By SHAUN KENNEY
Mr. H writes about the impact of “ritual Catholicism” on America and Ireland. It’s a topic that we have touched on before at First Teachers on the impact of Jansenism (all rules and ritual with a tendency towards clericalism — don’t roll your eyes just yet) on Anglo-Irish Catholicism, particularly in places such as Australia, Ireland, England, and in the United States.
For Catholics in America, clericalism wasn’t a dirty word, but a survival mechanism. The church in the modern age was the antipode to the state at a time when revolutions and totalitarians lusted after both the souls and the arms of those sent to die in distant fields: Flanders, Sedan, the Somme, Stalingrad, and Kursk.
During every time that the secular religions demanded their blood, it was the Catholic Church embodied in our shepherds that was the final hand held up against the power of the state. When anti-Catholicism swept through America in the 1840s during the Know-Nothing period, it was the Archbishop of Philadelphia who warned that if a single Catholic parish was touched, he would burn Philadelphia to the ground. More than a touch hyperbolic…but no parish suffered the indignities of anti-Catholic mob violence.
Thus, our rituals and our clerics protected us from the waves of secular emotion in their negative instance. What our rituals and clericalism could not do is protect us from waves of positive sentiment, and when during the Second World War the time came for Catholicism to be useful not just to the U.S. Department of State in going places Americans could not, we found additional currency in being staunchly anti-Communist.
The very instruments that inoculated us against anti-Catholicism became the very tools used to sap our virility over the course of 50 years. Catholicism became fashionable for a time; American hegemony propped up Catholic missions and charitable works, and ritual replaced charity. When the Second Vatican Council arrived and the hijacking of the “spirit of Vatican II” came about, we simply swapped out one set of rituals for another…same husk, different clothes.
This is where Mr. H succinctly mentions that the problem isn’t so much in our rituals but rather that we have a true crisis of faith and truth, both within the laity and the clergy. Rituals are important, as the old line “lex orandi, lex credendi” (the law of prayer is the law of belief) matters. Yet a poor Mass prayed devotedly in a mud hut in the Amazon can be more profound and honorable than all the Masses in the Sistine Chapel when one considers the power of faith over ritual.
This is the core of the so-called “clericalism” crisis. It’s an empty husk, a doppelganger used by certain individuals in the Vatican to throw all of our sins upon and then beat out of the public square, clapping one another on the back and commending ourselves for a job well done — just like 2002.
Yet the rot is more profound than this.
The question truly is a crisis of faith and truth, and it is not a problem of the laity. Our bishops, when they refuse to defend life in a manner that respects the scarlet they wear, confuse the laity about what Catholics believe and are willing to sacrifice for. When protecting trees takes forceful prominence over defending life, what does this tell the faithful? When persecuting priests who pray more traditional forms of worship while allowing McCarrick’s network to remain unmolested in seats of power, what does this tell the faithful?
An old mentor once told me that if you want to get the bishops’ attention, hit them in the pocketbook. More succinctly, if the bishops behave like politicians? Treat them as politicians. Yet if that line bothers you reading it as much as it bothers me writing it, that is due to a very good sort of clericalism — one that we should heavily invest ourselves in protecting.
What I fear is our course is twofold. First, by denuding the power of our bishops and priests to be shepherds of our flock, we are exposing the sheep to further depredations from the wolves. Shepherds need their croziers, not to negotiate kindly with wolves, but to beat them over the head! St. Anthony of the Desert did this with heretics who ran up his mountain to convert him; St. Anthony beat them off his mountain with his stick. That’s the sort of clericalism we need!
Second and perhaps more dangerously is that we are living in an era of totalitarian ideologies. Fascism still lingers in certain quarters; socialism is more popular by the day; liberalism is beginning to take new and terrible forms as the “wall of separation” becomes more formality than dogma. We can see it every day as marriage becomes bigotry, transgenderism becomes normal, institutions become inherently racist, and nature becomes misogyny.
The Catholic Church has always stood as a sort of antipode to these regimes of power. The litany of defeated empires and ideologies is impressive: Romans, Arians, Holy Roman Emperors, Albigensians, Saracens, Templars, Revolutionary France, Napoleonic France, Revolutionary Italy, Nazi Germany, and Soviet Russia.
In almost every instance, our bishops and priests were honored even as they were murdered, tortured, ridiculed, and slandered — not because of their office per se, but because through their priestly function, they alone could bring us the Eucharist. No bishops, no priests. No priests, no Eucharist. No Eucharist, no Church.
Are we not living in such times today? This is where one wishes our priests and bishops would spend time in an actual sheep pasture for a week or so. There’s a reason why the comparison works.
Rather than fret about clericalism or demand that the sheep do their own shepherding, it might be more instructive to understand the reasons why clericalism exists. One might as well rage about shepherdism in the same breath, and we could certainly use good shepherds today.
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First Teachers encourages readers to submit their thoughts, views, opinions, and insights either via e-mail or by mail. Please send any correspondence to Shaun Kenney c/o First Teachers, 5289 Venable Road, Kents Store, VA 23084 or by e-mail to svk2cr@virginia.edu.
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