Abortion and the Catholic Culture

Patrick Deneen wants to agree with Jody’s argument that Catholic culture stands at the middle of the Notre Dame controversy. But he can’t :

I admire and agree with much of what Jody writes, but I fear I have to disagree with him over this analysis. In my view, the singular focus upon abortion as THE issue over which conservative Catholics will brook no divergence and around which we are called to rally reveals, to my mind, not evidence of robust Catholic culture as much as its absence. It seems to me that—along with the opposition to gay marriage—this issue represents the last stand, the inner-most wall barely keeping the hordes from overrunning the sanctum. The ferocity over this issue—and this issue almost to the exclusion of nearly every other issue that might be part of a rich fabric of Catholic culture—suggests to me that Catholic culture, where it existed, has been largely routed. And, in fact, it suggests further that it is precisely for this reason that this issue has become largely defined politically — and not culturally —with an emphasis on the way that the battle over abortion must be won or lost at the ballot box (and, by extension, Supreme Court appointments).

Most Catholics have long ago ceased to live in a Catholic culture, per se. I would go so far as to surmise that many of the most vociferous opponents of abortion - ones lined up in this particular battle—do not by and large live in particularly Catholic cultures, so much as occasionally gather with like-minded Catholics at various locations (Church, a conference, a retreat) and otherwise live suffused in a decidedly non-Catholic culture. Most of us—Catholic or non-Catholic—live by default in THIS culture, whatever we would call it—liberal, modern, American, global, polyglot, anti-culture. THIS culture is decisively a “culture of choice.” Even those who would seek to inhabit a Catholic culture do so as a matter of individual choice—a lifestyle option. But this is not a Catholic culture as we might historically and traditionally understand such a culture—where that culture (as with any culture) shapes and forms your worldview, largely unbeknownst to you and without prior consent or choice on your part.

One of the most ardent and conservative Catholics that I know lives in an ocean-side house in Malibu, California. His opposition to abortion is fierce; however, in no way could it be suggested that he lives in a Catholic culture. He is a Catholic living in a culture of materialism, individualism, hyper-mobility and hedonism. While perhaps more extreme than the case for most of us, nevertheless his situation is closer to most American Catholics today than not. American Catholics have largely assimilated into mainstream American society, and come to seek success and approval from that culture on its terms.

Of course, Jody’s written on the loss and reorganization of Catholic culture as well:

The arcanery of decorations on albs and chasubles, the processions of Holy Water blessings, the grottos with their precarious rows of fire-hazard candles flickering away in little red cups, the colored seams and peculiar buttons that identified monsignors, the wimpled school sisters, the tiny Spanish grandmothers muttering prayers in their black mantillas, the First Communion girls wrapped up in white like prepubescent brides, the mumbled Irish prejudices, the loud Italian festivals, the Holy Door indulgences, the pocket guides to Thomistic philosophy, the Knights of Columbus with their cocked hats and comic-opera swords, the tinny mission bells, the melismatic chapel choirs—none of this was the Church, some of it actually obscured the Church, and the decision to clear out the mess was not unintelligent or uninformed or unintended.

It was merely insane. An entire culture nested in the crossbeams and crannies, the nooks and corners, of the Catholic Church. And it wasn’t until the swallows had been chased away that anyone seemed to realize how much the Church itself needed them, darting around the chapels and flitting through the cathedrals. They provided beauty, and eccentricity, and life. What they did, really, was provide Catholicism to the Catholic Church in America, and none of the multimedia Masses and liturgical extravaganzas in the years since—none of the decoy nests and artificial puddles—has managed to call them home . . . .

And yet, one can see signs, here and there, that the swallows might have begun their return, mostly through the pro-life movement. In itself, that is a disturbing image: Roe v. Wade as the event that most transformed American Catholicism over the last thirty years. And from the outward and visible signs, the new culture appears much, much thinner than the old; Catholic literature, to take an easy example, remains barely a shadow of what it was in the 1950s. Still, in ways that no one has fully traced, opposition to the Supreme Court’s 1973 abortion decree has helped undo the separation of Catholic culture from the Catholic Church.

Watch, for instance, the New York kids out praying on Saturday mornings with the Franciscan Friars of the Renewal in Manhattan and Queens. Or visit the energetic and hungry pro-life groups at the nation’s colleges. Princeton, Fordham, MIT, Penn State: It hardly matters where or what the school is; somewhere on campus there’s a group of Catholic undergraduates joining the evangelicals to fight abortion with Students for Life, Life Chain, March for Life, and Day of Silence for the Unborn.

And then there are all the Catholic figures who have emerged in the various worlds of public discourse over the past twenty years. At the political magazines, at the think tanks, in the law schools, in the judiciary, on the television talk shows, on the book circuit, across the nation there’s a way Catholics have of recognizing one another: a wink and a nod, a figurative handshake that declares joint membership in a particular intellectual culture. In 1956 it might have been a fragment of ecclesial Latin, the mention of an imprimatur and a nihil obstat , the odd way of pronouncing the name Augustine. In 2006, it is instead a verbal gesture at natural law and a firm rejection of abortion. The result is the beginning of a new culture: a new Catholicism that, at its best, simply bypasses the stalemates of the 1970s.