Catholic writer Russell Shaw says American Catholics ought to recreate the Catholic ghetto:
One of the worst mistakes American Catholicism ever made was the scrapping in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s of the subculture that had served it well up to that time. That was the era of the great flight from what Catholic intellectuals snobbishly called the “Catholic ghetto.” Yes, the subculture as it then existed did need updating and renewal. But instead of that, what we got was a foolish, self-imposed dismantling — the secularization of Catholic colleges and universities, the deliberate withering of Catholic organizations — driven largely by the craving of academic and religious elitists to be trendy and in step with the times.
Catholic blogger Arturo Vasquez disagrees, saying that’s impossible:
And really, that is all “traditionalism” is: it’s optional. Catholic ceremonial prior to the Liturgical Movement of the early 20th century had as much pastoral weight as a rain dance or an indigenous secret initiation in a cave. It was done to placate the gods, to keep the sun shining every morning, etc. Whether or not we understood it was neither here nor there. Even in modern traditionalism (except for the SSPX, but even they have a distorted view of things) the sacred has “left the building”. What is really sacred is democracy, human rights, property, my rights as a (religious) consumer, and so on. That is the real religion, and we all follow it.
Who is right?
(Via: Rod Dreher)
March 4th, 2011 | 9:52 am
In all honesty it’s embarrassing that Vasquez’s poor posting is even mentioned here. If you want us to answer “who is right?”, at least give us two well presented arguments.
Cheers from Canada.
Tony
March 4th, 2011 | 9:55 am
Which Catholic ghetto is a question that must be asked. The Americanist bishops such as John Ireland felt that, in order to maintain control over the Catholic faithful while simultaneously integrating them into a fundamentally Protestant American culture, they needed to impose a rigidly uniform Catholic subculture, and the one they chose was the austere neo-Jansenism of Irish Catholicism. That there were many diverse subcultures within Roman Catholicism (French, Latin American, Italian, Czech, Polish) mattered little to them–they wanted to present a uniform Catholic face to America, and they insisted on controlling it.
Which, of course, brings me to the tragedy of the Greek Catholics in America, and the birth of Orthodoxy in America (for which Rod should be grateful). When, in the late 1890s, Ukrainian and Rusyn Greek Catholic immigrants (who follow the so-called “Greek” or “Byzantine” rite) needed pastoral care, they wrote to their bishops back home for priests to minister their needs. As was customary, they sent over married priests, since married priests are the norm for pastors. Since there was no distinct Greek Catholic hierarchy in the United States, they had to apply to the local Latin ordinaries for faculties to celebrate the liturgy and administer the sacraments.
Well, these Irish-Catholic bishops were having none of it. They were having a hard enough time keeping their faithful in line while trying to convince rank-and-file Protestants that Catholicism was not antithetical to Americanism. And now here come these strange looking men, with beards and funny vestments, and wives and children, celebrating a peculiar Mass in a language that isn’t Latin–they needed that like a hole in the head. And so they refused to offer faculties to these priests, and insulted them, and their wives, and wrote to Rome asking for their recall and the suppression of the “Greek rite” in this country (something that Latin bishops were trying to do right up to Vatican II).
The tipping point came when Bishop John Ireland of Minneapolis told the widowed Ruthenian priest Father Alexis Toth that he was not needed: “If the Slavs need a priest, they can go to the Polish church down the block”, and that he considered the wives of Ruthenian priests “little better than legalized concubines”.
So out the door went Father Alexis, to enter the Russian Orthodox North American Mission–known to day as the Orthodox Church in America–taking with him almost half of the 300,000 Ruthenian Greek Catholics then in the United States. Today, Father Alexis is St. Alexis Toth, one of the Orthodox Saints of North America (even though I’m a Greek Catholic, I have his icon hanging on my wall, because he stood up for the Tradition against the tyranny of the Latin bishops). And this was the real beginning of Orthodoxy in the United States–what had previously been a small fringe Church suddenly had numbers. For this reason, a number of Orthodox, tongue in cheek, propose that Bishop John Ireland should also be glorified as one of the founders of Orthodoxy in North America.
No, the ghetto would not work today, because there could never be any agreement on what kind of Catholicism would be normative. And, overall, the ghetto was not healthy for Roman Catholicism, leading to a kind of mindless conformity and minimalism that was nominal at best. The failure of the ghetto to do more than transform the outward observance of Roman Catholics is the reason everything imploded after the walls of the ghetto came down in the 1960s. If the ghetto had worked, then belief would have been interiorized, and it would not have been necessary.
In any case, the walls of the ghetto are meant to keep the residents inside and separated from the rest of the population. I fail to see how self-imposed segregation would allow the Catholic Church to pursue the Great Commission or fulfill Christ’s prayer to make all one, as He and the Father were one.
March 4th, 2011 | 10:05 am
I feel like I’m speaking out of turn here, but while I as an outsider don’t see any inherent problems with a “Catholic ghetto” in the sense Shaw means it (and I think Vasquez is just out to lunch) I can’t help thinking that in this day and age, to attempt to recreate a “Catholic ghetto” would probably just wind up in an alternative version of the “evangelical subculture,” which has been good neither for the church’s own health or the church’s witness to the world. The nature of American society, I suspect, means that any attempt to create a self-contained culture would wind up in that kind of silliness.
I do think Christians of all stripes should seek to live lives that are both outwardly and inwardly characterized by their faith, which in the long run causes us to spend our time and energies in ways and place distinct from the world except when we intentionally “go out” to meet it. But maybe it’s trying to “make the ghetto” first so we can go live there (so to speak), rather than living in such a way that we tend to congregate there, that is the pitfall.
March 4th, 2011 | 10:09 am
Tradition, unlike traditionalism, is received, not chosen.
Traditionalism is a creature of modernity, an ideology of choice. It is by its nature at odds with itself.
March 4th, 2011 | 10:47 am
Traditionalism, as Jaroslav Pelikan reminded us, is the “dead faith of the living”. On the other hand, real Tradition is “the living faith of the dead”.
March 4th, 2011 | 11:08 am
What’s really embarrassing are the comments above.
Yes, “traditionalism” is a modern construct. But there are traditional Catholics who have remained faithful to the pre-Vatican II traditions of the Church and who cannot fairly be said to be attached to a “dead faith” or an “ideology.”
Vasquez’ point about “Catholic ceremonial prior to the Liturgical Movement of the early 20th century had as much pastoral weight as a rain dance or an indigenous secret initiation in a cave. It was done to placate the gods, to keep the sun shining every morning, etc. Whether or not we understood it was neither here nor there” is an important one and should not be dismissed out of hand.
Pre-Vatican II ceremonial, i.e., the Mass, was part of this ethos, the heritage of antiquity.
Vatican II changed all that, making the Mass a personal prayer rather than a public cultus. We have seen the results ever since with many sorts of “Masses” and no uniformity.
And this uniformity was not mindless and it was not nominal. That’s simply our modern notion that the emotional and individual are primary rather than the communal gathering to worship God.
March 4th, 2011 | 11:25 am
Irish Catholicism was NOT influenced by ‘neo-Jansenism’.
“Jansenism”. The Oxford Companion to Irish History. 2007.
“Jansenism was viewed with great suspicion by Rome, and 17th-century Irish synods toed the Roman line. Indeed, while its moral rigorism made it attractive to elements of the Counter-Reformation church, Jansenism’s theological and political radicalism alienated both local hierarchies and Catholic monarchs. This was especially the case in France and most Irish clerical students there associated with milieux hostile to the movement. Indeed their anti-Jansenist opinions were singled out for criticism by the pro-Jansenist journal Nouvelles ecclésiastiques, Irish clerics, in general, being more attracted to Jesuit-style humanism. The success of the anti-Jansenist bull Unigenitus (1713) marginalized the movement but it survived as a popular millenarian-cum-miracle cult. Neither as a theology nor as a political attitude did Jansenism recommend itself to the Irish Catholic community, either at home or abroad. The frequent claim that Irish Catholicism was Jansenist-influenced springs from the tendency to confuse Jansenism with mere moral rigorism.”
