing for that window of time, and an implausible amount of dirt on the ground to write on. But, I also thought, it is all conjecture. Say on, preacher.
He did not. His commentary on the day’s Scripture abruptly ended there, and he began musing on his recollections of the Catholic congregations of Iowa. As expected, he talked about the history of Dubuque and its Catholic immigrants- how at one point there were two large church buildings built because the Germans did not want to worship with the Irish Catholics. Those were different times, he supposed aloud with a tentative smile. This description was his speech’s humorous anecdote.
After that, he transitioned to the present, where the Asian refugees have joined together with the second and third generation members of the congregation. The existing congregation welcomed them, he said, and apologetically he pointed to the immigrants’ zeal for their faith as “an example to us,” speaking of those American-born church-goers who had been checking in to obligatory weekly services, dabbing the holy water, performing their parts in the liturgy, blessing the Virgin full of grace, and shuffling out after the last hymn without so much as a handshake for such a long time that they had no spirit for it anymore. They still maintained the traditions of their post-Vatican II fathers, yet they lacked the original impetus of their long forgotten post-St. Patrick fathers.
It was not surprising that the contrast between the old congregation members and the new, the refugees, was not a mere matter of skin tone, hair styles, and clothing. It was between a refugee people who had banded together around the name of Jesus Christ and, alas, the traditions of the Church of Rome, and a people who had grown weary and passive, unable to defend themselves from the insidious inundation of a secular American culture that increasingly despises them and their faith. The Asian refugees sang their native language hymns with conviction. The Iowans sang theirs out of nostalgia. One voice proclaimed the verses loudly, the other voice sounded like a halfhearted apology.
His brief discourse ended- suddenly, as promised- the priest invited to the pulpit the leader of the immigrant community to translate. As he spoke in sounds completely unintelligible to me, I wondered what he might be saying, pitying him if he were trying to make a point-by-point translation of the priest’s wavering remarks on Iowa Catholics in the Dubuque of yesteryear. Surely, his Asian hearers would then assume he had it wrong; no way would that white priest present some unprepared notes as his sermon. He is supposed to be our link to the Holy Father, the one who presents Church teaching as we ought to believe.
I have no idea what the immigrant minister said, and none of the English speakers could check him. So I hope he preached his own sermon, making an appeal to his people and telling them, “We have jobs now and homes, yes, and praise be to God for His deliverance and blessing, but look at the American people who have been walking this path of comfort and conformity before us, and ask yourselves if this is what we want. Our children can grow up with all the food they want, all the Pepsi they can drink, in heated homes with computers and smart phones and televisions, and yet the result, what we see before us in the people who have lived off the fat of this land for generations, is a tired and anemic faith.
“Beware that it is not we who are influenced by the ways around us, rather than those around us being influenced by the light they see in us. We might come to learn why it is that this church’s narthex is filled with pamphlets addressed to lapsed Catholics, and soon feel the fear of God replaced by the numbness of ritual, a hopeless effort against the dark tides of culture.
“Do not tell yourselves that we refugees have reached our safe shore. No, not yet. While on the waters, we must always choose and adjust our tack.”
The service closed with the singing of the St. Patrick’s Day classic, Danny Boy. It was sweet and sorrowful, and at the conclusion the people gladly applauded with a short round of light clapping. Then the church emptied- in one motion, as quick and procedural as every other movement of the liturgy.
I stayed after, sitting in a pew to observe the stained glass, the magnificent altar statues, and the relief statues of the fourteen Stations of the Cross. As I observed, a Sunday school teacher, with the best of intentions, explained in simple English to three maturing immigrant girls the meaning of the figures and symbols in the grand stained-glass windows. There was a sense in her words of instruction that, in this decoration and in these conventions, we could find our connection to God. Her voice, in tone and phrasing, was full of niceties. This is it, she seemed to convey, our faith and our worship. The way it is supposed to be.
Spoken through a smile that attempted happiness, meaning to sway the young to this viewpoint and accept the trappings of the church as institution, the high church tradition of Rome, her words sounded hesitant, their feeling echoed in the now empty sanctuary.
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