What we need in order to do religion

 

The most financially successful Catholic enterprise in the U.S. is EWTN, the Eternal Word Television Network, which has hundreds of radio stations, dozens of TV stations, the National Catholic Register, and who knows how many other media outlets. EWTN has money. The official U.S. Catholic hierarchy, the USCCB (United States Conference of Catholic Bishops), is below the poverty line compared to EWTN.

Some young priests are wearing cassocks and Roman collars. There are not many of them, but there are more of them than there are of young priests who live the kind of Catholicism that the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965) proposed. Our local bishop of Springfield as much as admits that Vatican II was a mistake. He presides at Mass with his back to the people once a week. Bishop Paprocki is on the advisory board of the NAPA Institute, a conservative Catholic think tank.

Since 2016 here in Quincy we have an official Latin-Mass church, St. Rose. Every day Mass is offered in Latin, the old way, just like before Vatican II. The 2018 and 2019 diocesan October Counts, annual tabulations of people attending Mass throughout the Diocese on one Sunday in October, gave the following figures for church attendance at Quincy parishes (I omitted 2020 because the pandemic distorted the counts):

                                       2018            2019

Blessed Sacrament           517             554

St. Francis Solanus       1,341           1,617

St. Joseph                        110              102

St. Peter                         1,497           1,456

St. Rose                            184              169

The combined 2019 total count minus St. Rose was 3,729. St. Rose accounted for 4% of the Catholics attending Mass in October 2019. St. Rose has never had a count more than 190 since 2016 when the Latin parish began.

3,729 people in Quincy attended a post-Vatican II Mass on a typical October Sunday in 2019. Why? Why were they there? 

What people need in religion

We human beings need three things in order to do religion: we need to be involved with other humans, we need to be involved with God, and our involvement with God has to include involvement with other people. The third involvement is what we call “religion.”

Pope Francis has been producing “encyclical” letters every few years with one theme that keeps recurring: too many people are not involved with other people. Too many of us are hyper-individualistic—we are loners. Hand-held devices do not substitute for face-to-face involvement with other humans.

The Pope has also been emphasizing another theme: our shared involvement with God, our religious practice, should grow out of our own culture. Since there is a wide variety of cultures in the world, there should be a wide variety of ways to express our common involvement with God. 

 Involvement means spending time

I use the term “spending” deliberately. In white middle-class American culture, money plays a central role, and we spend money. We get into the habit of treating time like we treat money—we spend it. When we combine time frugality with our individualism, we end up not spending time involved with other people, and even less time being involved with God. We spend time with things: with information, with entertainment, with work.

 There is a psychological theory labeled “cognitive dissonance.” The theory says that when we sacrifice for something, we come to value it. The sacrifice comes before the value, not after it. We have to spend time with other people and with God or we will never value involvement with others or with God. The reason so many people do not take God seriously is because they do not spend time with God.

This is not a new problem. Why was so much Old Testament history a story of estrangement from God, with prophets challenging people to take God more seriously? Why did Jesus talk about seed falling on paths, rocky ground, and among thorns?

 I like to believe that God gets after most of us, and maybe even all of us, before we die, so that we snatch just a tiny bit of involvement with God on our way out of this life. But that is up to God, and we are human beings trying to develop a loving relationship with God in this life, over time, through years We are trying to do religion. That takes leadership. 

Leadership

Leaders are people who motivate other people to do things. We need people who can lead us into the behaviors that will deepen our involvement with each other and with God. In Catholic middle class U.S. culture leadership lives in the parish. 

 The parish is a group of people, usually located in a shared geography, who are called together physically on a regular basis and motivated to do things that strengthen their involvement with God. One slogan describing what a parish leader does is a series of three phrases: “Gather the people, share the stories, break the bread.” 

You first have to gather the people. People are like sheep--they like to wander. You have to trick them, just like university professors have to trick students into experiencing new wonders such as art or literature. Food helps. It is no accident that the third phrase is “break the bread.” Even the tiny Eucharistic host satisfies. People like to get something physical. People who are not even Catholic line up to get ashes on Ash Wednesday.

 “Tell the stories.” We need stories, and we have stories, tons of them. The whole bible is full of them. It doesn’t take much—all you need is a bible and somebody to read it aloud. When a bunch of us share a story, we become a people. We share all the stories beginning with Adam and Eve, down through Abraham and Moses and David and Jesus and Paul and Augustine and Francis and Pope John XXIII and Pope Francis. And as we share these stories, our involvement with God grows, slowly, imperceptibly, like a fungus. 

The parish is where we Americans gather, hear the stories, and break the bread. The parish is not the only place where this can happen. I live in a Franciscan community that does the same thing. The Catholic Worker houses have their own style of doing the Catholic religion. Black Catholics in my country gather, listen, and break the bread a little differently from white Catholics.

 The parish is more than just a priest and a church building. The parishes in Quincy also involve some form of schooling. When the school is a physical building, just financing and running the school draws people into involvement. Parish picnics, celebrating feast days, creating weddings and funerals and baptisms all draw people into involvements. The buildings to be maintained, the parish staff—a typical parish in my world can have several employees besides the priest, or even employees without a priest—all these require time and money. Sharing time and money leads to involvement.

And all the while, as these processes go along, sometimes poorly, sometimes with great success, the gathering and the story-telling and the bread-breaking keep feeding the participants toward involvement with a loving God.

 The Church in the United States is suffering from some disabilities stemming from the wider Church’s inability to adapt to changing cultures. The primary disability is our U.S. Church’s inability to motivate its own young people to lead it. An increasing proportion of parish clergy in my country is from other countries—Nigeria, India, Poland. That is a fine thing for leading us to appreciate the oneness of the human family, but it is not helping us do religion in our own culture. This is not the place to discuss what might be done to remedy the situation. I will just say that Church leaders in Rome who hinder us from developing leadership from within our own culture are following the example of the Judaizers in the Acts of the Apostles. They think we need to follow the Old Law before we can be true to Jesus. 

Paul and Barnabas accepted conflict as the cost of freedom from the Law. Conflict simply means one party taking a stand and another party opposing the stand. We have learned that communication and negotiation can work through conflicts. Even in a conflict we practice respect, vulnerability, and faithfulness—we practice love.