Bonhoeffer's problem

          Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a Lutheran theologian who was executed by Adolf Hitler in 1945. During the 1960s, Bonhoeffer’s book, Letters and Papers from Prison, became a best seller in American circles. I would formulate one of his ideas this way: what are we Christians going to do when our scientific world has solved all our problems? We have been praying to a “God of the gaps,” a God who steps in the fix things that we humans have not yet learned to fix. Once we get all the things fixed, what will be left for God to do?

          In the 1960s it really did seem as though the human race was on the verge of solving all its problems. At least it looked that way to us Harvard folks who were living in a very privileged environment. Once we saw the way a process was developing, we pushed the model out to the limits and assumed that reality would eventually follow the model. We knew that things can happen very fast. The automobile was invented about 1900, and now everybody in the world wants an automobile.

          That way of thinking fit very well with the structural-functionalist approach to sociology. Society is like a machine, and as we learn to make the machine work better and better, it will eventually function without problems.

          Another version of the theory uses “democracy” as the god-term. If a country will just adopt democracy, all its problems will be solved. We went into Iraq with this idea. Let the Iraqi people taste democracy and they will become a beacon on a hill, shining to all the Mideast, showing what wonderful things can happen when you adopt democratic institutions.

          We in the U.S., of course, see ourselves as the model for all the world to follow. It is therefore distressing to see our democratic institutions faltering. Democracy should lead to more participation in the political process by more and more people. What is happening is that our political process is being subverted more and more by money. Instead of democracy, we are moving toward oligarchy, the rule of the many by the few.

          Here is an example of what I mean. The Supreme Court decides in January, 2009 that we cannot restrict contributions to political campaigns by large corporate bodies. Although labor unions are among such corporate bodies, the corporations of the business world far outstrip unions in resources. The present Supreme Court is dominated by a majority put in place by Republican administrations. As I write, there is a concerted effort in Wisconsin and other states by Republican strategists to undercut further the slight power that labor unions still have, by removing the legal supports that made union influence possible. The country’s distribution of wealth becomes more and more unequal. The very rich get richer and richer, and the rest of the population has to work harder and harder just to stay even.

          The 2008 election of Barack Obama broke the pattern of wealthy influence on political campaigns, but is that break only temporary? By now the wealthy have learned from the Obama campaign’s use of the social media, and are well on the way to corralling the use of those media in the interests of the usual oligarchs.

          The ultimate danger (the scientist projects trends into the future) is that the managers will become so skilled at manipulating the political process that it will become impossible to challenge them. More and more money will buy more and more votes, which will result in legal institutions to protect the rich from encroachment.

          What makes this possible is the lack of attention to politics by large sections of the population. Their lack of interest makes the system vulnerable to the influences that money can buy in favor of candidates (TV advertising, expensive campaign literature and signage, creative use of social media). 2008 showed that when enough people pay attention, real political change can occur. 2010 showed how hard it is to sustain the interest of the people who made 2008 possible.

          This does not describe the operation of the perfect democracy.

          The 2008 banking crisis was caused by wealthy speculators playing dice with the economy. The crisis caused unemployment. When unemployment is high, incumbents lose, so the Democrats lost ground in 2010. The defeat of Democrats favors the wealthy, which means that the rich end up coming out on top after the disaster that they caused. The Republicans, who systematically dismantled the regulations that might have prevented the crisis, get voted into power, and can continue to skew the legislative process in favor of the rich.

          My conclusion is one that every politician has known all along: politics is a game. Winning one game does not guarantee winning future games. Winning coaches and teams have to keep inventing new plays and strategies. There is no way to solve problems for all time.

          Conclusion: Bonhoeffer was misled by a structural-functionalist set of assumptions. Those assumptions go all the way back to the Enlightenment, with its stress on “reason” as the guiding light for human living. As Marx noted, “reason” is a fiction. He argued that the ruling classes create the fiction in a way that preserves their advantages.

          The pessimistic scenario would say that the rich are able to lock down the process so successfully that it becomes impossible for anyone to break into it. The optimistic scenario would say that when enough people become dissatisfied enough to take part in the political process, the system will be revised.

          I have been doing reading in the Civil War and its aftermath. The aftermath does not give one confidence that the poor can overcome the advantages of the rich. After the Civil War, the very people who caused and lost the war, the southern planter class, were able to re-assert control over the lives of their former slaves. It took a hundred years before a civil rights revolution began to break that control, and the fifty years since then have shown how hard it is to overcome the effects of a bad political system. But things have changed, very slowly.

          All along it is a game. We all need to play it.

A Lenten homily

A homily for the Fourth Sunday of Lent

          I shared the gist of last Sunday’s homily with Fr. John Joe Lakers, and he told me to write it up.

          The gospel passage is John 9, the story of the man born blind. I focused on the final statement of Jesus to the Pharisees: If you were blind, you would have no sin, but now that you say “we see,” your sin remains. The Pharisees were so focused on the letter of the law of the Sabbath that they missed what God was doing in Jesus. They could not see.

          We think we see when we really don’t.

