A culture not a community

I'm going to start Annie Hall style with two old jokes. Unlike that movie, though, I'm going to start with two old jokes that don't apply to story I want to tell about Catholics below. These are jokes told about Anglicans/Episcopalians that just don't apply to Catholics and I think that is a telling thing.

1. Some Sunday morning in the future, after the opening hymn, an Anglican priest will stand up in front of the congregation and say, today we have a special treat, and then take a place in the pews. A procession will come up the aisle and it eventually will becomes apparent that there is a marriage ceremony. A woman is marrying her cat and the ceremony is being presided over by three guest ministers: a Wiccan, a Unitarian and a guy in a clown suit representing the church of Aqua Buddha. In the fifth row, a woman leans over to her friend and says, "I tell you, just one more thing and I'm leaving."
2. Whenever two or three Anglicans are gathered together there will be food.

It's not that there aren't some Catholics like this. We can all think of individual Catholics who fit those jokes and if you know many Anglicans/Episcopalians you can think of a few individuals who most emphatically don't fit those jokes. But you couldn't tell either joke about Catholics in general.

The reason you can't is that both jokes play on the powerful sense of community that holds in the Anglican church. In the first we know the woman won't leave because this is her community. She is like the woman who endlessly complains about her boyfriend but never leaves him. The second is about parishioners who are like a man in a relationship where the sexual interest has long disappeared but hangs around because he likes the companionship and security of being part of a couple.

Most Catholics just don't relate to our church like that. For starters we are very intolerant of change. Heaven help the visiting priest who decides to move the Pascal candle a couple of feet left or right from where parishioners are used to seeing it. Invite a Wiccan onto the altar or have someone dressed up in a clown suit and half the congregation will write a letter to Bishop to complain and the other half will write straight to pope, helpfully including the video they shot of the incident with their cell phone.

And try and hold a tea and cookies reception after mass and you will be lucky to get one percent of the people to show up. Stand outside the doors to try and draw people in and you might be trampled by the rush of people eager to get to their cars.

No, what Catholics love most about their church is the culture it gives them. In Quebec where I come from, most people have now left the church but they love the culture. They are very emphatic about being Catholic even though they don't go to church anymore, not even at Christmas, and they have no tolerance for anyone who'd classify them as anything else.

It seems to me that it is a failure to appreciate the importance of Catholic culture that, more than anything else, caused the reform movement of the 1960s and 1970s to fail.

I know, every time I say this anywhere at all, people get touchy because there are a significant subset of Catholics who think the reforms should have succeeded. And maybe they should have. But maybe the Paris peace talks should have succeed too. The point is that they didn't. And they didn't because they never succeeded in offering people a Catholic culture that would help us to define ourselves as significantly different from other groups in our society.

A liberal catholic I know speaks disdainfully of what she calls "all the smells and spells" but most Catholics love that stuff.

At the Basilica the 12:15 mass was seeing less and less attendance a year ago, most people preferring to the 10 or 11:30 services. Rather than cancel it, our Rector allowed a Novus Ordo mass that was partly in English, partly in Latin. The first few weeks, some liberals tried to kill it by standing up as a group and loudly walking out at the first use of Latin, hoping they could start a movement against it. They failed utterly: 12:15 is now the most popular mass at the Basilica with about one to two thousand people every week, many of whom are teenagers who come by themselves, in attendance.

I'm pretty sure those teenagers don't take church teachings about sexuality any more seriously than most other teenagers do—I saw one one Sunday wearing a t-shirt that advertised condoms—but they love singing the Pater Noster. They love knowing the responses in Latin and they love the incense, the holy water and the ritual.

I would think that any aspiring reformers—liberal or conservative—would do well to take note of this. Any reform movement that hopes to succeed has to offer people in the pews culture, Catholic culture.