Introduction
We confess: The editors had a stiff argument about publishing Eugene McCarraher’s polemic on Starbucks Catholicism (“Smile When You Say ‘Laity’: The Hidden Triumph of the Consumer Ethos,” September 12, 1997). No pushing or shoving—of course! Some real incomprehension, some genuine disbelief, some utter perplexity, and, naturally, some genuine disagreement along with an insistent suspicion that maybe—just maybe—there was something here.
All of this led to the telling question: If we were arguing so heatedly about this, wouldn’t the rest of the Commonweal crew out there find it provocative? Indeed, many have. We asked some readers for their comments, from others came the spontaneous remark or letter of question or clarification. They follow on the next eight pages. Some respondents are annoyed, irritated, perplexed; some comprehending and sympathetic. Rest assured, nobody totally agrees with McCarraher’s analysis. The perfect Commonweal article!
Further reflection here in the editorial office leads us to think that “Smile When You Say ‘Laity’” has this to recommend it:
Its economic and cultural analysis of a triumphant laity stands outside the shopworn questions: When can the laity (that is, women and married men) get ordained? Can they ever be Cardinals? When will they be allowed to preach?
It is not pious.
It comes from a younger Catholic (McCarraher appears to be under forty) apparently free (or innocent) of the quarrels over pre– and post–Vatican II Catholicism, and looking to the kind of Catholicism we will need in the next millennium.
McCarraher’s thesis is distinctly against the American compromise, which Commonweal has preached, with some notable exceptions, these many years (and which we continue to favor in the absence of anything better). We really do think the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church is a better church because of its encounter with the American experience. But okay, McCarraher’s complaints about the seductions of bourgeois Christianity deserve a careful and serious hearing.
As well, there are the drawbacks (this is the perfect Commonweal article, after all).
It goes over the top rhetorically, especially at moments when it needs to clinch its argument.
Its academic venue and its deconstructionist mode of proceeding remind us that increasing numbers of younger Catholics take their frame of interpretation from outside rather than inside the Catholic community. In other words, they learn about Catholicism in graduate school—a prospect more gruesome than learning about it from Sister Mary Ignatius.
And then there’s the problem of whether it’s true or not.
But we leave that to you.
— The Editors
Mary C. Segers
Metaphors are fine, but after reading Eugene McCarraher’s essay three times, I’m still trying to decipher “Starbucks Catholicism” in his September 12 article “Smile When You Say ‘Laity.’” I finally began to understand his point when I received in the mail this week a church flyer announcing that Merrill Lynch was coming to our parish to discuss estate planning. Instead of a lecture on theology or spirituality, we are to hear about “gifting strategies” and “minimizing probate.”
There are positives and negatives in McCarraher’s analysis. The argument seems to be that, as Catholics have become successful in American society, they have absorbed the values and ways of thinking of late twentieth-century corporate America. Similarly, as the laity have become more prominent within the church, they are applying these norms to parish life. The working-class Catholicism of a bricks-and-mortar church, with its emphasis on social and political change, has been replaced by a new American Catholic religious culture which values expertise, consumption, and a “therapeutic spirituality.”
What evidence does McCarraher offer to support this assertion? Where has “the Church Mellow” triumphed? In North Dakota? Iowa? New Mexico? New Jersey? Does the “professional-managerial bloc” supposedly ascendant in American Catholicism include African-American, Asian-American, and Hispanic Catholics? McCarraher provides anecdotal, impressionistic accounts of three parishes among the more than 19,000 that exist in the American church. The data supporting his argument are admittedly thin.
No matter. McCarraher is on to something. A lay-directed church poses challenges. The priest shortage may be good since it forces ordinary Catholics to take some responsibility for passing on a living religious tradition. However, most lay people—and even most seminary students—have not been trained or educated for this task. Thus I agree with McCarraher that contemporary Catholics need a sense of history and tradition. The church does not need to borrow corporate jargon to carry out its mission. Lay Catholics would benefit from a deeper knowledge of spirituality, of the history of the sacraments, of church history, of theology, and of the development of doctrine.
Catholicism is a religion of the head as well as heart. The education previously reserved to priests and religious should be made available to a new generation of lay Catholics—otherwise we may very well end up with a “Church Mellow.”
Mary C. Segers is professor of political science at Rutgers University.
