Amen to Ben Hart
Regarding Ben Hart’s article [“The Evangelical Temptation: Why I’ve Stopped Attending the Catholic Church,” February], I can only add: “Amen.” I would like to be more forthcoming, because I feel very strongly about the issues Ben raises in his piece. However, counsel (Mr. Brendan Sullivan) has advised me that while Mr. Walsh continues his inquisition, I should refrain from any appearances, publishing, etc. Hopefully, these constraints will soon be lifted and I will be able to offer more meaningful comments. It would be, I think, helpful to many, to have a discourse on the questions raised. I look forward to the time when I may do so.
Lt. Col. Oliver
North Great Falls, Virginia
But We Have the Eucharist
Ben Hart’s story of his drift away from Catholicism and into a revivalist sect that he finds more emotionally satisfying is far from unique. This, I assume, is precisely why Crisis published his piece. And since I have no right to intrude upon the spiritual life of a man I have never met, I shall respond to it simply as a case history rather than on a personal level.
Most ex-Catholics leave the Church because some priest offended them. Perhaps Father appointed the wrong person to a committee, or refused to condone a favorite sin, or failed to accept a dinner invitation. Regrettably, ordination does not confer the gift of pleasing everyone. In Mr. Hart’s case, several priests offended him by spouting left-wing political views and/or being uninspiring preachers. The difference seems one of degree rather than kind.
If Mr. Hart has attended Mass at 15 churches in the Washington area, then he and I must have gone to some of the same churches. In my experience, the priests of the Washington area are generally very good men who rarely abuse their pulpits by turning them into political stumps. Perhaps I hit those churches only on the good days and Mr. Hart only on the bad days, or perhaps he is more attentive than I to the political nuances of preachers. But I simply do not find what he seems to have found. In case he is interested, St. Joseph’s Church on 2nd Street, just around the corner from his office and mine, offers consistently reverent liturgies and sound preaching.
While he may have been paying close attention to the sermons, Mr. Hart apparently failed to notice the great explosion of interest in Scripture among Catholics. If he wishes to call me, I can direct him to a number of Catholic Bible study groups in the Washington area. Or he is welcome to join a Bible study at my office, Wednesday mornings at eight. The reason why Catholics do not tote their Bibles to Mass on Sunday is that something more important than Bible study is going on there.
The church I regularly attend also looks like a gymnasium. It, too, has no stained glass, folding chairs instead of pews (although we do have a nice statue of Our Lady), and my pastor is probably not as exciting a preacher as Lon Solomon. But we have something McLean Bible Church cannot offer. Every day, and four times on Sunday, Jesus Christ comes down in person on our altar to give Himself to us as food and drink unto eternal life. And that is why I am a Catholic.
We Catholics do not go to Mass to hear about politics, good or bad; or, frankly, to hear anything else from our priests. Preaching has its place, and I wish more priests were better preachers. But that is not essential. Neither is getting an emotional lift when you are feeling low, or discovering some new theological insight, or meeting nice, sincere people. What is essential is meeting Jesus Christ, not just in the spirit, but in the flesh.
This is very biblical. If Lon Solomon is so insistent on the inerrancy of Scripture, then he and Mr. Hart might derive some profit in meditating on chapter six of St. John’s Gospel and on chapter seven of the First Epistle to the Corinthians. “I tell you most solemnly, if you do not eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you will not have life in you” (John 6:53). It is hard to believe that Jesus offers Himself as food and drink and commands that we partake; harder than believing the Red Sea parted or that Noah had all those animals on his ark; so hard that His own disciples walked away. But it is the Gospel truth.
Mr. Hart appears to be an intelligent young man, well read in the literature of Christian faith. He knows, or must have known, that the preaching of Lon Solomon, as good as it may be, offers only part of the truth. He knows, or at least must have known, that Jesus has called him to share in his Body and Blood. He once did share in this most intimate union with the Eternal God. The question he must now face is: do you believe that is true or not? If not, then maybe the McLean Bible Church is the place for you. But if it is true, how can you stay away?
Michael Schwartz
The Catholic Center
Washington, D.C.
Vacation From the Faith
I read with interest Benjamin Hart’s article, “The Evangelical Temptation,” in the February issue of Crisis.
Mr. Hart’s primary reasons for leaving the Church are described as a dislike for the leftward political direction of some in the Catholic hierarchy; his inability to find a priest in the Washington area who can make him feel good at Mass; the lack of emphasis on study of the Bible, separate and apart from the Mass; and the Catholic Church’s abandonment of its “strengths” — “history, intellectual tradition, and ironclad adherence to doctrine” — for the weakest aspects of Protestantism.
