The Sacred, The Profane, & 'Inculturation'

Did A Native American Ritual At A Catholic Chrism Mass Go Too Far?

Native American ritual at Catholic chrism mass in Michigan

Good morning. I know I’ve already posted six times this week, but let me toss out this one, because I think it’s on an important point, and I would like to read y’all talking about it. I like talking to y’all.

Saw this tweet just now. Click here to sample the video:

They’ve added Native American ritual to the beginning of this mass. I remarked on Twitter that it reminded me of a conversation I once had with a Catholic who had become Orthodox, who told me that he began to lose faith in Catholicism when he came to believe that many of the men whose job it is to uphold and “manage” the faith — the clergy — no longer really believed in Catholic Christianity.

To which a follower replied:

This is completely beside the point. I’m not talking about theology; I’m talking about psychology. Catholicism may in fact be true, but the fact that (some) clergy behave as if it is not true makes it harder for people who are having doubts to overcome those doubts and perceive that truth.

As you know, I lived through this myself, and left Catholicism. Please keep in mind that we are not talking whether or not Catholicism (or any form of Christianity) is actually true, but about the perception of that expression of the faith is true.

For example, Islam might be true, but I have never sat down and examined the case for Islam carefully, weighing the arguments and so forth, because to do so would require an immense effort to overcome my own biases as someone raised in a Christian culture. Similarly, someone my age who was raised in Riyadh would have to make titanic efforts to consider fairly whether or not Christianity is true. Or Buddhism. Or … anything but Islam. You see what I’m getting at?

If I lived in Riyadh, chances are I would find myself delving into Islamic teaching at some point, simply because I wanted to better understand the culture in which I lived. I would not be surprised if Muslims living in the West had been moved at some point to take Christianity more seriously than they otherwise might have done, only because it was more normative in the society in which they live, and therefore more plausible.

Because that’s what we’re talking about here: plausibility. Nobody has the time or the capacity to examine the truth claims of every one of man’s religions, to apply reason alone to them, and draw a conclusion about which one is truthful, or the most truthful. We all make our decisions to accept a particular faith, and to reject other possibilities, or to reject all faiths, based on reasons other than a pure logical comparison of them all.

This cartoon captures the absurdity of the Vatican permitting Native American ritual (for example) in or around a Catholic mass, but forbidding the traditional Latin liturgy of the Catholic Church:

This really is how Pope Francis has handled things. The one thing you cannot do at liturgy, as he sees it, is use the old mass. You’d have to be dense not to wonder what the heck is going on within the Catholic hierarchy. How Catholic are they, anyway? It is not at all a trivial question.

I believe that Orthodox Christianity is the fullest, most truthful expression of the Christian faith. But I also realize that even for people who are Christian, but who were raised in the West, it is not easy to reach the conclusion I did, mostly because Orthodoxy is so foreign to their experience. If I were trying to evangelize someone — a Western Christian, say — for Orthodoxy, it would be wide of the mark to tell them to sit down with a list of theological and ecclesiological propositions, and compare it side by side with Catholicism, or whatever Protestant form of Christianity in which they already believed.

Doing so is usually part of the process of conversion. But it is very rarely how things begin. The non-abstract, non-logical parts of the religious experience come first.

In my own case, I had three years of immersion in the hideousness of the Catholic abuse scandal to wear away the foundations of my Catholic faith. The entire time, I satisfied myself by invoking the principle that no matter how the clergy and the institutional Church behaved, Catholicism Is True. And, as a matter of logic, this is unassailable. (You could apply the same dynamic to an Orthodox believer who left Orthodoxy for Catholicism, or some non-Orthodox form of Christianity, by the way.)

But after a while, it got to the point where I began having serious doubts about the truth claims of Catholicism, in part because I could not reconcile those truth claims with the way the actual, existing Catholic Church was in my time and part of the world.

