Young Adult Catholics

YoungAdultCatholics – a blog of CTA 20/30

Catholicism: The Basement in My House of Faith

Posted by Lacey Louwagie on May 7, 2013

After my last post, I received a question that’s fairly common when it comes to my dissatisfaction with the Church: Why do you stay?

I’ve been attending a UCC church for over a year now, so the easy answer to that question would be, “I don’t.”

Of course, it’s not as simple as that, which is why I put off answering.

In my personal essay “Where I First Met God,” slated for publication in Unruly Catholic Women Writers, I wrote about how, despite my dissatisfaction with the Church, it was where I first came to have an understanding of the Sacred, and that wasn’t something from which I could turn easily away. The essay was written four years ago, back when I was still a “practicing” Catholic. Somehow, explaining why I “stay” feels a little disingenuous to me now, when Catholic service is no longer part of my weekly rhythm.

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Nameless in the name of God

Posted by Justin Sengstock on May 6, 2013

Timothy Cardinal Dolan’s April 25 blog post is entitled “All Are Welcome!” But the irony in the New York archbishop’s already-infamous reflection is that all are really not welcome in his Catholic Church. Unless, like the grammar-school Timothy and his boyhood chum Freddie, we remember to “wash our hands” before joining the family for dinner.

Dolan lists six categories of folks who had best clean up before appearing at God’s table: active alcoholics; businesspeople who deny fair wages to migrant workers; young unmarried couples who cohabit; women who have abortions and male partners who encourage them; people who act on “homosexuality” or “same-sex attraction” (note those terms, because they’ll be important later); and wealthy folks who ignore principles of charity and justice.

It’s a clever list, superficially diverse, careful to include social sins about which progressive Catholics often speak. But Dolan gives himself away. Three of his six “dirty hands” categories are sexual/reproductive, and he treats them with minimal nuance. (Another “dirty hands” category, alcoholism, is awkward because it’s at least as much a physical and psychological illness as a moral lapse.) And, among his sexual/reproductive bullet points, the most space is reserved for “homosexuality,” for “same-sex attraction.” In fact, it’s the longest point of the entire list, constituting 60 of 191 words, almost a third. (I used Microsoft Word for a tally.)

Local Catholics who sensed Dolan’s underlying point, and didn’t like it, announced a silent protest for Sunday, May 5. The protest contained but one element: participants would attend Mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral after rubbing their hands with charcoal. But alas, Dolan was evidently quite serious about soap and towels: the ten protesters were promptly greeted by an equal number of NYPD officers, who said they could not enter. A cathedral staffer confirmed it, telling the protesters that attending Mass with dirty hands would be treated as criminal trespassing. Therefore they remained outside, and one protester, Joseph Amodeo, wrote eloquently about his experience for the Huffington Post.

Better scribes than I have already spilled enough ink analyzing Dolan’s loaded rhetoric of “dirty hands,” as well as the ways Jesus deliberately transgressed the boundaries of clean and unclean during his ministry. My own insight is more of an aside.

I said to note my citation of Dolan’s terms “same-sex attraction” and “homosexuality.” When I read them in his piece, they reminded me of something I’d seen awhile back. But I didn’t know where to find it. So I employed brute force, typing my vague memory into Google: catholic bishops don’t use word gay. And, on page 3 of my search results, I found something familiar: an NCR article from January.

It began: “San Francisco Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone has said Catholics opposed to same-sex marriage should limit themselves to even using the term ‘only sparingly,’ as the idea, according to him, is an impossibility.” Almost what I remembered, but not quite. Then I scanned further down, and bingo: “Cordileone also prefers that Catholics do not use the terms ‘gay’ and ‘lesbian,’ but instead ‘persons with a homosexual inclination.’”

