Converts and Reverts: Floundering towards a Catholic Taxonomy

'It is a curious thing, do you know,' says Stephen Dedalus' friend Cranly to Dedalus in James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 'how your mind is supersaturated with the religion in which you say you disbelieve.'

 

I've been thinking about this in recent weeks, following discussions with friends where the subject of Catholic 'reverts' -- those who'd been raised Catholic, but left the Church, only to return as adults -- has come up.

 

I don't mean cradle Catholics who just turned their back for a few months, or lapsed for a little bit, or doubted. The latter, especially, is pretty normal: as Pope Benedict said back in the day, believers never really are free from doubt, and it's that doubt that saves them from complete self-satisfaction; as Flannery O'Connor puts it, 'Even in the life of a Christian, faith rises and falls like the tides of an invisible sea.' For plenty of us, though, that doubt has implications that can lead us, perhaps combined with laziness or misery, away from the Church, at least for a while.

 

No, I mean Catholics who've lapsed or who've determinedly rejected the Church for significant periods of their lives, baptised Catholics who've abandoned ship and spent years away from it, living apart for a period that can't be dismissed as a passing phase, a mere whim, only to come back to it, whether following a sudden change or slowly, painfully, inch by reluctant inch.

 

Does it make sense, as has been ventured in recent conversations, to think of these reverts as more akin to converts than to cradle Catholics? Or are they a separate breed altogether?

 

Friends have said they're best thought of as closer to converts than cradle Catholics. I'm not so sure. Some weeks ago, when researching an Aleteia piece, I was advised by a priest friend that it was especially important for vocations directors to visit secondary schools in order to help build a 'culture of discernment', by planting seeds that may come to fruition later. There's more than one important point there, I think, and one of them is that the blossoms and fruits of our adult lives may well spring from seeds planted much earlier: the faith of reverts may have very deep roots.
 

One of the more interesting -- if sometimes far from persuasive -- books I've read on Catholic culture is Andrew Greeley's The Catholic Imagination. He talks at great length of how our religious cultures shape our minds, something which may horrify the more ardent secularists among us, but only if they are, as George Weigel puts it, 'the most ghettoized people of all [...] who don't know they grew up in a particular time and place and culture, and who think they can get to universal truths outside of particular realities and commitments.'

 

Religious culture, if Greeley is right, can saturate our minds, such that even artists who've left the Faith -- one might think of Joyce, Anthony Burgess, Umberto Eco, Don DeLillo, Frank Capra, Martin Scorcese, P.T. Anderson -- still 'feel' Catholic in some sense when you read them or watch their films. Growing up Catholic isn't indoctrination -- massive lapsation rates are proof of that -- but it is inculturation, and something of their Catholic upbringing stays with Catholics as they grow and lapse. When reverts return to the Church they bring that back with them.

 

Reverts have something important in common with converts, of course, in that both groups practice and believe largely because of conscious adult decisions and have probably had a lot of catching up to do. They differ too, though, because reverts tend to have loads of mental furniture that converts lack; it's inevitable, really, given sacramental preparation, innumerable Masses, childhood prayers, local churches as focal points of childhood, and the sacramental small change of Catholic family life.

 

And that leaves aside the realities of grace brought about through having been baptised and even confirmed in childhood, not to mention having received communion and absolution a fair few times! It makes sense to dismiss the importance of this if you don't believe in sacramental realities, of course -- if it's a symbol, then to Hell with it, as O'Connor famously said of the Eucharist --  but what if you do?

 

Taxonomy is a tricky game, and I haven't even gotten here into whether there tend to be cultural, philosophical, theological, or imaginative differences between converts from other Christian traditions, other religions, or atheisms. As it stands, though, I'm really far from convinced that reverts are more like converts than cradle Catholics. It seems, to be blunt, that reverts actually are cradle Catholics, albeit ones who've followed a strange path in life.

 

I say strange. I don't mean unusual. The other day, I heard of how research on Maynooth seminarians found that 42% of those surveyed identified with the statement 'I fell away from the Catholic faith at some point in my life but later returned to it'.

 

It looks like there are are fair few of us around.

Put Not Your Trust In Princes

'Put not your trust in princes.'

 

So Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford, bitterly remarked on hearing that Charles I had signed his death warrant. Or, at any rate, so I was taught when I was thirteen. I didn't know then it was a quotation from the Psalms; I'm not sure, now I think of it, whether I was told that or not.

