Catholics are "Dead". Protestants are "Stupid".
First Things is hosting a terrific article by Gerardine Luongo, a Catholic - the sole Catholic - working in an evangelical missionary organization, CURE, in Africa.
Luongo has written an all too familiar description of the historic, hard-wired assumptions that Catholics and Evangelicals have about each other’s spiritual state. Assumptions that I long ago summed up for myself (painting with the broadest possible brush) as "Catholics are dead. Protestants are stupid."
Luongo uses the word "stunned" three times in her article. Her colleagues are stunned to learn that she, who seems to be a real Christian, is a Catholic. She is stunned to hear what they believe Catholics believe.
I didn't know whether to laugh or cry while reading so I settled for a strangled chuckle. Reading her recent experience brought back so many memories of my early days as a Catholic.
There was the young Dominican to whom I tried to explain why evangelical Protestants are so uneasy about Catholic devotion to Mary. He cut me off. "That's ridiculous." Everyone knows that we don't worship Mary." he insisted. "They are just stupid."
I can laugh now but at the time, I was certain that what was going on was simple confusion. No cultural insider had ever explained to the young priest what evangelicals really thought. A little catechesis would just clear everything right up. So I tried again.
"Well, you see, most evangelicals are afraid of undermining the glory and sovereignty of God . . .", I began. But this newly minted product of Dominican formation cut me off again. "They are just stupid!" And I was the one left open-mouthed and mystified. Stunned. With the first faint question rising in my mind: perhaps the "stupidity" involved wasn't all on one side?
Gerardine Luongo has had the same experience in reverse while trying to explain Catholic devotion to Mary to her colleagues. Her evangelical colleagues' concern? That Catholics are essentially spiritually "dead".
"I was told that Catholics worship idols. Another stunned look (mine) and more questions followed. What idols? (Visions of golden calves popped into my head.) Wait, were they talking about Mary and the saints?"
Yep. Because - ran the script that was hammered into me as a blue eyed baby fundie - Catholics are dead. People who are spiritually "dead" do things that horrify and enrage God like worship idols instead of the living God. 'Cause spiritually “dead” people don’t know the difference.
To this knee-jerk assumption, Luongo has a beautiful response:
"Every day, women in the developing world defy their communities and bring their children to CURE for help. These are mothers who have been told by village leaders that their disabled children are cursed and therefore to be feared. The mothers of such children are encouraged to kill their cursed infants. If they do not, they may be shunned by their villages and divorced by their husbands. These women travel long distances in search of help. These are radical women—women whose lives would be easier if they listened to their communities and abandoned or killed their disabled children. Because of their mothers’ hope, these children are offered hope through healing at CURE.
Is Mary not a role model—maybe even the role model—for these women? Mary and the saints offer us a wide range of examples of how to live a life of faith. To seek the intercession of the saints is not to place faith in them. It is to place faith in the power of prayer to the Father through the Son while recognizing the power of the communion of saints—a communion that includes all Christians, living and dead—to offer prayers to God on our behalf."
From the Catholic side, how many times have I heard intelligent Catholics casually dismiss evangelical worship as merely "entertainment"? It happened again last month when I was working with a group of pastors and pastoral leaders at a seminar on evangelization. I asked them "What have the lapsed Catholics that you know personally told you about why they left"?
The obvious goal of that particular discussion was to hear what people who have left the Church have to tell us. There was a broad spectrum of familiar answers: people didn't agree with certain teachings, didn't believe anymore, looking for community, the desire to be "fed", etc.
Then one woman said "mega church services are entertainment". "They just want entertainment", and a number of heads nodded in agreement.
I had to ask. " Is that the language that your friends actually used? Did they say that wanted to be "entertained"? Did they actually use the word "entertainment"? Since our goal is to understand what motivates lapsed Catholics, we need to actually listen to the language they actually use."
The women looked puzzled by my question. I had to repeat the question to the whole group. "Have you actually heard former Catholics tell you that they have started attending evangelical churches in order to be "entertained"?
Slowly it dawned upon us all. The "entertainment" thesis reflected our Catholic insider judgements about what must have motivated them. But none of us had ever heard an actual, living former Catholic use that language.
