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The Question: What can Pope Benedict XVI say and do to repair the growing rifts between the Vatican, the clergy and the laity in America?
In the realm of my imagination (because I don’t have much hope for these in the realm of reality), let’s just say that someone handed me a magical Catholic lamp and a Pope Benedict-like genie popped out to grant me three Catholic wishes. If this were to happen, I’d ask for the following:
I don’t know that it is a mark of health or sickness, so much as a sign of the information age in which we live, and the fact that people have access to explore a variety of religious traditions like never before, as well as access historical-critical analysis about their own faiths that, in times past, used to more or less be restricted to the walls of the ivory tower, and sometimes goes a long way (for some) toward dismantling what a person once took for granted.
Though, on the health and sickness spectrum—I am not surprised that the number of adults who identify as evangelical Christian is growing, and the number who affiliate as Catholic is plummeting—save the immigrant population helping percentages stay steady for Catholics in the U.S. I say this based on my own investigations into young adult religiosity in America (see Sex and the Soul: Juggling Sexuality, Spirituality, Romance & Religion on America’s College Campuses). I believe that what may indeed lead so many adults to identify shifts in their religious identities is tied more to their relationships to religious traditions during young adulthood than anything else.
I like Barack Obama. A lot. If he wins the nomination I will vote for him come November. If anyone can repair the United States’ reputation around the globe, Obama can, and this country needs a president who can mend fences in this regard.
But on the subjects of faith and fervor, I am of two minds about Obama.
The real question is not whether this year’s presidential campaign is too religious or even whether secular ideas get short shrift in the conversation. It’s whether we, as citizens, can come to terms with the fact that secularism is a theory, not a practical reality.
While America frets about the bedroom activities of its leaders, many young adults across the country and across traditions agonize--most often in silence--about navigating romance and sex in a way that doesn't leave them alienated, even rejected, by their faith. Once a child hits puberty, and sometimes even well before, she is often slammed with the (mostly) don'ts of her tradition's teachings about sex, often in a form that is much like chicken soup (so thin as to lack any nourishment at all), and often in a way that if she learns anything about her current sexual predicament, the takeaway involves how she stands to lose everything--her relationship with God, her standing in her community, the respect of a future spouse--if she should commit sexual transgressions before marriage.
Or if she doesn't receive such extensive scare tactics, sometimes adult "mentors" feel a simple Nike-esque "Don't do it" suffices. (That was about all I got as a Catholic young adult.)
For the most part, a young person can either take it or leave it when it comes to teachings on sex by their religious tradition--and more often than not, they face "leaving it," or at least "compartmentalizing it," if they want their faith lives to weather the storm of adolescence, college, and often a decade or more afterward.
So debating whether or not sex outside of marriage is "OK" in the face of a few particular scandals seems disingenuous to me, beside the point even, when the vast majority of our youth are faced with navigating the waters of sex outside of marriage without much if any of the real heavy-lifting of this difficult task done with the help of adults in their community.
Normally, Mr. Hitchens, I would disagree with you—at least with your tone in how you go at religion. Your approach is reductionist in ways that don’t entirely add up, given the good I know that religion does in the world, often in the smallest, most hidden ways, and given the good people I know who find in faith a beautiful, intellectual, satisfying, and giving life.
Of course, then, there are the truths you speak. We are all well aware of how the institution that is religion, not to mention its rogue off-shoots, wreaks havoc in our world and has left such tragedy in its wake. But again, this is only part of religion’s story. I worry when a person simply refuses to concede that religions—regardless of all their flaws—help most believers walk life’s finest of lines—between good and evil, between beauty and brutality, between utter joy and meaning and the deepest pain and despair. To deny this altogether is its own sort of fundamentalism.
I am sitting in Balthazar, one of New York City’s famed cafés, immortalized by the fab four on Sex and the City and purveyor of cappuccinos and Eggs Benedict to the well-heeled fashion gurus of SOHO before they head off for their designer days. It is the Monday following New York City’s fall fashion week (which, incidentally, showcases the styles for the coming spring, not fall), and Balthazar is buzzing with chatter, everyone with their copy of WWD (Women’s Wear Daily)—except for me, that is. I am listening in as the man next to me speaks on his cell phone in French, then Italian, then in English and watching as women in outfits I only fantasize about wearing sip their coffees and read the paper.
It’s also the eve of the sixth anniversary of September 11th. I’m not sure I have much of a message for religious extremists—unless this survivors’ reflection (and that is not a typo—I mean that in a collective sense) counts as a sort of pacifist, tangential kind of resistance.
Hic, haec, hoc…huis, huis, huis…
When I was in high school—a diocesan parish Catholic institution—all honors students had to take four years of Latin. This was in the late 1980’s. Old-fashioned or not, Latin was the official tongue of the Catholic intellectual tradition and therefore part of our preparation to go out into the wider world according to the nuns that ran my school.
This made sense to my Italian Catholic mother and grandmother, both of whom remembered the pre-Vatican II Latin Mass well, and, in my mother’s case, had endured long years of schooling in Latin growing up in the 1940’s and 1950’s. This is not to say that Mom and Gram did not enjoy the mass in the vernacular, but there was something about it that the more familiar, informal English language version couldn’t quite capture, they used to say.
It is difficult to find satisfaction amid great loss. Death and the terminal illnesses of those I love have come in powerful waves ever since I graduated from college, and in the middle of some of the most wonderful moments of my life—graduating with my Ph.D., getting married, writing my first book. I am still waiting for these waters to calm, wondering if they ever will. Betting that I just need to learn to live with it.
I know that death and difficulty is part and parcel of life, and I know that in the grand scheme of the wider world I am fortunate in more ways than I can count. I also feel that familiar twinge of Catholic guilt my Italian mother and grandmother instilled in me for even admitting that life doesn’t feel all that rosy lately.
I do not believe that any faith tradition can adequately “explain” tragedies such as the massacre at Virginia Tech yesterday. The search for explanations too often leads to the question of why one student was spared and not the next—a terrible thing to even ask, since all the killings yesterday were beyond reason.
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