It would have been easier to hold on to my Catholicism if I had had a solid parish, or leadership I could believe in. I searched. One very big turning point for me was Ash Wednesday 2004. As part of the media, I had seen a preview of Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ two days earlier. It tore me to shreds, but in a good way. I think it opened nationwide on Ash Wednesday, but I came to Ash Wednesday mass utterly wrecked, convinced of my sin, and ready to repent. No better preparation for Lent could have been possible, I think.

And yet, in my Dallas parish, the plush priest preached a homily advancing the claim that the season of Lent is really a time for us to learn to love ourselves more. Keep in mind that this was only two years into the Scandal, which broke big out of Boston in late winter 2002. Dallas was an epicenter of it, with the hideous bishop at the time having overseen, and covered up, horrific abuse, and mistreated victims and their families.

None of this was the fault of that parish priest, mind you. And for all I know, the homilies at other Catholic parishes in the diocese on Ash Wednesday were models of the Lenten spirit. All I can tell you was that in that parish, on that day, this is what I heard. And it was a piledriver to my morale as a Catholic.

Just before we arrived in Dallas and started attending that parish, its beloved pastor had been reassigned by the bishop because, other parishioners told me, he criticized the bishop’s negligent handling of abuse claims. I had done some research, and found that it was true about this priest. It will surprise no one now, in 2024, to learn that a Catholic bishop cared more about preserving the image of his authority, and the authority of the institution, than about morality and justice for victims of clerical sexual abuse. But back then, we were all just learning these things. I knew more than most, because of my work.

It’s one thing to know it from reading the cases, but another thing to experience it made manifest in one’s own parish. And mind you, that Ash Wednesday homily was no one-off there. The priest’s homilies were the quintessence of Moralistic Therapeutic Deism. It had gotten to the point where on about half the Sundays, I would have to walk out during the homily and stand outside praying the rosary, because I would be so angry at the guy. I remember one Sunday evening mass in particular, the deacon preached, and gave a sermon criticizing Protestant fundamentalists, and saying that we ought to all be grateful that we are Catholics, and not so closed-minded.

I was almost in tears, and they were tears of anger. They weren’t tears of anger because I have a soft spot for fundamentalists. They were tears of anger because I was coming to the conclusion that these people, these clergy, don’t really give a damn about the Catholic faith. It’s all pantomime to them. Sin, repentance, humility, good and evil — all abstract concepts for these comfortable middle-class clerics, and their comfortable, middle-class congregation. I too was, and I am, a comfortable middle-class Christian, and I need to be challenged to repent, to turn from my sin, and so forth. I eventually came to the conclusion that not too many people here really care all that much about what Christ asks us to do.

Maybe that is true in most churches in most times. All I can tell you is that I was deeply wounded, spiritually, by what I had learned and heard and experienced in the Scandal, and I desperately needed help believing that the Catholic faith was about more than learning how to love our fat, pampered, middle-class selves. When I realized one Sunday that I was spending a shocking number of Sundays driving home from mass explaining to my oldest son, who was old enough then to listen to the homilies, that what Father, or the deacon, had preached that day is not actually what the Catholic Church teaches, I knew it was time to go.

We visited so many parishes, trying to find a place where we could worship as part of a community that wasn’t perfect, God knows, but where we felt most people, especially the clergy, took the faith seriously. This is important: we were not looking for a perfect congregation. Those don’t exist. We were just looking for a place where the things we believed, as orthodox Catholics, seem to be taken seriously.

We finally landed at a church that took the better part of an hour to get to on Sunday morning — not an easy thing to manage with two squirmy little boys. For a while, we thought we were safe. We relaxed. The homilies were strong, and the sense in the congregation was that we were all there because we believed in God, and we had a shared faith in Catholic Christianity.

