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Monday, September 12, 2016

On leisure

7/31/2016      10:20 AM

It is Sunday morning. Cool enough to sit outside under the roof of our patio. The day is bright and clear. I am wearing rose-colored sunglasses.

This is the way it should be, I say to myself. I feel good--no pains, everything in my body working, at least as far as I can tell, and for the time being. At age 81, I know that that will not continue very long, no one knows how long.

But Sunday mornings have always been special times for me. I have a couple of memories that enrich each Sunday.

This morning. I am there on the patio, singing the psalms for Week 2 Sunday, in Latin, and out loud. A couple of them even in Greek. And I think of women and men around the world using these same words, probably not in Greek or Latin, probably in their own languages, but the same words.

The same words. The mystery of language. NPR this morning had a story about Native American people working to keep alive the Crow language. Some Native American groups are down to fewer than ten people who can still speak the language of the group.

A language can only exist in a group of people. Words are more than just the sounds, and the sounds are more than just the letters. Words float among the group. Words are spiritual.

The Latin and Greek are special to me because they tie me to my early years preparing to be a priest, and to the centuries of people who used those languages before my time. Very few people these days have those experiences.

But more and more I am drawn to recall experiences from my days in the seminary. We had no TV, no computers, no cell phones, not even newspapers. Leisure for me, even when I was studying theology in Teutopolis, Illinois, was walking around the small pond on the property. That’s all I needed. One Sunday memory is Brother Adolph, a World War II veteran, and apparently something of a war hero, though he never spoke about that--in fact, he never spoke at all--flying a kite. On Sunday afternoon he would get this kite way way up, sometimes even with a flashlight on it for when it got dark. That was his leisure.

We could live that way because other people were supporting us. The time came when we had to support ourselves and the rest of the community, so I taught for thirty-plus years.

Early in my life the Second Vatican Council came along and overturned so much of what I cherished. I did not regret the overturning, in fact I promoted it, because I thought that that was what God was calling us to. And I still think God was calling us to it. But, like so many people in our world, we got away from some things that were very rich and good for us, like leisure that did not depend on material gadgets.

Francis of Assisi struggled with the tension between doing things for other people, like preaching, and going away for time alone--leisure. He spent large blocks of time in such leisure. In fact, he even wrote a small rule of life for hermitages. The rule suggested that a hermitage should have four men, two of them mothers and two of them sons. The two mothers would provide the necessities of daily living, like getting and preparing food, for the two sons. After a period of time, the mothers would change places with the sons.

I reflect that so much leisure in history has depended on a subservient class. In Greece and Rome it was slaves who provided the leisure for the people on top. In religious life, there were lay brothers and sisters. Even in the seminary we had a cadre of lay brothers who were making the place run: cooks, bakers, carpenters, plumbers, etc. Brother Herb Rempe told me that at one time there were over 30 brothers in the seminary at Teutopolis.

We have abolished the subservience in our Order--even our General Minister in Rome, Michael Perry, signs himself sometimes in official documents as “Fr. Michael Perry,” and other times as “Br. Michael Perry.”

I am benefiting from another form of leisure in my society: retirement. Some people dream of spending their retirement traveling. I dream of spending mine sitting on Sunday mornings on a patio, and walking around the area. And I try to keep busy most of the time by doing other things. At the moment the other thing is working on a history of our Province.

If we are ever to create a society where everyone earns a living wage without destroying the world we live in, it will help if we can do leisure without consuming stuff. There are elements in our traditions that give us hints about how we might do that.







Thursday, September 1, 2016

How to create a world conducive to "vocations"

Here is why so few men and women are becoming members of religious orders today. They have lost the world required for their survival. They are like fish whose pond has been drained.

As a child I lived in a Catholic world in Decatur, Illinois. My parish was my world. It was made sacred by priests and sisters and a cycle of religious rituals centered on the church. It was easy for me to see myself growing up to become a leader in that world. I recall calculating that being a priest would require hearing confessions on Saturday afternoon, which would rule out listening to Notre Dame football games, but that was a sacrifice that would have to be made. It would be worth it.

