Call Pope Benedict XVI a “cultural Catholic” and you’re likely to get puzzled looks if not angry rejoinders. Cultural Catholics rank right down there with “cafeteria Catholics” in the opinion of those who argue that only a deep experience of Christian faith and a tight embrace of church teachings can make one authentically Catholic.
To a great extent that would also be the perspective of Benedict, whose Augustinian view of man’s fallen state and need for grace, discovered in a personal relationship with Jesus Christ, is almost Lutheran in its theology and evangelical in its expression. But Benedict is also, of course, a thoroughgoing Catholic, by birth and upbringing. And he recognizes that Catholicism is a culture as well as a religion, and that a strong cultural identity can cultivate faith in the present generation and pass it along to the next, as it has for centuries. (“Never!” Joseph Ratzinger once exclaimed to an interviewer who asked if he had ever thought of converting to Protestantism. The man who was to become Pope Benedict XVI had been so infused by “the Baroque atmosphere” of his native Bavaria, he said, that “from a purely psychological point of view I have never been attracted to it.”)
Thus it should come as no surprise that Benedict has made recovering a distinctive Catholic culture a principal theme of his first visit to the U.S., which concludes this weekend in New York. The theme has been evident in the liturgies, which stress Latin in the prayers and Roman styling in the vestments. But it has also been underscored in Benedict’s remarks, calling for stronger Catholic education from parishes to universities and for a more powerful Catholic presence in the public square as a way of “cultivating a mindset, an intellectual ‘culture’,” as he said at Thursday’s Mass in Washington, “which is genuinely Catholic.” When asked during a Wednesday encounter with the nation’s bishops how to redress a “a certain quiet attrition” by Catholics who drift away from practice, Benedict lamented “the passing away of a religious culture, sometimes disparagingly referred to as a ‘ghetto,’ which reinforced participation and identification with the Church.”
Benedict is absolutely right about what needs to be done to restore the church, not just the Roman one, but the whole church. We need to retrieve and continue to build a culture based on the Gospel [and all of scripture] and the way of thinking and living it engenders, focusing on the internals, not on the externals.
Mr. Gibson inadvertently strikes the nailhead when he calls this a novel approach. Well, that was a waste of several hundred years of Western culture, wasn’t it, that this approach should be thought novel?
The externals are usually what scare those who want to believe away, and they are the best excuse not to believe for the rest of humanity. They are a sort of idolatry that elevates the visible church over the invisible church. Nearly all of our current Anglican problems stem from the way the former has triumphed over the latter in the Western world. That goes for Western RCs doubly and for other prosperous Protestants as much or more.
People usually say they stay away from the church because of the church. It wasn’t anything Jesus said, or so they tell us. Well, yes, it was something Jesus said, but the church as an institution needs to be less of a wall and more of a gate.
As the article suggests, the idea that your faith rests on cultural grounds is generally viewed as bad. The truth is, though, Christian faith recognizes our being embodied and thus affecting and affected by culture. While I can recognize that a faith which rests solely or primarily on culture is wrong, I wonder if some of our focus on right belief hasn’t been to the detriment of a legitimate human need for cultural life. Rituals that mark us as different than the general public, and which foster a group identity, are things that reinforce Christian community in ways which appeals to the intellect do not.
Roman Catholics, I think, lost a lot when they abolished requirements like regular confession and fish on Fridays. Doing so eliminated many of the things that made them look and feel different from the surrounding culture. As a result, they have often failed to foster a sense of solidarity with each other that might trump identifications with the outside world.
More’s the pity that we Anglicans are even more lacking in such distinctions.
I must respectfully disagree with comment #2. I thought Benedict was talking about culture as history and civilization, not as practice. He meant intellectual culture, not anthropological culture. Fish on Friday means no more than priest or presbyter, father or mister, stoop and bend to pray, or stand up straight before God. I like fish, saltwater or fresh, but I think the whole fish on Friday thing is a precious microcosm of where the church went wrong. Belief precedes observance and worship for most of humanity.
