Follow Up on the Impact of Church Buildings

Earlier this week, I wrote on the difficulty the Catholic Church has in both spreading the Gospel and maintaining its aging, underutilized buildings. I contend that this is a major problem for the Church in the 21st Century. It needs to adapt to new circumstances, not continue to operate under the assumption that its buildings are the central gathering places of its communities.

Well, count on Walter Russell Mead, my favorite blogger, to point out a useful and instructive contrast:

Historically, the Pentecostal churches in the United States as elsewhere are strongly rooted among the poor. In the favelas of Brazil, the “informal settlements” of South Africa and in the squalid slums surrounding emerging megacities like Nairobi and Lagos, as well as in America’s inner cities, Pentecostal churches, many in storefronts, are often the most active, the fastest growing, and the most connected to the aspirations and the needs of the communities they serve.

Mead is making a larger point that populations afflicted by multi-generational poverty need more than government-subsidized welfare, they need faith (or something equally as powerful and motivational) to change the essence of their lives. In passing, he mentions the effectiveness of Pentecostal churches in accomplishing this mission, noting that they often set themselves up in humble storefronts.

But think about the flexibility and persuasive power that approach entails. First, a Pentecostal church can spring up wherever there is demand, because it will not wait for a formal building to be constructed. It could be sandwiched between the corner deli and the laundromat, but it is there and can have a presence. Second, this church will have low overhead, allowing it to spend the donations it gets towards good works and outreach, not maintenance and utilities. Finally, the humble surroundings likely resonate better with the community and the times than an elaborate structure. The ostentation of a Catholic church, meant to inspire and attract, can seem quite out of touch.

No one knows where the faithful will live in a decade or a century. Mobile populations call for churches that go where the believers (and the needy) are.

How Churches Kill the Church

This is my church, St. Agnes. I love it. If I move away from Brooklyn, it will be one of the things I miss most. However, I also know that it is an albatross around the neck of the Church, that is the Roman Catholic faith to which it is such a beautiful monument.

This past week was the kickoff of the annual appeal that the Diocese of Brooklyn conducts to raise funds. After the homily, the lights went down and we saw a video outlining all the good things the diocese will do with our money if we give it to them. Then, after the video was concluded, our priest reminded us that the majority of what we give will come back to the parish and go towards maintaining the building.

In that moment, it occurred to me why the Catholic Church feels so weak and passive: parish priests have been turned into caretakers for massive, under-peopled buildings like St. Agnes. Their minds are full of the latest contractor's estimates, fundraising plans, worries about the state of the roof, and heating bills. This seems to leave remarkably little time for instruction and evangelization. Heck, we're lucky they still have the time and energy to say mass.

And what about the parishioners? Their plight is summed up by the annual appeal: asked to sit back and watch as folks from a diocesan office provide things like 'immigration services' that they will never see. Told to send money, to fix a building built to hold the thousands of immigrants who built the neighborhood, but now hosts only the few families who have hung on, and the chance newcomer who keeps the faith. Their priest doesn't ask much of them, may not even know them (although, I will say, my parish priest is making a real effort to change that), but constantly reminds them that more funds are needed.It starts to feel a lot more transactional than inspirational, and the faithful become slowly discouraged, and even more drift away.

The Church must either renew or wither, and if the buildings it constructed in earlier days are now holding it back, they should not fear letting them go. After all, Jesus himself said, "If your eye betrays you, pluck it out." It would be painful to see the great built heritage of Catholicism pass away, but the Church is greater than the sum of its churches.

When We Look, and When We Turn Away

Abortion is one of those topics I don't much like writing about. While I have a lot of sympathy for women who find themselves pregnant and frightened, and I think it is a societal failure (and especially a failure of religious folks like myself) that they aren't given more support, I am absolutely opposed to it. And many people who share my position have written much more passionately and wisely about why it is wrong than I ever could, so I don't think my best argument would add to the debate.

However, the gruesome case of Kermit Gosnell and his revolting clinic has given me reason to think about abortion more than normal. Then I read this piece by Elizabeth Scalia, who goes by the pen name The Anchoress, highlighting the lack of media coverage given to the case. She sees in that lack of coverage a bias in the media, as she states here:

So, allow me to ask the impolitic question I have hinted at elsewhere: in choosing to look away, in choosing to under-report, in choosing to spin, minimize, excuse, and move-along when it comes to Kermit Gosnell—and to this whole subject of under-regulated abortion clinics, the debasement of women and the slaughter of living children—how are the press and those they protect by their silence any better than the Catholic bishops who, in decades past, looked away, under-reported, spun, minimized, excused, moved-along, and protected the repulsive predator-priests who have stolen innocence and roiled the community of faith?

Scalia wonders why the press has not tenaciously dug into this story, why there have not been investigations into other clinics. And while I agree with her, I think there is a pretty obvious reason, and even an understandable one. Simply put, the primary emotion evoked by the Gosnell case is not outrage, but horror.

Now, Scalia is outraged because she shares my conviction about abortion. But a lot of people have made an uneasy truce with the notion that abortion is a necessary fact of modern life, and so the reality of the thing, the notion that living things, identifiable as babies, are being dismembered is not something they ever want to face. Whereas you would search long and hard to find someone who would suggest a Catholic priest had any right or sanction to molest boys and girls. Thus, the predominant societal reaction is not to turn away in disgust, but to seek justice.

