Churches and the Ethic of Life: Facing the Human Cost of Employment Crisis

The AP is reporting Labor Department statistics that show a current all-time high for job losses in the United States (here). The human fallout of this situation has been on my mind this week, after I received an email from a friend telling me of the suicide of a friend of his family. It appears that this man took his life due to the economic downturn.

I fear that we may see skyrocketing suicides with further job losses. And as I think about these issues, I realize my optic on them was shaped early in my life by a tragic family story that I encountered sooner than I would have liked. It has to do with the suicide of my mother’s half-brother.

My mother’s brother Carl was the son of my grandfather’s first marriage. Carl’s mother died within days of his birth. For a number of years after that, my great-grandmother kept house for my grandfather and raised his son along with Ella, the daughter of my grandfather’s oldest sister Arabella, who had died young.

When my great-grandmother died, my grandfather was sorely in need of a housekeeper-nanny, and he married my grandmother, who was twenty years his junior, and from a social background different from his own. I mention this because it may be a dynamic that plays into the story of Carl’s life, something that added to his sense of being alien in the family in which he grew up. My grandfather had been born on a plantation in Alabama, and grew up on what remained of an old plantation in Mississippi following the war (he was born just after the war, in 1869). Though his family had no resources to speak of in that period in which every Southern family struggled merely to get by, they had a history of . . . well, something they never quite put into words: status, education, social dominance.

My grandmother, by contrast, grew up on a small, self-sufficient farm in central Arkansas. Growing up, she never traveled further than Little Rock, a twenty-mile trip that took all day on the rare occasions when her family took a wagon into the city to buy or sell goods or conduct other business. Her husband went off to school after he completed the standard eight years of education provided by public schools then. My grandmother had only the eight years of schooling.

When she reached marriageable age and had fallen in love with a young man she liked—the brother of her sister Fanny’s husband—my great-grandmother chose to interfere with my grandmother’s happiness and heaped guilt on her for wishing to leave home. My grandmother was the youngest daughter in a family of sixteen children, and her mother expected her to remain at home as long as my great-grandmother lived, to care for her mother and the younger brothers still unmarried at that time.

When their mother died, the “children” remaining at home (all adults by then, but unmarried) were parceled out to the homes of various siblings. My grandmother spent several miserable years living with her sister Alice, whose husband would complain bitterly in her hearing about the cost of boarding Hattie.

So when my grandfather asked for her hand, she jumped at the chance to marry, though she had no strong attraction to this older man whose mother and sisters had long treated her with disdain, due to the social distance they imagined between their families. The marriage was a ticket out: out of the misery of a dependent, unmarried woman in a society in which being married counted for everything in the life of a woman, and in which opportunities to marry as one pleased were few and far between. My grandparents spent almost two decades together, not in a loveless marriage, but not in one that happened due to romantic love. And they were, as far as I have ever heard, happily married, having six children, with Carl, the step-son from the first marriage added to this brood to make seven.

When my grandfather died in 1930, the Depression was just getting underway. Needless to say, this produced major trauma for my grandmother and the family she was left to provide for as a youngish widow of forty-one. In later years, she would often mention her horror when the banks closed and she realized only a nickel for every dollar she and my grandfather had saved. They had opened small accounts for each child; those, too, were wiped out, leaving their daughter Margaret in a fear that lingered throughout her adult life, of the sudden closing of banks and the unreliability of the economic system.

This was the situation in which my mother’s half-brother Carl grew up—the son of a widow who was not his mother, with six half-siblings who were the children of the woman raising him. I have heard nothing but high praise of my grandmother for her commitment to mothering this son. When she spoke of Carl to me in her late life, she always did so with tears in her eyes, as she said, “It cuts to the quick to lose a parent, but losing a child is unthinkable.”

Still, I imagine Carl has to have felt alien in a family that was not quite, not totally, his family. And his struggles with his demons, as he came of age, did not help matters: he apparently had a serious drinking problem, and he was the kind of drunk who rampaged when he drank, so that the family endured embarrassing scenes in their small town, in which he caused so much trouble that my grandmother would take the other children to the fields behind their house and sleep outside on nights when he was uncontrollable.

Some of this rage may have been fed by the sense of guilt that children whose mothers die at their birth are sometimes said to endure. Part of it had to do, I suspect, with Carl’s realization that he was intellectually gifted, but had no venue in which to pursue his gifts in a small Arkansas town in the grip of the Depression, with a widowed mother struggling to make ends meet for her large family. The professor who headed the local high school said that he had never encountered a student of the brilliance of Carl and one of his first cousins on my grandfather's side of the family.

My grandmother confirmed the judgment: she was amazed at the scope of Carl’s knowledge, much of it gleaned from his wide, constant reading of any book he could get his hands on. He would lie by the fireplace at night, reading by its light after the rest of the family had long ago gone to bed, oblivious to everything around him.

With little opportunity to do anything with his intelligence, Carl joined the army when the war came along, though he was older than most of those with whom he enlisted—he was in his thirties. The war gave him something to do, places to go. It also scarred him. He came home speaking with horror about the bodies he saw lining the roads into Russia when his cavalry unit marched there, of the hunger they saw in Italy, where people in small towns would rush out to cut up any horse that died on the streets, cooking and eating the flesh as soon as they were able to do so.

When he returned home, Carl could not find his way. Everything had changed. My grandmother had sold the family’s small general merchandise store and had moved into the city, into Little Rock, where her adult children could more easily find work. All of his siblings now had jobs, good ones, ones that paid well and seemed secure.

From what I’ve been told, Carl spent weeks on his return scouring ads for jobs, going to job interviews, never finding a job. I have not been told this, but I suspect he was drinking heavily as he was job-hunting, and this added to his lack of luck at securing employment. It was a particular shame to him that all of his sisters were working, as teachers and secretaries. As the oldest son, he felt obliged to support them and his step-mother. He felt worthless when he could not find a job.

And so he shot himself. In the weeks before he took that step, he carefully cut his face from almost every picture the family had of him, so that we now have very few pictures of him at any period of his life. On the night he chose to kill himself, he returned to his boyhood house in the small town twenty miles southeast of Little Rock, took a shotgun shell and removed most of the pellets so that the act would not create too much of a mess, put the barrel of the gun into his mouth, and pulled the trigger.

My grandmother’s niece's husband found Carl’s body the following morning. My mother—always regarded as the strong one, the one daughter who, as a neighbor told me many years later, was not a flighty Southern belle—had the unhappy duty of identifying her brother’s body at the morgue. She told me years later that when she did so, she saw blood running from his ear. She had nightmares the rest of her life, in which her brother would knock at the door and she would open it to find him drenched in blood.

