Political-ization of Religion

It is politics, politics, politics in this prolonged primary season in America.

What ever happened to the good old days of tobacco smoke filled back rooms and cigar chomping politico bosses cutting deals and deciding whose name would go onto the top of any political ticket? The good old days?

The late 1960’s in America was a brutal time both in terms of blood and in terms of communication. The Vietnam War raged and everybody had some relative or another trying to stop the communist monolith over there instead of it all coming over here.

The so-called liberal media was spewing government approved propaganda numbers. I remember around 1967 thinking to myself that they better end that war soon before I get drafted into it. The radio was spewing out an almost hourly body count of the enemy, the enemy, the enemy. There was a point around 1968 after I came home from the weekly Sunday family drive to the country that I reached a saturation point in all the war news. The radio or TV might be switched on after that date but I was not listening.

I wasn’t an outward war protestor or a Hippie, but if it came to a vote of no confidence for the government and its policies, I would have been at the head of the line to vote. Not much has changed in forty years of American Politics.

Something of late in American politics is the Religious Party or more accurately, the Religious Wing on one particular political party. Not to say that the Dems have not been playing with the “God Vote” in the past but that vote was decided behind closed doors.

In the Dem politics of smoke filled back rooms, the bosses decided who and what to give to the local Catholic hierarchy in terms of respect, deals or candidates. The process was behind the scenes. I had a distant cousin who was a bishop and I heard a little bit of backstairs politics and religion mixing in a way that would have made Thomas Jefferson blush or flush with rage.

The local Dem committee man made his rounds the Sunday before elections and gave you a list of the party approved (and church approved) candidates along with a wink and a nod. Whatever.

Outside the big city political machines, out in the countryside, new ideas, burb ideas were beginning to form. Some of these ideas had to do not so much with abortion but with the general idea of birth control. The old “blue laws” were vague and archaic about contraception. New laws were needed. New bills were being introduced in the state legislature.

There were one or two local politicians who spoke not so much with the voice of God as with the sanctioned voice of the local bishops. Contraception was a sin. Any bishop who approved of it would never get his red hat etc.

The local parish was not big on homilies as a rule. The time allotted to sermons in my church was usually gobbled up with church announcements, meeting schedules, appeals for money etc.

I liked homilies as a teenager. With the disappearance of the Latin dead language thing in the mass, there was no time to daydream except during a very boring sermon.

So I began to notice that instead of talking about Jesus and his teachings, the homily time got filled with loud demands that we write to our local state legislator and demand a vote against House Bill 10-20-14 etc.

As I said the late sixties were brutal in terms of communication. Vatican II, while a temporary PR triumph, it was the devil in the details – confusion – mistrust - in following through on ideas approved in that council.

It was then in the late sixties that I stopped listening to whatever political propaganda was spewing out of the pulpit and cut the chain with the old faith.

These days, Public Relations are more sophisticated along with corporate media networks having their political agendas and their officially endorsed church candidates. Whether you, in the privacy of the voting booth, vote the party/church line or your conscience, nobody but you will know.

I don’t like these outward religious endorsements of politicians lately. I believe in the concept of the separation of church and state. It’s as American as the Constitution.

I am old fashioned kind of guy. I prefer the wink and nod from the local committee man to let me know what is what regarding politics and not religion.

Religious Education

The late Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen once commented on a talk show in response to the seeming chaos and confusion and anger for Catholics in the decade following Vatican II. He shrugged a bit and saw something positive. He stated that the Church seems to shrivel up and die every five hundred years only to be reborn again in the next centuries.

Perception can sometimes be reality. Sometimes it all comes down to attitude.

I am reminded of surfing the net recently and coming upon the news that my catholic grade school in Philly had been shut down and was on the real estate market. Living in NYC on and off for thirty years I rationalized that real estate comes and goes. A piece of my personal history has disappeared.

A flowering of my Christian faith started with the education started in that school. I do not have the means to support or return blessings to that particular school or parish. I am sad about that fact of my life. I somehow feel that I owe a great deal but don’t know how to repay.

I mention this along with statistics that some 1200 catholic schools have closed since 2000. Inner cities do not have jobs or incomes to support the presently very expensive private education systems so prevalent in the past.