          I started off with a story about my Uncle Jim, who had trouble seeing toward the end of his life. But he kept driving, so my aunt would sit next to him and say “Stop sign, Jim,” and “Turn right, Jim.” He thought he could see but he could not. I used that story as humor, softening the congregation up for a more challenging message. I got some smiles.

          Three questions. (I warned the congregation that I am aware that one can get in trouble for asking questions--Socrates drank poison because he asked too many questions.)

          1) Are Catholic Church leaders so focused on a rule about no women priests and no married priests that they miss what God is doing? Do they think that they see God’s will but are actually blind?

          Just a question.

          I asked the question because both Fr. Bauer and I are 75 years old, and we do not see other people coming along to take our places. Is God telling us that our rules are too restrictive? I asked this question first, because I wanted to be an “equal opportunity” challenger. If I am going to challenge things going on in the secular world, I shouldn’t spare my own religious world.

          2) Are the people who want to send 12 million undocumented immigrants back to their home countries so focused on a rule about our borders that they miss what God is doing? Do they really want to break up a lot of families in order to preserve that rule? Are people who hold to that position really blind to God’s concern for people, and thus blind to what God is doing in the lives of those people?

          Just a question.

          3) Are a lot of us so focused on a rule that says “Never raise taxes” that we miss how that rule can hurt people and thus miss God’s concern for those people?

          Just a question.

          This last one skirts the edge of getting into politics. There was a school board election two days after this homily, and one party running for school board positions were basically campaigning on the platform of “no new taxes.” But the issue is a lot broader than just schools, and I decided I had to raise the question.

         Conclusion: We need to be alert to what God is doing in our place and time, and not let our human rules blind us to God’s action.

          I got a couple of compliments, but no return challenges. The criticisms may come yet, like little time bombs resting out there ready to explode just when I don’t expect it. If they come, I’ll deal with them. Nobody says homilies can be perfect all the time, and not even some of the time. Homily writing is risky business. I hope that at least we’re past the days when critics would come after the homilist with a gun.

         

The machine and the game

“The Marginal Sociologist Looks at Sociological Theory”

          It has been about ten years since I have taught a course in sociological theory, and even longer since I have taught a course in introductory sociology. Yet I cannot quit thinking about theory. At heart I am a neo-scholastic disciple of Thomas Aquinas (well, not exactly--we Franciscans think Thomas was superseded by John Duns Scotus and William of Ockham).

          Open any introductory textbook in sociology, published even as recently as 2009, and you will find, in the opening chapters, a description of the main varieties of sociological theory. Usually there are three, sometimes four: “structural-functionalism,” “conflict theory,” “symbolic interactionism,” and sometimes “rational-choice theory.”

          Intro soc courses often have a lot of students. This causes instructors to cast about for ways to save work, and publishers are happy to accommodate such a search. They provide “test banks,” whole batches of multiple-choice questions from which the instructor can randomly select enough questions to make a decent quiz or test. By the time I last taught the course, in the late 1990s, the test banks were computerized so that the instructor just had to select items and, voila, the test would appear, ready to be duplicated and distributed to the waiting students.

          I found the items disappointing. I got the impression that the items were written by hacks hired by the publishers to fill up a quota. The items seldom matched what I had been trying to do in class. I tried to write my own multiple choice items. Doing this for a while created the following experience: I was spending four-fifths of my time trying to invent false answers to questions and one-fifth creating the true answers. I thought that was a poor use of my time.

          I gave in and used the pre-cooked test bank. My students failed miserably. I decided I needed a study guide for them to use as a preparation. I would give them the opening part of the multiple-choice items, without the false and true answers. That would give them a clue as to what they should be studying. After a while I noticed that many of the items had the form  “Socialization is . . .” “Relative deprivation is . . .”

          Well, this is stupid, I thought. Why not give the student the term and have the student tell me what it is. That way the student has to do the work of formulating the answer in his or her own words. I created a study guide with about three times as many terms as were likely to be on the test, and created the test by randomly selecting from the list. This procedure had an added advantage. Invariably some student is not able to take the test on the day appointed. The instructor has two options: adopt a hard line policy: you miss the test on that day, you flunk the test or lose it as part of your grade; or the instructor has to make up an alternate test. Making up an alternate multiple-choice test is a lot of work to do for one student, even if you are using a test bank. With my technique it was easy. I would just haul out the study guide, randomly circle one-third of the items on the guide, and hand it to the student.

          My procedure had an occasional criticism from students. (Well, an occasional criticism that I heard--who knows what the students were saying behind my back?) They said it depended too much on memorization. Yes it does, I said, but half of the mastery of any field is knowing the vocabulary of that field. There are other things the student needs to know, and I always supplemented my list of terms with one or two essay questions. I was too easy on my grading of these essays--part of my poor discipline described in my previous blog item was being unwilling to spend a lot of time grading long essays. But I digress.

          The test-creating technique had one unique advantage. Hundreds of student responses to an item asking for a definition of “socialization” resulted in a lot of unique formulations of the concept. I was always saying to myself, “well maybe the student is right--it could really mean that.” I kept boiling down my own definitions of concepts to simpler and simpler wordings, capitalizing on the creativity of students. That got me to developing a whole dictionary of terms with memorizable definitions. Too often the definition of a term in the textbook was three lines long, and who can memorize three lines of a hundred definitions? But memorization is useful. It allows you to reflect on the term, and apply it in your reflections.

