c. 1999 Religion News Service
(Eugene Kennedy, a longtime observer of the Roman Catholic Church, is professor emeritus of psychology at Loyola University in Chicago and author most recently of”My Brother Joseph,”published by St. Martin’s Press.)
UNDATED _ Americans love to repent, but they do not seem to enjoy sin and may not even commit very much of it. Still, Billy Graham and a host of lesser evangelists look into the hazy vastness of stadiums and auditoriums and invite sinners to identify themselves and be saved from their transgressions.
We read a great deal _ and hear more from politicians _ about our moral decline. Pat Buchanan is almost William Jennings Bryan reborn as he soars to midlevel rhetorical heights by declaring we are embroiled in a”culture war”of traditional values versus”Hollywood”values. Gary Bauer is running for president as a spokesperson for religious versus secular values.
Periodically, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith issues a statement, like a warning shot across humanity’s bow, to alert us to the abiding sinfulness of some behavior, frequently homosexuality, and withdraws again within the equivalent of the Vatican beltway.
Social scientists report to us regularly about the breakdown of the American family and the perils of the divorce rate.
As I look around, however, I wonder where all the sinners are. I mean the people who are the subjects of all this preaching and warning, the ones invited to”come forward”and renounce the sins by which they are undermining faith, flag and family.
On a summer weekend, for example, I find in Roman Catholic churches, despite statistics of a decline in attendance, what is true of other denominations as well: You had better arrive early if you want to get a seat.
Those attending Mass, or other services, reflect in their faces and their groupings a view of our spiritual consciousness and religious behavior different from those found in surveys, political speeches or Vatican condemnations.
Let your eye rove about the pews. Do these people appear to be great sinners to you? Most of them are just making it, doing their best under enormous pressures to live good lives.
Rather than people tearing marriage and family apart, you will identify mothers and fathers struggling to keep theirs together. Families abound and, if you have had any experience gathering children together for church, you will take heart about the status of this fundamental unit of society.
They look more like old-fashioned pilgrims rather than decadent millennialists. The mother or father may be holding a 5-year-old by the hand while letting a sleeping 2-year-old rest nesting on a shoulder.
Keeping a young family in some kind of order in church resembles Heisenberg’s principle that one cannot measure the speed and position of an electron at the same time. Raising a family requires parents to be masters of uncertainty, that inescapable quality that unifies physics and religion to reveal the nature of the universe and the ever present risks of giving and nourishing life.
Are we unaware that a true religious mystery reveals itself in these parents as they present themselves and their children, fidgeting, yes, in and out of formation continually, cries of protest more usual than not, to God and to us?
Preoccupied with their parental obligations and utterly unself-consciously, these mothers and fathers are living out the roles of Mary and Joseph before our eyes. This is a small but durable miracle, far richer in spirituality than weeping statues or people claiming the Virgin Mary appears in their back yard. A good family trying to contain its own life energy in church is as great a vision as any ever claimed by a mystic, and a pro-life statement greater than any demonstration. And it can be viewed any weekend in churches across America.
The astonishing miracle is that of people of all ages and conditions _ of the homely girl still without a boyfriend to your left, and beyond her, the older couple with the husband needing his wife’s arm to find his way to receive the Sacrament, to the people in the front whose lives have been framed by their wheelchairs, and throughout the church couples of all kinds, some of them gay, surely, trying to keep faith with each other and with God.
They don’t look like great sinners to me. Sinners of some kind, of course, as are we all, but saints, too, in their own way, and very reassuring in the face of claims that the family, moral life and faith have disappeared.
DEA END KENNEDY