James Heft
This past May, I participated in a two-day colloquium on lay ministry in the church here at the University of Dayton. Nearly sixty people attended, including twenty bishops, as many theologians, and lay leaders. The group was diverse ethnically and racially; it included liberals and conservatives, men and women whose names the readers of Commonweal would recognize. Eight commissioned papers and the discussion they shaped were devoted to clarifying a theology of the laity, specifically “ecclesial lay ministry,” a theology for professionally prepared lay people who work in the church. Discussions were candid, vigorous, at times a little tense, but ultimately very positive.
I had trouble relating this experience and my understanding of the laity to Eugene McCarraher’s portrait of a “lay revolution” fed mainly by a therapeutic spirituality that has created “a Starbucks Catholicism embodied in a Church Mellow.” As I read, I found myself returning to the substance of the research and the tone of the discussion of our May colloquium. McCarraher may be on to something—a segment of Catholicism that is sophisticated, efficient, but soft and affluent. Nonetheless, I believe he overstates both its influence and its negative characteristics. Lay leadership today assumes multiple styles, many more than his narrowly focused portrait suggests. We are witnessing not a velvet revolution, but a valued evolution, one, for the most part, encouraged and supported by the hierarchy. McCarraher suggests as much in his “breezy” history of the growth of lay leadership.
Moreover, the actual profile of this strong and rapidly growing movement of lay ministers (20,000 already employed with over 20,000 now at various stages of preparation) is much more diverse than McCarraher suggests. Some members of the laity, well-paid and highly skilled members of the corporate world, have brought their managerial skills and habits of thought to parish councils and organizations. A similar pattern has emerged at Catholic universities where board members or trustees are typically CEOs of major corporations. Sometimes some of their corporate practices have been misapplied to the university, but at other times, some corporate practices, for example, TQM (total quality management), strategic planning, and budget conventions, have been immensely helpful when they have been applied to some segments of university operations. Similar mixed experiences have been reported by a number of parishes: both helpful and mistaken applications of practices derived mainly from the corporate world.
None of the bishops at the Dayton colloquium seemed threatened by either the rapid growth or the current influence of lay ministers and parish councils. And, yes, many of us, not just bishops and religious, continue to be concerned about the diminishing numbers of priests and religious. The rapid growth in lay ministry should not be thought of as a temporary filler until the number of priests and religious can be built back up again. Rather, we see this valued evolution as a providential development, a talented and generous group of dedicated people meant to share in the leadership of the Catholic church in the coming century.
I believe that McCarraher’s picture of a “velvet revolution” creating a “Church Mellow” is overdrawn. He mistakes a part for the whole, a much more complex whole. Moreover, he focuses on that part negatively, caricaturing it as the embodiment of an “upscale, therapeutic agora in values and ethics.” I suggest he visit more parishes than he seems to have done, discover in the process many more diverse groups of lay Catholics, and be less shocked by the ways in which our culture has influenced and, as history shows, will continue to influence all of us, even as we stumble and struggle, opposing its excesses and learning from its achievements—all in order to be faithful to the gospel.
Marianist priest James Heft is chancellor and professor of faith and culture at the University of Dayton. He serves as vice-chair of the Association of Catholic Colleges and Universities.
Una M. Cadigan
During John Paul II’s recent visit to France, NPR interviewed a young Louisiana woman who was clearly fervid in her acceptance of the pope’s challenge to young people. “We want to be the generation,” she said, “that embraces the Cross.” Whether or not this young woman has ever bought a latté at Starbucks, any church enleavened by such passion as hers will be anything but “mellow.”
I agree with much of Eugene McCarraher’s analysis—the shift in the laity’s role in the church is one of the most important facets of late-twentieth-century U.S. Catholicism, and we don’t yet understand all its implications. The consumerism and individualism of contemporary culture are, indeed, deeply dissonant with the gospel vision of the kingdom of God. I am left with a number of questions, though, most of which have to do with the goals of McCarraher’s analysis, the end to which his characterization of contemporary Catholicism is the means.
McCarraher says that “unless we recognize and come to grips with this revolution, we are in danger of misunderstanding and misconceiving the challenges facing the U.S. Catholic church in the twenty-first century.” He does not detail these challenges nor the strategies by which we might “come to grips with” them. This would be a tall order for so short an essay, so McCarraher, reasonably, confines himself primarily to diagnosis. What he sees is a “professional-managerial” laity with a “wrestler’s hold on the clerical imagination” attempting to force the church into the mold of their own unreflectively corporate-therapeutic values.