Three Varieties of Sociological Theory

1. Structural-functionalism

          When I began my graduate studies in 1964, there was only one form of sociological theory: structural-functionalism. That is, there was at Harvard only one form of theory. Harvard’s competitors, especially the University of Chicago, disagreed, but they were not in our world. The Harvard world as I experienced it was ruled by Talcott Parsons, and he was the structural-functionalist. As I have described elsewhere in this blog, Parsons went around the world like an intellectual vacuum cleaner, sucking up every scrap of theory and incorporating it into his Grand Synthesis. I did not know it at the time, but Parsons’s star was setting.

          Structural-functionalism depended heavily on a metaphor of the organism. A human group is like an organism, with structures, just as the human body has bones and muscles. Each structure has a function: the bones keep you standing upright, and muscles keep you moving. In a human group, the structure is made up of the norms of the group. Each norm has a function. In the family, for example, the rule is that the father should provide economically for the family, and the function of that rule is to make sure the family eats. Organisms operate by “homeostasis,” which means that if anything in the environment changes, the organism tries to maintain a stable state. If you eat too much salt, the body excretes salt and gets back to its ideal balance of salt.

          You can see why Parsons’s star was setting. His model doesn’t deal well with fundamental changes, and it can promote over-simple stereotyping (the man earns, the woman loves).

          Yet the metaphor of the organism is powerful. Paul the Apostle used it in his image of the Christian community as the Body of Christ. The hand cannot say to the foot, “I do not need you.”

          Most of us think this way much of the time. Legislators are always trying to perfect the organism. “If we just make it illegal to . . .” And laws do solve some problems. Auto travel is safer than it used to be because we have created safer roads, and roads are created by legislators.

          To me, an organism is just a fancy machine. So the real metaphor is the machine. If you can construct the perfect machine (create the perfect set of norms), you solve society’s problems. But when we solve some of the problems, we often create others. We make more and more things illegal and we fill up the prisons and then have to pay to feed and house the prisoners.

2. Conflict Theory

          Along about 1960, sociologists began to pay more attention to Karl Marx. Marx had been pretty much ostracized from sociological thinking ever since the country got scared silly in the 1930s by the prospect of “socialism” taking over. Marx’s theory, which was just a sociological version of Georg Hegel’s theory of the dialectic, was that any human group invariably splits into the haves and the have-nots. He developed this theory in all kinds of directions, of course, but what he did for sociologists was sensitize us to the existence of conflict in any human group. Structural-functionalism, using the metaphor of the organism, saw conflict as a symptom of disease in the organism, something to be gotten rid of, like pain. In a well-designed organism, there would be no conflict. Marx’s theory said “Nonsense. There will always be conflict in any group.”

          To me, this is just another variety of the metaphor of the machine. All social groups have authority structures, and the haves struggle with the have-nots. Marx just added the idea that you will never construct a machine to eliminate conflict. Homeostasis gets replaced by conflict.

3. Symbolic Interactionism

          I mentioned Chicago as Harvard’s competitor. The University of Chicago boasted the oldest department of sociology in the country (founded in 1892). Harvard did not have a department until 1931. By the 1920s Chicago was creating a whole school of empirical research, called, of course, “the Chicago School”.

          Chicago was home to a philosopher named George Herbert Mead. Sociologists picked up Mead’s ideas and, under the leadership of Herbert Blumer, created a brand of theory called “symbolic interactionism.” It was “symbolic” because it said that all human behavior is mediated through language. Blumer called it “interactionism” because he saw all human behavior as structured by the unpredictable interaction of human beings with one another.

          To me, the metaphor of “the game” was a perfect way to sum up the theory. Herbert Blumer had once played professional football--what more natural thing than for him to see all behavior as a game?

          In a game, there are rules, but the rules can be negotiated and people sometimes cheat. More importantly, you can never predict the outcome of a game. If the rules are well-designed, the teams are evenly matched and the outcome depends on the creativity of the players in figuring out ways to play against the opponent.

          That fits the reality of society better than the machine image. Every time a legislator devises a new rule to solve a problem, someone figures out a way to get around the rule. We are in a game, with fluid expectations and no sure predictions. What looks chaotic at first glance (basketball always looks that way to me) turns out to have a structure, even though you can still never predict the winner.

Conclusion

          Years ago I read Gene Sharps’s three volumes on nonviolent action. I became convinced that nonviolence was the answer to society’s most serious problems. If we could just get people to behave nonviolently. . . I now realize that I was unconsciously thinking along a structural-functionalist line. Nonviolence can be a useful play in a game, but it can no more guarantee victory than a single play in a football game can guarantee victory. In practice, nonviolence almost always seems to be overtaken by people who grow impatient with its slow results and move into violent solutions.

          I now believe that there are no fool-proof solutions to any human problem. We are in a game with unpredictable outcomes. The story will go on and on, and no one can predict what twists and turns it will take. As Christians we are called to enter into the game, play it in as loving way as we can, and accept the fact that we will never control the outcome.