I didn’t know all of these details as I grew up, but I did know of Carl’s suicide—sooner than I would have preferred to be burdened with such knowledge. When I was four years old, my parents had a huge row one evening. The next morning, my father sat my brothers and me down in the breakfast nook and solemnly informed us that my mother had had a half-brother who had shot himself. That was his less than mature way of getting back at my mother for whatever was the grievance between them.

This made a huge impression on me not only because of the sensational nature of the news, but because, from the time I was tiny, I had been compared to Carl by various relatives. We shared the same name: his first name was William, after the great-grandfather for whom his father was also named, a name that marks us in that family line, since it passes down from generation to generation, from the first generation of the family to settle in Maryland in the early 1700s. I loved to read, and read voraciously, with the same total absorption in whatever I was reading that the grown-ups told me my uncle had had.

I suppose this is, in part, why I am telling his story in such detail. He died unmarried, and those who knew him are now themselves dying. Soon, there will be no one left who remembers these tragic details of a promising life cut far too short. In remembering Carl, I am, I tell myself, making his life count. And I’m carrying on a commission that, without ever declaring it so, his sister, my mother’s oldest sister Kat, bequeathed to me.

When Kat died in 2001 and her remaining sister Billie and I cleared out my grandmother’s house, I found a trove of materials Kat had gathered about her brother: letters from soldiers with whom he served, who told her that his IQ test showed him having the highest IQ in their unit, and so they could not understand his suicide; scrapbooks full of articles tracking the movements of his unit, insofar as those at home had any information about this during the war; report cards and medical tests. Kat never accepted Carl’s suicide. On the day she received the news, she took a train home from the school at which she was teaching and collapsed across the front gate of the old homeplace, where the family had gathered. To the end of her life, she believed that he had shot himself because he had learned he had cancer: hence the preservation of any of his medical records she could find.

It’s clear, though, that Carl’s inability to find work after the war played the major role in his deliberations to end his life. I’ve noted, as well, that Carl was unmarried. Towards the end of her life, my mother chose to talk more frankly about questions of sexuality than she had ever done as I was growing up. Since I wanted to take advantage of this new openness to real dialogue about important issues before my mother lost all mental acuity (as she rapidly did in her final years), I can remember asking her whether her brother Carl had ever dated or had serious relationships with women.

She told me he hadn’t, not that she could recall. No, none at all.

And, of course, I can’t help wondering about that, too, and about the possibility that one of the additional burdens my mother’s half-brother carried around in that small town with limited opportunities was the burden of knowing that he was gay—and with no vocabulary at all with which to speak about this recognition, since no words existed to identify or define gay members of the community.

Unemployment takes a toll. When those dealing with the impossibility of finding work struggle as well with other issues that affect their self worth, joblessness can become an impossible burden to bear. For men, who define themselves according to what they do, not having a job can be lethal.

I am intently concerned about the effects of the job crisis in which we now find ourselves—about the real-life effects of the abysmal statistics on real human beings. Someone—all of us—need to be helping to pick up the human pieces, to prevent stories like Carl’s from happening now.

I continue to think—and have blogged about this previously (here)—that the churches have an obligation to assist in this regard. They do so because it is part of their mission, part of their calling as redemptive presences in the world.

They do so as well because the churches—many of them—have helped get us into this mess. Many church leaders worked very hard to place in office the leaders who walked us into our current economic crisis. It is the obligation of churches to help now, to provide safety nets for people struggling with unemployment. These could include seminars on dealing with unemployment, services to support families struggling with job crises, and outright assistance—church-sponsored health care, meals, loans through credit unions, and so on.

I will not hold my breath as I wait to see churches face this obligation. But I continue to wonder how churches can talk about themselves as churches, and not face such obligations. Or how churches can talk about the ethic of life and expect to convince anyone of its importance, without accepting such obligations . . . .

Some Notes on the Meaning of Church in Light of Benedict's Rehabilitation of SSPX (2)

A week ago, I posted some notes (here) on Vatican Council II. I wanted to look back at that council in light of the choice of the current pope, Benedict XVI, to rehabilitate a group who reject that ecumenical council, the Society of St. Pius X. As that posting promised, I also want to append to that initial discussion some reflections about the practical implications for the church today of the different ecclesiological paths represented by Vatican II and those in reaction to the council.

My previous posting argues that ecclesiology (how we are to understand and talk about the church) is fundamental to Vatican II. When John XXIII convened this council of the entire church (that’s what the term “ecumenical” means; these councils are thought to represent the Spirit’s direction for the entire church), he sought to return to ancient ecclesiologies that had been discarded in the church of the Counter Reformation and the modern period. In his view, the time for defensive reaction against modernity was past. The church needed to retrieve its ancient ecclesiologies in order to engage the world redemptively and dialogically, and not merely by way of constant condemnation.

My posting notes that the church of the Counter Reformation and modernity was primarily a church in reaction: first to the Protestant Reformation, and then to the rise of modernity, with its sovereign nation states, scientific worldview, emphasis on human rights (including the rights of women), and historical-critical methods for interpreting the Bible. The church of this period envisaged believers as prey to destructive, godless currents of thought from which they had to be protected.

The church of the Counter Reformation and the modern period closed ranks, drew into a fortress, pulled the drawbridge up over the moat, and hurled down threats and anathemas against the entire modern project. Its leaders preached to the laity that absolute, unquestioning obedience was the primary virtue. Without total obedience, the church could not effectively combat the threat of modernity.

The church of this period stressed what it called the deposit of faith, the doctrinal inheritance the church transmits from generation to generation, based on scripture and tradition. The deposit of faith was thought of in objectified terms as a body of “truths” that had to be safeguarded and transmitted to the faithful, and which it was the duty of the faithful to receive with unquestioning obedience and intellectual assent, if they hoped to be Catholic and to achieve salvation.

A single philosophical tradition, neo-Thomism, an adaptation (and bastardization) of a richer Thomist tradition from the medieval period, became the authorized language for presentation of these “truths”—almost as if that philosophical language and its formulas were part of the deposit of faith itself, and not to be questioned. Faith, in this tradition, came to be understood primarily as something the mind does—intellectual assent—rather than as something that the whole person does, mind, soul, heart, and body, through giving oneself to God. The notion of faith that prevailed in the church of reaction to modernity stressed the willingness to accept “truths” handed down by the church in approved philosophical formulas, rather than the personal relationship of the believer to God which is central in biblical understandings of faith.

