A spirituality is the core of a person's or community's relationship to God, reality and others; it is a way of life; it expresses a theology and a metaphysics in a myriad of practical was; it is a gestalt of beliefs, values, style, tastes and habits. Catholicism since Vatican II (1965) offers a variety of options. The five major players in this field are: generic, parish Catholicism; evangelical-charismatic-communal-nuptial mysticism; progressivism; American neo-conservatism; traditionalism. Smaller, niche countercultures are: Catholic Worker, 12-step groups, and Christian Meditation and Zen.
1. Generic, Parish Catholicism.
Amazingly consistent and pervasive across all areas of our county, this is the default, normal piety of most Catholics, as found in the local parish. It is a coherent synthesis of standard elements of our faith that are most affirming, encouraging, comforting to bourgeois, middle class, American life. It is:
- Orthodox, loyal to Church teaching.
- Emphasizes a God of love, pardon, mercy and compassion, as revealed in Jesus Christ.
- Advocates a moral code to emulate this God of empathy, kindness, and forgiveness. This includes reconciliation and forgiveness in family and friendship as well as concern for the poor and suffering.
- Clearly affirms a heaven that is broadly welcoming of all of good will. It does not deny but does ignore hell, Satan, spiritual warfare, the darkness of sin and evil.
- It accommodates the sexual, contraceptive revolution: neither supporting nor renouncing it. You are unlikely to hear a parish sermon address, one way or the other, contraception, cohabitation, masturbation or homosexuality.
- As in the Culture War, so in politics it is mostly non-partisan, welcoming Republicans and Democrats equally.
- Sermons are predictably intelligent, practical, positive, personal, echoing some scriptural or liturgical theme, relatively brief, and normally not erudite, profound, or inspiring.
- Music is feminine, drab, lacking virile energy and classical elegance, and distasteful to the masculine pallet. Architecture and artwork (of more contemporary buildings) is sterile, dry, secularized.
- Catechetics, unless there is a good Catholic school, is shallow and disliked by the young.
- This Catholicism is malleable, flexible and receptive: it easily absorbs elements of the stronger contestants. A specific parish might receive a traditionalist, then a progressive, than an evangelical pastor and yet the overall program retains a moderation and continuity.
- It provides adequate spiritual nourishment for countless Catholics who aspire to live their faith in the normal patterns of American life. It is always there for you: to baptize, marry, bury, comfort and pardon at every stage and circumstance of life. It is the staple, the meat-vegetable-potato of Catholic life.
- It is a weak soup for the hungry, searching soul. It is an inadequate response to the powerful forces hostile to Catholicism and thus fails to adequately protect, on its own without reinforcement from the stronger actors below, our young.
2. Evangelical, Charismatic, Communal, Nuptial Mysticism
This most fervent, profound, and promising piety was offered in the dual pontificate of John Paul and Benedict, in their authoritative interpretation of the Council in continuity with tradition, and a rich symphony of renewal movements (charismatic, Communion and Liberation, Neocatechumenate.)
- Personal engagement with the Person/Event of Jesus Christ, experiential intimacy with the Holy Spirit, and a rich theology of the Trinity.
- Small group engagement with the Word and fraternities of encouragement, accountability and support.
- Fidelity to Tradition, Magisterium and authority along with an open dialogue with the best in worldly culture.
- Ecumenical fraternity, especially with Orthodox, Evangelical, Pentecostal.
- A "nuptial mysticism" that roots its ecclesiology in Christ's conjugal embrace of his bridal Church and founds personal holiness and the common good in chastity and loyalty to the vow of marriage or consecration.
- Directly, firmly and clearly renounces Sexual Liberation and all its consequences.
- Like Catholicism in general, it pledges allegiance to no ideology of the left or right; but strongly defends, contra Cultural Liberalism, foundational Catholic values including: the right to life, marriage and family, chastity, religious freedom. Against economic individualism it upholds solidarity with the poor, working class and a strong guiding government; against centralization of power it upholds subsidiarity and localism.
