2000

Soul Catholicism: Balm for the Postmodern Psyche

A. Puritanism in U.S. Culture

We are a Puritan nation.

By Puritan I mean that we see ourselves as somehow a chosen nation, “a city set on a hill.” The story of the Puritans, from Plymouth Rock down to the present time, is a founding myth for us. Persecution in England, a dangerous journey across the Atlantic into an “untamed” wilderness, battles against hostile inhabitants, and enjoyment of milk and honey are the story, modeled on the stories of the Jewish Torah.

The story inspired not only the Puritans, but many of the Christian immigrant groups that came to this country from Europe, including, I am sure, my own ancestors. But the Puritans were the ones who shaped early English colonial culture, and their ideology came to dominate U.S. religious and economic thinking.

The picture I am painting owes much to Max Weber. When Weber was looking for an exemplar for what he called “the Protestant Ethic,” he placed New England at the heart of that spirit, and while he quoted Benjamin Franklin, no Puritan, the spirit was that of John Calvin, and perhaps most of all of Weber’s own Calvinist mother.

Weber, an economic historian, was trying to answer the question, “why did capitalism develop so thoroughly in Protestant cultures, and not in Catholic ones, or for that matter, in Hindu or Confucian ones? All those cultures had known human greed, and what Weber called “booty capitalism,” the kind of capitalism that thrived on raiding and plunder. But none of them developed the peculiar mixture of moral seriousness, industriousness, and frugality that characterized early capitalism. Weber sensed that the mixture had something to do with Puritan values. The thesis became the basis of his most famous piece of writing.

Weber’s argument puts a lot of weight on the theology of predestination, by which God saves some and damns others at the moment of their births. The theology is an extreme response to the philosophical question of free will versus God’s omniscience and omnipotence, a question that Catholics debated for at least a hundred years shortly after the Reformation. If God is truly all-knowing and powerful, how can a human being be truly free? Two answers are: God does not know everything (the answer proposed in recent years by Alfred Whitehead); humans are not really free, the answer that Calvin settled on. The point I wish to make is this: either answer privileges reason and rationality. Calvin opted for rationality as opposed to mystery.

Persons who believe in predestination, Weber said, look for signs that they are among the ones who are saved, signs of the blessing of God. Earthly blessings and success become such signs, and fellowship with “the saints.” The result is a lifestyle that stresses one’s standing within the chosen community. There is a subtle valuing of material success and a subtle push toward denial of one’s weaknesses, because failure and weakness would be signs of lack of election.

The God of predestination is a God who is the product of pushing reason to its limits. Robert K. Merton believes that this emphasis on reason and rationality was an important impetus toward the development of a scientific world view.

We come thus to our present U.S. culture: rational, scientific, sensitive to material success, industrious, frugal (at least in its ideals), and highly moralistic. Ours is a Puritan culture.

B. White U.S. Catholicism as Puritan

White European Catholics, like most European immigrants, came to this country looking for something better than what they left behind in Europe. Like most immigrants, they were under intense pressure to “make it” in their new land. “Making it” at first took the form of creating ethnic enclaves within which they could re-create American copies of the cultures they left behind. If the enclaves were successful, they provided a secure enough environment for immigrants to raise their children in basic material comfort, with a spiritual culture meaningful enough to give enthusiasm and joy to their lives.

But no sooner have immigrants established themselves in a new country, than their children begin to clamor to identify more fully with the culture of that country. Will Herberg proposed years ago a three-generation model of immigrant assimilation: first generation re-creates the old culture, second generation rejects it, and third generation revives it. But by the third generation, the people are thoroughly assimilated into the new culture and the revival is more symbolic, emphasizing romantic memories and small symbolic elements of the old culture, while living wholeheartedly in the new one.

White U.S. Catholicism leaped almost overnight from a “ghetto” mentality in the 1950s to a wholehearted assimilation into U.S. culture in the 1960s. Two events symbolized and hastened the move: the election of the first Catholic to the U.S. presidency in 1960, and the openness of Pope John XXIII and the Second Vatican Council to modern culture, which was in no small part U.S. middle-class culture. But the roots of the desire for assimilation were there. During World War II my little 300-pupil grade school in Decatur, Illinois, St. James, outsold the entire rest of the city of Decatur, some dozen public grade schools and junior high and high schools with over a thousand students, in war bonds. We named our B-25 bomber “The Spirit of St. James,” and mounted a photograph of it on the walls of the main corridor. We were ready for assimilation.