Certainly I never have. No former Catholic that I have met in the evangelical world ever talks about a desire for "entertainment" as a motivation for ceasing to attend Mass. In fact, the gap between the dominant "storyline" that you hear from former Catholics whom you meet in the evangelical world (which is usually some variation on “I never met Jesus in a living way as a Catholic”) and the judgment that so many Catholic pastoral leaders blithely make about why they left in the first place is staggering.
When we casually dismiss mega-church worship in general as "entertainment", we mean that we regard it as shallow, emotionally-driven, ephemeral, and without spiritual or theological substance or seriousness. The spiritual equivalent of a crude, popular sit-com. That it is, essentially, spiritually "stupid".
But that is a unjust caricature of the incredible breadth and often remarkable depth of worship that I knew in the evangelical world. Since the externals are often so different, it can be hard for Catholics who only have a superficial exposure to the evangelical world (often in the form of TV preachers) and who are steeped in certain liturgical assumptions to recognize that depth. But truly, it is there.
In some circles, thank God, the "Catholics are dead, Protestants are stupid" assumptions have disintegrated over the past 20 years. But even so, you can hardly describe the current relationship between evangelicals and Catholics as bland.
These days, I am less likely to be regarded as "dead" than as the object of fascination among a certain kind of sophisticated evangelical. Sometimes it is because they are hovering on the brink of entering the Church. For others, it is because they are discovering the spiritual riches of historical Christianity.
There is a whole movement called "spiritual formation" in the evangelical world whose content and inspiration is almost entirely Catholic. I have spent some time lately with a local evangelical group committed to spiritual formation. A group in which I am the only Catholic. An essentially evangelical group using only Catholic resources, including the writings of Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross. And they have told me that evangelical seminaries and colleges around the country are developing new courses of study in spiritual formation that are simply saturated with the writings of the great Catholic saints and mystics.
However, the old shibboleths can die hard outside specialized movements. I have found this especially true in evangelical missionary circles like the one that Geraldine Luongo is now moving in. In that community, everyone cheerfully accepts me as a "real believer" until they ask what church I attend. Then they look stunned and the conversation immediately changes in subtle ways. Usually no one says anything out loud because they want to be polite.
They don't have to. I know where the hesitancy comes from. They find it hard to believe that I am a true disciple and therefore, "spiritually alive". Because if I were “alive”, I wouldn't have intentionally entered the Catholic Church where, by definition, almost everyone is "dead".
Cause many evangelicals still presume that Catholics are spiritually “dead”. And many Catholics still assume that Protestants are spiritually “stupid”.
Which means that those of us who are truly “bi-cultural” and know that neither is true, have some important and practical ecumenical work to do.
posted by Sherry W @ 1:37 AM
19 Comments
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19 Comments:
Sherry
Just remember that there is work that you cannot do. There are deficits on the Catholic side that only clerical leadership can make up for. I,cradle Catholic, believe in Catholicism through the many ups and downs of life but there is an outer crust that is not Catholicism per se and yet many think it is. Slowly pronounced shallow and saccharine sermons are the rule in a number of parishes for decades despite the Church being aware of the problem from polls on that specific matter. If one is going to give a forgettable sermon, please say it fast. Slowness does not make the shallow any deeper. And the Catholic in one of those parishes feels eternally trapped each week unless he or she parish shops. Joyce Meyers has her faults but please...she talks at a speed that keeps one awake and she is interesting as she relates her marriage moments to her theme and she can refer to scripture instantaneously when it is needed....like Aquinas could in his day.