I take it when a historian speaks as a believer to the community in which he lives that he wants them to listen. I further take it that when he describes that community he wants its members to recognize themselves in his description. If McCarraher shares these assumptions about a historian’s role in speaking to his or her own community, then he may want to modify his cartoon version of contemporary cultural life into something in which people can see themselves reflected both accurately and charitably.
McCarraher seems distressed both by the ethos of the corporate culture in which the triumphant laity live and by their attempts to find authenticity and transcendence therein. It may perhaps be more difficult for middle-class believers today (and, a fortiori, for academics) to see the face of Jesus in a middle manager or an infomercial host than in a homeless person or a person with AIDS. But one of the things that the church has been consistently good at understanding is that people search for the holy where they are, and the church had better meet them there or it won’t be able to speak to them at all.
A tradition that can turn statues of fertility goddesses into statues of a virgin mother can surely baptize TQM without half trying. However bent this world is, the Spirit still broods over it. If groups of thoughtful, educated Catholics really started thinking and talking about what it meant to get our hands around (that is, manage) the kind of world in which we want to live, in its entirety, what emerged might startle us all. And if the group included that young woman from Louisiana, the laity’s victory, instead of being pyrrhic, might just be redemptive.
Una M. Cadigan teaches in the history department at the University of Dayton.
Patrick Allitt
Eugene McCarraher is quite right: the laity are more powerful and influential today than at any other time in American Catholic history, just as they are better educated and richer. And he is right to argue that the process was already under way before Vatican II. The evidence is everywhere. For example, Saint Thomas More parochial school in Decatur, Georgia, where my daughter Frances is a fourth-grader, founded in 1950, was run entirely by sisters at first, but is now run almost entirely by laity. The principal is a layman and only one sister now remains as a full-time teacher. Similarly, the adult education group at Atlanta’s Christ the King Cathedral and similar parish groups in the Atlanta area are all run by lay men and women.
What strikes me, however, is how well they do it. It is enough to give the managerial middle classes a good name! The school has no serious problems and is vastly superior to the local public school in which Frances attended first grade. Catholics and non-Catholics alike are lining up to get in because the school provides a fine blend of academic, moral, and religious education. I’m sure the old tales about Catholic schools and their nuns tempering ignorance with tyranny were often exaggerated, but they were not entirely groundless. The adult ed. groups too are welcoming, prompt, well-attended, and full of energetic, well-read members who show every sign of initiative. Priests sometimes come to the meetings but show no inclination to thrust themselves forward or lord it over the laity—just what McCarraher would expect.
I can’t quite understand why McCarraher denigrates the contemporary Catholic situation by calling it “Starbucks” Catholicism and the “Church Mellow,” since I know he does not want to revive the flinty austerities of the preconciliar church. It may be true, as he says, that incessant repetition of words like “diversity,” “inclusiveness,” and “democratic” soon gets annoying and that Catholicism, if it is no more than therapy, is a bore. But if you substitute “charitable” for “mellow,” everything looks better, and I think the Catholic church is much more charitable now than in former decades. It is selective in its use of Catholic resources, too, but it always has been; it’s just that today’s choices and emphases are different from those of 1897. I agree that Catholics should preserve their sense of history and tradition, but that’s more likely now than it used to be. Hagiography often got in the way of real history until talented, sharp-eyed laity like Gene McCarraher himself took over the writing of Catholic history from priests and nuns. As a result we know far more about Catholic history today than ever before.
Patrick Allitt is associate professor of history at Emory University and author of Catholic Converts: British and American Intellectuals Turn to Rome (Cornell University Press).
Michael Baxter
Readers tempted to think that Eugene McCarraher overstates our current dilemma should take a look at an article in America (September 13, 1997). Thomas P. Sweetser, a Jesuit priest who directs the Parish Evaluation Project, recommends a “filling station” model for an effective parish. “Everything,” he says, “would be geared to knowing the needs and desires of [parishioners] and responding to those needs. The liturgy would have to be adjusted and adapted to a variety of situations and circumstances. The people attending would come from a wider environment than the area within the classical parish boundaries. People would be attracted and drawn to the Eucharist because it ‘fit’ them” (italics mine).
There is a grain of truth in what Sweetser says, but in the end he presents us with an image of the church as provider-of-consumer-goods-and-services headed up by Jesus, the greatest marketing consultant of them all. What we have here is a hot-off-the-presses example of McCarraher’s “velvet revolution.”
