A few weeks ago I was having dinner with family and everyone was complaining about the nation's devolution into ever greater stupidity. It occurred to me that they were going through the stages of grief for America, or perhaps for their idea of what America should be, and were currently in the "Anger" stage. I pointed this out and asked how do we get to Acceptance?

Nah, they said. We are staying at angry.

The stages of grief model was developed by a psychiatrist who had worked with terminally ill patients, and she broke down the process into Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression and Acceptance. Critics of the model say it isn't really based on anything scientific and not everyone in fact goes through this process. On the other hand we all recognize something of these stages in ourselves so it has some utility for understanding our feelings.

Catholic blogger Steve Skojec has been trying to process his own feelings about the Catholic Church in which he was raised. In a long article he goes through his own scruples, struggles and beefs with the Church and some of its priests, and in doing so he gives a picture of how two generations of serious Catholics have tried and failed to come to grips with the realities of the post-Conciliar Church. Some points of his journey are typical of a lot of serious Catholics:

  • Starting out in sappy, shallow "felt banner" Catholicism of the 70s and 80s that failed to hold the attention of anyone past middle school age.
  • Enthusiastically falling for self-interested charlatans - in his case the Legionaries of Christ but there were plenty of other sketchy movements and popular priests - who presented themselves as the vanguard of authentic renewal when they were just in it for money and power.
  • Retreat into "Traditional Catholicism" communities with their Latin Masses and large doses of paranoia and weirdness.

Behind all these stages are the constant revelations of incompetent or corrupt clergy, the corruption taking the form of heresy or sexual or financial impropriety, often going together but not always.

These different movements can be thought of as stages of grief, though not in any particular order: with felt-banner Boomer Catholicism dominated by Denial, charlatan Catholicism by Bargaining (if we are loyal God will renew the Church) and Traditionalism by Anger. Skojec seems to have reached Depression. He has concluded that the Catholic Church is a steaming pile of wreckage and it is no use trying to deny it. I am not a pessimistic as Skojec, probably because I don't hate the current Pope and I suspect some of his axes-to-grind are a result of his own personality.

A massive and under-diagnosed problem with contemporary Catholicism is that the more serious a Catholic is, the more he intellectualizes the faith. The fact that Catholicism has a strong intellectual tradition is a great strength, but if it is the only strength it becomes a weakness. An intellectualized faith leads to rationalization and evasion. Skojec sketches out how much weird conspiracy theories infect Traditionalism as a way to help evade the reality of the modern Church, but charlatan Catholicism is also enabled by rationalizations: this charlatan priest or movement must be good because the Church must be renewed in the 21st century the way it always was in the past, or because Catholic orthodoxy can't go hand-in-hand with moral corruption.

Intellectualizing the faith is probably itself a form of evasion since modern Catholic communities and traditions are so thin: there is just so little for the average Catholic to hold onto. An intellectualized faith can't really speak to people like Skojec who are suffering, it will always be too neat, divorced from reality, and ultimately condescending.

The reality is that the Catholic Church nuked its cultural tradition in the 70s and its moral authority in the 2000s and its leadership is for the most part mediocre at best, wicked at the worst. There are pockets of sanity and even sanctity here and there, but no vast renewal is around the corner. The sooner we can accept that the sooner we can find adequate expressions of our faith.

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