Essays

Cardinal George/U.S. Bishops' Meeting
The Laity and the Contemporary Cultural Milieu

There is a crisis of belief today in the all-powerful God, Cardinal Francis George of Chicago said in an address June 20 during the US. bishops' spring meeting in St. Louis. George was one of three bishops who addressed a day of reflection on critical issues confronting the church in the United States today. The bishops' speeches covered the identity and spiritual life of priests and bishops, catechesis-and the role of the laity. Asked to prioritize 11 issues raised in discussions during their November 2002 meeting, the U.S. bishops ranked those issues, in that order, as their top three priorities. (The texts of all three bishops appear in this Origins edition.) The reflection day was part of a process through which the U.S. bishops are preparing to decide in June 2004 whether to convene the first plenary council of the church in the United States since 1884. “Belief in a powerful God, an almighty God ... is, in a secularized culture, a threat to human freedom,” George observed. He said that in this context, one in which "God can make no demands," religion becomes a hobby, "a leisure time activity, not a way of life"; at best it is "a set of ideas” or “source of individual comfort.” George said the religion in this situation cannot "make truth claims." He added, "If God has no power, ... then bishops certainly can have no authority." In the cultural context he described, George said that church "becomes one more voluntary association.... The emphasis is upon belonging." However, he said, "ecclesiology moves between two poles, that of belonging and that of converting. Catholics may not have spoken often enough about the need for conversion in order to belong." George said, "I would argue, that the primary crisis at this moment, and always, is a crisis of discipleship, of conversion to Jesus Christ individually and socially with his body, the church." The cardinal said he would argue that the post-Vatican II church's greatest failure is the failure "to have formed and to call forth a laity engaged in the world in order to change it." George discussed the place of freedom in Christian discipleship. He also discussed the relation of faith and culture."The world is both friendly and unfriendly, both holy and demonic," he said. There is a need, he added, to “form people with a genuine love of the city and love of our culture itself. Even with its demonic elements, the culture must be loved because you cannot evangelize what you do not love." George's text follows.

One year ago we made a number of promises in Dallas. A good number of them have already been kept and a number of others are in the process of being kept. If there is some kind of credible allegation against a brother priest, he is out of ministry and often out of the priesthood. The media says we are doing little or nothing. How is that possible when, from our perspective, we are moving along so quickly and so resolutely, even with so much difficulty, still involved in the trials and the audits and the procedural follow-up but nonetheless very active?

All of us, I think, have given a good deal of time and a great deal of prayer and concern to this matter, while the perception is that we have done very little. At least the accusation is there, and it seems credible to many people. This clash between the reality, because we , have done a great deal and have kept our promises, and the perception, whether in the newspapers or in some groups or in the general culture, is the subtext or the context, perhaps, for my reflections.

When we speak about the church in society, we are speaking in institutional terms of a deeper relationship that we have gotten used to talking about as the dialogue between faith and culture. I have talked about it, and many of you have as well because the Holy Father has talked a lot about it for 25 years now. It is a necessary dialogue because both faith and culture tell us what to do. Both are normative systems. "Everybody's doing it," children say to their parents, "especially when they are young teenagers; and the "everybody" is the culture. The culture tells you what to do. It is a normative system. So is the faith. If the faith and the culture clash or disagree, as they always do to some extent, it is because faith is a gift from God and culture is a human construct. There will be tension in us because the faith and the culture are both inside us.

At times there will be harassment outside of our immediate faith community, sometimes imprisonment and if the clash is deadly, martyrdom. We often think about clashes between faith and culture in terms of what we are called to do or expected to do, in other words, in ethical or moral terms, in terms of cases like abortion, fornication, homosexual activity, divorce and remarriage, contraception, corrupt business practice, unjust war and also, in other cultures, polygamy, ritual murder and female circumcision. We look at practices that the culture legitimates, or at least permits, and we look at the moral demands of the faith, and we see that two normative systems disagree. But behind the moral issues there is also, more profoundly, a double way of seeing things, a double vision, if you like, a double way of thinking about things, certainly a double way of thinking about God. It may be that a particular culture does not understand the God who comes to us in divine self-revelation. Perhaps a culture cannot understand a merciful Father, or a self-sacrificing Son or a self-effacing Spirit. These are faith issues much more directly than moral issues. They are issues that we do not often think about but which, in fact, do form the environment in which we think. I think you could argue that the most controversial article of the creed is the one that says, "I believe in God, the Father almighty." One of the more controversial statements in Holy Scripture is Jesus' proclamation, "All power in heaven and on earth has been given to me." The belief in a powerful God, an almighty God, an all-powerful God is, in a secularized culture, a threat to human freedom. Since freedom is our primary cultural value, claims that God has power over us are very problematic.