A lot of the moral base of our country or the moral base of any nation in the past has had to do with the quality of its education. The Catholics used to have that edge. I won’t put down public schools but it seems that they give more homework, projects, Internet assignments, things I compare with and measure against my own childhood. Is public education functioning to make the child think or is it merely there to keep children busy until mom and dad get home from work? I learned in the classroom and not so much at home.

The system that supported my free catholic education started with hate crimes and riots in the 1840’s. The local immigrant bishop, now a saint, had a right attitude to this dilemma. He went to the protestant bankers in Philly and told them that they were going to loan him the money to build a separate and not equal ( in truth superior ) school system. This school system was built for the children of all the catholic Irish and German immigrants pouring into that port city. This influx scared the hell out of the Anglo Saxon natives and inspired them to hatred and riots against the Catholics. Not only did John Neumann build schools but he got his bankers to pay for his new cathedral. That’s chutzpa (hutspa)!

Catholic education is decreasing. The vocations of nuns to teach and devote their lives to God got lost somewhere along the way. Nuns used to work for little or nothing as part of their religious calling. You don’t know what you've got till its gone.

We can’t blame Vatican II for everything. America’s post WWII value system paralleled a white flight to suburbia and to the MALL. It costs money to run private education. Priorities seem to have changed.

Anyway, I have noticed that religious education has declined in the general workforce. While somebody of my generation got 12 years of cheap or free moral, religious based education, any private education these days is the exception and not the rule. Private education seems in many cases to be limited to 6-8 years becaue of economic factors. Private Catholic high school education is now for an economic elite class.

Does this change America? Does this mean the general decline of morals based on religious education? Is it a better world? I will let you ponder on answers.

Evangelical Christians have a growing share in the old tough love education system I once experienced. I don’t knock anything these days. With eighty ten year olds in the class, as in my youth, a little old fashioned discipline can go a long way. Sometimes the classical model is the best model to imitate.

The Big Change - Vatican II

Somewhere along the timeline between my being a R.C. Christian and a Cultural Christian is the great Church council of Vatican II.

I was aware of the big event in the background noise of my young life. Talk and printed articles and of course that new fangled thing Television brought ceremonies in Rome into the living rooms of us mere mortals.

For what it was to accomplish or what my part was in it, let us reduce the macro down into the micro of my day to day life as a grade school student and an altar boy in the local church.

Something somehow almost poetic got said and I don’t know how it was exactly said but John XXIII “threw opened the windows and wanted to let some fresh air into the Church.”.

The Church was a stuffy place. Pharisee like ritual choked the arteries of an institution that had been on the defensive for four and half centuries since the German cleric nailed up his 95 points of grievance against the then establishment of a Full European Catholic Institution.

Anyway, back to earth. It is lunch time and we altar boys are in the chapel of the church with the nun in charge of altar boys. She is flustered. She is reading the latest marching orders from the local bishop regarding changes in the old Latin mass. There was a time there when the mass was divided up into A, B, C, and D. That one month A and C got put into experimental English, the local vernacular. Then the next month A and C went back to Latin while B and D got a new spin in the vernacular.

Of course, there used to be a lot of ceremonial movements and rituals like genuflection and the ringing of bells at the right moment. On that particular lunch hour with the other altar boys I got my chance to perform the recently revised stage directions. I was confused. I started the practice run and was motioning to genuflect in the old Latin style. From the back of the chapel came the very angry voice of Sister Sponsa Regis and the very real threat of “Bend that knee boy and I’ll break it!”

There was no way then to express what I felt at that moment. Over the years I have played and replayed the video tape of that incident in my mind. What I should have said to her was something in street talk about “Screw this!” or something similar. Hello public school! The other accent of the feeling of that moment was I think subconscious. It had to do with a paradigm shift and realization about how a perfect God that only spoke Latin had somehow changed.

Many lapsed Catholics have said over time that the Church left them and not vice versa. I know where they are coming from. In an attempt to catch up to Luther’s very real and very pragmatic suggestion to put the mass or common service into the vernacular took a lot of getting used to after Vatican II.

I remember the words of a commentator in the local catholic paper and his sneering almost cynical “best wishes” to the Protestants on the four hundredth and fiftieth anniversary of the Protestant reformation in 1967.

We went through the changes in the mass to English. I am not so certain that everyone survived them.

