Rock & Roll: Catholic Art Form; Power Tool of Evangelization
Or so says Mark Judge in the Washington Post:
"In his encyclical Deus Caritas Est (“God is Love), Pope Benedict refers to the love between a man and a woman as “that love which is neither planned nor willed, but somehow imposes itself upon human beings.” In the U2 song, love “steals right under my door,” neither planned nor willed. Bono can only cry for more, delirious with the fecundity and gratuitous grace of God. It’s probably no mistake that he cried for more three times, reflecting the Trinity.
This all works because in the last 30 years the Catholic Church has closed the gap between eros and agape - the love of man and woman and the love between God and man.
The Church has never denied this connection, but since the pontificate of John Paul the Great it has been developed in powerful ways - and ways that make rock and roll music seem a power tool of evangelization. In his massive series of lectures that are known as the Theology of the Body, John Paul II revolutionized Catholic teaching about sex - a revolution that is now just starting to unfold as people distill the dense and gargantuan work. In the Theology of the Body, John Paul talks about the Song of Songs, those wonderful, and even steamy, love poems of the Old Testament, not as a metaphor of the love of God for His people, as was traditionally done in Catholicism, but as the reflection of a very real event - the love of Adam and Eve before the Fall.
In one crucial passage, John Paul II contradicts the notion that God made Eve as a “helper” so she could get next to Adam to push the plow in the Garden of Eden. In fact, Eve’s help was spiritual help. She would do no less than make it possible for Adam to experience the Trinitarian love of God. Prior to this Adam “sensed that he was alone.” He was different from the animals, and while in communion with God, he was not God. Eve, rather than bringing about Adam’s ruin, allowed him to experience the interior life of God."
Comments?
posted by Sherry W @ 7:59 AM
2 Comments
2 Comments:
I went over to the Washington Post link and read the whole article, as well as the comments there... hoo boy.
About 80% of the WP readers took the opportunity to dump on Judge as a representative of everything they hate about the Catholic Church. The other 20% were positive and sympathetic to his experience, if not simply grateful for his cheery message.
I enjoyed the article and I'm grateful for the mention of JPII's Theology of the Body in connection with pop music's expressions of the experience of human love. The more people hear about that, the better. I took the piece as a light rambling feature column, not as serious cultural analysis.
However, I think that sound-bite sentence, "rock and roll is a Catholic art form", is a little strange and needs some context. It's like saying, "Impressionism is a Catholic art form", or "Bronze casting is a Catholic art form". On the one hand - of course it is, 'cause it's a thing humans do to express themselves and their ideas to others, and anything truly human is deeply Catholic, i.e. universal. On the other hand, rock and roll (just the word, even) carries so much cultural baggage and has such a checkered history with the Church that you can't just come out and claim the whole field (including its whole history?) for Catholicism, like planting a flag on the moon. Or baptizing an infant - to continue that analogy, Rock And Roll would need an RCIA class and some serious counseling first. Which isn't to say that the Holy Spirit hasn't been active in Rock's life before that moment. ;^)
Don't get me wrong; I like rock and roll as much as the next person, and I believe certain artists (Innocence Mission, Creed) really have "baptized" the genre by their involvement in it, but that doesn't mean that Marilyn Manson has stopped making records.
To me, it seems like an instance of someone sharing their (very valid) personal experiences in language that's open to misunderstanding.
Um... isn't his thesis reducible to, "Rock songs talk about love"?
Not really what I'd call newsy.
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