Catholic family feud: can we find common ground? (interview).

Several months before his death in 1996, Chicago's Cardinal Joseph Bernardin announced the formation of the Catholic Common Ground Initiative to help bridge the deep divisions he saw in the Catholic Church in the U.S. Its objective, he said, was, "a common ground centered on faith in Jesus ... and ruled by a renewed sense of civility, dialogue, generosity, and broad and serious consultation." Catholic historian R. Scott Appleby has been on the planning team for the Common Ground dialogues almost since the beginning. A professor of history at the University of Notre Dame, Appleby is a respected voice on Catholic issues. After six years of work with Common Ground, U.S. CATHOLIC asked him what lessons have been learned.

For five years now you have been part of a movement that invites Catholics who violently disagree with each other to sit down together and talk. What's it like? Any fistfights? Have you learned any lessons?

Two lessons. Number one: As the Common Ground Initiative brought together people from various points of the spectrum, we learned that when you get face-to-face with people--when you spend a weekend together and worship together, have meals together--that experience has a pacifying effect.

In that setting people are reminded that we share membership in the Body of Christ and that we care passionately about the same things. Even though the people around the tables may be from the left, right, or center, they are practicing Catholics who probably differ on only 5 percent of their worldview, not on everything. The very fact that they are actually willing to engage in dialogue says something about them. A civility emerges, followed by friendships. We planners would fret over what we could do to get some real controversy going. People were simply much too polite!

Any idea why?

Part of it was that the participants were away from their offices, journals, or college positions where they traditionally take potshots at one another.

In the end, though, I got the sense that people felt that some of the things we right about, and the intensity with which we right about them, are kind of silly. You come to realize that whether a certain liturgical style is preferable to another is perhaps less pressing than the fact that the whole culture is going to hell outside your window.

You begin to understand that the person who disagrees with you is not therefore a heretic or acting in bad faith. Although people may vehemently disagree with you and even think you are hurting the cause, they understand that you are sincere and care deeply about the faith.

So what's the second lesson?

We found that many issues that are very important to professional church folks--such as the exercise of authority in the church or liturgical rubrics, for example--are irrelevant to most of the Catholics in the country.

In our 2001 conference with younger Catholics, we found that, while they care about issues such as women's ordination or the authority of the pope or proper liturgy, they have deeper, more searching questions: Who am I? What is the relationship of my faith to my career, my family, my identity? Can my faith help me to integrate these many "selves"?

Those are their fundamental questions, and they were frustrated with the church for not always being available to help with those questions. In some ways they are on a different planet religiously from the previous generation.

I am 44, and I realized that I was definitely on the older side of that divide. The older group would say, "But don't you realize that these teachings and practices and worldviews that we want you to internalize--these are the answers to the questions you're asking?" The younger group was not fully receptive to that line of reasoning.

Why?

I sense a certain know-nothing-ism, a mistrust of knowledge. Younger people are accustomed to information and knowledge being manipulated and spun by the media and Madison Avenue. They are not sure there is a reliable foundation for knowledge that would apply in all situations. The church, for example, does not necessarily corner the market on truth, in their eyes. The current sexual-abuse crisis can't help.

The baby boomers and the generations before them thought of the church with a capital C: We "know" the church was founded by Christ. Which really means that we have accepted that teaching on the authority of others. Even-we supposedly skeptical boomers readily affirm the existence of God as "certain." And we affirm the collective wisdom of the church, with her tradition of saints and scholars.

But for the younger generations, their own experience is their primary basis for making judgments. Experience is sacrosanct. So if you say the moon is full of green cheese and I say it's a rock, there's no way to negotiate those positions because green cheese is your experience of the moon.

Think about what this does to the way young Catholics see the church. They do not easily inherit their boomer parents' optimism or belief in an underlying wisdom.

One young person pointed out that their generation did not enjoy the same opportunities to learn about the history and teachings of the church as my generation did, so we shouldn't penalize them.

But when we suggested they learn about the church, they thought we considered ourselves "superior" because we knew more.

I had to resist the urge to say, "Yes, that's correct." What I said was, "No, it's not that Catholics who are well educated in church history and theology are better than you, but there are people who are more fully formed in the faith than you are and than I am. You don't say all athletes are the same, do you? They're not all Michael Jordan."

We are not all the same, and that's not a bad thing. But we can all strive to deepen our understanding and love of the Christian faith.

Do you think they were opposed to learning, or did they think that the church hasn't found a way to present its wisdom so that they can buy it?

I think it's the latter. The church has to demonstrate to them the relevance of knowledge of any kind. By contrast, I was educated by the Jesuits, and I grew up convinced of an objective moral order. There is "Truth." I believed that I was relatively low on the scale of knowledge and wisdom, and that my job was to learn as much as I could. The relationship between "book learning" and faith is not as clear to most people 35 or younger.