I can’t claim to know for sure whether older terms like “homosexuality” or “inclination” or “same-sex attraction” are indeed being painstakingly retained in ecclesiastical PR messaging, apparently as pushback to the acceptance of “gay” and “lesbian” and “bisexual.” But even so, powerful hierarchs like Cordileone and Dolan certainly do set an example for other church authorities. And they are brushing aside not just the lingua franca of the wider culture, but also the ways most LGBTQs speak of themselves and their relationships.

As a straight ally, I have to take a long moment to ponder the implications. I have to imagine what it’s like to not only belong to a group singled out for “dirty hands,” but to be simultaneously stripped of the right to claim my own name: to be, paradoxically, both a scapegoat and a whozit. Because when you can’t say your own name, when everybody else calls you whatever they want, then you have no name.

Think hard about that: people kept nameless in the name of God.

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Francis and John

Posted by Justin Sengstock on April 26, 2013

A couple days ago at work, I took a call from someone who wanted to know what I personally thought of Pope Francis. I knew what she meant. She didn’t mean what I think of him in general. She meant what I think of him now.

Now, because Francis recently reaffirmed the Vatican “reform” of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR), the largest umbrella group for U.S. sisters. In April 2012 the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith put LCWR under the control of three U.S. bishops. Vatican concerns included “certain radical feminist themes incompatible with the Catholic faith.”

I thought for a second and said yes, I was disappointed by Francis’ response to the LCWR issue. But I added that I still like him. Francis has open contempt for power and careerism, for triumphalism and money. Inasmuch as reform begins with the pope, I’m not sure he could change anything else unless he starts with those problems anyway.

I also pointed out that someone we now consider a liberal, John XXIII, really wasn’t the liberal of legend. It was John as catalyst, not John as progressive, that mattered. And with that in mind, lately I think a lot about John and Francis, Francis and John.

Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli, who became Pope John XXIII on October 28, 1958, was then 76 years old. Although conversant with the socially-engaged Catholicism of his home diocese, Bergamo, he was also thoroughly steeped in traditional nineteenth-century Italian piety: Jesus and Mary and Joseph, devotions and saints, obedience and mortification. His diary and de facto autobiography, Journal of a Soul, reflects as much. His career was solidly bureaucratic, that of a consummate uomo di fiducia, or “reliable man”: three decades in low-key Vatican diplomacy and five quiet years as cardinal-patriarch of Venice.

When the conclave elected Roncalli, one of the qualities his brother cardinals appreciated was his obvious loyalty to his predecessor, the conservative Pius XII. And Roncalli continued some of Pius’ more overtly conservative policies. For example, John–or at least his Curia–would uphold Pius’ decision to shut down the French worker-priest movement, in which clergy took jobs as ordinary laborers to better connect with their flock.

John was also an old-fashioned church historian by avocation, devoted to classical and medieval literature, author of a series of books about the sixteenth-century St. Charles Borromeo. So it was really no big surprise when he issued the 1962 Apostolic Constitution Veterum Sapientia (“The Wisdom of the Ancients”), which pointedly promoted the study and use of Latin. Catholic intelligentsia, riffing on a then-current anti-Communist slogan (Cuba si, Castro no), joked that here was a case of veterum si, sapientia no (“old men, yes; wisdom, no”).

I doubt all of what transpired in Catholicism later in the 1960s and 1970s would have met John’s approval.  You can make a strong case that, despite his now-infamous encyclical against birth control, the real liberal pope of the Second Vatican Council was Giovanni Battista Montini, Pope Paul VI. But Paul, while he would continue the council, also admitted that it simply wouldn’t have occurred to him to initiate it.

And there lay John’s great gift: just to know that something had to be done, that something was missing, that we needed a gust of wind, a new Pentecost, even if he could not precisely envision it. And he intuited that only a gathering of many others besides himself could envision it. By calling the council, which only completed one session before his death, John XXIII had a sweeping effect that far transcended him.

