Obedience, writes Elizabeth Scalia, is a spiritual discipline desperately in need of recovery (especially for American Catholics) given ongoing challenges in the Church and more recent eruptions like the LCWR report.
Obedience, or really, our refusal to practice it, is at the heart of most of our troubles, because disobedience serves so much within ourselves that ought not be given in to. Our egos; our pride; our selfishness; our need to self-medicate, our greed — it all gets served by disobedience to the first and fundamental things. Disobedience is at the heart of the LCWR story, too, to some extent.
But Julie is on to something when she ties Americanism to Disobedience and finds something troubling in the mix. Our ingrained independence doesn’t understand the idea of something not being a democracy, subject to a campaign and a vote. [...]
In Europe, people either leave the church or remain; in Africa and Asia the church is of course growing and determined in its orthodoxy. Only in America do you see this insistence that a “spirit of Vatican II” that arose in the early 1970′s — and that often has nothing to do with the actual documents of VCII — must flourish; it (and these proponents) must increase, while Rome must decrease.
These tendencies lead her to speculate that the establishment of a schismatic “American Catholic Church” may be a real possibility. Fans of Walker Percy’s novel Love in the Ruins are aware of that body’s fictional existence there (it “emphasizes property rights and the integrity of neighborhoods, retains the Latin mass and plays The Star-Spangled Banner at the elevation”), but Scalia seems to think it’s not as far-fetched as it sounds.
I’m much more skeptical, especially given that some Catholics can (and do) simply leave the Church when they become sufficiently irritated by others’ emphasis on orthodoxy. Why bother going through the legal, emotional, and monetary trouble of a formal separation (for just how messy this can be, see the spate of ongoing lawsuits in Episcopal dioceses around the country) when there’s a much easier option? Nevertheless, Scalia’s points about our particular difficulty with obedience are well-taken, and one hopes that dangerous spirit/letter dichotomy she mentions, source of forty years of trouble, is indeed beginning to find resolution.
May 2nd, 2012 | 12:54 pm
There are too many alternatives and outlets for a major “American Catholic Church”. The Epsicopals have their “Catholic without being Catholic”-wing in several formats (from VII-like beliefs all the way to liberal Anglo-Catholicism). Plus, how many American “Old Catholic” churches are there running around? Protestantitis (the splintering tendency in people who break off from orthodoxies) will prevent liberal breakaways from ever forming their own, one American church. Just look at the far right’s inability to form one anti-VII Catholic Church alternative (SSPX, SSPV, Pope Michael, etc.)
May 2nd, 2012 | 1:54 pm
Thanks for linking. To my way of thinking, if the Catholics who are still insisting that the “spirit” of VCII be followed, if not the actual letter have not become Episcopalian by now, they’re not going to, not if this piece is any evidence: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/brother-louis-dethomasis-fsc/the-subversion-of-second-vatican-council_b_1438954.html
May 2nd, 2012 | 2:26 pm
Could it happen? Yep. There have already been multiple schismatic sects in the modern era (SSPX, Polish Nat. CC, etc.) even some that took priests and bishops with them.
However, none of these modern schismatic groups have really been successful in stripping influence away from Roman Catholicism. I doubt this potential schism will. I could see a schism. I can’t see an organized schism.
May 3rd, 2012 | 9:55 am
Thanks Elizabeth for the link to Brother DeThomasis. I wish I understood him. When it agrees with him, he has no problem with the “institutional” church, he just doesn’t call it that. Then there’s his “it’s all about the people”, as if the bishops, even the bishop of Rome, were not people as well. I guess I’ll just keep being docile as I bang my head against my own sins.
May 3rd, 2012 | 9:55 pm
There is no such thing as an “American Catholic Church”. If we are devout Church-going Catholics, then we are Roman Catholics who happen to be Americans. We are loyal and obedient to our Holy Father, the Pope, Christ’s Vicar on Earth, and to our Bishops. The greatest gift God has given me is to be Catholic and I will praise and thank Him for this gift for the rest of my life and for all eternity.
May 4th, 2012 | 8:38 am
Shirley J Schultz
Here is a curious thing. In France, if someone refers to « l’Eglise Catholique Romaine » you can be absolutely sure that person is a Protestant. Everyone else, Catholic or not, calls it, quite simply « l’Eglise » (the Church) and its members « Les Catholiques »
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