A People Adrift - The Crisis of the American Catholic Church (Review)
Reviewed by Colman McCarthy
Supportive friends, ever caring about your well-being in this life and after, invite you to join a billion-member organization to which they give their fervor and money. Male run and land rich, it is undemocratic, hierarchic, dogmatically unyielding, pays no property taxes, is rife with liberal vs. conservative battles, is mired in a prolonged man-boy sex scandal—complete with Watergatish coverups-- and obeys a secretive governing group headquartered and bureaucratized in a second-rate European country.
Like to join?
Lest you label your friends anti-Catholic Catholics for that acidic description of their beloved church, they pass along some recent books that lay it all out: “Catholics in Crisis” (Jim Naughton), “The Dysfunctional Church” (Michael H. Crosby), “Toward a New Catholic Church” (James Carroll) “The New Anti-Catholicism: the Last Acceptable Prejudice” (Philip Jenkins) “Will Catholics Be Left Behind?” (Carl E. Olson), “Papal Sin: Structures of Deceit” (Garry Wills), “Goodbye, Good Men: How Liberals Brought Corruption into the Catholic Church” (Michael Rose), “Goodbye Father: The Celibate Male Priesthood and the Future of the Catholic Church” (Richard Schoenherr), “Tomorrow’s Catholics/Yesterday’s Church: the Two Cultures of American Catholicism” (Eugene Kennedy), “In Search of American Catholicism” (Jay Dolan) and “Why Catholics Can’t Sing” (Thomas Day).
That’s the short list. Bulking it up still more are Peter Steinfels and David Gibson, both loyal to the flock and both left-leaning but well short of dissidence.
In A People Adrift: the Crisis of the Roman Catholic Church in America (Simon & Schuster, $26) Steinfels, a knowledgeable religion reporter for The New York Times since 1988 and former Commonweal editor, believes that “American Catholicism, to put it bluntly, is in trouble. Absent an energetic response by Catholic leadership, a soft slide into a kind of nominal Catholicism is quite foreseeable.” (p. 9)
That’s in the early pages. Eight long but readable chapters later , and after examining the sex scandal, bumbling bishops, gender problems, Catholic education and other issues, the slide is no longer soft, it’s hard: “The prospects, for the time being, do not look good…. And the long range prospects are not encouraging either.” (p 358)
Saying that his intention is to focus on the “institutional, practical dimension of Catholicism’s life,” (p. 14) Steinfels might have used a more precise adjective than “adrift” in his title. When hasn’t the institutional church been adrift? In its comparatively brief 2,000 year history—arriving well after Hinduism and Buddhism-- its leadership has often sucked at the roots of one Caesar’s power after another, rallied wars against Islamic people, waged pogroms against Jews, sanctioned anti-Semitism, damned nonbelievers, burned people at stakes, condemned scientists. Compared to that drifting— reckless lurching into the violent or chaotic is more like it—the current scene appears tranquil.
If some 20 million American Catholics attend Mass at 19,000 Catholic parishes, and give more than $7 billion annually to the church, Steinfels doesn’t have much of an argument that the institution is adrift. Most of the lay faithful are hanging in, not hanging it up. They don’t appear to be overly irked by what Steinfels sees as crisis-causing flaws: pedophile crimes, celibacy rules, the Vatican’s refusal to ordain women, tepid bishops, decrees on sexual morality that are “a form of Catholic fundamentalism” (p. 305).
. Steinfels appears unwilling to accept the reality that the failures of the institutional church are only the human failures of its leaders who, like all of us, come and go. Isn’t that how it’s always been? And will be, kingdom come?
Protestsant-raised David Gibson converted to Catholcism at 30 in 1989. Living in Italy as a journalist, he worked for Vatican Radio. In The Coming Catholic Church: How the Faithful Are Shaping a New Catholicism (HarperSanFrancisco $23.95) he sees American Catholicism as a “ fractious and diverse family that grows bigger and more boisterous every year.”(p 18) Unlike Steinfels, he’s cheered by it: “the faithful are shaping a new American Catholicism.” But which faithful? Catholics such as Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, Rick Santorum, Patrick Buchanan, William Bennett, Robert Novak, William F. Buckley, Phyllis Schlafly, Bernard Law? Safe to say, those aren’t among the shapers Gibson has in mind.
