Lately I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about my faith. I’m Catholic, but I’m not exactly sure where I fit in. Like a lot of things, religion isn’t black and white. It’s not a case of either you’re Catholic or you’re not because Catholicism is a culture. I remember in second year I met a girl who found out I was ‘proper Catholic’ (whatever that means) and she told me that she was Catholic (but not ‘proper Catholic’) as well and we ended up chatting about all sorts of things that we’d picked up from our Catholic upbringing. We’d never met each other, but instantly we had access to a wealth of shared experience.
I’m undeniably Catholic; I can’t get away from it. I’ve been to a whole host of other Christian services but I feel most at home in the Mass. In fact it’s probably the Mass that keeps me Catholic. I very rarely leave feeling underwhelmed. Mass can be sublime. I love the layers of symbolism; nothing is said or done without meaning, and the use of a common liturgy binds the community together.
However, in many ways I don’t get on with the Church. This is actually two separate, but related, problems. When I say I don’t get on with the Church, what I mean is that I don’t agree with a lot of what the Church teaches and her outlook on society. So this is a problem, obviously. When people find out I’m ‘proper Catholic’, I suppose they figure that I also share the Church’s views on a lot of things. I don’t. However, the other problem is that I seem to get on just fine with almost every lay Catholic I’ve ever met, which doesn’t sound like a problem, but becomes one if you consider the implications. I get on with most lay Catholics because most lay Catholics aren’t as fervent as the priests and bishops who represent the Church. Many of the Catholics I know pretty much ignore the Church’s teachings on a lot of things. I know for a fact nearly every Catholic couple I know are having sex before marriage, using contraceptives. So the problem here is that a lot of (young?) people, who are what people might term ‘proper Catholic’ because they’re involved in their parishes, are probably in a similar position to me. As such, I feel at home in my parish, even though I don’t necessarily feel at home with the Church.
I’m not the only one who doesn’t know where I fit in…
A couple of weeks ago, every Catholic parish read out a letter about gay marriage. Well, it wasn’t overly about gay marriage, since the Church doesn’t even entertain the idea a possibility, but it was about the affirmation of marriage as between a man and a woman. Now, the content of the letter isn’t what concerns me right now (although I may rip it apart in another blog post soon). What’s concerning here is the implicit –possibly even explicit – connection that the Church makes between Catholicism and opposition to gay marriage. You might not think this is concerning, but hear me out here…
The Church is facing an identity crisis in Britain (and elsewhere). Dwindling church attendance figures, coupled with the twin threats of secularism and Islam have left Catholics feeling marginalised. Secularism threatens Christian privilege. Islam threatens our majority status. Where do we fit in now?
After the Papal Visit, the Catholic Conference of Bishops in this country published a letter telling us that they’re planning on bringing back the “Friday Fast”. Their argument goes something like this: abstaining from meat on Fridays used to be something that marked out Catholics to others in society so let’s start doing it again. What’s missing? A motive. Why start doing it again? Because we’re losing our identity. We don’t know who we are. Well now we do, we’re the people who don’t eat meat on Friday!
Of course, this is a ridiculous idea. As I said before, people don’t listen to the Church now. People who do listen to the Church are the guys who probably never stopped fasting in the first place since they were brought up with it. But the implicit assertion of the Church’s identity crisis is there.
To be Catholic is to be against Gay marriage
The letter read out a few weekends ago was worse. It pretty much said “we’re Catholic, and what makes us Catholic we think that marriage is between a man and a woman”. In other words, “to be Catholic is to be opposed to gay marriage”. In doing this, the Church is shoring up Catholic identity with opposition to gay marriage. It’s an attempt to form identity negatively, i.e. against another group.
Why? Why do we feel so threatened by other people? Christians were originally just a small group of people, but we grew to be a Church by asking people to join us. Welcoming people is what Jesus did best; find me a bit of the Gospels where he’s not eating with, talking to, or healing people society deemed weird. If it’s only through loving our neighbour that we can truly love ourselves and God, then it’s only through encounters with people who are different to us that we can truly understand who we are (particularly in relation to God). Vatican II is a fantastic testament to this; ecumenism has healed a lot of divisions within Christianity and brought us together as one body in Christ, the celebration of the mass is now a celebration of local culture since our move away from Latin, and rethinking the role of the laity has made us feel more than passive participants in the Church.
Vatican II was about including people. What the Church is doing lately is completely counter it. We’re catholic, which is literally ‘universal’ in Greek. We’re not the Church of one people, or the Church of another people – we’re the universal Church, we’re the Church of all people. The Church is haemorrhaging members because if you don’t, or don’t want to, fit into the Church’s world-view then you’re not welcome.
Where’s theology in all of this?
The saddest part about all of this all is that there’s a new generation of Catholic theologians out there, like me, looking to bring the Church out to meet society but the Church just won’t let us have a say. We have a culture where priests can’t disagree with their bishops and Catholic theologians are told that they must agree with the Pope. I know this feeling first hand. Before I started this blog I had another blog, but I closed it because I felt intimidated by Catholic commenters. People called me a ‘cafeteria Catholic’ and pretty much told me that I’d go to hell for holding unsound beliefs. I was a lot less confident in my theological acumen then, but I’d like to think that if you’ve read this far then you can tell I’m not the sort of person who’s thought about eternity for twenty-five minutes come to some interesting conclusions. I’d like to think that I’m more well-read, thoughtful and engaging than the average person who blogs about religion. What sort of culture do we have where it’s okay to condemn people for exploring their faith?
You might think that this can be explained away by saying that these people are a vocal minority within the Church, and every group of people has to deal with extremism like this. I don’t agree. What happened to me is representative of what’s wrong with the Church. We have a homogenous culture. The Church likes to think that there’s an absolute truth, one timeless and eternal version of what’s true that applies to all people in all situations. Conveniently, the Church has discovered this truth and now exists to promote it. Personally, I’d agree with this. However, whilst the Church might claim this truth is Natural Law (or whatever else), I’d argue (admittedly influenced by Rahner) that this absolute truth is grace – grace that has always been there, the grace that is the inescapable setting of our existence, that always surrounds us, even if we’re a sinner or an unbeliever. God didn’t reveal this grace absolutely, in a timeless or eternal manner. Instead, he revealed it through Christ in the Incarnation, an event that took place in time, in a specific cultural context. Similarly, we’re tasked with revealing grace in specific cultural contexts. To be clear, this does not mean letting Thomas (or whoever else) do it for us once in the Middle Ages and then trying to apply it in every conceivable situation whilst also deluding ourselves that it’s always been true, he just revealed it.
Change is bad! What about Sacred Tradition?
For things to stay the same, they have to change. The mass today is different from the mass of the fifteenth century, but the Church still holds that they’re the same. What was beautiful yesterday may not be beautiful today, but we can still talk about beauty. Tradition doesn’t mean living in a stuffy museum. Tradition means drawing on the wealth of experience – whether that’s the great philosophies of the Fathers, the struggles our pious Saints or lessons we’ve learnt in our engagement with the poor – that we’ve amassed and applying it in everyday lives. It’s about going out to meet society with our treasures of experience. It’s about welcoming people into the Church. It’s about sharing. It’s about making the Church catholic.
Final thoughts
In short, other people aren’t going away. The Church needs to welcome them in because there’s no such thing as a Church without people.
Posted at 1:55am and tagged with: theology, Roman Catholic Church, Karl Rahner, grace, homosexuality, social issues,.
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