Fundamentalism Is Not The Answer
If one does a circuit around the blogosphere, you’ll see a number of posts speaking of the demographic bomb coming to the church. Although the answers vary a little bit, the answers are essentially fundamentalist. In one version, Catholics need to all be evangelists under the guise of discipleship. In another version, we have the bemoaning of not enough catechesis or not enough “good” catechesis.
I’m not attempting to cause anyone to lose faith, but people leave the Church every day who know their faith exceptionally well. Not only is it condescending, but it is grossly arrogant to assume that people leave you because they don’t understand you. Certainly there are people that leave the Church that really don’t understand what it is. Would more education have solved that problem? The honest answer is that we really can’t say, but we should probably assume the answer is no. Typically force is required for a change in inertia and if reasons of intellect aren’t the cause of leaving, stimulating the intellect won’t lead to many staying.
A little historical perspective is also in order here. At least three continents in recent memory have been converted to Christianity through syncretism: North America, South America, and Africa. A reasonable argument can be made that much of Europe was converted similarly. I’m not claiming to be an advocate of syncretism, but the one thing it isn’t is fundamentalist. And that happy campy social justice garbage has been front and center in history. Some of the first things missionaries set up were schools and clinics. Admittedly these things aren’t going to have near the appeal for the bourgeois we are so desirous of today. But fear not, the Church has plenty of history being tools for the bourgeois. However that history has been more pacifying proletarian outrage and hasn’t really been tested among a people that pretend they are bourgeois.
A lot of the problems today are simply the product of trying to reclaim a past that wasn’t there. Cafeteria Catholicism was the past. People stayed in the Church not out of some profound personal belief but because of social pressure. People didn’t just offer prayers together because they were more holy but because they liked the people around them or heaven forbid enjoyed having a beer with the people around them. Church bingo wasn’t always just a fund raising technique but one of many social activities centered at the parish. One of the Orthodox churches in Milwaukee still runs a bowling alley on their property. And while people can certainly disagree on the properness of this, the Catholic life did not begin and end at the mass. People were perfectly comfortable maintaining their devotions to various Saints even if they didn’t go to mass. That is true among many lapsed Catholics today.
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Fundamentalism’s greatest weakness is that it refuses to absorb newer knowledge into it’s core. You are either growing or you are decaying. If one’s faith is strong then one has nothing to fear from learning something new.
Well my thoughts have always been that one can have all the knowledge in the world regarding Catholicism. Yet if you can’t keep it simple and have Jesus Christ in your heart, and thoughts and mind and carry him inside of you with all that you do, then maybe all the knowledge in the world doesnt amount to much in the end. I mean eventually a religion can take on a more spiritual role inside of someone, and it becomes putting your faith in action through your own actions. At that point, for me at least, it doesnt matter how much you know, or how versed you are in being able to retell the stories of certian Saints. What matters is how do you live in this world and be Christ like? What can you really do to live your faith? I think social activities play a very important role in keeping people together as a family. So it would be the same thing with regard to our church. I guess my point is, home is where the heart is, and so is one’s faith.
Fundamentalism is not THE answer.
However, the fundamentals of the faith are a part of the answer.
Arturo will love this, and so do I; if I weren’t a “cultural Catholic,” I wouldn’t be Catholic at all anymore, what with the takeover of the American Catholic Church by Fundamentalist lay and sacerdotal groups, supported by bishops who excommunicate nuns and nurses for saving women’s lives with a necessary abortion.
Interesting set of reflections, and much needed. The idea that all we have to do is “make disciples” is as vague as the idea that the only way to fix the Church is to make everyone “saints”. The actual content of Catholicism, the actual thing that we are converting people to, is quite vague and skeletal. In the end, it seems to boil down to institutional loyalty: covert people to the “Catholic brand”, complete with loyalty to the Magisterium (which one?) and the Pope (whoever that happens to be).
As alluded to here, the various branches of Christianity in the developing world have far more in common with each other than they do with the international communions that they supposedly represent. They share common characteristics: ecstatic, lustful for miracles, anti-institutional, and so on. They aren’t having the Latin Mass in the favelas, and they are not obsessing over the theology of the body in the African bush. It is very evident, for example, that in Africa Christianity is fanning the flame of superstition (google “African witch children”) rather than quenching it.