Even without adverting to it very explicitly, the process of secularization of a culture and of an individual begins when the power of God is seen as a threat to the freedom of man. In the vision of faith, from divine self-revelation, the power of God creates us from nothing, and the power of God saves us from sin. God's power constitutes us. There is no way in which the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ can be a threat to our freedom or our salvation or to anything else except sin, But in a secularized culture, God is implicitly, in some sense, seen as a rival, a competitor to human beings, a threat. Some philosophers trace this development of seeing the power of God as something that is a threat to our human freedom and perhaps our existence to late scholasticism, to Dun Scotus and to nominalism, where God was recast as an arbitrary power and as a supreme being among other beings. Therefore, if he is being as we are beings, if being is a univocal category, then he can be a threat, a competitor.

Secularization in the form we call modernization began in the 16th century, when we started to clothe ourselves with the attributes of God in medieval scholastic theology. First of all, we took over control of nature through technology, where nature, instead of being a gift from God, is tortured in a global laboratory in order to bend nature through technology to our own purposes. We took over not only control of nature; we also took over control of history, replacing a provident God with the myth of human progress. Sometimes this has had good effect, as technology has had good effect. We have popular governments, but within the history of modern secularization we have also had the great totalitarian movements that simply took the place of God entirely. Since, for secularists, God is an arbitrary power in the lives of human beings, then in bringing the power of God into human control they have taken the arbitrary power as theirs and not the power of God as he lovingly reveals himself in history.

If God is a threat, he has to be done away with. So Nietzsche "kills" God, and God is denied, in many ways.

But there is a soft way of reducing the . threat that God's power might have for us, and that is to tame God. This is the kind of secularization that we live with in the United States. God is a name for everything that we cherish, whatever else he might be. God is like a pet brought out for our enjoyment at times, sometimes an object of fun as in Bruce Almighty but at any rate a construct. God certainly makes no demands, because he has no power. We cannot permit him to have power or we will lose our freedom. If God can make no demands, then religion is necessarily a hobby. It is what we do in our leisure time, particularly in the kind of leisure time we have invented with the weekend. "In a secularized culture, God is implicitly, in some sense, seen as a rival, a competitor to, human beings, a threat."

When both parents must work very hard for five days, they cherish the two days a week that they can be together with their children. It is leisure time. It is time for self-expression. If religion is one form of self-expression and if you want to express yourself that way, then that's fine. If it's not, that's fine too. In any event, neither religion, nor church nor God can make demands on what you do with your free time, what you do in your leisure time. Religion is a leisure-time activity, not a way of life. At best, therefore, religion is a set of ideas, now accompanied with a certain amount of ideological warfare. It is useful for celebrating but not for changing anything because it can have no power. We even have theologies of sacramentality which say that a sacrament is just a name for what is already there. The sacraments do not cause something; they are not powerful. Religion can be at best a source of individual comfort, if you choose to find your comfort there.

What religion cannot do in this situation is to make truth claims. In fact, in a postmodern situation any objective truth claim is illegitimate. It is a threat to subjective freedom. Religious truth claims in particular and therefore the exercise of religious authority or power are themselves offensive. They are threats in themselves to subjective freedom. They must be controlled. If they cannot be controlled, they must be ridiculed; If they cannot be ridiculed, then they have to be contained.

If God has no power because otherwise we cannot be free, then bishops certainly can have no authority. Any exercise of religious authority is therefore a form of usurpation. The crisis of faith in this kind of culture is not limited. It is not a crisis of belief in a particular dogma or in the moral teaching of Christ. It is a crisis of belief in the all powerful God. It is a loss of the conviction that spirit has power. Spirit is at best an epiphenomenon of matter. Only matter is powerful, and to make claims that spirit has power independently of matter is to indulge in superstition and to give oneself to a kind of religious enslavement.