Dr Thomas O’Connor. Ph.D.
Senior Lecturer – Department of History, National University of Ireland
https://history.nuim.ie/staff/oconnorthomas
author of:
_Irish Jansenists 1600-1670: politics and religion in Flanders, France, Ireland and Rome (Dublin, 2008)
_Strangers to Citizens: the Irish in Europe 1600-1800 (Dublin, 2008)
_An Irish Jansenist in seventeenth-century France: John Callaghan 1605-54 (Dublin, 2005)
_An Irish Theologian in Enlightenment Europe: Luke Joseph Hooke 1714-96 (Dublin, 1995)
Healy, John. Maynooth College : its centenary history (1895). Dublin : Browne & Nolan, 1895.
“During the eighteenth century many of the most eminent Churchmen in France were, to some extent, tinctured with these Jansenistic views, even when repudiating the Jansenistic errors regarding the operation of grace and free will. But although so many of our Irish ecclesiastics were educated in France during the eighteenth century, none of those who came to Ireland ever showed the slightest trace of this Jansenistic influence, either in their writings or their sermons. Nor has any respectable authority asserted, so far as we know, that the French Professors of Maynooth were in any way tinged with the spirit of Jansenism.”
Most Rev. John Healy, D.D., LL.D., M.R.I.A
March 4th, 2011 | 11:33 am
I’m more or less with Tom (11:08 am) on this, though I was raised Protestant during the period in question having been born in 1950.
In George Weigel’s “Letters to a Young Catholic,” his first chapter is titled “Baltimore and Milledgeville — acquiring the ‘Habit of Being.’” He doesn’t use the metaphor “ghetto.” Rather he describes the “seemingly last moment of intact Catholic culture” in the U.S.; and how Catholicism in that moment could be understood as a kind of tribalism that ultimately fosters an “intense sense of belonging to something larger than ourselves, something beyond ourselves that somehow lived inside us, too.”
On page 8, he writes, “The real question is not whether you grow up in a ghetto, but whether the ideas and customs and rhythms of your particular ghetto prepare you to engage other ideas and customs and life experiences with out losing touch with your roots…because without roots, there’s no growth, only dryness and decay.”
A “subculture” is defined not by that culture by the dominant culture around. But to the people IN it, that “sub” culture can be vibrant, expansive, teeming, and courageous, a gift to the world. And it can be again, because that’s what the Church is called to be, in every nation and every tribe.
March 4th, 2011 | 11:40 am
I don’t think it is possible to recreate the “ghetto” but not for Mr. Vasquez’ reasons. I remember the ’50s and like all other times, it had much to recommend it as well as condemn it. But time moves on. Even if the rituals remained the same, other things change making the general culture different, as particularly noted by Stuart Koehl.
I’ve heard and hear those that argue the RCC ended/began with Vatican II and find both lines of argument empty. It’s the same RCC and the same Mass as when it was said in Latin. The RCC is still full of us fallen humans. But the promises remain the same. So I worship. Whether vertical, horizontal, or diagonal doesn’t particularly matter, though maybe preferably all together. And I keep learning, in particular, how little I know.
March 4th, 2011 | 12:42 pm
Post-Famine Irish Catholicism was not so much imbued with latent Jansenism as deliberately modeled by the hierarchy in Ireland on British Industrial Age religio-cultural influences. The Irish hierarchy used the Famine to reshape Irish Catholicism.
March 4th, 2011 | 12:53 pm
Liam is correct. Quite a lot of what people today confuse as ‘Jansenism’ was simply (imported) Victorian values, and certainly not specific in any way to Ireland.
March 4th, 2011 | 1:27 pm
As a non-catholic, I must admit that, as an outsider, this is a rather amusing argument. And I would think that the best argument that can be made against re-ghettoizing the Catholic Church would that a non-Catholic is even bothering to read about the dispute.
Seriously. I grew up in a very Protestant home in the 1950s, being born in 1949, and I can say, with all honesty that for all practical purposes the Catholic Church did not even exist. When I was a boy, I don’t think I even knew the Pope’s name and frankly I had no reason to know it. The Catholics were the “other”, a strange, tribal people who were possibly not even human in the accepted sense of the word. The teachings of the Church, its controversies and dogmas had about as much power in the culture of the time as the rituals of voodoo. And when we did encounter them, in the stories from our catholic playmates (yes, we had them) we laughed our heads off. “You believe WHAT???”
In short, we regarded them with the same disdain that broader culture now regards Evangelicals.
Thus it would seem that by looking back to those days, those who do so are looking back to a culture that was doomed, that could not survive mobility and communication. And they are looking back, though they seem to have forgotten it, to a time when they really did not matter very much.
March 4th, 2011 | 2:04 pm
Give Dreher a blog on this site!
March 4th, 2011 | 2:31 pm
Isn’t Rod under a cone of silence?
March 4th, 2011 | 3:48 pm
I agree with the earlier commenter that there was never a single American Catholic community but a series of separate Catholic communities based on ethnic identity. (“Ghetto” is not a great term because it implies external force to create it; and “subculture” implies derivation from the larger “culture.”) Intermarriage between the different communities took off in the years just prior to Vatican II, without enough time for a single American Catholic community to be formed before almost everything seemed to be put into question. So there is no past uniform ghetto to return to. An American kind of Catholicism has yet to be invented. When it is, it will be interesting to see whether it shows any familial resemblance to American Evangelical Christianity, and whether it would end up being an attractive option for many Evangelicals.
March 4th, 2011 | 4:03 pm
Vasquez’s piece sounds like the blithering of someone who has gone days without sleep. I cannot discern within it even one coherent thought.
March 4th, 2011 | 4:15 pm
Tradition, unlike traditionalism, is received, not chosen.
Tradition is like a social network, only across time, rather than space.
March 4th, 2011 | 4:23 pm
It’s probably a mistake to blame the collapse of the “Catholic Ghetto” on Vatican II. Its roots go back further, to that great transformative event, World War II.
During World War II, on account of its duration and the universality of the draft, for the first time Catholic and non-Catholic Americans lived together, in the closest proximity imaginable, for extended periods of time–years, in fact.
As a result, each got to know the other in a manner that would have been inconceivable to their fathers or grandfathers. When you live with someone day in and day out, and often have to trust your life to him, it becomes rather difficult to think of him as “the other”. Protestants found it hard to think of Catholics as followers of the Whore of Babylon; Catholics found it hard to think of Protestants as misbegotten heretics damned for all eternity. The walls of separation began to crumble.
Something else also needs to be understood: all wars are antinomian experiences that tend to undermine accepted morality and social mores. The longer and bloodier the war, the more this is true. The Civil War bloodletting led to the rise of skepticism and “pragmatism” in the United States (and ultimately, to “Fundamentalism” in reaction to them). World War I saw a definitely loosening of sexual mores during the Roaring Twenties (the automobile also served as an enabler of illicit sex). World War II, and the revelations of the extent of its horrors, undermined the faith of many. If they did not exactly become unbelievers, they became deeply suspicious of entrenched authority and less likely to follow it blindly. So the top-down structure that enforced the Ghetto mentality was also weakened.
