More Catholic culture and community

(A lot more as it turns out. I have gone on a bit here.)

As noted in the comments of my previous post, there is no reason at all you can't have both culture and community. If anything it is normal to have the two together and there is something a little weird about Catholics wanting Catholic culture but not being particularly interested in the Catholic community part.

Why not?

I suspect it has a lot to do with the history of Catholicism, particularly here in North America.

The dominant group of North American Catholics for a long time were the Irish. One of the things that distinguished the Irish who came here from every group to come before them was that they chose to live in cities. All the other immigrants before them—the French, the Spanish, the Germans, the Norwegians, the English, The Scottish, the confusingly named Scots-Irish, and several others—came here to farm. The Irish were the beginning of a new trend, and a trend that has become typical of all immigrants ever since. They moved to the cities and took the lowest paying jobs in industry.*

The Irish lived in ghettos built around Catholic Churches. Go to any big city today and ask where Old Saint Patrick's is, and you can be pretty sure there will be such a church right downtown. The Irish community that used to be around it will now be gone, all moved to the suburbs, but, if you know where to look, you can find traces of them.

They built Catholic institutions. A church, a school,  a youth organization to rival the protestant YMCA, a Catholic men's community service club, a woman's group. The priest was a lot like King David in that he could survey the community put in his care. And he could help enforce the teachings of the Catholic church as he visited. Nowadays, anyone can show up at church and receive communion and no one can complain of scandal because no one knows who they are or where they go and what they do when they step out the door of the church. That wasn't possible back then. Everyone knew who everyone else was and even if they often didn't know what they were doing, they at least knew what to suspect. The League of Decency made sure that no movies with too much kissing were shown.

There was plenty of hypocrisy. The local barber made book on the side and he had some special magazines and books he could sell you, there were also bars where only men were allowed, then (as now) people tended to not question very close friendships between girls and, of course, there was a brothel.

There was plenty of sin in these communities, probably every bit as much as we have now, but there was considerably less privacy.

The other thing was that you had to be part of the community. You were allowed to be friendly with protestants—you were expected to be—but you were to be a part of the Catholic community and you were to marry within that community and you were to raise your children in that community and you were to support the institutions of that community with your money and your volunteer hours.

It was a major thing when my Godfather got the Catholic Youth Organization to merge with the YMCA and the Young Men's Hebrew Association in the city where I grew up. He started pushing for it in the early 1960s and it took a decade and a half to convince all the authorities involved.

When changes came, I think Catholics were simply motivated by practicality at first. They had gotten a lot wealthier and had moved to suburbs. There were Catholic churches** built in these suburbs but it wasn't the same. The suburbs were mixed and not exclusively Catholic. Catholic boys and girls started to play with non-Catholics and it seemed reasonable that they should play on the same sports teams, swim in the same pool, go to the same dances and, later, that they should intermarry.

But something else came with this. I don't think anyone planned on this something else but once they had it, Catholics decided it was very important to them. That something else was privacy.

We treasure privacy and we aren't going to let anyone take that away from us.

That, by the way, is why we all get so angry at hypocrisy even though we are, every one of us, hypocrites*** ourselves. It's not because some moralist has flaws that we get upset, it's because some moralist has threatened our privacy with their moral teachings. Men and women have always masturbated and they always will but now we expect to be able to do so in some private sphere of our life where public morality doesn't apply. Teenage couples have always masturbated one another but now they expect the fact that they do to be entirely their own business.

Catholics still give to charities but they expect the decision as to which charity to be a private one. They still vote but they expect the choice to be private.

All of this leads to one of my pet issues. Everyone talks about Catholic sexual teachings as if they are the problem but that is nonsense. Catholics have ignored the specifics of Catholic sexual teachings when these did not suit them since the days of Gregory the Great. Oral sex was not invented in 1962! That they do so more today is more a function of our living in a more educated society where knowledge of what else can be done is more common.

No, the real gap between Catholic social teaching and rank and file Catholics stems from the social teaching. That teaching is based on a culture where people live in communities that have clear links to medieval villages. That teaching is based on the assumption that we all live in communities where everyone knows everyone else so that supporting the community is not an anonymous act of giving money to some charity or government organization that we simply trust to do the right thing even though we have no idea about the charity or the real nature of the problems they address. Charity was different when everyone knew that Mrs. O'Leary needed help because her husband couldn't hold down a job, and everyone knew who was begging because they really needed help and who just wanted to get drunk. Charity was different when there there is little possibility of social mobility. And charity was different when there was real scarcity in the community.****

We no longer live in communities like that and Catholic social teaching has not kept pace.





* Not incidentally, displacing urban blacks in the process.
** It hasn't helped the Catholic sense of community that these suburban churches are universally ugly and typically dedicated to saints that they do not have any special devotion to.
*** Another old joke: The next time someone accuses the Catholic church of hypocrisy, say, "Yes, the church is full of hypocrites but there is always room for one more."
**** One thing that has not changed is the way charity shows little regard for privacy. I have privacy and you do too but pity the poor mother who gets "helped" by some charity or, worse, some official government agency. She has no privacy at all and lives under the daily threat of having her child taken away from her.