What is Catholic?

-- By AlexandraRex - 16 Feb 2012

The Creed of Catholicism

When I was seven years old I got kicked out of the weekly Catechism class I was taking in order to make my First Communion. I questioned the instructor’s description of purgatory. Her canned response came directly from the reading we were studying and when I wanted more, when I wanted to know how and not just what, she kicked me out of class for “talking back.” Fortunately my parents understood that the question stemmed from curiosity and not disrespect, and decided not to punish me for the transgression against the Catholic Church. They did make me go back to class the next week.

A complicated story, really, though hardly uncommon. You're right to start here, of course, given the importance of the emotional meanings layered in it for the reasoning that follows. But perhaps, precisely because you do need to start with a story, you should then proceed directly to articulating the actual subject of the essay, informing the reader clearly about what's to follow, leaving the story to resonate, as in vibrato, around the actual note being struck.

Eleven years later I sat in the back of a cathedral with gold-plated alter tables and ceiling-high stained glass windows while volunteers passed out pamphlets titled, “How A Good Catholic Should Vote.” The values upholding a “traditional” family and life left little doubt that in our two-party voting system, a dedicated Catholic could not in good faith vote for a Democratic candidate. While I was two years too young to vote in the upcoming presidential election, I was convinced that a travesty was occurring before my eyes. The Church was blatantly blurring the absolute separation between Church and State that our progressive nation was founded on.

Because of course the Church, founded long before this nation and on very different principles, doesn't actually need or want to conform its practices, doctrines, and its bigotries, let alone its basic sources of political authority, to those of the upstart republic within which it momentarily is compelled to exist.

Just last week I overheard a co-worker say that while she knew her view was controversial, she didn’t support abortion. As a young, 20-year-old female, she believed in “life” and her quick justification was, “It’s because I’m Catholic.” Alternatively, as an adolescent I refused to complete the final rite of passage of confirmation because “I was not a true Catholic.” But what then, is Catholic?

It seems to me that it matters, to this story, whether the speaker was saying that she wouldn't have an abortion herself, "because I'm Catholic," or whether she was saying instead that she supported making that decision not only for herself but for all other women, on the same ground. In the first case, she's saying that she was brought up in a particular moral and cultural system, and she therefore believes that voluntarily ending a pregnancy is wrong, so she wouldn't do it. In the second case, she is stating that she's committed to the belief that her religion and moral system are exclusively right, all others are wrong, and it's her duty to impede or prevent the ability of other moral systems to function in the community where she lives, so far as is consistent with the discipline and current policy of the Church, as expressed through the (exclusively male, "celibate") hierarchy. The two meanings of "because I'm Catholic" are obviously quite different. She might mean either. Her bishop, on the other hand, and even her parish priest, are required to mean the latter.

You are saying that, for you, the latter meaning is personally inaccessible, and perhaps repugnant. As you say, that would make you, from the Church's point of view, not Catholic in your doctrine. Depending on the degree of insistence on orthodoxy, convenient to the Church at the moment, refusal to conform would be either peacefully ignored, as in the United States at present, or violently suppressed, as in Spain until the 19th century, or somewhere in between.

The Written Word

Professor Moglen says, “The truth will set you free.” But when it comes to religion, what does this mean? The truth that religion has been used, and was probably created, as a form of social control and dominion over people who grasped onto the idea of a better life because they had to? According to Richard McBrien, “Catholicism is distinguished from other forms of Christianity in its particular understanding and commitment to tradition, the sacraments, the mediation between God, communion, and the See of Rome.” This is effectively the creed of the Catholic Church, which “of course, [does] not describe or explain the events taking place…[it] simply furnishes the Devil and the Hell.”

Thurman Arnold’s The Folklore of Capitalism goes on to describe creeds with written constitutions (i.e. the bible) – “They furnish the limits beyond which controversy must not extend.” This then explains the reason I was kicked out of Catechism. While debate on the length of time spent in purgatory or the scenery on the walls may be tolerated, questioning the very existence of such an illusory place attacked the constitution of Catholicism itself, an attack that were the Church to allow, would undoubtedly undermine the organization’s foundation. For such a foundation is based on abstractions like “the body of Christ” and “life” after death and like the legal rationalizations behind law, can only be described in terms of further abstractions, quite an unsatisfying answer for a seven-year-old who assumes each action has a concrete purpose and each belief effectuates concrete action.