          The game metaphor has one very important advantage as a model. It is interesting and open-ended. If society really operated like a machine, we would either become pawns in a perfectly-ordered society, or we would all die of boredom.

The Marginal Sociologist

          A great deal of success in life comes from being in the right place at the right time. Since most people are not in that place at that time, most people do not become great successes.

          Having been admitted to the Harvard Department of Social Relations in 1966, I was deluded into thinking that I was on the way to becoming famous. I was indeed in the right place at the right time. I was a Catholic priest with good grades applying to a prestigious school at a time when everybody was enthused about ecumenism and the opening of doors to new groups. What I did not realize, and what I am only now beginning to appreciate, is that getting admitted to a good school, and completing a degree in that school, did not remove all of the obstacles to becoming famous.

          Not that becoming famous was a central goal for me--after all, I am a follower of Francis of Assisi, whose goal in life was to become the least in his society. But who can resist giving in slightly to a faint dream of having your name recognized all over the world? Certainly not me.

          The obstacles to making it in the academic Big Leagues are both external and internal. One big external obstacle is the lack of contacts with the Right People. Going to school in a seminary in rural southern Illinois is not a way to make friends with the intellectual elite of the country. The bigger obstacles are internal. Going to school in rural southern Illinois made me hesitant to open my mouth. “Better to keep your mouth shut and allow people to think you are stupid than to open your mouth and prove it.” In several years of graduate classes at Harvard, I hardly ever ventured to ask a question in a class. I am not even sure I know how to hold a fork in polite dining (even though I once bought a book on etiquette and studied it from cover to cover). Add in a slight tendency to depression and you have someone who is likely to avoid any opportunity to take the initiative needed to become famous.

          Neither of my parents even went to high school. I was proud of the fact that my father dropped out of school after seventh grade, and that my mother wanted to go to high school but the family couldn’t afford it--they needed the income she could get by going to work. Those were great credentials for proving my membership in the Lower Classes, but I am only recently realizing the cost of those credentials. The biggest cost was the lack of coaching in the disciplines needed to do good intellectual work.

          Most young people would rather enjoy life than buckle down to hard tasks. The purpose of coaches is to motivate young people to undertake the hard tasks, show them how they can be successful in mastering those tasks, and lead them on to more and more challenging tasks. Playing in the intellectual big leagues requires a lot of such discipline. For example, you need to learn how to search out and read more and more sources for your thinking, and you  need to learn why you have to cite where you got your ideas. I never got such coaching. I read for pleasure, which seemed to convince my mother that whenever she caught me reading, that meant that I needed to be doing something more useful. Reading in my home consisted in my father’s subscriptions to Popular Science and Popular Mechanics, and my mother’s subscriptions to the Sacred Heart Messenger and the St. Augustine’s Messenger. The latter was a publication of the seminary for African American students operated in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi by the Society of the Divine Word. It happened that my mother’s best friend, who lived on the street behind ours, was the sister of the rector of that seminary. Both my parents liked the St. Anthony Messenger, a publication by the Franciscans from Cincinnati. The only thing my father ever published was a brief letter in that magazine thanking St. Anthony for the great gift in his life of a son (me). 

          My own reading tastes were hardly conducive to getting into Harvard. I bought every book in the Hardy Boy series and kept reading the same books over and over, often out loud to my younger brother, in bed before going to sleep, drinking Pepsi. No wonder I became overweight.  I never even wondered what that experience meant to the younger brother.

          The skills involved in finding and citing scholarly sources are changing rapidly, with the coming of Wikipedia and online libraries, but the basic rationale for having such skills remains the same: you need to think critically about where ideas come from, and you need to be able to show other people how your thinking has developed from those sources. Never in fourteen years of seminary training did I get training in such skills. My three years of philosophy study were intellectually stimulating, but half of the textbooks were authored by our teachers, and they never documented where they got their materials. That made sense in a system where the goal was to prepare the student to do the “care of souls” among uneducated lay people, but it caused culture shock when I arrived in graduate school. There it seemed that the game was to offer a critique of every statement made by a professor, along with the source of your critique. “But so-and-so says . . .”

          The bottom line was that I finished my graduate degree, went out into the world with my Harvard Ph.D., and failed totally to do anything remarkable with it. Not that those years of study were useless. They provided me with many skills, and I have often said and still say that the years at Harvard were one of the great experiences of my life. They just didn’t make me Famous.

         You can tell that I still haven’t quite gotten over the hidden dream of fame. 

          But being marginal in that way did give me an advantage in one way. It gave me some distance from the established ways of thinking in academia. I was always an outsider, with a little resentment at how outsiders always get treated in any game. Being a total failure at any athletic contest contributed to that sense of resentment.

          Why am I saying all this? I am leading up to presenting my great ideas about sociological theory, and explaining why my ideas will not be totally useless. The next entry in this series (which may end up being a series with only two entries) will be “The Marginal Sociologist Looks at Sociological Theory,” or, “The Machine and the Game: Sociological Theory Boiled Down to Two Simple Models.” Stay tuned.

Whose wisdom, whose wealth, and whose might?

          We usually say that wisdom is a good thing. But there is a false wisdom. Paul says that the follower of Jesus should be foolish rather than wise. He says that the foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom.

