[I put this piece on the blog last
January, but then moved it to my website. In view of the fact that the website
gets far fewer visitors than the blog, I decided to move it back, slightly
revised, to the blog.]
The biggest problem facing Roman
Catholicism today is the failure of its leadership to replace itself. The
average age of female religious, male religious and priests keeps going up.
Even if you grant that the Church in the United States was “overstocked” with
priests and sisters in the 1950s, the numbers of young men and women entering
religious life and priesthood today are nowhere near enough to continue parish
life and the ministry of religious at a level that most of us would think
desirable. The Church needs clergy and both Church and world need religious.
Now is not the time in history for the Church to go AWOL in the face of the
world’s challenges.
Conservative elements in the
Church, under the leadership of Pope Benedict XVI, seem to be trying out the
hypothesis that the root of the shortage problem is that priests and sisters
since Vatican II have gotten away from an observably “spiritual” way of living.
Presumably they have therefore also gotten away from the essence of a
spiritually vital life. The answer is to return to pre-Vatican II styles of
dress and liturgy.
As a sociologist I think the “spiritual-abandonment”
hypothesis obscures another motive, a motive probably unconscious among many. I
speak from my own experience. The motive is social prestige. For most of my
younger life I would have vehemently denied that a desire for social prestige
had anything to do with my decision to become a priest and religious, but now I
have to admit that such a motive probably lurked beneath my conscious thinking.
If this motive is operating, the theory
becomes that priests and religious no longer get the social prestige that can
motivate new recruits, and that the way to get that prestige is to increase the
social distance between them and the laity. Thus, for example, priests should
not attend Mass like lay persons. If a priest does not concelebrate, he should
attend Mass from a kneeler in the sanctuary. Religious and priests should
return to wearing distinctive garb. Cassocks and birettas are coming back into
style, and women’s groups are encouraged to return to old-style religious garb.
We Friars Minor here at Quincy
University are wearing our “habits” more than we used to. I do not see our
motivation as a seeking after prestige, but as an attempt to dramatize the
importance of certain values in an academic environment. The problem is that
wearing a certain garb does not get at the core of the problem. If we were bold
enough, we could issue religious garb to the entire faculty and require them to
wear it on campus. The core of the problem is that the entire Church, and
indeed the entire world, has to come to terms with modern culture.
Church authorities point out that
the Church in the “less developed” world is drawing priesthood candidates.
Seminaries, they say, are full. However, those regions are starting from a much
smaller base, and have a much greater need. For example, we consider ourselves
in North America as severely under-staffed with priests, with one priest for
every 1,536 Catholics. In Asia the ratio is one for every 2,310 Catholics, in
Africa it is one for every 4,729, and in South America it is one for every
7,155 Catholics (Statistical Yearbook of the Church, as cited in “The CARA
Report,” Summer, 2008). But large segments of society in Asia, Africa, and
South America are hell bent on replicating the cultural patterns of western
Europe and the U.S. As they succeed in doing this, will they run up against the
same problems we are having? I think they will.
If secularism is the lion, and the
U.S. is the den of secularism, we have to “beard the lion in its den.” We have
to deal with it where it is strongest, not where it is weakest.
The Head-scarf
The wearing of distinctive women’s
garb (the head-scarf, hijab, in more secular Muslim societies, or the burqah or
chador in more religious ones) is a matter of controversy in many places. Iran
is the most dramatic example. Under the Shah, women in Iran were encouraged to
become educated and to abandon such garb. After the Khomeini revolution, the
chador, the head-to-toe covering of women, was re-instated and enforced by law.
These regulations, which the novelist Azar Nafisi portrays in Reading Lolita
in Tehran, are oppressive, but seem mild in comparison to the practices of
the Taliban, who burn girls’ schools.
The Catholic Church hierarchy’s
attempts to restrict discussion of priestly celibacy, the ordination of women,
and inclusive language in the liturgy are the Catholic version of the same
struggle, a struggle over the role of women. The hierarchy seems to believe
that essential Church beliefs are under attack by modern gender norms, and that
the Church must take a stand against those norms.
The real issue is one that
sociologists of religion have been discussing for the last forty years: can
religion survive the secularizing influences of what we call “modernity”? We
Catholics in the U.S. answer with a resounding “yes,” and even Benedict seems
to recognize that we are doing something right here. But when it comes to
patterns of gender behavior, the United States suddenly becomes the opposition.
The Church here seems to be maintaining a remarkably high level of church
involvement by its laity, far higher than that maintained in Italy, but we are
accused of selling out to a secular culture. It would be tragic if the
developments of the last forty years in liturgy and parish life here in the
U.S. were to be replaced by a 1950s Catholic culture.