I was never a great fan of football, but listening to Notre Dame games was part of my Catholic world. Notre Dame was our fortress against the secular intellectual world.

We were reinforced in our world by constant reminders of the important people who were Catholic: Bing Crosby, Bishop Sheen, Danny Thomas. The outside world recognized our world.

In Decatur, we were a minority. In contrast to Springfield, where my parents grew up and where we regularly visited relatives, Decatur was hostile territory for Catholics. None of the important people in Decatur were Catholic. The only time we Catholics were featured in the newspaper was when our school, St. James, outsold the entire rest of the city in World War II war bonds.

My father remarked once that he did not take his faith seriously until he and my mother moved to Decatur. In his eyes, no Catholic in Decatur could be taken seriously as a leader. We were set apart.

Admittedly, that was my perception. In actual fact, there probably were Catholics in important roles in the town. But in my mind, we were the victims of segregation and prejudice, and those things reinforced our identity.

Fast forward to present-day Quincy, Illinois. We have here in Quincy a parish, St. Rose, that is officially a "Latin" parish--all the liturgies are conducted in Latin, Latin as it was used before the Second Vatican Council. There are students at Quincy University who practice a spirituality appropriate to that Latin environment: Benediction, recitation of the rosary before Mass, women wearing a head scarf during Mass. At least some of the younger priests that I see in our diocese seem to be cooperating in re-creating that world. I respect and admire such people. But I think they are fighting a losing battle. Their problem is that the world that they are trying to re-create is no longer a viable world for most Catholics.

The boundaries are too porous. "How Ya Gonna Keep 'em Down on the Farm (After They've Seen Paree)?" was a song made popular after World War I. You can hold children in a segregated world through grade school, and maybe even through high school, but when they hit college, off they go. The world opens up--the world in the sense of new possibilities. As someone who has spent his life teaching in a Catholic college, I see the situation. Over the years Quincy University has sent young men and women out into society to become genuine leaders, both secular and religious, but they are not the kind of leaders that the world of my childhood would have prepared. To be a leader in the worlds most people live in today, you cannot limit yourself to the world of segregated Catholicism.

Ecumenism did us in, as did success in politics (John Kennedy) and economics.

So what do we do? We need leaders in the Church, both men and women. Leaders have to live in the world that the rest of the community lives in. We have to create a world that will allow all of us to live the Gospel of Jesus Christ in the midst of unlimited information, profitable ways of making money, dreams of happy marriages and families, and philosophical and theological challenges. Within that world, we must be able to motivate some of us to become leaders.

We need priests, but not clericalism. Priests are people who lead us in knowing God and worshipping God. Clerics are people who survive by being a special caste supported by religiously devoted people.

We need women religious leaders, not the kind of "nuns" that used to enliven our communities. Women leaders today cannot be assumed to be subservient to men. They must have the freedom to initiate things. They must be seen as equal to men in finding ways to share faith effectively with others.

Above all, we need to create a world where religious leaders can flourish, but a world that is not set in opposition to the rest of the world. As followers of Jesus, we will need to challenge the rest of the world at times, but we cannot build our identities on challenge.

Our "vocation recruitment" efforts have been too limited to seeking out individuals to join us. We need to create cultures of faith and worship where the need for leadership will be obvious and rewarded. Only then will our "vocation problem" approach a solution. We may never have enough leaders. The harvest will always be abundant and the laborers few. But we can do better than we are doing right now.



Sunday, July 31, 2016

Bad news and good news

The Bad News

I am looking at the demography of my Franciscan province: we peaked in 1961 with around 800 men, and have been going down to our present number of just under 200. Our median age is 70.

About one-fourth of people who say they were raised Catholic no longer claim membership in the Church. Except for immigrants coming to the U.S. from Catholic countries, our Church would be in the same boat as mainline Protestant churches: sinking.

The sociological explanation for the decline in membership in churches and religious orders is the individualism of modern culture. Facebook and its allies in the internet world have caused that individualism to metastasize. So many of us say we are spiritual but not religious. That means that we do religion on our own, without reference to other people.