Whether the test of a creed's social utility should be its effectiveness in arranging the thoughts of a powerfully intelligent and clear-minded seven year old is hard to say. On the one hand, no system incapable of answering such a child's questions is worth serious consideration, which is why—as Gibbon famously pointed out—none of the great Greco-Roman thinkers who lived at the time of Christianity's founding gave the slightest sign of interest in the intellectually negligible philosophic content of the new religion. Despite the immensity of powerful thought subsequently generated in the Christian world, and even under the particular direction of the Roman Catholic Church, the philosophic basics of the religion are incapable of resisting the straightforward realism of a bright and inquisitive child, possessed of a rudimentary understanding of the scale and nature of the universe, and set upon having important beliefs confirmed by immediate tangible demonstration. We are scientists from the crib. "Faith," like other forms of dubious cognitive sophistication, we must be taught by someone less realistic than ourselves.

On the other hand, the Church, like any other cultural system, can only exist by addressing unconscious aspects of human life with which the child mind is not yet in a position, experientially or developmentally, to cope. Purgatory, as Luther perceived, had its origin in an immense scheme of taxation, to take the dead hostage in order to extort property from the living. Yet so adroitly does the concept answer to the unconscious needs of our psyches that even as penetrating a skeptic as Erasmus was unable to stop believing in it.

Social Control

If law is not an effective form of social control, is religion a better one? Morally speaking, perhaps not. Priests, the ultimate interpreters of God’s word, have sexually molested children (one assumes for ages despite the only recent attention given to the subject). “Believers” have murdered in the name of religion and plenty of criminals express devout faith. But then again, perhaps these outliers, like me, are simply attacking the foundation of the church and their transgressions should be proportionally penalized. Moral outliers aside, my experience with the Catholic Church seems to support some kind of control over, at the very least, political beliefs. For many devout Catholics there is never a choice of candidates in an election. Our two-party system coupled with Catholicism’s firm rejection of abortion and gay marriage have effectively removed believers’ free will, without most knowing or even understanding it. Members of our lowest socioeconomic classes continue to vote for a tax system that will make them poorer and the rich richer and against welfare programs that would help their families survive on a below-poverty income.

Felix Cohen would say that the meaning of Catholicism, or any religion, consists of its functional inputs and outputs. Functionally speaking, the Catholic Church seeks very real and practical consequences when it passes out “informative” election materials and actively seeks “true believers,” like my co-worker, to reject the devil known as abortion. Veiled under the ambiguity of faith and devoutness, the Church delineates between believers and nonbelievers. And even while I consciously reject the creed of Catholicism, I subconsciously believe that I cannot be Catholic because I do not espouse the ideals that the religion requires me to.

This section is weak. It veers from spot to spot under poor argumentative control. That priests are sometimes criminals, or that voters vote sometimes vote against their economic interests are not particularly relevant points for you in the context you've set so far.

Your argument so far is that the form of social discipline on which the Roman Catholic Church is based does not naturally lend itself to coexistence with democratic polities based on freedom of thought. This is historically correct. Your references to Arnold bring more baggage with them, perhaps, than they are worth, and too rigid a functionalism about religious institutions loses some important portions of their social meaning. But the centerpiece of your inquiry, beginning with your own story of childhood heresy, is to interpret the consequences of remaining at least partly within a cultural system in whose shaping myths one no longer believes. Arnold himself, if you mean to maintain his relevance, would say that this is inevitable for any observant and self-aware person in any organization, because creeds are inherently self-contradictory and vacuous, as they must be flexible enough to carry the organization coherently across social changes that compel modification of operating principles. But he means "creed" differently than we mean it when we talk about the Nicene Creed.