After the war, prosperity, mobility and mass media further eroded the barriers. It was the ethnic neighborhood that provided the cement of the Catholic Ghetto, and after World War II, as people moved to the suburbs or across country in search of jobs, these neighborhoods ceased to exist (with huge economic impact on the Catholic Church, as all those massive inner city churches no longer had big parishes to sustain them). Cut loose from the extended family, young men and women began finding friends of different faiths, and ultimately began marrying them.
On television, Bishop Fulton Sheen for many years had one of the most popular shows on the air, and he managed to make Catholicism both non-threatening and comprehensible to people who had no previous exposure to it, or had been viscerally indisposed to it. And that just made it easier for Catholics and non-Catholics to begin mixing socially and romantically.
By the time of Vatican II, the walls were largely down, and people were beginning to come out on their own. The implosion of ecclesial certitude and authority in the post-conciliar Church only accelerated a process already underway.
March 4th, 2011 | 4:39 pm
Also, I think those who believe there is no uniquely “American” Catholicism are wrong. Anyone who has been to a traditionally Catholic country in Europe (Latin America is its own unique brew) immediately perceives differences about how the Church is regarded, what issues are important (and which are not), how people worship, and so on. American Catholics, being immersed in their own environment, do not perceive how different they are, but outsiders do.
Samuel Huntingdon, for instance, believes American Catholics have been fundamentally changed by the culture around them, witness his statement that “American Catholics are essentially Protestants who go to Mass and like Mary”.
March 4th, 2011 | 4:55 pm
Given an understanding of what the Mass is, perhaps Samuel Huntington has a timeless definition? After all, Protestants and Catholics both profess Christ Crucified and Risen. Though, given the history (not to mention that I am Catholic), I suspect the definition should go the other way ;^).
March 4th, 2011 | 4:58 pm
I disagree with both Shaw and Vasquez. Mr. Shaw is correct to some degree: Pre-Vatican II Catholic culture in the US may have been better than what followed. But that culture was a derivative culture based on the ethnicity rather that directly on the religion of Catholic immigrants. When those immigrants exited the ghetto and moved to the burbs, the U.S. Catholic Church was unable to generate a replacement and almost succumbed to the secular culture.
Unlike Mr. Vasquez, I believe it possible to regenerate a Catholic “ghetto,” but not of the old type. The Catholic Church celebrates its principle of community but finds it almost impossible to put it into practice. A real community in the US would become a shining beacon for the rest of the (secular) culture, but also would resemble a ghetto in that it would be both compact and different: a good kind of ghetto, open to everyone else. This ideal not only is possible; it’s the only way out. It’s time for the Church to stop bragging about community and start becoming one.
March 4th, 2011 | 5:50 pm
@Bob G, perhaps it should called a “Catholic Quarter” rather than a “ghetto.” It would require some sort of physical presence and an intentional effort on the part of Catholics to live there. In Washington, DC, there is already something of the sort near Catholic University, USCCB, and the Basilica, though I don’t know if anyone has ever called it a Catholic Quarter or sought to live there intentionally.
March 4th, 2011 | 6:16 pm
Stuart is right, according to the basic thesis of Putnam & Campbell’s “American Grace.” They argue, based on their analysis of the data, that the more Americans come out of their ghettoes, the more religious tolerance there is. But it’s also quite plain that the less socially enforced religious particularity you have, the less devotion to any kind of religious orthodoxy exists. I think Huntington is mostly right. Unlike in the past, there is very little distinctive about (most) Roman Catholics in America today. They have been fully assimilated, for better and for worse.
Personally, I am pleased that we live in a country with such broad religious tolerance, but as a father hoping to raise my children to hold knowledgeably and firmly to their faith, and not be sucked into the Moralistic Therapeutic Deist blob that’s hollowing out all religious traditions here, I wonder to what extent some kind of conscious self-separation from the American mainstream is necessary to inculcate a strong, healthy sense of religious and cultural identity in my children (as well as myself). It’s a hard thing to pull off, I think, and I don’t know how it’s done. I don’t want to live like Amish or Hasidic Jews, in such total insularity, but without some kind of communal reinforcement of our beliefs and norms, we’ll dissolve into the undifferentiated Whatever.
I don’t have the answer here. I wish I knew who did.
March 4th, 2011 | 6:27 pm
ER, thanks for your comment. Maybe you have something there. I’ve thought about this subject a lot, and have concluded something with which few would agree until (maybe) they saw the reasons. I don’t believe a real community is possible unless its members put their lives into each others’ hands. And that would require material interdependence–something even most Catholics think we have rightly moved beyond. But a real culture is rooted in the material order. I believe that is the key to the problem with Capitalist economics, and the Catholic Church has the answer to it but doesn’t realize it. I don’t know how well the DC community you mention fits these criteria. Too bad we can’t get together and thrash this subject out. Good luck.
March 4th, 2011 | 9:01 pm
Rod,
At present, the Orthodox in America still rely heavily on the bonds of ethnic solidarity, but those bonds are weakening rapidly as the immigrant generation dies off. By the third and fourth generations, they no longer regard themselves as Greek, or Ukrainian, or Russian or even “Arab”, and thus the concomitant identification with the ancestral Orthodox faith is no longer sufficient to hold them in the Church.
At the same time, an influx of converts is creating tensions between the ethnic core of these Churches, and the newcomers, many of whom are far more zealous and scrupulous in faith than the “cradle Os”. This is particularly the case in the Antiochian Orthodox Archdiocese (where former Evangelical and Anglican converts now account for roughly half the faithful and an outright majority of the clergy) and the OCA, where “convert” parishes are by far the most active, and convert clergy are moving rapidly up the ranks of the hierarchy (to include His Beatitude, Metropolitan Jonah).
In short, the composition of the Orthodox Churches is changing, and I think Metropolitan Kallistos has made a valid observation when he said, “The time is coming soon when nobody will be an Orthodox Christian who does not choose to be so”. As he observed, Orthodoxy is so counter-cultural and its demands upon its members so onerous that being “culturally Orthodox” is not going be sufficient in itself to sustain the Church into the next generation. Instead, the Orthodox Church will rise or fall upon those who voluntarily embrace the life that it demands.
Most Orthodox converts I know (at least the ones who convert “to” Orthodoxy, rather than “from” something else) are quite tolerant of other Christians (after all, most of them came from some other confession), but their love of the Tradition itself holds them to it.
Inter alia, the same phenomena are visible in the Greek Catholic Churches, although there are different avenues out of Church for the ethnics. First of all, they switch, either de jure or de facto, to the Latin Church, which is far easier and more convenient in most places. A few, wanting to live the fullness of the Tradition and tired of the tensions and mixed messages within the Greek Catholic Churches, become Orthodox (usually moving directly into their counterpart Church). I think the majority simply decide to drop out altogether.
On the other hand, there are relatively few true converts (i.e., from outside of the Roman Catholic Church). A few Orthodox come into their counterpart Greek Catholic Church (usually women who marry Greek Catholic men), and a few non-Christians will be baptized into a Greek Catholic Church in order to marry a Greek Catholic, but true unbaptized adult converts (like me) are quite rare. Because defections and deaths greatly outnumber births and conversions, our numbers are dwindling rapidly (and, as I noted on another thread, actual membership is probably no more than one third of the “official” numbers).
March 5th, 2011 | 1:19 am
My comments will be in reference to Mr Shaw’s statement about reestablishing a Catholic culture. The other statement from a blog does not deserve any further reflection because it offers nothing of substance to comment on.
i struggle with the word ‘ghetto’. While I agree that in major cities there was indeed a very set pattern of thought, practice etc. This was not the fact in the suburbs. There is a world of difference between the Catholic parish identity in major cities and Catholic identity in the suburbs. By analogy, I would say that it was similar to Catholics in a parochial school [Catholic culture in a metro city] and Catholics in a public school. There was already two distinct worlds, yet of course, the same faith.