Mr. Hart makes statements in virtually every paragraph with which I disagree, yet the flaw of monumental proportions in the article is his fundamental misunderstanding of the Catholic faith and of the Mass.
Mr. Hart fails to discuss the essence of the Roman Catholic faith: the sacraments and the Mass as the celebration of the sacraments. The existence of and adherence to the sacraments are the strengths of the Catholic Church. The miracle by which man is filled with God’s grace through transubstantiation of bread and water into the body and blood of the Lord Jesus Christ is the greatest gift God has given to mankind. Baptism, penance, matrimony: these are the transmissions of God’s grace. The faith does not exist independently of belief in the sacraments.
The belief in the sacraments is not an emotional act to make believers “feel good” about themselves. It is a spiritual and intellectual exercise, a deep understanding of the temporal body as a vessel for God’s grace.
Neither is belief in the sacraments a political act. Transubstantiation has little to do with the homeless, Nicaragua, apartheid, the Strategic Defense Initiative, or low taxes. Surely, the leftward political slant in secular matters is disconcerting, but it has nothing to do with the immutable truths of the sacraments and the celebration of the Mass. The faith exists independently of politics and believers are always spiritually free, as is evidenced in totalitarian, communist countries where official atheism and persecution have not caused the faithful to leave the Church.
As for study of the Bible apart from the Mass, it is true that Catholics place less emphasis on reading of Scripture than they should, and than many Protestant faiths. But one should remember that to Catholics, the sacraments are the realization of fundamental biblical principles, the way in which we should live biblical truth in a concrete way.
I regret that Mr. Hart’s politics have caused him to abandon his faith, yet one wonders if he knows what he is leaving, considering his incomplete critique of the faith. Washington is a city where politics is the all-consuming passion, the secular religion of many of its residents. I have often been tempted to form a new therapy group, Politics Anonymous, to help political addicts conquer this terrible disease. Maybe Mr. Hart will be my first patient and he will come to understand the Evelyn Waugh theory: Catholics never leave the faith, they merely go on vacation.
Juanita Duggan
Washington, DC
The “Catholic Temptation”
For me, there was more than a little irony associated with reading Benjamin Hart’s essay, “The Evangelical Temptation.” As one who has spent nearly his entire life as an evangelical, I have experienced in recent years what I can only call “the Catholic temptation.” Not infrequently, I have seriously considered leaving behind Evangelicalism and embracing Catholicism. For myself this temptation has had little to do with aesthetics or liturgy — although these issues are, I believe, important — and has everything to do with the question of theological orthodoxy.
Benjamin Hart laments that the American Catholic Church has lost its historic theological moorings; that it has, inter alia, redefined the traditional orthodoxy by politicizing the biblical message. Sadly (and here is the irony) the same kind of theological redefinition has begun to take place within Evangelicalism. While American evangelicals have always viewed themselves as the bearers of theological orthodoxy, the fact of the matter is that the traditional boundaries of evangelical theology have begun to erode. This process is complex and, for the most part, subtle. The precise nature and the implications of this erosion are brilliantly discussed in James D. Hunter’s Evangelicalism: The Coming Generation (Chicago, 1987).
What is particularly disheartening to me is that there is an increasing tendency among evangelicals to politicize their understanding of the Christian faith. To be sure, this kind of theological redefinition is not evident in all evangelical congregations (such as the church which Benjamin Hart now attends), but it is clearly taking place among many evangelical elites, in colleges, seminaries, and in evangelical publications. Often, this politicization is overt, as in the sympathetic way in which liberation theology and so-called contextual theology is received and taught. Other times, this process is more subtle, as in the current evangelical fixation with becoming “world Christians” — a seemingly innocuous idea were it not for the fact that it frequently subsumes a host of other non-biblical ideological assumptions. Having read about Benjamin Hart’s journey out of the Catholic Church, I’m not sure what I’ll do; that “Catholic moment” has subsided for the moment. But my deep frustration, and even fear, remains: who — what church, what tradition — will, in the future, be the caretaker of the historic Christian faith?
Dean C. Curry
Messiah College
Grantham, Pennsylvania
There and Back Again
Crisis is to be commended for airing a thorny question in the form of Benjamin Hart’s article, “The Evangelical Temptation,” wherein he articulates the sentiments of a number of Catholics who have become disenchanted with their Church. Aside from the theological questions raised, there is also the delicate matter of how Christians can maintain an ecumenical tone while honestly confronting sharp theological disagreements, especially when the partners to this dialogue are allies on important public policy matters.