The younger generation may not realize that a preacher--a priest or bishop--speaks out of something greater than his own experience. (Of course, he may not!)

Where did they get this attitude?

Well, consider their parents--my generation, the baby boomers--who are deeply formed by a culture of choice. Baby boomers are used to having all kinds of choices their parents never had. "Should I go to Paris next week?" Time and space are not problems for them. They can even change their gender! Boomers have developed this notion that they can do anything.

Their children now have all these choices but no background to guide them in making such choices. Many children are left, for example, with the choice, "Shall I go to Mass or not?" That certainly was not an option in my household.

What happens to the authority of the church when it meets a culture like this?

The plausibility structures for accepting authority have broken down. As Cardinal Bernardin said quite rightly when he became archbishop of Chicago, "I can no longer command, I have to persuade." That was insightful--authority can rarely compel obedience.

In a time of orthodoxy, when everyone shares the same belief system, the community is governed by certain norms--people are held by the faith. Belief is taken for granted.

But when consensus starts to disappear--when the community experiences the fragmentation of authority, when people move away from the old neighborhood and form new alliances with non-Catholics--the consensus of the old world breaks down. Rather than being held by the faith, the orthodox must now hold onto the faith. In order to keep the faith in this situation, you have to assert it. But then you risk becoming a fundamentalist; the faith becomes a weapon or a club.

When I refused to visit the dentist as a kid, my mother would say, "Offer it up for the souls in purgatory." And I did. I imagined myself to be a saint in the making. (Subsequent events, sad to say, proved me wrong.) The point is: Everyone took purgatory for granted; we did not subject it to critical scrutiny.

So if we can't put the genie back in the bottle, is there a different model of authority coming along to replace the old?

There are two answers to that question. First, some groups in the church are trying to put the genie back in the bottle. They prey upon the lack of certainty and the quest for authority that young people have, even though they may not acknowledge the latter.

One can argue that human beings are oriented toward authority and the order and stability that authority brings. This doesn't have to be repressive authority. Indeed, the hope for security and authority can bind us together. The young people at the Common Ground conference said, in effect, "Yes, we seek a sense of order and stability, but authority has been so compromised that we don't know how to think about it or what it means." Sadly, this complaint is even more compelling in the wake of the sexual-abuse scandal.

For a time, the traditionalist and neoconservative groups made inroads in evangelization by responding to the crisis of authority in the general culture by saying, "If you are looking for the truth, well, we have a 2,000-year old tradition founded by the Son of God: Here is the truth, spoken with authority. (They did not say: Here is our version of that truth.) But now, when church authority is weakened, even that approach may fall on deaf ears.

And the second answer?

The second answer is that your question about authority makes us rethink what church is, and how we can remain Catholic, open to truth wherever it is found, inclusive of all kinds of people, and still nonetheless insist that we give full allegiance to the gospel.

Millions of Catholics seem to pay very little attention to the gospel. What does this have to do with authority? For the younger generation--for any generation of Christians--genuine religious authority comes from living the gospel. The authority comes from your example, from your person.

Take priesthood, for example. It is particularly powerful when a person not only takes the vows seriously but is on a quest for holiness. A priest, religious, or a layperson who has really submitted himself or herself to the authority of the gospel and of the church is a powerful model of sanctity--this we desperately need.

I stuck with the Catholic tradition because I found people like that. My pastor back in Shreveport, Louisiana, for example, is a sincere, good man who devoted his life to the poor and the underprivileged--it is not a stretch to apply the word "holy" to him. For me, Father Clayton was one of many striking witnesses to the possibility of holiness.

So on the one hand we have to say, with James Joyce, that "Catholic" still means: "Here comes everybody!" This is comforting for young people who may not have a place to go. On the other hand, even more powerfully, we are required to say that we Catholics are welcoming you into a community that stands for something: A beacon of meaning in our roiling cultural sea of "Who knows, and who cares?"

The church in this sense is countercultural. Priesthood is countercultural. Back in 1993 my son, who was about 10, participated in "career day" at his grammar school. At the time he thought he would either like to be a Catholic priest or a major-league shortstop. (I suggested he become the first shortstop-priest.) So he dressed for career day as a priest. That evening he was crestfallen.

Kids had made fun of him, asking him, "Are you queer?" (Today, they might ask: "Are you a pedophile?") Celibacy and priesthood, in short, were assumed to be deviant choices!

Now if I had dressed up as a priest for career day in 1966, my friends might have thought I was special--in a good sense.

To choose the priesthood in the face of the suspicion, to stay faithful to one's vows, is a powerful witness, and in some senses a countercultural witness.

