Michael J. Iafrate on Pussy Riot, Theology, and the Catholic Conversation

Finding Ears to Hear

And another just-now-seeing-it posting at another blog site: Michael Iafrate has recently been posting again at his excellent catholicanarchy.org site, and via his latest posting there, I learn that he posted a reflection some days ago at Rock and Theology about the theological implications of Pussy Riot's protest in Moscow.  As I did in a previous posting, Michael addresses the surprisingly unsympathetic response of Margaret Steinfels at Commonweal to the sentencing of the three young women in the punk group.  

Michael links to a statement by Bridget, a Notre Dame Ph.D. candidate, at the Women in Theology site which finds Steinfels's response to the Pussy Riot conviction "dismissive and gendered."  And then he notes how far removed the Commonweal crowd, many Catholic theologians, bloggers, and journalists are from popular culture.  And so, while the Catholic commentariat wrings its hands about the exodus of many Catholics--notably younger ones--from the church today, it floats superciliously above the world in which those fellow Catholics live, never engaging it, never trying to think about or understand it.  Or to listen to real Catholics who don't inhabit the rarefied, exclusive heights that the commentariat occupies . . . 

Michael writes: 

The Commonweal crowd could start, first, by Googling the English translation of the song Pussy Riot performed. They could then go on to read some of the many articulate statements written by members of the band. I would then recommend looking up some of the many commentaries by sympathetic observers in order to try to understand what the Pussy Riot phenomenon means to them. Such expressions are not hard to find, but one could start with this piece by Lindsay Zoladz. For some context on Pussy Riot’s place in the traditions of punk rock, Riot Grrrl, and contemporary feminisms, I strongly recommend Pitchfork.com’s interview with Kathleen Hannah (Bikini Kill, Le Tigre, etc.). They might be surprised to find Pussy Riot, and the movement that is beginning to form around them, “intentionally or accidentally helping the church meet its own potential theological goals of distinguishing Christianity from state power,” as Tom Beaudoin hypothesized early on. And they might find that in an election cycle in which religion, specifically Roman Catholicism, is at the center of popular discussion, the issues PR has raised have wide global resonance, taking us beyond the tired cyclic political debates within Catholic intellectual circles, if only they had ears to hear.

[T]hey might find that in an election cycle in which religion, specifically Roman Catholicism, is at the center of popular discussion, the issues PR has raised have wide global resonance, taking us beyond the tired cyclic political debates within Catholic intellectual circles, if only they had ears to hear: a fine--an important--conclusion, which deserves a very wide hearing.  Or so it seems to me.

It deserves a wide hearing if the conversation about Catholic identity is really going to have anything at all to do with catholicity itself.  Because catholicity surely means a hell of a lot more than the tiny grab-bag of officially ordained topics for conversation and official permitted stances now represented by the intensely parochial and exceptionally stilted normative conversation of the American Catholic center.