 

I have, for reasons I'll not go into here, been pondering that phrase a lot over the last year, and was mulling it over this afternoon when I visited Westminster Cathedral, puzzling briefly as I slipped in over why a Union Jack was fluttering next to the Vatican flag: the cathedral is mother church of England and Wales, after all, not of the entire UK.

 

As usual, once in the cathedral I turned right to the little chapel where Basil Hume is buried; with its mosaic of Saints Gregory and Augustine, it's always been a special place to me, and is a spot where I made a very important decision some years ago. It came to naught, as our plans so often do, but still, for good or ill it mattered, and pointed me along my path for a few years.

The path ultimately led to a cul-de-sac, but there you have it. These things happen. Still, the old decision was very much in my mind as I knelt down in the chapel and looked up at the mosaic.

 

The mosaic, as you'll see, is centred upon a picture of Pope St Gregory the Great and St Augustine of Canterbury, sent in the late sixth century as 'apostle to the English' after Gregory's hilarious 'not Angles but Angels' gag. A dove, representing the Holy Spirit, hovers above Gregory, while Augustine is holding an image of Christ, presumably that described by Bede in his accounts of Augustine's dealings with Ethelbert of Kent in 597.

 

As Bede puts it in chapter 25 of book one of his Ecclesiastical History of the English People,

'Some days after, the king came into the island, and sitting in the open air, ordered Augustine and his companions to be brought into his presence. For he had taken precaution that they should not come to him in any house, lest, according to an ancient superstition, if they practiced any magical arts, they might impose upon him, and so get the better of him.

But they came furnished with Divine, not with magic virtue, bearing a silver cross for their banner, and the image of our Lord and Saviour painted on a board; and singing the litany, they offered up their prayers to the Lord for the eternal salvation both of themselves and of those to whom they were come.

When he had sat down, pursuant to the king's commands, and preached to him and his attendants there present, the word of life, the king answered thus: ­ "Your words and promises are very fair, but as they are new to us, and of uncertain import, I cannot approve of them so far as to forsake that which I have so long followed with the whole English nation. But because you are come from far into my kingdom, and, as I conceive, are desirous to impart to us those things which you believe to be true, and most beneficial, we will not molest you, but give you favourable entertainment, and take care to supply you with your necessary sustenance; nor do we forbid you to preach and gain as many as you can to your religion."

Accordingly he permitted them to reside in the city of Canterbury, which was the metropolis of all his dominions, and, pursuant to his promise, besides allowing them sustenance, did not refuse them liberty to preach. It is reported that, as they drew near to the city, after their manner, with the holy cross, and the image of our sovereign Lord and King, Jesus Christ, they, in concert, sung this litany: "We beseech Thee, O Lord, in all Thy mercy, that thy anger and wrath be turned away from this city, and from the holy house, because we have sinned. Hallelujah."'

I've always thought of the chapel as being a chapel of Gregory and Augustine, but looking at it earlier it struck me that the chapel's less a commemoration of the two saints than it is of the Gospel they brought. They're very much commemorated as missionaries, as conduits, as mediums for the message. Look at the heart of the image.

 

 

Gregory's hand is raised in blessing, but in doing so draws our eyes and thoughts to the Holy Spirit, which seems to be speaking to him, as though his blessing only has merit insofar as he's guided by that Spirit; Augustine points directly at an image of our Lord, directing us to look solely to him. It's as if they're saying that in themselves they don't matter at all, and only have any significance insofar as the grace of the Spirit leads us through the Cross to Christ.

 

Those of us who find it difficult to trust can sometimes overcompensate, I think, placing our trust in those who haven't earned it, whether princes or priors, presidents or pretenders: in this imperfect world, getting the balance right can be very tricky, but in the meantime, the meaning of the system lies outside the system.

In defence of Timothy Radcliffe

I've recently received the following email, and seeing it popping up elsewhere online, it's clearly something that's going around. 

Dear CYMFED supporter,

Do you know about Fr. Timothy Radcliffe the radical homosexual activist which CYMFED is promoting at Flame 2, the youth event for thousands of young people in the UK?

If not see here and also here.

It is shocking what the organisers were thinking of when they put this event together, have they no shame?

Please protest to CYMFED for promoting this filth to our young people.