The countercultural witness is not limited to priests, of course. Anyone who takes the gospel seriously can be an authority for younger people.

Don't you think some elements of the institutional church are not trying to persuade, but rather to command more?

I have a more cynical view of this, perhaps. I think they know that most Catholics do not respond to commands anymore. Some conservative church leaders think that the answer is to stand firm, follows the pope's lead, and resist changes in ministry.

It seems to me, however, that we are on the brink of sacrificing the Eucharist to the insistence on an all-male, celibate clergy. I wish we had a sufficient number of priests, but we clearly do not.

We have to be willing to ask, "Where is the Spirit leading us?" The Spirit does not seem to be leading us to a renewal of priesthood as we currently understand it.

What about the local parish? For most people, the parish is the place where they experience the church.

The parish is essentially Catholic with a small "c" and a large "C" in that it embodies the Catholic notion that we are called to be in relation to our actual neighbor, not to some ideal other. I've always resisted "parish shopping" for this reason: God put me with these people, however wretched I might find them. (And I do not so find them!)

You don't choose your parents, you don't choose your genetic background, and in a sense you don't choose your fellow Catholics either.

When you go to your local parish, you are put into a setting where certain things are "given." When you seek elsewhere for a "better" experience of community, you may be missing something important about the Catholic tradition, our notion of sacramentality, the importance of that local community.

We don't have to go to Mecca, or even the Vatican. Our God is present right here in our local community.

The challenge for our church is to be truly "parochial." That word is often used to mean narrow-minded or exclusive, but really it refers to finding--accepting--a home. Today, with the challenges of different cultures intermingling, it becomes more likely that the parish can be the kind of home that the "here comes everybody" Catholic Church wants it to be.

Why do you say that?

When you have a parish that serves an immigrant community as in past decades, where everyone comes from the same heritage and has 2.3 or 8.2 children, that parish is not necessarily a place where you come to see God in diversity.

In some parts of the country, as parishes move away from one strong ethnic affiliation toward a mix of ethnic backgrounds, the challenge is to make the parish "parochial" in the best sense of the term: locally rooted, but also diverse.

You don't want to isolate single people, you don't want to isolate gay people, you don't want to isolate anyone who would be perceived by the society at large as "other." You want to belong to each other and to draw people into a faithful relationship with God. That's a challenge in this culture.

How does diversity change the parish experience?

To begin with, the pluralism of our church today is greater than it has ever been. As a historian I am cautious about statements like that, but I do think our church is more diverse today than it has ever been. The diversity is not only racial and ethnic but also a diversity of class, of education, and also of models of the church or models of theology.

People come to the church not with one template but with many points of access. It's daunting pastorally. But precisely because we have so much internal diversity, dialogue becomes much more prominent and important.

What are the greatest obstacles to dialogue?

The autocratic pastor is the biggest obstacle. I found in my studies of parishes in the 1980s and again in the mid-90s that the presence of dialogue is dauntingly dependent on the personality of the pastor. You can have a dynamic parish, and a new pastor comes in and starts undermining people--that's a psychologically devastating experience. Fortunately, such pastors are in the minority.

Another obstacle is the in-betweenness of the church right now. We've moved past the Vatican II era and the post-Vatican II era. What's missing is the next generation coming up, the leadership coming up to take parishes further.

The priesthood is diminishing in number; the numbers of religious women have been cut in half. As for lay Catholics, I'm not sure what's coming for the parish down the line. One study of young adult Catholics in their late 20s through 40s revealed that only 30 percent of them are religiously literate. And of that group, an even smaller percentage actually go to Mass every week and are actively involved in a parish. Then you have another whole group that is completely indifferent to the church.

Who will be committed to the parish as a good thing in itself, not just as a social service station? If you lose the parish as the primary home for Catholics, you wonder what the parish is going to look like in 10 years. Who will staff it? Who will participate?

That sounds bleaker than I intend, but I do have a concern about discovering and empowering the next generation of parish "core Catholics."

If you were a pastor today, where would you put your energies?

The needs are overwhelming. The expectations of parishes have increased tremendously since the 1960s. Our Catholic culture, happily, has become attuned to a full range of people's rights and needs. Now we are aware of people with disabilities, and people who have only remedial education, and people who don't have heat in their homes. The parish has become a multipurpose center addressing dozens of needs.

As a pastor, you'd have to discipline yourself to make choices, and then live with those choices. I would put my energies into formation of my parishioners; maybe have everyone participate in the Rite of Christian Initiation for Adults (RCIA), for example.

What we need is ongoing formation: not giving laity bits and pieces, but a sense of the comprehensive whole of the Catholic way of life. The sense that this is a way of looking at the world, not just this or that specific practice. The Catholic parish can offer an integrated lifestyle.