Belief

I continue to attend Church each Sunday I’m home and I sit, kneel, and stand for an hour, motions so engrained in my subconscious that I perform them without understanding or often even listening. But I enjoy it. In a world where life never stands still, where there’s always one more page of reading I could do or one more paper I could write, the hour of repetitive motion is relaxing. Recently advised to try meditating, I realize this is the closest I have ever come to emptying my mind. So does this make me Catholic? Probably not.

But this is nonetheless an insight well worth your further consideration. The private religion of many congregants is no doubt the same meditative discipline you are discovering in yourself. You have been discreet enough in this essay not to express directly the state of your theology, Christology, conception of the Eucharist, etc. But whether you believe or do not believe that the body and blood of the risen Christ are actually present in the miracle of the Mass has ceased to matter. The value of the experience has shifted to the well-learned and well-beloved habit of the dismissal of distraction, the subduing of hectic consciousness. That value you can make for yourself, as the most spiritual of Protestant seekers also discovered. Or, at the price of outward conformity to myths no longer inwardly engaged, you can remain within the bosom of the Church, and take your meditation in that familiar weekly form.

I don’t fit into the prototype created by the creed and written constitution of the Church. But then again, Robinson, despite not fitting the mold of the criminal lawyer nor believing in the legal system of “equal justice for all,” was still a part of the legal system, whether he “believed” in it or not.

And is in that respect like every other individual engaged within the structure of any social organization.

This is a very valuable first draft. More than anything else, it seems to me, it requires sharpening: you need to give a clear statement early of precisely the idea you want to get across to the reader. You should explicate it in the successive paragraphs with clarity, and return thereafter to the consideration of the personal implications you find in it. Losing the personal quality of the essay would be a shame, in my view, which puts a little more pressure for concise development of the central theme.

I think my underlying question in all of this is: How do I justify staying within an organization / religion that embodies fundamental beliefs I disagree with? The idea of using religion to create a personal belief system is all well and good but doesn't that simply equal complacency? What is the difference between staying in a system that institutionalizes White Supremacy and not doing anything about it? I want to believe in God and go to church and have premarital sex and use contraception but so what? Am I just getting hung up on the discord inherent in all organizations? How does this coexist with the idea of coherentism embraced in Constitutional Law? Is this just another myth because in the end everyone (and every organization) splits trying to appeal to different sects of the subconscious (people)?

Alix, as we talked about today, I think these are really difficult and thought-provoking questions. For me, reflecting on the inquiries you pose elicited a lot of thought but few answers. Like you, I struggle with the idea that I’ve chosen to remain (at least to the extent that I attend Church a handful of times per year) within a religious system which is shaped at least in part by beliefs with which I don’t agree and operating principles to which I don’t necessarily adhere in my own life. And so I recognize that the ritual of going to church – which I enjoy for similar reasons to the ones you express – perhaps carries far different meaning for me than for any other individual with whom I am sitting in the pews. While I do derive what I perceive to be real value from my experiences on those Sundays, I would characterize that value as, in Eben’s words, “the subduing of hectic consciousness”. Sometimes I leave musing over something that resonated with me, sometimes I leave thinking I fundamentally disagree with something that was said. Maybe the fact that my feelings after any given Mass have no actual impact on my behavior – I continue to go back regardless – means I’m struggling with cognitive dissonance and that I’m splitting to deal with it.

But even if that’s true, maybe (hopefully) there’s value in the very fact that we recognize this potential split in ourselves; that we have identified the discord inherent in the organizations to which we ostensibly belong. We are self-aware in the sense that we know we derive a particular kind of value (meditative, comfort of habit) from attending church, but that we don’t adhere to all of these organizations’ shaping ideals. Maybe that’s a reflection of an adherence instead to our personal beliefs of right and wrong, our individual notions of morality. Admittedly these personal ethical belief systems are perhaps influenced by or somewhat inextricable from the teachings of our respective religious upbringings, I don’t really know. However, even if our views on morality aren’t entirely independent of such shaping forces, maybe there’s value in the fact that we have self-defined benchmarks by which we measure what it means to be a ‘good person’.

