Jerome Baggett wanted to know how Catholics live their faith, how they interact in their worship community and how they relate to the larger church and their civic community. So he visited six Catholic parishes in the San Francisco Bay area and interviewed or reviewed questionnaires filled out by 300 parishioners. He selected interview ees from a wide spectrum of ages, ethnic backgrounds and educational levels, and he sought out people who were active in their congregations. The parishes he chose to study were also diverse: one parish was predominantly made up of gay people, and another made regular Sunday use of the Latin mass (but not the Tridentine version). He looked at working-class and affluent parishes, and at congregations that offered mass in Vietnamese, Tagalog and Spanish, with devotional practices to match. At the largely gay parish the closing hymn one Sunday was the decidedly noncanonical “Over the Rainbow.”
Sociology, it has been said, is just slow journalism. That gibe has a grain of truth. I did not have to read this book to know that the predominantly gay parish had problems with the teaching authority of the official church on sexual matters or that the most traditional parish saw itself as a countercultural fortress against a largely decadent culture. Nor was it a surprise that the various ethnic communities honored their native religious customs as a way of sustaining their ethnic identities or that the more affluent parishioners were almost uniformly negative about the church’s teaching on contraception. Nor, finally, was it big news that the Catholics Baggett spoke to did not have fully orthodox views on doctrinal matters or sacramental theology de spite their passionate participation in church life.
“Largely gay parish”? I thought he was studying Roman Catholics? Are the local RC hierarchy aware of this parish?
Though from a theological perspective their grasp of doctrine is not always orthodox, it is startling to see the seriousness with which they take their faith. They generally express the sense that they belong to a long tradition …
I am surprised that the reviewer does not see the logical non-sequiturs in this statement. Can we say that Catholic Christians take their faith seriously if they sit lightly to key doctrines? Likewise, can they be said to be part of a long tradition? We Roman Catholics need a wholesale revision of our catechetics and our preaching, and I think that the present pope is encouraging this. For myself, I wonder sometimes how different my homilies must be from those preached say 50 years ago. Today there is more scriptural exposition in the average Catholic sermon – but less doctrine. Reading this review made me vow to try to build in more doctrine.
I wonder what his results would have been had he interviewed six Catholic parishes in.. say.. Omaha, Charleston, or Houston versus San Francisco.
Cunningham’s review is disappointing. It is sadly superficial and reveals little of Cunningham’s intellectual astuteness. Chris Molter’s observation needed to be addressed in the review. Baggett could have come to Pittsburgh for another view of the Catholic Church. But that might not have served his rather obvious agenda.
Despite the lack of obedience to the Church’s teachings, it’s really a remarkable story of the love of the Church for her people and the love of the people for the Church. It reminded me of the saying attributed to James Joyce that the Catholic Church was “here comes everybody”. What needs to be taught and lived is that obedience to the Church’s teachings will only enhance the love that the people already have for Mother Church.
For those of you who are puzzled by the clearly non Catholic goings on in this Diocese. I have a simple explanation.
“Archbishop George H. Niederauer.”
Nuff said.
One of the interesting features of the post-Second Vatican Council era has been how the traditionalist-progressive debate has played out regionally.
In 1965, the heart of reform-minded (like the curate’s egg, most of it was good in parts) Catholicism – liturgical renewal, ecumenical outreach, social justice and lay empowerment – was the Midwest in general and the Archdiocese of Chicago in particular. Radiating out from the Great Lakes were satellites such as Cincinnati, St. Louis, [url=http://www.amazon.com/Road-Renewal-Oklahoma-Catholicism-1905-1971/dp/0813215072/ref=sr_1_6?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1246112671&sr=8-6]Oklahoma City and Tulsa[/url], and (proving that western Pennsylvania is really part of the Midwest) Pittsburgh.
Traditionalism counted its strongest champions in Archbishop Francis Spellman of New York and his former assistant Archbishop James McIntyre of Los Angeles. Many of the other urban dioceses on both coasts had diocesans who continued to hew to the more traditional, insular (I don’t see term as a pejorative but rather a descriptive modifier) model of the immigrant Church (Archbishop John Krol of Philadelpia is another good example).
In the South, a more diverse picture prevailed. On the one hand you had racial progressives like Archbishop Robert Lucey of San Antonio, who was nevertheless highly unsympathetic to anything that challenged their absolute episcopal authority. On the other, you had a man like Archbishop John Hallinan of Atlanta, who pioneered many of the measures being advanced in the Midwest. Just as an aside, one of the more fascinating untold stories of Southern Catholicism is that of an obscure Mississippi priest who, as editor of the diocesan newspaper, was excoriated for his racially progressive views and editorials pressing the Church to take a more resolute stand against discrimination. That priest’s name? Bernard Law (yes, the very same).
Today, the impact of John Paul II’s appointments seems to a great extent to have inverted the picture, so that the remaining progressive bishops are now on the urban coasts (many were first appointed in the 1970s) and the Midwestern dioceses are mostly overseen by men who not only appreciate how the pronouncements of the Council were misread but sometimes seem inclined to overcompensate (just as their predecessors frequently undercompensated).
[url=http://catholicandreformed.blogspot.com]Catholic and Reformed[/url]
No. 1 – There are largely gay RC parishes in every large city in the US. no. 3 – Take St. Joan of Arc in Mpls. for example. There are at least 3 in LA, 2 or maybe more in SF, but parishes all over the country have significant gay membership. San Francisco has many parishes, so don’t you guys get so upset about heterodoxy there. Speaking generally there is plenty of heterodoxy as well as faithful adherence in the Anerican RC Church, and the American Midwest may be one of the most heterodox areasl. I’m pretty sure I know which is the “largely gay” parish and can guess at one or two others. By the way, don’t blame Niederauer. The Archdiocese is no more liberal than it was under Levada, or Quinn, his predecessors. It was Quinn, by the way, who had to close about 8 or 10 of SF parishes because of changing demographics, a la Boston and a few other cities.