This, from a Commonweal blog post on the topic of the loss of the old-school Catholic culture and what that means for the future:
“Every single 60-ish or 70-ish year old Commonweal Catholic can tell you of memories of various thick, ‘ghetto’ practices that imprinted Catholicism into their DNA. The felt banners and coloring books of my generation’s Catholicism neither inspired nor repelled; they just made Catholicism trivial and easily surrendered, for they never made a substantial claim in the first place. The irony is that such a culture–which is ‘given,’ automatic, un-self-conscious, atmospheric, osmotic–now has to be intentionally and consciously constructed so that it can be organic and automatic in the future.”
How do we go about that, constructing something that is automatic and not self-conscious, in an intentionally self-aware way? It seems impossible on the face of it. Yet we have a model.
Think about the way we treat traditional, ethnic music, like for example how the Chieftains play Irish music. They play all the old tunes in an authentic way, but do it consciously. They don’t play Irish music on traditional Irish instruments because that’s all they know or because they only have one fiddle. They do it because they want to. They have many alternatives but choose to make this music. They’ve learned about it and play it in a way that’s both authentic yet unique to our time, with other artists like Sting or the Rolling Stones, Sinéad O’Connor, and Tom Jones (in their album The Long Black Veil), or fusing it with other musical styles to create something new yet recognizable as part of the tradition.
We can never recreate the “thick, ghetto practices” (and who would want to) that gave us the old school atmospheric, osmotic Catholicism of old, but we can understand and take from the riches of the past to recreate the best of the past today, in a way that is true to our time yet yet recognizable as part of the Catholic tradition.
These new traditions may never be “un-self-conscious” but there’s no reason they can’t be atmospheric: as rich in metaphor, aura and beauty as anything in the past.
Tags: loss of the sacred, power of the faithful, sacramental imagination, self-awareness, tradition recreating itself
The line is from the 3/15/10 edition of Sightings, Martin E. Marty’s weekly newsletter, and it describes one of the ongoing lunacies of Glenn Beck. “The fact that Mr. Beck charms millions of devotees tells more about the sad state of truth-telling and the high state of lie-receiving than civil citizens should want to hear.”
When reading the John Allen interview in NCR with Mother Clare Millea, who is heading up the Vatican “investigation” of American religious women, this patient and sane-sounding woman says the following in answer to John Allen’s question about the reaction the visitation has generated:
NCR (aka John Allen): A year into this process, are you in a better position to understand some of the fear and resistance it’s generated?
Mother Clare Millea: Initially I got many reactions along the lines of, “We were not consulted, we were not warned, this was just thrown on us.” That’s certainly foreign to our American mentality, and our way of doing things. … One time I said to a major superior who lives in Rome, “You and I both live here, and we know this is what happens. Why don’t we just get over it?” She laughed and said, “You’re right. Let’s do it.”
Here in the third millennium, the Church has a structure of governance that is a divine-right, absolute monarchy. It is grossly unrepresentative, lacks checks and balances, deadens the global and national voice of the bishops, excludes the sense of the faithful, compromises liturgy, paralyzes needed development in canon law, ignores the lessons of modern jurisprudence, is obsessed with obedience and secrecy, conflates traditional doctrine with papal opinion, and compromises the intellectual life of the Church. The sexual abuse scandal has shown time and time again that the hierarchy will value the institution over the safety of innocent children, rotting the Church spiritually (and financially) from within.
Yet otherwise sane people continue to accept this governance structure. As Mother Clare Millea said, ”You and I both live here, and we know this is what happens. Why don’t we just get over it?”
Little will change in the Church at the top. When it happens, it will happen from the bottom when people like Mother Clare Millea refuse to accept that “this is what happens” and start exercising some civil (i.e., papal) disobedience instead of just getting over it.
Tags: papal disobedience, structures of governance