This approach to church life—constant enmity towards the world, with a heavy emphasis on “truths” captured in neo-Thomist philosophical formulas, and the obligation of the faithful to assent to and defend those truths—went hand in hand with the understanding of the church as a perfect society, something I noted in my previous posting. The church of the perfect society was above all orderly and unified: from top to bottom, through rules handed down from its absolute monarch through his henchmen in each local church, the bishops, and their representatives at the parish level, pastors. The perfect society model of the church rests on the presupposition that if one removes any aspect of that top-down approach to church life—pope safeguarding the deposit of faith, handing its truths down to bishops, who oversee the transmission of those truths by priests to the faithful—the entire system would fall apart.

With its movement back to the much more traditional ecclesiologies of the Christian scriptures and the patristic era, that is precisely what happened, in the minds of those who had everything invested in the perfect-society model, with its top-down leadership style. Their strong push against Vatican II is rooted in a belief that everything has fallen apart in the Catholic church, insofar as it began to question the perfect-society ecclesiology and to make changes in its institutional life reflecting its critique of that model.

This is to say that those attacking Vatican II have refused, at a fundamental level, to give up the attack on modernity—even in this period in which influential cultural commentators insist we have moved beyond modernity to postmodernity. In their worldview, the world remains a dark and sinful place to be combated and overcome. Contrary to Vatican II, which for the first time in Catholic history began to speak of the Protestant churches as churches, valid Christian communions led by the Spirit, from whom Catholics can learn, those resisting Vatican II continue to insist that the Catholic church has exclusive ownership of the truth and Protestant churches are threats to the unity and purity of Catholicism.

The fundamental impulse of those rejecting Vatican II is to continue to close ranks, weed out dissenters, and fight—from within the fortress, where truth reigns and everything is in perfect order, insofar as each member of the church assents to all truths in the deposit of faith. This is a fight pitched directly against the key ecclesiologies that Vatican II retrieved from ancient tradition: the images of the church as the pilgrim people of God and the body of Christ.

Certainly those images were not absent from ecclesiological thought before Vatican II. But they were subordinated to the image of the perfect society, and their implications were not adequately explored, since they could not be explored as long as the perfect-society model prevailed. When those gathered at Vatican II made the fateful decision to move away from the perfect-society ecclesiology, with all that this implied about the church’s relationship to the world and how the church organizes its inner life, a simultaneous decision was made to give primacy of place to the images of the church as the people of God and the body of Christ.

And that’s when the trouble began. It is well-nigh impossible to synthesize the perfect-society model with the people of God model of church. One metaphor stresses order and control; the other stresses communion and participation. One privileges top-down leadership and unquestioning obedience to the leader on top. The other emphasizes the presence of the Spirit in each believer and the need for each believer to seek God in her or his own pilgrim journey.

The implications of these two ecclesiologies for the inner life of the church—for how it views itself, preaches about itself, organizes itself—are starkly different. If the church took seriously what Vatican II says about the church as the pilgrim people of God (and I would argue it has not yet done so, due to powerful resistance to Vatican II in its leadership circles), the entire way the church structures itself would have to be revised at a very fundamental level.

For instance, the top-down approach to transmitting the deposit of faith would have to give way to a more participatory, communal style of discerning the Spirit’s voice in the church. The latter approach need not imply the abolition of pastoral leaders, of those designated within the community to listen carefully to the voice of the Spirit in the entire people of God and then to formulate the significance of what the Spirit is saying for all.

But what would have to change is the autocratic, anti-democratic style of the church’s leaders, a style rooted in the imperial traditions of the Roman Empire and not in the gospels. What would also have to change is the assumption that the ordained members of the church (clerics) should have special power and privilege among the people of God—and that the people of God should be powerless objects in an institution in which only the ordained can exercise power.

I am emphasizing the question of where clerics fit in the scheme of things because, in my view, much of the hidden reaction to Vatican II in the church today—the hidden attempt to continue the perfect-society model inside the shell of the people of God model—arises out of clericalism. Since Vatican II, the Catholic church has been stuck—deliberately arrested in its attempt to come to terms with that council and its ecclesiology—because of the determination of powerful groups at the center to maintain the clericalist system within the church.

These powerful interest groups know full well that if the system that provides power and privilege to clerics and denies it to the rest of the people of God were questioned at a fundamental level, everything in the church would have to change. Their resistance to Vatican II is fueled not merely by a resistance to the Council’s retrieval of the people of God ecclesiology, or to modernity: it is fueled by resistance to any attempt to critique the clerical system that is integral to the perfect-society model.

In the way the crisis of clerical sexual abuse has been handled by the church's leaders—from Rome down to the level of national bishops' conferences and of individual bishops—we see the handwriting on the wall: that crisis is rooted in clericalism and can never adequately be addressed unless we examine honestly the horrific price the whole church pays for keeping this system intact. But both the Vatican and prominent leaders of most national churches adamantly resist this critique and any attempt to delve into the damages clericalism has inflicted on the church. Their response to the crisis—shielding priests, blaming and revictimizing victims of abuse, playing hardball with lawyers and courts, lying and refusing the disclosure of information sought by the public and the legal system—is all about their intent to hold onto the clericalist system. At all costs.

To a great extent, the resistance to Vatican II in many sectors of the church represents a preferential option for clericalism—for a continuation of the clericalist model in church life, for a continuation of the special power and privilege clerics enjoy in the church, and for the continued subordination of the laity to the clerical elite. Those combating Vatican II—both overtly, as in SSPX, and covertly, from the center of the church, where the reforms mandated by the council have been checkmated by the restorationist agenda—are willing to wager the future of the church on the continuation of clericalism. At all costs.

They are willing to subordinate the church and its future, in other words, to a mutable, historically developed polity and system of structuring the church, that (in the view of many observers) gives unjust power and privilege to the clerical elite. This is—ultimately—why a tacit decision has been made among the ruling sectors of the church to edge out millions of Catholics in the developed nations of the world, who were energized by Vatican II's retrieval of the people of God ecclesiology. This is why church leaders continue to ally themselves with movements that have strong ties to fascism, including Opus Dei, the Legionnaires of Christ, and SSPX, while battering theologians who explore the implications of Vatican II and pushing millions of their brothers and sisters who find hope in the council out of communion.

This is, in the final analysis, what Benedict’s smaller, purer church is all about. It is not merely a church that preserves essential features of the perfect-society model in the shell of Vatican II. It is a church that absolutely resists any and all critiques of clericalism, and above all, any institutional changes that will concede something to critiques of clericalism. It is a smaller, purer clericalist church, in which historically conditioned understandings of the priesthood and its place in the church have been elevated to the status of unchangeable doctrine. Benedict welcomes SSPX because, in key respects, even with its rejection of Vatican II, the ecclesiology of that schismatic group is closer to Benedict’s than is that of millions of Catholics of the post-Vatican II era.