The essay is important also in that it reminds us that, in addition to the feminists, gays, divorced, and remarried, who experience alienation from the Church, there is also a significant portion of people who find themselves alienated, not because the Church is too “conservative” in this or that teaching or practice, but because segments of it are too “liberal.”
But the main problem with Mr. Hart’s article is his failure to come to terms with the Catholic understanding of ritual. What I believe many evangelicals fail to appreciate about ritual is that it has always existed in human communities as a way of expressing common beliefs and concerns in a manner which transcends words. Ritual is belief expressed in symbol. One might come away from reading Mr. Hart’s essay with the impression that the only way legitimately to preach the gospel is through an emphatic declaration of propositions.
It is the nature ritual to be ambiguous for the simple reason that ritual must leave room to touch many aspects of the human person, whose own character is spirit and flesh (not spirit in flesh). Were the les sons to be learned in ritual easily categorized or defined, much of its power and mystery would evaporate.
People who, like Mr. Hart, come away from the Church’s liturgy with a sense that the exercise was “mere repetition” without any connection to the Scriptures (and I was one of these), point up the failure of many parishes and priests, and perhaps even in themselves, really to understand ritual. Such people, both inside and outside the Church, fail to see the rich and deep way in which the Church’s liturgy finds its basis in the Scriptures and from which its actions and signs derive their meaning (see the “Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy,” no. 24).
This relates directly to what is perhaps Mr. Hart’s failure to grasp the implications of the Incarnation. Fully to embrace the belief that God entered history in the form of man is to appreciate the importance of history itself in the role of salvation. In attending to God’s activity in the midst of history we in turn are called to accept the need for the institutional nature of the Church which allows the good news to be proclaimed within history, thus retaining the continuity of the faith from one generation to another.
To be sure, the Church is more than an institution; it is, as Avery Dulles teaches us in his masterpiece, Models of the Church, Mystical Communion, Sacrament, Herald. But it is also Institution. Like Christ, the Church shares an earthly and divine nature, and its liturgy attempts to communicate the latter to the former by using elements of both — admittedly, no easy task.
This apparent lack of historical awareness on the part of Mr. Hart invites a comment on his understanding of Scripture. It is impossible to attempt to understand the Scriptures apart from the Church because the Christian Scriptures emerged from the very heart and experience of the Church. The fact is that centuries before there was an authorized canon of Scripture (i.e., a New Testament), there was a highly organized, liturgically centered, praying, preaching, baptizing, ordaining, hierarchical Church. Simply stated, the Bible did not give us the Church: the Church gave us the Bible.
Tied to a belief in the authority of the New Testament is an implicit belief in the authority of the same Church which made the initial selection of canonical books to begin with. Separating the Bible from the tradition of the Church (which was used to determine which books were authentic), and from the teaching authority that canonized (the Magisterium), does an injustice to all three and leaves one, not only with a truncated understanding of the role of the Scriptures in the life of the faithful, but with a subtle disregard for the action of the Holy Spirit in history.
There has always been a tendency within Christianity to move to one or the other extreme of its belief that God became man. Some have opted for an over spiritualized view of Christianity which has led to a disregard not only for Christ’s humanity, but our own as well, and which has frequently ended in rigorism and simplistic dichotomies. The other temptation is to collapse all sense of transcendence and, as Mr. Hart rightly observes, place “an overemphasis on man to solve man’s problems, the results of which is an increasingly secular message.”
Neither of these extremes serve the authentic thrust of the Gospel. What has been called the great “and” of Catholicism must be maintained, specifically its ability to hold in tension the various aspects of truth in much the same way the Church during the early Christological debates did when it said that Jesus is both God and man.
The element in Mr. Hart’s article which laments the denigration of Catholicism’s transcendental character calls those who remain in the Church to commit ourselves to renew the Catholic Church in America and make it a more nourishing home for those who, like Mr. Hart, and like ourselves, need a place where our personal commitment to Christ can be deepened. This is, after all, what the Church is about.
I write as one who experienced the evangelical temptation and who yielded to it; and I write as one who retains a deep esteem for the insights that evangelicals bring to the Christian experience. I especially cherish the familiarity with the Scriptures and vibrant tradition that I absorbed as an evangelical. I am a better Catholic today for having had that experience. I can offer no better or more sincere prayer than that the same will one day be true for Mr. Hart.
Robert Sirico, C.S.P.
Minneapolis, Minnesota
Cheshire-Cat Christianity
The February Crisis was a highly interesting issue, especially for its combination of an increasingly fundamentalist (or populist?) influence at one end of the spectrum, and Pastor Richard Neuhaus’s powerful new book, The Catholic Moment, at the other. However, I think that a couple of disclaimers are very much in order on both points.
