Catholic Lives/Contemporary America: The South Atlantic Quarterly, Summer 1994.

The South Atlantic Quarterly's special issue, titled Catholic Lives/Contemporary America, offers a decidedly lively collection of essays - not as lively, say, as a debate between Mother Angelica and Mary Daly, but lively nonetheless. A smorgasbord table of contents includes Mary Gordon on Father Chuck O'Malley, Andrew Sullivan on homosexuality, Patrick Allitt on Catholic conservative intellectuals, and Stanley Hauerwas on Notre Dame - well, who could resist? It is apparent from the wild diversity of pieces that editor Thomas Ferraro gave relatively free rein to the the eclectic array of contributors, and the collection is quite happily uneven as a result. But like spoilsport adults on a roller-coaster ride, readers may find themselves unable to quash a certain uneasiness.

Recent years have witnessed the burgeoning of a new literary genre in America: a bizarre mix of nostalgia and derision that might be called Growing Up Catholic Meets Mommie Dearest. This collection, to its credit, does not belong to that genre. There are no schoolboy giggles or adolescent howls of rage in these essays, for the authors are, for the most part, quite a respectful bunch. Even Camille Paglia (especially Camille Paglia), whose style was once described by Christopher Thomas in these pages as "more or less that of a stormtrooper in jackboots," wants no part of that game. What emerges from the pages of this collection, then, is not a portrait of the church as monstrous or Catholic culture as silly, but the discomfiting portrait of Catholic culture devoid of explicitly Catholic faith. Paglia's commments on a scene from La Dolce Vita, though betraying either a partial viewing or a gross misunderstanding of the film, nevertheless come at the very end of the collection and in an eerie way sum it up: "The religion and the family culture are completely intertwined. You can see it there. There's a respect for the mother; respect for the family, that's your identity. And it doesn't matter whether in your heart you believe in God or not."

Considering that this is a country where the number of alienated Catholics outstrips the membership of any single denomination and where belief in God is often shoved into a private corner, it is certainly not surprising that there should exist (and flourish) expressions of Catholic culture not explicitly connected to any creedal profession of faith. Everything from the emphatic sacramentality of the tradition to the unique network of parochial schools to the pressures of assimilation has contributed to the phenomenon of a multifaceted subculture of an alienated or "lost" generation of Catholics who, as historian James Fisher puts it in his essay, "meet neither the demands of orthodoxy nor the conventions of apostasy."

Fisher, for one, is not willing to dismiss that lost generation as being implicitly irreligious and thus beyond the pale of the Catholic tradition. He contends that the lost generation "enters this tradition precisely through a fidelity, albeit often intuitive, to a profoundly orthodox doctrine, the Mystical Body of Christ.... This metaphor, with its consoling promise of self-dissolution, is the key to a profound yet scarcely acknowledged cultural style at the heart of the urban American Catholic experience."

Robert Orsi's "Mildred, Is It Fun to Be a Cripple?" is a bracing opening essay which addresses a certain permutation - perversion, perhaps - of Catholic self-abnegation in an earlier generation. The author of the much-heralded Madonna of 115th Street turns his attention to the "culture of suffering" in American Catholicism in the middle of this century - a time, he says, when we were "enraptured and enthralled by physical distress." Having pored through the popular devotional literature of the day, Orsi produces a litany of examples guaranteed-to-make you-squirm as he outlines the conflicted and conflicting attitudes toward the crippled, the sick, and the suffering. Orsi argues that the "crafting of the discourse of pain was not simply a reflection of perennial Catholic theology." Rather, it was contingent upon the social circumstances of the immigrants' children who were leaving the ethnic enclaves with a crippling load of ambivalence. But once Orsi is finished sorting through the mixed motivations in all the talk about a person's joining her potentially grace-filled suffering with the sufferings of Christ, one has to wonder whether he hasn't undermined large chunks of Catholic theology along with their perverted appropriations.

Feminism and the changing face of Catholic ethics are topics central to contemporary Catholic culture, and Feffaro was astute in soliciting two pieces covering these themes. Unfortunately, Mary Jo Weaver's piece on feminists and patriarchs in the Catholic church was written before the release of Ordinatio sacerdotalis and is thus already dated, though it remains helpful for its assessment of how we got to where we are now. Kathy Rudy's outline of the double effect/proportionalist debate is simply reckless, containing such sweeping infelicities as this: "Proportionalism, along with the shift toward Catholic assimilation into American culture, offers women who find themselves with an unwanted pregnancy the freedom to pursue careers and other interests without being hampered by familial conmitments." One would be hard pressed to find a single reputable Catholic proportionalist theologian who would agree.

The journal would be quite unbalanced without the contribution of Patrick Allitt, author of Catholic Intellectuals and Conservative Politics in America: 1950-85 (Cornell). His essay "Bitter Victory" offers a thorough and objective update covering the years 1988-93. Allitt follows the heterogeneous and motley crew of Catholic conservative intellectuals as they address the fall of communism, the Gulf War, political correctness, the church, homosexuality, abortion, the secular public square, family values, and, of course, each other's failings. He wisely leaves readers to consider for themselves whether Communio editor David Schindler is right about the neoconservatives Michael Novak, Richard John Neuhaus, and George Weigel "espous[ing] an impoverished notion of humanity, bereft of its divine center." The territory Allitt covers is vast and the list of characters long, making this evenhanded and eminently readable summary a rare and helpful guide.

But the most telling illustrations of the character of the label-resistant American Catholic culture come at the end of the collection. Novelist David Plante offers a five-page reflection, "My Parents, My Religion, and My Writing," that is a chewy enough morsel by one who, confirmed in his atheism, is yet aware that the truth to which he feels himself beholden and the God whom he worshiped as a boy are not strangers to one another. And Paglia, like Plante, believes "There's definitely a religious impulse in everything I do - even though I don't believe in God." Putting a Frank McConnellesque spin on things, she says "I feel very close to what Teresa of Avila was doing, or Saint Ignatius. There's definitely a contemplative religious thing going on...."

Yet for all the talk about Catholicism being more than a set of beliefs, one hesitates to be too optimistic about the future of a Catholic culture which seems so hesitant to confess, explicitly, both a belief in God and a belief that the ultimate goal of human striving is friendship with God. It is New Republic editor Andrew Sullivan who in this collection combines the understanding that the essence of Christianity is love of God and love of neighbor with a professed commentment to the Catholic church, "the eternal vessel of God's love." Sullivan's careful and heartfelt argument in "Virtually Normal," on homosexuality and Catholicism, will be familiar to those who encountered it in America ("I'm Here," April 5, 1993). His distinct voice and perspective make for a singular contribution to this collection.