I can see Pope Francis fulfilling a similar role. I know he will never agree with me about many causes for which I work. But I also sense a man with a holy impatience: a pope who, to paraphrase his own pre-conclave words, cannot abide a self-referential church that gets sick choking on its own stale air.

He gives many signals that our self-referential, royalist climate is finished. There is his name, his emphasizing his local role as bishop of Rome, his refusal to move into the nineteen-room papal apartment, his paying his own hotel bills, his black pants and black shoes, his cheap iron pectoral cross, his insistence on constantly dialing up random friends and telling them “it’s Jorge calling,” his historic appointment of eight international cardinals as an advisory council (seven of them metropolitan archbishops, and only one Vatican official), his reported “unblocking” of Oscar Romero’s beatification, his celebration of Holy Thursday in a juvenile detention center. At the Vatican, in many ways a small village where symbolic gestures foreshadow programmatic changes, all this matters very much.

So for now I retain the hope that Pope Francis is himself a catalyst, that he too will have an  impact far transcending his own conscious intent.

(P.S. I’m not the only one pursuing this comparison: Historians ask: Is Francis a John XXIII? | National Catholic Reporter)

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to Boston, from Virginia, with love

Posted by rhonda80 on April 25, 2013

For all of us who love Boston, and who have at some point in life called that city home, last week was a difficult one.  Like so many others, after hearing the news on the radio Monday afternoon, I began contacting friends in the Boston area, and each of them had their own story.  One friend, who had been in class with me at the Boston College School of Theology and Ministry, was cheering on runners a few miles from where the explosions occurred.  Another friend had been pacing a fellow runner and had left him at mile 21 about an hour before the attack.  A former colleague had a niece injured in the second blast.  Another friend, a Boston area native, told me that she has attended the marathon every year of her life, but skipped this year for the first time to stay home and work on her thesis.  Everyone was shocked and scared, sad and confused.  I did my best to offer encouragement and empathy, to assure them of my prayers, unsure of what else I could give.

                I spent the rest of the week trying to take in the news enough to be informed, but without getting sucked into the sensationalism and the speculation, and trying to avoid the image of the explosion they showed over and over on television.  The various places that were named in and around Boston are familiar and carry memories for me.  The mosque in Cambridge that the brothers attended was shown on the news, and I realized I had walked past it a few summers ago.  Struck by its beauty, I remember that I stopped on the sidewalk to silently pray for all who attended there.

                Now I live in Central Virginia and I spent last week surrounded by the beauty of the Blue Ridge Mountains in springtime – apple trees with bright white blossoms, baby lambs in the barn, dogwoods and red buds in bloom.  I felt the strange dissonance between the idyllic beauty of my surroundings with my own feelings of sadness and grief and my difficult phone conversations with loved ones in the Boston area.  These feelings were compounded by the awareness that for many people around the world, violence is daily reality – though it doesn’t receive the media coverage that the Boston Marathon bombings do. 

                Like so many of us over the last ten days, I have been asking myself how I should respond to last week’s events in Boston.  As people of faith, we pray – for the victims and their families and caregivers, for the perpetrators, for all who are impacted.  Even when we can’t find it within us to pray, we simply offer to God what is within us – our grief, our shock, our anger, our fear.  As NPR reported news of a manhunt and lockdown, I laced up my shoes and went for a four mile run, the rhythm of my footfall on the gravel and my breath their own kind of prayer.

                But it is not enough just to pray.  Events like this make us ask hard questions – about violence, security, vulnerability, community.  As we learn more about the two young men who carried out the attack, we seek to understand their intentions and motivations.  What could have been done to prevent such an action?  Tragedies like the one in Boston make us take a hard look at ourselves, our nation, and our world and ask what can be done to create a more peaceful and just world.