Secondly, there was no one Catholic culture. What we had was Catholic-hyphenated cultures, be it Irish Catholic, Canadian French Catholic, Italo-Catholic, Polish Catholic [and the list could go on and on]. Each came from ‘the old country’ with their own inculturated Catholicism. When those ethnic identities transformed as they did [and must; and will be joined in the future by present-day ethnic Catholics] into newer generations of truly American Catholics, there was a definite change, loss (to some degree) of identity, yet a whole different feel-which again is more similar to the Catholic in the suburb than the Catholic in the large metro-city parishes.
There can be no question of course that there is a continuity between the pre-Vatican II and the post-Vatican II Catholic Church [despite those forces on both ends of the pendulum that see discontinuity]. The Catholic Tradition develops but does not ‘change’. However a certain aspect at the ground level of the ‘pre-Vatican II Church’ did indeed emphasize the distinct ways we were distinct from the Protestants [just as they had been doing with Catholics]. For example the false dichotomy between Scripture (Protestant) and Eucharist (Catholic) was emphasized in both communities. This ‘ghettoizing’ was not only off-base but wrong. Any return to such expressions as this needs to be avoided at all costs. Certainly Catholics and Orthodox exalt both, and a growing number of our Protestant brethren are either exploring or are doing the same.
The final piece I would say that was part of that experience back in the first half of the twentieth century was the wider American Culture was indeed Judaeo-Christian in content and attitude. The whole country at the time breathed ‘Judaeo-Christian’ values and practices. Certainly not everyone abided by those ‘values’ but everyone including the ones not abiding by them, knew they were not. Now this wider Judaeo-Christian culture is gone in America. It probably will not be seen again by any of us now alive [I do not rule out a return sometime in the more distant future however]. This Judaeo-Christian culture supported the Catholic ‘subculture’ and of course, we supported it.
A return to a Catholic ghetto? I don’t think that is possible or even desirable. What we do need however is a new Catholic culture that is “Catholic’ and incorporates the newer gifts to the Church as the older one did in the past-the gifts of the Hispanics, Vietnamese, Filipino, Korean, Chinese and other new Catholic ethnics. A culture is always based on a ‘cult’. The Eucharist,the Mass, was, is, and will remain the center of any Catholic culture that is truly alive, for without Christ we cannot abide. Catholic intentional [active, conscious, participation] community-communion in mission [evangelization and service] will be key components of the new Catholic identity [versus 'ghetto']
March 5th, 2011 | 5:42 am
In the first half of the 20th century, American Culture was Protestant. Not much Catholic in it until World War II, and very little Judeao until after it.
March 5th, 2011 | 7:55 am
“i struggle with the word ‘ghetto’. While I agree that in major cities there was indeed a very set pattern of thought, practice etc. This was not the fact in the suburbs. There is a world of difference between the Catholic parish identity in major cities and Catholic identity in the suburbs.”
I submit that prior to World War II, American Catholicism was for the most part an urban phenomenon. The move to the suburbs did not begin until after World War II, by which time, as I noted, the collapse of the “Ghetto” was well underway.
“By analogy, I would say that it was similar to Catholics in a parochial school [Catholic culture in a metro city] and Catholics in a public school. There was already two distinct worlds, yet of course, the same faith.”
Having grown up in New York City at the fag end of the fifties, attended public school, and had Catholic friends who went both to public and parochial school, the difference was not that significant because the public schools accommodated religious education in a manner inconceivable today. I remember being somewhat envious of my Catholic friends who could get out of school early on Wednesdays to attend first communion and confirmation classes. And, of course, fish sticks in the cafeteria (“lunch room” as it was then known) every Friday and throughout Lent.
“Secondly, there was no one Catholic culture. What we had was Catholic-hyphenated cultures, be it Irish Catholic, Canadian French Catholic, Italo-Catholic, Polish Catholic [and the list could go on and on]. Each came from ‘the old country’ with their own inculturated Catholicism”
This is true, to some extent, and also to some extent these subcultures did not mix and remained somewhat hostile to each other. In New York, it was the Irish and the Italians, and woe betide the Italian boy who dared date an Irish girl (and vice versa). In other cities, it might be the Poles and the Irish. When my wife was growing up in Texas, it was the Germans and Bohemians. But on top of it all, there was an imposed “normative” Catholicism, which was fundamentally Irish, because the majority of the bishops were Irish, and their influence was seen primarily in the form the Mass tended to take in the good old pre-conciliar days: low, silent (or with lugubrious Marian songs grinding out on a creaky organ) and fast. The faithful spent most of their time during Mass reciting the Rosary or other private devotions. Very different from the effulsive liturgical practices of, say, Mediterranean Europe or even Austria, Bavaria and Poland.
“For example the false dichotomy between Scripture (Protestant) and Eucharist (Catholic) was emphasized in both communities. This ‘ghettoizing’ was not only off-base but wrong. Any return to such expressions as this needs to be avoided at all costs. Certainly Catholics and Orthodox exalt both, and a growing number of our Protestant brethren are either exploring or are doing the same.”
With this statement I entirely agree–particularly the rediscovery of liturgy and Eucharist by an increasing number of Protestant communities.
“The final piece I would say that was part of that experience back in the first half of the twentieth century was the wider American Culture was indeed Judaeo-Christian in content and attitude.”
It would be more proper to say it was overwhelmingly Protestant and increasingly Evangelical. Jews were known only in the larger cities, and mainly on the East Coast. Their influence on the culture (save through their domination of the motion picture studio system from the 20s to the 40s) was pretty minimal. And the films that they made reflected not Jewish, but broadly Protestant Christian perspectives.
“Now this wider Judaeo-Christian culture is gone in America. It probably will not be seen again by any of us now alive [I do not rule out a return sometime in the more distant future however]. This Judaeo-Christian culture supported the Catholic ‘subculture’ and of course, we supported it.”
Indeed, the Constantinian settlement is irrevocably broken, which is why the Church should begin to disentangle itself from the state to the largest extent possible, and cease relying on it to further its values and agenda. All Christians will have to learn, once again, to function in an environment either indifferent or hostile to their faith.
“The Eucharist,the Mass, was, is, and will remain the center of any Catholic culture that is truly alive, for without Christ we cannot abide. Catholic intentional [active, conscious, participation] community-communion in mission [evangelization and service] will be key components of the new Catholic identity [versus 'ghetto']”
I wonder the extent to which this was really true in the pre-conciliar Church. It would seem to me that the Church’s understanding of Eucharist then was mainly as one form of sacramental grace open to the individual, and not as the central ecclesial act by which the Church manifests its nature and unity in the world. But the Eucharist ought to be the center of the Church, and to the extent it does become so, we will become stronger and more united in Christ.
March 5th, 2011 | 1:34 pm
The “Constantinian” settlement is long gone (if we want to put a neat date on it, I would say AD 1648); we’ve just spent the past 350 years feeling phantom sensations like those of an amputated leg, and those started to subside in the past century.
I think Pius X’s emphasis on reviving regular sacramental practice by the faithful at large, and the arc of liturgical reform that culminated in an emphasis on the FCAP of the faithful in the liturgy, has been laying the foundation for the fully post-Christendom era. (Frankly, the Church should have started earlier, but was understandably stunned by the advent of the Age of Revolution. But the unease we have now is in part due to that century-plus delay. I think Vatican II came just in the nick of time, a view I know will cause some regulars on this board and elsewhere to lose their lunch or supper.)
March 5th, 2011 | 4:32 pm
“I think Vatican II came just in the nick of time, a view I know will cause some regulars on this board and elsewhere to lose their lunch or supper.)”
