Everything You Knew is Wrong

Yes. We here in upstate New York are having demographic shifts and a worsening priest shortage. Yes, every diocese up has here made the difficult decision to close and merge parishes as needed, based on those demographic shifts. (I belong to one such community, which has three parishes that share two church buildings linked under a single pastor.)

Buffalo is going through a period of closing and merging parishes according to shifts in the Catholic population. Historic ethnic parishes are closing. As a Catholic and lover of history, it makes me very sad.

But ethnic cleansing, it ain’t.

I wonder if this same politician had similar things to say when many branches of the Buffalo-Erie County Public Library, mostly in neighborhoods where people don’t own cars, closed a few years ago. Or was that different, because it was a difficult decision made in the face of a county fiscal crisis, instead of a difficult decision made in the face of a population, financial, and personnel crisis?

(H/T to CVSTOS FIDEI for the Catholic League link.)

Today, the homily was about how important the sacrament of reconciliation is and how people don’t use it enough today.  I wondered where this came from (after all, we had a few people in line who didn’t make it in to confession before mass started) and then I was skimming this morning’s newspaper and saw this article that ran in the paper today.  Maybe a coincidence, maybe not…

The article will eventually be deleted, so I’ll quote out some of my favorite passages.

This scene in Albany speaks volumes about the state of confession in America. The sacrament, once a pillar of Catholic practice, is crumbling. And the way people confess, both what they say and where they say it, is shifting from the old laundry lists of minor misdeeds recited in austere anonymous boxes.Only 26 percent of Catholics go to confession at least once a year, according to a 2005 poll by Georgetown University’s Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate. A University of Notre Dame study in the early 1980s put the number at 74 percent.

It’s an alarming trend for Catholic leaders, who see confession as essential to spiritual health. What’s at stake is a route, laid out in the Bible, to examine your conscience, overcome sin and achieve grace.

Signs of concern keep popping up. Pope Benedict XVI talked up the sacrament in at least three recent public appearances, even casting it in modern psychological terms as a remedy for “guilt complexes.”

…

O’Toole also pointed to a new emphasis since the 1960s on the social dimensions of sin, the notion that sin isn’t so much “I punched my sister” as it is things like racism, sexism and damaging the environment. Stuff that’s generally harder to talk about in the confessional.

The professor added that rates of Communion skyrocketed after Vatican II in the 1960s, while rates of confession plummeted. Catholics, he said, got the idea that the Eucharist itself provided forgiveness. For minor sins, Doyle said, that’s true.

All of that is much more complicated than the simple reason one parishioner offered for why she prays every night but hasn’t confessed in at least 15 years.

“I feel like I don’t need somebody between me and God,” said Ginny Hartkern, 59, of St. Brigid’s Church in Watervliet. “I think you can speak directly to God. You don’t need an intermediary.”

…

So is there any bright spot in the Catholic confession landscape?

Yes. Several Catholic priests agreed that the few people who still use the sacrament are using it really well.

Today’s penitents are far more likely to talk about “sins of omission,” as Doyle put it. People might lament their failures to put in enough effort at work, say, or to be generous with their money or time.

The Rev. Paul Smith, sacramental minister at churches in Altamont and Berne, said parishioners now delve into things like bigotry — into the attitudes that underlie their misbehavior.

“They’re willing to go deeper,” he said.

This story is the featured blog article on WordPress right now, which I saw when I logged in.  How tragic, on many levels.

And, as a Buddhist friend wryly pointed out to me, it ain’t just the Catholic Church that China persecutes.  A local woman who is a member of Falun Gong fears for her mother’s life after she returned to China and has mysteriously disappeared.

Man, getting excommunicated has done wonders for my hit count.

I contributed a picture of a church within walking distance of my house to the Terrible Tabernacle contest.  I’m a bad person, but it’s an ugly tabernacle.  Looks like a dollar-store Christmas decoration gone horribly wrong.

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I thought that was pretty bad, but then I saw this picture of the altar.  Which at first I thought was a timpani.  The resemblance is hilarious.