                But before all this, perhaps there is a more elementary step.  Before analysis and action, there is something simpler I am challenged to do in the face of such an event.  I am blessed to live in a community with adults with intellectual disabilities (similar to L’arche), and last Friday evening many of us gathered after dinner to watch a movie, as we often do on the weekend.  We watched Ruby Bridges, which tells the true story of a six-year-old African-American girl who helped to integrate the public schools in New Orleans in the 1960s.  She and her family faced great resistance and cruelty from many whites who supported segregation, but bolstered by faith in Jesus’ example of overcoming evil with good, Ruby and her family persevered.  After the movie was over, I had conversation with three of my community-mates, adults with intellectual disabilities, about what the movie meant to them.  Some of their responses:

                “We should be kind even if people are mean to us, and not hate anybody.”

                “The movie is about respect and love.” 

“Even though we’re all different, we should try to be friends.”

“The movie shows that we should love each other and get along, even when it’s hard.”

We went on to discuss practical, concrete ways that we could be kinder and more loving in our daily lives in community.   The simple and sincere words of my community-mates were a great consolation to me in light of the sadness I had been carrying throughout the week.  Often, the very young, the very old, and those with intellectual disabilities – people whose hearts are more open and less monitored by intellect – can speak with a clarity that is prophetic to the rest of us. 

Of course, it seems overly simplistic and unrealistic – saccharine, even – to say that love and kindness are the answer, especially as we face acts of individual and collective terror and violence.  Yet as I think what my community-mates shared, I remember the words attributed to St Francis of Assisi: “it is better to let one candle than to curse the darkness.”  When the news reports and the stories that are loved ones share make us so aware of the darkness, maybe the first step is to take a deep breath and commit ourselves to living in the light. 

A week and a half after the Boston Marathon bombings, I am committed to praying, committed to analysis and asking the hard questions about the root causes of violence – and also, inspired by my community-mates, I am committed to making love, kindness, and compassion the central values in my daily life.  In the face of violence, we commit to peace.  In the face of anger, we commit to compassion.  In the face of distrust, we commit to kindness.  We refuse to respond to hatred with more hatred.  We love our families, our neighbors, our friends, and – as followers of the Gospel – even our enemies.  We commit to building an ever-widening and diverse circle of community. 

It’s not the whole solution, but seems to me to be an important first step.  And, as any marathoner could tell you, the first step matters a great deal. 

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Catholicism: Are You In or Out?

Posted by Lacey Louwagie on April 23, 2013

I just left a phenomenal gathering of activists, clergy, social workers, researchers, and other experts sponsored by the Religious Institute to put together a guidebook about how spiritual communities might provide pastoral care to bisexual people (and others who don’t easily fall within a straight/gay binary). At one point, we were asked to write down one sentiment we felt was key for the guide to address. Mine went something like this:

Someone should not have to choose between her sexual identity and her religious tradition.

As a bisexual woman, the issue of choice is a complicated one. It makes people nervous to know that, hypothetically, the world of romantic attraction is so “wide open” to someone like me. (I say hypothetically because, back when I was single, I only fell in love about once every five years — it was so rare that I was thrilled when it showed up, no matter what form it took!) Although this is less an issue with my generation and those after me than for those who came before, there’s still a subtle pressure to “pick a side.” C’mon, which one are you really? Are you gay but you want straight privilege? Are you only willing to come “half” out of the closet? Are you still “figuring things out”?

As a bisexual woman, I don’t want to be pushed into “choosing” whether to deny my attractions to women or to men, when the reality of attraction is much more complex than that. I feel equally uncomfortable when faced with pressure to “choose” whether I’m Catholic or bisexual, Catholic or feminist. Last week, I saw a bumper sticker that declared, “You can’t be pro-choice AND Catholic.”

I wanted to add a sticker that said, “YOU don’t get to decide who is Catholic.”

Unfortunately, I think a lot of progressive Catholics feel this pressure to choose sides: Where do you really stand? Are you pro-choice OR Catholic? Are you gay OR Catholic? And it doesn’t just come from Catholicism, either. It often comes from the political or personal communities we find ourselves in: “If you’re a feminist, why do you continue to align yourself with a religious tradition that oppresses women?”

