Vox populi.

Early on a frigid morning, hours before a Chicago Bears game, a man leans against the hurricane fence separating Soldier Field's parking lot from Lake Shore Drive. He is grilling sausage patties with his brothers and a couple of close friends. They have fifty-yard-line seats, good winter clothes, bloody marys, a big thermos of scalding hot coffee, and hours of free time to burn. The parking lot is slowly filling up with Bears fans. Everyone is happy.

There are tears in his eyes from charcoal smoke, from a Lake Michigan-scraping easterly wind, and from a paroxysm of laughter brought on by an absurd story one of his brothers has just been telling. A carload of Bears fans honk and wave a t him as they speed past, and he toasts them congenially, raising his red plastic cup in salute. His hands are thickly gloved against the wind, and big lumps of ice clack against each other in his bloody mary, the sound of them muffled by his cradling fist. "Go Bears!" he roars. At a somewhat more boisterous tailgate party nearby, a boom box has begun to play a tape of the Rolling Stones' "Honky Tonk Women," and the stark, chopping notes of the song's opening bass and drum lead seem to split the joyful moment to its exhilarating pith.

The man could dance. Does dance, in fact, in a tentative, middle-aged and utterly clumsy way, pretty much indistinguishable from idle toe-tapping, like that barely noticeable hayseed in the background of Brueghel's Peasant Wedding.

And he prays a little, too. In thanksgiving for the love of his brothers and friends; for the love of his wife and his children back home, still asleep under quilt comforters; for the peppery taste of still sizzling sausage patties as they burst greasily within split biscuits, hot against the tongue and teeth; for the startling tang of salty tomato juice, Tabasco, and vodka; for whitecaps churning the surface of a cobalt blue harbor across Lake Shore Drive; for the aromatic steam rising from the hot coffee as he blows the black surface of his cup, making miniature waves of his own; for being alive and in exultant defiance of this arctic morning around this hot charcoal fire with these people; for the goodness of life; for the glory of the God who brings such life and such moments about, and for his only begotten Son who forsook his very own life and its similar moments for sheerest and unfathomable love of every last distracted scumbag who would ever enjoy such moments so unworthily, so fitfully, and so ungratefully.

One prays when one prays, of course, and the point is not simply that grace is available even to an indolent middleaged man with white trash values. To believe what the church believes about the Incarnation is to believe that there is finally no moment in human experience impervious to the love of God, no aspect of what we are and long for that this love can't search out, infuse, and transfigure. The point is the manner in which even the raunchy music of the Rolling Stones--the dissolute rock group whose aging members constitute a sort of Mount Rushmore of sexual and social depravity--can become an instrument of grace.

Which is why, it seems to me, that juxtaposing Catholicism and popular culture is a tricky thing. On which side of the ledger, for instance, will we place the liquefaction of the blood of Saint Januarius? Or the apparifions of Mary at Medjugorje? Or Mother Angelica? Or that Gregorian chant compact disk whose New Age cover shows a bunch of monks falling through a blue sky like rain a la Rene Magritte? Or the grotesque manner in which the flag is too often venerated in Catholic churches? Or most of what happens on any given football weekend at Notre Dame? Or frivolous liturgies? Or the tattoo I saw not long ago of Our Lady of Guadalupe? Or the pope's visit to Denver? Or the recent "Sixty Minutes" profile of the Catholic church in Los Angeles? Or the Catholic church in Los Angeles? Or the Catholic church herself?

Popular culture, from Pearl Jam to "Sesame Street" to the National Review, emerges from the volatile no man's land between the cultures of life and death which John Paul wrote about in Evangelium vitae. The plaintive ascension of a Jerry Garcia guitar improvisation, the poignant folly of the regulars in Cheers," the splendidly ordered violence of a professional football game, are all products of that culture and all strain to express the truth about us and our plight. So, alas, does Ed McMahon when he bellows about the Publisher's Clearing House Sweepstakes.

Considered only as a cultural artifact, the average Sunday parish liturgy is not much better than the "Donahue" show and doesn't hold a candle to a Grateful Dead concert. But the Mass isn't merely a cultural artifact, nor is popular culture reducible to "Oprah." Mystery--the mystery of God, of the world, and of one's own being--animates even the dullest Mass, almost as if to illustrate that there is nothing in all creation so vulgar as to be prophylactic against grace. The Catholic church, the bearer of the most irresistible mystery, withstands popular culture in much the same sense as a storm withstands thunder, a cornfield withstands topsoil, or perhaps even as a baby withstands the womb.

Robert Worth

In 1911 George Santayana quit his professorship in the Harvard Philosophy Department and left the United States for Europe, where he lived for the remaining forty-two years of his life. He left because what he called his "Catholic sympathies" were at odds with the intellectual atmosphere at Harvard. In a famous letter to his friend and colleague William james, he complained: "I wonder if you realize the years of suppressed irritation which I have passed in the midst of an unintelligible, sanctimonious and often disingenuous Protestantism, which is thoroughly alien and repulsive to me." Santayana believed that American culture was divided between a dull, censorious, and Protestant "genteel tradition" among the cultural elite--such as he had seen at Harvard--and a vigorously practical spirit among the masses. As a Catholic, he claimed to prefer the latter, though they "may ignore or even insult all that I most prize, but they please me nevertheless for their honest enthusiasm and vitality."