The Good News

In the midst of this discouraging landscape, I read two encouraging things. One was an article in Sojourners magazine by a woman who described how nature brought her back to God, and indeed, to a church community. The other is my reading of Amoris Laetitia, Pope Francis's letter written in response to the fall 2015 Synod of bishops in Rome.

So I conclude: two things counteract our individualism: nature, and children.

Nature does not of itself call us back to community, but my sense is that if a person really spends time experiencing nature, that person cannot but feel drawn to a closer relationship with other human beings. Too many people, I speculate, spend a few hours in nature, feel uplifted, and then return to a rat-race of everyday tasks that allows them no time to reflect on anything. So the nature experience starves.

A love for nature finds a powerful ally in the environmental movement. As people struggle to save parts of the natural world, they come to appreciate the beauty of that world, and beauty is God's middle name.

But children are another story. Children are truly the prophets in our world. They get through to us at moments when we are not ready to listen to anyone else, if we let the door open even slightly. I think of Jesus' parable about the seed sown by the roadside. It only takes a tiny bit of good ground to produce fruit a hundredfold.

Unfortunately, too much of the seed falls on rocky ground and too many children are left adrift in a world without love.

In earlier ages, sexuality was natural bait for producing children. Contraception cut that link. That cutting is an important argument in Pope Paul VI's 1968 Humanae Vitae encyclical that outlawed contraception for Catholics. Before contraception was so easy, sexuality could function as a hook that drew many people--not all, of course--into involvement with a spouse and children. Without that hook, children have become an optional accessory, and accessories are a cost, not a source of life.

Amoris Laetitia (translation: "The Joy [or Happiness] of Love") tries to point out ways that children and families can lead to true love. Everyone wants true love. So many of us have forgotten how to experience it.

The headwind against which Francis is pushing is a prejudice against the words "marriage" and "family."

Marriage suffers from too much history of oppression of women, and too little acknowledgement by religious people of that oppression. It does not help that many feminists found themselves battling religious people, and that many religious people found anti-feminism to be a motivator for political advancement, including priests and bishops in the Catholic Church.

It is unfortunate that people see gay marriage as threatening. The advocates of gay marriage are the only defendants of marriage accepted by the wider secular culture. Probably they would not be so accepted except that the churches, the whipping boys of the secular world, oppose them. If the churches come to accept gay marriage, secular culture will oppose it.

"Family" is an even more despised word. I speculate that the prejudice goes back to attitudes toward Catholic immigrants in the early part of the 20th century, largely Italian and eastern European, most of whom were Catholic and who had large families. That prejudice is long gone, but the Catholic hierarchy, organized as the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) has cemented itself to the Republican party. Since much of the leadership of the secular world leans Democratic, the tension between secularism and Catholicism has become politicized, with the result that the USCCB is in no position to speak convincingly to the larger U.S. culture. Francis's encyclical offers an opportunity to change that, but I fear that the opportunity is being squandered.

But "family" can be an important word in reviving our culture. Men and women released from prison often want nothing more in life than a family--a spouse and children. These are people--mostly men--who have experienced life without family, both before and during their imprisonment. Released from prison, they have none of the trinkets that can distract most people from seeing a family as a precious gift. Now that our society is coming to see that too many such people were imprisoned in unconscionable ways, and are releasing them, we may have just been handed a powerful influence favoring family life. We could draw such people into our communities. We probably won't. Too many ex-convicts are Black, and racism is alive and well in our churches.

Membership in a church is good. It can provide powerful social support, and it enriches much human experience. A love for nature, pushed along by efforts to preserve our natural environment, can lead people to community. If the church were to ally itself with environmental groups, the church could be that community. Support for family life, before, during, and after courtship and marriage (see Amoris Laetitia for details), could also draw people to community.

Mega-churches are communities with enough resources to support courtship, marriage, raising children, and enjoying old age. From my standpoint as a Roman Catholic, such churches could be enriched by our Catholic experience of ritual, and our Catholic tradition of intellectual exploration of faith issues. The exchange could be helped by the large number of former Catholics who attend these mega-churches. Exchange between Catholicism and the mega-church might be the beginning of a new ecumenical movement.






