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the book

When the Enlightenment Hit the Neighborhoods
Faith, Reason, and the Search for the Sacred

This is the gist of the book that I’ve been working on to understand what went on in the Roman Catholic Church between the time that I came of age and the time my children came of age, as we experienced a huge deflation in traditional religious belief and in communal access to the sacred.

It asks and attempts to answer the question: What the heck happened?

It’s a work in progress. I’m laying out the contents of each chapter as I go, roughly sketched below. I’ve made it through Part I and Part II.

Part I

In Part I scope the theme of the book: how in the 1960s the “Enlightenment hit the neighborhoods,” how regular people began questioning the traditional beliefs of faith and the authority that validated those beliefs, how we gradually left so much of it behind, and why that’s not a good thing.

I talk about that lost world and how it all came together in the immigrant church in Chicago where I grew up, which provided a potent mix of community, access to sacred space and sacred time, a comprehensive map of reality, and social action. But then gradually that great world of belief, ritual and meaning all simply ceased to make sense.

Next I look at what religion does and what the sacred means. Then I roughly scope out how that old world fell apart when the Enlightenment hit the neighborhoods in the 1960s and broke the authority of those who legitimized the beliefs of faith. As a result, the believer, not the institution, came to define the intellectual content of faith. But this resulted in an openness to only that which made sense; it meant a rejection of mystery and everything associated with authority, including the bulk of the religious tradition. This left a rather gaping void but we still have the need for a way to cope with the mysteries of life and the human heart. So I discuss how we might restore religion’s richness in a way that does make sense in the modern world, and why that would be a useful thing, and how we might go about it. This involves building a new understanding of the collective memory of the religious tradition that rings true in the modern world and reforming its structures of authority.

Part II

This is the specific Catholic story of the break in authority and the break in the lineage of belief and how it got us to where we are today.

There are seven parts:

1) What’s Been Going On for the Past Couple of Hundred Years
2) How Authority Broke in the Catholic Church
3) The Results of the Break
4) The Problem of the Narrowing
5) The Structures of Authority
6) The Mess We're In Today
7) Framing the Solution

1) What’s Been Going On for the Past Couple of Hundred Years

Vatican II was the biggest thing that’s happened to the Church in a long time but to understand it, you have to understand what happened about a hundred years before in Vatican I, and to understand that you have to understand the situation in Europe at the time as a result of the Enlightenment, the French Revolution and the consequent loss of the Papal States. This sent Church leaders into a paranoid backlash against everything associated with the modern world, including liberty, democracy, freedom of religion, historical scholarship, the study of early church history, and freedom of conscience. This backlash continued through the 1950s (and hasn’t yet worn itself out) and included the suppression of most of the Church’s notable theologians.

The Church’s anti-modern obsession was moderated when Pope John XXIII called Vatican II but the power struggles between the anti-modernists in the Vatican bureaucracy and the majority of the bishops continued through the Council. I give an overview of Vatican II, including the Vatican bureaucracy (i.e., the Roman Curia), the preparations for the Council, the power struggles, how the bishops took procedural control, the sessions, the theologians, the voting, the documents, the experience, the buzz, and the outcomes, which involved major reversals of the pre-Council anti-modernist lunacies. I also talk about what the Council didn’t do, what didn’t happen after the Council, and the impact of Humanae Vitae, the encyclical that continued the papacy’s condemnation of artificial birth control.

2) How Authority Broke in the Catholic Church

Prior to Vatican II, faith was the defining framework of life for Catholics; you kept the rules and got the benefits. Vatican II changed that; it changed badges of Catholic identity (e.g., disappearance of the Latin Mass; fish on Fridays, etc.) that the faithful thought could never be changed. The shock was not the individual changes themselves but the fact that anything changed at all. The faithful then concluded that if something might change, it would change, so they just went ahead and acted as though it did change. As a result, they started taking belief on our own terms, no longer looking to the Church to define sin or dogma and often actively disregarding it. The tipping point was Pope Paul VI’s 1968 encyclical Humanae Vitae which reaffirmed the papacy’s thoroughly illogical condemnation of artificial birth control (and which was subsequently thoroughly ignored). Ongoing lack of reform after Vatican II hurt as well, and the times in the Sixties were such that authority in all segments of society was suspect. Thus occurred the Catholic version of the Enlightenment hitting the neighborhoods: the breakdown in the centralized authority of the church and the passing of the truth of belief from the institution to the believer. This resulted in widespread confusion regarding dogma, liturgy, morals, and the structures of authority themselves, and the break in the lineage of belief between the Church before and after the Council.

