Remaining Catholic in the 21st Century

 Everyone should have a worldview implode at least once; ideally twice. It opens the mind to new possibilities and gives one a moment of pause before he declares any truth definitively. Mine imploded once as a Baptist, and again as a traditional Catholic. Looking back I wonder how I didn't die of cringe. Baptist pastors barking and bellowing behind a pulpit with such conviction, but rooted in a theological system that never seemed to make anyone better. The egoists and assholes and perverts and swindlers kept showing up, kept being what they were, and never really saw a contradiction between their lives and their faith. Perhaps this is true of every religion. Most of its adherents are nominal and lack even the capacity to examine abstractions. And maybe I could have overlooked this in the laity, but it seemed to infect even the clergy, so called. 

Baptists, evangelicals, and the like, are almost universally poorly read. The less broadly they've read, the more certain they are of their scriptures, their soteriology, and their peculiar scheme of natural history. They treat the Bible as something dropped from the sky; something that explains itself, whose meaning is obvious. Did I mention it's infallible? This is why so many fundy protestants are loath to send their children to college, or even to public school. There are many reasons to avoid those institutions, but shielding children from broader learning should not be one of them. 

One of the first casualties of Biblical studies is the idea that scripture is infallible. A comparison between the Masoretic Text and the Dead Sea scrolls will reveal many deletions and alterations, often motivated by theological disputes. The ancients seem to not have respected scripture as we do. To them it was something in a long process of editing. When you become familiar with the text you can begin to see it yourself. You can see the "seams" where a later editor harmonized the writings of different religious schools. The religion of Moses seems to be an imposition on an earlier and more universal Canaanite faith that animated the 1st temple cult. The earliest Hebrews were polytheists, and this seems to not have changed until Josiah's reforms. David named a battlefield after Baal; Solomon named a son or two after Baal. David kept a sizable idol in the bedchamber he shared with his wife, Michal, and Samuel sacrificed in the high places. Abraham worshiped in a grove; Jacob practiced sympathetic magic to defraud his uncle; and Daniel was chief of all magicians and diviners in Babylon. None of this vibes with the religion that would ultimately develop post exile within the cult of the 2nd temple, and even less with the fundamentalist Protestantism that would dominate parts of America well into the 20th century. 

Protestant ministers handle such knowledge with a few stock tactics. My favorite, in terms of its comedic value, is the Chicago Statement on Inerrancy. In brief, the statement claims infallibility for the scriptures "in the original manuscripts." The fact that it took a circle-jerk of ultra-educated Bapto-gelicals to come up with the most meaningless statement on scripture is hysterical, second only to the fact that they still take it so very seriously, even to this day. There are no extant original manuscripts. Claiming infallibility for documents that do not exist is peak fuckery. I can't take these people seriously. So, I left Protestantism largely over its inability to handle the scriptures, history, or scientific discovery with a shred of honesty. 

I came to Catholicism slowly. As so many young men did at the time I followed a path backward, from Fundy Baptist, to Reformed Baptist, to Lutheran. I attempted to remain in Protestantism while jettisoning as much of Protestantism as possible. It didn't work. The basic failures of Protestantism are baked into even its most Catholic instantiations. When my local Lutheran Church started hosting rainbow weddings, a meeting was called between the pastor and the laity. He had been off on some retreat where he learned new tactics to pacify the congregation on this very point. He opened the scriptures and labored to overturn every plain text condemning Sodom. The LCMS church in the next city was a real burden to attend, but we did that for a few months. It was more Catholic than Catholic -- vestments, closed communion, chanted liturgy, kneelers -- it had everything. But it was cold. It was insular. And it was an obvious LARP. They were very concerned to look as Catholic as possible without being Catholic. When you live in that space you become overly conscious of the fact that very little separates you from your supposed theological enemies. Those few trifles that break communion must be emphasized and intensified, making the whole institution unbalanced. There is always one nagging fact eating away in the back of the Lutheran mind: they cannot and would not exist without Rome. They are a counter-movement. They need Rome and desperately try to emulate Rome. But they have no claim to continuity with the original Church. It is a LARP, and the most perceptive amongst them understand this and swim the Tiber. That's what I did.