And then I discovered by accident that one of the priests there — the charmingly orthodox one to whom we were growing close — was not who he said he was. He had come there from a mid-Atlantic diocese, where he had been formally suspended by his bishop after being accused of sexually abusing a teenage boy. He was not supposed to be in ministry, but he returned to Dallas, his hometown, talked the pastor of this parish into putting him to work off the books, without telling the local bishop, and keeping it quiet. I presume that the pastor did not believe the accusation against this priest, and believed, as I did, because this is what that priest told me, that “the liberals” had driven him out of his East Coast diocese. I had not imagined that he had been formally suspended. It was unthinkable in those early days of the Dallas Charter that a suspended priest would be able to work in a parish.

It turned out that the entire parish council knew the truth about Father — that he had been formally suspended, and wasn’t supposed to be in active ministry — but had agreed to keep it from the congregation, for their own supposed good. This parish leadership — including its lay leadership — colluded to protect an accused abuser who was an extremely charismatic man, and to deceive not only the local bishop, but everybody else in the congregation.

Why? God only knows. We left that parish, and after a miserable interlude back at our old parish, we decided to give Orthodoxy a try. The first thing that struck me about the Orthodox liturgy we attended at St. Seraphim Cathedral in Dallas was: these people really believe this stuff.

I had never experienced that. My wife had, as a Protestant, and she came alive again. You all know what happened next.

Now, this is not Orthodoxy everywhere. When we moved from Dallas to Philadelphia a few years later, a parishioner there who had lived in that part of the world warned me that the Orthodoxy we will experience up there is not like what we were used to at St. Seraphim. This proved to be true, alas. Even though there were many more Orthodox parishes in that city, it was hard for us to find a parish that felt like home. Eventually we did, but it was a lot more like our Dallas Catholic experience.

I would, in time, meet some Russian Orthodox Christians from Moscow, who were suffering greatly from what they believed was the corruption of their own church’s institution, by politics and power. I say “what they believed” because I have no way of judging the substance of their complaints. The point is that they were remaining faithful to the Orthodox Church in spite of the hierarchy and much of the clergy.

And yet, they could all count on the Divine Liturgy being said with great reverence, and, of course, on the presence of Christ — the Real Presence — in the Eucharist. The fact that however corrupt this or that priest was, that he would not mess with the liturgy — that was huge.

It’s this kind of thing, I believe, that keeps a lot of Latin Mass Catholics in the Catholic faith, despite everything else. I get it. It is no doubt the case that it can be possible for a Christian to make an idol of the liturgy (the Tridentine rite, the Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom, etc.), but I think the experience of most of us liturgical Christians is that the solemn liturgy manifests Christ among us, and points us to Him, as nothing else does, or can do. This might seem weird to our Protestant brothers and sisters, but I assure you, it’s not mere aesthetics.

The fact is, we are all embodied creatures, not robots. God did not send to us a rulebook. He sent us His Son. This is certainly not to say that there are no rules; Jesus of Nazareth said that he came not to abolish the Law, but to fulfill it. It is to say, though, that God understands our humanity, and comes to us within that humanity, and all its limitations.

In my case, the anguish I felt over the abuse scandal, and the way the institutional Catholic Church reacted to it, was more than I could handle. I guess a lot of this has to do with the kind of man I am, and my own history. Whatever. The point I want to make in this particular discussion is that when Catholics see their priests, and even their Pope, behaving in certain ways, especially with the liturgy, it signals to some of them that these men don’t really believe in Catholicism. As a matter of fact, I remember in the first year of the scandal, asking a Catholic priest friend of mine how on earth the bishops could have done what they did, with all the cover-ups and the punishing of victims and families. I’ll never forget where we were walking on the street in New York when he answered: “Because they don’t believe in God.”

I struggled to understand that then. I don’t now. I am sure every one of those bishops would have been shocked to hear that accusation, especially coming from a priest. Nevertheless, actions speak far louder than words. Their actions showed that they did not take the faith seriously. It shook me to wrap my mind around what this good priest was telling me, but I had my catechesis to fall back on. Until the day came when even that was not enough.

