Opposites distract: is polarization pulling the church apart?

It's a prize fight--progressive Catholics against traditional Catholics, liberals against conservatives. But while the boxers slug it out in the ring, who is paying attention?

Does anyone care about the outcome? Do the people in the stands--er, pews--even identify with the factions in the church in the United States? Does it matter to ordinary Catholics that their church is polarized? Should it matter?

Caught in the middle

Julie French, 44, works as a restorative care aide in a nursing home in the northeast Montana town of Scobey, population 1,000. French does funeral preparation in her parish, is a leader in the parish women's group, and this year will be taking classes to preside at weekend services on those two or three Sundays a year when there is no priest at St. Philip Church, which is 17 miles from the Canadian border.

French has the pulse of her community, and her assessment is that Catholics in Scobey don't seem to be directly affected by the verbal sparring of Catholics from the left and right.

"I think the polarization in the church concerns Catholics here," says French. "But what we see are these two factions going at one another, and we're caught in the middle."

The major issues that cause polarization are no secret:

* Should priests be allowed to marry?

* Should women be ordained?

* Should the church relax its stand on birth control?

* Should Mass be a celebration of community or a solemn occasion of personal prayer?

* Should inclusive language be the norm in worship?

* Should the laity and local churches have more authority?

As divisive as these issues are, for the most part, average Catholics don't seem to worry much about the opposite poles in their church, for several reasons:

* They are ignorant of the issues and the potential impact they may have on their own faith lives. In one survey of 1,000 Catholics, 73 percent said they were unfamiliar with the term inclusive language.

* The issues of importance to one generation of Catholics are of no real importance to another younger generation--"Bring back the Latin Mass? What's that?"

* The American culture has moved some of the issues beyond the in-house Catholic debates. For example, the question of whether married couples should be able to use contraceptive methods to control the number of children they have is beyond the vaguest comprehension of many young people. "Would that were the question for them!" says a 30-something Catholic, who notes that the struggle among teenagers is not about whether to use birth control but when they should become sexually active.

* The church has been talking about some of these issues for a long time. Nothing has changed and it isn't likely to in most adults' lifetimes. Why continue arguing if all it is going to do is divide us? What more can be said? What new insight will make a difference?

* If you don't like the style of one parish, in most cases you can find one nearby that will suit your tastes, especially in a metropolitan area.

* People have much more important things to do with their time, like learning how to apply the gospel to their daily lives and passing on their faith to their children.

* People have so much stress and pressure in their daily lives that when they have time for personal spiritual enrichment, they would rather not be involved in legalistic arguments.

Beyond the labels

To some Catholics, however, the church is in crisis. A relatively new, right-of-center magazine is named Crisis and subtitled "Politics, Culture & the Church." Another publication is simply titled Dissent.

Nationally distributed newspapers feed the fire. The Wanderer, the standard bearer of ultraconservatives, continues to blast away, scolding bishops, priests, religious, and laity alike who dare implement creative solutions to the pressing issues of the day. The National Catholic Reporter criticizes from the other side of the aisle, deriding Vatican decisions and questioning the use of papal authority.

Bill Yacullo, a business executive from Glenview, Illinois, says he doesn't see polarization causing a crisis in his parish. Active for many years in men's ministry on the parish and diocesan level in Chicago, Yacullo says he was amazed recently at all the people in church for a weekday Mass.

"It was our anniversary, so my wife and I went to 6:30 a.m. Mass," says Yacullo. "She goes all the time, but I usually don't during the week. There were 200 people in church that morning. I think that's incredible."

Yacullo says he occasionally attends Old St. Patrick's Church in downtown Chicago, a once-tired parish that was given new life with the infusion of ministry to young adults. "I get energized going to Old St. Patrick's--seeing all the young people. And there are a lot of other churches in the Chicago area that are thriving in that way. There's a lot of great stuff going on in the church."

One of the reasons that the Catholic middle in the U.S. may not be enamored with the jabbing of church liberals and conservatives may have been uncovered by Father Andrew Greeley in a recent sociological study. Greeley's results show that Catholic polarization around the issues of sexual morality, the role of women, divorce, and abortion has actually declined since 1972 and is less than the polarization found in the rest of U.S. society. In other words, while Catholic thinkers tend to be consistently liberal or conservative, most people in general are not.