3. Catholic Progressivism
Aligning with modernity and especially the Sexual Revolution,,, this seeks "progress" over a past viewed as oppressive and ignorant. It is hostile to traditional Catholicism but seeks to reconfigure it to approve of the major features of progressive, secular, bourgeois modernity:
- Sexuality, contracepted and sterile, is torn from fertility, marriage, fidelity. The sacred character of sex/gender is desecrated. Self abuse, cohabitation, homosexuality are all normalized as sex is trivialized and romance fantasized.
- The gendered, male-female person as iconic of the Trinity is deconstructed and replaced by the androgynous individual as a unit of production, consumption, and recreation.
- Therapy replaces piety; wholeness supplants holiness. Psychology is the new religion.
- Consumerism, materialism, careerism, financial security, status and the accoutrements of bourgeois life are all made sacred.
- It endorses the values and ideology of Western, affluent, secular, liberal, cosmopolitan elites.
- Science and technology are exaggerated into messianic forces. Authority is no longer located in a Revelation received from the past, but in the future achievements of science/engineering.
- Religious trust is placed in an expansive Mother State which cares for human needs at every level as the diminishment of the natural family, and all the intermediate organizations that support it, is implicitly accepted.
- The dominant paradigm of political life becomes the Marxist, but cultural, oppressor/victim binary: white/black; male/female; etc. This shrouds the affluent, limousine liberal in self-righteousness but does not confront the increasing class divide of privileged/poor.
- At its core is a decadent, isolating, lonely individualism (which it shares with its political antagonist, libertarian, neo-liberal economics) which finds solace in therapy, romantic fantasy, science and leftist messianic ideology.
- It is hostile to core Catholic principles (authority, sex, marriage, sacraments, evil and sin) but remains an enduring temptation to a Church existing in the world. It reigns supreme in Catholic higher education and mainstream theology. It finds expression in prestigious journals: America, Commonweal, National Catholic Reporter. It has benefited from a surge of influence, status, and power in the age of Pope Francis.
4. Traditional Catholicism
This school affirms a deep continuity with Church past, specifically the 500 year old Tridentine Church. In its extreme form, it rejects the Council and all its consequences. In moderate form, it accepts that Council but interprets it in a hermeneutic of discontinuity within a greater continuity with the past.
- A quintessential expression is, of course, the Latin mass. But it would also include moderations of the ordinary mass: facing to the East, quiet in Church, silence and solemnity, adoration of the Blessed Sacrament, balance of the temple-sacrifice nature of the liturgy with the Passover-meal aspect.
- Accentuation on the intellectual primacy of St. Thomas Aquinas as in the Dominican Order.
- Populist in nature, surprisingly attractive to young families, a bottom-up movement with minimum support from the upper levels of Church hierarchy and the academy.
- In its warfare with progressivism, it basically aligns with Evangelical Catholicism and Neo-conservatism. In Pope Benedict we see a perfect synthesis of what is mutually enriching between the two forms of anti-progressivism.
- It is despised by Pope Francis who sees only arrogant, hateful, reactionary, clerical resistance to the "Spirit of Vatican II and Synodality." More broadly, especially in the USA, it is accepted and appreciated even by liberal-leaning bishops. The papal repression has elicited more fervent support from conservatives and moderates outside of the Latin community.
5. Neo-Conservative, Americanist Catholicism
The marriage of conservative, Republican politics with cultural conservatism, reactive to the sexual revolution, reached its epitome in the Reagan presidency and especially the euphoric triumph over Soviet Communism and the apparent, but short lived, hegemony of Western liberalism.
- It embraces the virtues of capitalism, market economics, freedom of initiative, entrepreneurship, small government, low tax and regulation, and business (including global). In this it is out of step with mainstream Catholic sympathy for the poor and the working class.
- It idolizes the "American Founding" and accentuates all that is compatible with Catholicism but ignores the underlying anti-Catholicism: masonic, anti-sacramental, anti-Marian, anti-Papist.
- It is largely uncritical of large scale, global capitalism, and it corruptive influence, with materialism and consumerism, on the family and faith.
- It advocates for traditional values around helpless human life, family and sexuality, and chastity/fidelity against the moral chaos of sexual liberation.
- During the cold war, against the Soviet Empire, it was especially strong and influential in its three pillars: anti-Communism, pro-Capitalism, pro-family.
- It found classic expression in the National Review of William Buckley, First Things of Fr. Richard Neuhaus, and the work of Michael Novak and George Weigel.
