Falling Off Chesterton’s Chariot

A lot of people are falling off of Chesterton’s chariot, and sometimes I think I’m the only Catholic in America who cares. I am concerned about numbers, about thinness in the ranks and those people drifting away from the Catholic Church. Is the ride too bumpy or is there no longer a destination in sight?

During the decades after Vatican II, as the number of priests declined, laypeople began to move into roles formerly reserved for priests and religious. They took over religious education of the young, both in Catholic schools (as the presence of sisters became increasingly rare) and in CCD; they staffed RCIA programs, participated in Bible study and faith-sharing groups, and helped run diocesan programs, etc. Undoubtedly, they have done a great deal of good. Nevertheless, I am unpersuaded by the comfortable conviction on the part of many Catholics that this improvised situation is acceptable. I recall speaking to a young mother who taught CCD who confessed that she often felt insecure when her pupils asked her questions. She just couldn’t answer them.

Of course, the response one meets with when expressing concern about this situation is to be told that CCD classes are not about information. We are there (we are told) to share our faith, to let the joy and excitement of our relationship with the Lord spill over to others.

I want to argue with this point of view. I want to say that information in the form of rational, informed, and persuasive discourse is critically important. We must pass along the faith in the world of late 20th-century America, where the entertainment industry, journalism, and academia are not only highly secular, but often explicitly antireligious. Perhaps we have something to learn from evangelistic Protestants who utilize the media to spread the Gospel — information about the Gospel.

We live in a world that prizes information and is often persuaded by argument, a world that is hungry for rational discourse, but which receives too little of it. Instead of civil and rational discourse, we are often subjected to sound bites, diatribes, and slogans. When so many contemporary Catholics are embarrassed by the very idea of evangelization, put off by the aggressive apologetics of C.S. Lewis or G.K. Chesterton, one wonders if they are bored, afraid, unsure of themselves, or all three?

I have three sons, none of whom is a practicing Catholic. All of them attended Catholic schools for at least part of their education; when they did not, they attended CCD classes. In addition, their father and I tried to incorporate our faith into our home life — praying before meals, reading and discussing the Bible, and emphasizing the liturgical seasons through family rituals.

My two younger sons (ages 21 and 27) now define themselves as agnostic, but the oldest, who graduated from a Catholic university, is a serious and devout Christian. He was a practicing Catholic, a choir member, and cantor in his parish until he became engaged to a young woman — a Protestant — who is also a serious Christian, and is comfortable in her Protestant faith and has no desire to be a Catholic. Since they wanted to be united in their faith life, my son made the transition to Protestantism.

When I recently informed a friend who is a priest that my son had been married in an Episcopal church and is now attending a Lutheran one, the priest just smiled. What did I expect of the priest? Polemic, rage, an anti-Protestant tirade? No, of course not. But I would have welcomed some small tinge of disappointment, a sense that it might matter — even if just a little — what Christian communion one belongs to.

Although my son attended a Catholic high school and a Catholic university, he learned very little about the Catholic faith in either institution. In high school the religion program was made up of mini-classes like Death and Dying. In college one of the two required theology classes was an introduction to Scripture (not particularly related to the distinctive teachings of Catholicism, and presenting a rather skeptical view of the Bible), and the other could be chosen from a broad array of courses, including such subjects as Christianity and Feminist Ethics, Death and Rebirth, or Corporate Conscience — many of which add very little to the student’s understanding of Catholicism.

When my youngest son was attending public high school and our parish offered no religious instruction beyond the eighth grade, I had many conversations with our Director of Religious Education in an effort to launch some kind of program for the teenagers. Nothing ever materialized except for a few ski-retreat weekends and a couple of discussion groups. The Director was not enthusiastic about any kind of systematic education, but instead preferred a forum that would allow the teenagers to come together and, as he put it, share with each other “the great things the Lord has done in my life.” I was skeptical about the ability of such an approach to really do the job. I had to wonder how many of our teenagers were ready to talk about “the great things the Lord has done in my life.” When I realized that the parish was not going to establish any religious education program for public high school students, I bought some books, and my son and I read and discussed them together. We also joined with a few other parents and their teenagers and watched and discussed some of the videotapes put out by the DeSales Bible Study program. Although it was better than nothing, it certainly was not what I would describe as the ideal religious education program for teenagers. Furthermore, it lacked the less obvious — but very real — effect produced on students when they find themselves part of a large group of their peers in a formation program that is supported by most of the parents of their friends. Numbers, a critical mass, is important here; numbers send an indirect, but powerful, message: This matters. Sessions with one’s parents around the kitchen table — even with a few other people — just do not have the same impact.