Hey, were it not for Vatican II, I would be Orthodox today.
On second thought, you’re right–it will cause some people to lose their lunch.
March 7th, 2011 | 8:23 am
On Vatican II, yes, I reluctantly agree with Liam. Despite the catastrophe that followed re: the implementation of the Council, I have to say that had it not happened, the RC Church would likely be in a worse position today. I could be wrong. It’s hard to say with counterfactuals. I’ve been to a few Tridentine masses, and while I strongly believe that the Trid mass should be widely available, and though I broadly sympathize with traditionalist Catholics, it’s hard for me to see how the Tridentine mass, as it is, could be an effective basis on which to evangelize the world. But maybe it’s all about the way the mass is said as opposed to the mass itself. In the Orthodox Church, we have very long liturgies, but they are said (usually) in the vernacular tongue, and everything the priest prays he does so loud enough for everybody to hear. The congregation participates fully in the rite; you don’t get the idea that you’re just there standing in the quiet, like a Quaker, while something happens that you can barely hear. When I *read* the Tridentine liturgy, I am awed by its beauty and profundity — especially when compared to the Paul VI mass. That’s why it was so startling, and not in a good way, for me to experience the Tridentine mass in actual parishes. On the occasion I could go to the Novus Ordo celebrated reverently, using Latin — there was a priest at CUA back in the day who did this in the crypt church at the basilica, and Fr. Paul Weinberger in Dallas used to do it, and maybe still does — I was equally startled by how beautiful and inspiring the Novus Ordo could be in Latin, when celebrated by a priest who respected the power of awe. What a shame that the Council thought updating the liturgy for the modern world required doing such violence to it.
Indeed, the Constantinian settlement is irrevocably broken, which is why the Church should begin to disentangle itself from the state to the largest extent possible, and cease relying on it to further its values and agenda. All Christians will have to learn, once again, to function in an environment either indifferent or hostile to their faith.
Which is why I emailed both the Shaw and the Vasquez bits to Joe, in counterpoint. All serious Christians — Catholics, Protestants, and Orthodox — have to grasp the reality of the historical and cultural situation that we’re in. We have to build up communal defenses against a culture so powerful and hostile to authentic Christianity that authentic Christianity cannot survive doing business as usual (this is what the Moralistic Therapeutic Deism business tells us). But how do we do that? I think some sort of “ghetto” — by which I mean sense of separation — has to come into existence, though how one does that in a healthy way, without becoming weird and culty, is a mystery to me. I think our modern Orthodox Jewish friends may have a lot to teach us on this count. And I think it may start with something as simple, but as radical, as the requirement to live within walking distance of one’s church. That simple rule can change everything about community.
March 8th, 2011 | 7:25 am
“But how do we do that? I think some sort of “ghetto” — by which I mean sense of separation — has to come into existence, though how one does that in a healthy way, without becoming weird and culty, is a mystery to me.
And yet, Rod, during the pre-Constantinian period, and for a long time afterwards, when pagans comprised the majority within the Roman Empire, Christians did not segregate themselves, but lived among their pagan neighbors, refusing to hide their light under a bushel basket. The rapid growth of the Church between the second and fourth centuries can only be attributed to the Church aggressively putting itself forward (when Diocletian stepped out the front door of his palace in Nicomedia, the largest building he saw was the Christian’s church).
After Constantine made Christianity a religio licita (and thus one legal cult among many), the Church had to compete for followers among many alternatives–Judaism, Mithraism and other mystery religions, gnosticism, etc. Again, Christians did not wall themselves off, but engaged in a muscular war of ideas, in which they took full advantage of the culture classical civilization had built for them. Basil the Great, in his “Letter to a Young Man”, tells him not to turn his back on classical education, and to take from it all that was good and useful. He knew whereof he spoke, having attended the (pagan) Athenian Academy, together with his friend Gregory Nanzianzen (and a moody lad later known as Julian the Apostate). Ghettoizing ourselves by forming our own schools, living in close communities, shopping at our own stores, and so on, will simply withdraw us from the world, in the same way it did the Amish. What we, as Orthodox Christians are called upon to do is much harder, and more heroic–we are called upon to live in the world, while not being of the world.
“I think our modern Orthodox Jewish friends may have a lot to teach us on this count.”
As someone who actually had Orthodox Jewish relatives and who grew up in an Orthodox Jewish neighborhood (Boro Park, Brooklyn), I think not so much. The solidarity of the Orthodox Jews is maintained through enforcement of a code of behavior so rigid and arbitrary as to infringe upon the free will that Christians are called upon to exercise in the service of God. Moreover, the people enforcing the rules can be just as small, bitter, and spiteful as can be found in any PTA or condominium association, albeit dignified with the title of “Rebbe”. Politics abounds, vendettas are pursued, favorites are played and the victims are usually women and children–those with the least power and influence, and also the most vulnerable.
Beyond that, the Orthodox Jews are totally without influence over the wider world. Like the Amish, they are guilty of that which Christ accused the Jews in his day–hiding their light, not being the salt of the earth. Instead, they have become insular, exotic and provincial–items of curiosity, rather than examples to be followed.
And they can be very culty–many sects are definitely built on a cult of personality centered on the founding rabbi or one of his descendants. Not the way we want to go.
“And I think it may start with something as simple, but as radical, as the requirement to live within walking distance of one’s church. That simple rule can change everything about community.”
Good luck with that, Rob. As an Orthodox Christian, you ought to know better. Now, I myself am a great fan of limiting the size of parishes to one hundred families or less–about the upper size at which the pastor can actually serve as a father to the congregation and the congregation can function as an extended family.
But even reaching that level is not possible given the low density of Eastern Christians in this country. At one time it was true–you could find heavily Orthodox or Greek Catholic communities on the East Coast (Boston and Queens for the Greeks), New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Illinois (for the Russians, Rusyn and Ukrainians, both Greek Catholic and Orthodox) and Michigan (for the Melkites and Antiochians).
But that wasn’t a very good model for any Church, because these were ethnic neighborhoods in which the Church was a component of ethnic identity, not necessarily a center of faith. And the general tendency within them was a parochialism that viewed the Church as serving “our people”–and to hell with everyone else (my sister was Orthodox for a decade before people in her parish stopped referring to her as “Xeni”).
Not surprisingly, these traditional ethnic communities are the places where the Orthodox and Greek Catholics are fading fast. Once you get to the second or third generation post-immigration, the ethnic identity is not enough to hold people to a very inconvenient faith. It is as Metropolitan Kallistos says: “The time is coming when no person will be Orthodox who does not deliberately choose to do so”.
That’s why the Orthodox and Greek Catholic Churches are actually growing in areas where there are very few of us, spread out over a wide area. People in my parish drive forty or fifty miles each way to attend Liturgy, and many can be seen on feast days during the week.
What purpose would be served by demanding they uproot their lives to live within walking distance of their church? This might have been practical in the days when a small city like York (population 10,000 in 1485) had fifty churches within its walls, or when every village and hamlet was built around a parish church. But it’s not particularly useful now, on two counts:
First, though you may not like it, physical mobility is a fact of life. Urbanism sucks (always has, as William McNeill proved in a very literal way). I grew up in New York, and have no wish to return to it. The very size and density of modern cities makes them the very last place where one might want to raise children in faith–and also the last place where the state might allow you to do so.
Second, segregation leads to insularity leads to irrelevance. If you are not in the world, you cannot change the world. You cannot fulfill the Great Commission, and invariably your faith becomes precisely the kind of “private matter” that secularists would like it to be.
