By Mike Filce
Copyright 2018 Mike Filce. All rights reserved. (Used by permission.)
The Catholic Church has seen its share of critiques in recent decades. Plenty to attack, after all.
I grew up with neighbors who discovered the local Calvary Chapel and became “born again.” They had always sneered at my Catholic faith, but this “rebirth” brought with it an eagerness to challenge this ignorant little kid about why we were “cannibals” and engaged in “idol-worship” — i.e. Mary, the Saints. You know the drill.
Later, as scandals rocked the Church, Catholic-bashing reached new heights in the media; I mean, what else could they do with such low-hanging fruit?
I kept wondering, won’t the Church need to ease up a bit on its rules if it’s going to emerge from these trials intact? Maybe relax a little on sexuality, divorce, and annulments? Abortion, even? To convey how far at sea I was, I really believed it would . . . and part of me thought it should.
How absolutely adrift I was.
Like many of those raised Catholic, I had indeed drifted as a young man. But unlike many, my falling away had little to do with the sex abuse scandals that would soon impact the Church. Instead, I rationalized my passivity and absence by pointing at the failings of priests and what I interpreted as the Church’s preoccupation with wealth. My distaste fixated on priests who seemed to have missed the lessons on humility — who appeared to make the mass about themselves, who aggrandized themselves by selling cassettes of their every homily and smiled like unctuous salesmen — in short, who seemed more show than substance.
Suffice it to say, if you want a reason to stop attending Catholic mass, you tend to find it. I had watched older siblings walk this line already, citing “phony” priests, “Puritanism,” and the ever-popular critique, “hypocrisy.” And I found those things, too. It wasn’t until years later that I realized I could find hypocrisy everywhere — in every human institution or organization, and because I am human, in myself too — though that was the last realization in the chain, as it always seems to be.
When we’re young, we want so much for the world to be the idyllic place we thought it was, and we hold fiercely to that ideal. As a result, we also hold our elders — parents, teachers, older siblings, adults around us or in the larger world — to an impossibly high standard of righteousness. And if they happen to be representatives of a religion, an even higher standard of perfection. As we move into our teenage years, we begin to sense the inevitable disillusionment, and we hone our critical blade to a razor’s edge. But why?
It starts with the fact that teenagers feel everything more acutely, including hurt. We see weakness, sin or foible, and it hurts us almost viscerally. It shatters our illusions — our world — the one we previously thought was perfect. And as teenagers, our defense mechanism to ward off the hurt of disillusion is to allow religious folks no room for failings — so we shield ourselves with scorn. It’s a loss like any death, and even at that age we experience the cycle of grief, ending in acceptance — but acceptance becomes cynicism. And later, apathy.
The critical step for me was not merely a religious maturation, but an evolving understanding of myself — my motivations and attitudes — and an understanding of our universal human nature. More simply, I got more honest with myself about why I had drifted.
But still I remained unwilling to absolve Catholicism of its perceived offenses, so I began exploring other Christian congregations, following the social rewards they offered. It wasn’t until I felt something lacking wherever I went, which I would come to realize as the sacraments, that I knew had to find my way back.
In time, I understood what I was doing and why — that I had been applying an impossible standard of righteousness to a human institution. Which isn’t to say I was letting off the hook sexual abusers or those who had allowed them to thrive. That was a different matter to me, outside of my experience, though it may have added to my detachment. But through what I can only assume was Grace, I grew to separate the human failings from the actual tenets and doctrines of the Faith.
As a result, I stopped blaming the Catholic Faith for the behaviors and attitudes of its representatives. Mostly, I realized that failings like hypocrisy are part of the universal human experience, failings we can’t avoid no matter how hard we try. I realized how easy it is to find flaws in representatives of any institution, organization, political or religious group — and therefore how easy it is to attribute those faults to the whole.
Partly what helped me was my experience as a public high school English teacher: I can exhibit specific teachers to attack public education, completely ignoring the foundations of the system. Same goes for law enforcement, the medical establishment, environmental groups, and even civil rights causes. But at some point, one must admit to the ad hominem fallacy as fundamentally dishonest.
Wherever humans are involved, we have flawed institutions. That’s just part of this messy human existence. Perhaps this explains why certain individuals live off the grid and away from all society. And even then, do they escape their human failings?
When we get past the charge of hypocrisy, most critics argue that the Church demands too much of its members and that these demands put it out of touch with people today: premarital and extramarital sex, birth control, regular practice of the sacraments, and so on. The tenets are simply too hard to follow, they complain.
And to some extent, I empathized with these frustrations. Like many people, I looked at the Church’s doctrines and thought they were too rigid, too unrealistic and impractical in today’s world, harboring the belief that someday there would become an “American Catholic Church” — one that is more forgiving or tolerant — of sexual laxity, of sacramental laziness and so on. I saw priests who seemed more liberal in their interpretation of doctrine, who seemed less offended by divorce and pre-marital sex. I thought it almost inevitable that they would rise up; I pictured these priests standing up to the Vatican and saying, “We go this way instead!” Clearly, I had a ways yet to go toward wisdom and maturity.
But then something happened. Over the years, as society embraced the “tolerance” movement and then extended it to moral laxity and relativism — growing more accepting of gay marriage and LBGTQ expression across the board, more accepting of divorce and abortion — the Church, under the leadership of the Pope, stood tall and unyielding in its stance against these trends. And I thought — wow — this just might be the only moral constant in the world. I had to respect that . . . and I also had to wonder why.
But to pursue that question, I flipped it on its head, asking, why not? Is there a chance that what we might be confused about what we actually want? — which led to other questions: Would we really wish our Catholic faith to be any less than what the Church has proscribed? Would we really want a Church that changes with society’s whims and vacillating moral standards? Would we want the Pope to come out and say, “Young people will not remain celibate, and so we are revising our moral teaching to say that it’s o.k. to live together, to have sex with multiple partners before marrying”? Would we then want to go about the practice of our faith the next day with this new understanding of morality? Really? By then, I had matured enough to know the answer to this, at least.
No, in this way we are like children: we want clear boundaries and standards to strive toward, even if we know they are nearly impossible to meet. We want to know someone or something cares about our striving to become the very best and purest versions of ourselves — even if we aren’t strong enough to fully achieve that version. We want to know someone believes we have the potential.
We don’t really want a Pope, a Church and a God who say to us, “It’s o.k. that you are weak and needy – I understand that you are less than capable of spiritual greatness; don’t worry — you have no hope of being moral, so don’t beat yourself up over it. We’ll be waiting here for you, no matter how mediocre and flaccid your efforts.” And isn’t that the essence of Free Will as taught by the Catholic Church — that our God and our Church believe in our potential for spiritual perfection and respect our ability to strive toward it?
In short, I stopped criticizing the Faith when I realized the Church was setting a standard we should aspire to. And following quickly on the heels of this understanding was the realization that this is precisely what a church should do; it’s just that most do not.
As teachers and parents, my wife and I have unfortunately seen that few parents lay down expectations for civil behavior and then hold their children accountable for those standards. Likewise, few religions parent their faithful with expectations and accountability. Instead, they temper their message and go with the flow, gauging the mood of their congregation and keeping an eye toward membership. They seem to focus entirely on the compassion and love, without the expectation to become a better, more Christ-like version of ourselves.
So then, is the Catholic Church expecting us to meet these exceedingly high standards? Well, it’s a bit like parenting, isn’t it? The standards are set, knowing there will be failings, but also that forgiveness will be granted with compassion and love so that we might rise and try again . . . and again.
There’s an honesty in that, and that’s what brought me home.