The reason I’ve written all this is because I recognize a real danger among a certain kind of believer — not just Catholics, mind you! — to think that the Christian faith is primarily about words and propositions. It’s not true. I’ve lived through this realization, and I’ve tried to apply it in my own life. I’m thinking now about a particularly cruel and hateful man — I won’t tell you his church affiliation — who delights in crushing people, and who presents himself as a model of orthodoxy and intellection within his faith tradition. Sure, we all have our faults, but there is a chasm between what this public figure professes, and how he treats others. The only people who can recognize in him any kind of model of the Christian life are those for whom the substance of the faith is to be found in agreeing with certain propositions, and hating those who dissent.

For that matter, ordinary, non-celebrity people like this are everywhere to be found online, in hardcore trad bro circles in Orthodoxy, Catholicism, and Reformed Protestantism.

As I write this, I am thinking about a very liberal Catholic priest of my acquaintance for whom I have immense respect: Father Thomas Doyle. Father Doyle, who knows what he believes anymore as a matter of doctrine and dogma. But for decades, he has been profoundly Christ-like in his reaching out to sex abuse victims and their families, and defending them in court. I first heard of Father Doyle from a very orthodox Catholic priest friend who knew him slightly. He told me a story back in 2001, about a family that my priest knew, whose teenage son had blown his own brains out shortly after he admitted that he had been raped as an altar boy by their parish pastor. My priest friend said that he put them in touch with Father Doyle, who got in his car and drove hundreds of miles to be with them, right then and there — to hear them, to pray with them, to console them, and to promise he would fight for them, for justice for their son and the other young men who had been victims of this priest, and who were now in their graves, by their own hands.

That is the Christian faith. That is the kind of thing I’m talking about here. I haven’t talked to Father Doyle for many years, but I recall reading some things he had said online indicating that he is very, very far from any kind of Catholic orthodoxy. I’m not a Catholic anymore, but I regret that, and I wouldn’t recommend Father Doyle as a source of Catholic orthodoxy. But I would heartily recommend him as a model of Catholic living, and I hope that I, as an Orthodox Christian, can have even a tiny bit of the courage, charity, and selflessness of that heterodox Catholic priest.

Father Doyle’s personal sanctity does not nullify his failures in orthodoxy, of course. You know who was theologically orthodox? Cardinal Bernard Law. But if you were a stranger to the faith, and you observed the behavior of those two contemporary Catholic clergy, which one do you think would have more credibility in your eyes?

This is the point I’m trying to get at. Just as we cannot separate our minds and our souls from our bodies, we can’t separate the Christian faith out as an abstraction. Lately I have been suffering from recurring nightmares having to do with the destruction of my family by rejection and ultimately divorce. I have found it consoling to think about poor Jesus, rejected and condemned by his own people. He is Jesus and I am not — I get that. But dwelling on the fact that my God knows intimately what it is like to experience rejection by the people you love — man, it has held me together. He didn’t end my suffering, but he suffered with me, and with all of us. To the weak wreck of a man that I am these days, this matters more than any catechetical point.

To go back to the original reason for this post. The Native American stuff in that mass was not about any kind of cruelty or indifference to suffering. It’s about what we admit in the temple as sacred, and appropriate to temple rites. I believe that it is possible to have Native American styles of worship that rightly honor God, just as it is possible to have God-honoring styles of worship in many different forms. But what we do in the temple, at the altar — that is a different thing, and must be a different thing.

Many years ago, at a garden party in Dallas, an Evangelical missionary who had recently returned from Guatemala told me how shocked he was to arrive at the village where he’d been assigned, and to visit the local Catholic parish. As the priest celebrated mass at one end of the nave, at the other, a local shaman was performing an animist ritual, with the priest’s permission. They called that “inculturation”; the Protestant missionary called that syncretism — and he was right. This Evangelical did not believe what Catholics believe about the liturgy and the Eucharist, but even he understood that pagan ritual had no place in a house of Christian worship.

