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What I Learned from U.S. Catholic Magazine

I subscribe to more than a half-dozen Catholic periodicals, but U. S. Catholic is not one of them. In fact, I had never read it until one day late last year I picked up the October 2001 issue from our parish magazine rack and decided to read through it.

U. S. Catholic is a slick, attractive magazine with well-proportioned illustrations, ads, and sidebars. A glance at its table of contents reveals timely topics of interest to many Catholics. The cover story was on Catholics and the Internet; other features included one on ways to improve religious education, an op/ed piece on Catholic racism in Chicago, an interview with the authors of The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Understanding Catholicism, reviews of recent films, and a meditation on a Gospel text.

One of the first things I look for in a Catholic periodical is “slant.” Where does it stand in relation to the Church? What are its editorial biases? What expectations does it make about its readers’ perspectives? These are important questions to ask in a Catholic world that has been polarized over issues of Church authority, women’s ordination, contraception, abortion, extra-marital cohabitation, homosexuality, divorce and remarriage, et cetera. Some periodicals aim to support and clarify Church teaching. Others are devoted to revisionist agendas of various kinds.

These differences are not always overt, but all periodicals have an editorial perspective. There is no point of view from nowhere. Discerning the slant of a periodical helps you see where the writers are “coming from” and to interpret and understand what they are really saying.

Letters and a Token Conservative

In this issue of U.S. Catholic, letters to the editor begin on page seven under the headline “Catholics need facts to vote their faith.” A sentence from the first letter is excerpted and highlighted in the center of the page: “If Catholics do not vote their faith, it’s probably because social justice aspects of their faith have not been articulated as clearly as the abortion issue has.”

This is telling. First, it implies that abortion is not a social justice issue and that Catholics concerned with abortion are not voting their faith, both fallacious assumptions. The letter calls for church leaders “willing to take on hard questions such as war, poverty, hunger, the death penalty, and injustices committed by our country around the world, instead of merely encouraging personal piety and feel-good religion.” This suggests that Catholics concerned with pro-life issues aren’t “taking on the hard questions” but are “merely encouraging personal piety and feel-good religion.” Also telling is the fact that the editor considered this letter important enough to highlight, which could signal an endorsement of its perspective, a hypothesis reinforced by the “leftward” tilt of subsequent letters.

An exception is the sixth letter by Charles Zuneffi (page eight), which takes issue with a previous article by Kathleen Chesto on why young people are dropping out of the Church. Zuneffi, a twenty-two-year-old Catholic, says he only started attending church after his grandmother asked him to start driving her to her old inner-city parish where the interior was nineteenth-century Gothic, not 1980s suburban, and the Mass was in Latin, not English.

“I loved it,” he writes. “The chants and the organ, and all the rituals that Chesto scoffs at as old-fashioned, really appealed to me.” He blames Chesto’s generation for sinking attendance: “In an attempt to make religion fit your views of soft, contemporary suburban culture, you took away an important element that attracts young people to religion—the idea of mysticism, sacredness, something higher.” Zuneffi’s letter may represent a token minority viewpoint, confirming that the prevailing editorial viewpoint, represented by Chesto’s article, tilts left—a hypothesis consistent with the data thus far.

Subsequent pages spotlight Jim Wallis (the leftist Anabaptist editor of Sojourners magazine); Mata Amritandandamayi (a Hindu leader); summer internships on worker justice in Chicago; Le Moyne College’s new environment-friendly geothermal heat pumps; and an article on Benedictine Sister Christine Vladimiroff, prioress of the Mount St. Benedict Monastery in Erie, Pennsylvania, who “has become something of a hero” for her refusal to deliver a Vatican directive to Benedictine Sister Joan Chittister forbidding her to attend and speak at the Women’s Ordination Worldwide conference in Dublin, Ireland.

The Editor Shows her Spots

Running along the bottom of pages fourteen and fifteen is a brief opinion piece by U. S. Catholic’s editor, Mary Lynn Hendrickson, who relates a personal anecdote about “ultraconservative” and “mean-spirited” Catholicism on the web. She describes dropping in on a Catholic web site and getting “slammed” and called “anti-family” for offering her opinion on the use of artificial contraception. She quotes Yahoo’s Theology and Religion discussion leader, John Switzer, who suggests that “conservative Catholics” are more outspoken on the Internet “because the main body of Catholics takes it for granted that the changes in Vatican II were inevitable and it’s inevitable that these changes will continue and develop. It’s a moving locomotive that cannot be stopped and that, I believe, is moving under the direction of the Holy Spirit.”

This suggests that “changes” of the kind protested by “conservative Catholics” were not only inevitable after Vatican II but also mandated by the Council and approved by the Holy Spirit. This is a highly questionable assumption, depending on whether the “changes” include things like the widespread acceptance of artificial contraception, homosexuality, and divorce and remarriage. “Ultimately, we’re all cafeteria Catholics and we’re all progressives,” Switzer continues, “because none of us can know the mind of Christ perfectly and none of us can hold the faith in a manner that exactly mirrors God’s glory. A two-ounce bottle cannot contain the ocean.” While magnanimously appealing to humility in the face of our human finitude, this suggests the erroneous inference that all opinions are relative, and no views—even those of the Church—can be expected to give us true knowledge of “the mind of Christ.” It is significant that the editor highlights these views in her own column.

