Wednesday, August 04, 2010

How Times Have Changed!

Four years or so ago, when I established this blog and briefly continued to write for it, the most significant threats to the well-being and unity of the Catholic Church in the United States seemed to be coming from people who had misinterpreted the Second Vatican Council as permitting them, if not indeed encouraging them, to adapt the cultural style and teachings of the Church to the norms of American culture. This "inculturation" meant, in effect, a movement to Protestantize and even to some extent to secularize American Catholics' ways of belief and practice. The powerful appeal of this project to many American Catholics came mainly from two sources: (1) a deeply rooted sense of the superiority of "the American Way of Life," including the principles of the U. S. Constitution, over all others; (2) a misguided notion that loyalty to the Church in the wake of the Council meant a wholesale abandonment of old ways and an unquestioning adoption of the new.
In the absence of a clear idea of what was "reformable" in the Church and what was not, everything could seem equally up for grabs. If one was no longer obliged to abstain from eating meat on Fridays, then why bother any longer to go to Confession on Saturdays, which had always been even more of a drag? Furthermore, if aggiornamento meant that any given facet of the Church's life could be "updated," then why not change or eliminate those things about the Church which made her seem most foreign because they had no spontaneous appeal to American cultural sensibilities?
The almost instantaneous emergence of the "folk Mass" in the mid-to-late sixties and the continuation of the trend that it set even up to the present in many American parishes illustrates well the effect of the two influences mentioned above. Ironically, as I remember it, some of the earliest and most enthusiastic proponents of the "folk" approach to liturgical music had not too long before been among those most devoted to the cultivation of Gregorian Chant. The reason was that the chant had been important to the reform-minded liturgists in the decades leading up to the Council; many of the same people after the council, strongly under the influence both of its "pastoral" emphasis and of the contemporaneous burgeoning of a "folk" music associated with the promotion of social justice and resistance to the Vietnam War, found almost irresistible a new style of music which appealed to young people even as it expressed strong moral commitments on issues such as civil rights and peace.
In any case, the real threat to the Church in America seemed to me four years ago to be coming from groups like "Call to Action" and ideas like Robert Blair Kaiser's notion of an American "autochthonous church." Then, through various random circumstances, I started paying more attention to the opposite side of the spectrum of ecclesial opinion -- the so-called "conservative" side. And what I found there seemed, as time went by, just as extreme, just as mistaken, and just as alarming. In fact, it appeared to me that as the tactics and rhetoric of the American political Right became increasingly unrestrained by standards of truthfulness and fairness, so too did those of the ecclesiastical Right (involving, in many cases, the very same people).
There has even developed within the Church a rough equivalent of the political "Tea Party" movement, a kind of raucous populism that has had enough of the hierarchy and is not going to take it any more. Examples of this phenomenon can be found on Carol McKinley's blog "Throw the Bums Out in 2010," and the blogs it links to. In spite of a title which seems to allude to this year's mid-term elections, this blog is actually taken up almost exclusively with the affairs of the Archdiocese of Boston and with secular politics only in so far as they intersect with ecclesiastical concerns, such as in opposition to abortion. And it is almost completely devoted to discrediting the cardinal archbishop, the archdiocesan administration, and many of the institutions within the archdiocese. It is also not particularly enthusiastic about the rest of the American ecclesiastical establishment, especially as represented and governed by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (hereinafter the USCCB). In this it follows in the footsteps of the man who appears to be its principal theological mentor, frequently linked to or embedded in various like-minded blogs, Michael Voris, S. T. B., once of "St. Michael's Media," now of "Real Catholic TV."
Less populist in style and more professionally polished in his delivery of his views, Mr. Voris seems to share with Ms. McKinley two important things: the conviction that it is a mortal sin for Catholics to vote for most non-Republicans and the same interpretation of recent Church history. What it means to vote almost exclusively for Republicans is something I will let my readers discover for themselves -- it is all there in the public record. But the shared metanarrative concerning the course of Church history since Pius XII is something less obvious to the untrained eye and less generally accessible outside any source not already controlled by it.
The master idea behind this metanarrative is that the Catholic Church and most of its established institutions (i.e., its religious orders, schools, official liturgy, and major publicatons) have been hijacked by people acting, wittingly or unwittingly, according to the plans of the Forces of Darkness, and hence must be reclaimed or rescued by the Forces of Light, which happily include the likes of Mr. Voris, Ms. McKinley, and most of those ordinary folks in the pews. Some of the specific complaints which these people raise, such as that run-of-the-mill catechesis since the Seventies has been insipid and often barely Catholic seem justified and would meet with widespread agreement. But the overarching metanarrative seems unnecessary as a way of accounting for this and all the other specific sources of discontent with recent Catholic practices and attitudes in the United States and elsewhere.
On the one hand, this metanarrative is an easy extrapolation from the Biblical and traditional account of universal history as the titanic struggle of Satan versus God. Rejecting it therefore can be make to look like a rejection of the whole framework of Salvation History. On the other hand, a rejection of it is not necessarily a rejection of the underlying reality of history as a struggle between good and evil; it could rather be merely the rejection of a too confident assignment of roles in this struggle to particular historical figures and movements. Few would quarrel with the giving Hitler and Stalin, or Simon Magus and Alexander VI for that matter, stations in the ranks of the Powers of Darkness. But Father Joseph Gelineau and Archbishop Annibale Bugnini? One hesitates. Especially in an era superabounding in nonsensical conspiracy theories, the reasonable person with a concern for truth and justice can only resist giving easy credence to what seems nothing but another clutch of such theories.
In subsequent postings to this blog I hope to explore further this topic of the threat to the good estate of the Church from some of those on its theological and political right wing.

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