There really is only one solution, and it requires us to take responsibility for raising our own children in faith. Basil’s parents sent him to Athens in full confidence that he would not be seduced by the attractions of pagan philosophy (not to mention the flesh pots of the big city). We should be able to do the same. I did not hesitate to send my daughter to a secular university in a big city because it was the best place for her to learn the discipline she had selected to study. Not for a moment did I consider some little hothouse Catholic liberal arts college where she would be insulated from the reality of the world. To my mind, that would be like sending someone uninoculated into the midst of a smallpox epidemic. We built in our children a foundation of faith, a faith which she lives out in the world, finding like-minded people people with whom to share her faith, and to serve as a living example for others.
That’s what we are called upon to be and to do. It isn’t going to be easy, but it is not supposed to be easy, because the world hates us, just as Christ said it would.
March 8th, 2011 | 12:12 pm
Stuart, I have to leave for lunch right now, but I wanted to point out a couple of quick things, inasmuch as I don’t have time to give your long, thoughtful post the response it deserves.
1) When I wrote that “modern Orthodox” Jews have something to teach us, I had hoped putting the adjective “modern” would distinguish them from the Hasidim. Modern Orthodox Jews are Jews like the journalists and writers Jeff Jacoby and David Klinghoffer.
2) Living in community is extremely hard for Orthodox Christians, for the reasons you say. But not as hard for Catholics and Protestants. There is a Protestant church in my own neighborhood whose members specifically believe in doing your best to live within walking distance of the church, because that’s the best way to build community around the church. I think they’re right.
March 8th, 2011 | 12:16 pm
“What we are called upon to do is much harder, and more heroic–we are called upon to live in the world, while not being of the world”
I agree with Stuart’s analysis on this one. An in-but-not-of approach seems to be the best form of witness, though it doesn’t quite answer Rod’s question about how to best keep our children faithful. Looking at my own Roman Catholic family, three of my siblings are devout and two are unchurched but are widely known in their communities for their ethics, receiving awards, etc. Four out of six isn’t bad (unless I’m not counted!). But the numbers get worse in the next generation. Only three of nine are devout, not counting my children for whom it is too early to tell. This goes to Rod’s point that this is an increasingly tough environment.
“People in my parish drive forty or fifty miles each way to attend Liturgy, and many can be seen on feast days during the week”
Stuart is right that there remains a vitality to the faith wherever it’s alive. There’s a Methodist church two blocks from my house, but I drive a half hour to my parish, and I have a short commute. There are families who come in from an hour away, and one doughty couple makes a three-hour drive. And once you’re in church, you can expect to stay at least 90 minutes. Most of us are in for three or four hours.
“when pagans comprised the majority within the Roman Empire, Christians did not segregate themselves, but lived among their pagan neighbors, refusing to hide their light under a bushel basket.”
As far as not hiding your light under a bushel goes, one of my favorite ministries is the bar witness. A couple of years ago, the college-age group decided that wherever they were on a Saturday night, they would slip in a mention of where they were going to be Sunday morning. Not exactly the kind of witness Carrie Nation brought to bars but a good one.
“It isn’t going to be easy, but it is not supposed to be easy, because the world hates us, just as Christ said it would”
I try to distinguish those circumstances when the world hates us from those circumstances when the world hates something else. Much of what the world hates is simply difference. People who behave or believe differently are perceived as threatening. But the hate Jesus warns us about is hatred of our call to live righteously. The most common charge is that we are being hypocritical in making judgments when Christ commanded that we not judge. The logic is flawed, but sometimes they’re right, to our shame.
March 8th, 2011 | 4:11 pm
“Living in community is extremely hard for Orthodox Christians, for the reasons you say. But not as hard for Catholics and Protestants.”
Alas, the closest Roman Catholic church in my neck of the woods is a good two miles away (there are two, in different directions, one being St. Thomas More Cathedral). That may not seem like much (forty minutes for a healthy person on a nice day), but it can be an ordeal for the sick, the elderly, or even for the physically fit on one of our famous Northern Virginia 3H summer mornings or cold and rainy winter mornings.
There are Protestant churches out the wazoo, of course, including at least four Baptist churches within walking distance–apparently none of these are on speaking terms with the others. For Protestants, it’s not a matter of finding a vanilla church, but finding the flavor that matches yours. And that is getting increasingly difficult even within jurisdictions (witness the nastiness surrounding the attempts of the Episcopal Diocese of Virginia to hold onto the Falls Church, Truro Church and five other congregations that can no longer stand by the false doctrine of the Episcopal Church.
It was much easier to live within walking distance of a church when everyone had to live within walking distance of everything, and when churches were like Model Ts (any color you want, as long as it’s black). But with Christian unity shattered and a long way from being restored, the self-sifting process precludes the formation of neighborhood churches that are anything other than parochial in the narrow sense of the word.
March 8th, 2011 | 5:18 pm
Hello Stuart,
With all due respect, I think you’re making an awful lot of unfounded assumptions about how Christians lived in the early Roman Empire. We have little evidence about how they did live in society, and what little there is (Pliny, Athenagoras, Diognetus, etc.) just as easily points to a life lived largely apart from Roman society. Evangelization was surely taking place, but that does not mean that Christians were not living for the most part in their own sub-communities.
I only make this point because I find it all too easy to speak of “not hiding your light under a bushel” when there is little consideration given to how a Catholic (or Orthodox) is supposed to bring up his or her children in the faith. The Great Commission does not require that we sacrifice our children just so that we can, say, send them to public school in hopes that they can be leaven for the mass. I am not making an argument for an Amish solution, but I am saying that the survival of the intentional Catholic family *is* going to require at least a limited detachment, where necessary, from the wider culture if it is to survive as such.
Just as it requires some real disentanglement from the secular state, at least in most of the West. The Catholic teaching about the desirability of the confessional state as ideal remains intact; but the state and larger society have reached a point of distance from the Church such that close attachment seems likely to do much more harm than good to the Church. A look at how Catholic education is faring now in Britain and Canada suffices to prove the point.
March 8th, 2011 | 5:35 pm
Hello Rod,
“Despite the catastrophe that followed re: the implementation of the Council, I have to say that had it not happened, the RC Church would likely be in a worse position today. I could be wrong.”
Counterfactuals are always a tough business.
We know things have been “catastrophic” in the Church since the Council, to use your term (which I agree with, of course) – the raw numbers (collapse in vocations, in mass attendance, in resort to other sacraments) speak for themselves. While correlation is not always causation, one would think this would at least give pause to the liberals of a certain age who continue to sign paeans to the council and its spirit. Blaming it all on Humanae Vitae or refusal to ordain women (has anyone looked at the vitality of the Anglican Communion lately?) is much too easy.
Yet on the other hand it’s true that the Church is not hermetically sealed from society. In 1965-1970 the western world underwent a cultural revolution, and it is hard to see how a Church that had decided to harden its Tridentine carapace rather than hold Vatican II would have been immune from all of that, or not suffered some real upheavals.
But as you say, to recognize that the Church needed to adjust to the new circumstances that obtained in the postwar world is not to justify the vast, reckless and unprecedented changes that were made, especially to the liturgy. The reality is that the changes made to the Roman Rite amounted to something unprecedented, a new rite in effect if not in name, and one much more anthropocentric in focus, too open to creativity through endless options – yes, even in the original Latin. That does not make it invalid, not at all, but it does make it spiritually impoverished. The liturgy is not meant to be frozen in amber, but what actually happened in the second stage of the Council went far beyond anything that John XXIII or most of the original liturgical reformers had in mind (which appeared not to go beyond a greater but limited use of vernacular, at least in the readings, and expanded use of Scripture, greater resort to dialogue, and reduction of some redundancies).