But just as issues of sexuality, reproductive rights, and women’s equality are complicated and nuanced, so too is the Catholic church, including all the clergy and lay that comprise it now and throughout history. So, too, are each of our relationships to the places we call our spiritual homes. Pressuring anyone to “choose sides” when it comes to core aspects of her identity is a form of spiritual violence, and it’s not okay. So rather than go into intensely personal territory when these different aspects of identity are challenged, sometimes I’d rather just exist quietly in this inbetween space. Perhaps the next time someone asks, “How can you be both x and y,” I’ll simply respond, “Because I am.”

 

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Rebels for Jesus

Posted by Dave Montrose on April 14, 2013

This post first appeared on Pax Christi Southwest Florida’s site.

“Nonviolence does not mean non-action. Nonviolence means we act with love and compassion.” – Thich Nhat Hanh

A little bit of rebellion goes a long way. Just ask the apostles.

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Simplicity (Things I learned from my kids)

Posted by Dave Montrose on April 13, 2013

“We live in a world that celebrates superficial beauty and rejects ugly, yet God sees beauty in all of us despite our ugliness. Jesus loves us just the way we are.” - Pastor Jamie Stilson, Vineyard Community Church of Cape Coral (Fla.)

Today was the first “summer” day for the kids.* We broke out the sprinkler and the heretofore unused inflatable wading pool for the purpose of joyful splashing and scampering. But after a few minutes of Daddy demonstrating how to properly jump through a sprinkler and Mommy placing Jacob (16 months old) in the wading pool, the experience ended up turning into Jacob toddling around the driveway, and Hannah (2 years) taking pleasure in using a sprinkler-free hose to water whom- or whatever she could find.

Once again, my kids have taught me a lesson in Christian living.

"Okay, we're ready to get out and play now."

“Okay, we’re ready to get out and play now.”

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Implicit Bias, and Doing vs. Being

Posted by Lacey Louwagie on April 9, 2013

Last week, I took an implicit bias test as part of my homework in a Know Thyself class I’m taking through Coursera. The test was designed to explore a theory that much of our mind’s workings are totally unconscious, and not even possible for us to access, even though they still influence our actions. In particular, it is believed that many of our prejudices exist in this deeper, inaccessible part of ourselves, hidden from us even as we consciously believe we harbor no convictions about one group of people being better than another.

When I took the test, I found that I have a “slight preference” for people with light skin (meaning that I have a slight tendency toward racism). Although I don’t like my results, I wasn’t surprised by them, either — not because I consciously consider myself racist, but because I know that the “isms” are much more pervasive and slippery than we’d like to think, and this is precisely why discrimination continues to exist in a world where many people vehemently deny their prejudices.

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Language gap

Posted by Justin Sengstock on April 7, 2013

Jamie Manson’s latest NCR commentary is entitled: “Dolan and Cordileone: Please don’t call it love.” She wonders what exactly it might mean for Timothy Cardinal Dolan of New York, and Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone of San Francisco, to proclaim that the Catholic Church really does love gays and lesbians.

Dolan said “I love you, too” (literally) in an Easter Sunday interview on ABC. He elaborated: “we want your happiness…you’re entitled to friendship.’” And when Cordileone arrived in San Francisco in 2012, he announced: “We need to continue to learn how to be welcoming, let them know that we love them and we want to help them.”

But Dolan is, of course, a vocal opponent of marriage equality. He also declined a request to meet with homeless LGBTQ youth last year. Cordileone, meanwhile, is nicknamed the “Father of Proposition 8.”

And Jamie notes that when the Human Rights Campaign recently distributed a red and white equal-sign graphic on Facebook, meant to be posted while the Supreme Court heard arguments on marriage equality, Cordileone’s PR staff went ahead with their own jaw-dropping riposte: “a graphic of a white division sign and the citation ‘Luke 12:51′ on a red square. (Luke 12:51 is the verse in which Jesus says, ‘Do you suppose that I came to grant peace on earth? I tell you, no, but rather division.’)” The archdiocese pulled it from Facebook when people complained, but the division sign had made its point.