A large box on page seventeen (“Editor’s Suggestions of Useful Web Sites”) lists web sites under various headings, including “Liberal Catholicism” and “Conservative Catholicism.” This in effect legitimates web sites on “Women’s Ordination Conference,” “Call To Action,” and “Radical Catholic Page” (even though such groups have been explicitly censured by Rome) by placing them alongside “Conservative” listings such as “New Advent,” “Peter’s Net,” and “EWTN” (all known for their doctrinal substance and fidelity to Rome). The strategy is as ingenious as it is disingenuous—unless it stems from simple invincible ignorance, which, given the state of Catholic catechesis and publications today, is not unthinkable.

The Complete Idiot’s Guides

Probably the most revealing article in the magazine is “Power to the People of God” (page twenty-four), an interview with Mary Faulkner and Bob O’Gorman, authors of The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Understanding Catholicism. The authors are upbeat, sincere individuals, interested in “empowering” the laity with a sense of their own “spirituality.”

“There’s been a real awakening of spirituality in the past twenty years,” declares O’Gorman. “People are getting in touch with the movement of the spirit within them.” Faulkner adds, “Much of the spirituality today is a raw, unprocessed power. Maybe this raw energy is ‘breaking out’ because it’s been boxed up too long. You can’t keep the spirit in a box. The more you try to control the spirit, the more it is going to insist on being free. The challenge today isn’t to the people—they’re doing just fine—the challenge is to church leadership to recognize this outbreaking and ask, ‘How can we help this become more of what you want it to be?’”

Why does this remind me of the movie Wag the Dog? In effect, Rome is being asked to submit to the popular “spirit” (whatever that means), whereas the apostle John warns us to “test” and “discern” the spirits to see if they are of God (1 John 4:1).

Contradicting a basic Church teaching, O’Gorman declares, “We wanted to be able to talk about the fallibility of the church because, for instance, the church in its relationship to women has been in grave sin.” In the first place, this confuses fallibility (erroneousness) with peccability (sinfulness). In the second place, it assumes—as later parts of the interview make abundantly clear—that the refusal to ordain women is part of the “sin” for which the Church must “repent.” But Pope John Paul II recently proclaimed the tradition of a male priesthood irreformable, stating: “I declare that the Church has no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women and that this judgment is to be definitively held by all the Church’s faithful” (Ordinatio Sacerdotalis, 1994). Third, and most fundamentally, it assumes that the Church can err in her teaching, which may be a Protestant doctrine but most assuredly is not a Catholic one.

A recurring theme in this interview is empowerment of the laity, an issue that is highly vulnerable to improper interpretation. Vatican II intended to empower laity with a renewed sense of the “common priesthood of the faithful” (Catechism of the Catholic Church 1591). But by this the Council Fathers meant a personal relationship with God that could be fostered through prayer, Bible study, and a sense of vocation to sanctify one’s daily life in the world through prayerful service to God and neighbor.

O’Gorman stresses his belief that “in many ways the Second Vatican Council fell short on several issues, and one of the issues that it did not really deal with was the power of the people over their own religion.” He sees the basic problem as Church authority. Faulkner adds that women “want less hierarchy and greater access to ordination.” She says, “Right now, the only way church [sic] leaders are going to let women into positions of power is if they think they have to. Sooner or later the numbers will speak.”

Clearly, this represents a politicized, de-sacralized view of ecclesiology—”doctrine by popular vote,” a democratized view of Church authority. In this view authority is not delegated by God but voted into office by people. It is understood not as a question of what is right but as a question of power.

Updating Catholic Truth

Another article, this one by Bill Huebsch, suggests ways to take the “dread out of religious ed”—a timely and important topic. He makes some positive suggestions about the need for parental involvement in their children’s catechesis. He calls repeatedly for ways of speaking about eternal truths “in a language that fits our culture.” For example, noting that the biblical story of the fall from grace is told “in figurative language,” Huebsch proposes the need for “a new language in which to talk about these ancient truths.” Today’s students, he declares, have “more information available in one visit to the Internet than was available in an entire lifetime to an adult in the seventeenth century.”

This suggests that the traditional content of Catholic doctrine is no longer tenable and needs revision in light of scientific knowledge. (Huebsch seems to have little sense that science itself is highly provisional and based on assumptions that must be taken as axiomatic.) The danger of trying to “update” Catholic truth, of course, is that it can be denatured in the process of translation. Too often the gospel message—Jesus died for our sins that we may have eternal life—is watered down into truisms like “Let’s be kind to each other so nobody feels left out” that really do make for banal and boring religious ed classes.

