Richard Niebuhr's classic 1951 Christ and Culture provided an invaluable typology of the ways the Church engages culture: Christ of culture, Christ against culture, Christ above culture. The first is adversarial; the second approving; the third involves itself three subtypes of conversion, dualism and synthesis. What follows will draw upon these models to consider the varying ways Catholicism has engaged modernity, over the last 80 years, in our USA.
Modernity
Is the underlying structure and form of our culture: complex, dense, Godless, disenchanted, bureaucratic, technocratic, market-based, consumerist, capitalistic, scientific, constitutional/democratic, individualistic, state-regulated, automated, meritocratic, release from tradition, mobile, class-stratified, mega-capitalist, saturated with social and entertainment media. (That is 20 adjectives if you are counting!)
We will contrast the pro-modern, the anti-modern, and an integrally Catholic approach. We will see things are not always so simple: some movements are embracive of aspects of the culture but reactive against others. The culture itself is complicated and contradictory; and Catholicism offers a banquet of values and options; neither are monolithic.
We will be seeing "hybrid-Catholicism" of different sorts: dualisms which maintains along side our faith and values an alternate, often dissonant or contradictory system of morals.
Of Culture: Pro-Modernity
The bulk of contemporary Catholicism accepts and accommodates mainstream culture, but in a variety of ways: progressive, neo-conservative, suburban-bourgeois.
Catholic Progressivism dominates across elite, affluent, highly educated groups. It retains the traditional Catholic alliance with unions and the poor even as most adherents themselves enjoy affluence and power. Configuring themselves as anti-establishment through identity politics and anti-racism, they leave the class structure unthreatened as they sequester themselves safely in areas removed from the poor. Most importantly, they accept the Cultural Revolution's liberation of sexuality from procreativity/union and embrace contraception, legalized abortion, LGBTQ causes, and a relaxed attitude to pornography, cohabitation, and fornication. Anti-modern elements include concern for the environment, support for a strong safety net, progressive taxation and regulation of corporate capitalism. Here we have Commonweal, America and National Catholic Reporter...and lots of liberal boomers.
Catholic Neo-Conservatives are Republicans, a la Reagan or Trump, fierce defenders of capitalism (even the corporate sort), economic liberalism as low taxes/regulation, nationalistic. Against the sexual liberals they defend traditional family and sexual ethics. On these cultural/moral issues they are anti-modern. The pro-life stance against legal abortion aligns them with the Republican Party which is itself a party of corporate expansion, technology and of modernity. On economics they are pro-modern; on sexual morals anti-modern. They are First Things, Crisis, National Catholic Register and EWTN.
Catholic Bourgeois Moderation is your typical suburban parish. Political liberals and conservatives are equally comfortable as politics is avoided. Also avoided: moral topics like masturbation, contraception, homosexuality, and IVF. The pastoral sensibility is irenic: do not disturb, do not challenge. And so, American Catholics cohabit, contracept, divorce, and abort at the same rate as other groups. Elements of Catholic practice that contradict mainstream culture are cancelled in favor of toleration, accommodation and peace. Some priests will lean more left or right; but in our polarized society the degree of moderation and tranquility in parish life is striking. A strong Catholic impulse is to reconcile and unify; even if at the cost of a dilution of the faith, "Catholic Lite."
Against Culture: Anti-Modernity
Serious Catholic anti-modernity is found in small quantities, outside of parochial life, in a fascinating variety of contrasting countercultures which accentuate specific Catholic values against a hostile society. We consider six.
The Latin Mass cherishes and protects ancient traditions around the mass but also classic Tridentine Catholicism in elements that have been diminished in the post-Council Church. Largely it is an aesthetic of chant, Latin, incense, art and solemnity. It is favorable theologically to Thomism. Pro-life, it will lean Republican. I have personally experienced their generosity towards our non-profit. The pastor of a parish with different ethnic groups tells me the Latin Mass group gives far more money than any other. They may homeschool in reaction to woke education. They often are high-achieving in mainstream career paths and so not so anti-modern professionally. Since the papacy of Francis, their war for survival is against the progressive Church, rather than a pagan society. They have been criticized by my friend Stephen Adubato, with some validity, as being a form of modernity, an ideology, rather than flowing authentically, organically from tradition and authority.
Catholic Worker is smaller; far more radical in its life with the very poor, classic Catholic piety, bohemian renunciation of bourgeois normalcy, ruralism, pacifism and anarchism. These last stances are ideological and therefore forms of modernity. It is an uneasy, unstable hybrid in its wedding of classic, deep Catholicism with political extremism. In pure form I think it is rare, if admirable.
