Fillipo Neri (3)

"The heat and the sweat and the life"

Fitzgerald did that on purpose. In some people's books it would count as blasphemy to echo Christ's words like that. It might seem like setting up a rival good to God's good. In a  section of the story that I did not quote in the earlier post, Fitzgerald seems to literally do that,

... underneath his [Rudolph's] terror he felt that his own inner convictions were confirmed. There was something ineffably gorgeous somewhere that had nothing to do with God. He no longer thought that God was angry at him about the original lie, because He must have understood that Rudolph had done it to make things finer in the confessional, brightening up the dinginess of his admissions by saying a thing radiant and proud.

I for one, cannot think of anything gorgeous that doesn't have to do with God. Then again, I think of God when I see women's breasts. Wordly beauty seems to me to have everything to do with God. It is the ugliness of the world that seems to have nothing to do with God.

But I can see how poor old Rudolph got boxed into believing otherwise. He grew up in a  culture that had been set up as a rival culture to what we might loosely call "the world". In the 1920s, when Fitzgerald wrote "Absolution" the dikes around that dry, ascetic culture were beginning to leak.  But we shouldn't think it a weak idea for all that as it had thrived for centuries before that. That rival culture was the work of a lot of people but it was especially the work of Phillip Neri. It was his work that took the life of monastic contemplation out of the monastery and set it up as an ideal for every Catholic.

And not just Catholics.

American* Catholicism has lately lost its ability to present an alternative culture for believers. It was much a part of Catholic life in North America when Catholics, especially Irish Catholics, all lived in the same section of cities where they went to the same church and attended the same school. They had their own rival to the YMCA and groups like the CWL and the Knights were powerful forces within that subculture. It started to lose its grip as more Catholics moved to the suburbs. The recent sex scandals (overwhelmingly the molesters were Irish priests and brothers) were probably the death knell for that sort of culture.

There is a virtual Catholic culture springing up on blogs and at the EWTN but this strikes me as a parallel to the big downtown church that still attracts the big congregations. Few Catholics live around that church anymore so it fills up with people who drive some distance to get there. When they walk out and those big doors close behind them or they log off their computer, they are free of the sort of cultural direction that Phillip Neri and other counter-reformationists sought to create. Like young Rudolph in the story, they take their private pleasures having convinced themselves that God does not disapprove.

Some of my Catholic friends argue that this is because the representatives of the church are no longer teaching Catholic morality. There is some truth to that but when I talk to Catholics who seem to be casually ignoring church teaching on, for example, sexuality or the church's social and economic teaching, it is not because they don't know the church teaches differently. They ignore because they have decided long ago that the church has lost moral authority in these areas. And they don't disagree so much as they just don't pay attention. They might take church teaching as directional but they ignore any specific prohibitions that inconvenience them.

(An aside, although sexuality and birth control gets all the limelight, I think it is actually the church's loss of authority in social and economic matters that has done the most damage. Individual Catholics found it easier to ignore church teaching on sexuality because the social and economic teaching had long ago stopped feeling relevant to most American Catholics.)

I don't think I am telling anyone here anything they don't know. My father did a survey of opinion at his church for his Pastor and found that less than one third of the regular churchgoers (i.e. not just members but people who are sitting on a pew 52 weeks a year) regard the church's economic and social teaching or sexual teaching to be binding. How much longer this can go on is anyone's guess. It might well last for centuries to come. I could be wrong but I don't think the moralistic monastic ideal can be revived again.



* I use "American" to mean the culture that predominates through both the United States and Canada.