Time Immortal

If only women could be teachers! If only we stopped imposing a rigid, inflexible regime of celibacy upon those who educate our children, we could stop this horrid torrent of sexual abuse!

Yet another teacher — this time, a lesbian — is caught with a student (also female).

You know, this suddenly recollects to me the fact that my high school apparently had a cheer team at one point prior to my term as a student there. I never could get a straight answer about why it, and the lady who had coached it, had vanished from the map (so to speak).

Most of the media coverage of the Pope’s visit to the U.S. seems to focus on his addressing the sexual abuse scandals that have rocked the Church. And I for one am not going to complain that Pope Benedict XVI has chosen to address this issue as thoroughly as he has — it needed to be done, and Benedict himself is a great person to have in charge of handling the situation.

The folks at GetReligion, however, point out that the Pope also took time to speak out against the dangers of secularism and relativism — this, it seems, has been woefully underreported.

Pope Benedict XVI visited the White House on Wednesday, his 81st birthday, and praised America as a nation where strong religious belief can coexist with secular society.

But he later warned, in a speech to American bishops, of the “subtle influence of secularism” that can co-opt religious people and lead even Catholics to accept abortion, divorce and co-habitation outside of marriage.

“Is it consistent to profess our beliefs in church on Sunday and then during the week to promote business practices or medical procedures contrary to those beliefs?” he asked in a lengthy address to the bishops. “Is it consistent for practicing Catholics to ignore or exploit the poor and the marginalized, to promote sexual behavior contrary to Catholic moral teaching or to adopt positions that contradict the right to life of every human being from conception to natural death?”

“Any tendency to treat Religion as a private matter must be resisted,” he said.

What’s interesting is that the Pope approaches the issue from two directions; he confronts secularism directly and opposes it directly, but he also confronts and opposes the creeping influence of secularism — including the spread of moral relativism — that afflicts members of the body of the Church. He reminds us all that if one yokes oneself to the Catholic Church, one necessarily accepts Catholic teaching in matters pertaining to, among many other things, sex, marriage and abortion. And he then follows that up with an admonishment to the non-religious: religion cannot kept out of view.

I’ve always been offended by those who insist that religion is merely a private matter, because…well…because it isn’t. After all, if there is any truth to the religion I am a member of (Catholicism, natch), then what is at stake is not merely some temporary thing, but an immortal soul that resides within my being. If in fact we Catholics have it right, then it can only follow that the most important thing in our lives, above all other considerations (including family and friends, jobs and leisure activities) is our faith.

Simply put, we can no more be expected to set that aside than we can be expected to set aside our skin colour, because our religion is even more important than the biological realities at work in our bodies. Especially for Catholics — who experience Christ both directly, in the Eucharist, and in the context of community — religion cannot be relegated to the realm of “the private.”

And to suggest that it should be thusly relegated is laughable.

Amy Welborn responds to a question posed by Deacon Greg about what sort of things make people want to leave the Church.

The Deacon’s hypothesis is this:

From my experience, most alienated Catholics have wandered away not because of dogma or doctrine, or even discipline. They’re willing to live with the sometimes difficult teachings of the Church, even the ones with which they don’t entirely agree. They’re even willing to forgive (after a lot of prayer and teeth-gnashing and soul-searching) the financial and sexual scandals that seize the headlines.

No, what drives people away is often something far simpler and, in a way, far more sinister.

It’s other people.

It’s the priest who condescendingly tells a grieving daughter, after her mother’s funeral, “Now you can really grow up. You know, we never truly become adults until after our parents die.”

It’s the deacon who refuses to anoint a baby at a parish baptism because the family arrived late.

It’s the pastor who won’t take the time to listen to a teenage girl’s problems because “it’s just hormones.”

These are real examples from people I know — and the people who experienced them walked away from the local parish and, eventually, the Catholic Church. There are many other factors that contribute to religious alienation, I know. But, like the woman at the well in last Sunday’s gospel, people are thirsty. What are we giving them to drink?

And I certainly think there’s a point in all of this, although I don’t think it’s a complete answer (nor do I think it’s necessarily the best of the incomplete ones).

Oh, I know some people who’ve fallen into a “crisis of faith” of sorts over the sexual abuse scandals — setting them firmly in the minority as per the first paragraph cited above — while others have parted ways with the Church not over issues of doctrine directly, but because of the actions of certain members of the Catholic community within their diocese. I do think that many Catholics — both clergymen and laypeople — do more than enough to drive others away from the arms of the Church.