Take Julie Drake, for example. An active prolife advocate, this Florida realtor identifies herself as a conservative. But is she? She doesn't see anything wrong with the use of inclusive language in the liturgy. On the issue of married priests, Drake says, "I think we will probably see married priests some day. That possibly might be something I would support because we've lost a lot of good priests."

While the Wanderer sees anyone who does not support its views as belonging to the heretical "Amchurch"--meaning: not really Catholic--Drake says, "It's not for me to define what a good Catholic is." And while some conservative Catholics tell those working for change in the church that if they don't like the church as it is they should leave, Drake says, "I certainly wouldn't kick anybody out of the church, but through persuasion, I'd try to bring them over to our side."

When these differences were brought to her attention Drake corrected her self-identification: "I guess I should have said I'm conservative on prolife issues."

Rather than debate other issues, Drake lives out her faith by lobbying in the Florida state legislature on behalf of prolife legislation. She is also active as an advocate of women's leadership in the church, business, and community, particularly with the Council of Catholic Women.

Drake says she doesn't see polarization necessarily harming the church, but the lack of unity does trouble her on issues that are close to her prolife interests.

"The one issue that divides most Catholics who are prolife is capital punishment. That's a very touchy subject with most prolife people," says Drake. "On some issues I'm willing to look at the other side, but we certainly must go by the teachings of the church. We have the Catechism and Pope John Paul II's encyclical The Gospel of Life. We have to uphold the sanctity of life."

More people don't express their opinions on issues "because they don't want to get involved," says Drake. "Even priests shy away from taking a stand because they don't want to offend anyone."

On the opposite coast, Joan Higgins says she doesn't see much in the way of polarization at St. John the Evangelist Parish in San Francisco.

"Maybe it's the circles I walk in," says Higgins, a 60-year-old retired educator. The issues that are important to the left and the right in the church are "rarely discussed in casual conversation."

Higgins, who has a master's degree in education administration, says, "I know the issues, and I'm in support of some of them. But I'm not going to go out there and fight for them. The issues matter to me, and I feel that in time they'll be resolved. But at this point nothing's going to happen--probably not in my lifetime."

Higgins says she would rather see the church put more energy into attracting young adults and more effort into helping people pass their faith on to their children.

Up in Montana, Julie French recommends that a little less finger-pointing and a little more humility may go a long way to bringing the extremes closer together.

"Everyday Catholics seem to get caught up in labels attached to groups," she says. "As Catholics, if we are going to find common ground, we're going to have to get away from the labels. When push comes to shove, we agree on more than we disagree. And when we do disagree, we have to realize that neither way is right or wrong. We need to remember we are all church and we are all learning to live out church."

Life goes on

Scott Appleby has been mapping the preferences and opinions of U.S. Catholics as part of his research as director of the Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism at the University of Notre Dame. He makes this observation:

"On the one hand, there are the ideologues bickering away, the intelligentsia, theologians, journalists, and professional pastoral leaders. What they are talking about is removed, on a certain level, from what goes on in the parish.

"Local Catholic parishes, on the other hand, are a very vital and vibrant reality. The local Catholic community has its own issues, and at base they are sacramental and developmental. There's a rhythm to that life. You can be part of that life and not be aware of the latest controversy. Parishes are affected in a more remote way by what goes on at the two ends of the spectrum."

Appleby recalled visiting his parents and attending Mass with them at their parish in suburban St. Louis. It happened to be a Sunday when the lectionary called for the reading of the infamous passage from Saint Paul's letter to the Ephesians in which the evangelist says women are to be submissive to their husbands.

No one stood up to protest. No one walked out of the church. "I heard a little snickering," Appleby says, "but that's all."

In the news at the time, too, was the rumor that the pope would name the Blessed Mother a co-mediator with Jesus. Although the story was on the cover of Newsweek, there was no mention of the controversy at all at the parish.

"It was not addressed from the pulpit, and people weren't talking about it in the back of church after Mass," Appleby says.

What do the middle-ground U.S. Catholics care about if they don't care about these so-called hot topics?

"The middle portion of U.S. Catholics are more concerned with how the church supports family life and how it sacrally ritualizes the important times of passage in their lives," Appleby says. Among the core parishes he has studied, a few are trying to stay au courant with the polarizing issues. These are more susceptible to discussing the debates going on among the elites, Appleby says.

