Theology Today - Vol 32, No. 4 - January 1976 - ARTICLE

365 - Catholicism as a Protestantism

"Among the ways in which the American Catholic church has protestantized itself in recent years, the most important has been its transformation into an intentional community. For Catholics now, as earlier for Protestants, religion is a matter of opinion, not of birth; and one may change religion as easily and frequently as one changes one's mind. However-and this is the key point-intentional, Protestant religious communities have long had ways of recognizing and removing those who do not share the grounding intention of the community, whatever it may be. The Catholic Church, for the moment anyway, does not."

Catholicism as a Protestantism
By John A. Miles, Jr..

A Presbyterian friend of mine, now residing in Florida, recently received a letter from his home congregation in Wisconsin. The letter was a politely worded but unmistakable suggestion that if he intended to make no financial contribution to the congregation, he allow his name to be removed from the roll, thus relieving the congregation of its obligation to count him when making its per capita contributions. Though the letter seemed reasonable to me, my friend forthwith instructed his pastor to remove his name from the roll. From that day, he says, he ceased to consider himself a Presbyterian.

I am left with a question. By striking his name from a roll, a Presbyterian, it seems, can cease to be a Presbyterian. How, supposing I so chose, would I cease to be a Roman Catholic? The answer to that question, I believe, throws a key feature of American religious and political life into relief.

Money, plainly, has little to do with the matter. The Catholic church is not less concerned with money than the Presbyterian, but no Catholic parish keeps such good track of its parishioners as does my friend's Presbyterian congregation. The barque of Peter has always been full of stowaways.

What of heresy then? Suppose I deny papal in-fallibility? Hans Küng has denied it so convincingly that Karl Rahner calls Küng a Prot-

John A. Miles, Jr., is a postdoctoral fellow with the Committee on the Conceptual Foundations of Science at the University of Chicago. Dr. Miles received his doctorate from Harvard University, and he has also studied in Italy, Germany, and in Israel. He has published articles in numerous journals and serves as book review editor of Zygon.

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estant. Yet Pope Paul has not excommunicated Dr. Küng. Has His Holiness, by declining to call a Protestant a Protestant, allowed one theologian to make the Roman Church itself Protestant, at least with regard to the key Catholic doctrine? In my opinion, the answer to that question is plainly affirmative, though Küng deserves neither all the credit nor all the blame. What might once have been an heretical Protestant position is now one Catholic position among many. And with the bulwark of papal infallibility removed, nothing prevents me, however less learned than Dr. Küng, from demanding that my doctrinal black sheep be admitted to the Catholic fold.

And what of church discipline? What of the "Commandments of the Church" as distinct from the "Commandments of God"? My Talmud teacher at the Hebrew University told me that Zwi Werblowsky, a famous Israeli scholar, did not believe that God created the world but was a good, even an orthodox Jew because he observed the torah shebe'al pe', roughly, the customs of Judaism. The coherence of Judaism-its line between "ins" and "outs"-was not doctrinal, then, but observational. There is an "orthopraxy" in Catholicism as well-one thinks at once of the "Easter Duty" to confess and take communion-but it is a matter of some moment that most Catholics do not any longer know who is hewing to that line and who is not. Jews know very well who among their fellow Jews keep kosher and who do not, and it is not considered indiscreet to ask. A question as to the date of a fellow Catholic's last confession would be the height of indiscretion. No one asks me, and I ask no one.

One of the slogans of the Italian fascists was, Noi non discutiamo la frontiera, la difendiamo ("We don't discuss the frontier, we defend it"). Contemporary American Catholicism, or much of it, has, it seems to me, reversed Mussolini's slogan. The doctrinal "frontier" of papal infallibility, the observational "frontier" of the Easter duty may be discussed, but they are no longer policed. Perhaps to speak of policing such frontiers is religious fascism indeed and utterly foreign to the spirit of genuine faith. But something surely has changed when the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church has so little doctrinal and practical consistency. 'Twas not ever thus.

