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When Being an American is more Important Than Being Catholic:
Cultural Catholicism
by Fr. Dwight Longenecker: Reading Sherry Weddell’s excellent Forming Intentional Disciples: The Path to Knowing and Following Jesus
is making me think about the American church and what ails her. Can
anybody deny that there is a sickness in the body ecclesia? When 50% of
Catholics vote for a man who stoutly defends same sex marriage and
partial birth abortion can we say that Catholics in America are okay?
 Catholics Voting for Staunch Defenders of Partial Birth Abortion and Homosexuality
I don’t think so.
Thus a series of posts on what’s killing Catholicism. All the
words begin with the letter ‘C’. I can’t help it. I was brought up as a
Biblical Evangelical and our pastors always used alliteration to make
their points memorable.
The first problem is cultural catholicism. The Poles, Italians,
Irish, French, Czech, German and more Catholics came here from the old
country and the bishops reckoned the best thing to do with them all was
to allow cultural parishes. So in the same town the Irish Catholics went
to St Patrick’s and the Poles to St Stanislaus and the Italians to St
Anthony of Padua. Geesh, a man in my parish who grew up in Reading,
Pennsylvania said that when he was a boy a girl from his Czech parish
fell in love with an Irish boy and the Irish priest wouldn’t marry them
because it was a mixed marriage.
I’m all for cultural customs and so forth, but the problem is that
the immigrant Catholics–in a foreign land–clung to their culture for
security and happiness and part of that culture was their Catholicism.
The didn’t distinguish their culture from their Catholicism. Then, after
a few generations, when they were all really American and stopped being
Italian or Irish or German they also stopped being Catholic. The
Catholic faith wasn’t much deeper than Mama’s special spaghetti sauce or
stories of the Blarney stone.
Of course they didn’t all stop being Catholic. Something else
happened which was even more subtle and insidious. They became Americans
and because their mindset was that their Catholic faith was something
which blended with their culture, instead of being Italian-Catholics or
Polish Catholics they became American Catholics. Just as nationalism and
love of culture blended with their Catholic faith when they were ethnic
minorities, now it blended seamlessly with their new American culture.
Just as Catholicism gave their former culture God’s approval, not their
Catholicism gave American values and culture God’s approval.
Thus we have what I call AmChurch: the American Catholic church
which is happily and blissfully blended with everything wonderful about
America. Except that the “wonderful” values of most Americans are
unapologetically materialistic, hedonistic and self centered. Thus at
least 50% of American Catholics live like their American neighbors–going
to the mall, getting as much stuff as possible, giving as little as
possible, having a neat and tidy two children and a double income, and
basically smiling their way to success like everyone else.
Now this grates with me because I was brought up as an Evangelical
fundamentalist and I realize the roots are deep. More than that, I come
from seven generations of sturdy Pennsylvania Dutch
anabaptists–Mennonnites, Amish, Brethren and such. These people had
exactly the other point of view. They were first and foremost
Christians. They considered it the default setting that each person had
to hear the call of Christ and leave their nets and follow him. The
church was a pilgrim people–a people set apart. They were suspicious of
the surrounding culture and very suspicious of officialdom of every
kind. If the Catholics absorbed culture the Mennonite were deliberately
counter cultural.
The Mennonite approach, however, has it’s problems. The gospel
says we’re to be “in the world but not of the world”. We’re not actually
supposed to be totally counter cultural. We’re supposed to be yeast in
the dough, a light set on the hill. You get too counter cultural and you
become a weird sect like the Branch Davidians
Being a happy Benedictine oblate I see the solution as being
something more than both of these ways. The problem with cultural
Catholics in America is that they have never come to realize that the
Catholic faith transcends every culture. That’s what Catholic means for
goodness sake! It’s universal. The Catholic faith is therefore embedded
in every culture and takes from every culture what is useful and good,
but because it transcends culture it is also automatically counter
cultural in the right way.
The Catholic should always be in a constant tug of war with the
culture around him. Here affirming what is good–there condemning what is
bad. Here supporting all that is full of life, love, truth beauty and
goodness and there condemning and avoiding all that is full of death,
hate, lies, ugliness and evil.
The answer to Cultural Catholicism, therefore, is what I call
Comprehensive Catholicism–a Catholicism that embraces all things for
their essential worth. If their value is precious and eternal the more
highly we love them. If their value is trash–well we love trash for what
its worth too: to be thrown on the rubbish pile and burnt. This sort of
constantly discerning Catholicism is what is needed at the individual
and local level, but the reason people opt for cultural Catholicism is
because it is easy.
This is the core problem with Cultural Catholicism: by its very
nature it goes with the flow. In its love and acceptance of the ethnic
culture it is uncritical, and because individual cultural Catholics are
uncritical of their culture they are also uncritical of the level of
their Catholic faith. They chortle along quite happily living the
unexamined life.
When the test comes this kind of Catholicism will simply with and
die in the heat. “When the test comes?” We are in the middle of the test
already. What I see in the American Catholic Church is a huge “F” on
that test. The opportunity to stand up and be counted and to stand
against the culture of death in this country has already been lost by
the majority of so called Catholics because so blinded by the love of
their culture, they didn’t even realize there was a test to start with.
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