3) The Results of the Break

As a result of the breaking of authority, the faithful tended to accept only what made sense and to turn away from the mysterious and that associated with authority and tradition. But the downside was that individuals had to figure everything out for themselves and had the full burden of making meaning in their lives, rather than receiving it from the institution. This often resulted in missing most of the wealth of the tradition.

What typically made sense for the faithful? In belief, the core Christian message of justice and love made sense. In worship, a modeling of the liturgies of the early church made sense, evolving services that were simple, pristine, understandable, community-based, and participatory. Church interiors were brightened and simplified, decoration was removed, the altar was turned around. Music moved towards simple, folk-like melodies.

What didn’t make sense? In belief, dogma didn’t make much sense, and anything previously legitimated by authority. In worship, anything too mysterious or traditional, priest-centric, complex, or devotional didn’t make sense. The altars were stripped; ornamentation, statues and manifestations of wealth were removed from church interiors. Music that was complex or traditional disappeared.

4) The Problem of the Narrowing

Anything too mysterious or anything legitimated by the old authority was suspect or ignored. This gives us what some call “beige Catholicism;” a Catholicism as non-threatening, accessible, culturally appealing, and politically correct as possible. Of course a church bereft of the authority of its historical tradition and a church that shies away from mystery pretty much sucks as a church. By its nature the Church is an institution and it’s legitimate for institutions to expect their legacies to be received, understood, and passed on in something resembling their fullness. Yet we don’t really know who we are anymore, or what we believe. Our collective memory has taken a huge hit. In belief, the resolution of faith with reason hasn’t yet happened. In worship, there are huge issues concerning external vs. internal participation, understanding the liturgy vs. experiencing it, the ascendancy of text, the issue of ownership, the piety of niceness, the loss of the sacred, confusion around the sacramental act and the sacral role of the priest, and the understanding of the Mass as a meal versus a sacrifice. In architecture, we’ve lost the sense of church as the house of God and in music the great wealth of traditional sacred music has been pushed aside. The shared, collective memory of the institution has narrowed so much that there’s very little the faithful can agree upon concerning what it means to be Catholic. Resolving these issues requires the Enlightenment’s valuing of evidence-based reason coming face to face with mystery and tradition -- and this hasn’t yet happened.

5) Structures of Authority

Besides the narrowing of the collective memory, the other thing wreaking havoc on the Church are its current structures of authority. The Church is an institution and institutions require legitimate structures of authority to function effectively. The current structure of authority in the Church today (as defined in the Code of Canon Law) is an elected, divine right monarchy where the supreme legislative, executive, and judicial power in the Church resides for life in the Pope as the Roman Pontiff, who derives this right to rule directly from the will of God as the successor of Peter. This structure of authority is a holdover from monarchical Europe.

As time goes on it is increasingly out of sync with the progress made in modern world and increasingly poisonous to the life of the Church, harming it in so many different ways. It is grossly unrepresentative, lacks checks and balances, deadens the global voice of the bishops, deadens the national voice of the bishops, excludes the “sense of the faithful,” compromises the liturgy, paralyzes development of Canon Law, ignores modern jurisprudence, is obsessed with obedience and secrecy, conflates doctrine with papal opinion, and suffocates the intellectual life of the Church.

Church leaders seem incapable of seeing evidence or following a thread of logic beyond a the traditional, Pope-approved party line (e.g., the papal stands on celibacy, collegiality, artificial birth control, etc.). Papal utterances in encyclicals, allocutions, books and speeches have thus taken the place of reality. This has compromised the hierarchy’s very relationship to truth. The idea that faith and reason are coherent, that truth cannot contradict truth, lies at the heart of the Church’s intellectual tradition. Corruption of reason and evidence is therefore corruption of faith itself.

By perpetuating the status quo of its monarchical structures of authority, the papacy and hierarchy cripple the Church by forcing it to remain antiquated, unrepresentative, unjust, deaf to the lived experience and wisdom of the faithful, intellectually bankrupt, and dangerous to its own: an organization that chooses power and control over all else. This is a corruption of the Church’s relationship to reality and of reason and evidence as a means to understand it; it is a corruption of the Church’s very relationship to truth and therefore to God. There is an institutional soul to lose and we’re in the process of losing it.

6) The Mess We’re in Today

As a result of the problem of the narrowing, the Church’s collective memory has been so compromised that there’s very little the faithful can agree upon when it comes to what it actually means to be Catholic. And the institution’s authority to validate the collective memory is almost non-existent. At the root is a lack among the faithful (and often the clergy) of a straightforward, understanding of the intellectual content of faith that we all share and that the institution validates. We don’t have a coherent framework that makes faith intelligible and makes it all hang together rationally, liturgically, morally and psychologically, and which the faithful recognize as the real thing.