First, one must feel genuinely sorry for Benjamin Hart’s disenchantment with, and apparent flight from, the Catholic Church at this critical point in the working out of his salvation with care and diligence. Likewise, almost, for Marlene Elwell’s curious gravitation to the Cheshire-cat Christianity of Pat Robertson.
The sad point is that we should so easily fail to realize the center of Roman Catholic worship and community is the Eucharistic Presence. Preaching, as such, is not the center of the Catholic community; biblicism is not the be-all, end-all of Catholic community even though the Bible itself would not have survived without the custodianship of the Church. Add to this, of course, the fact that a beautifully integrated selection from Holy Scripture provides the very context of our daily and Sunday Masses.
I for one certainly do not want to walk into a church and listen to hymn-singing for half an hour, then get a lot of preaching, with charismatic demonstrations to follow. Thank God for ritual, I say, no matter how watered down, for it is still the Eucharist as the irreducible point of Catholic community. Ill-directed sermons and a weak liturgy may be impediments, to be sure, but we do not understand Catholic worship and community unless we “know” the mystery of the Eucharist too.
Secondly, though I share a keen admiration for Richard John Neuhaus, I also question the viability of his major premise: that the Catholic Moment is the “moment in which the Roman Catholic Church in the United States assumes its rightful role in the culture-forming task of constructing a religiously informed public philosophy for the American experiment in ordered liberty.” Theologically speaking, such a Catholic moment is always and forever present. It is the historical context that is so critical and uncertain.
The fact is that no matter what the Founding Fathers may have had in mind, the American experiment has long since gone awry; and it is all the more unlikely that the neo-Gnosticism of the American Renaissance, which had rushed in to fill the vacuum, is about to seek the salvation of a Catholic moment in the offing. In any case, there can never be a sense of continuity in “ordered liberty” which also has the blessings of its highest court on the appalling destruction of unborn human life in America. This is the fatal flaw.
What we have in the United States today is a pernicious form of “disordered liberty.” A Southern Catholic writer, Flannery O’Connor, clearly and devastatingly perceived this in her recognition of the American moment, indeed, when whatever we may have had of a philosophical and cultural unity ceased to exist. She once wrote to a friend that when Ralph Waldo Emerson, the actual founding father of the republic, “decided in 1832 that he could no longer celebrate the Lord’s supper, unless the bread and wine were removed, an important step in the vaporization of religion in America had taken place.”
That continues to be the premise, I’m afraid, for the American experiment today. There is no prospect for a Catholic moment in the United States — much less, indeed, for a truly Judeo-Christian one — which had in fact been ironically cancelled out by the election of John F. Kennedy to the presidency. Our culture develops from our philosophy, and we can see how depleted the latter is tithe simple (though not necessarily simplistic) observation that most of our major writers (Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Mark Twain, et al.) have been studiously hostile to Christianity itself. The vaporization of religion in America had already occurred, and what we have left is mere religiosity, on the one hand, and a kind of evangelical fervor, on the other, pathetically seeking the salvific moment that it has already denied.
Thomas P. McDonnell
Stoughton, Massachusetts
Stick It Out, Ben
Your February issue certainly had a good mix of attitudes. I could feel sympathy with Benjamin Hart’s disappointment with the general condition of much of our bankrupt clergy. Yet, I cannot empathize with him. Running away to find an orator to tickle his itching ears is no solution. When you are right, you stay and fight. Marlene Elwell is a good example of a David slugging it out with a Goliath. Richard John Neuhaus has recently been extolling the position of the Catholic Church. Benjamin ought to consider the Church as the Mystical Body of Christ and not judge her by her wayward clerics. He should realize that there are good and holy clerics as well. He should realize that he also has a role to play, and not be just a spectator and taker. Is he one of those who “finds it hard and walks away from Christ”? To whom will he go when the verbose Lon Solomon is gone? Jesus alone has the words of Eternal Life, and he left those words with the one and only Church he founded.
I, too, am disenchanted with the way the Church seems to be headed. But thanks to God’s grace, I have not walked away. I have placed my head on the block many times. I have been castigated and ridiculed by my pastor and fellow Catholics; but my head is still on, ready for another time to place it on the block of controversy. Benjamin said he didn’t walk away lightly. The final word to Benjamin and the thousands like him is: don’t blame the wayward bishops, priests, religious, and theologians. You did not leave them. You joined them by defection. Come back. We need you. You are abandoning God’s house to his enemies.
Peter J. Hahn
Hampshire, Illinois