The genteel tradition represented the heritage of the older, Protestant America, but it was a heritage that would not fade away quickly or easily. Even in the 1920s and '30s, when countless artists and intellectuals were united in a bohemian rebellion against gentility, Santayana argued that a cold Protestant individualism continued to exert its curse on the upper echelons of American society. He continued to side with popular culture, the America of "football, kindness, and jazz bands," against the highbrows; and he rarely did so without invoking the Catholicism of his boyhood in Spain. Santayana did not believe in God, but the church remained his model for the possibility of harmonious relations between art and the, lives of ordinary people. Catholicism became a code-word for living culture, for a community where art and ideas could flourish outside of museums, classrooms, and textbooks. It gave him an ethical context that liberalism lacked, and it allowed him to talk about fate in a way that Americans seldom did.

The church, of course, could not welcome the embraces of an atheist like Santayana. Contemporary Catholics may feel a similar bafflement and distaste for Madonna, Camille Paglia, and any of the other popular figures who desecrate church doctrine while claiming to draw all their inspiration from it. Yet the lingering allegiance of these apostates is instructive. Like Santayana, they are reacting against liberalism's failure to uphold resources of character, fate, or tradition. TV washes Americans in a daily bath of self-renewal, telling them no problem is so real that the right lawyer or the right therapy cannot "redefine" it back into the comfort zone. If anything characterizes current American pop culture, it is the cult of self-help. And this cult is a lineal descendant of liberal Protestantism's guarantee that the individual's encounter with God determines everything, regardless of health, circumstances, family, politics, or any other constraint. "You can be anything you want to be," American mothers still tell their children.

Yet in significant ways this is less true now than it ever has been, even for those "whitemales" who supposedly run the show. As the myth of national and personal omnipotence gradually fades into history, Americans may begin asking for a dose of the healthy fatalism that is so desperately lacking in the rest of their lives. There are indications that something of this kind has already begun to happen. Some of the pop culture that grows out of today's working class--the songs of Bruce Springsteen come to mind--speaks more to the need for community and a shared faith than to a merely reckless hedonism. Of course, much of the noise that throbs from our Tvs and boomboxes is hostile to ally religious tradition. But the Catholic church is very old, and TV and rock 'n' roll are very young. Sooner or later the world economy will start to persuade Americans that freedom has its limits, and that life gains more than it loses from the burden of community and tradition.

Suzanne Keen

The relation of two amorphous entities--Catholicism and popular culture--cannot be reasonably understood in units larger than the individual person. For if we can sometimes agree about what Catholicism means to American Catholics, we certainly will not agree about the lineaments and boundaries of popular culture. We are too much immersed in it, and Catholicism is too much a part of it. Of course pop culture is influenced by Catholicism: the derivative blasphemies of heavy metal music, grunge, and Madonna require the iconography of religious culture. So do the film, s of Wim Wenders, a contemporary allegorist. While my pop culture may have more subtitles in it, and my husband's more sports statistics, its significant relation to our Catholicism depends only on how much time and money it absorbs.

Though frequently urged by the church to live our lives counterculturally, we watch TV, listen to the radio, read magazines and catalogues, go to movies, rent videos, repeat urban myths, and spend our money on the material goods we ought to be able to live without. When we deplore movies on moral grounds, our Catholicism refracts differently. I fumed for days about the repellent message of The Lion King (that those nasty inner-city hyenas would despoil paradise for lack of a patriarch); my husband could not get beyond the adultery at the heart of The Bridges of Madison County.)

As consumers and Christians, we must make our own judgments about popular culture's multifarious offerings and its methods of making us want more. Similarly, we must wonder why certain productions of pop culture "ought to be" offensive to us as Catholics, or as defenders of American family values. "Who says?" we ought to ask. "How do they know? And what are they getting out of it?" Too often attacks on the "messages" of pop culture get the message wrong, or take a naive view of the consequences of representation.

In extreme cases, alternative recommendations cast doubt on the cultural watchdog's competence (poor Bob Dole--do you think he actually saw True Lies?). To be convincing, condemnation requires understanding, which sometimes means looking at the interdicted object. In the end, one of the most striking contrasts between popular culture and Catholicism is the latter's defensiveness. If the two can be seen as antagonists at all, their rivalry takes the ludicrous form of a contest in which one of the parties (popular culture) fails to rearize it's being attacked. I do believe that protesters can make big companies such as Disney or Time-warner jumpy, but popular culture is a diverse and mercurial phenomenon, broader and less predictable than the big companies most often targeted by those who would circumvent the First Amendment by employing strategies of public shaming, rather than out-and-out censorship.