On the other hand, Catholicism in Latin America hasn’t really changed at all, and if anything, the institutional church has become more popular than it was before Vatican II through the comunidades de base and the charismatic renewal. Whether this is very “orthodox” is somewhat questionable. Catholicism in Latin America has a lot of spiritist, indigenous, and African religiosity pulsing through its veins, and in a lot of ways, the cult of the saints is just as popular now as it was in the past. But people’s loyalty to the institutional church (“discipleship”, Mass attendance, etc.) probably hasn’t changed all that much. In a lot of ways, it’s just business as usual down there, much to the horror of American neo-con, Puritan-rite Catholics.
I know that many orthodox Catholics, especially Latin Mass attendees, spend most of their days reading such posts or such and such material. The result is that they become angry, lose their joy, and do the Church a great disservice because a miserable Christian is going to be able to evangelize no one. Such people have another bad habit – they talk Catholicism for the better part of the day as this is something they love to do, and by bedtime, they realize they have hardly prayed at all.
We all could learn to overcome our faults and one way would be to try and practice opposite virtues to our vices. This may cause us great discomfort in the beginning by taking this on, but it would begin to help us actually begin to live what we say we are. This is what I mean by living like Jesus did. All I know is that in some ways, you can be in church in the presense of God and other fellow Catholics, and still be very alone, and feel like you are not part of anything. Warmth and kindness and joy are feelings that can come from others around us and in my view any relationship is fragile. So it is up to us to be caretakers of eachother. So if we make a cold church, then we are missing something somewhere along the lines. That is the main reason I think people leave. They feel a lack of belonging, and warmth and a sincere relationship with the people around them. I think it could be part of it.
I am critical as the next person of the deeply rigid, fundamentalist streak in our Church. At the same time, what is the opposite? The opposite is moral and cultural relativists and they are gone. They don’t even see a need for Church anymore or for Christ because God is all lovey dovey and He would NEVER send someone to the H word.
I honestly cannot tell the difference between Catholics who reject Church teaching on pretty much everything and my Atheist friends. I cannot and that right there causes me humility because I have to wonder if we know people by their fruits. It is my fundamentalist friends who are having the children who will make up the Church. It is they who are faithfully present every Sunday.
Somehow there must be a rich middle ground, that is messy but still faithful. The fundamentalists want to get rid of the mess, except that is impossible because we are human. And the relativists want to believe in a God who doesn’t make any demands on them at all. I hope to be the Catholic that struggles with the Church’s expectations, but most importantly, Jesus’ expectations even while being the sinner I am.
Certainly we can’t become a Unitarian sect either. I think that is fighting the last war though.
As far as who’s having children and who isn’t, it is a real mixed bag. The families with children at my parish are broadly representative. I’m not overwhelmed with bumper stickers when I enter the parish parking lot.
The root anxiety in all this is the question any parent who thinks that his Catholic faith is an essential part of his life and hope of salvation has as to how he is going to help his children follow him in the faith. The cradle Catholic experience over the last fifty years is very much one in which the big happy Catholic family with six kids ends up thirty years later with one of those kids still actively going to Church, two going once or twice a year, one being “spiritual but nor religious” and two being loudly Evangelical Protestants. That one surviving actively practicing Catholic is going to be thinking, “My parents seemed like the did everything right, but everything went wrong. What do I need to do?”
I’m not clear from your post if you’re saying, “Ah, forget about it. You can’t affect that anyway,” of if you’re just objecting to the way in which people discuss these questions. (Though if so, what would seem to be the right way?)
I think we are witnessing a cultural phenomenon. Therefore, I think it will be best addressed culturally.
The greatest tendency I see is to want to engage the weekend warrior mentality, to create the dichotomy between my “normal” life and my Church life. The key to unlocking this is to find a way to weave the religious into our “normal” life, forgetting for a moment about it permeating our normal life. People want to keep enriching that Sunday experience, even if it means neglecting their local community by traveling miles away to some parish. By doing so, they diminish their ability to actuate their faith in their normal life.
I would certainly agree that the search for the perfect Sunday liturgy can become something of a false god, beyond a certain point.
Though at the same time, the few folks I’ve known who have been doing the parish commute thing have also tended to be families who work hardest on the “domestic church” side of things as well what with family rosary and saints days and religious reading and catechesis in the home and some small set of like minded families who socialize together.