I have to admit, when I saw pictures of this church on the Web site, I realized that it was not quite the parish for me.  They have healthy attendance and a fine school…just not my “scene,” as the kids say.

I forgot to mention that on Sunday at the Tridentine Mass, there were a fair number of women with uncovered heads.  Bad for the rite, but good in general.  Why?  Well, there were so many people that I think they ran out of loaner veils!

The indult parish is part of a group of three parishes (the Tridentine community is “non-territorial,” but the other two are regular urban parishes) together under one pastor, due to the dwindling number of practicing Catholics in the city, and the priest shortage.  A wonderful priest in his eighties who is otherwise retired celebrates the Tridentine Mass, but the pastor has done it in the past.

For Sunday Masses, the indult Mass’s attendance is about 120, which is delightfully high for a service around here.  People travel from three different states.

I love the aesthetic of it.  Attending the cathedral’s long, solemn Novus Ordo Mass occasionally was a big step, and the catalyst of my reversion.  It reminds me of what is special about being Catholic, as opposed to most mainstream parishes where the only glaring difference between that and Protestant services I’ve attended is that you don’t hear any female voices reading the Gospel.

The parish has a Web site.

Man, I’ve gone all rad-trad lately.  I promise that I’ll be back to normal soon.  I just finally absorbed how wonderful the old Mass is.

I’m a librarian.  Thinking about how people search for things is what I do.  One of my favorite things, especially on blog sites, is seeing what keywords lead people to my site.

One day on this blog was spectacular.

Things are well here.  I’ve been busy and tired, and haven’t had a lot to say in general.  I’ve had a lot to think about–some religious things, some not.  I have some serious posts brewing, but they’re not ready yet.

On Sunday, I attended my third Tridentine Mass and managed to keep up in my missal the entire time.  It was nice.  My mother came of age around the time that the new Mass came into use, and she was initially surprised that I had an interest in doing something so old-fashioned.  She’s intrigued now, though, and nostalgic.  I think I’ve forced her to remember the Mass from her childhood that she didn’t think was still celebrated.  She wants to attend one with me the next time one of us visits the other for a weekend, and even dug out her old missal from 1961, a gift for her 16th birthday.  My hometown has an indult Mass, and an SSPX chapel.  Going together will either be a disaster, or really cool!

I wish consecration killed germs.  I think I caught a cold from the priest at the chapel I attended last week.  He kept reaching under his vestments into his robe to get a handkerchief, and he clearly wasn’t well.   (Though maybe people think that about me, and I just have allergies.)

I’m tired and grouchy, I got nothing done today, and I slept in and missed Mass due to a migraine, so instead of doing anything constructive, I played around on the Internet and went grocery shopping.  Grocery shopping while sad isn’t a good idea….I come home with frozen pizzas and Oreos.

I will point you to this interesting “Mass in the Round” article that I dug up while looking for stories for the Diocese of Albany news blog. I’m not really sure how I feel about that arrangement–I’d have to see it in action. There appears to be a lack of kneelers, which makes me uncomfortable.

I grew up attending a church where the pews surrounded the altar in a sort of semicircle, which is a nice arrangement except that it makes weddings and funerals a little bit awkward since there’s no true “aisle” to walk down, and there’s barely enough room between the baptismal font and the altar steps to put a coffin. Being able to see what’s going on on the altar was never a concern for me, since we always sat in the back and I’m under five feet tall.

Come to think of it, now that I’m an adult, there’s no one to scold me for standing on the kneelers, so maybe I could try it….

There’s something that speaks to me about this article. Maybe not to people whose faith never wavers. Or who don’t spend their entire lives around active atheists or lapsed believers.  I wish I were one of those people.

I struggle against doubt all of the time, wondering if what I’m doing is even sensible. I was happier without faith in a way.

Before I converted to Christianity, I had a rather absurd, but probably not atypical relationship with my skepticism: On the one hand I embraced it unreservedly with my intellect, while on the other I had an intense romantic yearning for there to be something more to the universe than simply minds and matter.

