It Was the Worst of Times: American Church 1947-2023 (Letter 38 to Grands)

 We now consider the dark side: the distortions, dysfunctions and degradations of the Church of my time.

1. The Church Becomes Bourgeois.  The dark side of the Great Catholic Restoration of 1945-65 was that Catholicism became comfortable, accepted, privileged, respected, secure, and arrogant. Prior to 1945,  American Catholicism was immigrant, ethnic, poor-and-working class, afflicted by the Depression, despised by WASP and Fundamentalist, uneducated, ghettoized, and heroically militant in a world war. That changed drastically within the two decades of my childhood and adolescence. Catholics rose the capitalist ladder of affluence, status and privilege. Flight from ethnic, urban neighborhoods to monotonous middle class suburbs. Access to higher education, the ivy leagues, political influence, firms and country clubs. In the process Catholicism became soft, accommodationist, compliant with mainstream mediocrity. It became a "thin" rather than a "thick" faith, compliant with rather than resistant to the broader culture. It blended into the bourgeois mainstream and was soon indistinguishable in things that matter: marriage, family, sexuality, gender, acceptance of abortion.

2. Catholic Progressivism as Accommodation. Catholicism blended into mainstream American culture, including at elite levels, as that was embracing the Sexual Revolution. So a critical mass of the more intelligent, ambitious and successful surrendered to the new "Culture of Death": abortion, sexual sterility, deconstruction of masculinity/femininity, technocracy, meritocracy, bureaucracy, dissolution of the intermediate communities that have always supported the family in deference to an expansive state and malignant global capitalism.

3. Political Polarization. A Catholicism now comfortable, complaisant, consumerist, slothful and  inebriated by the unbalanced optimism of the Council found itself impotent in the face of the Sexual Revolution. Catholic labor leaders supinely surrendered the Democrat Party to the sexual liberationists and have electorally supported legal abortion with unconditional loyalty for the last half century. Their class hostility to the wealthy Republicans blinded them to the transformation that happened.

Conservative Catholics encountered more moral ambiguity in the new Republican Party. This championed the core religious-moral traditions around life and family, but retained allegiance to the financial interests of the rich. It retained a libertarianism as an individualism that compromised Catholic allegiance to solidarity, the poor and the common good. A  Catholic Reaganite Republicanism emerged for the best and worst of reasons: in respect for vulnerable human life and the sacredness of marriage and in order to protect their newfound wealth.

A Catholic grounded in the Church's social doctrine found himself without a political home. More recently, however, in the wake of Donald Trump, there is emerging a "New Right" that advocates a cultural-and-economic populism that is closer to the Catholic sensibility. However, the Church can never marry herself to any party or politics.

The political polarization of the society deepened and intensified the ecclesial divide between conservative and progressive.

4. Mega-Church-Institutions. The expansive, robust, affluent Catholic Camelot of 1945-65 left the Church with an enormous physical infrastructure of buildings, parishes, schools, hospitals, universities and social agencies. She found herself to be a Giga-Bureaucracy. This was not entirely deliberate, but the result of a million initiatives at all levels of the Church and society. Suddenly, the bishops found themselves as chief executives of multi-billion dollar enterprises involving fund raising, legal liability, public image, institutional survival and expansion. The mission of the bishop, already dense and demanding...shepherd, theologian, mentor, exemplar of prayer and holiness, governor of the diocese...became immensely expanded to entail stewardship of a mega-organization of a universe of lower bodies. Already in the 1960s the iconoclastic Ivan Illich was calling for the Church to de-institutionalize and become small, poor, humble. Half a century later, after endless sex and financial scandals, he is proved to be prescient. The institutional, sacramental, hierarchical Church will do well to surrender the corporal works of mercy (medicine, education, etc.) to the laity and purify itself in its actual priestly works.