The fact that emails like this are zipping about disgusted me, to be honest, especially in the aftermath of all the viciousness directed towards Timothy when he came to the Divine Mercy Conference in Dublin back in the Spring. Frankly, the Little Brothers and Sisters of Perpetual Outrage could do with listening to him and emulating him, rather than praying the Rosary against him as though it's a weapon to be used against our fellow Christians. Small doses of reality and humanity can be a wonderful antidote to hardened hearts and thickened skulls.

Putting it bluntly, I like Timothy Radcliffe, having read several of his books and interviewed him once; perhaps he sometimes phrases things unfortunately when, in effect, thinking aloud, but I don't think it's especially charitable to invariably put the worst possible interpretation on his words when it's clear that what he's doing is trying to grapple honestly with certain realities.

Take, for instance, someone like James Alison, who's definitely one of the most astute and perceptive Christian thinkers out there, and who, being gay, has also written quite a bit on how he thinks the Church should embrace gay Christians. I'm told -- I may have been misinformed -- that James and Timothy fell out many years ago, but I have no doubt Timothy has spent the intervening twenty or more years trying to get his head around what James has to say. James, after all, would have been a devout, erudite, and astoundingly intelligent young Dominican, and then he left and fell out with Timothy apparently at least in part over the very sort of matters James so often talks about.

It is, I think, absurd to call Timothy a radical homosexual activist. A radical homosexual activist would be unlikely to stand with the Church in saying that same-sex marriage is a contradiction in terms. He nonetheless is accused of being one because he has expressed frustration with Vatican statements, because of saying things like how love between committed gay couples should be supported, and because he has preached at the Soho Masses. 

I'm going to run quickly through this, knowing that in doing so, I'll inevitably end up talking about 'gay people' as though they're 'those people over there'. That's not what I believe, and I think it's something we should try to avoid doing. An inclusive Church -- indeed, an inclusive society -- shouldn't do that. Unfortunately, it's hard to write this kind of response without doing so. And with that...

Frustration with Vatican statements seems to me to be entirely understandable. Leaving aside how the media can pluck things entirely out of context, making statements seem about something almost entirely tangential to them, we're saddled with jargon like "disordered". 

I know what it means, you know what it means, and yes, Timothy Radcliffe knows what it means, but here's the thing: hardly anyone in the Church taken as a whole knows what it means, and basically nobody who isn't in the Church knows what it means. If you don't believe me, try asking someone who's bothered by the word "disordered" what it would mean to describe something as "ordered". If they can't say what the latter means, you can be fairly confident they have no idea what the former does.

In truth, as a phrase it means very little when shorn of an Aristotelian-Thomist context, and simply sounds ugly, offensive, and hurtful. I don't think Timothy should be chastised because he recognises this. 

The New Testament was written in the crudest, simplest form of Greek the ancient world ever produced, a lingua franca for the common man in half the Roman empire. Christianity was never a mystery religion, hiding its secrets from ordinary people. We shouldn't be holding up a technical philosophical term nobody understands as though it's a pearl beyond price. 

What of Timothy's belief that love between gay couples should be supported? Here it's important to remember that gay people tend to have little choice in their being gay. I'm not saying they're born gay, because nobody knows that, but whether their sexual inclinations originate in nurture, as, say, Desmond Morris would have said back in the day, or in nature, as, perhaps, due to something happening while they're in the womb or at a genetic level (which I doubt as homosexuality would, I think, be an oddly counterproductive variation for nature to throw up even as often as one case in fifty let alone thirty), or a mixture of the two, what seems clear is that same-sex attracted people have very little say in that fact. I suppose they might be the eunuchs 'from birth' mentioned in Matthew 19:12. 

The reality, then, is that the only deep personal love -- the only non-familial love that can go beyond ordinary friendship -- for them is the love that subsists within a same-sex couple. I see no reason at all why that shouldn't be supported, nor why any truly self-giving love within that couple shouldn't be recognised as an expression of Christ's love, though of course, the partners within such a couple would remain called to chastity like everyone else. 

And then we have the Soho Masses. 

That they were problematic is, I think, clear. That plenty of people at them had been frustrated with the Church as a whole, and that people at them and involved with them had sought to challenge and indeed to subvert Church teaching is hard to deny. That's not to say that they were hotbeds of dissent, but it seems pretty obvious that there were problems with them. 