Wednesday, July 6, 2016

We swim in the waters of racism

It has been  while since I put anything here. I wrote the following piece intending to put it into our diocesan newspaper. I hope to get around to that one of these days.


We may never be able to overcome a feeling of discomfort between Blacks and Whites in the United States. This feeling depends on two facts, one historical and the other statistical. 

Historically, the feeling comes from the years when Whites were systematically taught to consider Blacks as intellectually and morally inferior. This thinking was necessary to preserve a system where Whites could make Blacks work for them without pay, and far worse, could buy and sell human beings as though they were property. When slavery was abolished by the 13th amendment, former slave-owners devised ways to continue the system under the laws which we now call "Jim Crow." No intermarriage, no sharing of drinking fountains, etc. etc. etc.

For Whites, the atmosphere created by that history is like the water in which fish swim. We swim in it without realizing it exists. 

The second fact is statistical. There are nine Whites to every Black person in this country. In northern rural areas the difference is even greater. That means that the average White person is 90% unlikely to meet a Black person and get to know that person. There are simply not enough Black people for most of us Whites to interact with on a regular basis. Without regular interaction, stereotypes and prejudices can continue without challenge. When we get to know one another, those stereotypes are gradually dispelled, though they may never get washed out entirely. I can see Black actors on TV and vote for a Black president, but until I interact with real people of color, I can continue with the two problems I just described. Most of us do. 

So what are we to do, as people of faith, people who follow the Gospel of Jesus Christ? 

One thing we can do is to recognize the handicap we face. Call it original sin, if you prefer. It is like our traditional idea of original sin in that we are born with it. 

The more active thing we can do is to practice treating people with respect. 

Respect is a set of learned behaviors. Parents drill these behaviors into their children. But often I as a white person am uncomfortable when I meet a Black person because I'm afraid of saying the wrong thing, and in my discomfort, I forget to be respectful. I may not look the person in the eye, or I might not address that person as warmly as I would a person of my own race. Most damaging of all, I might avoid the person, and just like that, I am practicing racial segregation and contributing to the problem. 

Being respectful is not, as they say, rocket science. It means approaching another human being with the behaviors that imply that I accept the other person as an equal, even if I may not feel that equality. It means simple courtesy. 

Recently some Black friends of mine described a reunion of their family that took place, in Georgia, in a vacation site that was not used to Black faces. My friends, who are "middle class," with educations and good jobs, had every right to rent the location. A neighbor came over and wanted to know why they were there. Implied was the neighbor's expectation that Black people do not belong in that place.  

That is lack of courtesy and respect. The courteous and respectful thing for such neighbors to do would have been to approach the newcomers with a smile and gestures of welcome, even if doing that might feel uncomfortable. Asking what the newcomers were doing there implied that the questioner was afraid that the newcomers would import poverty and crime.

I think we Christians are called to practice being respectful to every person who comes into our lives, regardless of that person's appearance or history or even behavior. If we want to be like Jesus, we might even look for people who make us feel uncomfortable.

In Jesus' day, anyone with a physical disability was something of an outcast. Poor people were outcasts because they did not observe all the rules that the religious leaders set up. (Jesus had some comments about that situation.) It was the poor and people with disabilities who flocked to Jesus. I can imagine people worrying about what that was doing to the neighborhood. 

Let us White Christians sigh, accept our own disabilities of prejudice, and practice being respectful. We are going to be living in our world of stereotypes and prejudice for a long time. An act of contrition would help.


Wednesday, May 4, 2016

How to do religion

5/3/2016 9:49 AM

Standard survey question: “What is your religion: Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, other, or none?” People who give the last answer are called “nones.” About a fourth of the U.S. population now falls into that category.

Here is why there are so many “nones.” People don’t know how to do religion.

To do religion, you have to do three things:

          1. You have to move your body. You can’t just think religion, or just feel it. You have to do something that involves physical movement. The reason for this is that, if you want to relate yourself to God, you have to do that with all parts of your being, not just your mind or feelings.

          2. You have to do religion in relationship with other human beings. The reason for this is that God is a community of persons, and God has created us to do things in relationship with others.