The analogy between the frontiers of the Roman Catholic Church and the frontiers of a nation is instructive. Why, despite disillusion in the late sixties, did I not quit America? That move-I speak of true depatriation and not merely of temporary emigration-scarcely came to mind because, however less so than most countries, America was a matter of blood relationship, ineluctable kinship, and Gemeinschaft. Frost says, "Home is where, when you go there, they have to take you in." The corollary is, "Home is where, when you're there, you have to put up with it." "My country, right or wrong" does not mean "My country is always right." It is more like "My old man, drunk or

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sober"; the expression of a loyalty which, as not intellectually engendered, is not intellectually terminated. Despite my disillusionment with the Vietnamese War, I could no more have decided not to be an American than I could have decided not to be the son of my father. Or rather, I could indeed have decided not to be an American even as I could have decided not to be the son of my father; but in both cases, it would have been the body and not the mind that was renounced.

The Catholic church in America is not now a natural, national community (both adjectives derive from the Latin nascor, "I am born"), but not long ago, it was. Not long ago, Catholics endured church excesses as fatalistically as children endure a drunken parent or citizens a venal government. Catholic pastors-"fathers"-wrote no polite letters to their parishioners asking whether the latter wished to remain in the congregation, because a Catholic parish was not a club which one joined but an extended family into which one was born. Of course, spiritual transgressions could put one spiritually "out." If one deliberately and repeatedly failed to perform that Easter duty, one was indeed "out," but for many a ghetto Catholic, that departure was nearly as drastic an option as the renunciation of family or nationality.

It is so no longer. Among the ways in which the American Catholic church has protestantized itself in recent years, the most important has been its transformation into an intentional community. For Catholics now, as earlier for Protestants, religion is a matter of opinion, not of birth; and one may change religion as easily and frequently as one changes one's mind. However-and this is the key point-intentional, Protestant religious communities have long had ways of recognizing and removing those who do not share the grounding intention of the community, whatever it may be. The Catholic Church, for the moment anyway, does not.

The Missouri Synod of the Lutheran Church, for all its recent internecine strife, has faced an important fact about the organizational life of religion in America; namely, that stripped of true political control over its members, a church holds its members not by birth but by decision. The Catholic Church, though it once had a measure of true political control over its members, has now lost it. It too now holds its members by decision and not by birth; and yet it has failed to face the psychological and organizational consequences of its new condition.

III

What are these consequences? A keen-minded friend of mine compares the new Catholic church to the new American army. Just back from a hitch as a flight surgeon, he sees the style of the new, unbuttoned army as the liberty of civilian life without its built-in restraints. If you don't do your job in business, you lose your job. If you don't do your job in the new army, not only do you not lose your job but your

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punishment may well be a longer term at the same job. In the old army, iron discipline and the threat of the guardhouse worked better than the loose sanctions of civilian life. Now with the iron discipline gone and nothing there to replace it, my friend concludes that the country is nearly defenseless.

The analogy is clear enough. Roman Catholicism in America has gone Protestant in the same unthinking way that the military has gone civilian, excusing its members from Catholic obedience without enjoining Protestant consensus. As one can't be fired from the army, so-for all practical purposes-one can't be excommunicated from the new Catholic church. And as the supremacy of the American military is now more memory than actuality, so also the unanimity of the Roman church.

If in the next decade, beginning, say, with the abortion issue, the Catholic Church does at length attempt to substitute consensus for obedience as a principle of unity, it will most likely suffer the fate of Protestant churches which have made that attempt before; and it will split into two or more distinct bodies, of which each taken separately may have a certain vigor but neither will be the equal of its progenitor. If, as is more likely, it makes no attempt either to reach consensus or to enforce obedience, it will remain officially large but will grow steadily weaker and more diffuse as the consequences of membership in it become more and more difficult to specify. In either case, the Roman Catholic Church in America will have been reborn as a sort of unprotesting Protestantism, a denomination rather than a religion, displaying its wares in the religious marketplace alongside its several hundred competitors in the time-honored American manner.

The assimilation of Roman Catholicism to the operational model of American Protestantism might seem to be the ultimate victory of native over immigrant religious traditions, but there remains a further step. Having swallowed the Catholic camel, Protestantism may yet strain for a time at the Jewish gnat. Much more intensely than Catholicism, Judaism has been a nation within the American nation. However, now that the Jewish homeland is open again to any Jew who wishes to be repatriated, the American Jewish community no longer has any reason to act like a community of exiles. For those who wish to end it, the exile is over. The natural basis for Jewish community thus removed, the continuation of religious Judaism requires a new, intentional basis; and as that basis is provided, Judaism must conform, willy-nilly, to the Protestant pattern. Thus as Catholicism fades to Episcopalianism with an Italian accent, so, however more slowly, must Judaism fade to Unitarianism with a Yiddish accent.