          Some preachers these days say that if you are holy, you should get wealthy. Wealth is a sign of God’s blessing.

          Practically everybody in this country says that the U.S. should have bigger guns than anybody else in the world.

          Walter Brueggemann, a United Church of Christ theologian, compares Egypt under Pharaoh with our situation today (Journey to the Common Good, 2010). Pharaoh is the opposite of everything that God wants for the people. God led the people out of Pharaoh’s Egypt into a place of freedom, the desert.

          Pharaoh lived by an unholy trio of values. They are:

                    wisdom

                    might

                    wealth

          Pharaoh had all the wisdom. He had his wise men, those who interpreted his dreams and performed miracles for him. That worked until God stepped in and sent him dreams that the wise men could not interpret and helped Moses to do things that those wise men could not duplicate.

          Egypt, with its seven years of famine, became a place of scarcity, and Pharaoh used that scarcity to get control of all the country’s wealth. He put Joseph in charge, and the story says that the people gave everything they owned to Joseph in return for food. Pharaoh, through his agent Joseph, ended up owning everything and making slaves of everyone. Pharaoh got all the wealth.

          That’s what happens in human societies. It is happening in our society. Fewer and fewer people are owning more and more of the wealth.

          God called the people out of the place of bondage, the place where scarcity kept the people under the control of Pharaoh, into a desert where they could begin to see past their scarcity. To do that they had to let go of their fear. Brueggemann uses the stories of manna and Sabbath to make that point.

          When the people ran out of food, God provided them food in the form of manna, “bread from heaven.” God forbade them to store up the manna. If they tried to store it, it became rotten and wormy. But on the day before the Sabbath they could gather twice as much as they needed. The extra they kept over was to be used on the Sabbath without getting rotten and wormy. God wanted the people to rest on the Sabbath.

          The kingdom of scarcity is a 24/7 kingdom. There is no rest. You can’t rest, because someone may be gaining on you. There won’t be enough if you don’t work every minute of every day.

          Pharaoh had his chariots and charioteers--he had all the might. The people who run the show in our country and around the world are careful to keep control of the military, the source of might. If we don’t have the big guns, someone else will come along with bigger guns and take away what we have.

          In the desert the people did not store up wealth, and God was their defense (look at what happened to the chariots and charioteers when they tried to pursue the Israelites across the sea).

          The Exodus of the Israelites from Egypt into the desert is one of the great stories of all time. It motivated the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s, one of the great nonviolent movements in history. It can motivate us today.

          We have to quit being so concerned with scarcity, and depend more on God and each other. We have to quit fearing possible attacks from the latest enemy (in the 1950s it was Russia, in the 1960s it was Vietnam, in the 1990s it was Saddam Hussein, and since 2001 it has been El Qaida). We have to demythologize the wise men of our time, those who tell us that our economy has to make more gadgets more and more efficiently and sell them to more and more people. That may create wealth, but it is not making us happier. We can’t see that because our wise men have sold us on Pharaoh’s wisdom.

          God wants us to be free just as much as God wanted the Israelites to be free. We have to get out from under the control of Pharaoh’s wisdom, Pharaoh’s wealth, and Pharaoh’s might.

Sharing one's faith

          Recently the Pew Trust on Religion and Society conducted a survey of American religious practice and affiliation. It got publicity for the statement that the second largest “denomination” in the country is ex-Catholics. About 30% of people raised Catholic no longer say they are Catholic. That amounts to about 20 million people. There are only 16 million Southern Baptists in the country, and they are the largest single denomination besides the Catholics.

          That is not news to me. I have been following numbers like this for thirty years, and have seen the trend toward leaving the Church increasing over that period. Also not news to me is that the Catholic Church is no worse off and no better off than any other denomination. All denominations have been losing members at the same rate or at worse rates. Whatever is happening to Catholicism is happening to everybody else too.

          The study also points out an interesting fact: a substantial segment of those leaving the Church are leaving it because they see the Church as not religious enough. For example, they see Catholics as not taking the Bible word-for-word literally.

          The only reason the Catholics are growing in number overall is because of the number of Catholic immigrants from Latin America.

          Analysts of the Pew study surprised me with one statement, however. They say that most other groups are making up for their losses by “evangelizing,” by recruiting new members. Catholics aren’t doing that. The implicit concludion: Catholics should get with it and start evangelizing.

          The word “evangelize” sounds bad in the U.S. People equate it with proselytizing. Proselytizing means that you go out and actively poach members from other churches. Evangelizing means that you witness to your beliefs publicly, and, I suppose, work to recruit unaffiliated people.

          There is another connotation to the word “evangelize.” It suggests an appeal based on emotion, possibly on fear. “If you don’t join us, you are not saved.” Not being saved means “going to hell.” Vatican II pushed many of us Catholics away from that approach when it made two significant declarations: 1) God operates in some mysterious ways in religious bodies outside Catholicism, and 2) the individual person’s conscience is supreme over all else. If in conscience I believe that God calls me to leave the Catholic Church and become a Lutheran, God is okay with that.