We eternally say we love scripture and we have tons of homilists who give the impression that have none of scripture by memory when in fact the original verse memorizers were Augustine, Jerome and even more so..Aquinas. After Aquinas look at our literature. No one after him quotes extensively small verses as having authority in the encyclopedic volume with which he did it. Fearing that scripture leads to more Reformation movements, we abandoned it as to really memorizing it in such a way that it would weave in and out of anything we were talking about in our sermons. I was listening to any lady who seems to have her TV show from a large living room where she is surrounded by the audience. She proceeded to give a sermon based on her border dog that discerns how to get the other animals to the house at the end of the day by knowing what they would grab onto from her mouth and then proceeded to compare that to both God knowing how to draw each to Him and we knowing how to draw each person to God differently. I'm sorry...there are Catholic parishes that will simply never have a sermon that good and creative...and again, she spoke quickly. Our homilists speak slowly about the general and after being in parish too long, one can guess within the first two sentences where this is going....and could he please speed it up. Did I fraternally correct my priests? Sure did. Will never try again. One told me that Christ never really said what the gospel said He said about hell....and the other, afraid of my capacity for memorization, was furious and enumerated all his degrees for me. In both cases, I left the rectory stunned and feeling that I had vastly underestimated who depressed I should be.
Great writing, Sherry. You've articulated the situation quite well. I stand in solidarity with you as an Evangelical convert and a "bi-cultural" Catholic.
I have been deeply impacted by the "spiritual formation" movement (by writers like Richard Foster, Dallas Willard, and Eugene Peterson) and still am. This is an example of treasures in the Protestant church that would be of utmost benefit to the average Catholic.
It's a shame when Catholics discount all Protestant practices and vice versa. There is so much good in both traditions. And it's obviously an incredible shame when Protestants aren't exposed to authentic Catholicism and Church practice before 1500.
I wonder how many who attend the Tridentine Mass are looking for - not necessarily entertainment - perhaps entertainment plus (plus being God, sacraments, grace, etc.)? That is not half bad. Nor would it be half bad for evangelicals to want "entertainment plus" from evangelical services if music, showbiz and such were a kind of sacramental to them.
Mark R
How interesting that I should read this post after returning home from an "Introduction to Charisms" session I gave to the local Uniting Church (formerly Methodist, Congregational and Presbyterian).
It came about when one of their parishoners attended a Called and Gifted Workshop in the Cathedral parish in Ballarat and talked to her pastor about it. She told me that I shouldn't leave out the 'catholic bits' because they were really interesting. I met with the pastor and we decided that it was worth presenting an introduction to Spiritual Gift discernment - the invitation went beyond his parish and greater Ballarat was represented.
I had a lovely time and they were hugely receptive. One of the participants who has a formation role in the Western Presbytery (covers half the state of Victoria) was very excited. She was familiar with Wagner's work but thought the Called and Gifted approach was superior in that it provided the opportunity for ongoing formation beyond the inventory, and that the Inventory, too, was better thought out and developed. (kudos to you Sherry).
I came away thinking that many of the barriers between Catholics and the older style Protestants were breaking down - or at least, in the face of encroaching secularism, they were no longer important.
Called and Gifted seems to have potential as a bridge-builder!
In my experience, the strongest critics of evangelical worship and spiritual formation are...
..Protestants.
It doesn't take much study of the scene to see the questioning, challenging, dissatisfaction and general angst *among Protestants* about many of their own practices.
Many are very, very worried about the future.
I loved your post, Sherry. I am a cradle Catholic, but most of my closer friends (they were from college) were non-denom./evangelical Christians. I've learned to take my faith to heart from their witnesses and challenges, and, for a cradle Catholic, I know their culture pretty good - their ideas on certain things, their language, their prayer and worship style (which I have gained a great love and respect for). (Of course, the culture I was in could vary from what you're experience was, I'm not sure if it was strictly "evangelical" but it was a great experience, very conservative and wholesome.) Since I was raised a pretty typical Catholic, I also know what it's like to hold the Catholic prejudices against Protestants - I had them until they were knocked down by those who challenged me to grow deeper. I love that you call yourself a "bi-cultural" Christian. I would like to consider myself one as well, since I feel that I understand both worlds (even though there's still a lot in the Protestant world I'm unfamiliar with).
I have found what you said about both prejudices to be true. When I would tell a Protestant friend that I was Catholic, sometimes I was quite the novelty to them. When I try to explain something I learned from a Protestant to a Catholic, a lot of the time I am met with defensiveness, or explanations of how the Church actually does teach that (the underlying tone is often one of mistrust towards anything Protestant). There seems to be such a huge misunderstanding about what the Holy Mass really is, and what an evangelical worship service really is (or at least can be).