We don’t blindly or automatically internalize the ideals espoused by a given religion and call them our own, or worse, define ourselves as “good Christians/Catholics” and use that self-identity to justify behavior we’d otherwise consider morally wrong. Like we talked about, we have had encounters with people who have the capacity to ignore and/or justify their moral transgressions by leaning on their self-definition as ‘good Catholics’ (going to Church regularly, getting ashes on Ash Wednesday, giving something up for Lent) and conflating that with being ‘good people’. I guess this is the paradigm I had in mind in response to your query on how one ‘uses religion’ to create a personal belief system and whether that equates to complacency. You obviously don’t use religion in this manner. You also don’t tell others that you do or do not believe in something simply “because you are Catholic” while knowing internally that you disagree with many other ideals the Church espouses. So in that sense I don’t think you’re complacent in perpetuating the shaping principles of Catholicism.

The bigger question, that I don’t know the answer to, is whether you and I are, by definition, complacent anyway, for choosing to ‘use’ religion the way we do, for deriving personal value from that use, and ultimately for choosing to remain within our respective religious organizations as a result.

-- CourtneyDoak - 17 Apr 2012

Thank you so much for sharing this experience. This essay was really thought-provoking and honest. Your paper explores a topic that is so uncomfortable that most of the world does not engage with it at all. Many people, nervous to indulge the doubts you identify here, suppress them and continue on blindly while still others withdraw altogether.

Having thought about some of these questions with regards to my own faith (Judaism), I wanted to share a piece of advice I received a few years ago. A colleague told me that oftentimes our experiences with the organizations/institutions which we respect can be compared to the trajectory of relationships between children and their parents. We are raised to believe they are flawless fortresses of morality and prudence. When the veneer of this image cracks and a duller reality is exposed, we feel rebellious and sometimes resentful. Why aren't our parents perfect? Why aren't our religions free of questions? This period of disenchantment can be really painful; it erodes at the foundations of our "truths" and leaves us feeling unstable. But, it is natural that these organizations will exhibit anthropomorphic discord; after all, they are made up of humans. Once we grapple with these questions, we can begin to really think about these organizations in a critical and productive way.

Like our parents, these institutions are not perfect, but we glean value from them and so they are important. Unlike your parents, you can tailor your own spirituality and religious experience so that it is a custom-fit. You can continue to be part of a community and a faith without subscribing yourself to all of its stances. At the same time, as a member of the congregation, you can steer that congregation's direction. Avoiding complacency doesn't necessarily mean leaving the religion (unless you want to), it can mean trying to change the particular Church to which you belong or, if that is not possible, allowing yourself to extract what is valuable to you from the faith while keeping some questions in the back of your mind. Some of the Church's actions which you take issue with seem to reflect a decision made by a person or groups of people, rather than natural extensions of the tenets of Catholicism. This is out of my depth, but I wonder, and maybe your paper can examine, if there is a difference between those elements of the Church which are actually fundamental from those that are traditional. Indeed there are a few Catholic congregations which have taken different positions from the one which you have described. Sorry if I made any of this sound easy. I know that it is not. You are brave to engage with these questions. Again, thank you for sharing.

-- TomaLivshiz - 17 Apr 2012

Ladies,

Your essay and responses really resonated with me as well. I always find it enlightening to listen to/read unique individual experiences with religion and spiritual identity, as each time I gain new insights that serve to catalyze further self-reflection and growth in my own spiritual journey. I was raised Catholic and attended a Catholic school for 12 years. I particularly liked Toma's parent-child analogy for individual relationships with religious institutions. I started to feel disillusioned with the Catholic Church in sixth grade. I struggled with reconciling the social and spiritual value I derived from the community I grew up in with my visceral distaste for some of the political and moral positions espoused by the Church and my school. Through my personal conflict and through interaction and discussion with those from a variety of faiths, I have come to believe that religion – for me at least – is what I make of it. In general, I’m not a big fan of labels, which I find to be often reductionist and stifling. I don’t ascribe to a particular organized religion, but instead consider myself a ‘spiritual’ person. At one time, not too long ago, I was concerned about the implications of practicing ‘buffet style’ spirituality. I felt, as Alix and Courtney have stated, slightly guilty for ‘using’ religion, because I didn’t fit the ‘prototype’ of ‘the good Catholic’ I was raised to aspire to be. But I genuinely don’t think it upsets my God - or at least any God I would want to believe in - that I can both love the teachings of Jesus and take issue with religious institutional disdain for homosexuals and abortion rights. I don’t think my God would see this as cognitive dissonance or splitting or failing some spiritual unity test. In fact, I would like to believe that my God would respect and cherish my free thought, my emotional reaction to injustice, and my individuality. That’s why I feel I can, to borrow Alix’s words, “believe in God and go to church and have premarital sex and use contraception”…and support abortion rights and gay marriage. Because my God sees the inherent beauty in my unique ‘incoherence’ and discord, and loves me even more for it.