In retrospect, the old Latin mass had been quite a calming almost meditative sort of thing. Your mind could drift off during the dead language and you could half pray and half mediate or day dream at the same time. Only the bells would bring you back into focus. That and the old ladies doing their own sort of prayful meditative thing as they rattled their glass rosary beads against the pews.

In retrospect I give Angelo Roncalli points for trying and for starting the process of the long term rebirth of Christianity. This stellar fisherman did open windows and get some fresh air into the Vatican. I look at that as a painful start to a whole new possible future of Christianity in the global culture.

I look at that symbolic window opening and address the matter in terms of eastern mysticism or philosophy if you wish. I see Vatican II as a change in the coming flow of energy from the Holy Spirit to all the people of God.

Early Remembrances of Religion

I don’t remember the exact moment how or when religion got introduced into my life. I was aware of my older brother and sister going to Mass on Sunday at the children’s Mass at 9:00 A.M...

I would be going to mass every Sunday when I entered the first grade. School at six was more of a concern to me than the church thing.

My mother did the 6 A.M. mass and then came home to start cooking breakfast. In those days you had to fast from Saturday midnight from both food and water if you wanted to receive Communion. Brushing your teeth was a no-no etc. Rituals had their demands.

I did go to church with my mother in the first grade. Mandatory attendance for school children did not start until the second grade.

The people going to mass at 6A.M. were working class who had to go to work on Sunday. No Saturday evening masses back then. The attendees were working people or other mothers who would go home to tend to household duties.

My memory of the first grade was that there was something like 103 students in the class. That rounded down to about 99 after the first week and more or less stayed at that number. The old wood and cast iron desks were bolted together and sometimes you got to sit three in a row. God forbid you got sick and stayed out a day or two. Not only did you lose your desk and seating arrangements but you were likely to lose your pencils, books and boxes of cardboard letters and numbers.

I’ve told people that I started in first grade with 99 kids and graduated in eighth grade with 66 children. I don’t think that they believe me. More about Catholic education in another article.

I didn’t have a clue what was going on when I first attended services in first grade with my mother. There was Father Dougherty who taught at a high school but was in residence at the rectory and helped in the warehouse factory schedule of the 6.7.8.9.10.11 and 12:15 masses. Father Dougherty empathized with people who were going to be late for work on Sunday because they felt an obligation to attend. He would race through the mass in something like fifteen to twenty minutes. No sermon and diction that sounded like it was fueled by five cups of coffee.

The nuns in first grade started the religion thing with topics about angels, saints, Jesus, the Blessed Mother, the devil, Protestants and Communists.

In second grade you memorized a lot of boilerplate Catechism and received Holy Communion. I never liked the stepping into a dark space of a confessional and waiting to talk to the small screen and priest beyond. This fear touched something primal within.

Confirmation was more of the same with questions and answers but this time a bishop got to rub some sacred oil on your forehead and you got to wear a red robe, symbolic of the blood of martyrs for the faith.

I was an altar boy and got to see things at a closer range than the congregation. I did accept what was ever handed to me in the text of faith and never questioned anything.

There was high school and in freshman religion class they made you carry around a bible the size of a cigar box. The reading of the bible was in keeping with the PR freshly put out by church management and conforming to the mission statements of Vatican II etc.

I am certain that the awkward size of the bible and the physical pain in carrying it every day to class had to do with the deal or price offered by the publishing company. I doubt that the size of the book discouraged anybody from reading it. Of course there is the old joke about “you’ve never read the bible, you’re a catholic”. It was something I would hear many years later and understand.

After high school, I stopped attending church. It would be something like fifteen years before I started to read the bible and after I read it, something remarkable happened. I had always thought that the New Testament would explain everything. I expected that the gaps in the Catholic religion thing would be filled in and explained in black and white. I expected a boost to my spirituality among other things.

What happened after I read the New Testament from cover to cover was that I realized that I was no longer a catholic. I had become more or less Protestant.

The Sacred and the Secular

There is that standard term ”the sacred and the profane”. Sacred of course means the church. Everything else is the profane.

The term is no doubt centuries old and goes back to when the church was equal to or greater than the local civil authority or king. The aftermath of the collapse of the Roman Empire left many gaps and many niche opportunities for those willing to fill those gaps. Many of the basic civil institutions of western and European countries started first as church entities.

Profane as a word or description has picked up much too much negative connotation over these recent centuries.