Actually, Amy Welborn (among others) has said that eliminating fish on Fridays (in favor of individual penances that no one knows they are supposed to do) was the single most destructive factor in the collapse of Catholic culture after the council. It’s an interesting thought.
But there is something I have come to appreciate about being Catholic over the past 5 years, and it’s about “culture”. Cradle Catholics I know – those who really know and practice their Faith – have something about them that I, as a convert, can never have. There is something in their bones – in their DNA – that makes natural for them things I struggle with. They might talk about how much fervor converts have, how knowledgeable converts are, and so on, but when it comes to a Catholic instinct – a Catholic imagination – a Catholic identity – I struggle with things they don’t even think about. It’s second – or first – nature.
All of that comes from years of practice, including failure. It’s been fashionable for 40 years to trash our heritage. You know, I’ve just outgrown all that stuff. But for those who embrace their Catholic culture and live it, the end result is something I glimpse once in awhile, but can’t imagine I’ll ever really embody.
My comment above flies in the face of a lot of sociological theory from Durkheim to today, but I believe that ideas have as much power to shape society as society has to create ideas from its habits.
God is transcendent and immanent and we are finite. We should keep that in mind as we evaluate our ability to interpret His Word. Please chuckle and snort and berate me not for my pomposity.
I’d like to clarify some things. Fridays continue to be penitential days. The change is that you can now pick your own penance; the specific penance of abstinence is not required. This was NOT MADE CLEAR AT THE TIME. I only got the full word about that a couple of years ago, and I’m a fifty year old cradle. Similarly, “regular” confession is still required: at least once a year, and before receiving Communion if one is conscious of serious sin. What changed is is the stress laid upon the importance of confession and the verbal and non-verbal response of priests and religious when whiny children of all ages asked “do I hafta?”
Ratramnus,
I agree that in this article Benedict was speaking more of intellectual culture, and I didn’t mean to imply that this isn’t vital. Fish on Friday isn’t, in and of itself, terribly significant. Yet, in practice, it’s these very things that people who may have a hard time articulating their ideals, actually identify with very strongly. As a parish priest, I can tell my people as much as I want that it makes no difference whether you bow or kneel or other things in the service, but I know what kind of response I will get. Rightly or wrongly, these things matter to people and form an important part of their identity as a congregation.
The same is true when it comes to many of the traditional marks of RC practice that have fallen by the wayside. I think this is part of what Benedict is saying when he refers to “the passing away of a religious culture, sometimes disparagingly referred to as a ‘ghetto,’ which reinforced participation and identification with the Church.” I don’t suggest he is downplaying the importance of intellectual culture, but he does seem to recognize that common practices make us identify more strongly with the Church. At the very least, this should mean that people look to the Church more readily for direction.
Stephen
I suspect that whilst Benedict sees intellectual culture as important, he is pointing to something richer than that: faith lived not just intellectually in the narrow sense, but morally, in music and all the arts, as body-language, as liturgy. These things are not separate domains, but aspects of a whole.
The word “culture” is almost misleading in this context, because from the secular standpoint, it identifies one of a number of strands in the world’s rich tapestry. Its very mention seems to import a kind of relativism. Secular bodies, anxious to minimize the estrangement and polarization caused by the juxtaposition in today’s mobile societies of disparate cultural communities, hold up “multiculturalism” as the standard behind which all peoples should gather in peace and harmony, each treasuring all others’ cultures with the degree of enthusiasm culturally appropriate to each.
Recent liturgical experiments have shown how multiculturalism, as a liturgical device, can lead to somewhat self-conscious (and necessarily protracted) liturgies in which mutual affirmation competes with the possibility of encounter with the divine Transcendence.
Although it is good to try to create a culture in which people of all cultures (and none!) can feel at home, I sense that there is more to it than that. I would propose instead that a genuinely Catholic culture is one in which nobody feels foreign; not so much “at home” as on the way home; and with the shared understanding that whilst there are many unique journeys, there is only one way.