There are a couple of consequences that we live with that I would trace to this phenomenon of"soft" secularization, of taming God by making him powerless and religion a hobby. The first is that nothing can be really new. If, in fact, the world is in our hands, both in our destiny and in the present, then anything that is unintended is an affront. We have to insulate ourselves against it. A primary example we have lived with for a generation now is that of an unwanted child. It is the wanting that makes a child valuable. An unwanted child is an affront and somehow must be done away with. There can be no unintended consequences. There can be no accidents that cannot be righted; so after every kind of incident or tragedy, the first thing that the authorities are expected to do is to reassure people not only that things will be all right, but that everything will be restored to the way it was before. In this kind of economy a great percentage of our assets is exhausted in insurance, in litigation, in the upkeep of prisons and in the development of homeland security in all its forms until, finally, we end up living in prisons that we've constructed ourselves. This is to embrace despair. It is a form of what Nietzsche called "the eternal return of the same."

There can be nothing that is truly new, and the present is made tolerable only by expensive distractions and frivolities which in fact change nothing. They are designed to change nothing, but to reinforce a sense of determinism. While it is no longer an angry God who is going to get us, it will be a wounded earth, or parents who have treated us badly and set our path of life by the time we were 4 or 5. Because of the particular kind of secularized Calvinism in which we live, our rhetoric is always full of eschatological warnings, but nothing changes. The eternal return of the same goes on. Every change that is not willed is considered wrong, and somebody has to pay.

But if there is nothing new, then nothing can be forgiven. For every genuine act of forgiveness means that a new beginning is possible, and there can be no truly new beginning. We see this in the tragedy of the current scandal, where healing cannot begin without an act of forgiveness on the part of one whose life has been so badly harmed, sometimes ruined, because of sexual abuse. Yet the one thing that cannot be done is to forgive. The culture is bizarre in its insistence that we should try everything, "just do it," and that everything is possible, "you can be whatever you want to be," while in fact nothing can be forgiven.

Faith, by contrast, says many things cannot be done. Jesus says, "If you love me, keep my commandments." There is much activity that is forbidden. But in the end everything can be forgiven. Perhaps that is the crisis of the sacrament of reconciliation: not so much a loss of the sense of sin as a loss of conviction that a new beginning is possible and that forgiveness is available through the power of our risen Lord.

One religious response to this kind of culture is to institutionalize schools and hospitals and works of mercy, charity justice in such a way that we contribute to the culture, but on the culture's own terms. It assumes that it is a good thing to be socialized according to the patterns of this culture. This response has exhausted many of the resources of the Catholic Church in this country. Our universities are American universities and our hospitals are American hospitals, for good or ill. Have our institutions, which have been our best response for taking the children of immigrants and keeping them Catholic while making them Americans, demanded too high a price? Have we formed professionals, but not formed disciples?

The church in this kind of culture becomes one more voluntary association, a spiritual club. The emphasis is upon belonging. Even the theology of communion can emphasize only the relationship which unites us to Christ and to one another. Of course, if we are to be visibly in Christ, we must belong. But ecclesiology moves between two poles, that of belonging and that of converting. Catholics may not have spoken often enough about the need for conversion in order to belong. The evangelicals are very good at this, but without an adequate ecc1esiology. For them, without a subjective experience of conversion, one cannot make a claim to belong to Christ. Catholics can belong to the church as we belong to a family before we have experience. But we have to be led, particularly through the sacraments and through good preaching and catechesis, to the experience of conversion, of turning ourselves inside out so that Christ is at the center of our life, not us.

Perhaps that is the crisis of the sacrament of reconciliation: not so much a loss of the sense of sin as a loss of the conviction that a new beginning is possible and that forgiveness is available through the power of our risen Lord.

The cry “we are church” is often a claim to say that if there is a clash between our personal culture and the Catholic faith, it is faith that must change, not us. That is new. In earlier years largely through parochial missions and in other ways, Catholics assumed that if they were in disagreement with the church, it was they who were wrong and who were sinful and eventually had to change, perhaps on their deathbed. The church had the right to call them to conversion. With the disappearance of Catholicism as a way of life, we have lost the regular common life of fasting and of prayer and of devotions that reminded people hour after hour throughout the day and the night that the church could make demands on them that God could make demands, on them, that Catholicism is a way of discipleship. That has disappeared, and with it, the automatic assumption that the church has the right to call anybody to conversion as a necessity for belonging. So if, in fact, we have focused too much on belonging and not enough to change the institutions and structures of the church. Rather, in all of our life and our ministries and in the way we think about things, we must focus again on real change, real novelty on an alternative way of life that gives hope from conversion.