Officially, celibacy has nothing to
do with norms about women’s behavior. Celibacy is intended to allow the priest,
in St. Paul’s words, to be “concerned about the things of God.” If he were
married, he would have to be concerned about pleasing his wife. But in
actuality celibacy requires that women be kept at a distance. Priests are not
to socialize too much with women. Dropping norms of separation from women will
result in the “loss of vocation,” and certainly history has borne this out.
Sexual attraction is one of the strongest of human tendencies, one that
certainly deserves to be labeled as “natural law.” The price of celibacy is
separation from women, and, just as in racial matters, separate is inherently
unequal.
The real battle is over the issue
of sexuality, and of how to manage it so that its power can build up society
rather than destroy its fabric. The mullahs believe that women must be covered
because otherwise men will be unable to restrain themselves. Men certainly have
problems restraining themselves, but veiling the women will not solve the
problem.
The fact that we are not able to
motivate young people in our country to accept Church norms about celibacy and
the ordination of women says that the Church cannot avoid the issue. We are not
persuading young men and women to live apart in the ways that celibacy
requires. We are no more successful in persuading young women to dress in
traditional religious habits than the authorities in Iran are in persuading
young women there to wear the chador. A few will do it. The rest, unless forced
by law, will choose otherwise.
The Solution
The solution is that the Church
must reconfigure its leadership to allow for the development of healthy male-female
relationships. This does not mean accepting promiscuity, it means accepting
fidelity. It is a scandal that canon law expels members of religious orders the
moment the person “attempts marriage,” but defends the man or woman against
expulsion when the behavior involves simple fornication. This norm contradicts
the Church’s claim that it stands in favor of committed marriage relationships
over temporary sexual liaisons.
One obstacle, probably the biggest
one, standing in the way of allowing priests to marry is the issue of
property. It costs a lot less to support
a celibate man than to support a man with wife and children. That argument made
sense when Church finances centered on the day-to-day operation of parishes and
seminaries. But suddenly the Church in this country has had to come up with
hundreds of millions of dollars to pay lawsuits involving sexual misconduct of
priests. If we in the Church can find huge sums of money to settle lawsuits, we
should be able to pay a living wage to priests who have families.
The experience of men and women in
Catholic Worker houses is a good model. Many young people have been drawn to
the Catholic Worker because of its style of living in poor neighborhoods and
inviting needy men and women to share their home. The idealism that draws these
Workers is the same as the idealism that drew so many of us as young men and
women to priesthood and religious life. But often, as the days of struggling
with human realities pass by, Workers find themselves drawn to each other and
end up deciding to commit themselves to marriage. A few, like Dorothy Day
herself, continue to live in the Worker communities and raise children there. Others
leave but keep contact with the Workers and develop ministries that serve the
Church and society in the places where they decide to live. There is no
pressure to marry, and there is no pressure to avoid marriage. As God calls,
the men and women involved are free to respond without censure by the group. In
fact, their commitment to each other is seen as an enrichment of the group.
Celibacy has locked the Church into
a system where young men and women cannot commit themselves to the Church
during the years when they have the most idealism and energy. Instead, they
must spend those years in some other work. If their desire to serve the Church
survives these years, they can then enter the seminary or religious life. They
are now able to make a “mature vocational decision.” Meanwhile they have moved
further and further away from the direct contact with younger people that could
inspire those younger people to follow a Gospel calling. I decided in the sixth
grade that I wanted to be a priest. Our parish had a kindly pastor in his late
60s. I admired him, but the man who had the most influence on my desire to
serve the Church was his younger assistant, just ordained, who taught catechism
in our school and brought his dog “Smoky” to the classes.
Of course, as Rome knows, if men
are allowed to marry and still be priests, women will not be far behind in
seeking ordination. That is the dynamic of life in our cultures. The question
the Church has to ask is, can we win this battle?
Years ago I heard a Methodist
minister predict that the Catholic Church will go the way of the Anglican
Church. As the number of Anglican ministers declined, a lay movement sprang up
and replaced Anglicanism with a new form of Christianity, Methodism. What was
lost was Eucharist, the thing that Catholicism has always seen as central to a
Christian life.
No one has counted the number of
young Catholic women who have left the Church to seek ordination in a
Protestant community. No one has counted the number of young Catholic men who
have reluctantly decided to choose another life course than priesthood because
they were not sure they could commit themselves to lifelong celibacy. All we
see are aging priests, sisters, and brothers. Meanwhile Church authorities keep
hoping for a turnaround, light at the end of the tunnel.
I don’t think it will work. The
only solution is to back up out of the tunnel and make use of the light that is
already out there.