Cooking to Save the Planet: Turning Seasons, Sprouting Potatoes

Another in my series of postings about eating to save the earth (here)--cooking with readily available local ingredients that do not stress the food chain, cooking with what is on hand. As I've noted in my previous postings on this topic, the point of these discussions is not so much to provide recipes but to provoke thought about how readers might look at their own local areas and the food seasonally available in those areas, and cook with the earth in mind.


In this case, the "recipe" (such as it is) begins with a problem: what to do when your potatoes and onions begin, all at once, to sprout? I think this is a common challenge in many households where these workhorses of the larder are gathered in summer and stored through winter. There comes a point when winter is giving way to spring, in which both potatoes and onions begin to sprout. And it seems to happen all at once, to both.


When I noticed this happening last week in my kitchen, it occurred to me that the vegetables were actually signaling to me something positive: that this is a season, the cusp of winter turning to spring, when one can take advantage of the rush of old life to renew itself. Since I had also noticed enticing bunches of green Vidalia onions in the store last week--another late winter, early spring gift of the earth in this area--I decided to stage a meal focusing on winter potatoes and onions, with fresh green spring onions added.


And with a flourish: I think I've mentioned before that I routinely cook soup for a friend. In fact, on her birthday last year, I made a promise (my birthday gift to her) to provide her with a quart of fresh homemade soup each week. This is not a burden at all. We love soup and I keep it on hand all the time. But this arrangement makes cooking the soup even more of a joy, since I know that I am cooking it not only for ourselves but for others.


It happens that this friend has quite the story of a culinary adventure several years ago with her sister. Sister is, as with many scions of old branches of old local families, sometimes a bit on the margins--in a good way, you understand. The kind of way-out-there relative Southern families delight in having--and might as well delight in having, since we seem to breed them so readily.


On the occasion I'm recounting here, Sister and my friend were on a trip through the Amish country of Pennsylvania. Seeing the fields of corn made Sister ravenous for corn, so she pulled up at an Amish farmhouse with a sign about food for sale, rang the bell, and asked what was available.


Noticing bits of corn around the mouths of the children, she pointedly asked if they happened to have any cooked corn for sale. At which point--and probably a tad bit terrified by crazy Southern lady--the shy children went inside and came out with a bowl from the table, full of freshly picked corn on the cob. And the butter dish with a trough in the butter where the family had rolled each cob to butter it.


The angelic children then politely wrapped up the butter in wax paper, handed over their dinner, and off my friend and Sister rode, to find the first turn-off at which they could stop and devour the fresh buttered corn.


All of this is to say that I decided to add corn to this particular pot of soup just so that I could remind the friend with whom I'm sharing the soup about that story. With each batch of soup I give her, I also provide a recipe. This one will begin with, "Find a crazy lady who will terrify Amish children into turning over their dinner of corn to you." I intend to call the soup Amish Potato and Onion Soup.


So I took what I had, plus corn, and this is what happened. After carefully cleaning the green onions (which can hold grit), I chopped them fine (whites and greens) with one of the onions sprouting in my pantry, and slowly wilted these in butter, with a finely chopped rib of celery added. When that had cooked down, I added three tablespoons of flour, stirred it in carefully, and then began adding stock, mixing carefully so that the flour did not lump.


When the bottom of the pot had been well scraped and the pot filled about halfway with water (salt and pepper added to taste), I then added about five of the sprouting potatoes, peeled and cut into small cubes. I brought all to the boil with a handful of chopped parsley added, and then covered and simmered.


After the potatoes had cooked through, I turned off the heat and added several cups of milk with another knob of butter and a bit more flour worked into it, to thicken the soup more. At this point, I added the corn--two 16-ounce packages of frozen corn. I brought the pot to a boil again to help thicken and cook the flour, and then turned it off and added more fresh parsley and ground pepper.


And that was our meal, with good bread and cheese. And somehow a fitting meal on a cold, gray day at the end of winter, when the body longs for something green like the onion blades and parsley (spring), but something substantial as well, like potatoes and onions, milk and butter (winter). It's not a glitzy soup. It's as plain as daisies and clover. But it's as beautiful as those humble blooms we too often take for granted, while we pine for orchids.


And it would be spectacular, I think, with some dried porcini mushrooms added to provide depth to the stock and interest to the potatoes and onions. And hearty, with little drop dumplings added--something I think Amish cooks might be capable of doing. (And, of course, I'm writing about soup this morning because I'm avoiding the continuation of my reflections on Vatican II, which are too much like work, but which will follow.)

More on Recent Anti-Gay Initiatives

A video released in West Virginia by a mysterious group trying to frame gay citizens as snipers who might attack traditional families; a full-page ad in Utah newspapers on the weekend, released by an equally mysterious group, slamming gays (here).

And now reports of a rally against gay marriage in Augusta, Maine, on Sunday, organized by the Family Research Council (here). And a renewed push in North Carolina to push for a state constitutional amendment banning gay marriage (here).

Accidental, the timing of these events? I don't think so. Not at all. We're seeing the unfolding of an orchestrated campaign to use the gay issue--and gay human beings, and gay lives--as a wedge issue to try to reclaim Republican voters. And to try to siphon off support for the new administration, particularly in states that used to be solidly Republican but are gaining Democratic voters.

It's cynical. It's calculated. And it's well-funded.

I'd very much like to know who's pouring money into those initiatives in West Virginia and Utah, whose funding sources and proponents are so mysteriously vague. If, God forbid, violence ensues as a result of their hate rhetoric, someone--some real human being--should be held accountable.

Rod Dreher and Faith in the Church: People Need Church Too Much to Know Full Truth

I’ve been following with interest a thread at Commonweal (here) discussing a recent USA Today article by neocon columnist Rod Dreher (here) explaining why he has chosen to leave the Catholic church. Dreher’s piece is entitled “How Much ‘Truth’ Is Too Much Truth.”

Dreher credits the clerical sexual abuse scandal with shattering his confidence in the Catholic church. As the wide parameters of that scandal became apparent from 2002 forward—and as it also became apparent that the hierarchy, all the way to Rome, had long known about this scandal and had covered it up—Dreher “lost the will to believe and became profoundly spiritually depressed.” And so he and his family made the trek out of the Catholic church and into the Orthodox Church of America—a church whose scandals he does not intend to investigate, for fear of deligitimating the religious authority on which his faith now rests.