I'm not sure that there's a whole lot Catholicism can do about pop culture, although individual Catholics can use their time, attention, money, and intelligence like any other Americans. In the style of Hildegard of Bingen or Whoopi Goldberg in Sister Act, Catholicism can adopt aspects of popular culture in order to get the folk to sing along, but I confess a distaste for this derivative strategy. My own view is that if the Catholic church really wanted us to be countercultural, the priests would tell us to throw away our Tvs. But as long as we're keeping them, we'll have to rely on our own judgment to recognize the pernicious fictions and to resist the enticements to consumerism.

James Fisher

Urban-dwelling immigrants and their children, Catholics and Jews, created a new mass culture in the early decades of this century, but only the former express guilt over it, as though the accomplishment somehow gives scandal to standards of theological purity. In a symposium devoted to Patrick Allitt's Catholic Intellectuals and Conservative Politics in America, 1950-85 (U. S. Catholic Historian, Winter, 1995), William L. Portier chides Allitt and other contemporary historians (present company included), in whose hands "American Catholic history becomes a history of Catholics living in American culture rather than the history of Catholics living consciously within the church's formal structures." Portier characterizes such work as "dare I say, `trendy' and even, to some extent, fundable."

Portier's jeremiad extends a creaky if enduring American Catholic tradition that equates spiritual virtue with resistance to consumerism, suburbia, rock 'n' roll music, and various mass-produced detritus served up by the "dominant" culture. Now apparently that critique includes "graduate schools that Catholics used to call 'secular.'" This strain of countercultural Catholicism has proven quite hardy despite its highly paradoxical foundation. For starters, Catholic critics of popular culture in the age of modernity were quite often converts and thus more implicated in a tangle with some presumed "other" America than immigrant or "ethnic" Catholics, who were less inclined to construct such oppositions as "sacred" versus "secular." It is perhaps fitting that in the postmodern era one need not even be Catholic to uphold this tradition: see for instance Robert Coles or the late Christopher Lasch, who viewed the church--or at least those precincts within it that had not succumbed to what Phillip Rieff called "the triumph of the therapeutic"--as one of the last holdouts against various modernist idolatries.

But any religious community that produces Jimmy and Dorothy Kilgallen, Jackie Gleason and Art Carney, Gracie Allen, Eleanor Powell, Bing Crosby, and Rosalind Russell should not have to ask what it can learn from pdpular culture. The ways in which Catholics have negotiated this interaction are fascinating. Shopping for yet another theory about the cultural origins of rock 'n' roll? How about this one: since the Scopes trial of 1925, evangelical Protestantism had grown increasingly defensive and could offer little resistance to the hegemony of East Coast Catholic and transplanted Hollywood Jewish producers of a national popular culture. Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins, and Jerry Lee Lewis--all steeped in the traditions of Southern fundamentalism--blended gospel imagery and pop crooning with the rhythm and blues introduced to places like Memphis during the 1940s' black migrations: the result was a cultural revolution inspired by George Whitefield as much as Bing Crosby. But while Jerry Lee Lewis was soon locked in mortal spiritual combat with his cousin Jimmy Swaggart and the music was held hostage to broader internecine strife in the "Bible Belt," rock 'n' roll offered Northern Catholics like Bruce Springsteen access to the primal myths of his civilization, profoundly adding to a foundation he had built over the writings of Jack Kerouac, one of the first American Catholics to seriously explore the profoundly multicultural fabric of urban American life.

Does all this have anything to do with Professor Portier's concern for "Catholics living consciously within the church's formal structures," a challenge that may sound ecclesiological but actually exposes the fissure between theological and cultural approaches to Catholic America? At the risk of further collusion with the dominant culture, I would simply ask: What would happen if theologians began to apply their insights and methods to the subjects and texts of found Catholicism, down in those spaces where a furtive spirituality flourishes in defiance of stereotypical representations of "the church"

I weary of being asked by non-Catholics what I think of the lifeless, boring, and wholly predictable movie, Priest. I tell them to go see Kevin Smith's Clerks instead (read "clerics"), in which young New Jerseyans working in a convenience store engage in ferocious post-Thomist disputation over the relative merits of space-adventure films, and treat sexual morality with the kind of hair-splitting earnestness not seen since the advice columns in the American Ecclesiastical Review of the 1950s (except in Clerks, "Dante" and "Veronica" skip the euphemisms: the language is downright gross, and while that's part of the message about these free-floating postpost Vatican II Catholics, if you were raised at all like me you'll be offended).

Kevin Smith has had all sorts of fun telling skeptical journalists that he is not only a former altar boy but a persisting Catholic and that his next film is to be titled Dogma. It will undoubtedly suffer from the self-consciousness of a "serious" treatment of religious concerns. But Clerks reminded me of the old 1940s' dreams of an integral Catholicism, in which one's entire universe was so infused with spiritual energy that distinctions between sacred and secular were obliterated (though Smith, admittedly, sure seems intent on making us endure a heavy dose of the dark side of rock 'n' roll Catholicism). A lot of people in the old days believed this goal entailed separation from the dominant culture. Maybe today, since there are so many of us doing so many different things, it just means being ourselves.