The price of assimilation was the adopting of U.S. cultural norms, including the dominant Puritan ethos. After Vatican II Catholics eagerly adopted the Protestant emphasis on the reading and study of Scripture, and the rejection of Marian devotions. We also, not quite so consciously, adopted the Puritan valuing of industry, frugality, material success, the denial of weakness, and a highly moralistic approach to all of these things. We became wholehearted Puritans.

Black U.S. Catholics did not enjoy the same experience of assimilation. No matter how hard the Black middle class man or woman tries, White U.S. society will not accept her as equal. This is clear even today. One of the best-known sociologists writing on issues of race today, Joe R. Feagin, focuses his study on the experiences of the Black middle class, and its rejections in so many ways in White society. Middle-class Blacks have to live in a separate middle-class Black society, and in White eyes, that society is welded to the lower class.

European-American Catholics are by and large insulated from Black Catholics, mostly because Black Catholics are geographically concentrated in large cities and in a few other areas of the country such as Louisiana. Less than one percent of the Black Catholics in the U.S. live in cities the size of Quincy. Yet Black Catholics are far more likely than any other group, Black or White, to say that they worship in a congregation which is racially diverse. Even in areas where the neighborhood is almost entirely Black, Catholic congregations include White participants. The Whites are often there because they like the worship style.

It is the thesis of this paper that White Catholics have much to gain from a deeper interaction with Black Catholics, especially in liturgy. At the risk of appearing too cute, I would characterize the gift that such people offer us as the gift of soul.

C. Soul

Soul is story.

The Greek word psyche is used in many senses, both in early Greek and in the New Testament. It is often translated Alife,@ but just as often Asoul.@ It was the use of the term in Mt 10,28 that caught my imagination: ADo not fear those who deprive the body of life but cannot destroy the soul. Rather, fear him who can destroy both body and soul in Gehenna@ (NAB). Reflecting on Gehenna as the Jerusalem landfill, and on the fate of objects that go to the landfill, as opposed to objects that are lovingly preserved in family memories (objects that have a story--heirlooms), I concluded that psyche can be fruitfully thought of as story.

This conceptualization ties in with another important concept in the sociology of interpersonal relations: face. Face is also story. To save face means to save a certain version of one=s story. People die rather than lose face. Bill Clinton lost his story because he tried too hard to save it.

Gospel music is an important part of present-day Black worship, both Catholic and Protestant. One of the roots of gospel is the blues. To sing blues means to acknowledge publicly all of one=s story, both the upbeat and successful parts, and the downbeat and failed parts of it. The Puritan fears that an open acknowledgment of sin would be a sign of lack of election. Puritanism pushes us to doctor our stories. People who sing blues are people who claim to tell their own stories without doctoring. To doctor one=s story requires a certain amount of power and influence, at least if the doctoring is for more than our own personal consumption. People who cannot doctor sing the blues.

The first gift that Puritanized Catholics could receive from their brothers and sisters of color is therefore the gift of being able to tell one=s own story honestly, with an acknowledgment of personal lack of control. There is danger in such lack of control. We can too easily make peace with lack of control and become chemically or otherwise dependent in unhealthy ways. But we Puritans suffer from the opposite extreme. We are too controlled, to the point of self-deception.

There is another dimension of story that we need. Since Vatican II Catholic theology has emphasized that spirituality is communal. We are all in this together, saint and sinner alike. White spirituality, shaped by the Puritan rejection of the sinner, is individualistic. Gospel lyrics are usually in the first person singular, but gospel is sung in congregations, and congregations live into it.

The attitude of the White liberal is: I must help you. Behind that is a subtle assumption: your story is not my story. I have something that you need, and you must welcome me because I want to give it to you.

What we need is to be able to say, with all other peoples of the earth, “my story is our story,” and the “our” is all of us. My story is part of the same story that you live, with the same joys, the same sorrows, the same virtues, and the same sinfulness. Gospel counteracts the lonely individualism of White Middle class culture, where competition so often gets out of control.