But is even this the final Protestant victory? In an essay of the 20's reprinted in Louis Schneider's Religion, Culture and Society (New York: Wiley and Sons, 1964; pp. 143-156), James Bissett Pratt distinguishes

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...between two types of worship, one of which aims at making some kind of effect upon the Deity or in some way communicating with him, while the other seeks only to induce some desired mood or belief or attitude in the mind of the worshiper.

Pratt calls the first type "objective," for brevity's sake, and the latter "subjective." In a Catholic Mass, he observes, singing is to God, candles for God, flowers for Our Lady; and the celebrant-who is understood to have been called by God, not by the congregation, to his role-stands with his back to them, talking soberly to God, usually about God, in a language which the congregation would not understand if they could hear it. In a Protestant service, by contrast, singing is about the worshippers' feelings toward God; candles and flowers-if there are any-contribute not to worship but to a worshipful mood; and the presiding minister addresses the members of the congregation, often with considerable passion, about their interior lives, taken individually.

An oversimplification, of course, even in 1920 when Pratt wrote it, but the irony which struck him then deserves even greater attention now:

The question whether prayer is nothing more than a mind state having a certain subjective value, such as auto-suggestion or the enjoyment of music, or whether it is also an objective relation between the prayerful soul and some sort of "Higher Power" above or "Spiritual World" round about, from Whom or from which new influxes of spiritual life may actually come-this is for metaphysics rather than for psychology. Psychology may and should point out, however, that the subjective effects of prayer are almost invariably due, directly or indirectly, to some real faith in the objective relation � This being the case it is interesting to note the fervor with which certain psychological writers extol the value of prayer and in the same breath either state or imply that its value is due entirely to subjective conditions. These writers seem to have forgotten . . . "the alchemy of thought," "to interpret experience is to change it." For since the subjective value of prayer is chiefly due to the belief that prayer has values which are not subjective, it will with most persons evaporate altogether once they learn that it is all subjective.

Thinking back only to 1920, one might well view the contemporary transformation of Roman Catholicism to be the extension of basic Protestant patterns; but on a longer view, a slower, sleepier struggle comes vaguely forward. Catholicism has not so much succumbed to Protestantism as succumbed with Protestantism, though more reluctantly, to something like Pratt's subjective principle as a tertium quid. The emergent type is not truly a "Protestant" person but a personage more like Philip Rieff's "psychological man," an experimenter with religion who asks of it, as of all else, "What do I get out of it?" His genesis as a dominant cultural type, though complex in the extreme, clearly lies in the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and the Scientific Revolution rather than in the Reformation. Even without Luther, Calvin, and Wesley, perhaps then Erasmus, More, Galileo, and Descartes would inevitably have called such a person into exis-

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tence; for "objective" religion has been rendered impossible not by anything engendered within either Catholicism or Protestantism as religions but by a scientific reorganization of the universe in which God seems to have no "objective" reality.

What Protestantism and Catholicism now face is an unwelcome agenda which began to take shape before the Reformation and grew longer as it was neglected during centuries of sectarian hostility. For various reasons, a kind of "objective" religion lingered longer in Roman Catholicism, perhaps shielding Protestantism from the full consequences of its own progressive subjectivization. But with the debut of the Roman Church as a Protestant denomination in America, the only remaining alternative to "subjective" religion in this pivotal nation is what we may call "objective politics."

Not to speak precipitately of McCarthyism, it was John F. Kennedy who commanded, as heartbeats strangely quickened: "Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country!" "Ask not what you can get out of the church, ask what the church can get out of you"-no pope, no pastor could today exhort in such words, and yet the history of fanaticism argues that the desire to respond to such an exhortation survives even when no condign formulation can be found. In such wise does the mild religious question become a harsh political question even for those who would leave religion quietly behind, and for such reason is the final protestantization of American Catholicism fearful to witness.