What passes for "analysis" at the L.A. Times

I've read this February 29th Los Angeles Times editorial written by Michael McGough, the Times' senior editorial writer, three times now and am still uncertain why, exactly, he wrote it. But, hey, at least it provides me with an opportunity for some mild sarcasm and mention of a couple of books that did have a reason for being written:

A colleague and fellow cradle Catholic once told me about a revealing conversation with her parish priest. When she had described an acquaintance as an "ex-Catholic," the priest objected. There were no ex-Catholics, he said, only bad Catholics.

I wonder what he would have made of this factoid from the Pew Forum's new "religious landscape survey" of the United States: Overall, 31.4% of U.S. adults say that they were raised Catholic, but only 23.9% of adults identify with the Catholic Church.

I think the priest would say, without any hesitation whatsoever: "There are a lot of bad Catholics out there." And, frankly, if it takes a Pew poll to help someone figure that out, they need to either stop reading the L.A. Times or stop writing for it.

Here's what I make of it as a Catholic whose life spans the pre- and post-Vatican II church: As the church in the United States became less Roman and more catholic (with a small c), it became easier for Catholics to leave the faith of their fathers and embrace the faith of their spouses, co-workers or golf buddies.

It must have also made it easier for them to leave the logical thinking and writing of their fathers and embrace the vague ramblings of their "catholic" golf buddies. But, to be fair, McGough is onto something. So let's try to put it into plain English: As Catholics became less Catholic—that is, less observant of Catholic doctrine and practice—they became more like their non-Catholic neighbors. Brilliant.

There is much talk, especially among politically conservative Catholics, about liberal "anti-Catholicism." But generations of American Catholics were inculcated with what can only be called anti-Protestantism.

Which, if you think about it, makes perfect sense: when a group of people is generally disliked, even attacked, by the predominant culture, they tend to be less than affectionate regarding that culture. This is not to defend Protestant bashing, or to make light of how nasty things sometimes were between Catholics and non-Catholics prior to Vatican II, but McGough's insinuation that "pre-Vatican II" Catholicism in America was essentially about being anti-Protestant strikes me as both simplistic and self-serving. (Here would have been a good place for McGough to ponder why it was that some Catholics were so desperate to be liked and accepted by the predominate Protestant culture. And to ask, "How has that worked out so far? Any problems to speak of?" Just a thought.)

Even worse, McGough labels as "rad trads" those "radical traditionalist Catholics who cheer Pope Benedict XVI when he says Mass facing the altar instead of the congregation and unmothballs the jeweled miters of his pre-Vatican II predecessors." Does this mean, for example, that Ignatius Press is "rad trad" because it publishes books such as Turning Towards the Lord, as well as Ratzinger's The Spirit of the Liturgy? Perhaps McGough is unaware that most radical traditionalists have little or no affection for Joseph Ratzinger, not to mention Henri de Lubac, Hans Urs von Balthasar, Yves Congar, and other Ressourcement theologians whose books are published by Ignatius Press (as well as by others). Equally cognitively-confused is his brief take on Vatican II, which concludes with the remark, "Why be a Catholic if you're no longer sure that it's the 'one true church'?" Has McGough read Lumen Gentium, chapter 8? Or has he been too busy playing golf with his buddies?

After having chastised "pre-Vatican II" Catholics for being anti-Protestant, McGough laments that many "conservative Catholics" get along so well with Evangelicals when it comes to "hot button" issues such as abortion and homosexuality. Finally, after quoting Richard McBrien/Thomas Groome—"Catholicism [is] a rich, multifaceted reality that cannot be contained by any single doctrine or institutional element"—he concludes:

And yet, according to Pew's statistics, many cradle Catholics are rejecting that reality. Whether you blame guitar-strumming liberal priests or antiabortion Catholics who cozy up to Southern Baptists, Catholicism isn't as exclusive or as aloof as it used to be. It may, however, be more Christian.