          If I really accept those two statements, and I do, I cannot go around telling people that they are lost unless they join us. I lose an important recruiting tool. Does accepting the two statements also make me too relaxed about sharing my faith?

          I think it does.

          For some reason, even though I think my Catholic tradition is the best thing in the world for me, and I could never think of leaving it, I am casual about sharing it with others. Why?

          I parallel it with enthusiasm for something like quitting smoking. The way people describe the passage from smoker to non-smoker convinces me that non-smoking is definitely the better course of action. Yet pushing the issue can turn people off. One former smoker I know used to make a pest of himself by reminding every smoker on every possible occasion that the smoker was going to wellness hell if he or she did not quit. That made the rest of us refuse to bring up the topic with our smoking friends.

          I am reluctant to get heavy, deep and real with people with whom I am engaged in casual interaction. But the easy course of action for me is to define every occasion as one that calls for steering clear of the important topic of my faith.

          Do I have any enthusiasms that I find myself sharing with others?

          This blog represents one way in which I do such sharing. A blog gives the other person the freedom to take it or leave it. I don’t risk pestering people. I do risk having them not listen to me at all. I have no idea if anyone reads this blog, or that they arre affected by what I say if they do read it.

          The bottom line is that I do not think God calls me to go on a crusade of street preaching. Someone else may feel called to do that. More power to her.

          I still think it is important to provide good pastoral care to the people already in our Catholic community. There is no reason why we have to copy the rest of the U.S. religious world by letting 30% of our own folks go somewhere else.

          Recently Pope Benedict set up a Church office in Rome to promote the “new evangelization.” The idea is good. I just with he could have found a better word to name his program.

The Care of Souls

Back in my seminary days in Teutopolis, Illinois (ca 1962), the term “care of souls” was one of the most important phrases in our vocabulary. In Latin the term was cura animarum.


We had been ordained to the priesthood in June of 1962, but we could not “get the cura” until we had fulfilled certain requirements. The most important of these was to deliver the “cura sermon,” a 30-minute written essay read orally to the entire seminary community during its main meal. Until we had completed the cura requirements, we could not do two important things that every priest was supposed to do: hear confessions and preach publicly.


I did not keep a copy of my cura sermon, but I remember that the topic was “tradition,” and that, following my life-long fascination with stories from the old West (the Lone Ranger), I based it on the robber’s phrase “hand it over,” which is what the word “tradition” basically meant.


I arrived at graduate school determined to use my graduate training to study the topic of “care of souls,” which people at Harvard translated, too literally in my opinion, as “cure of souls.” My heroes in the priesthood were men like Msgr. Alphonse Bertman (“Father Al”) of St. Aloysius Parish in Springfield, Illinois. My parents had moved to his parish shortly before my ordination. The neighborhood of “St. Al’s” had been an unruly Italian and Lithuanian coal miners’ enclave in the late 1930s. The bishop had asked Father Al to hold the fort for a while until some priest could be persuaded to take over the unwelcome assignment. Father Al stayed on the job until his death in 1963, and saw the parish grow into a vibrant Catholic community that helped to give new life to the entire northeast side of Springfield.


How did he do it? What did he do that made such a difference in the lives of so many people, who respected him so much that the city named a street after him? Those were my questions.


There are negative examples of care of souls also. Just recently I heard a story of how a foolish action by a priest resulted in the departure of two people from the Catholic community. That is not tragic--when we do not provide good care of souls, people should go where they can get it. But I believe that our Catholic tradition has riches that are worth trying to preserve and pass on, and that when someone leaves us, their departure impoverishes both that person and the remaining Catholic community.


For some reason, which I have spent a lifetime trying to understand, some U.S. parishes become really vital centers of Christian living, to the point where, on the whole, U.S. Catholicism has become much more vital than the Catholicism of western Europe. I was convinced that the answer lay in what I called “good care of souls.” Where you have that, good things happen. Where you don’t have it, good things don’t happen. But what is “that”? What is “good care of souls,” and how do we go about making it more likely to exist?


The Vatican II Hiccup


From 1962 to 1965 the Catholic Church experienced the Second Vatican Council, which was accompanied by a widespread revision of everything that U.S. Catholics had been doing for several centuries. Much of the revision was necessary and very productive, but some of it went off track, as many observers, including our present Pope Benedict, have observed. I want to focus on one way that the Council threw the priesthood off track.


What happened to the priesthood after Vatican II was something similar to what was happening at about the same time to the profession of teaching elementary and secondary school in our country. Every theorist in the country developed recommendations about how to make the job better. The expectations shot so high that no human being could possibly fulfill them. A priest was supposed to be a combination of financial manager, personnel specialist, psychological counselor, marriage and funeral advisor, expert in canon law, school administrator, and community organizer. In addition, he was expected to be a saint, and spend hours a day in prayer and contemplation. No wonder that many men in the role gave up in frustration, and many other people decided that priesthood was no place for them.


I call this the “Vatican II hiccup” because I think the fifty-year trend, a mere hiccup in the scale of the history of Catholicism, is about to come to an end. As priests have become fewer and fewer, lay people have taken over many of the roles that priests had been expected to play. That should make the role of priest more “do-able,” more realistic in its expectations. When I was first ordained, I thought I should act as counselor to several people who came to me for advice. Gradually I concluded that I was not doing them or myself any good and I withdrew from that role. Today I try to recognize when someone needs professional counseling, and as carefully as I can, I refer the person to a professional. Similarly, if I were a pastor, I would surely not try to handle the parish finances by myself.


