The Reluctant Protestant

I’m not a Catholic (hence the name of this blog) but I’m married to one and I have much respect for the Catholic Church.  I have no respect for Time magazine because it is a worthless source of news.  Nevertheless, it was the only reading material I could find this morning without getting of the couch so I proceeded to read a short essay in the July 30, 2007 issue that sums up quite nicely one of the most significant problems faced by American Catholicism and Western Christianity as a whole.

To sum it up, in light of Pope Benedict’s recent easing of the restrictions on the Latin Mass, Lisa Takeuchi Cullen encouraged her fellow Catholics to push for the practice of the Mass in Latin because she is tired of bad homilies she can understand.  They are bad because they employ trite rhetorical techniques and presume the authority to tell her how Christians ought to feel regarding political issues.  Lisa just wants to do the important stuff like take the Eucharist, when her busy schedule allows her to attend.  The depth of her faliure to comprehend Christianity in any deep sense is perhaps best evident when she discusses “Catholocism the religion” as distinct from “Catholocism the faith,” followed by all the reasons she gets personally fulfilled by attending Mass, when and if she goes.

I’ll abstain from further deriding a theologically-stupid essay on theological matters because that’s not what I sat down to write about.  I sat down to wonder aloud why on earth Lisa Takeuchi Cullen, a Catholic who goes to gym class instead of Mass, is writing about Catholocism in Time magazine.  This is of course quite common.  Besides a few op-eds by David Bentley Hart in the Wall Street Journal and the occasional one-liner from Neuhaus in a major newspaper I am unaware of a major U.S. media outlet, print or otherwise, that gives space for the explication of theological matters by an actual professional theologian.  This trend is unique to theological matters.  You will never hear about Presidential Politics on CNN from some guy who hasn’t cast a vote in twenty years but just really enjoys the feeling he gets when he bitches about candidates he doesn’t like.  Likewise, you won’t here about the latest trend in medical research from Fox News’ marketing intern.

The reason Lisa Takeuchi Cullen is writing about Catholocism in Time Magazine is that many Americans who are sympathetic to Christianity understand it as an opportunity for therapeutic self-expression and they can probably identify with what she wrote.  The problem with understanding any religion as distinct and well-defined as Catholic Christianity as primarily an avenue for free self-expression is that this blinds one to the reality that in interacting woth or participating in the Catholic Church one is dealing an historically developed set of relatively fixed practices and doctrines (but one wouldn’t want to waste time trying to figure out where the practices end and the doctrines begin).  I do not want to suggest that Lisa Cullen or anyone else should not be able to discuss their faith and express that faith.  I am suggesting that they should take the Church’s faith seriously enough to deal with, at least when they are at Mass, because the Catholic Church does have a well-defined faith that has been developed at the expense of countless lifetimes of prayer, sacrifice and hard work.  You don’t have to accept this faith, I’m not Catholic, I don’t accept it at this point in my life.  But I respect it enough not to be blind to the fact its bigger than me.  One aspect of this is that, as a non-Catholic, I do not receive the Elements when I go to Mass. 

What is at stake here is maintaining the possibility for real discourse between Christians about Christianity.  If Lisa (an admittedly unfaithful Catholic) my Wife (a faithful Catholic) and myself (not even a Catholic at all) were to all partake of the Elements as an act of personal expression we impeed any real engagement with the objective Catholic faith, the triune God this faith purports to draw humanity into, and each other regarding that faith.  There are so many things Christians need to work out, ecumenical issues, social stances, etc… but the basis to all of this as to be the possibility of actually Christian discourse.  By confusing spiritual forms of free self-expression with the performance of Christian practices in a faithful manner such discourse becomes gradually less likely to occur and this is a shame.