What happens in worship affects everything else in the Church, and thus I find it not surprising that the upheaval and banalization of the Church’s lived liturgy (at least for most of its communities) was accompanied by such upheaval in the Church at large.
March 8th, 2011 | 6:57 pm
“With all due respect, I think you’re making an awful lot of unfounded assumptions about how Christians lived in the early Roman Empire. We have little evidence about how they did live in society, and what little there is (Pliny, Athenagoras, Diognetus, etc.) just as easily points to a life lived largely apart from Roman society. Evangelization was surely taking place, but that does not mean that Christians were not living for the most part in their own sub-communities.”
I base my description on the work of Wayne A. Meeks (The First Urban Christians; the Origins of Christian Morality; and the Moral World of the First Christians); W.H.A. Frend (The Rise of Christianity; The Archaeology of Early Christianity); Robert Louis Wilkings (Christians as the Romans Saw Them); and standard reference works such as the Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church; and the Encyclopedia of Early Christianity (2nd ed.). It is surprising how much we do know about how early Christians lived, from their own writings, from pagans writing about them, and the ruins and artifacts they left behind.
If you think about how the ancient world was organized, it would have been very hard for Christians to live totally apart, unless they went the route of the Essenes and formed self-sufficient communities in the desert. Villages are simply too small to have sub-communities, insofar as most of the people in them are members of the same tribe, belonging to several extended families. And once they moved into the cities, things would have been little different. We know, in places like Rome, Alexandria and Antioch, that there were Jewish, Greek, Syrian and other ethnic “quarters”–but we know of no “Christian quarter” in any of these. We know that Rome, the largest city of all, had five synagogues at least, in Transtiberium (across the Tiber, near what is now the Vatican), in the Subura, and several other quarters. We also know that there were several different Christian communities (or Churches, in Pauline terms), at least one of which catered to Jewish Christians. Other cities were much smaller than these three, and the notion that the Christians could live apart from their neighbors in them is not logical, given the dynamics of civil life.
In fact, Paul’s Epistles make it quite clear that his Christians, at least are indeed living in the middle of civic life, rubbing shoulders with their pagan neighbors on a daily basis. The problems he encounters in his Churches would not exist if the Christians were indeed truly separate. And the response of the pagans to the Christians would not be what it was (e.g., in Ephesus in the time of Paul, or in Lyons during the time of Irenaeus), if the Christians were not in the middle of everything.
“I only make this point because I find it all too easy to speak of “not hiding your light under a bushel” when there is little consideration given to how a Catholic (or Orthodox) is supposed to bring up his or her children in the faith. ”
I would say the way that Christians brought up their children in faith during the patristic era ought to be our model. They lived in and around a pagan culture in which they were a distinct minority until the sixth century, in its own way as sensual and highly sexualized as our culture today (Daddy, what’s a “herm”?).
Separation from the culture was not their choice (Basil, the two Gregories, John Chrysostom, Ambrose and of course, Augustine, all received the best possible classical education, which was, of course, utterly pagan).
Engagement, not disengagement, is what we must do. If your kids cannot resist the secular culture, the problem is not with the culture, but with you: you have not prepared them to know their faith, to have confidence in their convictions, and to be able to answer in faith and truth when challenged. As I said, if you hide your kids away in the hothouse of a purely religious school, send them off to a purely religious college, then when they get out of school and enter the world, they will not have any resistance whatsoever to a culture which is utterly alien to them. Some people think it’s a solution. I think it’s a cop out, and a catastrophe waiting to happen. It’s a cop out, because it somehow or other makes the schools, television, books or whatever responsible for the spiritual formation of our children, when, ultimately, it is our responsibility as parents–and nobody else’s. That’s the burden that comes with being given the Crowns in marriage–you are lords of the domestic kingdom, and priests of the domestic church.
“A look at how Catholic education is faring now in Britain and Canada suffices to prove the point.”
It wasn’t so hot in the U.S. back in the 1950s, now that you mention it. Fulton Sheen had a point, when he warned parents if they wanted their children to lose their Catholic faith, then by all means send them to Catholic colleges and universities.
At a lower level, I thought it pretty pathetic that I, a highly secularized, non-observant Jew, knew more about Christian doctrine than my Catholic friends who went to parochial schools.
When I began teaching Eastern Christian Formation to seventh graders, I was not surprised to find that kids who went to Roman Catholic parochial schools actually knew less about the faith and the Bible than public school kids (though those who went to Episcopalian day schools seemed to know more than both combined–a puzzlement).
March 8th, 2011 | 7:01 pm
“What happens in worship affects everything else in the Church, and thus I find it not surprising that the upheaval and banalization of the Church’s lived liturgy (at least for most of its communities) was accompanied by such upheaval in the Church at large.”
Being old enough to remember the liturgical life of the pre-conciliar Church, I can tell you there was plenty of banality (as well as minimalism, reductionism and abuse) going on then as is today. It was just a different set of problems. But, had it not been for the dire state of the liturgy in the Latin Church, there would have been no need for the reforms mandated in Sacrosanctum concilium. One should read the document in full, keeping in mind that one does not legislate against that which is not happening, or mandate that which is. Parsing the prescriptions of the Decree will give you a very good picture of what was wrong with the liturgy of the Latin Church by the early 1960s.
March 8th, 2011 | 7:41 pm
Stuart,
“For Protestants, it’s not a matter of finding a vanilla church, but finding the flavor that matches yours.”
It certainly was once true that Catholics strictly bound themselves to the parish, but Vatican II changed that. Of my three Catholic siblings, one chooses a church with the highest liturgy, another, the most politically conservative, and a third, just wanted to escape the ugly internal politics she found in her church once she began to volunteer there.
Everyone seems to be seeking the right flavor.
March 8th, 2011 | 9:35 pm
Can I raise the question of what God desires or commands Catholics to do? It has an immediate application to the liturgy; liturgical questions are evaluated above in terms of what appeals or makes sense to people. In fact you evaluate the liturgy by its purpose, which is the worship of God. If a liturgical form is a superior kind of worship of God then you adopt it, and you don’t consider people’s attitudes to it. Of course in the long run this is a choice of the liturgy that will appeal to most people, but that is just not relevant. For education, consider what Catholics need to know in order to best carry out God’s will; for political and social issues, what Catholics need to do to best carry out God’s will. Again, these will tend to be the choices that in the long run will attract people the most; but if they don’t – and in some circumstances they won’t – that just does not matter.
March 8th, 2011 | 11:09 pm
Hello Stuart,
“Being old enough to remember the liturgical life of the pre-conciliar Church, I can tell you there was plenty of banality (as well as minimalism, reductionism and abuse) going on then as is today. It was just a different set of problems. But, had it not been for the dire state of the liturgy in the Latin Church, there would have been no need for the reforms mandated in Sacrosanctum concilium.”
No question that indifferent liturgy was not uncommon in the preconciliar days – the legendary 15 minute “speed” low mass, while probably not as common as legend suggests, was a reality. There has never been a “Golden Age” of the Church, liturgical or otherwise. Nor will there be. Every age has its problems. And the 50′s had the St. Louis Jesuits.
I think “dire” is a strong word, and one I would disagree with. I don’t doubt that it was accepted by some of the reformers. Certainly there was a sense for some that the mass had become inaccessible to many Catholics.
But the road to hell is paved with good intentions, and the cure ended up being far worse than the disease. I challenge you to find any banality in a ca. 1958 mass that would match up with some relative commonplaces I have seen in my dioceses – liturgical dancing, puppets giving benedictions, etc. But more to the point, there was no precedent for such massive, rapid changes in the Roman Rite (or indeed, any rite), and by making such massive changes, it led many Catholics (perhaps not unreasonably) to believe that almost anything else in the Church could be readily changed as well.
