299 - Sober Surveys and Religious Humor

Sober Surveys and Religious Humor
By John Deedy

Reams of copy have been written about the Yorkville Survey-the fourteen-parish study of Catholic life in New York City's upper East Side-but a few last words would seem to be in order. For those who need reminding, the survey was conducted by the Archdiocese of New York's Office of Pastoral Research and traced declines in Catholic worship to a loss of faith in the church's central mysteries. The findings came as a huge shock to those who have tended to view empty pews as temporary phenomena that would be corrected once the new generations (among whom the declines have been the heaviest) settled into the patterns of their parents and grandparents. This had been a rationale easy enough to argue. Young generations have traditionally been more casual about religious practice, so that, until Yorkville, it had been possible to argue that nothing more drastic was happening than what had happened in the past, that only larger numbers were involved. I'm not sure that is valid argumentation any more. The Yorkville survey-which found Catholic non-churchgoers "only half as likely" to believe in a personal God, the divinity of Jesus and his resurrection, as those who are churchgoers-brings all easy assumptions into question.

The Yorkville Survey is significant because it raises the possibility that faith itself may be eroding among a sizable and most crucial segment of American Catholics, youth being, as always, the holders of the future. Admittedly, Yorkville is only a small slice of American Catholicism-52,234 Catholics in a national population of about 50 million-and it is atypical of almost any population group, with its high percentage of people who, in addition to being young, are single, college educated, and affluently employed. Admittedly, also, the Yorkville Survey has sociological soft spots, such as the very low rate of response. Nevertheless, it would have to be the unmitigated optimist who could ignore the possibility that American Catholicism has changed greatly.

This possibility should not actually be too surprising. The signs of a dramatic shift in American Catholicism have been around for years. In 1971, for instance, Monsignor George A. Kelly, director of the Institute for Advanced Study in Catholic Doctrine at St. John's University in Jamaica, N.Y., found that only 30 to 40 percent of high school seniors were attending Sunday Mass regularly, as compared to

John Deedy is Managing Editor of Commonweal and a member Of THEOLOGY TODAY's Editorial Council. He is presently at work on a book for Thomas More Press on American Catholics who have had an impact on modern life.

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65 to 80 per cent five years earlier, and that high percentages no longer took seriously traditional church mandates, such as the injunction to be one day "married in the church." More particularly, he found that the students were barely influenced by parish or Eucharistic life.

About the same time, in a survey for Newsweek magazine, the Gallup Poll organization estimated that 92 percent of American Catholics could not name any decision of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops that had been important to their lives.

Findings such as these tended to corroborate the surveys of American Catholicism being conducted since 1963 by sociologist Father Andrew M. Greeley and his colleagues at the National Opinion Research Center, affiliated with the University of Chicago. The major point of difference came in the attribution of causes. Until Yorkville, most surveys accounted for declines in neat cause-effect equations related to current happenings: the alienation, for instance, born of the reforms of Vatican Council II; the loss of credibility in Catholic leadership, particularly after the hard-line papal encyclical of 1968 on birth control; questionable administrative decisions, such as those leading to a retrenched parochial school system. Never, until Yorkville, was the notion broached that a fundamental development may be in process, one linked to faith itself, and one for which there are no ready textbook answers or solutions.

I have no answers or solutions. I just want to make a suggestion about what might be happening. The evidence, I allow, is not all in. However, it may be that American Catholicism-generally the last of the mainline religions to feel new religious currents-is at last being touched by the shade of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German Protestant pastor who went to Hitler's gallows speculating about a new era of "religionless Christianity," an era when people would have to learn to live "as if there were no God." The Bonhoeffer proposition helped propel Protestantism through its "death of God" and "secular city" theological cycles. It also had Jewish writers grappling with the question of the existence or non-existence of God in the light of the Holocaust.

Bonhoeffer did not set religion on any permanent new course. Yet, at the same time, no religion-not even Catholicism, it would now seem-seems to have escaped the impact of the Bonhoeffer idea that people cannot look beyond earth for the settling of earth's problems, that people must carry on as if God did not exist. By coincidence or not, the Bonhoeffer proposition caught its echo in the comment of one of the respondents cited in the Yorkville Survey: "The fact of God's existence, and whether Christ is God's son, is really not relevant to my daily life, and how I live it. Nor would I live any differently if I felt differently about these beliefs."

