Why Do Catholics Stay in
the Church? Because of the Stories
by Andrew M. Greeley
July 10, 1994, New York Times Magazine
http://www.nytimes.com/1994/07/10/magazine/why-do-catholics-stay-in-the-church-because-of-the-stories.html?pagewanted=all
"If you don't like the
Catholic Church," the woman in the "Donahue" audience, by her
own admission not Catholic, screamed at me, "why don't you stop being a
priest and leave the Church?"
I had been criticizing
what I took to be the insensitivity of some Catholic leaders to the importance
of sex for healing the frictions and the wounds of the married life and perhaps
renewing married love. I was taken aback by the intensity of her anger. Why did
it matter so much to her that I had offered some relatively mild criticism? Why
did such criticism seem to her to demand that I decamp from Catholicism and the
priesthood?
"Why should I
leave?" was the only reply I could manage. "I like being Catholic and
I like being a priest." Later I remembered the response to a similar
question by my friend Hans Kung: "Why leave? Luther tried that and it
didn't work!"
Yet the question
persists. In its most naked form it demands to know, "How can someone who
is intelligent and well educated continue to be a Roman Catholic in these
times?" The question is not a new one. It has been asked by anti-Catholic
nativists for 150 years. Often the latent subtext is, "How can anyone who
is intelligent and well educated believe in any religion, especially
Catholicism?"
The question is worth a
response, if only to clarify what religion is and what there is about the
Catholic religion that explains its enormous appeal even to men and women who
think that the Pope is out of touch and that the bishops and the priests are
fools.
Catholics remain Catholic
because of the Catholic religious sensibility, a congeries of metaphors that
explain what human life means, with deep and powerful appeal to the total
person. The argument is not whether Catholics should leave their tradition or
whether they stay for the right reasons. The argument is that they do in fact
stay because of the attractiveness of Catholic metaphors.
You can make a persuasive
case against Catholicism if you want. The Church is resolutely authoritarian
and often seems to be proud of the fact that it "is not a democracy."
It discriminates against women and homosexuals. It tries to regulate the
bedroom behavior of married men and women. It tries to impose the Catholic
position regarding abortion on everyone. It represses dissent and even disagreement.
The Vatican seems obsessed with sex. The Pope preaches against birth control in
countries with rapidly expanding populations. Catholics often cringe when the
local bishop or cardinal pontificates on social policy issues. Bishops and
priests are authoritarian and insensitive. Lay people have no control of how
their contributions are spent. Priests are unhappy, and many of them leave the
priesthood as soon as they can to marry. The Church has covered up sexual abuse
by priests for decades. Now it is paying millions of dollars to do penance for
the sexual amusements of supposedly celibate priests while it seeks to
minimize, if not eliminate altogether, the sexual pleasures of married lay
people.
One might contend with
such arguments. Research indicates that priests are among the happiest men in
America. The Church was organized in a democratic structure for the first
thousand years and could be so organized again. But let the charges stand for
the sake of the argument. They represent the way many of those who are not
Catholic see the Catholic Church, and with some nuances and qualifications the
way many of those inside the church see the Catholic institution. Nonetheless
this case against Catholicism simply does not compute for most Catholics when they
decide whether to leave or stay.
Do they in fact remain?
Are not Catholics leaving the church in droves? Prof. Michael Hout of the
Survey Research Center at the University of California at Berkeley has
demonstrated that the Catholic defection rate has remained constant over 30
years. It was 15 percent in 1960 and it is 15 percent today. Half of those who
leave the Church do so when they marry a non-Catholic with stronger religious
commitment. The other half leave for reasons of anger, authority and sex -- the
reasons cited above.
How can this be, the
outsider wonders. For one thing, as the general population has increased, the
number of Catholics has increased proportionately. Still, how can 85 percent of
those who are born Catholic remain, one way or another, in the church? Has
Catholicism so brainwashed them that they are unable to leave?
The answer is that
Catholics like being Catholic. For the last 30 years the hierarchy and the
clergy have done just about everything they could to drive the laity out of the
church and have not succeeded. It seems unlikely that they will ever drive the
stubborn lay folk out of the Church because the lay folk like being Catholic.
But why do they like
being Catholic?
First, it must be noted
that Americans show remarkable loyalty to their religious heritages. As
difficult as it is for members of the academic and media elites to comprehend
the fact, religion is important to most Americans. There is no sign that this
importance has declined in the last half century (as measured by survey data
from the 1940's). Skepticism, agnosticism, atheism are not increasing in
America, as disturbing as this truth might be to the denizens of midtown
Manhattan.
Moreover, while institutional
authority, doctrinal propositions and ethical norms are components of a
religious heritage -- and important components -- they do not exhaust the
heritage. Religion is experience, image and story before it is anything else
and after it is everything else. Catholics like their heritage because it has
great stories.
If one considers that for
much of Christian history the population was illiterate and the clergy
semiliterate and that authority was far away, one begins to understand that the
heritage for most people most of the time was almost entirely story, ritual,
ceremony and eventually art. So it has been for most of human history. So it
is, I suggest (and my data back me up), even today.