          This is the most serious obstacle to religion in western societies. We have become so individualized that we tend to approach everything as though we do not need anyone else for anything. Above all, we think that we do not need anybody else when we deal with God.

          3. What you do has to lead to an increase of beauty in the world. This is the ethical dimension of religion.

I am reading a book on the Franciscan approach to ethics. The author argues that Franciscan tradition sees beauty as the foundation of ethical behavior. Beauty is expressed most powerfully in the way we relate to each other as human beings. A human person fully alive is beautiful. What we do must lead toward making humans, including ourselves, more fully alive. What does not do this is “sinful” or evil.

Our capitalist cultures do not value beauty, except for those with resources. We do not care if what we do destroys beauty, as long as it increases profit. So we go though the world, leaving behind ugliness and decay. Last Sunday I took a walk along the Mississippi riverfront here in Quincy. I passed several properties overrun with weeds, featuring the remnants of concrete foundations and abandoned stair steps. In poorer neighborhoods in our beautiful city, houses features blue tarps on the roof (covering shingles blown off by last summer’s windstorm), weeds and trees sprouting up in the midst of what used to be sidewalks, houses whose paint peeled off years ago, and windows covered with plastic or even boarded up. Only the well-to-do (including me) can afford beauty.

Bottom line: if you think that you can be religious just by thinking about God, and perhaps having nice feelings, but never using your body; if you think you can be religious all by yourself; if you think you can be religious just by trusting in the maximizing of profit, you are not likely to be religious at all.

In earlier ages, followers of Jesus Christ were focused on baptizing people as a way of “saving” them. Baptism was a physical act, and it had to be done in relationship to others. If it led to an imitation of Jesus’ approach to the world, beauty followed. We have gotten away from that kind of baptizing, probably because we have downplayed the importance of the physical, of relationships with others, and of beauty.

You may notice that nothing I have said requires that you be Christian. The majority of people in the world are not Christian. But if they use their bodies in worship, relate to others in their worship, and work to create beauty, they are on the road to God. As a Christian, I happen to believe that Jesus Christ has showed us the best way to approach God, but I don’t believe that non-Christians are hopelessly out of touch with God. I believe that God loves each of them, and takes care of them in ways that I do not know.




 


Tuesday, April 26, 2016

Words


Bear with me a little, while I play at philosophy.

What is a word?

You can say that a word is a sound. But there are lots of sounds that are not words. What makes a sound into a word?

The sound has to be shared by other human beings.

“Shared.” What does that mean?

You say a word: “hello.” I hear the sound. I know what that sound means. When I hear that sound, I locate it in the midst of a story.

A story is a sequence of memories in my brain. When I hear “hello” I think of other times when I heard that sound. The experience of the sound was followed by other events that are somewhat similar to each other. I remember people smiling, maybe shaking my hand. Each such memory is a story, a script for things that happen.

But what is the word itself? It is not just my memory, because I cannot create a word on my own. A word has to be created by a community of some kind. The word is not the sound that the community hears, because in the midst of a different group of people, for example, people speaking a different language, the sound would be meaningless. The word is somehow “out there,” floating above the people making the sound.

They say that the sounds that a bird makes has meaning to other birds of that species. There is one song for warning, another for mating, and still another for just celebrating the morning (I think of what I used to call “the morning song of the robin”). 

I once used a textbook in social psychology that claimed that without words, we cannot think. When the portion of the brain that processes language is damaged, for example, by a stroke, we literally cannot think. We cannot remember.

My father had a stroke. The last months of his life he sat by his living room window looking out. When I came into the room he would brighten up. The textbook would say that when I was not in the room, he literally could not think of me. His brain was processing his immediate experiences, but nothing beyond the immediate experience.

A word is an event that has no weight. It cannot be measured. It can be observed only when people are using it, but it ceases to exist when people are not using it, except that the memory of it is lodged in the people’s brains. But their memory is not the word itself. Their memory is of a sound linked to a story. The memory would have no meaning unless the experience of the sound had been shared by others, who have linked it to similar stories.

