Marian Ronan

Changing Catholicism

There’ve been all kinds of books lately about Catholicism: Garry Wills’s new book on the priesthood, Why Priests? A Failed Tradition; Kerry Kennedy’s anthology, Being Catholic Now, and even, if you’re so inclined, Why Catholicism Matters, a study of the cardinal virtues in the 21st century, by Bill Donahue of the Catholic League.

Sometimes, though, if you want to know what’s happening with American Catholics, it’s just as helpful to notice what’s going on. Like the other day, when I had lunch with a relative down in Philadelphia, a cradle Catholic like myself, but even more so since a number of her parents’ siblings were nuns or priests. (She’s also a successful lawyer.) We chatted a bit about her kids, and then she said, “Well, I’ve stopped going to Mass.”  In response to my inquiry as to why, she told a long but all-too-familiar story: first there was the new pastor, who’s a lot more conservative than the previous one. Then there was the archdiocesan campaign to which she refused to contribute because of the Philadelphia archdiocese’s shocking record of protecting child sex-abusers.

But the last straw, she said, was the attack by the Vatican on the nuns. “I know that my aunts who were nuns put up with a lot from the pastors and priests they interacted with,” she said, “but the idea of these women being treated this way in old age is more than I can take. I’m finished with it.” This, as I suggested some months ago might be the case for many Catholics, was the “line in the sand” for this extraordinarily theologically middle-of the road, (almost) life-long Catholic.

Next there is the steady movement of married priests into the Catholic mainstream (by which I do not mean the institutional church). First there was the celebrant of the memorial service for my friend Susan Donahue down in West Chester, PA, in January. This former member of a religious order, now married, and vested in an alb and stole, led a room full of nuns, ex-nuns, and practicing and non-practicing Catholics through readings, hymns, prayers of the faithful and eulogies. Nobody blinked.

Then there was an article on the National Catholic Reporter webpage this week about “Fr. Paul Mayer” of East Orange, New Jersey, who has called for faith communities to begin building a major movement that elevates climate change above its current “footnote” status and places it squarely in the center of both spiritual and public concerns. Mayer’s lifetime of social justice activism, as described in the article, is truly inspiring. Almost as an afterthought, in the last sentence, the authors identify Mayer as “the founder of a spiritual peace community in East Orange, (who) teaches yoga to seniors and has an active wedding ministry as a non-canonical, formerly married priest.”

And lest you think that all the change goes in one direction, there’s an article in the January 27 New York Daily News about John Cornelius, the first former Episcopal priest to be ordained a Roman Catholic priest in New York state. A big part of the story is that Cornelius took a vow of celibacy, to which his wife of thirty-three years gave her blessing, in order to be ordained. I will attempt here to restrain my cynicism about the quality of the sex lives of couples who eagerly renounce same and say instead that it’s good to know that the exclusion of women and gays and sexually-active married men from the Catholic priesthood is an inspiration to somebody.

I suppose I could close with a riff on the increasing number of Catholic women priests in the US, but since that’s been going on for decades, it hardly constitutes a change at all!