A little introduction to what's coming
I'm calling it "A Totally Unauthorized Guide to the World Church"
“I am not afraid that the book will be controversial, I’m afraid that it will not be controversial.”
--Flannery O’Connor
I need to begin with a consumer alert: this project does not have an imprimatur.
Which is a Latin phrase meaning “let it be printed”, and an old-fashioned way of signaling the Catholic reader: “No worries, at least one bishop somewhere took a look at this book and couldn’t find anything that would damage your Catholic faith.”
I’ve only known one bishop slightly and he was transferred to a distant state a few years ago. Neither he nor anyone else in the hierarchy was consulted here. Just so you know. (I identify with Fr. Daniel Berrigan’s opening comment to a group: “You’ve heard about the hierarchy? Welcome to the lower-archy.”)
I’ll add that I’m not trying to play the familiar role of the Angry Catholic Dissident working out a personal grievance. Some things about the institutional Church should make anyone angry but I’m not writing a jeremiad—mostly just a user’s guide in the form of a memoir.
After all, being a Catholic is not like being in the Army: you’re free to get up and walk out any time. (Although your parish will never cease mailing you those packets of weekly donation envelopes, wherever you go.)
So what follows here is simply a personal essay, not a work of sociology.
Who then should read this little essay? I wrote it for the following people:
Anyone who suspects that buried somewhere beneath the foundations of this tottering ecclesial culture are treasures of spirituality and even a kind of indigenous wisdom, however barnacle-encrusted, betrayed or forgotten today
Anyone who suspects that a good deal of what passes for American Catholic culture today is a lame imitation of evangelical culture--with even worse music and an equally compromised public witness
Anyone who suspects that Catholics in America were once risk-takers in their sense of justice, as demonstrated in their historical solidarity at certain moments with workers, with people of color, and with non-Americans, and that this kind of authentic witness could, just possibly, be recovered amidst our current cascading crises
Anyone who hungers to be in solidarity with the poor, with what the Old Testament calls the anawim (the “poor ones” who remain faithful to God even in their distress), especially those in the global South who do not even have the possibility of having possibilities
Anyone whose loyalty is first and foremost to the Gospel, not to nationality or local culture or politics or even a denomination (more on this later)
In a later chapter, I’ll get to that well-worn feature of “spiritual writing”, my conversion story. For now, let me simply place myself in time.
I’m a Boomer, a former Cold Warrior, an adult Catholic convert who came into the Church at Easter 1986. For a number of years, I referred to myself as a “John Paul II Catholic.” That adjective is anachronistic now, describing only where I came from, not where I am today.
My subtitle for this little fusillade, “A Totally Unauthorized Guide to the World Church”, already suggests the book probably won’t appeal to most RCIA directors (the lay people who help instruct and shepherd new converts into the Church). But that’s fine. Nor am I expecting that anyone will necessarily join, leave or simply ignore the Church after reading my comments.
What do I mean by “the world Church”? Simply, the international community of Catholics and indeed all Christians. I’m saying that in addition to our connection with our local parish—where the Church becomes real to us—we need to claim to our membership in a global communion, an “imagined community”. But first we have to understand what that means.
Just as Pope John XXIII wanted us to imagine human unity on a global scale (as we see in the documents of the Vatican II council), Pope Francis has urged us to take the next step and actually go out to “the peripheries”. But he’s not insisting that we get on an airplane for Zimbabwe or Mumbai.
In my case, I found the peripheries simply by changing Mass times. Instead of attending the 10 AM Mass in English, for some months I attended the smaller 1 PM Mass in Spanish. (My Spanish language skills were modest but they have improved.) There I discovered a beautiful community of neighbors in my little Indiana town I had never met. And an atmosphere of worship that included a sense of solidarity, family to family. The peripheries, it turns out, are also next door. More on this experience later.
My mostly working-class friends at the Spanish Mass are of course a far cry from the millions of Catholics in the rising Church of the global South. I think of the Nigerian pastor I read about whose parish boundaries are within the area of a giant garbage dump. He’s known as the “priest of the garbage pickers.” Can you imagine? This is the real periphery to which Pope Francis is trying to awaken us comfortable First Worlders.
So why “street Catholic”? To me the phrase suggests someone who has chosen to stand apart, no longer sitting in a pew but waiting and watching on the outside, from “the street” where we encounter the Others. (Although I’ve come to embrace the theological insight “there are no Others.”) Think of Thomas Merton’s “guilty bystander” or Fr. Richard Rohr’s notion of “the edge of the inside.”
Again, a street Catholic is not—please note--someone whose focus is mere disobedience, even if they might appear to be standing apart in some way.
But neither is a street Catholic someone attached to a collection of apologetics DVDs, fretting about having all the right arguments, if and when they ever engage with a non-Catholic, in hopes of “winning the argument.” This form of evangelism begins from a losing proposition and is rarely a true form of witness.
A street Catholic is someone who understands that not only is the planet burning (in the Amazon, in the jungles of Mexico, in California) but our very societies are aflame with fear and distrust of each other. To me and my fellow Street Catholics, that means we have to run toward these fires.
Finally, a street Catholic embraces the radicality of the Magnificat, the great Marian prayer (found in Luke 1: 46-55), in order to move beyond the Blessed Mother solely as cultural icon toward the mestizo brown figure whose face is now that of the world church.
And whose song is one of resistance to worldliness and social sin through world transformation.
Today, for a street Catholic, Mary must also be remembered as a member of the Anawim (the Hebrew word meaning those who depend upon the Lord), a young woman who lived under oppressive Roman occupation in her time. She thus represents the world’s poor—i.e., the majority of mankind on earth. You can see all this more clearly—from the street.
So with all that in mind, I offer the following definition:
Street Catholic, noun phrase
1. A Catholic who imagines himself/herself as having left a comfortable pew in order to take up a symbolic “outsider” position on a street somewhere nearby;
2. A Catholic who works for solidarity with the poor in resistance to bourgeois Christianity, neocolonialism, and late capitalism;
3. A Catholic who has heard and is acting upon Pope Francis’ call to “go out to the peripheries”.
The image of the outsider contemplating an institution in slow-motion collapse is scarcely a new one. I think of the elderly St. Augustine in North Africa, hearing the news in 410 A.D. that the Goth leader Alaric, a professed Christian, had finally succeeded in entering the city of Rome and pillaging it for four days before leaving behind a landscape of corpses and ruin.
Is this an image of the American Catholic Church today? Is the best response for lay Catholics to stand apart from the institution until it heals itself? Could such a position actually be a form of faithfulness? I don’t attempt to answer such questions, I simply want to leave them hanging in the air.
See you next time—peace.
Dear Elias, what powerful words. As a Catholic, my biggest disillusionment in the past few years have been Catholic sub-cultures that totally deny the preferential option for the poor and what it means from a policy standpoint, regardless of party-politics. How being our brothers keeper manifests in actual action! Thanks for this great essay and looking forward to your book!
For many American Catholics, Sunday Mass and in the activities of their parish is where they are most likely to encounter and listen to people of different racial and national backgrounds. In large parts of America you're most likely to encounter in Nigerian or ethnic Vietnamese person at Mass, in fact they may very well be your pastor. Many work and social environments are segregated by race and class, but outside of Catholic enclaves in major cities they're typically are only a few parish options that draw Catholics from all walks of life.