Roger C. Schank, a
professor of psychology at Northwestern University who specializes in the study
of artificial intelligence, argues in his book "Tell Me a Story" that
stories are the way humans explain reality to themselves. The more and better
our stories, Schank says, the better our intelligence.
Catholicism has great
stories because at the center of its heritage is "sacramentalism,"
the conviction that God discloses Himself in the objects and events and persons
of ordinary life. Hence Catholicism is willing to risk stories about angels and
saints and souls in purgatory and Mary the Mother of Jesus and stained-glass
windows and statues and stations of the cross and rosaries and medals and the
whole panoply of images and devotions that were so offensive to the austere
leaders of the Reformation. Moreover, the Catholic heritage also has the
elaborate ceremonial rituals that mark the passing of the year -- Midnight
Mass, the Easter Vigil, First Communion, May Crowning, Lent, Advent,
grammar-school graduation and the festivals of the saints.
Catholicism has also
embraced the whole of the human life cycle in Sacraments (with a capital S),
which provide rich ceremonial settings, even when indifferently administered
for the critical landmarks of life. The Sacrament of Reconciliation (confession
that was) and the Sacrament of the Anointing of the Sick (extreme unction that
was) embed in ritual and mystery the deeply held Catholic story of second
chances.
The
"sacramentalism" of the Catholic heritage has also led it to absorb
as much as it thinks it can from what it finds to be good, true and beautiful
in pagan religions: Brigid is converted from the pagan goddess to the Christian
patron of spring, poetry and new life in Ireland; Guadalupe is first a pagan
and then a Christian shrine in Spain and then our Lady of Guadalupe becomes the
patron of poor Mexicans. This "baptism" of pagan metaphors (sometimes
done more wisely than at other times) adds yet another overlay of stories to
the Catholic heritage.
The sometimes inaccurate
dictum "once a Catholic, always a Catholic," is based on the fact
that the religious images of Catholicism are acquired early in life and are
tenacious. You may break with the institution, you may reject the propositions,
but you cannot escape the images.
The Eucharist (as purists
insist we must now call the Mass) is a particularly powerful and appealing
Catholic ritual, even when it is done badly (as it often is) and especially
when it is done well (which it sometimes is). In the Mass we join a community
meal of celebration with our neighbors, our family, our friends, those we love.
Such an awareness may not be explicitly on the minds of Catholics when they go
to Church on Saturday afternoon or Sunday morning, but is the nature of
metaphor that those who are influenced by it need not be consciously aware of
the influence. In a New York Times-CBS News Poll last April, 69 percent of
Catholics responding said they attend Mass for reasons of meaning rather than
obligation.
Another important
Catholic story is that of the neighborhood parish. Because of the tradition of
village parishes with which Catholics came to America, the dense concentration
of Catholics in many cities and the small geographical size of the parish,
parishes can and often do become intense communities for many Catholics. They
actuate what a University of Chicago sociologist, James S. Coleman, calls
"social capital," the extra resources of energy, commitment and
intelligence that overlapping structures produce. This social capital, this
story of a sacred place in the heart of urban America, becomes even stronger
when the parish contains that brilliant American Catholic innovation -- the
parochial school.
Perhaps the Catholic
religious sensibility all begins with the Christmas crib. A mother shows her
child (perhaps age 3) the crib scene. The child loves it (of course) because it
has everything she likes -- a mommy, a daddy, a baby, animals, shepherds, shepherd
children, angels and men in funny clothes -- and with token integration! Who is
the baby? the little girl asks. That's Jesus. Who's Jesus? The mother
hesitates, not sure of exactly how you explain the communication of idioms to a
3-year-old. Jesus is God. That doesn't bother the little girl at all. Everyone
was a baby once. Why not God? Who's the lady holding Jesus? That's Mary. Oh!
Who's Mary? The mother throws theological caution to the winds. She's God's
mommy. Again the kid has no problem. Everyone has a mommy, why not God?
It's a hard story to
beat. Later in life the little girl may come to understand that God loves us so
much that He takes on human form to be able to walk with us even into the
valley of death and that God also loves us the way a mother loves a newborn
babe -- which is the function of the Mary metaphor in the Catholic tradition.
It may seem that I am
reducing religion to childishness -- to stories and images and rituals and
communities. In fact, it is in the poetic, the metaphorical, the experiential
dimension of the personality that religion finds both its origins and raw
power. Because we are reflective creatures we must also reflect on our
religious experiences and stories; it is in the (lifelong) interlude of
reflection that propositional religion and religious authority become
important, indeed indispensable. But then the religiously mature person returns
to the imagery, having criticized it, analyzed it, questioned it, to commit the
self once more in sophisticated and reflective maturity to the story.