Sometimes the best choice in my life has been the one that I know intellectually is wrong.

Spirit of Vatican II “Catholic” Faith Community makes me giggle hysterically. I admit it. I will read it and start laughing so hard that my atheist-raised roommate will look at me as if I’ve gone quite mad. I send her the pages I’m reading, but despite her abiding hatred of hippies, she doesn’t get the material or understand why so much of this blog is so wrong, but also utterly hilarious. I’m not sure anyone who wasn’t raised in this kind of Catholic church would get it, or find it nearly as funny as I do. I was talking this over with a convert friend, and she admitted that she isn’t sure what’s tongue-in-cheek and what’s real (or what’s exaggerated for effect and what really goes on in dissident parishes, I imagine.) I suppose she’s lucky in that way.

There’s a more serious side to why I find the blog (er, I mean the parish) so funny, though. The church I grew up in wasn’t quite so … nutty, but we had more than our share of forced hugging and group meditations during confirmation class, and I learned nearly all of the theology I know ten years after “graduating” from religious ed. Baptisms of children and adults were part of Mass and served the purpose of “welcoming infants/catechumens into our faith community.” Never mind exactly what that faith was in, which remained fuzzy and amorphous for me until well after I was confirmed. Doctrine, tsk! That’s so old-fashioned.

I found the forced camaraderie, the constant pressure to hug people I didn’t really like, the liturgical dance, the screechy syrupy recycled ’70s folk songs in our hymnals, .. everything…spiritually dry and sometimes even revolting. I liked participating as a guitarist (yes, folk mass. hush) and as a a lector. Indeed, a lot of things were nice about the parish I grew up in, and I also sometimes liked the bare-bones Mass we had in the Protestant chapel in college, but overall I just gave up on a certain level. I kicked around converting to Buddhism for a while, but that seemed like too much of a radical departure. Most of my college friends were neo-pagans, which didn’t appeal to me at all. I proclaimed myself “culturally Catholic,” and avoided Mass mostly in order to avoid my ex.

After I graduated from college, I tried to arrange my work schedule so that I was in the office during all possible mass times on weekends. It was a drudgery and I couldn’t stand going. I’d sooner pray on my own….provided that Anyone was listening, and as I became more lonely and depressed and discouraged about the present and about my future, I doubted that there was any deity at all. The parade of human suffering that I dealt with every day in the call center where I worked made a compelling case for that.

I moved to another city for grad school, but decided not to hang out with the Newman group on campus. I was 23, and they seemed so…young. After Pope John Paul II died, I felt compelled to attend Mass at the cathedral for some reason I didn’t quite understand. (So did a thousand or so other people, and a few local news crews. Mass attendance there is usually quite sparse.) I attended the cathedral parish on and off for about two years after that. I was drawn back even though I couldn’t articulate why. Now I realize that it was because the Masses there were reverent, traditional, and aesthetically pleasing. I attended the cathedral sporadically until sometime just after Ash Wednesday of this year, when something clicked in my brain and I knew that I needed to go back.

Poking around the Internet and reading blogs and forums made me realize–I’m not as weird as I thought. In the minority, perhaps, but not wrong. Not wanting to hold hands during the Our Father, disliking the Gather hymnal, or not having lots of sex with my youth group boyfriend were indeed not things that made me a bad Catholic, as my experience growing up had led me to believe. There wasn’t something wrong with Catholicism, or with me. The problem lay in the liturgically liberal, theologically moderate tradition in which I was raised–many people seem to find that fulfilling, but I don’t anymore.

The sadness I felt was in part a God-shaped hole inside of me, and returning to the Church according to her rules has left me serene and even content. If I want to be intellectually honest, I have to admit that I can’t ever be completely sure again that there’s a God or that he’s holding us to Catholic rules.

Maybe in time I can be sure of that again. I hope to. A total loss of faith is hard to recover from. I keep the rules and habits that I should, in hope that the doubt will disappear someday.  Moral guidance is important, as is ritual, but transcendence and salvation are far more important.