McCarraher is right to deplore the ideology of choice ushered in by this revolution. And he is right to see Vatican II as a culmination rather than a commencement of the takeover of the church by a managerial elite. But it seems to me that this “velvet revolution” has not been a triumph of an accommodated laity alone. It has also been a triumph of an accommodated clergy. While McCarraher acknowledges the role of clerics in his account and rightly rounds up some of the usual suspects (Ireland, Ryan, and Kerby), he seems to blame the church’s embrace of U.S. corporate culture entirely on the laity. I think the clergy had more than a hand in it.
Dorothy Day thought the same, back in the twenties, when she encountered what she later called “the scandal of businesslike priests.” Likewise in the forties, when she noted the University of Notre Dame’s role in creating the bomb; and again, when she tangled with Cardinal Francis Spellman over the grave-diggers’ strike. My point is this: Sweetser’s church-as-filling-station approach is a recent instance of a long history of clerical accommodation to the mores of the managerial class.
Focusing on the responsibility of both laity and clergy for this “velvet revolution” is important for two reasons. First, it should remind us that our present predicament derives not from an emergent laity, but from an emergent Americanized laity “empowered” by an Americanized clergy. Second, if we do not see this revolution as the result of a mutual failure, we might indulge in yet another round of lay-clergy feuding, and thus avoid addressing a real pastoral crisis: Many young Catholics in the position of having to “choose” their Catholicism are, ironically, choosing a version that favors obligation, service, and love over “choice.” These young people do not seek a Eucharist that “fits their needs,” but pray that their needs will be transformed by the Eucharist. If we fail to show them how such a transformation can occur, we will fail them utterly.
Michael Baxter, CSC, teaches in the theology department at the University of Notre Dame.
Jack Deedy
A “Starbucks Catholicism embodied in a Church Mellow?” Give me a break. Paul Wilkes’s “good enough Catholic” no more defines a new “disciple” in the American church than Frances Kissling’s Catholics for a Free Choice reflects common Catholic attitudes toward abortion. And if Michael Novak’s “theology of the corporation” belongs to a Starbucks “bazaar”—well, maybe that isn’t so bad given reports that his theology directly influenced John Paul’s social encyclicals, which just may prove this pope’s most enduring legacy.
More to the point, how accurate is it, really, to speak of “the laity’s victory” in running the American church? The prominence of the laity in today’s church is not to be denied, but is this a “victory,” or have laity moved into a void created by the failure of the church’s own “professional and managerial” class, its ordained clergy, to measure up to the standards of “clerical excellence” noted long ago by Dan Callahan? Might it be more accurate to talk of clerical default? The unfortunate reality is that American priests as a group have not risen above the mediocrity mistaken as intelligence and leadership before an educated laity discovered the shallowness of those supposedly possessed clerical qualities. That priest whom Andrew Greeley saw as a “quarterback” one day directing an array of “spiritualities” in a glorious new church never made it off the practice squad, not in substantial numbers, anyway.
What went wrong? Lots of things, and for that the laity bears its share of blame. But before the “self-help, inspirational crowd” is anathematized—and some of them should be—might we ask about our ordained co-religionists, historically the leaders, inspirers, and motivators of the rest of us? Where did they go? What turned the American church’s own “professional and managerial” class into a body of many chiefs, few Indians? (Recently I saw an ordination class of two flanked by four, or was it five, bishops.) Do we blame assertive laity and the national secular culture for clerical flight and the drying up of vocations? Might the church’s own professional class have something to answer for intellectually—and morally? Too many have become behavioral embarrassments. The other night a familiar face popped onto the television screen. It belonged to a priest many states removed from Massachusetts where I now live, and whom I had interviewed a few years ago. He’d been picked up by police for soliciting a prostitute. His job? Diocesan director of vocations.
And McCarraher fingers the laity and frets for the future.
John Deedy was Commonweal’s managing editor from 1967 to 1978.
David L. Schindler
By happy coincidence, I was occupied with the work of Charles Péguy at the time I received Eugene McCarraher’s “Smile When You Say ‘Laity.’” As is well known, Péguy struggled vigorously with clericalism in the church, and with the political Catholicism that extended “clericalist” modes of thought into the world (for example, the integralism of L’ Action Française).
At issue, in Péguy’s famous phrasing, was the collapse of mystique into politique. Péguy recognized that Roman Catholicism in France in 1910 was probably stronger than it had ever been under the Third Republic—and in this sense Hilaire Belloc was right in his denial that France had been “de-Christianized.” Péguy’s point was rather that the strength of the church had come at the expense of “de-mystification.” Born of faith (mystique), the Catholic movement in politics had given way to reliance on power (politique).
