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After the Future

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Francis’s Church

Timothy Egan in this morning's Times: The Jesuits have always tried to get people to think for themselves, to arrive at belief through an arduous process. When bishops started telling…

Timothy Egan in this morning's Times:

The Jesuits have always tried to get people to think for themselves, to arrive at belief through an arduous process. When bishops started telling parishioners that their gay and lesbian siblings were sinners, and that family planning was a grievous wrong, people stopped listening to them — for good reason.

“In terms of people in the pews, the Catholic Church lost roughly one-fourth of its strength over the last 35 years,” wrote the political scientists Robert Putnam and David Campbell in their book “American Grace.” They argue that when the religious right politicized faith, they put a “not welcome” sign on the door for millions of people of faith. This was compounded by the hypocrisy of these same moral authorities protecting pedophile priests while ignoring the lifelong anguish of the victims. For much of the 20th century, the Catholic Church in places was essentially organized crime in clerical garb.

The spirituality of Pope Francis, like his namesake from Assisi, is by example. Shedding the glam trappings of power and the aura of invincibility, he lives in a spartan guesthouse, mixes with the folks and tries to give voice to the sick, the poor, the immigrant living in the shadows. He washes the feet of prisoners, and Muslim ones at that. He laments that worshiping “the god called money” makes for bankrupt human beings.

The church he envisions would be a “home for all,” not “a nest protecting our mediocrity.” It’s strong stuff, long overdue and as refreshing as a brisk wind blowing down from the Dolomites.

Sure. This is a welcome change. I think the world wants the Catholic Church to present its best self–a self that represents the spirit of the gospels rather than the spirit of moralistic fussiness and institutional self-protection. But nothing really changes until the Catholic Church moves out of Rome.

I know. It's not going to happen. Petrine ministry and all that. It's too bad because the "Roman" part of the Roman Catholic Church is its biggest burden. So long as the ghosts of the empire inhabit the Vatican hallways, there will be something fundamentally unchristian about the Roman Church. Popes like John XXIII and Francis come and go, but the ghosts remain. 

The Roman Church in the coming century faces the choice whether it wants to be a Church that appeals primarily to fear-and-order-obsessed, right-wing personality types or to all people of good will, and if the latter it needs a clean break with its history of abuses of power. The ghosts in the hallways are all about power–getting more of it and abusing it. Those ghosts are the spirit of Rome; they have nothing to do with the spirit of the gospels. 

Comments

5 responses

  1. Jonathan Avatar
    Jonathan

    Jack, I’m a little surprised someone who professes to dislike NPR as much as you do and for the reasons you do, so often resorts to the NYTimes. To me, it’s the same as NPR except worse. The Times actually makes me nauseous. Its opinions are usually at least as condescending and narrow-minded as anything I’ve ever heard from a pulpit, Roman or otherwise. The first paragraph you quote from Egan is pure rhetoric, it doesn’t even deserve the name of journalism. “Propaganda” would be better. Anyone who’s taken a course in logic, history or sociology, or actually learned to think like Jesuit, would stop reading before even getting to the part you object to.
    But anyway, what I want to ask is if you could define what you mean by the Church’s “Roman” nature. It’s not clear to me. You know probably better than I do that the hyper-organized curial structure is not the Church’s traditional modus operandi. It begins to form as an aspect of the Counter-Reformation, and only really takes off in the 19th century response to the rising tide of full blown secularity and liberalism. For most of its history the Church has not presented an outward, official face like the one it now offers, yet it has surely been “Roman” these last two millenia. And as for that official face, it is at least as much a product of the wold that must be faced as it is an expression of some inner essence of Romanness. If by Roman you mean power-hungry and corruptible, then I think you need to find some other word than Roman, because these traits describe any institution.

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  2. Jack Whelan Avatar
    Jack Whelan