My community has recently been shaken by an event at our local Catholic high school. A young and very popular teacher and basketball coach was fired by the Bishop when the Bishop learned that this young man had been a Catholic before he married but joined his wife in the Baptist faith. The Bishop explained that, although Catholic schools employ many non-Catholics, there is a peculiar problem with a teacher who has been a Catholic but has chosen to reject the Church. The Bishop has been strongly denounced for his action, accused of violating freedom of conscience and raising the specter of the Inquisition. However, I can see the logic in his decision. After all, teachers are role models and embody, we hope, the values the school aspires to inculcate. The irony is that this teacher, according to newspaper reports, had a Catholic education. That education evidently failed to convince him that the Catholic faith was worth holding on to. Obviously, we all need to take the evangelization of our Catholic youth much more seriously.

I teach at a Catholic university. Although I teach literature and writing, not theology, much of the literature I teach has religious themes, providing plentiful opportunities for students to speak about religious beliefs and feelings. In addition, I have occasionally taken informal surveys of my students, inviting them to share (anonymously and, therefore, candidly) their views on religion. The vast majority of my students identify themselves as Catholic, although some of them are not practicing or admit to having serious reservations about the Church. About half of them had some Catholic schooling. What continually amazes me about their responses is statements like the following: “All the Catholic Church tells you is that everything you do is a sin, and you’ll burn in hell for it,” or “The Catholic Church thinks morality is only about sex and that almost every sexual act is a sin.” I have to wonder where they are getting these impressions of Catholicism. I go to Mass every weekend and cannot remember the last time I ever heard Hell mentioned. Similarly, I, for one, never hear sexual sin mentioned from the pulpit unless it’s a lament over the presence of legalized abortion in our country. Unless these students attend Catholic churches that are very different from all those I’ve attended in the last 20 years, I suspect their conception of the Church comes more from the media than from the Church herself. In the absence of substantial religious education for our young people and a serious sense of mission for them, the popular media, which usually portray any form of traditional Christianity in a negative light, have filled the void. It’s as true in the life of faith as it is in science that nature abhors a vacuum.

We need to realize the extent to which our culture aggressively militates against religion — especially orthodox Christianity. The fact that religious practice is not explicitly persecuted (we are not thrown to the lions or hustled away by the Gestapo) has perhaps misled many Catholics into a complacency that fails to see the extent to which much of academia and the media undermine the efforts of Catholic parents to hand on the faith. Many parents do their best to pass along the faith, yet see one after another of their adult children stop going to Mass, marry outside the Church, and fail to have their children baptized. The Catholic immigrants of the 19th century built an extensive and impressive Catholic school system because they saw their faith imperiled by the anti-Catholic society that surrounded them. Today the kind of overt anti-Catholic bigotry they faced is rare. But are today’s materialism, consumerism, self-indulgent sexuality, pop psychology, and New Age spirituality any less formidable foes?

I suggest that we need to consider the question of “difference.” It is an axiom of multiculturalism that differences enrich. Gone are the days when the “melting pot” was held up as the ideal society, where all the various ethnic strains had blended into one homogenous whole. On the contrary, whole academic departments have emerged in an effort to keep alive the distinctiveness of being African-American, Native-American, Latino, or Chinese. But in religion exactly the opposite kind of emphasis holds sway. In the ecumenical atmosphere of recent decades, we have been encouraged to minimize those elements of our faith that divide Christians and emphasize what we have in common. Thus, today a Protestant church and a typical Catholic church look much more alike than their counterparts did 50 years ago. The Catholic church has very little religious art, and what there is is often done in such an abstract or minimalist style as to be easily overlooked. Similarly, Catholic worship, like Protestant, now is carried on in the vernacular and features congregational singing. Many of these developments are positive. Yet a genuine sense of Catholic self-identity is being eroded. One way to stem that erosion would be to look seriously, attentively, and lovingly at our differences, at those elements in the Catholic tradition that make it distinctive.

Although some of the distinctiveness of Catholicism has been attenuated in the ecumenical climate of the post-Vatican II era, we need to pay closer attention to those aspects of our tradition that have made us different and use them to evangelize, not only those who do not know Christ but those who are falling off the chariot of orthodoxy.