I am very curious how you've become involved in both circles, since I feel that it wouldn't be quite right for me to join an evangelical church and a Catholic Church (although at present I'm attending both, because my boyfriend is going through RCIA but also loves the Four-Square Church's service up the road, which is quite solid and good.) Since I'm recently graduated I'm no longer in touch with my college friends who were so instrumental in my faith, and I don't have the chance to witness much as a Catholic anymore. I would never leave the Eucharist, but I do miss the Protestant community I was part of, really I miss the culture that went with it. What do you do about missing that culture? How are you connected to the evangelical world? I think the love and respect you have for both worlds is beautiful!
Bill, I hear your disappointment and I know where you're coming from. But I would like to encourage you to move past bitterness and to try to respect the Catholics (priests or not) who don't know what they're really doing. It isn't always quite their fault, it's the fault of being taught a cultural mindset that they don't even see they carry. They haven't been exposed to certain things, and they have been trained most of their lives to see things in this certain light, even though it's not necessarily a very good light. But they still need our respect and honor, not our criticisms and disappointments coming at them. I might suggest that instead of trying to correct your priests, you might try simply sharing ideas that you love with them. Then maybe there could be more of a discussion, and even if they disagreed with your ideas, they wouldn't feel like you were criticizing them or their homilies. And you might not feel so upset and bitter if you focused on sharing, with respect and honor, the things that mean a lot to you. I know I'm a lot happier when I stop criticizing the priest for what he's lacking in and start trying to honor him where he's at instead. Just a thought :)
Brandon:
Thanks for sharing your experience. One of the reasons that we need one another is that at a lived level, Catholics and Evangelicals "major" in each other's minors. The spiritual formation movement is a true spiritual ecumenism, a true "exchange of gifts" although most Catholics are unaware of it.
Clara:
What a great story! You are not the first person to tell me that the C & G is a bridge-builder. Especially in a highly secularized context like Australia, serious Christians must "all hang together or we will all hang separately" (as Benjamin Franklin put it so memorably).
I sometimes think that part of what fuels Catholic-evangelical antagonism in the US is that our culture is much more openly religious. We have the dubious "luxury" of fighting with one another.
Ellen:
Of course, there are huge debates within the evangelical/Protestant world. We must remember that it is an enormous world and just as diverse as the Catholic world. So there is much talk about the young leaving the faith, concerns about the whole emergent church phenom and independent Christianity and on and on it goes.
But while they use the same language that we do to express their concerns, we must remember that the level of vitality in their congregations (as a whole) is still far above our own. In nearly every category, the Pew Study have evangelicals 15 - 20 points ahead of Catholics: in number of young adults who attend church regularly, belief in a personal God, prayer, Scripture, looking to the church for guidance when faced with moral dilemmas, etc.
Evangelical expectations and standards are much, much higher in many areas than our own. So they get extremely concerned about situations that would actually strike us as a significant improvement in the Catholic pastoral context.
Sarah:
I was born and raised as an evangelical and became a Catholic as a young adult. So I come by it naturally.
"Bi-cultural" "Catholic evangelicals" or evangelically influenced Catholics are not that unusual in the US, you know. The boundaries between the two groups have become very permeable.
My educated guess is that 10 -20 of our most active Catholics move in and out of the evangelical world on a regular basis. They attend services (5% of "active" Catholics are also "active" in another religious tradition) or Bible studies, read evangelical books, watch evangelical TV or listen to evangelical music or radio, etc. They are hungry for spiritual nurture, support, companionship and our parishes aren't offering it.
And they don't regard "that's not Catholic" as an answer.
I run into practicing "bi-cultural" American Catholics everywhere.
Sarah
Thank you for your imput which is very good in itself given some caveats. You call it bitterness; I call it the biblical and stoic term...severitas.
But look how passive you picture the priests' formation. Rather ask yourself why did they not go beyond their milieu and on their own initiative proceed to read Vatican II and obey it which said their sermons were to be based on Scripture, the Fathers and approved theology. As a layman, obeying similar dictums, I had read most of Augustine and the entire bible by the time I was 28 while doing intimate social work of a Catholic nature in the Newark ghetto. Hence I asked only of priests the initiative I was living....even less.