    Jonathan–I mean by Roman part of the Roman Catholic Church the part of it that filled the vacuum in the civil sphere when the western empire collapsed in the fifth and sixth century. One could argue it played an important role in preserving the Western heritage, but it was always more Roman than it was Christian, and the Pope was always more Pontifex Maximus (a title held by Julius Caesar early in his career) than the humble, bumbling, very fallible St. Peter.
    The ghosts to which I refer might be better understood as institutional memory, and I’m arguing that the Roman Church’s institutional memory works against it rather than for it when it comes to representing the gospel to the world in the coming centuries. Its imagination of itself is largely shaped the Roman imperium’s imagination of itself as lawgiver and maintainer or the civil order. This in turn has created a particularly intransigent extrinsic legalism and moralism in the Roman church’s ethos that has made it ridiculously un-Christian.
    Memory shapes identity, and identity in turn shapes the limits of possibility. That identity is deeply rooted in an ecclesial fantasy of empire, a hubristic sense of its institutional self-importance, and that in turn has led it to commit the most egregious crimes in the name of Christ.
    If you are arguing that the Roman Church is no different from any other institution, I would respond that the Roman Church is, in fact, unlike any other institution, if for no other reason than its longevity and because of what I believe is its world-historical mission. It’s because I care about it so deeply that I say this. But as long it is Roman in the sense that I describe it here, it cannot fulfill that mission. It is deeply at odds with itself. While the gospel admonishes us to be shrewed as serpents and guiless as doves, the Roman Church has had too much of the first and not near enough of the second.
    Regarding your query about the NY Times: This summer, after abstaining from the NYT for many of the reasons I have abstained from NPR, I got a discount home-delivery subscription of the NYT because my aspiring journalist son was home from college and one of his great pleasures in life has always been to read the paper in the morning. I had recently cancelled my subscription to the local Seattle Times, which I really cannot stand and only got for the sports pages. So to replace it I figured I’d give the NYT a try. I was blown away at how much of the world was there, and how much I missed having something ‘catholic’ in that sense. There really is nothing like it. The comprehensiveness of the reporting is amazing.
    So I don’t bother ever to read its official editorials or the op-eds of Kristoff, Keller, Dowd, Friedman, and others like them; they are, truly, nauseating. The others are, for me anyway, less objectionable, and I read them if they are on a topic that interests me. I don’t find David Brooks as always awful as many do, and Tim Egan is a local guy (in the NW) whose writing I admire and whom I’ve followed for years. So I understand where you are coming from, but I make no apologies. With the newspaper you can choose what you read; you can’t do that when you are listening to the radio. Listening to NPR has a deeply depressing effect on me; reading the times an exhilarating one.
    I see the purpose of this blog to be one person’s reading the signs of the times, for what it’s worth. I see the NYT as indispensable resource for doing that.

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  3. Jonathan Avatar
    Jonathan

    Well, this is helpful. I want more, though, on the exceptional nature of the Church as institution. I think you’re on to something, but it’s something very hard to approach. The RCC is indeed different from other institutions, and I’m with you in calling that a difference in kind. But it is still an institution, and the world is still the world, in need of institutions. The legalism and clericalism of the Church is off the mark in many ways, and yet I can only wonder what would have happened without it. The fact is, people need something to push back against or cleverly avoid in order to get anything done. It is a great mystery and aspect of the problem of evil. Viewed in its totality (to date) I think it’s safe to say no institution has produced as many wildly dissenting souls who have still managed to uphold the institution and who have refused to forsake it. That is the astonishing thing. There was the Inquisition; there was also John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila. So many eccentric geniuses are now Saints. And the Church continues to retain and win the loyalty of great thinkers and artists. It really is the catholic Church. What needs desperately to happen is for more people, within and without the Church, to recognize and openly celebrate the fact that the Church is the entire body of the faithful, not just the ordained hierarchy.
    I agree that when the Times does journalism, it’s good, arguably the best in the world. I just get powerfully turned off by everything in it that’s not journalism, which is a lot. But you’re right, one needs to keep an eye on on it, all of it. And that’s a good point about the radio. But as media go, I find visual media (I mean tv) the most manipulative, radio second, and print the least. I wonder if reading a hardcopy paper makes it more endurable. For years now I’ve only looked at the Times online. I remember liking it much better when I read an actual paper. But then, I had different views on life back then. It’s easier to be selective, I think, with the print edition.

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  4. Jack Whelan Avatar
    Jack Whelan

    Balancing the serpent and dove is difficult under all circumstances–for individuals and for institutions.
    I remember being struck several years ago when my son was in high school that his highest compliment for a teacher or for the parents of his friends was that they were ‘down to earth’. When I asked him who wasn’t down to earth, he described the adults who were the control freaks, the helicopter parents, the one’s pushing their own agendas, imposing rather than enabling. People like this sincerely think they care about their kids, but mostly they care about preserving their own dissociated, airborne fantasy reality.
    The adults he most admired were people who stood for something, and who deeply cared about the kids in their lives, but who had a sense of humor, who didn’t take themselves or their role as parent or teacher too seriously. But these kids knew these adults were there for them, truly committed to them and what was best for them without imposing their own agendas.
    Parents and teachers who have that are everyday models of the balance between the serpent and the dove. The serpent part keeps them earthbound, but the dove part gives them their idealism, their ability to care and to stand for something without forcing it, because they trust the kids in their care, and trust that most kids when they know they are cared about, find their way on their own, and also know when to ask for help when they need it. I’m not saying that some kids don’t get themselves into messes that require tough love and a sharp intervention, but the down-to-earth adult knows when and when not to intervene. The control freak is always intervening.
    The world needs a down-to-earth church, a church that is comfortable in its own skin, which is the world–but what the world has got through most of last two millennia has been a control-freak church. Sure, the church needs to stand for something, to point to the “more”, but it cannot force things. It needs to seduce rather than force, and if it had any real faith or hope it wouldn’t be hard for it, because then it would have what everybody most deeply longs for. Francis seems to get that.

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  5. Patrick Avatar
    Patrick

    I have little to say about Francis, but I do want to echo Jack’s sentiments with respect to the NYT. My reading interests tend toward foreign affairs, and for that there really is nothing like the NYT. The daily reporting is very, very good.

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