- It is in crisis in the age of the convoluted, incoherent populism of Donald Trump which is: populist in a resentful mode; strongly pro-life, family, religious freedom; erratically isolationist; and nationalist in a crude, chauvinist manner offensive to the internationalist, "catholic" sympathies inherent in Catholicism. The remnant that remains faithful to this "three-pillared" conservatism coherently become "never-Trumpers," especially in reaction to his vile personal moral character. It remains to be seen if a post-Trump Catholic politics can emerge to unite a populist defense of the cultural and economic underdogs (DeSantis? Vance?).
- In its underlying libertarianism and individualism it shares the isolating decadence of the cultural liberal.
- It is compatible with Catholic Traditionalism and feels entirely comfortable in default parish life.
Other Niche, Minor Players
If the above five are the major contenders for the allegiance of the American Catholic, it is worth noting three lesser, but not insignificant actors.
Catholic Worker
Small in size, but large in influence, this "thick" counterculture, as birthed by Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin, is (with large variations) solidly Catholic in doctrine, practice, and prayer and especially admirable in the acts of mercy and identification with the poor. In politics it is radical: pacifist in its absolute rejection of warfare and anarchistic in its rejection of capitalism, and the American state. In these last two "...isms" it is out of step with Catholic social thinking, but as these involve prudential judgements it does not diminish their Catholic identity.
12-Steps
While not specifically Catholic, this path has profoundly influenced countless Catholics and must be recognized. It is entirely coherent with Catholic life, and can be understood as an intensification of elements of our faith which work in a new, miraculous gestalt to overcome addiction in its various forms. Many practice this, to great effect, in harmony with our sacramental life. For others it becomes an alternative, as they forsake Catholic practice but give themselves generously and loyalty to these steps and do great work as they grow in sobriety, serenity and (in my view) sanctity.
Christian Zen and Meditation
There many forms of Christian meditation and contemplation: some sink deeper into Christian love of Christ, as in Centering Prayer. Others move into Eastern traditions and attempt to merge what is best from the West and the East. My observation is that this later is not a contradiction of Catholicism, but an alternative to it.
- It tends to be anti-intellectual, dismissing the value of theology, doctrine and cognition in favor of a deeper, mystical awareness. And so, it does not deny, but ignores Catholic realities (incarnation, redemption, resurrection) or reinterprets them in ways mystical or moral.
- It does not articulate but draws from an implied pantheism: that we are all united in the good, the true, the beautiful and the divine. The foundational Christian binary of (personal) Creator and creation is unknown. Rather, there is a primal, incomprehensible union of all in all.
- A historical, definitive, actual, concrete Revelation in Jesus of Nazareth is not acknowledged. The Eternal is not seen as taking flesh in a literal sense. Rather, there is an escape from history, a transcendence beyond it. The actual death and resurrection are not central. If anything, they are probed for moral, poetic, and mystical meanings.
- Sin is not an issue. So there is no need for a savior. Rather, the illusions of the "false self" need to be discarded as the enlightened one enters into a peace and a harmony with the real, free of illusions of jealousy, competition, lust, achievement, and such.
- It seems to appeal to: the affluent, more women than men, the educated, spiritual seekers discontent with organized Christianity, the more liberal leaning. It attempts to distance itself from the vehemence and passion of partisan politics but surely leans left.
- It works well with psychology and therapy as upper class rituals.
- There are some who practice Zen along with Catholicism, but there is no inner coherence between them. They are not mutually reinforcing in the was the 12-steps. It is less likely that a meditator leave a "Zen sitting" and go to daily mass than an addict leave a meeting for the same.
Conclusion
Generic parish Catholicism is miraculously consistent, available, loyal, stable, dependable, nourishing, welcoming, maternal, efficacious. It can be boring, uninspiring, insipid.
It is in itself not an adequate response to the ferocity of anti-Catholic, secular, progressive modernity as it demeans the Church and invades her in the form of Catholic Progressivism.
It requires reinforcement from more intense, profound, militant forms of Catholicism, specifically an alliance between a reasonable Traditionalism and the fervor of Evangelical-Charismatic-Communal-Nuptial Catholicism.
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