A Way of Looking at Things No. 11: Where have all the Catholics gone?

A Way of Looking at Things: No. 11 – Where have all the Catholics gone?
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© 2001

Sometimes the most prosaic of issues manages to elicit the response, “Citizen, cure thy soul,” with apologies to the apotheosis medical profession (“Physician, cure thyself”), which has custody of this distinguished metaphor because, quite falsely, it assumes to have control over “life and death” issues, when, in truth, each of us has more control over this than we would admit.

We like to look outside ourselves for sanctuary, be it the temple of the “Holy Ghost,” “God,” or other possible answers to the conundrum of life, death, and immortality.

We are slaves to time and conceive it as a measurable construct much like spatial dimensions. But life is not experienced in time but rather as a succession of marked-off states of consciousness, something that can measured, not quantitatively, but only qualitative, not objectively, but subjectively, not cognitively, but intuitively.

Religion is a mark-off state of consciousness. It is a metaphor that is schooled in mystery and treated as historic when, in truth, it is its mythology, which holds a body and soul together. People distinct from each other have the same soul but come to understand and appreciate that soul in a unique style which, again, is shrouded in mystery with “God” having a thousand different faces.

By the accident of my birth, I was born in an Irish Catholic culture. It permeates my soul and is beyond my capacity to change its hold on me. Some thirty years ago, when I felt my religion had lost respect for my struggle, I wrote a book called The Silent Man in the Pew Speaks Out. It was a terrible book, and to my eternal relief, never published. It was the cry of a confused man attempting to find catharsis by forming his pain into words. It didn’t work.

Next, I read of my church’s enemies, Luther, Calvin, Henry VIII, and the Gnostics. I read on Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, naturalism, and my own Catholicism during its tainted history. I became acquainted with Freud, Jung, Krishnarmurti, Gibran, Nietzsche, and many others. I found they all had more in common than not. Then, again, by the accident of my work, I saw many of these different faces of God up close and personal through my travels and quest for self-understanding.

Religion as mythology, I discovered, has more power to hold us to ourselves and to our beliefs than any dogma, for it is dogma that divides us from sharing a common soul whatever face we put on our God.

In my religion, for instance, the Immaculate Conception is perceived by many Catholics, quite erroneously as it turns out, to relate to the virgin birth of our Lord, Jesus Christ, when actually it is dogma by papal encyclical that states that the Blessed Virgin Mother came into the world without Original Sin on her soul. It matters little that this was declared nearly 2,000 years after the mother of Jesus left this world. Likewise, again by papal encyclical, in a like period of her absence from life, the Holy See created the beautiful imagery as dogma of her bodily Assumption into Heaven. Non-Catholics have great difficulty with such mysteries, but they are truths to Catholics under the pain of Mortal Sin. If this seems extreme, people of other religions hold just as firmly to their mythologies. Mythology is sinew to muscular Christianity as it is to other religions.

This brings me to my first point. Religion was once the center of man’s life whatever face God was given to have. Religion was a way to cope in an insane world. And the world has always been insane. Religion was a way for virtue to triumph over vice, compassion over cruelty, life over death, quality over quantity, generosity over greed, spiritualism over materialism. A small body of religious was given the responsibility to act as sentinel to our souls. When the religious proved as human we all, many of us lost confidence in it.

The religious – in my religion, nuns, priests, and brothers – once carried the burden of virtue. Since they often found vice, cruelty, death, quantity, greed, and materialism more to their liking than its other face, we blamed them for losing our faith. The fact that the religious proved more like than different from the laity made them subject to ridicule and loathing instead of understanding and compassion. Once the religious no longer were given the respect they deserved, they no longer (in many cases) enjoyed the armor of self-respect, leaving them essentially defenseless to deal with life’s temptations and ill prepared to accept ecclesiastical burdens.

What an opportune moment for Papal Authority to enter the fray and demonstrate leadership by asking the questions, why and where: why have we so few priests, nuns, and brothers carrying out the Will of the Church; and where have all the Catholic souls gone? The body count is still high, more than a billion, but where are the souls?

As a layman, I have my thoughts which I form into questions of why and where: why can priests not marry and why can’t women be priests; where are the tenets of faith which show respect for the struggle of contemporary Catholics in an essentially Godless world and where are the souls of Catholics when their bodies attend Mass on Sunday?

It would seem that the church hierarchy has little respect for contemporary man, that is, for man who thinks like an adult and not like a child. What seems apparent is a failure to understand thinking man. Thinking man can accept mythology as doctrine as long as it is not promulgated as historical truth.

Thinking man needs religion as much as ignorant man, perhaps even more. Having contempt for the head does not discover the route to the heart.

In my lifetime, with the exception of Pope John XXIII, there has been little papal leadership other then the hubris and hegemony of dogma, which brings me to my second point.

Again, by the accident of my birth, I was born in the second quarter of the 20th century, a simpler time, a less crowded world, a time when a bomb in a war in which 60 million people lost their lives shattered innocence.