I'll grant all that, while quietly pointing out that I have been at far too many Masses over the years where liturgy was thrown out the window and Church teaching was flatly denied: we have problems that go far beyond the Soho Masses, and singling them out for criticism makes it rather look as though there's another agenda at work.

Still, to stick with that substantive point, does Timothy having preached at the Soho Mass give succour to dissenters, or somehow validate them? Maybe it does, but I'm not sure that's the point. 

Remember, for starters, that those of our gay brothers and sisters who attend the Soho Masses are those who have not walked away. They may have deep issues with the Church, and may feel hurt and wounded by the Church, and they may disobey the Church, and they may wish the Church was other than it is, but still, they are those who have not abandoned the Church. 

I get very tired of people saying how, as Catholics, we're called to love our gay brethren, and to cherish and respect them as we do everyone else, and then, when asked how we should love them, hearing that we should tell them they're living their lives the wrong way. 

No. As Pope Francis would say, doctrine flows from mercy, from love. If we want to love our fellow Catholics of any shade we have to go to where they are, and we have to help them and listen to them and be with them. As Blessed John Henry Newman put it, we become perfect by changing often. Pauline conversions may be the dream, but for most of us we go step by step, and as long as those steps are in the right direction, I think they should be encouraged. 

"Therefore a thousand stages, each in itself all but valueless, are of inestimable worth as the necessary and connected gradations of an infinite progress," as Lewis's master George MacDonald put it, continuing, "A condition which of declension would indicate a devil, may of growth indicate a saint."

I've no doubt whatsoever that the Soho Masses, to Timothy's mind, offer a way of accompanying gay people and helping them step by step towards being who God wants them to be, and thus towards God himself.

This, to be honest, is kind of what Dominicans are for. Friars are called to go to the people: they're not monks, settled out in the countryside, waiting for people to come to them and offering the finest and most beautiful of liturgies when they get there. They're meant to be in towns and villages, going to the people and among the people. And that means going to the outcasts, disreputable preachers standing among disreputable people. 

Whenever I see people attacking Timothy for going to where gay Catholics are, I think, well, Jesus got flack for going among prostitutes and tax collectors. Dominican habits are meant to be white: I don't necessarily think they're meant to be clean.

___________________________________________________________________

A friend has already kindly ran a version of this on his own blog.

Blackboard Politics: UKIP and BBCQT

A good, smart, and principled friend of mine posted the below picture on his Facebook feed earlier today. It makes a case I've heard time and again over the last few years, that being that UKIP is disproportionately present on BBC Question Time when compared to, say, the Green Party, which actually won a parliamentary seat in the last election.

Now, without getting into the fact that Nigel Farage is what TV producers would describe as "good value" from a viewing standpoint, or how Caroline Lucas's vote in Brighton was a mere 31.3%, which is hardly a resounding mandate, such that it's fair to say that her victory was an odd quirk of the First Past the Post system which requires candidates not so much to be "first past the post" as to be "just one vote more popular than the next candidate", I think this is a dodgy approach to the issue.

The fact is, as I said to my friend, that I think this chart is misleading for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that MP stands for "Member of Parliament", not "Member of Panel show."

First, the unbalanced nature of the UK's demographics means that if parties aren't seriously active in England, they're basically not playing the national game. I'm not saying that parties shouldn't be regarded as serious ones unless they're present in the rest of the Union too, but the reality is that England, with 85% of the population, is key to the whole thing, and this matters when it comes to presence on a national television programme. 

Second, if the BBC site is right, the Greens (1%), Sinn Fein (0.6%), the DUP (0.6%), and Plaid Cymru (0.6%) combined got 2.8% of the national vote in the 2010 general election, compared to UKIP's 3.1%. If anything, it looks like UKIP is slightly underrepresented compared to them.

Third, given the unrepresentative nature of the British electoral system, where the typical voter is less likely to have voted for his or her MP than otherwise, using the number of MPs as a measure of anything seems unwise. 

Fourth, in the 2009 European elections, UKIP was the second party across the UK, with 16.5% of the vote, and in the 2014 elections they were the leading party, with 27.5%. Aside from beating Labour, the Tories, and the Lib Dems, that's roughly three times what the four parties on this blackboard got combined.

I think UKIP gives wrong answers -- even dangerously and stupidly wrong answers -- to things perceived as serious problems, but I think their answers, and the problems they're addressing, need to be tackled properly.

And I don't think stuff like this helps.