“Soul” has other characteristics. Clarence R.J. Rivers, a well known African American Catholic composer of music, describes some of these in an article entitled “The Oral African Tradition Versus the Ocular Western Tradition: Puritanism and Discursiveness As Obstacles to Celebration.” Rivers talks about emotional involvement and bodily movement in worship. I would add, from my observations of music in Black worship, that such worship involves the use of a variety of musical instruments, and it integrates youthfulness.

There is something that happens to worship as people become more educated and well-to-do. They begin to look down on emotion and free body movement. (I think of 2 Samuel 6,20, where Michal despises David because he danced before the Lord too enthusiastically.) The slang adjective is “up-tight.” Perhaps for Puritans it has to do with a fear of being seen as out of control. Rationality and control are virtuous. Emotion is seen as anti-rational, when actually it is merely a different dimension of life from rationality, and is deeply involved in rational behavior. I have argued for years that we cannot remember something unless we have an emotional tie to it, of love or of hatred or of some other emotion. Black worship is open to emotional response: people are free to speak out spontaneously in response to a preacher, to clap, shout, sing, and sway with the rhythms of music.

Over the years of Christian history, various instruments have been seen as appropriate for worship. The Bible speaks of lute and lyre and harp, and cymbal and gong. At one point church people forbade the use of the organ; at another they considered it the only instrument appropriate for worship. Our European American Catholic toolbox still has a rather small number of musical instruments. The organ is universal, the piano is coming in, violins are appropriate at Christmas, guitars are permitted at youth Masses, and the guitars may be supplemented by amplified bass and perhaps even by drums. But once you get past the organ or piano, you lose most of the older members of the congregation.

Gospel, on the contrary, uses every tool in the musician’s toolbox, wildly, freely, and skillfully. Those without voices can make joyful noises in other ways, and they do. Welcoming other instruments into worship not only welcomes more youthful congregations, it allows young people who are not ready to sing in church the option of making a joyful noise in other ways. One of the most delightful and rare experiences in any person=s life is the experience of being asked, as a young person, to contribute meaningfully to a project that is valued by both young and old members of a community.

Which brings me to the fact that Asoul@ integrates youthfulness into worship. Last January’s King Day celebration in the First Baptist Church in Quincy featured Pastor Orville Jones on the organ, skillfully accompanied on the drums by a young man I estimated to be about 12 years old. Youth choirs and youth soloists are common in Black worship, and are used well in gospel.

White Catholicism, and for that matter, White Protestantism, could benefit from greater openness to one’s whole story, not just the good parts of it, more openness to emotion, to free bodily movement in worship, to the use of more instrumentation in worship, to the acceptance of youthfulness. We could all use those aspects of Asoul.@

D. Sabbath praise and glory

We exist to praise God. That is a belief held by many religious people of the world, not only the Jesuits (“A.M.D.G.” “For the greater glory of God”), but even Muslim and Hindu peoples. We gather fundamentally to praise.

An overly scientific attitude toward worship urges us to find more reasonable purposes of worship: it motivates us to love our neighbor, to do good, and to raise our children morally. Worship becomes a tool for the good life.

While anyone, Black or White, can be coaxed into a mentality that finds earthly payoff in holy deeds, one could make a case that a “true” religious attitude puts the glory of God before every earthly good, and the praise of God before every other motive for worship.

“Glory” means “standing forth before others just as God meant you to be, in the height of your powers.” The model is the bride and bridegroom on their wedding day. God wants us in glory, and we give glory to God, letting God be truly God. A long spiritual tradition says that the glory of God is humanity fully human. This is what worship is all about.

One traditional way to give glory to God is by setting aside one day a week for that praise and glory. When we were preparing for the Tolton celebration, my friend Mike Perry, who has had long experience in Black churches both in the U.S. and in the Congo, said to me “Saturday night won’t cut it. You have to have a Sunday Mass. And people have to dress up. Black Catholics dress up for Mass.” I interpret this as one way of allowing people to be “in their glory.” Students at Q.U. appear occasionally in their glory, such as at weddings or dances. Black culture says we need to do that more often, once every seven days to be exact.