The Catholic imagination
sees God and Her grace lurking everywhere and hence enjoys a more gracious and
benign repertory of religious symbols than do most other religions. On measures
of religious imagery I have developed for national surveys (and call the GRACE
scale), Catholics consistently have more "gracious" images of God:
they are more likely than others to picture God as a Mother, a Lover, a Spouse
and a Friend (as opposed to a Father, a Judge, a Master and a King). The story
of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus is the most "graceful"
story of all -- the story of a God who in some fashion took on human form so
that he could show us how to live and how to die, a God who went down into the
valley of death with us and promised that death would not be the end.
How do they reconcile
such gracious imagery with the often apparently stern and punitive postures of
their religious leadership? It must be understood that religious heritages
contain many different strains and components, not all of them always in
complete harmony with one another. However, in any apparent conflict between
images of a gracious God and severe propositional teaching of the leaders of a
heritage, the latter will surely lose.
Consider the matter of sexuality,
a subject on which Catholicism is thought to be particularly repressive. Under
the grim and dominant influence of St. Augustine, the Catholic high tradition
has always been suspicious of "too much" marital sex. It was all
right for married people to make love for the purposes of having children, so
long as they didn't enjoy it too much.
Whether this cold and
harsh teaching was ever accepted by married lay people, whether in fact it was
ever possible for anyone but a celibate theologian to believe it, remains open
to question. But the problem did not bother most Catholics because they didn't
know about St. Augustine and they learned about marital sex from their parish
priests (some of whom had wives of their own), their mothers, their friends and
neighbors and especially from the marriage liturgies which praised the union
between man and woman as reflecting the union between Jesus and his people. The
Sarum ritual from Catholic England provided a blessing for the marriage bed and
for the bride that she might be vigorous and pleasing in bed -- a blessing that
today we would doubtless want to extend to men. While the Anglican ritual of
the Book of Common Prayer follows Sarum closely, it discreetly omits such
references.
In any contest between
St. Augustine and Sarum for the hearts and the bodies of the common people,
Sarum was bound to win. But surely the Sarum tradition and what it stands for
cannot have survived to the present, can it? Does not everyone know that
Catholics are sexually repressed and that Catholic husbands and wives do not
enjoy marital sex? Like a lot of other things "everyone" knows about
Catholics, this happens not to be true. Or to put the matter more cautiously,
while Catholics may be sexually repressed, they are on the average less likely
to be sexually repressed than other Americans.
According to two
different national surveys, Catholics have sex more often than other Americans,
are more playful in their erotic amusements than others and apparently enjoy
sex with their spouse more than do others.
Moreover if I use my
GRACE scale I can account for all of the differences between Catholics and
others in their sexual pleasures. Catholics seem to enjoy sex more precisely
because they have more benign religious images. I do not claim that they are
aware of the link between their enjoyment of sex and religious images;
metaphors work usually on the preconscious level. Yet one can hardly find a
better proof that religion is imagery before it's anything else and after it's
everything else.
A new school in the
psychology of religion, which bases itself on the so-called attachment theory
of psychological maturation, supports my perspective. A happy and playful
attachment between mother and baby prepares the child for similar attachments
later in life, especially to God, who is in some sense a surrogate mother -- an
all-powerful source of love and reassurance. Prof. Lee A. Kirkpatrick of the
College of William and Mary has suggested recently that Catholicism is an
especially powerful religious heritage on the imaginative level precisely
because it offers so many objects of potential attachment. It has been
suggested that the most powerful of all the objects of attachment is the
metaphor of Mary the Mother of Jesus representing the mother love of God.
I believe that is
absolutely right, although some progressive Catholics have tried to play down
the role of Mary in the Catholic tradition lest it offend our ecumenical
dialogue partners. Research on Catholic young people reveals that the Mary
image continues to be their most powerful religious image. Who would not find
appealing a religion which suggests that God loves us like a mother loves a
little child? Who would not be enchanted by a story which suggests that we are,
as the Chicago theologian John Shea has argued, not just creatures, not just
sinners but, more than anything, beloved children?
When I was in grammar
school in the mid-1930's, the nuns told a story that sums up why people stay
Catholic. One day Jesus went on a tour of the heavenly city and noted that
there were certain new residents who ought not to be there, not until they had
put in a long time in purgatory and some of them only on a last-minute appeal.
He stormed out to the gate where Peter was checking the day's intake on his Compaq
486DX Deskpro computer (I have edited the nuns' story) -- next to which, on his
work station, was a fishing pole and a papal crown.
"You've failed
again, Simon Peter," said the Lord.
"What have I done
now?"
"You let a lot of
people in that don't belong."
"I didn't do
it."
"Well, who
did?"
"You won't like
it."
"Tell me
anyway."
"I turn them away
from the front gate and then they go around to the back door and your mother
lets them in!"
It is the religious
sensibility behind that fanciful story that explains why Catholics remain
Catholic. It might not be your religious sensibility. But if you want to
understand Catholics -- and if Catholics want to understand themselves -- the
starting point is to comprehend the enormous appeal of that sensibility. It's
the stories.
Andrew M. Greeley is a
professor of sociology at the University of Chicago and the University of
Arizona. His book "Religion as Poetry," on which this essay is based,
will be published by Transaction Publishers this fall.
