In a lively opinion piece in the New Statesman, John Cornwell examines the refractory conversation that now constitutes worldwide Catholicism, and finds it breaking down in developed nations between "scruffies" and "straights." Scruffies "strive for an inclusive 'big tent' Church (accepting a pluralism of viewpoints and practice, especially on sexual morality and gender)." Straights "espouse a strictly defined identity, obedient to papal teaching, and declare, for instance, that you can’t help it if you’re gay but it’s a grave sin to get up to anything."
As Cornwell notes, things were easier for Catholics to sort out in the pre-Vatican II period, particularly in the 1950s when he was growing up Catholic in England: the world was either "me or not me." You were Catholic or you weren't.
And you and everyone else knew what Catholics stood for and who they were. If you were Catholic, you assumed you also knew what the "not me" stood for--though you were likely to be wildly wrong, since you were, after all, what Irish-American writer Mary McCarthy once called American Catholics of the pre-Vatican II era: "so certain and set apart." You couldn't know the "not me" because you were so entirely divorced from "them."
And so superior and so insulated by your certainty.
Fast-forward to the start of the 21st century, Cornwell maintains, and Eamon Duffy's metaphor of Catholicism as a conversation reaching backwards and forwards in time is breaking down under the strains of the battle between the scruffies, who welcomed the Vatican II invitation to talk about most anything at all within the confines of the Catholic community and to talk to the "not me" communities outside the Catholic box, and the straights, who hanker for a return to the world of "so certain and set apart." As Cornwell notes,
The Cambridge historian Eamon Duffy once described the Catholic Church as a “conversation” reaching back and forwards in time and space; but there are other current images. There is talk, even in the Vatican, of the Church as a black hole, a dysfunctional family. As Cardinal Ratzinger, Benedict XVI once referred to the Church as a collapsing star, the detritus of dissent and relativism spinning in orbit around the shrinking mass of the true remnant.
The ultimate effect of the decline of the Catholic conversation and the ascendancy of the black hole with its (imagined) true remnant occupying the center of the dysfunction: loss of moral influence in the public sector. Because you can't have significant moral influence in the body politic--not in pluralistic secular democracies--if you eschew conversation for rigid, top-down, conformity enforced by decrees.
Conversation--open, free, respectful, far-ranging conversation--is at the very heart of the enterprise of modern secular democracies. In attacking the notion that such conversation is valuable within the church itself, the leaders of the contemporary Catholic church are also giving the impression that they don't value the notion of democracy itself. Period. For anyone.
And that they'd be perfectly willing to assist other anti-democratic movements to deconstruct the entire modern democratic enterprise, if the act of deconstructing modernity and democracy promises to resurrect the authority of clerical leaders. So that increasing numbers of people in the developed nations of the world, who have decided that imperfect as it is, the vision of a pluralistic society of many different "not me" communities bound together by notions of tolerance, respect for one another, and human decency towards each other is valuable and worth pursuing, are simply not listening any longer to the leaders of the Catholic church.
Nor should they.
(A note of thanks to Alan McCornick of the wonderful Hepzibah blog for sending Cornwell's article to me--and don't miss Alan's sharp reflection Sunday about what the papal nuncio to Britain, Antonio Mennini, has just announced to people of faith and the general public that "we Catholics" in the British Isles value as the new millennium is underway.)
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