Jamie wants church officials to stop using the word “love” unless they demonstrate it in concrete, relational ways:

When we love another person, we genuinely desire to know her or him. When we love, we long to listen to the beloved and to learn his or her story….But that quality of listening requires true presence and vulnerability. For now, men like Dolan and Cordileone continue to insist that gays and lesbians do not know the truth about themselves and their relationships.

Unsurprisingly, commenters began shooting back. One critic, who goes by the screen name Purgatrix Ineptiae (my rough translation: “she who cleans out the folly”), wrote that love means something else entirely:

When a bishop says he loves you, he means he wants to help you get into heaven. It doesn’t mean he will clear his schedule to listen (for the thousandth time) to your protestations that he should adopt your opinions. It doesn’t mean he enjoys your company. It doesn’t mean he wants you to like him. It means he wants to help you eschew sin and grow in faith in accordance with his understanding of sin and faith.

Reading Jamie’s understanding of love, which I confess to sharing, and reading the alternate view provided by Purgatrix, I realized (for the thousandth time) what one of the biggest problems is in the church today. It is the language gap.

For all intents and purposes, there are multiple Catholicisms. Words and symbols might coincide, but meanings do not. I began to grasp this near the end of my college career, while researching a paper on sexual ethics for a theology class. I read articles about John Paul II’s understanding of love.

The articles suggested that love for John Paul was, at bottom, the choice to disinterestedly pursue the objective good of another person, particularly the other’s eternal good. Because God is the creator and ground of all that is, we learn how to make such a choice by first studying God’s self-revelation, of which the church is the privileged custodian. Only secondarily do we study human experience.

This view appeals to our idealism, and has some beauty and logic. It is also somewhat removed from the friction of our everyday, embodied lives. It frequently does not allow our personal encounters to speak for themselves with all their compelling mystery and poetry, their unbidden ecstasy and sorrow. And so when we try to dialogue with the Vatican about love, particularly sexual love, the result is generally an impasse.

Speaking of dialogue, I had a related light-bulb moment while reading David Gibson’s book about Pope Benedict XVI, The Rule of Benedict. One passage argued that while Benedict considered himself wholeheartedly committed to dialogue, he often used the word in a different way than it appears in common discourse. Benedict’s model for “dialogue” was the Gospel of John, in which the truth-seeker asks questions of the truth-bearer, as Nicodemus does with Jesus, and then accepts what the truth-bearer reveals. This is dialogos with the divine logos, not a hashing-out among parties of equal standing. For me, it explained a lot.

If this is how much our basic terms and concepts differ, then consider just how much we talk past each other, and how much we will continue to do so. I obviously have no easy solution. I doubt there is even a hard solution.

But if I am not immediately optimistic, I yet have hope. My hope is in Jesus’ observation that the proof of the tree is its fruit. My hope is in Gamaliel’s counsel that what comes from God is not stoppable. We will see which language, which worldview, gives the most abundant life to the most people. And you know where my bias is.

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Mary Magdalene, Rules, and Following Jesus

Posted by Lacey Louwagie on April 2, 2013

After we attended Easter service, my husband was speculating about what it might have been like for Mary Magdalene to go out and try to tell the rest of the world what she had discovered at the grave of Jesus. I told him about my copy of The Gospel of Mary Magdalene, which might shed a little more insight. He read it aloud as we drove to my aunt and uncle’s for Easter brunch, adding his own commentary along the way. At one point, Jesus is quoted as saying:

“Impose no law other than that which I have witnessed. Do not add more laws to those given in the Torah, lest you become bound by them.”

Ivan paused and said, “It’s no wonder this book was banned from the Bible!”

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