Evangelical Catholicism: Who's at the Table?

Today’s my nephew Patrick’s name day, so a celebration is in order. Steve and I cooked an enormous pot of stew yesterday—enough to feed armies. I would have written "Irish stew," but it’s not precisely that. Though it does contain lamb, onion, and potatoes (as well as carrots and celery, a bit of thyme and parsley), I’ve added whispers that would be out of place on a traditional Irish table: tomatoes and paprika, for instance, to enrich the sauce and give it deeper color.

We’ll enjoy the stew with my Southern-American Irish (and English, Scottish, Welsh) family’s version of soda bread, aka cornbread, along with cole slaw and a cake and pie my aunt Billie has baked for the occasion. My brother Philip, his wife Penny, and sons Luke, Colin, and Pat will be with us. Beautiful, brilliant Kate is, alas, pursuing her fortune in the big cities in which she’s interviewing for jobs—and may she be offered all of them!

The Internet brought me an unexpected St. Patrick’s gift early today: a clip on the Towleroad blog of Rosie O’Donnell talking to young Danny Noriega on the cruise to which she invited him after “American Idol” dumped him. People have strong feelings about Rosie, pro and con. Mine are decidedly pro

Seeing her talking to Danny Noriega today, no make-up on, face plain as an ungarnished potato, made me warm to her all the more. That, to me, is the face of the Irish at their best: free-handed, open-hearted, lacking in pretense, capable of subtle cutting irony or the grandly embellished verbal wallop that will knock the offending party off his feet. Even when Rosie says what is clearly outrageous, I admire her for the honesty that sears through every word she utters. I’ll take such honesty any day, over the mealy-mouthed liberalism that calculates every word to assure that the speaker ends up always on the winning side—about which more in a moment.

As I listen to James Galway’s heart-rending ballad of the perpetual exile that attracts the Irish imagination so powerfully—“Steal Away”—I’m thinking through an account I read this weekend of a recent session at which three luminaries of American Catholicism discussed evangelical Catholicism. Evangelical Catholicism is a phrase coined by reporter John Allen to describe the restorationist tendency of the last two popes: the assertive, in-your-face retrieval of a supposedly waning Catholic identity, which imagines the modern world as antithetical to Catholic identity, because its secularism and pluralism erode the distinctives of said identity.

I’m not buying: either the restorationism (which is not restoring a beleaguered Catholic identity, at all, not seeking to restore the tradition, but trying to revitalize the sectarian, highly clericalized ecclesiology of Trent and Vatican I), or the various justifications of it provided by people such as the Catholic gentlemen who recently discussed the rise of evangelical Catholicism at an American Catholic university.

Reading the discussion makes me itch: with unanswered questions; with discomfort about the unvarnished shilling for restorationism under the guise of objectivity that runs through not a few reportorial and theological presentations of evangelical Catholicism today. I’m itchy with thought about where really innovative and promising currents of new theology come from: the centers of power, or the margins?

The three distinguished Catholic gentlemen discussing evangelical Catholicism at an American Catholic university recently are, well, all gentlemen, all men. All married men. All heterosexual males. All white men.

Yet, in their comments about the rationale for evangelical Catholicism, several of these men apparently focused on the wild, free-wheeling pluralism that is threatening Catholic identity in American culture today! Three white, heterosexual, married (middle-class) American men talking about the unfettered pluralism that fritters away Catholic identity?

What pluralism, dare I ask? Where is that pluralism, when the official (officious) voices for Catholicism continue to be men—ostensibly straight men, white men?

Would the discussion of evangelical Catholicism have been any different if the wives of the gentlemen discoursing ponderously about Catholic identity had been on stage? What would women say about Catholic evangelicalism—if asked!—I wonder? What might they say about their lives of stirring pots and cleaning bathrooms, while their husbands pen weighty articles? What might women throughout history have said about Catholic identity and its retrieval—if asked?

And what might people of color say, if they were invited to the table? Or some of the people Catholic Worker houses feed each week? Or gay and lesbian Catholics?

It is really difficult to convince me that pluralism is eroding Catholic identity today—such that we need an assertive movement to retrieve that supposedly fragmenting identity—when the official spokespersons for Catholicism continue to be, overwhelmingly and without a whisper of apology, men, straight men, men who come from the power centers of world cultures.

Is the pluralism of which the clerical centers of the church and its spokesmen are so afraid primarily the pluralism that would result from inclusion of the voices of women—or males imagined as feminized, which is to say openly gay men? One surely has to wonder . . . .

I’m also impatient with the pretense to objectivity running through these analyses of evangelical Catholicism. I’m impatient because I have strong reason to suspect that the Catholic gentlemen who are supposedly describing what is merely happening—the triumph of the restored clericalized church—have something vested themselves in that triumph. They have their own male power vested in the clerical system of the church.

I question the objectivity of presentations of evangelical Catholicism such as the one that recently took place at a roundtable discussion at an American Catholic university. While the Pew Foundation’s report on the state of religion in America recently reported that a vast number of American Catholics—including many younger Catholics—are walking away from the church, some of the advocates of evangelical Catholicism who expounded on that theme at this recent workshop speak as if a majority of young American Catholics are buying into restorationist Catholicism today.

Really. Where? Who are those young American Catholics? And why do they not show up as a significant trend in the Pew report’s statistics? Is what is being objectively described really a fantasy of those describing it—the church they would like to see restored, in which male (straight male) power is never questioned in any way that threatens the dominance of that power?

In the interest of full disclosure, I do have to say that I am writing here out of my own experience—as a gay, and thus marginal, Catholic. In fact, I know one of the gentlemen who expounded at the workshop. When I came out of the closet in a public way as a gay theologian, I became curiously invisible to this gentleman. Where before we would greet each other at academic conferences, after my coming out, I found that when I walked past him, his eyes would suddenly glaze. I was no longer there.

To those in the center, I no doubt write and think as I do because I am bent on destroying.

From where I stand, I write and think as I do because I am intent on listening to voices that promise hope—hope for the truly new, for the novum, for tendencies in history that move toward the reign of God. I care deeply about the church. I want to see it thrive in the future. I want to see it capable of speaking a truly evangelical word to the world—a convincing, transformative, affirming, redemptive word.

The voices for which I am listening come not from the center, though, but from the margins. They are not the voices that continue to define (and represent) the center of American Catholicism in such roundtable discussions. They are not yet at the table. They have not been invited.