Free will has been tabled replaced by an obsession with time. Everything is reduced to mathematical constructs, which justify cloning, stem cell research, abortion, life without consequences, and living faster and more on the edge with a cell phone in the ear and a laptop on the legs.

Science is the new religion and it is not fairing any better than the old religions. Science would supplant free will and forgive wickedness whatever behavioral form it may choose to take – be it eating and drinking to excess, promiscuity, or any other form of addiction – by creating a miraculous drug for obesity, AIDS, cancer, and other maladies which are chiefly behavioral in context. Life style is killing us, not religion.

Words have lost their magic, too, as the profane has been made sacred, and the sacred profane. It is nigh impossible to see a single film, be it a comedy, romance, mystery, or drama without the constant bombardment of the senses with the non-word-word better known as the “f---“ word. You can hear children using it on the playground, and even clerics and the religious at unguarded moments. It has lost its shock value because shock has been reduced to a drug.

This brings me to my final point. In the face of all this, in a tiny community that is shrinking faster than water evaporates, a small contingent of souls has protested the planned demolition of one of its churches – St. Patrick’s Catholic Church in Clinton Iowa.

This small contingent of what one person calls CAVEMEN (Citizens Against Virtually Everything) is looking for leadership, alas, in all the wrong places. It has, by default, assumed that role as it sees five parishes in this community shrinking to one. A mark-off state of consciousness is embodied in these churches with four of the five tagged for demolition, starting with St. Patrick’s.

A quite intelligent person tells me, and I believe rightly, that there are perhaps 100,000 churches in the country, which are more beautiful and could be saved at a great and worthy cost. This is his head speaking. He is missing the character of these troubled hearts. Rational argument is fodder for the head but not necessarily for the heart. These hearts are bleeding and they are not embarrassed to show it.

Has anyone asked why this small contingent puts itself on stage to public scorn, ridicule, contempt and disgust? I think the answer might be quite revealing. Bricks and mortar, stain glass and mahogany, incense and candles are not what St. Patrick’s Catholic Church means to these people. The church is a marked-off state of consciousness, something that mirrors the continuity of their lives in the community, a benchmark on the continuum of their life experience, a symbol of solace, trust and meaning. It was a place they went to light a candle, pray, and feel renewed. As one 74-year-old woman puts it, “We were five parishes, five families with the same Father. Now, the family feeling is gone.” You can discount her sentiment as myopic, but is it?

For the past forty years I have spent my life in the corporation as corporate executive, internal and external corporate consultant. The Germans call this corporate society of ours, “corpocracy,” the American disease (Wirtschaft Woche, January 16, 1987; Work Without Managers, pp. 13 – 15):

The church demonstrates the identical problem to that of Corporate America, which I rephrase here in the ten characteristics of the “American disease” in the context of church authority:

(1) The church is insensitive to its parishioners.
(2) The church supports internal politics at the expense of its spiritual function.
(3) Secretiveness is the measure of communication.
(4) The principal product of divine intervention is paperwork.
(5) Endless meetings are the way to avoid making a decision.
(6) An internal focus is maintained at the expense of accelerating external demands.
(7) Short-term focus is preferred to embracing long-term challenges.
(8) Individual initiative is never supported for you never know where it might lead.
(9) The church has isolated itself from the vicissitudes daily faced by parishioners.
(10)A covert hostility is maintained to innovative thinking while it is overtly praised.

The irony and paradox are that the Catholic hierarchy is proving atavistic and the church anachronistic, as it stubbornly refuses to change. The church coffers everywhere are diminishing because of this, and the church would tear away the only remaining symbolic tether to the faithful in this small community because of economic exigencies. This move is consistent with corporate society’s inane obliteration of 100-year-old companies for short-term advantage, and I trust, with similar long-term consequences. I call this Corporate Sin (2000) in my book whereas Garry Wills calls it Papal Sin (2000) in his. Wills sees a comparable gap between the religious and laity that I have observed between management and professional workers.

The so-called “Cavemen” should take heart in the words of Eric Hoffer:

The exceptional adaptability of the human species is chiefly a peculiarity of its weak. The difficult and risky task of meeting and mastering the new . . . is not undertaken by the vanguard of society but by its rear . . . Only when, after a clumsy and wasteful struggle, they have somehow bound and tamed the unknown do their betters move in and take charge. The plunge into the new is often an escape from a familiar pattern that is untenable and unpleasant . . . The role the unfit play in human affairs should make us pause whenever we are prompted to see man as a mere animal and not a being of an order apart (Corporate Sin, p.10).

And what is the new? It is an active laity not afraid of church authority. It is a laity in which humility remains a virtue born of weakness and expressed in strength. I wonder how much humility is possessed by those who fail to see these protesters for what they are, parishioners who feel abandoned, and are clinging to this sliver of hope in a building which they call a church, when in reality it mirrors their souls.

* * * * *