A word is an interpersonal event. It cannot be observed or measured, except in its effects. That sounds to me very much like what the ancients called a “spirit.” A word is literally spiritual.

They say you cannot observe or measure a soul. You cannot observe or measure a word either.

There is a spirit world that we live in the midst of, a world of words and stories.

I like to think of an evil spirit as a bad story, and an angel as a good story.

Let me describe an experience I recently had.

I wear two hearing aids, each one worth $1300. I was walking down by the Mississippi River. The day was very windy, and I began to worry that the wind could catch one of the hearing aids and flip it out of my ear without my realizing it. So I took out the hearing aids and put them into my left pocket.

I thought I put them into my left pocket. I did not. After about a half hour of walking, I returned to the car and got out the hearing aids to put them back in. There was only one hearing aid in my pocket. I searched the car, over and over again. I felt in my pockets, and began to panic. $1300. Finally in despair I decided there was nothing else I could do except to go home, and maybe look in the car with different lighting, although there was nothing wrong with the lighting where I was.

My companion insisted on trying to retrace our steps, to see if I had dropped it somewhere along the way. She went one way, so I decided, with no hope at all of success, to go the other way. I had not gone more than ten steps, when I saw the hearing aid, lying on the pavement in the street about a foot from the curb. I could not believe it. How had it escaped being run over by a car? It had to have lain there for at least a half hour.

That whole event was as close to a miracle as I have ever experienced. It would be very easy for me to tell the story that an angel had saved the hearing aid and pointed me to it at the right time.

It is that kind of experience that causes people to talk about angels.

I have heard stories of people, especially young people, who suddenly go “off the deep end.” They seem to become someone else. They start doing things they would never otherwise do, sometimes very destructive things. I speculate that an evil story has entered their head. A “demon.” (The original meaning of the word “demon,” in Greek, meant some kind of force that took over a person or a situation. The force could be good or bad--an angel or a devil.)

We very easily turn physical objects into persons. We personify a car. I think of the way World War II pilots named their airplanes after women. The plane that dropped the first atomic bomb over Hiroshima was called the “Enola Gay,” the name of the mother of the pilot.

As a child, I got my first introduction to electronics from a book called Electronics for Young People. It personified electrons as little people, moving about in wires and vacuum tubes. That allowed me to visualize what was happening.

I have come a long way from “words.” I guess what I am saying is that a word is a spiritual event, one that cannot be measured or observed in itself. But once you start analyzing the experiences that give rise to words like “angels” and “devils,” the experiences do not seem so unbelievable.

We are learning that each of us is bathed, inside and out, in microbes, our “bionic” environment. We are also bathed in spiritual realities, inside and out. We are bathed in words.




Monday, February 15, 2016

A Better Philosophy


Fr. John Joe Lakers, my close friend who died in 2011, got his philosophical education at Oxford in England. That education was sometimes called “analytic” philosophy, and focused on language. As “JJ’ went though the last decades of the 1900s, he began to relate this approach to what was coming to be called “postmodernism.”

I come at postmodernism through sociology, and specifically, sociological theory. I taught a course with that title for several years. The readings that were appearing in the theory textbooks were by strange new authors: Michel Foucault, Jean-Francois Lyotard, and Richard Rorty. When JJ talked about postmodernism, he related it also to Rene Descartes, Emmanuel Kant, and Friedrich Nietzsche.

Nietzsche especially was toxic for believers. He was famous for his statement that “God is dead.”

But our Franciscan approach to philosophy was grounded in the principle that no one is so toxic that we cannot dialogue with that person, and that sometimes ideas that appear toxic at first have some merit to them. The education that we received in Our Lady of Angels Seminary in Cleveland in the 1950s was heavily influenced by two Franciscan friars, Philotheus Boehner and Allan Wolter. Boehner, a German emigre who was widely known in European Catholic philosophical circles, had become a specialist in William of Ockham, another toxic author. Ockham got into trouble with Pope John XXII, and Thomistic authors accused him of being a precursor to the Reformation. Wolter was a specialist in the writings of John Duns Scotus, but was sufficiently competent in scientific cosmology that he was able to teach alternate semesters at Princeton.