5. Priest Sex Scandal. The abuse by trusted clergy of our youth has done more damage to our Church than anything else. The harm to victims, families, the broader Church and the priesthood is incalculable; it boundlessly exceeds the billions in settlements and bankruptcies of our dioceses.  It was a "perfect storm" of confluent, demonic forces. It surged in the decades immediately after the Sexual Revolution: prior to 1960 and after 1990 the recorded cases are very few. It is partly but not entirely a result of the sexual liberalism that surged in the Church: some of the worst offenders (Maciel, McCarrick) were staunch conservatives. For our purposes here we may understand it as a catastrophic convergence of the "flesh" (sexual addiction), the "world" (of sexual license) and the "devil" (Lucifer himself as principal conspirator.)

6. Flight from Philosophy. Fashionable progressive Catholic philosophy in the wake of the Council renounced reliance on Thomism, but it largely moved away from metaphysis entirely, thus throwing out the baby with the bathwater. With few but notable exceptions (John Paul, Benedict, Communio), there was a pronounced move into the pragmatics of therapy and politics and avoidance of the hard work of metaphysics. To not do metaphysics is to do a bad metaphysics. Catholicism classically is a wedding of the Hellenic philosophy with Hebraic spirituality. Progressivism renounced the first and degraded into lazy, sloppy relativism, agnosticism, subjectivism, and emotionalism. 

This unfortunate trend is exemplified in the magisterium of Pope Francis whose lack of theological vigor and clarity has discouraged many who are loyal to the Church, has fueled the forces of confusion as in Germany, and has further divided an already polarized Church.

Conclusion

These six are hardly exhaustive of the sin, decadence and decline of the Church of this time. The Church is human and as such always sinful, disordered and dying. We are living now in a particularly dark time for the Church. Like all organic, natural, living life, She waxes and wanes; has good days and bad days. Looking back, I see that the postwar period was a good one. The last decade, the time of Pope Francis, is a particularly bad one. The Church is in decline. She is divided. Discouraged. We are in bondage, like the Hebrews in Egypt. We are in exile, like the Israelites in Babylon. We are in disbelief, like the apostles on Good Friday and Holy Saturday. We are in a "dark night" with all the great mystics. We do not lose heart because we await the sunrise of Easter with joyous expectation.

These last few letters have considered the changes, good and bad, within the Church over the last 75 years. To conclude we might reflect on the continuity and the dramatic relationality of the Church.

In her over 2,000 year history, the organic fluidity and creativity as well as the fragility and vulnerability, of the Church is in tension with an even greater stability, continuity, reliability and even invulnerability. This is the Divine nature of the Church. She has continued, as the same divine-human, corporate person, unflinchingly through time and incredible misfortunes. She is the same in every part of the globe; she is the same now as in the early Roman persecutions, as in the Egyptian hermitages, as in the feudal monasteries, as in the medieval mendicants, the Tridentine Jesuits, the missionaries to the continents, the Great American Catholic Restoration, and the convoluted transformations of the 1960s. 

The Holy Spirit abides in her, perpetually. The priesthood celebrates Eucharist and all the sacraments, efficaciously, always and everywhere, regardless of the worthiness of the celebrant. The Truth of God is proclaimed infallibly, by the Magisterium. The soul, the inner form of the Church exists eternally, in our Blessed Mother in union with the saints of heaven, in purgatory, and with us who struggle and fight here on earth. The flesh of our Savior abides...in perhaps half a million tabernacles globally...quietly, humbly, patiently, begging for our love.

That ecclesial, Catholic, Marian soul abides eternally. But it is not static, inert or monotonous. Rather, it is dramatic, eventful and relational. The Church is in never-ending interchange, with Christ the Bridegroom, with our heavenly-Merciful Father, indwelt by the Sanctifying Holy Spirit, with each other in Truth-Beauty-Love, in battle with the world-flesh-devil, looking upwards always to our heavenly destiny.

Thank you, Triune God, for the Church of our time: flawed, sinful, disordered and distracted; but organic, alive, resilient, dramatic, eventful. Thank you for staying with us, abiding with us, encouraging us, guiding us. We surrender ourselves to You! We rest in You! We trust in You, delight in You! We love You and we adore You! Amen!