"They will want to experiment with liturgy, for example," he says. "The progressive or liberal parishes where there is a strong core such as this are a relatively small percentage of Catholic parishes across the nation. To the extent that you have active lay participation and professional pastoral leadership, you may have greater awareness of the cutting-edge issues.

"But I don't mean to say parishes are immune from the controversies."

The circuit riders

The controversies that keep Catholics from the opposite corners of the ring bobbing and weaving are fed by what Appleby called "circuit riders"--theologians, experts, and intellectuals who make a living going from diocese to diocese for speaking engagements.

Some punch from the left, some from the right.

"There is a percentage of these who are trying to stay ahead of the curve," Appleby says, "and another group who would have you think Vatican II didn't happen."

Not that their motives aren't pure, he adds, but "it is in their best interests to keep the controversies going and take them in a way the mainstream doesn't want to go."

He adds, "A lot of the invective is fairly specialized and technical, too," and of interest only to a small niche of scholars.

But even the scholars who are part of the Catholic Theological Society of America are not at the point of creating a schism and breaking away from the church, Appleby notes. When this past summer at their annual conference in Minneapolis they once again questioned the church's reasoning in the Vatican decision that bars women from ordination, the members of the CTSA in their paper, in sum, said, we should keep discussing the idea of women priests. "Which means they are still listening to the hierarchy," Appleby says, "which indicates they are moderate."

What happens in both corners of the ring is "demonizing" of the other, Appleby says. "If you confine yourself to reading or listening to Frances Kissling (a liberal) and George Weigel (a conservative), you can come away with the impression that the Catholic Church is irreparably split.

"The neoconservatives have a mindset that says if you don't like what the pope and the bishops teach, get out of the church. If you read NCR [National Catholic Reporter] and listen to the Call to Action types, you get a very different sense of church.

"When you go into the parishes, what you come away with is a much more vital or harmonious situation."

While some blame the media for focusing on the extreme points of view at both ends of the ideological spectrum, Appleby disagrees: "The media did not create the problems. There are real, substantive differences, and it is basically differing interpretations of Vatican II," he says.

Many people thought those issues were settled, but the lingering divisiveness trickles down to a level that touches peoples' lives, primarily in the areas of liturgy and church governance, Appleby says. "We've not found a way yet to bridge the differences."

One body

What can bridge the gap?

"The centrality of the Eucharist," Appleby replies. "That is our source of unity. People will come together at Mass, normally. There is a very broad middle that includes conservatives, liberals, and moderates."

Unfortunately, there is not a discourse yet among that broad middle, a way for Catholics at the parish level "to talk together and draw on our strengths: the Eucharist, belief in Jesus Christ, respect for the church," Appleby says.

It is one reason the 40-year-old researcher wants to see the Common Ground Initiative work. He sees the high-level conversations among Catholic elites from both left and right as providing a model for how church people can conduct themselves in civil discourse.

Appleby counsels that persuasion and conversion--not authoritarian measures--may convince today's Catholic of the correctness of church teaching.

"Standing on authority and expecting people to obey, that ain't the way it works anymore," Appleby says.

"Teaching has to generate a free response from people. Even Jesus didn't come down and say, `Obey me because I'm God.' Jesus continued to persuade and convert."

Mary Kaye Medinger thinks everyday Catholics are being harmed by the divisiveness in the church. The Minnesotan says she has felt the pain of people discounting one another's faith.

Medinger is founding director of Wisdom Ways, an ecumenical resource center for spirituality in St. Paul that is cosponsored by the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet and by the College of St. Catherine.

She says she has seen how the stereotypes of left and right come between Catholics and cause them harm in the parish, among ministers, and in the spiritual direction she does now.

Medinger says she doesn't use terms such as conservative or liberal "because that puts people's spiritual fives in a stereotyped column."

Medinger, 51, has master's degrees in catechetics and liturgy, has taught in the St. Paul public-school system, and has been involved in ministry as a parish religious-education director, as a teacher in the archdiocesan permanent diaconate formation program, and now works in adult spiritual faith formation.

"I think it's a cop-out to use that language of liberal and conservative," Medinger says. "It's so easy to dismiss the other side that way. I find it so painful when people discount one another's faith or question the integrity of their faith.

"It harms the spirit of the body of the whole when people just write each other off. That sense of just dismissing a person or group by labeling them is so contrary to the gospel. I don't think that is what church is about or what the gospel is about."

