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F e a t u r e A r t i c l e
THE LINCOLN FLAP: ONE YEAR LATER
By MARK P. SHEA
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Not long ago I was browsing on the World Wide Web and ran across the transcript of an Internet "chat" held between Garrison Keillor and various netters. It was sponsored by the ACLU. The topic was censorship, and the ACLU hosts seem to have begun the discussion under the impression that Keillor, a fixture of Public Radio and a proud old liberal, would be a strong ally in sobbing about "censorship in America." As the chat session went on, Keillor left his ACLU hosts aghast by stating that he did not think license to do whatever one wanted in the name of "art" had been especially beneficial to American culture. He concluded the session by writing, "I’m fifty-three. Life is short. There is no censorship in America. There is very little discipline either. . . . So we move on to something more interesting. God. That’s what we want to think about. And we’re free to."
I have thought about this reassertion of common sense a great deal lately as the We Are Church petition drive wheezes along, emphysemically gasping into the nearest microphone the increasingly tenuous assertion that lay people in the richest, fattest, freest, and most hedonistic nation on earth are somehow repressed, stunted, and shackled by a cadre of ecclesial bureaucrats who, like the Pope, know nothing of living under totalitarianism and "fear empowering the laity." What we need, say the We Are Church folks, is FutureChurch! A Church on the cutting edge of the 1960s! A Church committed to the divine revealed decree: Do Your Own Thing.
But it is beginning to look like the future ain’t what it used to be. Last year, We Are Church’s flame of repressed victimhood flamed brightly for a brief moment, when the commonsensical bishop of Lincoln, Nebraska, Fabian Bruskewitz, declared that people could not simultaneously call themselves Catholic and remain members of organizations devoted to things like sucking out the brains of babies seconds before they are born, declaring the See of Peter empty, or fadging up do-it-yourself liturgies devoid of Catholic content.
This was the media event the "movement" desperately needed! Hopes were raised, and hoary dissenting heads were lifted up, as people such as John Krejci, co-chairman of Nebraska’s chapter of Call To Action (one of the principal organizations driving We Are Church) cried out the blessed word, "Censorship!" The flame of hope burned even brighter as the American media dutifully gobbled up these cries and, like USA Today, explained to the world that CTA simply "seeks a greater role for lay people."
But the flame dwindled to a flicker when the laity began to wonder what exactly CTA had in mind. Among other things, according to Mary Jo Anderson, who wrote a piece on CTA for the February 1996 issue of Crisis, they have little things like these in mind: "Goddess worship, augmented with Hindu and Buddhist precepts, figure prominently in the ‘wholeness’ CTA adherents seek." Thus, as soon became apparent to us lay people, the "liberation of the laity" for which Mr. Krejci labors was most clearly depicted, not by sanitized snippets in USA Today, but by the doings at a recent CTA conference that featured Matthew Fox and his "Seven Chakras of Creation Spirituality." "This ritual," according to Anderson, "stars a priestess-prostitute who guides mankind into a form of self-impregnation in order to spiritually recreate oneself as a goddess-woman, or a god-man, raised to a higher consciousness, at one with the universe." In short, CTA’s strategy for liberating the laity is "Destroy the Church in order to save it." For some reason, laymen (whose adherence is, after all, to the Catholic faith) did not see such strivings toward FutureChurch as within the pale of the faith handed down to us by Christ and the apostles.
Nor were we impressed with the astounding exclamation of one Randy Moody, a Catholic on the boards of both Planned Parenthood of Lincoln and the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, the most powerful and ardent force behind the 1.5 million abortions committed in America yearly. When news of the good bishop’s decision reached him, he exploded, "I challenge them to excommunicate me. This may end up in some court if they would proceed to do that."
It was this sort of extraordinary response—so amazingly uncomprehending of the nature of Church—that made so many begin to doubt that We Are Church was an accurate name for the group. Thus, a year later, the revolution that wasn’t seems to have largely contributed to bringing FutureChurch to its present status as FossilChurch. A year after Bishop Bruskewitz’s statement, where are we? Have the laity been galvanized with inspiration by the cries of censorship and repression emitted by CTA or Catholics for a Free Choice? Have we seen the leaders of We Are Church drawing a crowd of millions in Manila? Do we see a laity fired with love and hope begging for yet another press release from the greying force of academics and ideologues who carp about repression after each papal encyclical is issued?
On the contrary, we see an extremely small percentage of lay Catholics responding to the We Are Church petition. The average layman knows in his bones that Garrison Keillor was pretty much right when he said, "It’s trashy for artists to imagine that somebody is holding them down, repressing them, keeping them from expressing themselves. Ain’t true."
The same point, for all the sound and fury of Messrs. Krejci and Moody and the other self-proclaimed "victims of censorship," is true in the Catholic communion. If you want to go on working to suck out baby brains, celebrate goofy "liturgies" with prostitutes, and declare the See of Peter empty, you can. The bishop can’t do a thing to stop you. It’s a free country. But you can’t call yourself Catholic too, a fact which a thousand trashy appeals to the Bill of Rights will not alter. Communion is not a civil right.
Mark P. Shea is the author of By What Authority? An Evangelical Discovers Catholic Tradition. He lives in Washington State.
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