Spiritual Modesty

The genesis of this entry goes all the way back to some time around 1970, when a middle-aged priest of my acquaintance went off to make his annual retreat at some place far away and exotic, foreign and outré, somewhwere, as we used to say, “west of Dedham.” As soon as he came back it was clear to everyone who knew him that whatever had happened on that retreat had been a transformative experience. He took to wearing jeans and a cowboy hat and to pronouncing the name of Jesus as though it had three syllables: “Je-yeez-us.”

He had also developed the need to “testify,” as he called it, to all the wonderful things this Person whose name had just picked up an extra syllable was doing in his life. He punctuated this stream of highly personal testimony with hearty “thank you’s.” This was a man who had been celebrating Mass, the great “thank you” of the Church, every day for at least twenty years. But somehow that was no longer quite adequate. His personal gratitude and the gratitude of the Church had parted company and could no longer be expressed in the same act, unaccompanied by the intimate details of the reasons for his gratitude. I could hardly bear to be in his company.

My adverse reaction to his enthusiasm (in the sense close to that of the word as used in Ronald Knox’s book title) led me to question why I was so uncomfortable with the novel turn in this man’s behavior. Was it simply that I had not experienced a similar “conversion’ — that I had somehow never welcomed Him-of-the-Three-Syllabled-Name into my life as my very own personal savior? Was it perhaps just a cultural thing, that I merely felt the typical north-easterner’s loathing for the “Country-and-Western” style? What I realized in the course of my self-examination was that a certain attitude toward openly and publicly manifesting the state of my soul and its relationship to God had been instilled in me by my mother, a Quebecoise with a slight tinge of Jansenism in her religiosity. This attitude she called “spiritual modesty.”

But this attitude was not just a peculiarity of hers or of the Grand Seminaire training of her spiritual mentors. My childhood pastor and confessor spoke of it, as did two of my later spiritual directors (both Irish-Americans and so perhaps also not unaffected by the same heresy). Indeed, the principle of “spiritual modesty” seemed very much in keeping with the spirit of the liturgy and the tone of the kind of piety nourished on it. Growing up Catholic, I had taken these qualities for granted. Challenged with the display of their opposites by my priest-friend in the cowboy hat, I began to reflect on them explicitly and to appreciate them anew, and in the course of this reflection, I reached some conclusions.

The first was that Jesus can be my personal savior only because he is the Christ, the Savior of the World. It is only the absolute objectivity of this truth which is able, so to speak, to guarantee the genuinity of my personal experience of a relationship with Him. The second conclusion follows: that although the details of this relationship are of immense importance to me and, I dare say, to Him as well, in some mysterious way that passes understanding and is accessible only to faith, it is of importance to others only in so far as it is the wellspring of my attitudes and actions toward them. Which leads me to my third conclusion, namely, that words are cheap, but actions, especially habitual actions, are not. They are a way of spending, and so of expending, our present finite lives. They cost us, in the end, everything, and this cost is woven as a thread into the objective order of the universe.

Our acts, once performed, are unalterable and make a permanent difference both to us and to the world. But the difference they make to us can only be expressed in a limited and imperfect way and is, ultimately, of little importance; it is the difference they make to the world that matters. The emotional restraint and objectivity of liturgical prayer seem to reinforce and affirm these truths in the midst of a culture in which every little individual is constantly being tempted to act as though he himself is of primary and ultimate importance. The liturgy reminds us that our individual significance, a reality whose greatness we ourselves cannot begin to estimate, is derived from our having been created and redeemed and sanctified by God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

It is in the light of this realization that “spiritual modesty,” a kind of habitual reticence about the details of one’s own personal relation to this mystery, seems a virtue indeed.

Americanismus Redivivus

Depending upon the sources you consult and your own ideological proclivities, “Americanism” was either a dangerous heretical tendency among certain members of the hierarchy and clergy of late 19th-century Church in the United States or a figment of the overheated imaginations of certain reactionary European ecclesiasts. In any case, once Leo XIII had been persuaded enough of its reality to issue Testem Benevolentiae Nostrae in January, 1899, whatever of such a movement had actually ever existed disappeared deep underground, and American Catholicism was already on the way to earning its mid-century reputation for unswerving loyalty to the Papacy and unquestionable orthodoxy in doctrine.