Huh? Which means...what? Granted, McGough is onto something with his discussion of Catholic culture and Catholic identity. It's unfortunate that in trying to make sense of it he keeps hitting his tee shots into the woods and his recovery shots into the sand traps. Otherwise, par for the course for the L.A. Times.

Comments

[Robert Miller]

"As the church in the United States became less Roman and more catholic (with a small c), it became easier for Catholics to leave the faith of their fathers and embrace the faith of their spouses, co-workers or golf buddies."

"There is much talk, especially among politically conservative Catholics, about liberal "anti-Catholicism." But generations of American Catholics were inculcated with what can only be called anti-Protestantism."

With these two comments, McGough is closer (than he probably knows, or would want to be) to the heart of the problem that afflicts the Catholic Church in the United States.

Catholics are members of a Body -- this is their identity; not adherents of a philosophy, or a "tradition" or a school of thought and practice. Their identification with Rome is inseparable from their identification with the Body of Christ. The US, from its very beginning, proclaims itself a body, striving for "more perfect union". Catholics who are US citizens always have had trouble working out the inherent conflict between their real membership in the Roman Body and their putative membership in the US body.

Now, the essential characteristic of a body is that it occupies its own space in time. Therefore, no member of the ("Roman") Body can be a member of the US "body". Like St. Paul, a member of the Body of Christ can be a citizen of the US; but he cannot be a member of the US political and cultural body. To the extent he attempts to be a member of both, he defiles the Body of Christ.

McGough -- together with most liberals and conservatives -- locates the crisis-point of Catholic schizophrenia in the events surrounding Vatican II. In reality, Vatican II had very little to do with it. As early as the 1880s and 1890s, Rome had noticed that Catholics in the US were developing novel ideas of ecclesiology in action and practice. This notice drew down Leo XIII's lapidary warning in Testem Benevolentiae (1891).

Shortly thereafter, "Americanism" became confused with Modernism -- and the confusion enabled pragmatic Catholic US churchmen and intellectuals to sweep Americanism up with Modernism into the dustpan of Liberalism. That's why it's easier for "conservative" US Catholics to blame Liberalism than Americanism for anti-Catholicism.

It then happened that, for about a half-century (say, 1910-1960), even Liberalism had to look to the Right and to the Catholic Church for allies against the totalitarian monsters Liberalism's own antinomianism had spawned.

Americanism, however, is not Liberalism. It is a "soft" totalitarianism. It proposes to demote the Body to membership in its own body. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Catholic immigrants came to the US fully intending to carry forward their various versions of the Catholic public thing (res publica christiana). Like St. Paul, citizens, yes; but not worshippers of the city's gods (democracy, capitalism, "separation of Church and State", the Bill of Rights, the Constitution, the "American dream", "America" itself). I often wonder how St. Paul would have reacted to the incorporation into the Mass of hymns to America, like the "Battle Hymn of the Republic", "America the Beautiful" and "God Bless America" (not very gently, I wager).

When Liberalism waxed, during the first half of the twentieth century, new Catholic immigration waned. The older assimilationist tendencies among Irish and other English-speaking US Catholic ethnic groups regained the upper hand. And, by the 1940s and 1950s, most US Catholics were ready to join the US civic body as members.

Today, very few Catholics in the US recognize that their membership in a Body puts them essentially at odds with the body of US politics and culture. "Catholic" liberals don't understand the issue at all, because they have consciously adopted the Americanist heresy. Catholic "conservatives" may be in a worse (tactical) state, in that (with nabobs like Burke, Buckley, J.C. Murray as mentors)they believe there is some "Great Tradition" that somehow unites the "Founding Fathers" with St. Thomas, St. Augustine and the Fathers of the Church.

The beginning of salvation for US Catholics is to foreswear the Founding Fathers, and ressource the Fathers of the Church.

Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's; and to God, the things that are God's.