Charles,
I checked out your SI profile and noticed that you're a big fan of Pie X and, accordingly, a denigrator of Vatican II...
As you can imagine, I've spent most of my lifetime in a Catholic environment --only to end up as a staunch skeptical agnostic! Yet, I serenely recall all these teachers, professors, and clergymen who, somehow, brought me up in a humanistic cast of mind.... Besides, over here, in Europe, many places and distinctive features wrap you up, sometimes unconsciously, in a Catholic conditioning --after all, we're dealing with a 2,000-year old cultural background!
Hence, Christian values pervade everyone, even the most resolute freethinkers who, ironically, assert their philosophy relatively to the Christian framework. Notwithstanding the diverse Traditionalist and other Fundamentalist breeds that have popped up here and there since Vatican II and who more often than not belong to the far right fringe, the mainstream reaction to the Catholic lobby is usually a good-tempered one. Which doesn't mean that people turn a blind eye on the Church's scandalous scams --whether pedophile affairs or financial fiddles.
Yet, all in all, we, in Europe, don't seem to share any religious activism with Americans. To put it bluntly, people over here don't support their religious 'team' as you'd cheer your local football team! There's no such a sports craze about Catholic tradition or Calvinist reformism for instance.
Furthermore, most practising Catholics expect their leaders (ie Bishops, priests,...) to be mild-mannered fellows. US televangelists can't make it in Europe because they basically look like burlesque crooks.... Contrariwise, Catholic personalities such as l'Abbe Pierre or Monseigneur Jacques Gaillot, or abbot Gabriel Ringlet in Belgium, do enjoy a moral authority that reaches well beyond their Catholic fellowship. For that matter, I believe that that's what the US Catholicism is lacking: humanistic clerics who are not up to some fin-de-siecle crusade, always sermonizing people about their alleged sins....
In brief, I think Catholic Americans should tackle Catholicism as a Culture, not only as a disembodied Religion. And by 'Culture' I don't mean chivalric histrionics or the revival of King Arthur's Round Table! I mean the philosophical background that has harmoniously developed alongside Roman Catholicism.
Primus in orbe deos fecit timor, ardua caelo
Fulmina quum caderent, discussaque moenia flammis....
Gus. |