Dreher’s analysis pushes an interesting question, one he batted about with Richard John Neuhaus before that leading neoconservative Catholic figure died in January. This is whether people need to know and how much they need to know: hence the title of Dreher’s piece, how much truth is too much?

Neuhaus was unambiguous—unambiguously on the side of suppression of information that (in Neuhaus's judgment: an important qualification) people do not need to know: “There are things (Catholics) really don't want to know about their church," he maintained. Neuhaus censored information about the abuse crisis in the journal First Things, noting that "we thought there were some things people didn't need to know and didn't want to know, and for good reasons."

Dreher, by contrast, is conflicted. His conservative convictions lean in Neuhaus’s direction—that is, in the direction of censorship:

I do not believe Father Neuhaus was a cynic; he really did believe that there were certain things that ought to be concealed from the public for the greater good. And though it might be heresy for a journalist to say, as a matter of general principle, I agree with him.

But on the other hand, as Dreher notes, Jesus informed his followers that they would know the truth, and the truth would set them free. And God knows, if neonconservative Catholics talk about anything at all, it's about truth, and Truth: that rock on which they imagine everything is so solidily founded.

We also live in a culture that values the free exchange of information—an exchange premised on people’s right to know—and, as Dreher notes, institutions that seek to cover up damaging information about themselves court further damage when that information (and their deception) becomes public:

But any institution — sacred or secular — that has to depend on deception, and the willingness of its people to be deceived, to maintain its legitimacy will not get away with it for long. These days, the attempt to withhold or suppress information doesn't work to protect authority, but rather to undermine it.

Even so, Dreher concludes, the claims of authority figures and authoritative institutions (the terms “authority” and “authoritative” loom large in Dreher’s thought: on which, more in a moment) are implicitly undermined when we allow the free exchange of any and all information. The free flow of information is inherently corrosive to authority and “full transparency can harm society — and even, perhaps, our souls”:

Societies cannot survive without authoritative institutions. Societies cannot survive without authoritative institutions. But which authoritative persons or institutions can withstand constant critical scrutiny? In our culture, we are predisposed to see damage done from failing to question authority. We are far less capable of grasping the destruction that can come from delegitimizing authority with corrosive suspicion. How much reality must we choose to ignore for the greater good of our own souls, and society?

In the final analysis, Dreher concludes, “People need the church too much to know the full truth about her.”

I appreciate Dreher’s candor. Conservative (and neoconservative) thinkers do not always admit something that is strongly apparent to their critics: their penchant for censorship, and the authoritarian philosophical claims that underlie that penchant. The desire to suppress information that discloses less than admirable behavior or motives in institutions they admire is woven deeply into conservative ideology and conservative souls. As is the desire to attack and disempower those who promote the free exchange of information that they consider damaging to their authority figures and authoritative institutions . . . .

For a number of reasons, I find Dreher’s argument entirely unconvincing and even dangerous—and for that reason, I’m surprised at the sympathy it appears to receive among those centrist Catholics who form the knowledge class of the American Catholic church. It’s an argument that is all about enshrining authority—that is to say, certain authoritative figures and authoritative institutions—in a cultural location that places them beyond criticism.

And that’s something that Christians cannot and must not do with any person or institution, including the church and its leaders. Constant critique of all social structures and all institutions (and their leaders)—including the church and its leaders—is a fundamental obligation of Christians, an obligation inbuilt in the call to discipleship. It is our obligation and our call because the failure to critique leads to idolatry. What is beyond criticism—beyond the free flow of information, no matter how damaging that information may be to the claims of the institution or person being critiqued—is an idol. And idols exact flesh: we pay a high price for forming them.

If Dreher is correct in his claim that “people need the church too much to know the full truth about her,” then the price we must pay to make the church credible—to enable it fulfill our needs—is a steep price, indeed: it’s the price of turning the church into something fixed and beyond critique, which we end up serving in the end, even as we claim that the church exists to meet our needs and to serve us.

This is one of the theological points I wanted to make in my initial posting about the ecclesiology of Vatican II the other day (here). One of the key implications of the traditional patristic and biblical ecclesiology Vatican II retrieves is that, as the pilgrim people of God within history, the church never finds a permanent place in history. It is always on pilgrimage, always critiquing every social structure in light of the vision of the reign of God that urges the church forward throughout all historical periods.

And applying that vision of the reign of God and its critique of all social structures to itself: as an institution on pilgrimage, which refuses to settle down in history and canonize (and idolize) any particular social or political structure, any particular moment, any particular way of being in the world, the church has a constant obligation to be self-critical. To admit that its present and past ways of being in the world simultaneously move towards and betray the vision of the reign of God that is the engendering center of the church as it moves through history . . . .

As I read Dreher and Neuhaus, I wonder what those who accept these thinkers’ ideological penchant for censorship do with the many “inconveniences” of the history of the church. And I’m afraid I do know very well what their tendency is, as they deal with these “inconveniences”: the principle of censorship is applied not just to troubling information in the present, but to information from the past, as well.

The abuse crisis is horrific. I’m appalled that so many Catholics seem content to live with it—to carry on business as usual, to act as if we can continue being church in the same old untroubled way, without a fundamental analysis of what this crisis means for us as church. Without a revolution. Without, it often seems to me, much awareness at all of the many lives shattered by the leaders of a church with whom many of us are still content to live all too cozily, without demanding more—of them. And of ourselves.

Even so, I’m also painfully aware that this is hardly the first time the church has so betrayed its fundamental mission and identity that it is exceedingly difficult to know how to place one’s faith in the church, because of what it has done. There have been other dark moments, after all—the Inquisition, holy wars, the witch hunts, pogroms and ghettoes, blessing of troops and burning of heretics, slavery, welcome of Nazis, the never-ceasing abuse of women century after century and all the theological arguments developed to legitimate that abuse.

The church’s history is replete with damaging information that undermines its claims—and this is true of all churches, and not merely the Catholic church. Those of us who remain in any way connected to an institution that can behave in such shameful, anti-gospel, anti-Christian ways need to be constantly aware of the propensity of the church to do evil, to trample on people, to turn human lives upside down and harm human beings dreadfully.

We need to be aware of that tendency so that we can struggle to keep the church from doing this again in our day. And to stop ourselves from doing so, with the same unthinking abandon of believers in the past, who often assaulted other human beings because they felt entitled to do so—precisely as believers.