But I think it would be fair to say that for the majority of people I know who’ve parted ways with the Church, their reasons for doing so in general don’t meet up with any of the Deacon’s suppositions. Some of my relatives might have left the Church over the actions of the diocesan office in dealing with a gay church employee, but for the most part the “lapsedness” in my family — and among the people I’ve met over the years who’ve discussed the issue with me — either sources itself in some doctrinal squabble or in…something else. The sexual abuse scandals, while troubling, are definitely a minority reason.

Amy Welborn’s analysis goes a bit further, and better encapsulates something I too have witnessed:

The spiritual shifts brought on by the Second Vatican Council. Follow me carefully here. Remember that in Church Time, 40 years isn’t very long at all. It’s not long enough to measure the true impact of events or responses. But I think what we’re in the middle of is a readjustment that’s a consequence of both the Council and modernity.

To put it simply and simplistically: You saw much higher levels of adherance and external practice among Catholics before the mid-60’s in the West because many people believed they’d go to Hell if they weren’t there.

People don’t believe that anymore.

Just to be clear on what the Church teaches in this regard (something which, I think, Vatican II did throw into a goodly deal of confusion), let’s consult Catholic Answers for a minute:

We do have a grave obligation to attend Sunday Mass. It’s been Church law since, well, long before any of us were around. The reason is simple: We are creatures, and our first duty is to worship our Creator. More than that, we are social creatures, so it is right that we should worship together, and that worship is done best at Mass, which is the highest prayer of the Church. Since the Church has authority from her Founder, we ought to obey whatever strictures are imposed for our spiritual good, such as the requirement to be at Mass on the Lord’s Day.

So, yes, it is a mortal sin to miss Mass knowingly, but not if one has a sufficient reason (such as illness or the incapacity to get to a church). But the writer is wrong to insist that merely forgetting to go to Mass is a mortal sin. Sin arises only through a deliberate act. This is true of any sin. You cannot commit a sin—either mortal or venial—accidentally.

Amy Welborn points out that a goodly deal of Church teaching about the importance of attending Mass was, in part at least, predicated on the above understanding being clear. With Vatican II and the shift in focus that it brought, the laity began to lose sight of this reality, and Church authorities have not shifted their teaching quick enough to reflect the altered understandings that the people now have…which ought not to have been that different from the ones they had before, admittedly, but, well…”if you give a mouse a cookie.”

The Church did the right thing to clarify and delineate between an intentionally missed Mass and an accidentally missed one, but more and more Catholics began to misinterpret what was an honest concession to human nature as an excuse to abstain from something they had already begun to feel certain reservations about over a host of issues (gay marriage, women in the priesthood, etc.). And most priests and ministers did not respond by attempting to underscore that intentionality played the deciding role in weeding out sin from accident; soon the received wisdom became that it “was no longer considered a mortal sin” to miss Mass…which is only a half-truth.

But then, the half-truth is a close ally of the vice, isn’t it?

And so, incrementally, it became more and more acceptable to skip out on Mass, and perhaps even on any manner of participation in the life of the Church, in response to more and more sorts of disagreements between individual members of the laity and Church teaching. Church teaching is not easy to accept or follow all the time, and struggles between a person’s wants/desires and what the Church teaches are inevitable — that’s called concupiscence, the struggle with the tension of temptation.

At the same time, the Catholic faithful and clergy erroneously stopped attaching the stigma of sin to wanton absence from Mass. I’ve been attending Mass almost every Sunday since…well, since before I can remember anything, and in all that time I can recall only one sermon that discussed the sinful nature of intentionally missing Mass — and that was at a Ukrainian Catholic parish, mind. The last time I wound up in a discussion of the subject, even I thought (erroneously) that in the Western Rite there was no longer the peril of mortal sin attached to a Mass deliberately missed.

It turns out I was wrong.

And so, personally, I tend to think that a number of people have let their faith lapse in no small part because they felt they could, in the “eternal life” sense of the phrase, “get away with it.”

As a secondary reason, I also think that the Church has failed, in recent years, to hammer home the point of what is most important to the Catholic faith — that is, the Eucharist. It needs to be communicated, at every stage of a person’s faith development as a Catholic, and at every opportunity every Catholic takes to participate and progress in the Sacramental life of the Church, that the Eucharist is key, and that no other issue takes precedence over participation in the Eucharist. Who can or cannot marry, who can or cannot be ordained, the validity or invalidity of other faiths, and who we can or cannot kill at whatever stage of development or gestation — all of these are secondary considerations next to the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist. And we must take care that we let nothing supersede the priority of the Eucharist in our lives, if in fact we are Catholic.

We don’t really teach that well in the Church, I don’t think. And I think we’re paying for that oversight in the growing ranks of the lapsed.

Update: Welcome, 4 Massketeers readers!