I would argue that the primary crisis at this moment, and always, is crisis of discipleship, of conversion to Jesus Christ individually and socially within his body, the church. Second, there is a crisis of marriage for life and for the sake of family. Only third is there a crisis of special vocations. If we could solve the first two, we could easily solve the third. It is a mistake to begin with the third. We have to go back and ask again
about Vatican II's purpose as it was called by Blessed Pope John XXIII. The purpose of the council was strengthen the mission of the church order to change the world. Blessed Pope John XXIII was looking at a world in tatters and shreds because of racism anti-Semitism, the Holocaust and two great wars in 50-some years. Looking also at the economic and class warfare that was institutionalized by communism, he said: "Who excepts the universal church the Catholic Church?"

The purpose of calling the council was to make vigorous the mission of universal church in order to help the world come to the discovery that we are brothers and sisters in Christ, to bring Christians together through the ecumenical movement, to heal the sins of racism, to engage in interfaith dialogue and to address the world in terms of social justice and of universal charity. This conciliar program, all of it rooted in the Gospel and Christ's will for unity among his people, was brought forward precisely because the world was in need of change. The church was also in need of change, but only to the extent that she could most effectively change the world. We have allowed a missionary council to domesticated.

The greatest failure, I would argue, of the post-Vatican II church, is the failure to have formed and to call forth a laity engaged in the world in order change it, a laity engaged politically, economically, culturally and socially, but on faith's terms, not just the world's terms. If perhaps we paid less attention to ministries and to expertise and to functions, necessary though all of that is, and more to mission purpose, then we might a recapture sense of what should be genuinely new as a result of the council. The novelty the change sought was in the world and only secondarily in the church. Not that the church doesn’t have to change. Of course, the church must constantly change, to be obedient to her Lord, who calls her, as a church, to constant conversion. But the purpose of the church herself is not just to comfort individuals, celebrate events or be a voluntary association for people who like to spend their leisure time in that way and to do good things through it. The purpose of the church is to tell the world with one united voice that an alternative way of life is possible, that we do not have to live in the despair that more and more contains us inside traps of our own making. The purpose of the church is to be Christ' s judgment on the world.

This means that we have to recognize what we are up against. The world is both friendly and unfriendly, both holy and demonic. The world will welcome some of our criticisms and will do everything it can to contest others. The problem of separating out the demands of the world, which we have to hear at the risk of not attending to the signs of the times, and the problem of discerning in that call of the world what truly does require us to adapt the church and what is a trap, is the great missionary challenge of our times. I think that in changing parochial missions for a while right after the council in order to explain the changes in the church we got off to a very bad start. The call to conversion, was not heard with the same insistence in our parishes as it had been for generations. The call of Christ himself in the liturgy, in public devotion, in private prayer, has to be heard as a call to every Catholic. We cannot allow the laity's and our fear of the mission Christ gave his church to distract us or paralyze us.

The problem of separating out the demands of the world, which we have to hear at the risk of not attending to the signs of the times, and the problem of discerning in that call of the world what truly does require us to adapt the church and what is a trap, is the great missionary challenge of our times.

So what do we have to do now? We should pray for courage. There are good reasons to be afraid. The challenge is very difficult. A couple of weeks ago I received a letter just at the time we began to invade Iraq. The man was writing from the northwest side of Chicago, not far from where I was raised. He returned his baptismal certificate to me because he said that he was ashamed of the message of the Holy Father. The Holy Father did not understand why America had this mission to bring freedom to the Iraqi people. He wanted to return his baptismal certificate because he was ashamed of being Catholic. I wrote back to tell him what the Holy Father truly was about, how the pope must always plead for peace because war, even if it can be argued as justified, is a failure for the human race. The Holy Father went on to plead for peace even after the warfare began, without condemning the actions of those who were going to war. The pope's message and the situation of Iraq were both far more complicated than he had been led to believe. At the end of the letter, I said, "No matter what you accept or don't accept of what I've written, I see by your baptismal certificate that you are 65 years old. In a very few years, you will appear before the Lord Jesus Christ. He is not going to ask for your U.S. passport, but he will be interested in knowing is that you were baptized.” I returned the baptismal certificate, and I haven't heard anything more for the moment.