Medinger notes that the differing perspectives of Catholics might more properly be understood by comparing the different styles of prayer that suit different personality types.

"Take an introvert and an extrovert," Medinger says. "The prayer that is meaningful for one is a waste of time for the other. Where people are in their life journey may dictate their needs or their perspective. It depends on how one views church, one's personal relationship with God, how the community fits in with social teaching. It's not just me and God."

Generational differences

The issues that polarize those who remember the church before 1965 can seem to be less than cutting edge to younger Catholics.

Rhode Island native Cathleen Kaveny, 36, has a Ph.D. in ethics from Yale and is an associate professor of law at the University of Notre Dame.

"I don't mean to say the issues the older generation is talking about aren't important and worth talking about. It's just that, based on our own experience of church, we see other things as being much more urgent and pressing, from our own perspective. We grew up in a very, very different context."

The older generation, formed in the pre-Vatican II church, had a firm thought structure, a clear worldview. "You knew where you stood," Kaveny says.

"Some people experienced this as very repressive, unopen to change and varying insights of history, and too legalistic. Conservatives felt it conveyed a welcome certainty. For me and my generation, the church was ever-changing. First it was Confession, then Penance, then the sacrament of Reconciliation. They kept changing all of the things. Nobody knew what was what. That led to an utter tentativeness to what was being taught.

"At the same time, the entire society was falling apart," Kaveny says. "There was the Vietnam War, the divorce rate was exploding, nuns and priests were leaving the church in droves, and we were getting very little help from CCD to deal with this."

Kaveny says the ongoing debate about the use of contraceptive methods by married couples pales to the problem she saw when she was in high school, where sex was prevalent. "The argument about whether or not married couples should use birth control is not exactly on today's cutting edge of the debate. I wish it were," she says.

"There's a sense that maybe some of the debates have played themselves out," she says. "There's not much more that can be said. As a scholar I'm going to try to look at other issues."

For her, the pull has been to work on the issue of assisted suicide, "where the church has something to add to the national debate in emphasizing the equal dignity of all human beings," Kaveny says.

What else would the younger generation have the church work on?

"There's the whole question of moral formation of teenagers, how to help them think about issues," Kaveny says.

"How to integrate prayer life with moral decision-making. Teaching people what it could possibly mean to follow the way of Christ."

She says she finds herself asking, "What kind of person do I want to be? I need to find out how to have a spiritual life, how to think through moral issues in a complex way."

Kaveny acknowledges that the post-Vatican II generation of Catholics wasn't catechized well, as she put it. "Hopefully the new Catechism will remedy that," she says, "but we're all confronting situations that aren't even covered in the books, such as genetics.

"We see the tradition as a source of great wisdom, but that tradition has lots of strands in it, and different people are going to find different aspects of the tradition useful.

"My generation is hungry for the richness of tradition. We really want the tradition and the training, but that doesn't mean we're going to accept the debate of the prior generation."

A place to pray

Paul Rocheford would fit Kaveny's image of the typical 30something Catholic. A 34-year-old attorney, Rocheford lives in the Minneapolis suburb of Edina but is a member of St. Olaf Parish in downtown Minneapolis, a church near his office.

The accessibility of the church is one reason he's found a spiritual home there, Rocheford says, but he's also comfortable there because ideologically St. Olaf is "pretty moderate," he says, "and because there are a lot of people there who are my age. There's lots of enthusiasm there."

Rocheford, who is married, describes himself as a cradle Catholic whose faith was nourished by attending St. John's University, a Benedictine school in Collegeville, Minnesota.

He says the debates that polarize some in the church aren't big issues for him. "A lot of my contemporaries, especially women, have a real issue with some of the things they see in the church," he explains. "A lot of the women are firm on women being priests or having a more active role in the church. Some of my friends go to St. Joan of Arc," which has the reputation as the most progressive parish in the Twin Cities.

Rocheford says ideology wasn't a factor in his choice of a parish. "I never saw a Latin Mass," he explains. What he appreciates are opportunities to serve, having been on the parish board, and he continues to lector at a Mass each week. The most significant factor in his choice of church is that he has found St. Olaf a place to pray.

"St. Olaf is great for me, because working downtown, I can have a time out from my work there when I need one," Rocheford says. "The most important factor for me is that it offers an opportunity to go privately and have my reflection time."

A new tribalism?