In technical terms, mystique integrates the eternal and the temporal, while politique separates them. Péguy sorts this out in terms of “clericalism.” What we have, he argued, is mostly ecclesiastical cures on the one hand and “lay cures” on the other. The ecclesiastical cures “remove the temporal from the eternal,” while the lay cures “extract the eternal from the temporal.” The result is a curious convergence of mindsets. From opposite directions, both groups end up reducing the gospel to an exercise in political power.
McCarraher’s perceptive analysis, I believe, confirms and illustrates the argument of Péguy. The lens of Péguy, however, brings into focus the intrinsic link between the older “clericalist” and the more recent “lay” culture. Having failed to go to the theological roots of the problem of clericalism and its twin, integralism, the laity inevitably repeat their basic flaw: namely, technical management in advance of gospel transformation as the way of the church ad intra and ad extra (no matter if the laity’s managerial style is now rather more “nondirective” and “nonhierarchical”).
McCarraher is quite right that the new “techno-urban” lifestyle is not the exclusive domain of progressive Catholicism. Catholics on all sides of the spectrum are content with the old dualism which would marginalize Dorothy Day’s way of sanctity as “exceptional,” relative to the “realistic” world of professional expertise.
Georges Bernanos once said we should presume that intellectuals are imbeciles until they prove the contrary. What he meant was that we should not confuse the mastery of techniques with the wisdom which emerges from the prayer and suffering of the little ones of the gospel. This, in my opinion, is the theological lesson to be drawn from McCarraher’s wonderfully stimulating reflection.
David L. Schindler is professor of fundamental theology at the John Paul II Institute in Washington, D.C., and editor of the North American edition of Communio.
David O’Brien
Historian Eugene McCarraher’s provocative essay echoes themes heard often from the few sharp young Catholics who really care about the Catholic tradition and its promise. Uninterested in my generation’s arguments with the church, they share McCarraher’s anger at the mindless, therapeutic complacency of so much of American Catholicism as they find it. If that accommodationist Catholicism is the result of a lay revolution, as McCarraher argues, it was unintentional, a revolution by default. It resulted in large part from an almost total absence of leadership; good bishops isolated, weak ones promoted, depressed priests no longer recruiting successors, shrinking religious orders, justifiably frustrated women, and the near-complete disappearance of Catholic intellectuals much interested in the real church. After the failure of church reform in the early seventies, all but the restorationists abandoned ecclesiastical politics. Can you name a national movement or organization to the left of Opus Dei with a significant influence either on the institutional church or on Catholic self-understanding? Of course, careerists, who attend to the organization, won. And McCarraher, who simply ignores the organization, names the all-too-predictable result.
Of course in a free society, where people eventually realize they can in fact choose, things will get difficult for those who want “good“choices: theological coherence, corporate discipline, engagement with tradition, mobilization for mission. If you want those things, you have to work at them, with the organization and with the people who compose it. But the more conservative usually lack pastoral skills, or interest, and the reformers, sometimes pastorally alert, lack a Catholic strategy, and even the will to organize. So of course the dynamic of accommodation by class and culture continues.
But McCarraher’s history is only half right. Each of his three stages of lay emergence contained important truths. Turn-of-the-century Americanism had Isaac Hecker’s understanding that eventually freedom means faith will depend on personal conviction: choice. Catholic Action witnessed to the fact that if you want to confront massive public evil, you need a strategy, one which combines forming people in an alternative Catholic subculture while deepening a sense of responsibility for the culture shared with others.
The emerging laity of the Vatican II era had too much cold-war Americanism, true enough, but they sensed a great truth: the movement of millions of poverty-stricken immigrants from margin to mainstream in a few generations was an experience of self-liberation, not of passive cultural accommodation. Reactionaries then and young Catholics hankering for substance today seem to think that families improved automatically, without sacrifice, and if they did sacrifice, it was to a false God. Immigrants watching grandchildren graduate from Notre Dame knew better.
Garry Wills wrote of loss, Bare Ruined Choirs, a quarter century ago, and his words still move Gene McCarraher. But Wills missed the point in that wonderful book, as McCarraher does now. The question is what should we do, not what we lost. The point is responsibility: there’s no one to blame. Judgments about loss or gain, accommodation or liberation, turn on what we have done with the economic security, educational opportunity, social status, and access to power that our parents gained for us and that make us responsible for our lives, our church, our history.
In the absence of the profound challenge which our American Catholic story poses for middle-class Catholics, of course it’s all fluff. In the absence of the political analysis that judgment requires, criticism of fluff risks adding...more fluff.
David O’Brien is Loyola Professor of Roman Catholic Studies at the College of the Holy Cross and author of Isaac Hecker: An American Catholic, among other books.
Paul Wilkes
First off, a humble thanks to Eugene McCarraher for including me in the same sentence with Marianne Williams, Deepak Chopra, M. Scott Peck, and Thomas Moore.
But alas, it is not deserved, and the Sisters of Notre Dame, Marianists, and Jesuits who did their best to form me throughout seventeen years of Catholic education would feel they had failed totally if I blithely accepted such praise. Even with the hope of impressing my publisher, or my kids. The reality is that for every book of mine that is sold, these authors sell thousands, perhaps tens of thousands. They get free-standing displays in bookstores; at best I have a copy or two lurking nearby, sometimes even properly shelved. And while they tactfully skirt the issue of such an uncomfortable topic as institutional affiliation, I make no secret of my Catholicism.
As for the “low-intensity disciple” that McCarraher claims I am appealing to in my book, The Good Enough Catholic, perhaps on this account he is onto something. If such a person is marked by having a great affinity for the Eucharist, being a member of a parish, developing a prayer life, looking at work as co-creation with God, reading the next letter from the local bishop, being inspired and motivated by the church’s social encyclicals, instituting family prayer and religious rituals, and reaching outside yourself to make a positive impact on all those you meet, all of which I advocate in The Good Enough Catholic, then McCarraher has indeed found me out.
Paul Wilkes is a filmmaker and author, most recently, of The Good Enough Catholic (Ballantine).
James Hitchcock
McCarraher’s understanding of American Catholicism, which is largely correct as far as it goes, raises a fundamental question: Is it possible that the kind of culture he describes is inherently secular, and that attempts to create a “Catholic” version of it cannot but diminish any kind of faith? The recent history of liberal Protestantism seems to bear this out.
But no one has attempted a systematic sociology of conservative American Catholicism, inquiring into who exactly makes up the various movements which go by that name. Liberals think it is mainly elderly people who will soon be gone. But conservative activists talk about their liberal opponents, such as Call to Action, as “a sea of grey heads,” and there are in fact a number of vigorous, intelligent, articulate younger people quite visible in the conservative movement.
In this respect, conservative Catholicism is similar to militant evangelical Protestantism, which whatever else it may be, is a “revivalist” movement, not merely the survival of the old. There is also a parallel in that conservative Christianity, Catholic and Protestant, actually includes many of the kinds of people McCarraher describes, who ought by his logic to be liberals. It is a truism about evangelicalism that it includes a good number of people highly trained in science and technology, and that nuclear engineers, for example, are more likely to be church members than are professional poets.
The contrast between the dioceses of Lincoln, Nebraska, and Saginaw, Michigan (see Commonweal, June 6, 1997), illustrates a neglected reality. They seem to be almost interchangeable as rural Midwestern societies, but they are at polar opposites from each other in religion, not because of anything about the laity in each place but solely because of the episcopal leaders they have had for thirty years. In the age of the laity, a bishop can still place his stamp very firmly on his See, if he chooses to do so. (In this respect, contrast the conservative diocese of Arlington, part of metropolitan Washington, D.C., with the liberal diocese of Richmond, largely rural and Southern.)
McCarraher is uninformed about conservative Catholics in two relatively minor ways. Such people are only too aware of the ways in which they themselves have helped promote the “lay revolution,”which they see as richly ironic. Most conservative Catholic movements have little clerical support, but where would Call to Action be without its nuns? There is also continuing suspicion between many religious conservatives and political-economic conservatives. William F. Buckley, Jr., has never been a favorite of The Wanderer.
James Hitchcock is professor of history at Saint Louis University.
Dolores R. Leckey
After reading (and rereading) Eugene McCarraher’s article, words attributed to Eleanor Roosevelt flashed repeatedly across my mind. “Is this worth the effort of a rational response?” I’m not sure.
And I’m not sure exactly what, precisely, is McCarraher’s point. Perhaps his final paragraph holds a clue. There, at last, he names several perceived specific problems: choice and diversity, the erosion among Catholics of a sense of history and tradition, and the inadmissibility of doubt in the continued growth in faith. These are new?
Haven’t choice and diversity, in the context of unity and communion, been an ongoing church debate from the very beginning? Aren’t the Pauline texts a window onto those very issues in first-century Christianity?
The inadmissibility of doubt? Has McCarraher missed much of the contemporary theological conversation, to say nothing of the fact that Thérèse of Lisieux has been named a Doctor of the church? She whose final days on earth were characterized by the two-edged sword of doubt and trust?
In McCarraher’s concentration on capitalism’s co-opting of American Catholic laity, he has apparently missed the legions of laity who have been (and are) Christ’s ambassadors for peace. These competent lay men and women have been diligently working over the years for realistic world unity as well as Christian unity. Impelled by their commitment to Christ, they try to establish “permeable borders” in society and in the church. Their efforts are as large as conflict resolution between warring nation-states (on both official and nonofficial levels), and as small as ecumenical cooperation in tending to shelters for the homeless, or addressing systemic injustice in local communities. Permeable borders, wherever they exist, depend on dialogue and shared action, and on participation and partnership. Fortitude, patience, and lots of prayer are required here.
I submit that a major challenge for the laity of the twenty-first century is to keep at it, to sustain commitment to “an ecumenical process of continuous interaction among whole bodies of believers, lay and ordained.” This was one of the agreements of the recently concluded bilateral Roman Catholic/Reformed Church dialogue whose topic was the laity. The dialogue members recognized how hard this can be. So if a cup of Starbucks helps—Amen.
Dolores R. Leckey is executive director of the Secretariat for Family, Laity, Women, and Youth of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops.
Dennis O’Brien
At the risk of being a crank or a regular columnist (there is a difference?), I would take some exception to Eugene McCarraher’s windig allzuwindig characterization of the “velvet revolution” accomplished by the laity. Like most “revolutions” this one seems to me more a change in the direction of the breeze than the underlying current. I believe it was Henry Kissinger, during one of the gloomier periods of the Vietnam era and hangover, who commented that Americans had moved from shallow optimism to shallow pessimism without bothering to pass through reality.
I am not at all certain I agree with McCarraher’s notion that there has been a lay-inspired “techno take-over” of the ancient church, but if that is the case, I would think we have passed from a “technology” of morals to a technology of “management” without passing through reality. The previous regime presented a moral bureaucracy which thought there was a clear casuistical solution to every moral dilemma; the new lay technology (as McCarraher characterizes it) dissolves dilemmas in the language of choice, flexible options, and final feel-good. In neither old casuistry nor new sentiment is there room to face the tragic dimension of life so eloquently evoked by John Garvey in the same issue.
Dennis O’Brien is president emeritus of the University of Rochester and author of All the Essential Half-Truths about Higher Education (University of Chicago Press).
Francis X. Meehan
Eugene McCarraher’s “Smile When You Say ‘Laity’” was exhilarating. There seems to be emerging with ever greater clarity a third force among American Catholics—a force overdue—with Commonweal its foremost exponent. I used to try descriptions of this movement, “progressive but not liberal,” or “critical but not conservative,” but new articulations are putting flesh on the labels.
Where are the lineaments of such a force? Pieces here, pieces there. One thinks of Michael Baxter’s effort to find a critical nonliberal path at Notre Dame, or Mary Ann Glendon standing with women and yet against narrower feminisms, or Paul Baumann’s clairvoyance into the cant of James Carroll.
As a pastor attempting to be faithful to church and respectful to parishioners, I can only be grateful.
The Reverend Francis X. Meehan is pastor of Saints Simon and Jude, West Chester, Pennsylvania.
Walter Ong
In his perceptive and stimulating article, Eugene McCarraher interprets my advocacy in Frontiers in American Catholicism (1957) of “an apostolate of the business world” as a proposal “to replace the working-class apostolate.” Consultation of my text will show that this is not the case. I proposed an apostolate to the business world not to replace the working-class or any other apostolates, but to supplement the ongoing apostolates of the Catholic church. I was making the point that the church (less in the United States than in Europe) had not been sufficiently evangelizing the business world, not addressing it as such, not making it aware of the gospel and of Jesus’ teachings. This chapter appeared originally in French in the monthly Etudes (Paris, May 1952). In France, and in the rest of the West where long involvement with feudalism had sabotaged the church’s awareness and evangelization of the world of commerce, of businessmen and business women, there was desperate need to bring the gospel to the attention of the commercial world as such and to those whose life was wrapped up in this world.
Walter J. Ong, SJ, is university professor emeritus of humanities at Saint Louis University.
Paul Q. Kane
Although Eugene McCarraher asks good questions about the role of the laity in our era, after reading his article I found myself wanting more. This victory of the laity is precarious and is met with ambivalence among some segments of the Catholic population. As co-director of a lay-ministry formation program among native peoples of the Northwest, my involvement raises another set of concerns about the future of ministry in the community I serve.
Jesuits have ministered among Native Americans in the Northwest since the mid-nineteenth century, and the history of our interaction with the various tribes and bands is complex. It is fraught with contradictions: paternalism, appreciation, cooperation, accommodation, neglect, and abuse. Compunction and healing are necessary aspects of our formation program.
Today, we—the Jesuits and the Native Peoples—find ourselves in a state of Catholic schizophrenia concerning leadership roles in the faith community. Mixed messages from the past still haunt us; mixed messages in the present are still being sent by Jesuits who believe that the priest shortage is a myth and that priests “will always be with the people,” and by other Jesuits like myself who do not believe there will be resident Jesuits or other priests on every reservation and in every urban community from eastern Montana to western British Columbia.
We also receive mixed messages from the dioceses in which we work; for example, whether Word and Communion services are appropriate for Native communities. These mixed messages are reflected back to us by the lay people we work with who desire more leadership roles for themselves and yet want ordained priests stationed in their parishes. The question that keeps coming up for us is, “We are training the laity; now what?”
In a perfect world, a structure which allowed for locally ordained Native men and women would be supportive of lay formation programs. In the real world, we continue to send mixed signals: inviting people to be leaders in their church communities and then reminding them that formal recognition of their leadership is not yet available. How should we proceed with prayerful, educated, and trained lay people who feel a calling to serve and are acknowledged as leaders in their local Catholic communities?
Among poor and marginalized peoples the victory of the laity is hardly assured, yet ministry is needed and there are not enough priests to provide it. The issue needs to be addressed openly in the church in the United States to assure a more coherent and just policy with regard to lay ministry as a necessary part of developing a “vision beyond the glittering imperium of consumer culture.”
Paul Q. Kane, SJ, is co-director of Kateri Northwest Ministry Institute in Spokane, Washington.
Eugene McCarraher
To all the respondents, I raise a cup of Wawa’s early morning swill. (That’s a compliment, by my lights.)
I thank Schindler and Father Baxter for their noncorporate endorsements. Baxter rightly maintains that a clerical blessing of the managerial ethos has been and remains a necessary condition for the “lay” revolution. (Indeed, Father Heft supplies evidence on that score, asserting that corporate hegemony is a “providential development.”) Father Ong properly chastises me for misinterpreting his call for a business apostolate as a replacement for the working-class apostolate. Still, I cite the extenuating circumstance of Ong’s insouciance toward corporate power, a posture that I would argue is a defining feature of liberal Catholic cultural criticism in the 1950s.
Baxter’s acuity counters the stale rehearsals of 1950s’ liberalism in Leckey and Deedy, especially the latter. After changing the subject to the all-too-obvious sins of the clergy, Deedy winds up making me a defender of clerical Johns and harrumphing about my “fretting.” While no one should downplay clerical vice and incompetence, I feel that Deedy—like those Japanese soldiers who holed up in caves for years, thinking that the war was still raging—continues to fight the battles of yesteryear. Since most of us now know that priests are fallible human beings, we can move on to confront today’s troubles.
Other critics focus on what they perceive as my facile dismissal of American Catholics’ economic and educational achievements. Far be it from me to pooh-pooh the sacrifices and aspirations of the grandparents David O’Brien invokes: However ambiguous their descendants’ success, the brick-and-mortar ghetto was no city of God. Likewise, Cadegan and Allitt take me to task for overlooking both the divine presence and the real progress in contemporary Catholicism. To them I reply that I have no difficulty in seeing God’s face in a middle manager, and that it is both impossible and undesirable to reclaim the “flinty austerities” of the past. I am just not convinced either that we should want to baptize TQM (as Elliott Gould cried out in Little Murders, “What the hell ever happened to standards?”), or that the amiability of the people Allitt and I know in our daughters’ lay-run schools counters the ever-more uncharitable world of corporate capitalism.
Finally, I hope that Father Meehan is right in discerning a “third force” rising among American Catholics. The witness such a force would provide (one radiantly prefigured in the Catholic Worker movement) could indeed, as Cadegan writes, “startle us all.” Here’s hoping that all of us awaken from our undogmatic slumbers, and transform the laity’s pyrrhic triumph into a spectacle unto the world.