The culture is strong and very able to fight. It has something to teach us as well. It isn't a demonic culture versus a holy faith. It's much more complicated than that. Nonetheless, within this situation Christ needs lay disciples who can take up the challenge of the council and transform the world. We have to pay attention to helping people understand good in a social system that is seen as a collection of interest groups and of interested individuals. We haven't paid enough attention to the way in which our kind of culture is fundamentally based upon conflict, needs conflict. The legal system is based upon conflict. The political system is based upon conflict or competition. The media are based upon conflict. There must be a difference of opinion. There must be a clash of personalities. The conflict that is part of our cultural formation makes it very difficult for us to think beyond a particular interest or individual interests of all sorts to the common good; but it is possible. There are a lot of good people who do think about the common good first. You know them in our presbyterates and in our parishes.

We have to form people with a genuine love of the city and love of our culture itself. Even with its demonic elements, the culture must be loved because you cannot evangelize what you do not love. We have to love the city, not to possess it, but to perfect it for Christ in order to finally surrender it to him when he comes again in glory. That is a particular kind of disinterested love far removed from the love of possession which is the object of interest in our culture.

We have to speak about freedom. Freedom is a Gospel virtue.... Freedom is a gift, however, not something won by conquest. Discipleship means knowing how to wait in order to be set free by Almighty God.

We have to develop people who have a distinctive way of life. We had a Catholic subculture, but it could not last with the changes in the dominant culture. It is not a question of returning to the 1940s or 1950s. Even if somebody wanted to, that is impossible; and I do not believe it is desirable. But there is a way of life that is bound up with being a disciple of Christ in his church, and a common way of life not constructed by individual choice. It has a common devotion. It has penitential practices. It has common prayer. It has common vocabulary. It is a way of life which tells me every moment of my life that the church can make demands because she is the body of Jesus Christ, to whom all authority has been given in heaven and on earth. We bishops have to take a great deal of responsibility for the dissolution of Catholic culture.

We have to form people who look to the poor not merely as objects of concern but rather as guides, as people who in a sense are closer to the necessities and basics of life than many wealthy or middle-class people. At the time of the council, Yves Congar and others spoke about the a church of the poor. We didn’t take it to seriously in this country. One can romanticize the poor. The poor are as sinful as anybody else. Catholics have remembered what it was to be poor in the Great Depression and in the first generations of immigrants. Who wants to be poor? Poverty is certainly not an ideal in the sociological sense; but it is an evangelical ideal. The proclamation that the poor are the ones who are favored in the kingdom and that it is likely that the rich will go to hell is a very real warning in the Gospels. Without conversion, we will collapse into the ways of those whom Jesus warned would lose eternal life.

There is nothing wrong with being wealthy or middle class. It is the way of responsibility, the way of doing many generous and good things. The middle class exists in order to set people free, including the poor; but if wealth is not dedicated to the well-being of the poor, then it becomes a road to condemnation.

We have to make the church more clearly the way of freedom. If God is not a threat but is someone who makes us free, then especially for the young the church can be the way of freedom, because they know the world is a trap. The openness to the world that was demanded rightly in Gaudium et Spes was at times, I believe, confused with self-secularization, seeing the world as the primary way of grace. The church had to "catch up" to the world, and the better she was conformed to the world, the more she would be truly renewed. That position is a dead end.

We have to speak about freedom. Freedom is a Gospel virtue. Freedom is what we're all about. We should speak about freedom before we speak about anything else. Freedom is a gift, however, not something won by conquest. Discipleship means knowing how to wait in order to be set free by Almighty God.

A few weeks ago I was with some young people in Chicago in a tavern near Wrigley Field at something called YACHT (Young Adult Catholics Hanging Together). It is a kind of extension of "Theology on Tap." There were about 300 young people there. Shortly after the conversation began, they asked, "Cardinal, why should I be Catholic?"

I said, "You should be Catholic because God wants you to be Catholic God is active in the world. God is powerful. God sets us free; and God wants you to be Catholic."

Then they asked, "What about my Buddhist roommate?" and other very good questions, but none of them contested the truth claim that God wants you to be Catholic. They were open to hearing that and had a sense of it, thou they weren't all convinced.

That is what we have to proclaim: "Dear brothers and sisters, in this culture, God wants us all to be Catholic. Here's how you go about it. If you do so, God will set you free. God is doing wonderful things here. Why shouldn’t he? He is God, and we are not." Then trust the laity to work it out in the world and, in the name of Christ and with his authority, hold them accountable in this world, as Christ will in the next.