Becoming Catholic is one of the most important things I've ever done for myself. It's influenced my thinking in ways that I now take for granted. I can summarize Catholicism in one word as compared to Protestantism: "Incarnational." Protestantism, broadly, is Nestorian, always separating matter from divinity. Catholicism is quite the opposite. If God condescended into the material world then anything may become holy -- holy water, holy relics, holy days, etc. etc. Baptism is not a sign, but a sacrament; communion is not a memorial, but a sacrifice; and there is a saint for every season and office of life. In Catholicism I could live and move and be human in a world that had not yet been demystified as Protestantism had been for centuries. 

My caution for new converts is to not become embroiled in Trad Catholicism as I did for the first several years of my time in the faith. There are certainly beautiful liturgies among the Latin parishes, and an ancient air of permanency. But this is largely posturing; a type of Catholic LARP from a segment of the Church which has chosen an arbitrary moment of time in which to ossify. Its rigidity harmed my family, and luckily I wasn't so prideful that I couldn't let it go when it became necessary. The abuses I witnessed on an emotional level were indicative of a Catholicism that is better left in the past. The 20th century, and so much more the 21st, requires a different type of Catholicism if the faith will survive. 

I credit Garry Wills with keeping me in the faith when I had my seven year itch moment. I briefly toyed with the notion of going Eastern Orthodox, but decided against it. the EO is its own can of worms I will discuss in another post. Garry Wills is far more liberal than I ever could be. Many of his views flatly contradict Church teaching, yet he remains in the Church. Part of this is his tactic carried over from the 60's of enacting change from within an organization by refusing to leave, something the conservatives are loath to do, they much rather preferring a schism to the art of politics and transformation. Garry Wills has many books in print, but his earliest book is perhaps his best: "Bare Ruined Choirs." He gives a detailed account of the condition of the Church prior to the 2nd Vatican Council. Change was coming whether the council happened or not. The council truly provided a relief valve for many clergy and laity to stay, and on many points did not go far enough (Clerical marriage, contraception, etc.). On the whole, the council was a blessing and has allowed the Church to transition into a time of mass communication, travel, and the global political intrigue as we saw during the cold war, and see even now as the Vatican navigates relations with China. The Church has been criticized on all these points as a great compromiser and ecumeniser, but the Church has responded responsibly to the realities of the world in which it operates, something foreign to most conservatives. 

There's the rub. And the rub is even greater now that everyone with a smart phone has access to the world's largest library and database. Every instance of skulduggery ever committed by priest, bishop or pope is there for the world to Google. What stance should the Church take in light of this? One of stern moral composure? Or one of understanding and humility? What good will it do to rail against the homosexuals if anyone with internet access can know that half of all priests are gay? And what will this do for millennia-long claims of immovable infallibility in moral judgment, still on the books, to be read by the same crowd of internet users? Clearly the pontificate of Francis has been one of damage control and an artful shifting of the status quo. He has moved to crush the traditionalist element in the Church, however sincere they may be, because their brand of Catholicism is deliberately closed off from reality, attempting to live in its own timeless bubble, appealing only to eccentrics, hipsters, and the morally scrupulous. Trad Catholicism cannot be universal in the 21st century and is therefore not Catholic. There, I said it. 

Being Catholic in the 21st century means embracing ambiguity. The Church, by its own most rigid definitions, has defaulted on its claims. Yet, the Church remains, and is the still Church that Christ founded. As it turns out, the Church can be wrong, and more often than not, is wrong about itself. This is where the Church is today. Sorting through the wreckage to see what may be salvaged. This is an exciting time! There is a new latitude possible for the understanding of things that were considered settled for 100's of years or more. A Catholic can now feel justified in following his conscience rather than a papal encyclical. 

This is where I am now. I am a Catholic, and it is doubtful that I could be anything else. But I am now free to explore my own spiritual world with new eyes, informed by the faith, but not bound by it. This is not liberalism or conservatism. It transcends these labels. 21st century Catholicism is a new world, and I advocate for no other position than "Frontier-ism," if I may coin a phrase. The Apocalypse is not an ending, but an unveiling, and those of us who remain Catholic now will be the first to step through the veil and witness a new work of God.

SJ