But quite apart from the historical status of any movement espousing the tendencies and ideas condemned in the 1899 encyclical, the underlying fear that American Catholics might allow certain premises of their secular culture eventually to infiltrate their understanding of their religion has proven, in the long run, not to have been entirely baseless. Much of the American way of attempting to implement the decrees of the Second Vatican Council seems best explained by the resurfacing of a “Americanist” vein in this country’s Catholicism. It was as though, after the strain of a long-sustained effort to maintain attitudes in religious matters which were becoming increasingly foreign to our other habits of mind and heart as fully assimilated Americans, the promulgation of the council's decrees finally allowed us to relax into our native and more natural modes of thought and behavior.

A survey of self-identified Catholics undertaken three years ago on behalf of the Boston Globe, though methodologically flawed, as the Catholic Action League’s C. J. Doyle has pointed out, nonetheless squares with what I have found in my own conversations with “cradle Catholics” in the same area of the country in which the survey was conducted. To quote from the League’s own refutation of the study:

That survey reported that overwhelming majorities of Catholics in the Archdiocese of Boston reject Catholic teaching on abortion, contraception, and homosexual sodomy, and favor the ordination of women, married men, and homosexuals to the priesthood. It also claims that 39% of Catholics want a schismatic American Church.

This is the current list of public opinion preferences, presumed by the sponsors of the survey to constitute an ecclesiastical vox pop, usually refered to as the sensus fidelium by those anxious to throw over it some veil of theological legitimacy. To the secular media, the hierarchy's unwillingness to accede to these preferences is yet another sign of how "out of touch" it is with the people in the pews, although there is a good deal of evidence that many of those who self-identify as Catholics and yet hold these opinions have long ago deserted the pews.

It is the notion that the opinions and "beliefs" of such people should somehow be normative for the Church that smacks of the kind of "Americanism" condemned a little over a century ago. Underlying this notion are two typically American, but not typically Catholic, assumptions: first, that all legitimate authority is derived from the consent of the governed, so that "policies" (and it is significant how often Church doctrines are so called in the media) should reflect the current opinions of those over whom authority is exercised; second, that moral progress is just as inevitable as material progress, and that the American people are at the sprearhead of such progress. (A good deal of United States foreign policy seems, at the moment, to be premised on the latter assumption.)

"Americanism" in this sense may or may not have been a widespread problem among Catholics in this country around 1899. There can be no doubting that it is a widespread problem here and now.

Heading Down the Old Schism Trail

In an earlier blog entry I expressed my belief that the Catholic Church in the United States is likely to face increasing harrassment from the media, hostile interest groups and organizations, and eventually government, at least at the state level, which could in time even amount to what might be characterized as a mild persecution. A good deal of this is likely to be led by persons who were once Catholics themselves and now feel, for various reasons, angry and hostile toward the institution whose teachings they have come to reject. But the Church in this country should perhaps also steel itself against a second, distinct though related threat: a formal schismatic movement on the part of people who will maintain that they are still faithful Catholics — indeed, that they represent "true" American Catholicism.

I am inclined to agree with those who have maintained over the last few years that there is already a de facto schism in the Church in this country, but one which has been resisting the temptation to formalize itself and even refutes any attempt to point out that it exists. This informal schism that dare not speak its name, often flying the false flag of "fidelity to the spirit of Vatican II," is centered in the groups belonging to the coalition called "Catholic Organizations for Renewal." Whether in fact this "coalition" consists of anything more than a Web site full of links, some of them dead, is not at all evident; but the organizations listed, including both US and Canadian branches of Frances Kissling's "Catholics for a Free Choice," — a rogues' gallery indeed! — pretty much define the contours and the content of the general movement I have in mind.

Over the last several months, even in the secular press, there have been ever more frequent references (most recently in connection with the gay adoption flap) about the possibility of "catholic" institutions or agencies without the capital "C," or about the fact that "American Catholics" are not just Catholic Americans, but rather constitute a special breed, apart from and to a great extent opposed to "Roman" Catholics, that is, those who remain loyal to such distant, oblivious, anachronistic, and irrelevant figures as the Pope and his power-hungry (indeed, probably crypto-fascist) Vatican. I wish that what I have just written were a caricature, but I am afraid that it is not.

