The Culture Club

A quiet consequence of Vatican II has been the rise, over the past 40 years, of the secular Catholic. Like that more established analogue, the secular Jew, the secular Catholic identifies for good or ill with the social context of his or her former religion, well after the tug of faith has subsided into indifference or agnosticism. Like the secular Jew, the secular Catholic's existence is denied in one breath by the Church, and invalidated in the next; the invalidation being a back-handed acknowledgement of existence.

I know of no systematic study, but I rather suspect that secular Catholicism comes most naturally to national groups who have experienced the solidifying effects of persecution. Irish and Polish Catholics, for example, came to this country as the losers in religious conflict in their own nation. They arrived to discover an America in which the prejudices were chiefly a difference of degree, rather than intent. Struggling to avoid being locked into a permanent underclass is a more promising conflict than one in which you face the immediate threat of violent death. Catholics from Latin nations, having always been top dog, tend to skip the intermediate stage that secular Catholicism represents and go directly to atheism. I can't say which approach is healthier, only that secular Catholicism is out there.

The secular Catholic is heir to the healthy tradition of anti-clercialism, which deftly draws a line between the spiritual aspirations of the laity, and the political aspirations of the clergy in general and the hierarchy in particular. The anti-clerical finds the former as admirable as the latter is despicable.

The Catholic Church institutional today appears quite willing to ignore that the five-century old animosity by Protestants toward Catholic laity is far from dead, in order to advance agendas that are tangential to Catholic doctrine. It is actively promoting an interpretation of civil marriage that is heresy by any informed reading of Catholic tradition. It advances both to kiss up to right-wing Protestants for support of its positions on abortion and birth control. Both were formulated in the past 150 years, which is the day before yesterday in the church's chronology. The entire gay marriage issue may be nothing more than a desperate attempt to prove to the Protestants that a celibate clergy is not a gay clergy, a prolonged reaction to eons of denial of clerical child abuse.

I seem to have climbed through the secular ceiling into clearer light, but I still hear these and similar ponderings from secular Catholics I know. I am greatly concerned that many proponents of both abortion rights and gay rights no longer hear such reflections, if indeed they ever did. It is far easier to fall back on centuries of habit, more convenient to think of American Catholics as a priest-driven rabble who do exactly what their clergy says.

I am still enough of a secular Catholic to be deeply worried about that. Is the only acceptable response to the ham-handed politics of the contemporary Catholic hierarchy a return to "no Irish need apply," or "dogs and Catholics keep off the grass?"

What say we try to get rid of hate and intolerance and have nothing in its place? One step to that goal would be to direct one's anger at institutions, not at the people they oppress. Regrettably, that's a distinction that the American Left has been ignoring for decades.