To put it another way, the Gosnell case creates what psychologists (and especially amateur psychologists like myself) call cognitive dissonance. Our instincts tell us that something horrible is happening, but our rational brains say that what is happening is not that bad, or a freak happening, or the price we pay for some greater good. I would compare it to the gruesome videos I've seen of horrible (there's that word again) slaughterhouse conditions. I react viscerally, and maybe even doubt my decision to buy beef from the store without knowing where it came from and how the animals were treated. But then I let it go, telling myself that these videos are the exception and that the meat I buy isn't adding to the problem.

T.S. Eliot said, "Humankind cannot bear very much reality." I think this is the type of thing he had in mind. The simple fact is that something disgusting, immoral, and disturbing was happening at Dr. Gosnell's clinic, and his acts were just on the far side of legality. For those of us who support the legal right to abortion, and for those of us who don't but who shirk the hard work of changing laws and minds, we simply prefer not to bear that reality.

Dreams for the 21st Century

In church on Sunday, our priest mentioned in passing Dr. Martin Luther King, and posed a question (I'm paraphrasing): "Who would have thought, when Doctor King gave his famous speech on the Washington Mall, that his dream would be realized in the lifetime of those hearing it?" The thought, which I have heard expressed before, set me to thinking about how a clear vision for how things could be in the future can actually change the trajectory of society.

And so, while humbly admitting that my dreams aren't as eloquent or as powerful as MLK's, I humbly submit three dreams that I would hope to see realized in my lifetime:

I have a dream that those involved in politics will assume their opponents are arguing their position in goodwill. Having become a political junky in my adulthood, I am disheartened by how hard most politicians and pundits find it to not cast doubt on their opponents' motives. While both sides have their share of opportunists and dealmakers, working with the assumption that a person genuinely believes his or her policy will solve the problem in question makes it a lot more likely to find a middle ground or a new solution that actually can work for everyone. This seems like asking for human nature to change, but then again, so did (does?) asking people to act without
thought of race.

I have a dream that we will cherish the value of human life. I am pro-life, but I think a major failing of those leading the pro-life movement is that they act as if the lives of the women and doctors involved are less important to them than the lives of the babies they may abort. But on the flip side, pro-choice rhetoric seeks to deny the obvious point that a human fetus is a human life. Abortions will happen in a sinful world, but appreciating the common humanity that unites everyone from the beginning until the end of life could change the tenor of the debate, and lead to a solution where abortion, at the very least, is seen as a genuine loss. I could make the same point about euthenasia, the death penalty, and medical cloning, among other topics.

I have a dream that religious people will really love the sinner. It is a difficult balancing act, in public debate, to condemn what you think is a sin without making the sinner feel rejected, shunned and unprotected by the law. We have to seperate sin (which is a matter of the soul) and crime (which is when one person does harm to another). A powerful article I read recently pointed out that if Christians had done a better job of reaching out to homosexuals by, for example, caring for those with AIDS, people might be a bit more willing to listen to arguments they might make about gay marriage, because it would be clear they weren't making the argument out of hatred for gays. But the reality is that many believers can't separate the sinner from the sin, leaving the faithful open to (sometimes well-deserved) charges of hypocricy.

At any rate, my list may seem utopian. But I hold out hope that as a society, we'll get there. (My dream for myself is that I get off the couch and find ways to make these dreams happen.) If we want to achieve the vision, we first need to clearly express the vision, which is what I've made a rough first effort to do here.

Faith and Knowledge

I just finished reading an interesting piece in Slate by Ron Rosenbaum on agnosticism. It tapped into something that I think is a logical challenge of being a religious believer: namely, that the only way you can be 100% sure your faith is right is to be in some way delusional. Faith is almost meaningless if it ia guaranteed.

Does that make me a religious agnostic? (Or a Catholic agnostic, to be more specific?) I do think the medieval Church would have condemned this line of thinking, but I am not sure the Church of John Paul II, and now Pope Benedict, would. How can one say that religious belief cannot be compelled, acknowledge the legitimacy (if not the truth) of other traditions, and then state that a member of the Church must profess 100% certainty in all of its teachings? To believe is not to know.

And to go further, I think there is a good, theological reason we cannot be absolutely sure of our faith claims, one that has been said many times: to make God undeniable is to remove the free will which is His greatest gift to us. Even within an individual heart, an unearned certainty in one's faith turns the believer from a free soul to an automaton. And history shows that those who are absolutely certain in a belief, whether in the Catholic Church, or Islam, or Communism, or Atheism, or the superiority of a certain race, are likely to do horrible things in the furtherance of their beliefs.

There are few humans so incurious about the world that the question of why we are here will never come to them. And that sliver of a non-materialistic question opens the door to belief. As the compulsion to believe fades from human society, I think religion will get more confused and less hierarchical, but the need people have to 'grow in faith' together (a process more halting and unsteady than the phrase implies) will remain. There will be a purges and renewals in faith, as has happened periodically throughout the history of all the great religions, but the existance of doubt does not destroy, and may increase, the need for organized churches.