What Do You Call Us?

Each January I appear as a pinch-catechist for my parish’s RCIA, delivering an afternoon’s worth of talks on Catholic moral teachings to a handful of catechumens and candidates. The timing coincides with the end of the “inquiry” phase — four months of Breakfast Club-style sharing of “What Jesus means to me” — and the beginning of a period of more substantive instruction, leading up to the big event at the Easter Vigil.

That means I’m under orders to rock them gently. The countercultural moral teachings of our Faith are far more scandalous to this age than the theological. (Mouths drop when you mention contraception; they open in a big yawn when you define the hypostatic union.) So I do my best to ease them in.

Even so, I never fail to get the same kinds of questions, usually beginning with, “I know Catholics who . . . ,” as they attempt to overcome the cognitive dissonance caused by my presentation of certain Church teachings as binding and immutable, and their own Catholic upbringing or encounters with other Catholics and their more . . . flexible beliefs.

That always leaves me with the unpleasant task (for one wishes to keep up appearances in front of the new guys) of having to explain that not all “Catholics” are of the same sort.

On the Inside Blog some months back there was a short exchange over the question of what to call Catholics of a certain recognizable sort. The consensus was that, whether you’re using it as a political, religious, or cultural term, “Catholic” alone isn’t specific enough; it’s no longer a solid touchstone for identification.

In this way I guess we’re not much different from Jews, for whom “Jewish” identity derives from a jumble of factors involving ethnicity, adherence, and cultural tradition — leaving quite a broad spectrum from the freewheeling Reformed to the Torah-bound Haredim. Although strictly speaking our Catholic faith-identity is, in its fullest sense, a combination of religious belief (through assent the doctrines of the Faith) and practice (through observation of the Precepts of the Church), and an interior, ontological reality (through the sacrament of baptism), in popular usage you can self-identify as “Catholic” simply by virtue of being Irish, or by checking in to a pew every Easter, or by admitting to an attachment to old churches, angel figurines, or nagging guilt. Or, alternately, by claiming to have hit on a parallel set of beliefs and practices that, no matter how little they conform to the letter of the institutional Church today, allegedly jibe better with the spirit of early Christianity (as discovered in 1968).

It was for that reason that we kicked around the old can of what to call a certain kind of Catholic; our kind of Catholic; the kind of Catholic who — for such has the word lost its significance that it becomes necessary to add such qualifiers — really believes all of it.

What do you call us? We’re Holy Day Mass-attenders and confession-line squatters; tithers, fasters, and adorers. We’re not usually traditionalists — being willing to tolerate ICEL infelicities, versus populum, and “On Eagle’s Wings” if that’s the price of participation – but we still like our liturgies reverent and our tabernacles ornate. We’re Humanae Vitae-obeyers, conspicuously filling entire pews, driving old vans, and never visiting St. Martin or Gstaad. We’re Hahn-devourers and Mother Angelica groupies; homeschoolers and school founders. We attend Evenings of Recollection and Days of Discernment. We bare scapulars in the locker room, finger beads on planes, and say grace in restaurants.

We’re the Catholics who, however much we personally fail to live up to it, try our best to look revealed truth — in all the fullness of the Church’s own understanding — straight in the eye.

Does this kind of talk strike you as elitism? Does it smack overly of sheeps-and-goats, of “I thank thee Lord that I am not like that tax collector”? I don’t mean it to. As I see it, to be a Catholic Who Buys It All is not to set oneself far ahead of the pack in the great race of faith, but merely to line up at the starting gate. It’s not something merited by study or work, or achieved by virtue of native piety or smarts, but rather a grace freely given and gratefully received. And it’s not to claim membership in some holiness society; we’re as intimate with the Seven Deadlies as any other kind of Catholic, or indeed the most vicious pagan.

Neither is it some imagined justification for forcing all believers into a homogenous mold, should they want to be considered “authentic” Catholics. True, I offered some iconic sample images above for color’s sake, but in truth the basic shared foundations of Catholic orthodoxy and orthopraxis are a jumping-off point to richly diverse and personal modes of expression, as numerous as there are individual temperaments, cultures, gifts, and states of life. The eye is not the nose, and all the rest of it.

So what do you call us? This is a very practical question, from an apostolic point of view. Since the broadest swath of self-selected Catholics today dress and speak and vote and pray and fornicate in ways and numbers functionally indistinguishable from the rest of the world, it’s not enough now to write a letter to the editor about partial-birth abortion or same-sex marriage and say, “As a Catholic . . . .” One has to add that one is a serious Catholic. A woman can no longer warn her blind date, “I’m a Catholic,” by way of telling him to keep his hands where the Holy Spirit can see them. She has to say, “I’m a committed Catholic.” A voter can’t reply “Catholic” to a pollster and expect that information to be of much value; no, if his reply is to be cross-referenced with his religious identity in any meaningful way, he has to say practicing or faithful Catholic. Mandatum-observing Catholic colleges have to communicate their intention to remain 100 percent Vagina Monologues-free with code words like “dynamic orthodoxy.”

It happens on the other side, too: People readily confess to being “lapsed” Catholics, “raised” (and subsequently, it’s implied, fallen) Catholics, even “recovering” Catholics. Habit or nostalgia or cafeteria convictions prevent them from making a clean break with the nominal Catholic identity, but there’s a felt need to distinguish themselves from other members of their species.

So that’s the first part of the problem: how the world is to recognize and reckon with us, and how we are to present itself to it; that is, how we are to represent the Church.

The second part is trickier: How does the Church reckon with us? For we may sometimes feel like strangers within it, caught in the maddening circumstance of standing out by trying too earnestly to conform. Of appearing freakishly pious or scrupulous (or worse, enduring grumbles that we are affectedly so) simply by trying to live Catholic life undiluted.

To any half-awake observer of such things, the list of banalities in modern parish life is by now long and familiar and tiresome to repeat — and those things are hard enough to bear. But I think it can be less of a trial to face the insipid homilies, de-contented catechesis, and liturgies played fast-‘n’-loose, than to be forced to contemplate the tragic barrier between us and other kinds of Catholics — lay and cleric — who don’t Believe It All. Supernaturally united in the Mystical Body, morally united by mouthing the same Creed, we should be standing together in obedient solidarity before the Magisterium, and kneeling together in humble wonder before the Mystery. Instead, we too often regard each other with bemusement or suspicion.

What do you call us? Let’s see if we can’t rehabilitate “Catholic.” I don’t want to be anything more.