Ultimately, choice of spirituality and religious identification is a very personal decision, one that may constantly evolve throughout a life span and one that each individual must reach on their own. While some may derive great personal value from following the sermons of their priest to the letter, others, like myself, prefer to commune with God and practice spirituality in a different way. I don’t think either method is less worthy of respect than the other. It is often difficult however, being raised in a community focused on the former approach, to redefine yourself without feeling as though you are betraying your family, friends or community and isolating yourself from them. I definitely think Alix, as Eben said, that your new experience with meditation may prove to be very valuable. In addition to enabling you to dismiss distraction and subdue hectic consciousness, it may also help you to build upon the keen sense of self-awareness and introspection already emanating from your words, assisting you to reconcile seemingly conflicting emotions and define your own spirituality throughout your life.

-- MeaganBurrows - 17 Apr 2012

Toma and Meagan,

I found both of your responses so enlightening, and helpful, in broadening the contours of self-reflection on my religious and spiritual identity. Toma, like Meagan, I really liked your delineation of how the trajectory of our relationships with our religious institutions mirrors the trajectory of the parent-child relationship. I found the analogy comforting in that it acknowledges the imperfections inherent in these "flawless fortresses of morality and prudence", but it reframes those imperfections as opportunities for more honest examination of and introspection on these organizations. While such examination might be painful - I know it was for me, as I grew disillusioned with my Church in middle school and tried to reconcile my adherence to the institution with my fundamental disbelief in some of its shaping ideals - I now see that perhaps this process is actually imperative to shaping a 'custom-fit' religious and spiritual experience, an experience that's a personally meaningful reflection of one's most deeply held beliefs.

And Meagan, I really appreciate your point that subscribing to only some of the stances espoused by a particular religious institution isn't indicative of or synonymous with cognitive dissonance or splitting, but rather an illustration of individuality, an inherently beautiful incoherence that's unique to each of us. Both points, I found, were instructive in recasting my thoughts on Alix's essay and our conversation earlier today regarding the value we derive from our respective religious institutions in spite of our distaste for some of the fundamental tenets of those very institutions. And I'd also like to thank you both for sharing your thoughts because I found them really helpful in beginning to facilitate a more self-accepting way to think about my own faith and spiritual identity.

-- CourtneyDoak - 18 Apr 2012

Thank you all so much for these insightful comments. I love the parent-child analogy - so true - and I think I've always considered my "religion" as a kind of buffet-style spirituality similar to Meagan. I think you all are right that describing this selective approach to Catholicism (or any religion) as cognitive dissonance is unfair if you assume that cognitive dissonance has a negative connotation. If anything, such an approach allows for deeper introspection and a closer relationship with God or spirituality than blindly following on "faith." And I too, wouldn't choose to believe in any other kind of God than one that would appreciate this self-reflection and thought-provoking discussion.