I am surprised, in short, that those who want to shield us from accurate (and damaging) information about the church and its leaders seem to have a strong doctrine of the sanctity of the church while lacking an equally strong doctrine of the sinfulness of the church. History would seem to indicate the need for both doctrines—and for those two doctrines to be held in tension with each other, at every period of the church’s history.

I understand the nostalgia for an institution beyond critique. At the same time, I find that nostalgia ultimate ly childish. Running through so much neoconservative argumentation about the need to preserve cherished institutions in the face of rampant social change and social decline is the belief that there are—or should be—unquestionable “authorities” behind it all. Authorities to whom we should submit, so that we are not engulfed by the changes around us . . . .

Scan Dreher’s writings, and you’ll find the words “authority” and “authoritative” everywhere. A particularly interesting (and, to my mind, revelatory) piece is an essay Dreher published in Dallas Morning News back in January, entitled “What Child-Men Need Is Some Tradition” (here). Dreher characterizes the tradition-denying men of the baby boom generation as “child-men,” men wrapped up in themselves, without traditional norms of manhood to instruct them about how to behave, how to become real men.

And in this cultural abandonment of manhood, authority is everything.

For 40 years now, we have been living through a cultural and psychological revolution that has rendered young men (indeed, most people) incapable of recognizing and submitting to authority . . . .

Which brings us to our latter-day child-men, the wayward sons of a generation that crawled on purple and never got over the experience. Quintillian and his successors through the ages knew that the process of becoming a man requires a juvenile male to subordinate his own desires to an objective code of conduct – which is to say, some sort of higher authority . . . .

They have deprived their sons of authoritative tradition, both in word and example, and with it the ability to transcend the adolescent state . . . .

Sad, isn’t it? Plaintive? Get out the handkerchiefs: the heart-rending cry of a generation of boy-men who feel they have lost their way as men, and who cannot find the trustworthy authority figures to shape them as men that they assume men of the past had. Men hungering for an authority figure to whom to submit. Men looking for an authoritative tradition to assure them that they are real men.

Men looking for a father.

One cannot read Dreher’s analysis of religion and the role that the flow of information plays in religious bodies without hearing that same plaintive cry there: the cry for a father that will not betray our expectations of a bona fide authority. The good father.

Built into the emphasis on authority in neoconservative ideology is patriarchy: a determination to make everyone else submit to the paternal authority figure on whom I have hinged my self-worth and my belief that the world has order, and is not headed to hell in a handbasket. What does not seem to strike Rod Dreher and did not seem to trouble Richard John Neuhaus is the possibility that not everyone in the world may share their psychodrama.

What does not seem to occur to these neoconservative thinkers is that not everyone may be so ravenous for authority—for male authority, for paternal authority—as they are. Or that not everyone in the world and in the churches may think that everything hinges on authority—and male authority in particular. And that not everyone shares their analysis of a world hurtling to destruction through its denial of authority and tradition and its thirst for information.

And to return to a theme I cannot seem to drop on this blog (here): isn’t it interesting that a centrist American Catholic publication like Commonweal and the members of the knowledge class of the center of American Catholicism that maintain the Commonweal blog are so attuned to the plaintive cry of Mr. Dreher as he is dispossessed of his church home—yet seemingly so tone-deaf to the cries of millions of other equally dispossessed brothers and sisters who never seem to have a hearing at the center? Kathleen Caveny characterizes Dreher’s piece about his struggle with the church as “anguished.”

Yes. And so, for years, have been the wonderful cries from the heart of John McNeill. And Andrew Sullivan. And James Alison. (And I have cited the names of gay men here, to make a point about the kind of male pain the center seems to notice, and the kind it refuses to notice, knowing all the while that I could also cite names of woman after woman, both gay and straight, whose story also deserves attention). And millions of other gay and lesbian Catholics to whose suffering at being excluded and having our faith shattered those at the center seem curiously inured.

As if we are not there. Not there at all. While child-men struggling with the loss of the good father—a predictable psychodynamic for those seeking adulthood, and one that is, on the whole, to be welcomed as we come to maturity—occupy center stage . . . .

Monitoring Hate Speech: Recent News in West Virginia and Utah

Two stories in the news the last several days catch my eye. I see connections between them that may not be apparent to some readers. And I think those connections deserve attention.

The first story has to do with a video just released by the group West Virginia for Marriage—WV4Marriage. The video contains footage implying that some insidious group or groups could open fire on unsuspecting “traditional” families in West Virginia.

The video is on the homepage of WV4Marriage (here). The footage showing a family in the sights of a sniper is about a minute into the video. The context leaves viewers in no doubt about who is “attacking” such families in West Virginia. The voiceover states explicitly that those mounting these “attacks” are proponents of same-sex marriage: the gays, in other words.

The first thing that catches my attention here is that this representation of hidden gays planning an attack on an iconic all-American mom-and-pop-and-apple-pie family verges on hate rhetoric. As Jim Burroway notes on Box Turtle Bulletin (here), the video was released just days after the sentencing of Jim David Adkisson, a real shooter who opened fire against liberals and gays in a Knoxville, Tennessee, church last year, and whose written statements about that act suggest that he hoped to spur others to do the same:

And to think that this irresponsible image went out right as Jim David Adkisson was sentenced for training his scope on a gay-friendly church. Images matter, especially in a well-armed state like West Virginia. This conjured image of a “homosexual threat” has clearly crossed the line.

It is malicious and irresponsible for any group to claim that gay folks pose a potential threat to their fellow citizens and to families—a violent threat—in a culture in which precisely the opposite is overwhelmingly the case. LGBT citizens remain susceptible to violence at a much higher rate than most other groups in American society, precisely and solely because they are gay.

Whoever produced this video—and, as I’ll explain below, that’s a question still not completely resolved—is spurring violence against gay citizens. This is a form of hate rhetoric, and it needs to be declared beyond the pale.

The second interesting point about this video: do some digging to try to discover who funded and produced it, and you quickly discover that the answer to that question is—well, mysterious. Heath Harrison on the West Virginia Blue blog has the full story (here).

As he notes, WV4Marriage implores concerned West Virginians to donate to WV4Marriage, but doesn’t provide any clear indication to whom one would be donating, if one did send money. A search for the producer of the video leads to an interesting discovery: it was produced out of state. In Georgia, to be precise. By the equally mysterious group CampaignSecrets.com.

A group apparently led by one Mark Montini. With a history of producing anti-gay web materials and with ties to the Swift Boat Veterans. In the WV4Marriage video, we have, then, a video targeting citizens of West Virginia produced by a citizen of another state, through a website whose sponsors, affiliations, and funding are not made clear, and with a producer tied to (to use Heath Harrison’s phrase) other national-level “conservative misinformation group(s)” that have tried to herd voters to the polls to vote for conservative candidates on the basis of disinformation.