Two Models of Priesthood


I use two priests as my exemplars of good care of souls. One is the man I just described, Msgr. Alphonse Bertman. The other is the pastor of the parish where I grew up, St. James Parish in Decatur, Illinois. Its pastor from around 1911 to his death in 1952 was Fr. Francis Ostendorf.


A priest who knew Fr. Ostendorf once described him, derisively, as a “sacristy priest.” That meant that Fr. Ostendorf did nothing more than carry out ritual duties without trying to help people in other ways. The criticism was muted, in my eyes, by the fact that the critic was himself pretty much a disaster as a pastor. However, I recognize that two observers can see quite different things and tell quite different stories about the same person. The author Mark Costello, who attended St. James grade school a year or two behind me, published a story about a woman I worked for at St. Mary Hospital during my high school summers. His picture of her was bitterly cynical, a picture that I could hardly believe.


From my perspective, as a child growing up during the Second World War, Fr. Ostendorf created a safe and sacred world. Every day all 300 of the students in the school (there were about 40 in my grade) marched outside for the raising of the American flag (with reveille played by a student bugalist), processed over to the church for the 8:00 am Mass, and then returned to school until, around 3:30 pm, we marched outside again for the lowering of the flag (this time the bugalist played “Taps”).


Fr. Ostendorf had an assistant, Fr. Joseph Prokopp, who won our admiration by bringing his cocker spaniel (“Smokey”) to his once-a-week catechism class and let the dog wander up and down the rows of classroom desks. The two priests presided at Masses every day (6:30 and 8:00 am), “Mother of Perpetual Help” devotions on Tuesday evenings, Stations of the Cross on Friday evenings during Lent, Saturday confessions (2:00 to 4:00 and 7:00 to 8:00 pm), and at least two or three Sunday Masses. Thirteen School Sisters of St. Francis lived in a two-story convent next to the church. Besides teaching, administering the school and providing excellent musical leadership for the church and school, they baked hosts for Mass, and probably cleaned the church. (They must have done that. If lay parishioners had been asked to do it, I am sure my mother would have been one of the volunteers, and I do not remember her ever doing it.)


Fr. Ostendorf drove a Packard, and every year he went to Wisconsin for a month of fishing. Except for that month, he was always present, bounding up the steps from the street to the rectory two at a time. I am sure he “went on sick calls,” anointing people and giving them the “last rites” in their homes at all hours of the day and night, and did many other things I never saw.


I spent three months in bed with rheumatic fever during my high school years. Fr. Ostendorf lent me a tiny metal puzzle, a checkerboard cut into pieces. The goal was to re-assemble the pieces into a complete checkerboard. It took me two months to get the puzzle solved. When I returned the puzzle to him after my recovery, he produced a piece of paper on which he had written several more solutions of the puzzle. I concluded that he must have spent a lot of time on the puzzle. He was able to relax.


A job description based on his life described a job I could handle. The Saturday confessions bothered me because that meant that I would never be able to listen to a Notre Dame football game. But some bad always comes with the good.


“Father Al” provided a rather different model. His rectory was an ordinary house along 20th Street in Springfield--if you didn’t know where he lived, you would have had trouble finding the place. He was a stickler for ritual details. I remember him carefully removing his biretta at every mention of the name of Jesus during the sung Gloria and Credo at Mass. The story was that he reproved an assistant for washing a car in the rectory driveway wearing shorts. Yet he refused the title “Monsignor,” and must have done something to win the approval of those unruly immigrant coal miners. His “right hand man” was a woman, Gilda Fulgenzi, who stayed near him as he died of liver cancer, and later became Chancellor of the Springfield diocese.


When I was ordained, even though my parents had only lived in his parish for three years, he insisted on having a “First Mass” for me in the parish. He paid for a breakfast for the clergy and my family at the Springfield Fairgrounds.


Both of these men seemed to me to be comfortable in the role of pastor, able to laugh and have fun, to be reverent and serious when dealing with sacred things, and with a sense of compassion and sympathy for the plight of ordinary men and women trying to live a Christian life in the midst of the more Catholic Springfield and the more Protestant Decatur environment.


Preparation for Priesthood


My seminary education took place just before the changes of Vatican II. The system was easy to understand. We studied Latin for six years because we needed it to say Mass, pray the breviary, and use Latin textbooks in philosophy and theology. We studied philosophy so that we could understand theology better. We studied theology so that we could minister to people (do care of souls) better. Theology consisted of four major topics: dogma, moral theology, Scripture, and canon law. Each of these fields was studied throughout the four-year program. Other smaller topics got a year or so: homiletics (how to preach) and catechetics (how to teach catechism) were two that I remember.


I came out of theology with the conviction that book learning is essential but limited. You study books so that you get more tools in your toolbox, but in the real world you are never sure that the tool you plan to use will work. You try all the existing tools, and if none of them work, you invent a new one. In the meantime you keep reading. The priest who quits reading is likely to do the care of souls poorly.


