Reclaiming a Catholic Culture

-Shorts and tee shirts, short skirts, ripped jeans and flip-flops at Sunday Mass
-Mundane chit-chat before, during and after Mass
-Schmalzy liturgical music and abstract "sacred" art
- The wholesale jettisoning of the Latin tongue, in clear defiance of Vatican II
-Large swaths of woefully uncatechized faithful, totally ignorant of Church history and Catholic culture
-A superabundance of soft-sofa homilies and gutted churches, cluttered with eye-offensive bric-a-brac

Has the Catholic Church in the United States become a Church of vulgarians? The high culture of the West, from art, to music and literature, science and innovation, is very much indebted to the rich patrimony of the Catholic Church. (Those interested in exploring this theme should pick up Thomas Woods' excellent book, How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization.) Despite the inexhaustible wellspring of high culture, which has been faithfully guarded and nurtured by the Catholic Church for thousands of years, here in the United States we've witnessed in many quarters the extirpation of all things beautiful and inspiring, all in the name of "fitting in" so as to satisfy the mystifying demands of diversity. The current Pope, in addition to his spiritual depth is (much like his predecessor) the personification of culture and refinement, good taste and acumen. All too often though, the Church leadership in America, instead of rising to the occasion to issue a bold clarion call to be more than just average or so-so, opts for equivocation and accommodation. Catholics, in response to this leadership vacuum, have defined what it means to be Catholic for themselves, on their own terms. The bar has been significantly lowered and virtually no one is calling for it to be elevated. Opponents of tradition have effectively air-brushed from the minds of Catholics all memory of things pertaining to "High Church" liturgical and cultural practice. In its place, they have filled in the gaps with all sorts of garish paraphernalia.

Liturgy, that sacred event which should be (and has been in the past) an incubator for a distinct Catholic identity and culture in the world, has been undermined from within for decades. Instead of adorning and embellishing the sacred liturgy with accoutrements and solemnity suitable for what it truly is, we have seen the liturgy woefully dumbed down and churches cluttered to the point of disorienting distraction, combining bad art, atrocious liturgical music, busybodies mulling about in the sanctuary and hollow, self-affirming homilies offered by uninspiring, sycophantic priests. In light of the widespread Protestantization, nay, Oprahfication of the Mass, one can see why so many Catholics today haven't the foggiest about what liturgy is.

A priest friend of mine once wisely noted, "Liturgy, offered properly, is formative in the faith, but when offered improperly it actually deforms people in the faith." How true and painfully evident this pity observation is! In other words, when the wrong things are emphasized or elevated over and above the important things, the faithful are given a distorted understanding of what and where the focus of liturgy ought to be. It's no wonder then that Church documents on liturgy state explicitly that the prayers and practices of Mass are not to be altered by the priest (not that this directive has halted the run amok liturgical tampering that goes on unabated to this very day at nearly every parish). Sacred elements that once provided Catholics with a distinct identity were misconstrued as fluff, both superfluous and harmful, mossy relics of a bygone era: Latin, chant, incense, intricately woven liturgical vestments, bells, etc., all irrelevant! An insatiable desire to pander to the masses and the lowest common denominator saw these elements swept aside by modern-day iconoclasts, only to be replaced with things that made Catholicism seem mediocre, or worse still, gaudy. As Michael Knox Beran observes, "Being a child of Rousseau, the liberal believes, deep down, that progress can be made only after the old artistic forms--the corrupt and archaic poetries of the past--are overthrown. He wants to make a community from moral and aesthetic scratch."

So is it any wonder that, when it comes to the average Catholic approaching the liturgy, an acute sense of appropriateness and solemnity has taken flight? Is it any surprise that Catholics seem ambivalent when it comes to assimilating the finer details of the faith, its proud history and its unique culture? If their only experience of Catholicism has been watered down, bland, ordinary and totally uninspiring, who can blame them for being thoroughly unimpressed and bored? A Catholic culture should be thriving in the United States. Surely the numbers and the talent are there. But, as a result of much of the leadership's endless shilly-shally, damaging blunders and meekness before the many challenges presented by society, the Church in America still finds itself playing catch-up.

In Montesquieu's cheeky Persian Letters, Usbek, in a missive to his friend Ibben writes: "It is a great sight, for a Muslim, to see a Christian town for the first time. I am not talking about the things which strike everyone straight away, such as the differences in architecture, or clothes, or way of life. Even in the slightest trivialities there is something curious, which I feel I cannot express." Yes, there used to be something ineffably distinct, something beautiful, about our ways.