Interestingly enough, this is not the only story to break in the last few days re: a campaign mounted by a mysterious group attacking gays and employing hate rhetoric in the process. As the Towleroad blog is reporting (here), on Sunday, a group called America Forever, with no business license or PAC registration in Utah, placed a full-page ad in the Salt Lake Tribune and Deseret News. Towleroad characterizes the ad as hate rhetoric:

The ad is replete with hateful rhetoric and fear tactics. In fact it's so extreme that even those who agree with the message behind it think the group, which "does not have a current Utah business license as a nonprofit nor is it registered as a political-issues or political-action committee" according to the Salt Lake Tribune (here), has crossed the line with the ad, which "compares being gay to being 'druggies and hookers,' labels homosexuality as 'anti-species behavior' and concludes that 'gays should be forced not to display' their sexual orientation."

As the preceding statement from Towleroad indicates, a 16 February article by Rosemary Winters in the Salt Lake Tribune notes that America Forever’s lack of Utah business or PAC registration. The article also notes that the group had not responded to the Tribune’s request for more information by the close of business on the 15th. Head to the America Forever website (here), and you’ll find a mission statement, but not (at least, not insofar as I can find) an address or information on who founded the group and/or currently directs it.

And there you have it: two anti-gay initiatives in a matter of days, both inciting hatred of gay human beings, both spearheaded by organizations whose source of funding and leadership is not clear. In one case, the organization producing the material targets a state in which the video producers don’t even appear to live. The same may well be true in the other case, given the lack of any registration in Utah of a group placing full-page ads in Utah newspapers.

What to make of these stories? Now that the economic stimulus plan has been passed, it seems clear that at least one strategy those on the right will be using to attack and undermine the new administration, as the administration demonstrates success in addressing serious problems, is inflammatory anti-gay rhetoric. This is rhetoric designed to trouble the political waters and keep people distracted, so that they focus on hot-button issues and not the success of the new administration. In addition to its video claiming “Christians” are being attacked in our society today if they express anti-gay views, the American Family Association announced on 11 February a new initiative called Project Push Back (here).

It hardly seems coincidental that we are seeing the emergence, all at once and precisely at this moment in the history of the new administration, of well-orchestrated attempts to play the anti-gay card as the administration begins to do its work of putting the nation back on track. These local attempts are part of a larger strategy of the political and religious right to distract by targeting vulnerable groups: to use hate to make political points. To target human beings and human lives. And, shamefully, to do so in the name of God.

Those of us concerned about the use of hate to undermine our democracy need to continue monitoring these groups. And the new administration needs (in my view) to stop playing footsie with the religious right. It’s important to note that, as these initiatives stir hatred against gay citizens, there is still no federal-level protection for gay citizens against discrimination, and no federal hate-crimes law that includes sexual orientation.

We need action on those fronts. Real human beings are the target of these hateful political initiatives. Hate rhetoric has effects on real human lives. We need to find ways to place such rhetoric beyond the pale, and to stop allowing religious groups to claim the right to attack fellow citizens, stir hatred, and discriminate in the name of God.

The Smaller, Purer Church: Observations from the Life of a Catholic Family

It occurs to me that, for readers of this blog, it may not be immediately apparent that my interest in the smaller, purer church Benedict has sought to build is more than academic. I’ve watched this restorationist theme play out for some years now in the life of a Catholic family close to me, and my reactions to the movement have much to do with the effects I see it having in this family’s life. These effects are, on the whole, destructive. And they’re accelerating in recent days, in part, due to the election of a president they regard as close to the anti-Christ, and in part, due to the hardened ideological lines the movement is creating all through their lives.

Let’s call this family the Schwanns. They’re a large Midwestern Catholic farm family, the kind often regarded as idyllic by those looking at their family life from the outside. Even as the birth rate of Catholic families in other regions of the country declined in the post-World War II period, theirs remained high—an expression of their unquestioning fidelity to church teaching, while the rest of the world had begun to critique aspects of Catholic teaching, and, in particular, sexual teachings.

Vatican II and its aftermath produced crisis for such Catholics. In key respects, they had been living in an ethnic, religious enclave up to Vatican II—and happily so. They didn’t have to pay much attention to what was going on outside their own world, which was totally Catholic, completely demarcated by ethnic and religious lines, so much so that their Lutheran neighbors were exotic to them, people they knew when they went to town, but with whom they didn’t socialize. And whom they definitely didn’t marry.

In one sense, Vatican II opened the Schwanns and their neighbors up to a new perspective: a new perspective not only on the church, but on the world. Since the council was underway as their children started going off to college, one of the usual effects of sending children off to school—the opening of a family to new friends and new experiences through connections the children form at school—was exacerbated by Vatican II. Several of the children went to Catholic colleges, where there was a new enthusiasm for social activism, travel, meeting and talking to those different from oneself.

For a time, this process created a small, quiet revolution in the Schwanns’ sedate Catholic-enclave farm life. They hosted exchange students from exotic places—Japan, Switzerland, Germany, France. Their children went to some of those places and brought friends home from their overseas jaunts. A number of the children even reached outside the ghetto to marry “outside”—Catholics, but Catholics of different ethnic backgrounds, Eastern European, French, Irish.

Two sons came out of the closet and announced that they were gay. Another married outside the church. Half of the children no longer go to church. The half that do go to church have retreated back into the shell with a vengeance. One of these, along with her family, has actually joined SSPX and had considered Benedict a schismatic until he rehabilitated her sect. Another wants to participate in SSPX but is forbidden by her husband, who considers it beyond the pale (plus, he has a position in the community to consider), though he likes and prefers the Latin Mass celebrated by a non-schismatic priest.

The Schwann family lost a key member last year who was a point of stability and moderation for the entire family. Without him, and in response to this year’s presidential election, the members of the family who affiliate with right-wing Catholic movements have, in recent months, slammed the door shut with a vengeance on anyone (including members of their own family) outside their chosen religious ghetto. They have pulled their mother, who was previously only on the fringes of the right-leaning religiosity of some of her children, into their cultic form of Catholicism.

To them, the election of Obama signals the beginning of the end, and is a signal to step up the devotions they have added to the usual Catholic ones. For some years now, they have been at war with their parish priest over the issue of perpetual adoration. They wanted (and finally got) a chapel for perpetual adoration in their church, and it is, in some sense, now their private chapel—theirs and that of like-minded neighbors.