One of Rocheford's points shows up in other conversations, too. People who find a parish too liberal or too conservative for their taste just pick up and find one that is compatible with their ideology. They vote with their feet.

But that's also one of the reasons dialogue is not happening at the parish level between left and right.

"It's what Vaclav Havel calls the `new tribalism,'" says Father James Bacik, an adjunct professor of humanities at the University of Toledo, pastor of Corpus Christi University Parish, and a campus minister for 28 years.

"People tend to cluster with those of kindred spirit," Bacik, 60, says. "What we see in the church is a mirror of the culture as a whole, with liberals wanting to be with liberals and conservatives with conservatives.

"The new global sense we have--the global village notion and all we know about different cultures today--has produced this reaction that is aptly named the new tribalism." Bacik says another factor that he sees coming into play is the busyness and complexity of the world, and people recoiling from that.

"People have a lot of stress and pressure in their daily lives," he says. "When they have time for personal enrichment, they don't want to be involved in arguments and fighting and attacks and defenses."

Bacik acknowledges that his university setting might be atypical of the average parish, and that squabbles over some polarizing issues do occur.

"In many parishes you don't have those kinds of fights," says the priest of the Toledo diocese. "They are of secondary importance to people. There's something more primary about being Catholic: gathering around the Eucharist and an incarnational, sense of life; putting into practice the scriptural lessons they hear in the liturgy.

"They want help for their families, guidance on how to live their daily lives, how work connects with faith, how to pass on the heritage to their children, the best ways of educating their parishioners."

While some parishes tend to draw an ultraliberal or ultraconservative crowd, most parishes do not, Father Bacik pointed out. They buck the trend of the new tribalism by being a home for everyone.

"You know, the Elks go with the Elks, but parishes aren't like that," he says.

"We put together young and old, different ethnic backgrounds. That's the beauty of our Eucharist. Conservatives and liberals approach the table together. Charismatics and people more traditional in their piety hear the Word together.

"The Mass is a great catalyst for bringing people together," he added. "There's a fundamental quality around the Eucharist. We really should capitalize on that."

Face-to-face encounters between two people who see things differently can also help in sounding the bell for the end of the fighting among Catholics.

Montana's Julie French says talking and listening to an East Coast conservative who is also active in the National Council of Catholic Women helped them both.

"When I told her of my experiences and she told me her experiences, we came to respect one another's opinions," French says. "That's all we can do."

Medinger says she watched similar understanding happen among permanent diaconate candidates from both ends of the ideological spectrum.

"It was a most amazing thing," the Minnesotan says. "As they came to know one another's stories and the things that had influenced them, they came to see there are many ways to be Catholic and remain faithful."

RELATED ARTICLE: The call to Common Ground

Engaging Catholics of differing perspectives and ideological positions in face-to-face conversations and developing models of effective dialogue are among the goals of the Catholic Common Ground Initiative established by the late Cardinal Joseph Bernardin.

Catholic Common Ground originated in the concern that the tendency to unnecessarily polarize differences among Catholic leaders and members hinders the efforts to strengthen the faith community and to carry out the mission of the church. The basis for dialogue and for forming "common ground" are the convictions shared even by Catholics of divergent viewpoints--primarily belief in the centrality of Jesus Christ.

The initiative is guided in its analysis of the situation and conditions for dialogue by "Called to Be Catholic: The Church in a Time of Peril," a statement released August 12, 1996 by Bernardin, just a few months before his death from cancer.

The Catholic Common Ground Initiative seeks to foster dialogue on critical pastoral issues, and it promotes that dialogue both at the level of leadership and at the grassroots. It calls for dialogue among Catholics to have four characteristics: openness, honesty, civility, and mutual respect.

The initiative plans to hold annual Catholic Common Ground conferences, the first of which was held in March of 1997. The next one is scheduled for March 6 to 8 near Milwaukee. Members of the Catholic Common Ground Committee have presented workshops at the parish level to promote dialogue. The materials for those workshops are based on the "Called to Be Catholic" statement and include a handout to help groups name the issues of concern to them, plus a list of "working principles for dialogue." The initiative is also preparing a video and a series of teleconferences.

For information: The Catholic Common Ground Initiative, National Pastoral Life Center, 18 Bieecker St., New York, NY 10012-3404 (Phone: [phone]).

By Bob Zyskowski, editor of The Catholic Spirit, the newspaper of the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis.