Roman Catholics: Selective Faith

A take-it-or-leave-it attitude toward church doctrine and discipline is a growing characteristic of Roman Catholics in the U.S. Despite the promise of renewal represented by the Second Vatican Council, more and more young members of the church are deciding for themselves whether or not a teaching is valid for them. Unlike the time before the council, when an alienated Catholic felt that his choices were to still his doubts or defect, many Catholics today feel free to deny or ignore doctrines and yet also count themselves good members of the church.

Donald Thorman, publisher of Kansas City’s yeasty National Catholic Reporter, sums up this attitude of selective faith and dogmatic iconoclasm as an “age of unbelief that has finally begun to hit the church in America.” Somewhat gloomily, Thorman foresees the possibility of an era of what he calls “Uncatholicism, in which large numbers of the faithful will live their religious lives apart from official Catholicism—not fully leaving the church, but not really participating in its life either.” Chicago’s priest-sociologist, Father Andrew Greeley, co-author of a major study of religious attitudes in parochial schools (TIME, July 29), estimates that perhaps 10% of the nation’s Catholic university students and seminarians share this attitude. “They are the brightest, probably even the most religious of the Catholics,” he concludes. “They say ‘I am a Catholic, but I’m not taking the church seriously any more.’ ” Among college-trained Catholics in the professions, the number of such dissidents probably runs higher than Greeley’s educated estimate.

“The Magic Show.” The questioning attitude of the new Uncatholics extends to virtually every area of the church’s life and discipline, and almost automatically to observance of Friday abstinence, Mass every Sunday, and the church’s current ban on birth control.

Dr. John F. Mahoney, chairman of the English department at the Jesuits’ University of Detroit, is one such self-styled “growingly noninstitutional Catholic.” Mass, for him, need not be the conventional Sunday service at the parish church down the street; it is just as likely to be an unauthorized, experimental liturgy celebrated by a radical priest-friend in his own living room. Irreverence toward ecclesiastical tradition is common among Uncatholics. They tend to dismiss the veneration of Mary as irrelevant today and refer to the Mass as “the magic show.” More seriously, these Catholics ask whether the church needs a Pope, or even whether the institutional church itself is necessary.

Why should disbelief and disaffection have risen precisely when the Second Vatican Council has set Catholicism on the road to renewal? One reason is that too-high hopes for change in the church have not been rapidly fulfilled. Complains John Razulis, a graduate theology student at St. Michael’s College in Toronto: “The bishops came back from the council raising the hopes of the young, and then they ignored what they had said in Rome.” Still another reason, suggests Philosopher Michael Novak of Stanford, is that the council “demythologized” the church. Reported by secular mass media as just another news event, “it was brought down to human size and seen in the context of real life.” Moreover, the evidence of elderly bishops openly challenging hallowed traditions inspired lay Catholics, young and old, to re-examine their faith on their own. In brief, the spirit of the council made membership in the church a matter of choice rather than inheritance.

Cultural Crisis. Novak believes that the church today faces “a cultural crisis of the first order of magnitude.” Understandably, Catholicism’s hierarchical leaders are uncertain as to how to deal with this new, nothing-sacred, questioning attitude. While the instinct of many bishops is to return to the traditional methods of control, suppression, denunciation and excommunication, Thorman points out that such a tactic cannot be applied to Catholic intellectuals who no longer fear authority. Yet church leaders fear that total freedom to question and doubt is to open Catholicism’s doors to a plague of heresy and half-truth. It is a dilemma that seriously concerns Pope Paul VI, who in recent speeches has repeatedly urged the faithful to be loyal to ecclesiastical authority.

Associate Editor Daniel Callahan of Commonweal suggests that Catholicism today may be undergoing the kind of transformation that Judaism suffered through in the 19th century. As dogmatic and cohesive a community then as Catholicism was before the council, Judaism offered its adherents a choice between Orthodoxy or apostasy. Now the Jew has a range of choice from secular indifference to Reform permissiveness to the strict Halakic observance of the Hasidim. Jews—and Protestants too—are aware that pluralism offers risks as well as rewards: indifferentism, sectarian quarrels, doctrinal anarchy. Yet just as Catholicism accepted the precedent of other faiths in adopting a vernacular liturgy and a belief in the primacy of conscience, it may come to embrace the Protestant and Jewish acceptance of fiery dissent within the community of faith.