This quality of Black spirituality counteracts the vanished sabbath. In White middle class culture, everybody works and shops on Sunday, which becomes no different from any other day of the week, except for the one hour in the morning for the devout.

E. The Weaknesses of Black Catholicism

The view of Black Catholicism I have presented is perhaps overly positive, a typical problem of a White liberal viewpoint. It is important that we not romanticize this population, or its experiences. There are serious difficulties and weaknesses in the Black Catholic population, just as there are in any other human group.

However, when a group has been stigmatized for as long as this group has, the last thing it needs is for outsiders to point out its weaknesses. There are ample treatments of those weaknesses within the literature of the African American population. See, for example, writings in the Norton Anthology of African American Literature, a volume that saw a small contribution from our own Dr. Don Schweda.

In my examination of survey data about African American Catholics, however, I did uncover some findings that might not be obvious even to Black Catholics, and these are what I wish to mention briefly here.

1) Black Catholics are less strongly tied to Catholicism than other Catholic ethnic populations, except for the “minority” populations of Hispanic and Native American Catholics. They are less likely to describe themselves as “strong” Catholics.

They attend church services less frequently than most other Catholic ethnic groups, again with the exception of the two minority Catholic groups mentioned above.

These two findings suggest that the Catholic community needs to do more to integrate Black Catholics into the larger Catholic world.

2) Black Catholics are more likely than almost all other Catholics to describe the world as “filled with evil and sin.” Similarly, they are more likely than other Catholic groups (except for Hispanics) to say that human nature is “perverse and corrupt.” In these things they are more like Black Baptists and Black Methodists than like other Catholics.

By listing this finding as a Aproblem@ for Black Catholics, I betray my own modern view of psychological health, which says that an emphasis on evil, sin, perversion and corruption is a sign of an unhealthy world view. Perhaps it isn=t. In this, Black Catholics are more Puritan than European American Christians.

3) Black Catholics are more likely than White Catholics or than Black Baptists and Methodists to be raised in a single parent family, a family which is single-parented because of divorce or separation. These Catholics, who are more urban than any other White or Black religious population, suffer from the evils of urban life more than other groups.

F. Why “Balm for the Postmodern Soul”?

Postmodernism is a movement in literature and philosophy that questions the value of making claims about the truth. Put crudely, every time someone claims to speak the truth, that person is using the claim as a way of exerting power over someone else.

The position reminds me of the old philosophical riddle: “All statements are false, including this one.”

The movement includes, besides its attack on truth language, an attack on science, and for much the same reason. It sees science as having been hopelessly coopted by the dominating powers of modern world culture, and therefore something to be opposed and if possible destroyed.

In its attack on “truth” and science, postmodernism mounts a critique of capitalist culture, and also of the Puritan ethic. It was while reading Clarence Rivers’s subtitle, which speaks of “ocularity,” that I was reminded of Michel Foucault’s attacks on the panoptic society. Both involve a questioning of the value of hyper-observation and hyper-rationality, along with the suggestion that the victims of such hyper-ism end up oppressing themselves and others. It was for this reason that I suggested a tie between the Black Catholic alternative to traditional Catholic worship, and the attack on rationality and science mounted by the postmodernists.

The Apostmodern psyche@ (psyche) is the story we American middle-class folks tell about ourselves as the pinnacle of human evolution. We are scientific, rational, in control of all things, and able to plan our futures and those of the rest of the world with supreme confidence. If we are momentarily befuddled, it is just a passing phase, something that our experts will handle once they have devoted two semesters of research to the problem. The rest of the world should be like us, and wants to be like us. Our homes are magnificent, our automobiles are luxurious and safe, and environment is being cleaned up faster than we are polluting it, and our families are havens of peace and joy in the midst of the exciting competition of the capitalist workplace. Our stock market is going up, our poverty rate is going down, our medical bills are mounting only because we are inventing so many new ways to cure ourselves.

This is not complete delusion, but it is a seriously distorted view. Postmodernism says that we need to hear the voices of others, especially of those who do not share this story. We need to share their story, because their story is also our story.

Our soul needs the balm that we call Asoul.@