Now comes Robert Blair Kaiser, who began his career as a Jesuit scholastic with a somewhat different name, then left the Society and changed his handle at around the time he became Time magazine's man in Rome for the Second Vatican Council. In this capacity, Kaiser was, perhaps, after the pseudonymous "Xavier Rynne," the person most responsible for the popular impression of the Second Vatican Council as a titanic political struggle for control of the Church between "Liberals" (cheers) and "Conservatives" (boos). Presently he seems to be making a rather desperate bid to re-launch himself yet again as the catalyst for the formation of something he describes as an "autochthonous" Catholic church in America. (The term "autochthonous" is derived from Greek roots meaning "pertaining to or derived from one's own soil; indigenous, native.") Or perhaps he is really only trying to flog his recently (14 March 2006) published book, A Church in Search of Itself: Benedict XVI and the Battle for the Future (Knopf, $25.950).

That title gives away the general tone of what is going on here, which is an extension of the "good guys vs. bad guys" version of church politics which he helped to establish as a cliché forty years ago. It would be easy to dismiss it as dated and almost silly except that it has gained wide popular currency and is supported by a certain number of people (whose names Kaiser loves to drop) who are taken for intelligent and inflential. Hence, I am afraid that the sort of thinking that Kaiser's notions represent may have very serious implications for the future of the Church in the United States and for the unity of the Church universal. (Anyone inclined to doubt this might perhaps check out the text of an e-mail that Kaiser posted this March 27 to a Yahoo group he had formed for ex-Jesuits in 2002.)

What Kaiser seems to be promoting under cover of the word "autochthonous" is an American branch of the Catholic Church remodeled along the lines suggested by the constitutional forms and prevalent cultural norms of the United States and whose relation to the See of Rome would be analogous to that of the Eastern Rites, which are also sometimes described as "autochthonous" churches (although I think the term is much more usually applied to those larger, parallel religious bodies not in communion with Rome). This notion reflects an increasingly common idea among Catholic Americans that what is wrong with the universal Church is that it is not sufficiently in harmony with contemporary American values, attitudes, and ways of doing things. This, it seems to me, is a sure-fire formula for schism. (Those with firm faith, steady nerves, and a nagging curiosity about what Kaiser and his associates are really up to might want to take a look at this Web site they have recently put up.)

Indeed, what Kaiser seems blithely to overlook is that most of these historically "autochthonous" churches were rooted in ancient, geographically distant and genetically distinct cultures and that for a long time they fell out of touch with one another and out of communion with Rome. In fact, the present Eastern Rites of the Catholic Church are for the most part minority groups from within these ancient Churches which at various times and for various reasons once again acknowledged the primacy of the Bishop of Rome, while at the same time the majorities in their ecclesial communities remained separated, often bitterly so. Thus, the actual history of "autochthonous" churches, from the perspective of Church unity, is not a happy one.

But the idea that the "American Catholic Church" has become so significantly different from the "Roman Catholic" — and potentially so superior to it in its modernity of thought and degree of popular appeal — that it could and should rightfully claim a kind of special autonomy has become widespread, it seems to me, at least in those parts of this country where the bulk of the Catholic population is thoroughly Americanized. It has certainly emerged with increasing frequency in my own private conversations with "cradle" Catholics in the northeastern United States. It often takes the form of assuming that the fundamental political principles enshrined in America's founding documents are so self-evident and axiomatic that they must always trump the doctrines and practices of the universal Church in situations of apparent conflict. This is another way of saying that these people are now more certain of their political convictions than of their religious beliefs.

At the moment the conflict of this sort most frequently cited is that between popular notions of the equality of the sexes and the Church's insistence that it cannot ordain women to Holy Orders. But usually discussion of this or other disharmonies between "American" and "Catholic" principles leads quickly to the question of the hierarchical structure of the Church. (The newly annointed King James I dimly perceived the problem when, explaining why he had no intention of introducing his Scottish presbyterian church policy into England, he uttered the famous maxim, "No bishop, no king." I wonder if he realized that it also perhaps works the other way around: No king, no bishop.) What is at stake, ultimately, in the very nature of the sacramental institution/community which Christ left behind him as the ordinary means of salvation.

[More on this topic next week.]