The Franciscan philosophical tradition, therefore, never accepted Pope Leo XIII’s 1897 decree that all Catholic philosophy and theology should be based on the writings of Thomas Aquinas. In JJ’s view, that position froze Catholic thinking into the thirteenth century and made it impossible for Catholic scholars to deal honestly with anything more recent.

Back to postmodernism. JJ was determined to mine the thinking of Nietzsche and the postmodernists for nuggets of insight that might contribute to a life of faith in our world.

My reading in the aforementioned postmodernist authors convinced me that their position could be boiled down to one statement. (I have always held that anything can be boiled down to one statement.) That statement is: “Any time someone claims to be speaking the truth, that person is hiding an agenda of getting power over someone else.”

Postmodernists are rejected by many Catholic authors because their position can be rephrased as “There is no such thing as the truth.” That formulation is completely nihilistic, and can easily be rejected, even on philosophical grounds. It reminds me of the riddle that we discussed in philosophy: “All statements are false, including this one.” To claim that there is no such thing as the truth is to imply that the statement itself is true.

Back to Sociology

In the 1960s, a sociologist, Peter Berger, and a Lutheran theologian, Thomas Luckmann, wrote a small book with the title The Social Construction of Reality. The title says it all. What we call “reality” is a socially constructed thing, and as such is subject to the vagaries of the social groups that are constructing it.

Behind that definition of reality is an idea as old as sociology—W.I. Thomas’s 1917 principle of what we called “the definition of the situation”: “If a situation is defined as real, it is real in its consequences.”

Sociologists have accepted that principle over most of the last century and society has continued to exist. What we have is a tension between the fact that we humans tell stories about things that happen to us, and the fact that sometimes the stories we tell are not verified by others.

The best example of this is a court of law. Every trial is a competition between competing definitions of the situation—competing stories. The defendant claims that something happened, and tells the story in support of that claim. The prosecutor challenges the story with an alternate story about what happened. The jury’s role is to determine which the of the two stories is more likely to describe what actually happened.

Sometimes no one can determine what actually happened. The position of the postmodernists is that such a situation is in effect in most of the important issues in life. I think they argue that position because they see people using truth claims to support political domination. But they don’t, JJ claims, get past that. All they offer is what JJ calls “a hollow voice of protest.”

Thomas Aquinas and his more modern followers, including popes, talk about “natural law.” The term really means that there are some stories about reality that everyone accepts, and that if you don’t accept the story, you are mentally or morally deficient. That is a shaky basis for making decisions about life. For centuries people accepted the story that the sun goes around the earth. The Church has clung to stories about human sexuality that most of the rest of society has rejected--for example, that artificial means of contraception are bad. The only sense I can make out of that statement is that it means that bad things happen when you use artificial means of contraception. But whether bad things happen or not is a matter for observation. The last fifty years of observation give evidence that, while there are some bad outcomes of such use, as is true of almost anything in life, overall such use does not cause enough harm to forbid the practice.

What does all this mean?

The endpoint of this line of reasoning is that the Catholic intellectual community, especially those who claim to speak authoritatively in the name of the Church, is out of touch with the major philosophical currents of the day. That is one of the roots of the widespread abandonment of religious affiliation. There are other sources of such abandonment, most notably the huge tendency toward individualistic isolation in our societies, but when we have no credible answer to the questions that people put to us, we lose them.

This gap between official Church teaching and the wider philosophical environment is one of the sources of lack of applicants for leadership in the Church—i.e. priesthood. Who wants to be locked into presenting things as true when the individual is not convinced they are true. Even worse, who wants to be locked into a situation where you cannot even discuss the issues?

The clergy problem is not limited to the Catholic community. Protestant groups also face a slowdown in clergy recruitment. I suggest that those groups face a similar problem. Their spiritualities—the practices and stories that they use to structure the lives of believers—are too often out of touch with the realities that most people have constructed for themselves. Protestant congregations have their own versions of orthodoxy, and their own punishments for people who say things outside the orthodoxy.

In short, part of our problem is intellectual, and its solution has to be to grapple on a wider level with the intellectual issues. That was JJ’s position, and it is mine.