Without a shared collective memory and agreed upon structure of authority to validate it, we remember different things and think different modes of authority are more legitimate than others. Since this fractures memories, it fractures identity at its very root. This fracturing is exactly what is going on in the church today, causing a split in the Church across progressive / conservative divides and across time, between the pre-conciliar Church and the post-conciliar Church. Who gets to define the collective memory? Does the Pope get to do it? Do the bishops and the clergy? Do the faithful? Do the Conservatives get to do it, or the Progressives?

This is currently unresolved. We are running without an agreed-upon, coherent intellectual framework for belief and a trusted authority that is recognized by the faithful as being able to legitimize it. What we need is the re-creation of a full, rich and complete collective memory that resolves faith and reason and a rational, recognized institutional authority legitimizing it. What we have is conservatives and progressives each taking up opposite corners in the domains of collective memory (of both Vatican II and of the tradition itself) and of institutional authority.

7) Framing the Solution

We need to build a new understanding of our collective memory that rings true in the modern world, “imaginatively projecting the lineage of belief.” We also need to reform the structures of authority.

Dogma is the exact place where the Enlightenment’s valuing of evidence-based reason comes face to face with traditional faith. We need to explore the mysteries and traditions that have not been accepted and let reason come fully to grips with faith, including the truths of the heart, and let our minds really wrestle with the mysteries of existence in light of what the tradition tells us has been the answers to these quandaries in the past. We can recognize that even though the old world of faith was legitimated by an authority we no longer accept, it still created a useful map of the world. Religious authority may have broken but the deposit of faith remains and we can explore it to understand and thereby re-legitimize its meaning for us in the modern world. This is “tradition in the act of re-creating itself.

We then need to restore credibility to the Church by reforming its structures of authority. Conservatives are right when they decry the lack of authority in the Church but the progressives are right in envisioning the type of authority that should evolve. Reversing the changes introduced by Vatican II moves in exactly the wrong direction. The whole structure must be re-imagined in a way that incorporates modern standards of justice and organizational best practices (to say nothing of exemplifying the Christian message), yet in a way mindful of the tradition.

What follows are brief summaries of the remaining sections of the book as I haven’t yet outlined them in detail.

Part III

Since what we lack is a straightforward, agreed-upon understanding of the intellectual content of faith, let’s look back into the tradition to find one. An understanding of the intellectual content of faith is key to starting the recovery of the collective memory and will affect how we reform the structures of authority. So we take a look at Thomas Aquinas, who gave us the last complete and systematic statement of belief that we have. But first, we look at the question of how to best think about faith and reason.

Thinking About Faith; Thinking About Reason

Before we start exploring the intellectual content of faith, we look at what it means to think about things that are complex and mysterious. Doing it right requires the acceptance of the world as coherent, the recognition and proper bounding of mystery, an appreciation of context, scope and complexity, and an understanding of the difference between reason and proof.

The Thought of Aquinas

The last time reason crashed in a big way into faith was in the “medieval renaissance” before the Renaissance and Aquinas was right in the middle of it, creating the last great systematic statement of faith that we have. He also throws down the best challenge there is to both faith and reason: "Truth cannot contradict truth." So we look at what he has to say.
This is the Aquinas of modern scholarship, not the Neo-scholastic version, which is no longer taught. It is also Aquinas translated "into the secular." Religion has its own technical language, which can be as useful to those who know it (and as obscure to those who don't) as any other technical language. So I try to explain Aquinas not in Church-speak but in language understandable to those both inside and outside the tradition.
To explain Aquinas we follow the format of his Summa Theologica. We first look at the cool bits: A God we can't really know, the movement of the universe towards consciousness and reason, the place of happiness, the importance of being vulnerable, the drive to flourish, a God outside space-time, the Trinity as the self-awareness of God, grace as healing, the sacraments, and where he draws the line between revelation and reason. Then we look at how the cool bits are connected. To get the fullness of his work you have to unfold all the parts one by one and draw the connections between them; the intelligence is not only in the ideas but in how they relate. You can't see it's whole shape until you're able to stitch the parts together.

Part IV

"Tradition in the Act of Recreating Itself"

Based on our understanding of faith as articulated by Aquinas, we look at the implications of it for dogma, worship, morals and the structures of authority. How can the core dogmas of the faith be articulated in ways that are understandable to the modern mind? How should our rituals be structured? How should we experience sacred space and sacred time? How should we understand personal morality? How should community be organized? How should the Church as an institution be organized? How should the Church face the world?

Is it possible for a religious tradition such as Roman Catholicism to recreate itself in a way both coherent with its historical identity and also coherent with what we know of the modern world? I think that’s the whole point of being a healthy institution. We did it once; we can do it again. Aquinas gives us the biggest clue: “Truth cannot contradict truth.”