For the sake of anything you might read here, I am using or will be using the word secular in place of the word profane, to mean the common man or woman’s world outside of any religious organizations.

Secular of course and of late has a nasty connotation especially in conjunction with the use of the word humanism. That is another article.

I live in a secular world. The USA is a market economy and goes non stop 24/7, twenty four hours a day and seven days a week in case you have never seen or totally understood that new cliché of communication.

So many things culturally are changing today. The fast pace of life has taken over the way we live in this secular world.

As a child, and half a century ago, my local neighborhood was immersed in the traditional nineteenth and early twentieth century predominate Christian culture. That meant that six days per week commerce was conducted. On Sunday, the Sabbath, stores did not open. The origin of the term “blue laws” in Pennsylvania applied to moral conduct codes and legislated by the state assembly.

Open a store on Sunday and get fined or arrested. In our neighborhood that was true but we played a little bit of a local variance of the law thing. Since orthodox Jews were closed on Saturday, their Sabbath, these grocers opened their stores from nine A.M. to one P.M. on Sunday and sold mostly milk and bread. My father would be buying milk on the way home from church from the Jewish Deli for my baby sister.

Over the years in larger urban centers, these local blue laws began to be ignored or legislated out of existence.

The stage was set for supermarkets and malls to do business seven days a week.

This commerce thing did not immediately weaken the religious thing. The tradition of not shopping on Sunday or keeping a quiet stay at home Sabbath lingered on depending on local regions.

Speaking to somebody recently who grew up in rural Georgia, the collapse of the no shopping on Sunday tradition budged a little when the local K-Mart opened from 12 to 4 on Sundays in the early eighties.

All this coincided with the expanding suburban mall culture, with the local indoor fountain area or food court in the local mall becoming the equivalent of the traditional American town square.

Many factors pulled the American culture away from the traditional sacred culture of the past.

Secularism did not happen as some evil satanic campaign to rob the sacredness from Sunday. It just happened.

So when I hear the strong political voice of American evangelicalism and their faint hope to go back to some sort of rural farm sacred Sunday kind of place, I have to concede that the dream sounds great. Shut down the Malls, our new 21st Century Cathedrals of Commerce on Sunday? I don’t think so.

It is a secular world and we are very much a part of it.

A Cultural Christian

Cafeteria Catholics - Free - All You Can Eat - The Grace of God

I have spent many, many years in the pursuit of what might be called spirituality.

Along the journey I have examined my religious upbringing among other things. In this corner of the universe I wish to share my thoughts about many things sacred and or profane, where I have been, am and possibly going to.

We are entering a new world. Technology and culture are merging and sometimes clashing on a global level. The adage that all politics is local seems more true than ever.

Some of us have our feet in the old world of paper, pencils, manual typewriters and traditional western logic. The younger generation is playing with virtual and abstract ways of seeing things.

Perception is in many ways reality now more than ever before. I try to sort out the things of everyday life, work, play, leisure and without knowing it I am being transported along with the rest of humanity to the future.

This new land, this new global culture, is a strange and perhaps for some a mysterious place. I think about the European discovery of America in 1492. Some of us are explorers and some of us are left behind to read about the accounts of exploration.

As a practicing but non-church going Christian, I could be labeled as a Cultural Christian. Rather than fight pundit style journalism and Madison Avenue labels, I do not resist the title.

I was taken aback by the use of a similar term "Cultural Catholic" in the New York Times in connection with the recent visit of the Bishop of Rome to that fair city.

These days, labels besides being labels, connote what the speaker of labels want them to do - to put you down somehow.

Having started my life journey with twelve years of Roman Catholic education, I was mildly insulted by the term "Cultural Catholic" having seen it in black and white for the first time. This put me on the Internet to do further research.

Other put down labels from the church hierarchy are terms like "recovering Catholic" or "cafeteria Catholic" to label people who dare to disagree with management or who have merely fallen away or been swept away in the new global culture.

I might have found these Catholic labels insulting if I was still a full or partial, "lapsed" member of that particular Christian sect.

Jesus said to turn the other cheek. This I do here. Always Jesus. Always.

Because so much of me is rooted in the R.C. tradition, my present Christianity has not label. Rather than put wasted effort into establishing a new sect, I accept what I am - a Cultural Christian.