We probably will not know for several years how representative Yorkville is in terms of belief, in part because of the culture gap that exists between New York and the rest of the country. Also, some

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trends turn out to be mere fads, including New York trends; Yorkville may be a theological aberration. If it is not, Yorkville raises another question, not only for Catholicism but for other religions and the country at large: "with belief eroding, can the ethical structure which is the heritage of a religious past survive indefinitely?"

Poking fun at religion is a risky sport, but it is done in England and a few other countries, if not always with grace (e.g., the Monty Python show), then at least with a higher survival rate than a comparable exercise in the United States. Even the very proper Sunday Times indulges itself now and again, and one time last winter it offered this account (spoofing, I hope) of the work of the Roman Rota, "the Vatican's unmarriage bureau," as the Sunday Times would have it. Specifically, the Sunday Times provided this account from correspondent Dalbert Hallenstein of the Rota's modus operandi in arriving at an annulment decision:

When a marriage has been blessed with issue, the learned doctors of the church are forced to resort to certain strategies. The most curious of these is to plead lack (sic) of animus copulandi. [All court procedure is still in Latin-not always classical, Hallenstein informs us.] To lack (sic) animus copulandi means to have unholy thoughts either at the moment of taking one's marriage vows or during the sexual act. If one can manage to prove this to the satisfaction of the ecclesiastical judges and of their appointed psychiatrist (medicuspsychiter), one is home and dry.

Another strategem is to demonstrate that the vital organ of one's wife was too diminutive for necessary sacrament to be completed in a holy way (vaginismo definitur fortis constritio). Often a husband will gallantly plead that his own apparatus was too large to have correctly brought his religious duties to a pious conclusion (membrum supra normum).

Experts appointed by the court make minute inspections of the organs in question and produce learned Latin reports. Even in these cases, the existence of a child produces a few problems that cannot be overcome. Canon law requires four basic conditions (erectio, introductio, penetratio, et ejaculatio) which must all take place in their appointed order before an ecclesiastical court can be certain that pious consummation has taken place.

There's more to the article, but I think you get the idea, just as I believe you have some notion of the explosion that would take place, if such a piece ever appeared in The New York Times. Ye gods, just recall the controversy connected with the Times's publication of Marina Warner's "unholy" Op-Ed page article on the Blessed Virgin, on the Feast yet of the Immaculate Conception! The Times mea culpa-ed like a freshman altar boy. Most religious irreverencies, humorous or not, have to sneak innocently into American newspapers. For instance, a Los Angeles Times story on the religious dimensions of the abortion debate suddenly had Janice Gleason of La Jolla, president of Catholics for Free Choice, saying: "Abortion is a gut-level issue to many women throughout the country." That's one for Monty Python.

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Occasionally, however, a pleasant humorous story appears in religious news, and when it does the source deserves a tip of the beanie. NC News Service had such a story with its handling of the Vatican's recent declaration that women needn't wear hats in church anymore. "It's hankies away," said NC, and it went on to predict that "bareheaded though unordained" women will salute the Vatican with a hearty, "Hats off." Not bad.

But not as good as Religious News Service's story of the Dane who rose during the benediction in his village church to address his pastor: "Vicar, there is something I want to say to you. This is no threat, but unless you stop running after my wife you'll be in for a sound thrashing." The Dane was subsequently fined the equivalent of $50 for his "impertinence" (disturbing the peace), but he figured it was worth it. "Since the church is where the priest gives his messages to the congregation, I decided that the church must also be the place where I gave my message to the priest." Come to think of it, that's wisdom, not the stuff of humor. What about the pastor? Well, he lost his pulpit, and his own wife. She sued for divorce. And as Hans Christian Andersen would have recorded, the people of Sabro, Denmark, lived happily ever after. I think.

So, what's not so funny? A lot of things. Like Anita Bryant's theologizing on the homosexual issue. Dead serious, she is humorous, and humorous, she is sad, as when she says: "If homosexuality were the normal way, God would have made Adam and Bruce." And unfunny-although in no way ever intended to be funny-was the prize offered last Spring by the American Civil Liberties Union of Louisiana and the Delta Women's Clinic as part of a fund-raising program called "An Adventure Auction": a complimentary abortion. You don't have to be pro-abortion or anti-abortion to be appalled by that offer. The abortion sold to the highest bidder for $30. The Clarion Herald, newsweekly of the New Orleans archdiocese, protested vehemently. "In placing the life of a pre-born child on the auction block," the ACLU had in effect "put out a contract" on an unborn child, the paper charged. That may be a little much, but not the Clarion Herald's essential point about the ACLU. It's a long way down for an organization which has pointed to the auction block of slavery and won many important black civil rights cases, to where it becomes an accessory to an abortion auction.