The liturgy was not meant to be frozen in amber. It has developed over time. But I do think it quite reasonable to observe that much of what has been lost to Catholics came from the experimentalist iconoclasm that stripped down their liturgy – a “fabricated liturgy,” as one Joseph Ratzinger once referred to it – and not just moving out of their ethnic ghettos.
March 8th, 2011 | 11:36 pm
Stuart,
“Engagement, not disengagement, is what we must do. If your kids cannot resist the secular culture, the problem is not with the culture, but with you”
One thing that makes our situation different from that of the early Christians is that the culture we set ourselves against is one that we have created and thus shares many of our values.
“Being old enough to remember the liturgical life of the pre-conciliar Church, I can tell you there was plenty of banality (as well as minimalism, reductionism and abuse) going on then as is today”
I’m curious. You were neither a Christian nor a Roman Catholic at that time, so I wonder whether you would feel differently had you been one. My older, pre-Vatican II siblings adore the old liturgy, now at least.
More importantly, I wonder whether you feel that the Orthodox Church has succeeded where Rome has failed. Did the Orthodox never have their Vatican II-like liturgical reform?
March 9th, 2011 | 7:39 am
“More importantly, I wonder whether you feel that the Orthodox Church has succeeded where Rome has failed. Did the Orthodox never have their Vatican II-like liturgical reform?”
Every Church has its shortcomings, though these tend to be specific to particular Churches. The Orthodox see liturgy in a slightly different light than do Western Christians. For Western Christians, liturgy is one of a variety of duties and obligations to be fulfilled; for Eastern Christians, liturgy is the essence of what the Church is and what the Church does. It is both the source and the touchstone of theology and spirituality, from which all other things flow.
So, for the most part, the Eastern Orthodox have been extremely reluctant to make overt changes to the liturgy, which reached its present state of development in the 13th century. That is to say, every Orthodox Church (and every Greek Catholic Church) has a set of books (25 in all!) that present the normative form of the liturgy. This represents the ideal, but the Orthodox approach allows for great variation in the application. Only a few monasteries actually do the liturgy in its entirety (because only monastics have that much time and endurance). There are customary abbreviations for cathedral use, and additional abbreviations for parochial use, all governed by custom (I once remarked that the archetypical Byzantine rubric is “And at the appointed time, the priest goes to the usual place to perform the required actions in the customary manner”). Changes in the liturgy usually revolve around what sorts of abbreviations are allowed.
There was only one major effort to impose widespread liturgical reform in the Orthodox Church, and it did not go well. In the 17th century, the Russian Patriarch Nikon, with the assistance of Tsar Alexei, “reformed” the Slavonic Liturgikon to bring Russian usage into line with that of the Greeks (the reasons being largely political). A substantial segment of the Russian people could not accept these changes (which, to an outsider, appeared to be arcane and trivial; e.g., making the sign of the cross with three fingers instead of two), but given the strength of Tradition within the Orthodox Church, these were seen as attacking the foundations of the faith. Nikon and Alexei imposed the reforms by force, excommunicating and persecuting those who would not conform, who today are known as the Old Believers, or, more properly, the Old Ritualists. Ironically (and as Greek scholars told Nikon at the time), the Slavic use was both older and more authentic than the Greek use. Oh, well! It was not until a few years ago that the Old Ritualists were reconciled with the mainstream of the Russian Orthodox Church (and allowed to keep their rite).
In the 20th century, there have been a number of minor changes adopted by several Orthodox jurisdiction. The most widespread and important is increased use of the vernacular (i.e., modern languages). Traditionally, the Orthodox liturgy was celebrated in Greek, in Slavonic, and in Arabic (adopted from the 9th century by Orthodox living in the Middle East). Liturgical Greek, however, is a antique form that is barely intelligible to speakers of modern Greek. In the same manner, Church Slavonic (Old Middle Bulgarian) is no longer intelligible to Russians, Ukrainians, Belarusians and just about all other Slavs except Bulgarians and Macedonians. It bears the same resemblance to modern Slavic languages as Chaucer’s English bears to modern English. So there has been a consistent movement to celebrate in languages that can be understood by the people, and to translate the liturgy into other languages, such as English, Spanish, Japanese, Korean, and German, in order to spread the word in missonary territories. The Russian Church, back in the 18th century, translated both Scripture and the Liturgicon into various Siberian languages and Aleut–but, ironically, holds out against celebrating the liturgy in modern Russian. By the same token, the Greek Orthodox Church resists translating the liturgy into modern Greek.
Other changes are more subtle. A number of Prayers of the Anaphora originally chanted aloud by the priest, gradually came to be taken silently, or “in a low voice”. Under the influence of theologians like Alexander Schmemann, many jurisdictions have started chanting these prayers aloud once more.
A final and important reform is the push for more frequent communion. Metropolitan Kallistos likes to say that “The Orthodox speak endlessly about the Eucharist but never receive communion”, which is only a slight exaggeration. In many places, people receive only once or twice a year, and then only after extensive preparation–even though the Fathers preached consistently about the importance of receiving regularly, and not abstaining because of perceived unworthiness. The frequency of communion has increased, particularly in the U.S., but elsewhere it remains the exception rather than the rule.
Among the Greek Catholics, the liturgy had become highly latinized after 400 years, but from the 1990s onward, reforms were initiated to restore the fullness of the Orthodox Tradition, in accordance with the Liturgical Instruction of 1996. Unfortunately, in the Ruthenian Byzantine Catholic Church (into which I was baptized in 1996), these reforms have gone off course. Rather than following the mandate of the Liturgical Instruction to prepare a full and accurate translation of the 1942 Slavonic Liturgicon, an “Inter-Eparchial Liturgical Commission” promulgated a highly abbreviated and extremely tendentious “Revised Divine Liturgy”. Not really a translation, it is in many places a paraphrase that reflects the hobby horses of the members of the commission.
Aside from inaccurate and lame translations, it also decided to employ “horizontal” inclusive language, which in places verges (some would say crosses over) into heresy.
Repeating the errors of the Latin Church of the 1970s, the Ruthenian hierarchy mandated use of this–and only this–translation of the liturgy, a move that was as successful as Latin attempts to suppress the Tridentine rite. Attendance in the Ruthenian Church has plummeted, and in many places, priests either refused to use the new books or quietly returned to the old ones after seeing the dire effects. Most of the bishops admit the new liturgy is a failure, but refuse to allow the old books to be restored, fearing a loss of faith (not to mention the investment in all those new books).
Because of the liturgical chaos in the Ruthenian Church, my family have attached ourselves to a Melkite Greek Catholic church (meaning I now can sing both Byzantine and Slavonic chant, and have added Greek and Arabic to my storehouse of liturgical phrases). I think it significant that my new parish has absolutely no pew books whatsoever (no pews, either!). Instead, everybody just learns all the parts by heart, and after three years there, I have to say I know all the fixed parts and most of the moveable parts for all the major feasts. Everybody sings, everybody prays from the heart, and it is pretty close to my ideal of what liturgy should be.
March 9th, 2011 | 10:47 am
Thanks. That was helpful.
March 9th, 2011 | 11:53 am
” There has never been a “Golden Age” of the Church, liturgical or otherwise. Nor will there be. Every age has its problems. And the 50′s had the St. Louis Jesuits.”
Amen to that. Anyone who thinks otherwise should read Robert Taft’s book, “Through Their Own Eyes: Liturgy as the Byzantines Saw It”, a collection of first hand accounts of real liturgy in the patristic era. The West saw similar problems. Taking into account the principle that one does not legislate against that which is not happening, consider the implications of a canon forbidding the presence of livestock in the sanctuary.
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