I think what I continue to struggle with is the line between using Church as a time for self-reflection and meditation (and anything else I choose to get out of it) and the fact that attending mass in itself is a sign of support for an institution that at its foundation I'm not sure I agree with. As Courtney and I were discussing yesterday, I think there is a significant difference between attending church occasionally on the one hand and using religion to justify one's stance on abortion or gay rights or any other social controversy on the other. If each member of a congregation was able to selectively integrate into the community then I don't see a problem with buffet-style spirituality. But one of the major issues I experienced in Southern California was the fact that there were entire communities that clung to Catholicism to the possible detriment of their children and younger members (I'm thinking specifically of teenage girls unexposed to birth control for religious reasons and then being forced to drop out of high school due to pregnancy - a type of cyclical, perhaps even institutionalized, poverty). But maybe what I'm experiencing is simply one side of a spectrum of faith, ranging from absolute adherence to absolute denial and the issue isn't the stark contrast between the two endpoints but the range of middle ground that extends between the two. Thus, my real problem is that I haven't decided for myself whether I'm too close to denial to use Catholicism for what I need/want out of religion (not to say that there aren't plenty of other belief systems that may be more conducive to my goals), or whether my beliefs are sufficient to overcome any prejudices I have against blind faith.

Again, thank you all so much for your input. This has really helped me to try and align my personal belief system with the real problems I have with the Catholic Church. Obviously I still have a lot to figure out, but this is a great start.

-- AlexandraRex - 18 Apr 2012

Sorry if I'm a little late to the discussion, but I've faced similar challenges with the Catholic Church. I grew up with my non-devout single mom and my very devout grandmother. Because my grandmother was so involved in the church community, as many recent Hispanic immigrants are, I became very involved early on. In the church, I found a bigger and more intellectually stimulating family: a church filled with more traditions and meaning than my biological family. Later on, with my church community's financial help, I was able to attend their parochial all-girls high school. These relationship led me to a Catholic college. So when Toma talks about the imperfections of the parent/child relationship, I really feel it: the church took the place of the missing father in my youth.

Attending a Catholic college was not the rosy experience I expected. I thought I would be surrounded with passionate peers who cared about social justice and putting their faith in action. Instead, I met people who had never met a Mexican girl, whose parents earned more than a quarter million dollars a year, and who knew nothing about the Catholic social justice tradition. The experience was suffocating. Yet, I was able to find my niche and find the people who shared my values. I didn't transfer out because I realized there was work to be done: the purpose of community is to learn from one another and not chicken out.

Yet, when it comes to the substance of Catholic Church teaching and its practical experience, I am more than troubled. I remember going to a friend's wedding a couple years ago and feeling like the door of the Church was shut against my body: I am never going to be on that altar. I had gotten over the fact I could never be a priest as some point, but having yet another sacrament torn away from me felt de facto excommunication.

There are a couple of things that do keep me in the church, though, and I hope that they might be a source of consideration, Alix: 1. Catholic Social Tradition: I find fuel in externalizing deeply held religious values and maybe, this is my Catholic "functional output." There is a significant quantum of people in the Church who do believe in the life and dignity of the human person, who believe there should be a preference for the poor, who believe that providing people a living wage is a Christian mandate, and who believe that participation and diversity make the Church truer. If you're interested in learning more, here is a link that might be a good starting point. For a really cool New Yorker who took the call to solidarity with poor and women's rights seriously, check out Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker Movement.

2. Wealth of Spiritual and Intellectual History: I was fortunate to major in the "Great Books" in college (another reason I didn't leave) and to experience Western culture with a dose of the Catholic intellectual tradition. In much of the assigned text, I found the beauty of the God experience as related by men and women hundreds of years ago. Of note were Dante, Julian of Norwich, and Teresa of Avila. I wouldn't lose this if I became a Lutheran, but it reels me in to the Catholicism.

3. The Face of Tomorrow's Theology: The next generation of Catholic theologians also live the cognitive dissonance we worry about: they are gay, feminist, progressive, and engage in inter-religious dialogue. When Pope Benedict says that condom use by male prostitutes can be justified to stop the spread of HIV, there is some hope that in our generation, there will be a different face to the Catholic church.

I admit that change in the Church comes glacially. Only in the last century was the liturgy you and I relish allowed to be in the local vernacular. Is it worth it to stay in a church today, hope to revitalize it, and pray that something actually changes in a hundred years? I don't know, but it's a daily decision to stay.