Look at the beginning of Matthew 15's first verses. Christ does not share ideas that He loved as the pharisees question Him. He immediately accuses back toward the pharisees ("And why do you break the commandment of God?"). And as He said...they sat on the throne of Moses...He was simply "rabbi".
Why didn't He share ideas He loved with them rather than be accusatory?... because they are responsible for their own formation by a certain age despite the mindset they grew up in.
Your softness though I will keep in mind, Sarah, because it has a place with people younger than the priests I was confronting.
Yes, Bill, I see I'm coming at it from the perspective of a 22 year old, that probably makes a lot of difference in how I treat people and would like to be treated. I think you have some excellent points, that people do need to be called out and confronted. I'm glad you have the guts to do so where you think it is appropriate :).
Sherry - I didn't realize so many Catholics attended evangelical activities. I guess in the circles I've been exposed to (more traditional than charismatic usually) that's been very unusual and rather looked down upon. I'll have to expand my circles so I can find those Catholics you're talking about.
No former Catholic that I have met in the evangelical world ever talks about a desire for "entertainment" as a motivation for ceasing to attend Mass.
I do agree with your post, Sherry, but I have often heard people complain that Mass is "boring." This does tend to lead one to wonder whether there is an inordinate desire on the part of some people for "excitement."
Having said that, I do think people leave the Catholic Church b/c somehow they have not found God here (or something else essential for spiritual growth). Parish life by itself, is not very nourishing here in the West.
What a delightful post! I am an adult convert in the same small midwestern town where I lived for 16 years as an evangelical before I converted. I consider my personal evangelism to just ride the wave of cognitive dissonance that I seem to cause all my old evangelical friends. It has been a great privilege and often highly entertaining to be "bi-cultural."
May I humbly submit that a significant part of our liturgical problems (Mass is "boring," irrelevant homilies, facile - and sometimes downright silly - attempts to "spice up" Mass) may be due to the fact that for all intents and purposes we have abandoned the mission of the Church to the world in our parishes. The Mass, as "source and summit" of our lives as Christians must be seen in relation to the rest of our lives as Christians, which, for the laity, are lived in the world.
Until we reclaim the mission to the world, and see the Mass as the place where we offer our work in the world to the Father in the Spirit through Jesus, we will likely continue to undermine the power of the liturgy and see it as an end in itself, rather than as a means of worship and communion with the blessed Trinity and the place from which we are sent to "become what we have received" in the world.
May I humbly submit that a significant part of our liturgical problems (Mass is "boring," irrelevant homilies, facile - and sometimes downright silly - attempts to "spice up" Mass) may be due to the fact that for all intents and purposes we have abandoned the mission of the Church to the world in our parishes. The Mass, as "source and summit" of our lives as Christians must be seen in relation to the rest of our lives as Christians, which, for the laity, are lived in the world.
Until we reclaim the mission to the world, and see the Mass as the place where we offer our work in the world to the Father in the Spirit through Jesus, we will likely continue to undermine the power of the liturgy and see it as an end in itself, rather than as a means of worship and communion with the blessed Trinity and the place from which we are sent to "become what we have received" in the world.
It's interesting to hear all this commentary about how Evangelical worship services aren't all about entertainment and aren't shallow. I grew up an Evangelical, becoming a Catholic in April 2006, and growing up, I was routinely disgusted by how entertainment-focused and shallow the worship services actually were.
Maybe I was just a lousy Evangelical or something, but I absolutely found it vapid most of the time. You can only have so many light displays and smoke machines before the overwhelming sensation sweeps over you that this is all about the band and not at all about Christ.
I still have a hard time listening to Christian radio, even though I know all the songs, because I associate even the ones that could potentially have great significance with a time of incredibly shallow faith in my life. And I assure you, it wasn't for lack of effort. I threw myself as headlong into Evangelical Christianity as I could, only to smack my face on the bottom of the pool.