The advice about reading was good, but the system did not prepare us for change. We expected that life in the Church would be pretty much the same as it was when we started our studies.


After Vatican II much of the fixed structure of the old curriculum changed. I did not experience the change first hand, but it seems that one important change involved rejection of what was called “theology based on the manuals.” In dogma and moral theology there were “manuals,” textbooks based on earlier textbooks. The manuals tried to condense for practical use what was known about each of the issues discussed. In moral theology, for example, our (Latin) textbook was the 17th edition of a text written by Jesuits at Louvain. The first edition was probably written in the 1700s.


The old system gave me a solid foundation in factual information (what doctrines were defined by the Church and when and why they were defined the way they were), but many of my classmates found the texts deathly boring. My impression is that the new system evolved to look more like the standard game in secular academic institutions: do a critique of everything and win points by looking creative. It seemed to me that the game did what Rodney Stark, a sociologist of religion, accuses many Protestant seminaries of doing: make religion into an academic exercise and take out of it any emotion that might give it life. In other words, make the seminary a branch of a secular university and its graduates will kill whatever religion they find when they go out into the “real world.”


U.S. seminaries are apparently in the middle of a rejection of the post-Vatican II approach. I welcome the rejection, but my impression is that what the rejectors are suggesting to replace that approach is too slavish an attempt to return to what we had before the Council. What we need is a theological preparation designed to help us do good care of souls in the world we live in, not in the world of 1950.


My Own Struggle with the Care of Souls


I began work on my doctoral dissertation in sociology at Harvard in 1967 with the goal of describing the role of the Catholic priest. I had in mind some of the efforts to provide such care in the environment I was in: the student body at Harvard. Our efforts revolved around what we called “small-group liturgies.” Instead of focusing on the larger Catholic community at Harvard (which was centered at St. Paul Church near the center of the campus, and which regularly drew capacity crowds on Sunday), we had Mass in a nondenominational building in the Harvard Yard called Philips Brooks Hall. We could get maybe 50-75 people for a Sunday Mass.


After my dissertation committee rejected my thesis proposal in May of 1968 (“much too ambitious--get one advisor and work with him”), my new advisor, a woman named Renée Fox, suggested, “Why don’t you study the place where you live, St. Anthony Shrine in Boston?” The Shrine was the total opposite of the small-group approach that had fascinated me. I made the switch, except that problems in Boston made me move the study to Chicago, where I ended up with a study of St. Peter Church in the Loop, a place very similar to the Boston Shrine. Processing several thousand written surveys and analyzing 80 face-to-face, hour-long interviews, I developed more ideas about what makes for good care of souls.


Several of my interviewees made statements like “I like it when the priest enjoys saying Mass.” A woman interviewee said “I was praying the Our Father with the congregation one day, and suddenly the thought struck me: these people—they come here to pray.” I have never been able to pray the Our Father at Mass without thinking of that statement.


One finding astounded me. The church walls are marble. It is marble with an orange tone, but to me, any kind of stone feels cold. Yet the one adjective that came up over and over in the interviews in people’s description of the church was “warm.” The church and its staff were warm.


What makes a place “warm”? Here is my answer: the people who staff the place are open to involvement with the people who come there. The staff involvement has two characteristics: it is vulnerable, and it is faithful. The staff do not stay behind plexiglass shields, and they try to make each encounter with every individual open to future encounters. I could use the word “love” to describe this kind of involvement, but the word has become so overloaded with other connotations that it has become useless for serious use. Nevertheless, that is what love is: vulnerable, faithful involvement.


Good Care of Souls


So good care of souls requires vulnerable, faithful involvement with the people. What does that look like?


To be vulnerable means that you can be influenced by the other person. This means that you cannot enter an encounter with all the answers, dictating how things will be or have to be. Here is where the pre-Vatican II approach has its greatest difficulty. That approach was grounded in a theory which said that the pastor is judge and ruler. Judges and rulers tell you how it is and how it should be. Such an attitude makes a loving relationship difficult.


Does that mean abandoning principles and becoming totally wishy-washy? One principle you can never abandon: you must be vulnerable and faithful. That principle is not open to negotiation. If you are to be really faithful to another person, you have to have the other person’s long-term well-being at heart. If you have someone’s well-being at heart, you cannot just “let anything go,” cannot just abandon all principled behavior. The key is how you communicate your idea of what the principled behavior should be. You approach the other person vulnerably, open to the possibility that you might have to change your own mind about what is good for that person. “I believe that something has to be done a certain way, or bad things will follow. But I could be wrong.” Could the pope be wrong? The pope speaks to a universal audience, and maybe if the pope were facing this particular individual at this particular time, the pope would have second thoughts too.


This kind of openness fits exactly what Gustav Weigel, one of the great promoters of Vatican II ecumenism in the Church, laid down as the rules for ecumenical dialog: 1) state your own beliefs as clearly and honestly as you can; 2) listen to the other person state his or her beliefs as clearly and openly as she can; 3) let God determine what you should do next. That’s vulnerability. That’s what made the Vatican Council such a moment of grace in the Church.