One of the agreements they had to make with the parish priest to have the chapel set up was that they would maintain it, so that it would not be a burden to him, since he already serves an increasingly large parish as smaller priestless parishes around his close and he becomes pastor of those communities. This is to their liking, the perpetual adoration group: they had seen the chapel as theirs from the outset, in any case.

They arrange for the around-the-clock prayer sessions and the Friday devotions. They open and lock the chapel and decorate it. It’s their church inside the big church—a smaller, purer church co-existing with a lax larger church of dubious piety and orthodoxy. The chapel is a place in which they can prostrate themselves if they wish to do so, without fear of censure from other parish members.

Fridays are a big day for the group. No one has told me this, but I suspect the Friday devotions are centered on some belief that perpetual adoration before the Eucharist on the day Jesus was crucified somehow holds back the arm of the wrathful Father God in a world run amok with sin. I suspect this because I know, from what right-leaning members of the Schwann family say about political and cultural issues, that they believe this.

That is, they believe that God is intent on punishing America because abortion is not outlawed everywhere in the land. They also have distinct views about homosexuality, ever-hardening ones, but about those, they are less publicly vociferous, since two family members are openly gay.

Their piety is, in general, focused on select and highly fetishized aspects of Catholic piety. As the Friday devotions suggest, one big aspect of their piety is the crucifixion, mortification, suffering, the need for atonement in a world seen as dark and sinful. The SSPX branch of the family made a big fuss at a recent family funeral since the parish priest had replaced the “real” crucifix in the parish church with a resurrection crucifix—one they regard as not real, not a true icon of the real message of the crucifixion, which is about death and suffering, not life and resurrection.

They insisted that their dead family member wanted to be buried with the “true” crucifix behind the altar, and they got their way. For this funeral, the priest grudgingly redecorated the church. He would not, however, give in to their demand that a “real” pall—a black one and not the white one now used following Vatican II—be placed over their loved one’s coffin.

The rosary and Mary loom large in the piety of the right-leaning branch of the Schwann family, too. But a particular form of the rosary and a particular devotion to Mary: Mary and the rosary have everything to do with abortion and repressive right-wing politics, with the fixation on holding back the arm of the wrathful Father God by appeasing that God through constant prayer.

To the traditional recitation of the rosary, they have added flourishes and para-devotions, chaplets of mercy and pleas for the wrath of God to be stayed through their prayers. In some sense, the recitation of the rosary—the “real” rosary, the anti-abortion one—is an assertion of their identity as “real” Catholics. Lax Catholics no longer say the rosary, and if they do, they do not kneel on the bare floor without benefit of kneelers, and they do not say the endless round of mercy pleas that these purist believers have added to the devotion.

The rosary, and how they pray it, lets others know that they do not belong to the inner circles of the right-wing members of this family. It is a religious weapon, used not merely to pray but to banish fellow Catholics (and family members) who do not buy completely into the worldview of those praying the rosary in this particular way.

Latin is the only way for the right-leaning members of the Schwann family. The SSPX branch will not go to the parish church at all. Some of the others go only grudgingly, because their spouses refuse to permit them to boycott Sunday Mass if it is not in Latin.

The devotions are supplemented by cultural practices that increasingly set these true-believing Catholics apart from those who are not true believers, including members of their own family who do not endorse the right-leaning Catholicism these members have adopted. The women wear long skirts, and they insist that even their small daughters do so, even when they work on the farm. In church, they veil themselves. They do not eat meat on Fridays, and they expect other family members to go along with this preference, even when those family members do not partake of their rigid pre-Vatican II religious views.

Interestingly enough (or predictably?), the men do not adopt any particular practices or forms of dress or demeanor to set them apart from mainstream culture. Only the women . . . .

These families home-school their children, and they have many children: they have replicated their parents’ choice to have a large family, in a period when such families are almost heard of among most Catholics even in their rural Midwestern community. They do not want their children to have computers or access to television, and have allowed these technologies only grudgingly, when the home schooling seemed to require them. When their children have decided to go on to college, they have sent the children to the most right-wing and cultic places available in the U.S., colleges that proudly proclaim that they are keeping the "real" and "true" Catholic identity in a church losing its identity.

And as inevitably happens when children of such sheltered worlds grow up and try their wings, occasionally one of the children sent out into the world comes home troubled and confused. One of the daughters of one of these families went away for part of a year last year, and came back seriously depressed.

No one could understand her problem. She became seriously withdrawn and talked about the need to go to confession in order to cleanse herself. She stopped eating and picked neurotically at her skin.

One of her aunts decided that the problem had to be demonic, so she contacted an exorcist in a nearby state. But before they could take the family member to be exorcised by that priest, her parish priest asked to hear her confession. After she had spent five hours confessing to him, she came out and announced she was healed, so the exorcism was set aside.

With the election of Obama, all these expressions of piety have been ratcheted up. Talk to any of the right-leaning members of the family, and you hear an endless litany of reasons this new president displeases God. The family has already been participating in (and helping organize) rosary crusades in their community, which are dedicated to praying the rosary more or less exclusively to hold back the arm of the Father God as the nation permits abortion. The pro-life signs at these rosary rallies never mention the war in the Mideast, for instance. A special Marian statue circulates for these crusades.

Now these crusades are being organized with a vengeance, and the Marian statue is wandering the countryside more and more. And the lines are hardening around the issue of homosexuality, even when there are family members who are gay and who are likely to experience pain due to this hardening of lines. There are laments about why God has chosen to give the family such a heavy cross to bear: not one but two gay members! The smaller, purer church that has already produced a smaller, purer parish inside the larger one is now producing a smaller, purer family, a family of the saved and upright, who cannot and do not wish to affirm their unsaved and non-upright members.

In this family, it's clear to me, the movement of Benedict XVI to a smaller, purer church has been antithetical to some of the key principles of catholicism—principles like including everyone, welcoming and affirming those who are different, refraining from looking inside the hearts of others and judging their worth in God's eyes. In the life of this staunch Catholic family, the smaller, purer movement has set brother against sister, mother against children.

The restorationist movement, in the life of this Catholic family, has also resulted in the near deification of one political party, with a total blindness to its many shortcomings as measured against the standpoint of Catholic values and an ethic of life. It has resulted in a quasi-apocryphal form of religion that centers almost exclusively on the notion of a wrathful God preoccupied with sexual morality and abortion, and intent on punishing those who do not toe His line.

And Vatican II? Not a blip on the screen, for these particular Catholics, except as a blip to be abolished by those retrieving the church as it should be, as God meant it to be. As they believe it should be.