Covenant Communities of Catholic Pentecostalism, came out of the broader charismatic renewal and took an extreme anti-modern form in the 1980s. Many gathered under the authoritative umbrella "Sword of the Spirit," brain child of the brilliant, intellectualist Steve Clark. He developed intensive communities, with strong authority structures, detailed protocols and flamingly traditional gender roles which militantly resisted a culture now seen as pagan and diabolical. In contrast to Ralph Martin, his collaborator in the earlier days of the Renewal (1970s), he downplayed specific Catholic elements in favor of more pronounced Evangelical/Pentecostal practices. In effect, this entailed an alternate ecclesiology and hierarchy so that many of the communities (in Newark, Steubenville) fought with local bishops, not unlike the struggles of the Latin Mass. Famously, Justice Amy Coney Barrett hails from such a community in South Bend. The People of Hope here in north NJ has now reconciled with the Archdiocese and settled into a steady routine, sponsoring a fine alternative Catholic school and a summer camp which has been a blessing for my own grandchildren. They seem to live, however, in many ways a standard suburban life, pursuing careers in finance and skillfully navigating higher education and networks to ensure bourgeois success.
Neocatechumenal Way is the most systematic, intense, comprehensive Catholic anti-modern counterculture. Theologically and morally it is unabashedly Catholic and militantly anti-modern. Communities gather at least twice a week around Scripture and Eucharist. They have very large families and lots of priestly vocations. They are already having a pronounced influence on local Churches where they flourish. They detach from politics other than being pro-life and protective of religious liberties. Focused intensively on community and family, they steer clear of careerism, materialism, and consumerism fluidly, without ideological articulation. Their most "modern" feature is their liturgy which, in sharp contrast to the Latin Mass, developed in the progressive euphoria after the Council in the 1960s. It rejects centuries of Catholic liturgy as temple/sacrifice/silence/solemnity in favor of a Passover model of the Eucharist. Even beyond worship they aspire to an "originalist" pre-Constantinian ideal of the early Church. They have an extremely negative view of modernity as pagan and implicitly view the broader Catholic Church as weak in the face of a hostile world. They are already wielding immense influence in the Church, almost all for the good (in my view.)
Benedict Option is not an actual, sociological reality, but a proposal by conservative thinker Rod Dreher. Highly anti-modern, he sees that all our major mega-institutions, for example both political parties, are fragmented, dysfunctional and post-and-anti-Christian. He urges us to detach, with due prudence, from the larger institutions, and focus our energies locally and concretely on our families, local Church/ school, and smaller organizations that flow from and into them. In different ways, the forms explained above follow this ideal, although not deliberately. Another example would be the creation of home school organizations in informal, close community. As it is not an organized movement, it is impossible to measure. It has been a hot topic in conservative circles and is surely having influence informally.
Ethnic Parishes in urban areas, such as the northeast (NYC, Boston, Philadelphia) are a residual, diminishing force for anti-modernity. Diocesan policy and clergy do not encourage these but implicitly accept the standard homogenous ideal. In the 1960s, Catholic clergy imbibed the liberal ideals of civil rights (basically a good thing) but unfortunately abandoned the practices of ethnic, urban parochialism (positively understood) as Catholic rose up the economic scale and moved to the suburbs. However, the magnificent Churches, traditional feasts and holy days, and nostalgic memory all remain as connections with the Catholicism of our fathers, even for those of us most thoroughly modernized.
In contrasting ways, these six groups are admirably fearless, fierce, intense and loyal to the faith of our fathers in a world increasingly hostile to us. Their temptation is to anxiety, resentment, victim-complex, and condemnation of those outside their circles. They can detach and rash judge normal Church parochialism now seen as compromised and weak. They can tend to become sect-like, losing a confident, positive Catholicity that welcomes God's grace wherever it is found.
Integral Catholicism
In line with the best traditions of the Church, integral Catholicism avoids the dualism of hybrid identities, engaging modernity to criticize, strongly if necessary, but also assimilate and synthesize what is best. This was, of course, the practice of the early Church fathers with regard to Greek culture and of St. Thomas with regard to Aristotle: the famous "spoils of Egypt" whereby the escaping Hebrew slaves took with them the best of Egyptian culture. This was clearly the aspiration of the bishops in the Vatican Council, even as the implementation of that providential event was significantly highjacked by progressivism. It avoids the credulous embrace of culture by the liberals. It overcomes the hostility, anxiety, victim complex and resentment that tempts conservatives and traditionalists.
In a highly intellectual form, it finds pure expression in the legacy of John Paul/Benedict and the Communio school that follows them. Adjacent to this is the slightly left-leaning Communion and Liberation movement and (in its better moments) the more right-leaning First Thing or the refreshingly balanced, non-Catholic Plough from the Catholic-friendly Bruderhof community.
Locally, concretely it is found in a million expressions in the best of ordinary parish life, in the more prudent and moderate forms of anti-and-pro-modernity, and in myriads of societies, movements, retreats, schools and others.
The Holy Spirit is active and effective among us, guiding us to take from our storehouses the best of the old and of the new, embracing what is good, renouncing what is bad.
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