Reflections on The Church Mediocre
Over at Fr. Dwight's Standing on My Head, he has a nice reflection on what it is often like for converts who enter the Church. Here's a snippet:
Among converts and those thinking of converting and those who are thinking of converting but denying it, there is a lot of talk about how awful the Catholic Church is when you actually stop reading books of apologetics and visit the local branch. Here you thought it was the Church Militant and it seems like the Church Mediocre.
It has what Fr. Newman calls, 'living room liturgy' a goofy left wing priest wanders around in sandals, and tone deaf children sing kumbayah and stand around the altar with father to say the Lord's Prayer...(Awww, aren't they cute?) Added to this are the pedophile scandals, priests dipping into the funds and what seems an epidemic of ignorance, complacency and idiocy in the pews.
Sometimes it can be hard, even for cradle Catholics who strive to live their faith intentionally and with fervor, to see the supernatural reality of the Church through the incarnated temporal reality of the Church. That doesn't mean that we shouldn't try, however. For every Parish Council fraught with agendas and in-fighting, for every committee plagued by endless sniping and the personal failings of its members, there is Christ, calling us all to repentence, conversion, and a deeper living out of what it means to actually be the Body of Christ in the world.
Fr. Dwight sees this as well. He continues his reflection:
Mark Shea has a good post about the church mediocre. He says it better than I can: it's down to this--don't join the Catholic Church because you are against gays or women priests. Don't join the Catholic Church because you don't like Baptists or Anglicans. Certainly don't join the Catholic Church because you think you'll find fine liturgy, excellent preaching and enthusiastic congregations (with certain notable exceptions of course) Join the Catholic Church because you are convinced that it is the Church Jesus Christ really did establish on his friend Peter.If you're there, come and join us. We can always make room for one more sinner in the boat. If you're not, maybe you'd better put up with what you've got.
It's an important reflection because all too often, the only gospel that other people read is the one written with our life.
posted by Keith Strohm @ 9:06 AM
3 Comments
3 Comments:
I'd just like to mention that there are serious converts who didn't enter for any of those reasons. Not primarily for history, or liturgy, fine preaching, or for a bulwark against modernity or even, primarily for the sake of intellectual or theological truth. And not because of the contemporary debates over homosexuality or women's ordination or the culture wars.
Sometimes, one can get the feeling hat those are the only reasons from reading the best known conversion stories such as Joseph Pierce's "Literary Converts" (very good by the way) or reading blogs.
It has become the conservative chattering classes' dominant paradigm of conversion in the 20th century. It is our high culture version of the evangelical "knocked off your horse on the way to Damascus" paradigm. "I was blind but now I see".
When a single paradigm become so dominant and the converts who enter for that reason so lionized, it makes those who enter for other reasons reluctant to talk about their experience and the rest of us less likely to hear them and to recognize the breadth of Holy Spirit's work in our generation.
Dorothy Day didn't enter the Church for any of those reasons. I have to acknowledge that I didn't either - even though I read the same books - Newman, etc. (Not that I am comparing myself in any way to the amazing Dorothy!).
As Fr. Mike pointed out in an earlier post, some of us enter because of mystical experiences or relationships or encounter with the poor or some other compelling non-intellectual, non-liturgical reason. What we coming ask of the Church Mediocre is different and our frustrations (and joys) will be different too.
Sherry,
That is a fantastic observation! Thank you for bringing it up. One of the reasons that I moved from a fairly heterodox, the Church is a truth and not The Fullness of Truth, cradle Catholic had to do with an encounter with Christ through the Holy Spirit.
All of the theology made sense after that experience, but not before.
I have a good and agnostic friend who is peeking around the corner at Catholicism. From his current perspective everybody has an angle - why they became Catholic or became so famously Catholic, e.g. Maximillian Kolbe had a very strong domineering mother, so he reckons. He's not bothered by the behaviour of bad Catholics, it's the good ones who bother him.
Sure we all have an angle and the only angle is the right one (awful pun I know) and that angle is the person of Jesus Christ.
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