Pages thirty-six through forty are devoted to an article on Benedictine monks in Minnesota who have teamed up with calligraphers at a scriptorum in Wales to create the first Bible to be written and illustrated entirely by hand in more than 500 years— the “Saint John’s Bible.” Beyond the intriguing factual details of the project are several facets that betray a decided slant. In 1998 the university and abbey agreed on the project on the condition that the new Bible be “contemporary, ecumenical, multicultural, and prophetic.” In other words, its art should “appeal to people of faith the world over,” its illustrations should emphasize women, and the New Revised Standard Version should be used for its gender-inclusive language (even though Rome has banned this version from liturgical use because of distortions of meaning stemming from its gender-bender translation).

The project’s participants engage in an ebullient celebration of modern technological advances. Donald Jackson, the chief calligrapher, incorporates modern touches such as twining strands of DNA into his illuminations of the biblical manuscript. “Think of the scientific and technological changes that have occurred since the Bible was last handwritten and illuminated,” he says. “No one knew then about evolution, DNA, space flight, or black holes. Certainly no one could imagine viewing an earthrise from the moon. They thought the world was flat.”

Here Jackson shows the pervasive modern condescension toward the medieval world that springs from an ignorance of it. It is a myth that the medievals entertained the ignorant belief that the earth was flat. Thomas Aquinas (1227–1274) declared in the opening pages of his Summa Theologiae that “the astronomer and the physicist both may prove the same conclusion—that the earth, for instance, is round” (I: I:1:2). This flat-earth myth reinforces our confidence in our own modern “progressiveness” and is all too eagerly embraced by revisionist Catholics who like to see Vatican II as justifying a break with an ignorant past and inviting a revisioning of the faith, a “New Catholicism” and “New Church.”

True Colors Shining Through

The magazine’s back cover announces, ” U.S. Catholic magazine is proud to honor Diana L. Hayes with the 2001 U.S. Catholic Award for furthering the cause of women in the church [sic].” Above the announcement is a quote from Hayes: “It is time for black Catholic women to regain their voices. . . . That voice has been silenced.”

Hayes is described as associate professor of theology at Georgetown University and a leading Catholic proponent of “womanist theology.” What is that, you may ask? She says it’s about “building up the entire community,” which also means opposing oppression. She is celebrated for having “called on the church [sic] to repudiate its complicity in the oppressions of race, gender, and class and to honor and contribute to the liberation of all people.” She is quoted as declaring, “It is difficult to be an active, involved, faith-filled woman in the church [sic] today without constantly feeling that you’re being limited, restricted, gagged, and bound.”

Here U.S. Catholic displays its true colors. The Church is an “oppressor” of the poor, of minorities, and especially of women. So says Hayes. And U.S. Catholic is proud to honor her with an award for pointing this out.

What does this mean? What is the target of this animosity? Apparently it’s not that the Catholic Church today has a larger worldwide network for helping the poor than the United Nations, or that it was one of the chief historical opponents of the slave trade through societies such as the Jesuits and individuals such as Bartolomé de las Casas, or that it has been at the forefront of the battle to defend the rights of women and children at the recent U.N. conferences on the family held in Cairo and Beijing. No, apparently the target is what the secularized world regards as “oppressive” about the Church—its tradition of a male priesthood, its prohibition of contraception and same-sex marriages, its authority structure, et cetera.

All of this tells us not only that U.S. Catholic magazine has a definite slant but that its slant is infected by the mind of the dominant secularized American culture. Whatever the editors and readership of U.S. Catholic may wish, this is not the mind of the Church nor is it the mind of Christ. It is the mind of powers and principalities inimical to the mind of Christ.

This is not to say that everything printed in U.S. Catholic magazine is anti-Catholic. There were several positive, informative, and edifying articles and features in this issue, such as those calling for helping the oppressed or suggesting that parents get involved in their children’s religious education. Yet the editorial slant and the readership’s overarching frame of reference remain thoroughly secularized.

A U.S. Catholic Primer

Here is a list of things I learned from reading this issue of U.S. Catholic:

  • Historic Catholic teaching is oppressive, ignorant, arrogant, and outmoded at best; its chants and rituals, its distinction between clergy and laity, its all-male priesthood are residual vestiges of an authoritarian, patriarchal past.
  • Apologists for orthodoxy are by definition “mean-spirited.”
  • The Church is fallible and can err.
  • The Church’s biblical doctrines of original sin must be demythologized and translated into a contemporary idiom compatible with the reigning dogmas of public opinion that pass for science.
  • Catholics who are pro-life and anti-contraception aren’t to be taken seriously.
  • The heart of the Catholic faith has to do with meeting social “needs” (such as the needs of some women to be ordained), celebrating diversity (such as “womanist” theology and non-Western religions), defending the environment (by opposing global warming, using geothermal heat pumps, et cetera), and, above all, following the democratic “spirit” of the laity.

If I ever read U.S. Catholic again, it won’t be to find the Catholic Church’s perspective on this or that issue, since its editorial slant is decisively dissident and its Catholicism is consistently confused. Rather, it will be to take the pulse of one group of American Catholics and check the degree to which it continues to suffer from the value vertigo afflicting most secularized Americans today.

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