I think often the reason people get into the parish commute thing in the first place is that they’re searching for a parish which doesn’t seem to actively undercut the Catholic culture there’s seeking to create at home.
It is difficult to speak of a domestic church when it extends no further than the nuclear family. All of the cultural criticisms of the nuclear family extend to the domestic church as it is formulated in this country.
While I like play dates as much as the next guy, they are an artificial community, much like the commuter parish.
I don’t subscribe malice to people who commute, have play dates, etc. I’m just critical of our plastic-y world where these things are more valued than real things.
Or Neopagan. I’ve encountered a fair number of those, and the majority of them seem to be ex-Catholics.
The main problem I’ve seen is when going above and beyond is portrayed as being the bare minimum. By the time I’d finished high school, I had the impression that unless you wore the scapular, made a daily novena, and went to Mass *at least* once a week, you were Not Good Enough. At one point, I actually considered skipping class on First Fridays to go to church, simply because the nine-months-in-a-row loophole looked to me like the only way I was going to get into heaven. And this is coming from someone who didn’t do anything unusually bad, went to Mass and CCD every Sunday, and volunteered often. A lot of young people probably leave simply because they can’t handle the pressures of what they erroneously believe to be necessary.
Who am I and why am I here? Do these questions get answered in the Church? Yes. What are the answers? Those answers provide reasons why people stay or leave and return or stay away.
I can’t say I’m sure what this article is about. I don’t know if there are any good guys, but it’s clear who the bad guys are. That’s not true, either: it’s clear what label is applied to them, but not who they are or what they’re being fundamentalist about.
I will say this much. If you truly believe that the Church is Christ’s body, the only thing which can bring a person contentment, then you have to believe that outside the concious rejection of God, the main reason for people rejecting the Church is a failure to understand it. There’s nothing arrogant about boasting in the truth of the Church. I don’t know how you’d be a Christian and not believe that the light of the truth has appeal.
Perhaps life is too good? Distractions keep people away. There is always something to do on a Sunday – go shopping, catch up on some journals, go fishing, enjoy some outdoor fun with the kids, sleep in, work, etc. When crisis hits, people find faith, when everything is going well (or seems to go well) people become apathetic towards God.
Then there are boring and uninspiring sermons, or at least people claim that they’re boring – perhaps they don’t grasp their importance. The modern idea that there are many paths to God sets in and people rationalise that it becomes OK to miss Mass and that God understands, after all Jesus is a all loving and all forgiving. Some contend that the Church has to be rigorous or else no-one would attend and that the ‘good’ people need only to be spiritual and attend occasionally. The rules are not for me. For the intelligent, highly educated, rationalising cradle Catholic who has no unconquerable problems in his life, God becomes like expensive cognac, to be brought out only on special occasions and otherwise kept locked safely away while the drudgery of life happily goes on. I’ve also heard people take offense at priests, for example in one case the priest would chastise attendees with threats of hell and in another gently scold for not coming on time. In the latter case the parishioners actually complained to the bishop and the priest was removed. This did not happen in the US though.
I’ve spoken to one high ranking non-US Catholic priest in Europe lately and he lamented the lack of proper Catholic instruction. He did say that the least educated but most devoted country people had often the best insight on God and even taught him a thing or two.
I just want to say here that I am SO glad I found this blog. I am Catholic, and recently was introduced to the Catholic Blogosphere through a petition to include rice host in the eucharist. It was posted on an orthodox blog as heresy. I stayed to lurk and was sickened by the comments and the posts. I think that orthodox catholics are a fringe group, but they seem to be taking up an ususual amount of blogspace. thanks again for your presence.
Evangelization and discipleship are some kind of fundamentalism?
I don’t follow.
It’s not evangelization that’s the problem, but evangelicalism, which the excellent blog Slactivist describes as reducing the Gospels to “Amway without the soap.” (Reference here: http://slacktivist.typepad.com/slacktivist/2006/02/lb_hospitality_.html )
It’s the poisonous mindset found in fundamentalist-Protestant circles, which Is slowly infecting Catholics, especially older Catholics who really ought to know better. It’s a focus on lip-service to faith rather than living the faith. On praying on the street corner over the corporal works of mercy. On so-called “family values” rather than doing something to help actual families that one knows. It’s basically a modern Pharisee movement.
Hey Bathilda,
if you like this blog, check out dotCommonweal sometime.