In 14 chapters divided into three parts—the laity, the priesthood and the hierarchy—Gibson sees hope in those who push for liturgical, governmental and programmatic changes that they see as reforms and others damn as follies. Gibson, in crisp prose lightly sweetened with insider scuttle picked up from his Vatican days, points out the irony that as Pope John Paul II has persistently groused about rebelling American Catholics, it is they who “are the most religiously observant Catholics in modern Christendom, attending church and supporting the pope to a degree that has no parallel in the industrialized world.” (p 54)
Neither Steinfels nor Gibson examine what some Catholics see as the institution’s sorriest scandal: it’s refusal to be a peace church, as are Quakers, Mennonites and Church of the Brethren. American Catholicism’s most prophetic 20th century voices—Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton and the Berrigan brothers—were not furrowing their brows or getting steamed about theological debates, mandatory celibacy, birth control or whether altar girls should be allowed. Instead, they lamented the church’s coziness with militarism: from Daniel Berrigan’s scorn for the Notre Dames and Georgetowns that allow ROTC on their campuses to Day’s support of conscientious objectors to World War II.
What difference would it really make if the conventional liberal reforms that Steinfels and Gibson call for—among others, a less centralized church, open debate on moral and theological issues, livelier liturgies—came about? It would remain an institution unloosed from its first century pacifist moorings as a gathering of communistic rebels committed to absolute nonviolence. Steinfels aptly refers to the “familiar jibe that Jesus came preaching the gospel and ended up with the church.” (p. 13)
One of those who unwaveringly remained faithful to Christ’s teachings on nonviolence was Dorothy Day, co-founder of The Catholic Worker who died in 1980 at Maryhouse, her communal home on New York’s lower east side. In Dorothy Day: Portraits by Those Who Knew Her (Orbis) Rosalie Riegle brings to vibrant life the memories and stories of 134 people who prayed, picketed, wrote, despaired, hoped, laughed, served meals at soup kitchens and shared jail cells with a woman whose commitments to pacifism, nonviolent anarchism and the works of mercy are carried on in some 180 Catholic Worker houses of hospitality around the country. Each page brims with lovely and lively accounts of Dorothy Day and her passions for justice, truth and peace.
An intellectual who wrote about issues that mattered to poor people, Day lived in voluntary poverty herself. It gave her rare credibility: living what she wrote. Day took her theology undiluted from the Sermon on the Mount, end of discussion. The recollections here are an inspirational mix ranging from the reverential to the wry. Well-known writers—Robert Coles, Michael Harrington, Daniel Berrigan, Robert Ellsberg—are included as well as students, artists, barricade radicals, mystics, agitators and cogitators. “Almost everyone I interviewed,” writes Riegle, “listed Dorothy as the significant person in his or her life….Dorothy gave the part of herself that people needed at the time. Perhaps that’s why so many remain truly connected with her—in memory, in faith and in lived conviction.” (p 122)
Faith and conviction are the marks of the Catholic women whose stories are ably told by Kristin Ohlson in Stalking the Divine: Contemplating Faith with the Poor Clares (Hyperiion ($23.95). The nun’s cloistered convent is in downtown Cleveland, with 15 elderly sisters committed to perpetual adoration of their God. They take turns praying in the chapel round the clock. Ohlson, a free-lance writer who says she “a derelict Catholic,” (p 251 admires the Poor Clares partly out of distaste for her own impoverishments: “I’m tired of marriages that fall apart because people won’t persevere through the dry, dull, miserable periods; I’m tired of people who have given up on making the world better; I’m tired of people who cynically deconstruct everything for their own amusement—and I’ve been all these people. These nuns fell in love with God, and have stuck with him year after year.” (p 151)
Ohlson’s gracefully written account of the Poor Clares is blended with the narrative of her own search for faith. In the end, does she return to the Catholicism of her childhood? Does she take prayer seriously? Does she, like Balzac’s worldly Mme. De Beauseant, bid the good times goodbye and join the convent?
Check the final pages.