If your foundations are being shaken, what you need more than anything is people who buy into the whole project, people who want to commit themselves to that larger process of formation and see its depth and importance. You have to plant disciples who are, in a sense, responsible for the parish, and you can't do that without forming them.

I would make it clear that formation is not just for 18-year-olds--formation itself is the Catholic way to be. We all need a perpetual deepening of our commitment to the tradition, committing to others through our study, through prayer, through service, through ritual. That's a constant deepening engagement with the tradition.

Specifically what would this involve?

Parishioners must be open to continuing education and formation--to discipline, in a word. It's a challenge to say: It is not enough to be nice to your neighbor; you need to school yourself in a way of seeing the world. You do that through spirituality, through reading the great Doctors of the church, the saints, and the mystics, through practices such as the RCIA.

Of course, the key question is: Do you have people in the parish who are willing to practice the faith in this demanding--but fun!--way?

Even though the Catholic formation we received in the preconciliar and conciliar periods was not flawless, it was deeply rooted. Even if many baby boomers don't go to church today, their behavior is still affected for the better by that deep-rooted Catholic formation. They instinctively know that certain actions and attitudes are Catholic. But the young people of today don't have that cultural milieu to fall back on.

So how would this affect the job of a pastor?

I'd begin by recruiting a few dozen "core Catholic" types to enter a formation program to become leaders in formation for other parishioners.

Imagine how their formation would affect the rest of the parish. That would be a tremendous accomplishment.

I'd pick on some of those baby boomers who have made their fortunes and are retiring in their mid 50s. These folks could be an incredible resource. A shrewd pastor would ask them, "What are you going to do to build up the church that formed you and educated your kids?"

We baby boomers got us into a predicament--and we can be part of the solution to getting us out of it. Many of us are still committed to the church after all these years--and we have a lot to give. Just ask us.

SCANDAL OBSCURES HOLINESS

How has the sexual-abuse crisis affected our church in terms of trust?

Unfortunately, this scandal means that years--if not decades--of honorable, disciplined pastoral work by the vast majority of priests and religious has been undermined, at least in the short term, by the sins and crimes of a tiny minority.

What's far worse, there appears to be a clear lack of moral discernment and moral judgment on the part of some of the bishops of the American church. Much social capital and religious trust has been eroded. It's unfair and unjust but the sins of the few have distorted and eclipsed the profound good work of the many.

My colleague here at Notre Dame, John Cavadini, makes the point that holiness often occurs in obscurity and is hidden throughout the history of the church, whereas sin has a public and open character. Since January, the holiness of the church has almost been completely obscured.

Those of us who deal with the mainstream media find it virtually impossible nowadays to tell the story of holiness, which is truer than the story of sin. Even in the best of times it's difficult to promote a story about holiness unless you have a dramatic media figure such as Mother Teresa or Pope John Paul II.

Even as recently as January the media would occasionally remind the public that the Catholic Church--longtime provider of education, health care, and charity--has a powerful record of serving the common good. As the crisis has grown, those reminders have faded.

What about the effect on young people?

Young people today, hearing constantly about the scandal, will naturally ask if the church can be trusted. The examples of truth-tellers such as Saints Augustine and Teresa of Avila, or Pope John XXIII, are obscured by the unfortunate images of Geoghan and Shanley. The overall impact is chilling.

The crisis will disrupt the way the church recruits people into religious life, which happens best through appropriate intimacy--friendship and spiritual mentoring. Now both priests and young people will be so wary that it will place even appropriate intimacy under suspicion.

How can the church restore credibility?

Reform church governance to incorporate greater levels of lay participation. Not that bishops would yield their doctrinal authority as pastors of the church, but they would seek the participation of Catholics in law, finance, and so forth.

The church must rely increasingly on lawyers, administrators, and financial consultants who have the church's best interests at heart, and these lay men and women must also have a say in the way new policies are implemented.

Many people, for example, are outraged to read about the hardball tactics that church lawyers use with victims of priest sex abuse. Catholic lawyers could have advised bishops to avoid those tactics. We need to move the church toward transparency and accountability.

We clearly need to re-think the relationship between theological authority and the administrative and personnel dimensions of governance.

That will have to come from a fresh generation of clerical and lay leaders--those with an open, reforming mentality.

How have church divisions played out in this crisis?

If there's any good news, this crisis has revealed an underlying unity among Catholics who passionately care about the church, be they left, right, or center.

Catholics are circling the wagons in the good sense. We are all equally ashamed of the ads of some bishops and abusive priests, but we all still believe in our church.

We are of one mind on the need for repentance and accountability, I've seen unanimity on that across the spectrum--a widespread agreement that the culture of secrecy is a bad thing, that we need more openness. It's been reassuring.