I think some of that is inherent in its nature, though. When you think about it, Evangelical communities are geared primarily toward evangelization of adults. They get people into the church, give them ten or so years of training and formation, and then turn them around and get them to bring new people into the community. That's all well and good if you enter the community in your thirties or later, but if you enter in utero, by the time you finish junior high, you've fairly well mastered all they have to teach you. They're trying to send you out to evangelize more people. But the thought that I could, at 14, already have learned all there was to learn and was now in a position to teach was the bottom of the pool almost breaking my neck. It almost spiritually caused the death of me.
Thank God for--believe it or not--Boston College and some amazing Jesuits there for showing me how much deeper our faith goes. They invited me out into the depths of the ocean, and I haven't looked back. Kiddie pools are great for splashing around and cooling off on a hot day, but something tells me we were made for scuba.
Lindsay:
You describe very well the spiritual "glass ceiling" that many of us hit - which is why we started looking beyond the evangelical world. But we only noticed the glass ceiling because we got such solid basic formation as Christians there.
One of my favorite images: Catholicism is like the Bodlian Library in Oxford: filled with the wisdom of the ages and open to anyone who enters. But first you have to be able to read - at a pretty high level.
Graduates of the evangelical elementary education systems have the necessary formation to dive deep.
But most Catholics can't avail themselves of those riches because they were never taught to read - cause there is functionally little or no elementary education in the Christian life in the Catholic world.
I also suspect much depends upon how broad your experience of evangelicalism was and where you spent your time. I was blessed to spend time with, live with, and study with some of the very best hearts and minds in the evangelical world. From all denominations and movements and from around the world.
So as much as I appreciate the great depth of the Catholic world, I know that evangelicals are also capable of great depth. Of a real, important but different kind.
In fact, I suspect the difficulty is that Catholic depth is focused in areas that evangelicals don't focus (as a whole) and evangelical depth is focused in those areas where Catholics don't pay much attention.
Catholic depth (deep in history, strong on the intellectual component of the faith, contemplative and mystical life, liturgy, etc.) in the areas of relative evangelical weakness and
evangelical depth (creativity in evangelization, mission, communication, basic Christian formation of the average person, very aware of current spiritual climate ) in the areas of relative Catholic weakness.
No wonder we think the other is appallingly clueless. We are comparing our strength to the area of their weakness and come away affirmed in our prejudices. Catholics are "dead" and evangelicals are "stupid".
As I sometimes say (with a grin) watching Catholics try to evangelize is like watching a group of Southern Baptists sight-read their way through the Easter Triduum. Painful.
My wife is Catholic and we're raising our 5 girls Catholic, but 4 of the 5 go to an Evangelical elementary school (I'm bi- myself).
If the only religious ed the girls got was in CCD, they would know NOTHING. I'm serious - NOTHING about basic Christianity.
CCD, for them, is to get their ticket punched for admission to the sacraments. The thought - and I know it's true - that most adult Catholics learned their Christianity in classes like that - is horrifying to me.
On Palm Sunday, our DRE needed a substitute teacher for seventh grade. She asked over 300 real, genuine Catholics, all of whom said "no", most of whom said they "weren't qualified". She asked the priest if I could do it, and he said OK as long as there was a Catholic in the room.
Palm Sunday! Can you imagine a lesson easier than that? I could teach Matthew 26 for six months! I chose the proofs of the resurrection, 'cause that's easy and non-controversial (for real Christians). The kids ate it up. Even the ones who started out staring at the floor. They were STARVING for a Gospel message.
I don't think Catholics are dead, but, man, a lot of them could use some basic catechesis (IMHO, of course).
This phenomenon you guys are discussing has actually been a bit of a hindrance to my conversion, and any help you can offer would be gratefully received.
Unlike Lindsay, I was a very good Evangelical. I recognize the riches of Catholicism, and want to receive the Eucharist with my family.
But c'mon! If this was the Church (you know, THE Church) - wouldn't it be teaching Christianity in some recognizable form to the children?
You know, Only Son of God, sent to die for your sins on the cross, commissioned the apostles to proclaim the Gospel to all the nations, baptizing as they went? This is the Bible, this is the Gospel, this is the message?
How hard is that?
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