In the case of the ritual around the altar in the Diocese of Superior, for all we know, everything the Native American Catholics chanted around that altar was godly. But to my way of thinking, it did not belong at an altar in a Catholic church. We would never, ever think of having anything like that in an Orthodox church, not because we disdain or dislike indigenous people, but because the sanctity of the temple and temple rites must be maintained. We wouldn’t even have the native rituals of American suburbia in Orthodox temples, for the same reason. This is why we Orthodox look at videos of entertainment spectacles at Protestant megachurches, and wonder what on earth is the message of that religion. It’s not about aesthetic snobbery, but about blurring the difference between the sacred and the profane.

I wrote this a couple of years back in this space, about what Mircea Eliade had to say about temples in his great book The Sacred And The Profane:

Eliade says that temples exist symbolically “at the center of the world” because they are where man establishes communication with the transcendent realm. It’s not that man can’t talk to God in other places and in other ways, but the temple is a special place set apart. The temple often represents a sacred mountain where the initial meeting with God happened. For traditional Christians, churches are a representation of Golgotha, and therefore “the pre-eminent ‘link’ between earth and heaven.” Obviously there are countless churches in the world, so understand that they all exist at the center of the world in a symbolic, mythic sense.

This jumped out at me because it is easy to see how the older, sacramental forms of Christianity conform to this global pattern. The death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth is the core of the religion, and is re-enacted every time there is a liturgy at the altar. The altar is Golgotha, which is part of Mount Moriah, on which the city of Jerusalem is built. When you take the sacramentality out of the religion, as many forms of Protestantism have, it wrecks the symbolism. How can a church that looks like a theatrical space do the symbolic work it is supposed to do? Does it matter? I think it surely must.

You’ll remember, maybe, the lovely line from an older black lady running the dry cleaners in my hometown, St. Francisville, when my then-priest brought Orthodox liturgical vestments to her for the first time: “Ooooh-weee, those look like they got God all over them!” Yes, exactly! (Father Matthew, from Washington state, was amazed and delighted to go on to discuss the Old Testament in detail with this same woman, who had only a high school education.) Physical space, visual imagery, sounds, smells — these things matter. They aren’t the same thing as God, but they prepare us, consciously and subconsciously, to enter into communion with Him. The fact that traditional religions of all kinds, around the world, build temples that don’t look the same, but which symbolically perform the same function, is anthropologically meaningful, don’t you think?

Let me be clear: it’s not that God is not with people who worship in low-church Protestant temples; it’s that the structures perhaps make it harder for the worshipers to feel God’s presence. This matters for my book project, because I am trying to figure out how we can re-enchant the world, and live more like “religious man” (Eliade’s term) lived in the premodern era. The Protestantization of worship spaces, and the de-sacramentalization of some forms of Christianity, likely contributed to the disenchantment of the world. It wasn’t on purpose — nobody can accuse the Puritans, for example, of wanting to push God out of the world — but their theology, and horror at things that smacked of papistry, might have led them to throw out too much.

… Eliade discusses how for religious man, even his home must be configured religiously, that is to say, to bring it closer to the Center Of The World by making it a place that looks like where God dwells. In Orthodoxy, it is customary for an Orthodox home to have an icon corner, which functions as a kind of home altar. This is where the family gathers to pray. Eliade talks about how the modernist architect Le Corbusier described the home as “a machine to live in,” and goes on to say that the desacralization of the home is part of the greater desacralization of the cosmos by industrial, Enlightenment, scientific thought. He wonders if “this secularization of nature is really final, if no possibility remains for nonreligious man to rediscover the sacred dimension of existence in the world.” My task in this book is to discover what nonreligious man needs to do to rediscover it — and what religious man needs to do both to ground himself more deeply in the religious sense, and to make true religion more inviting to nonreligious man.

We know that a religion that accommodates itself to a desacralized, profane world is not attractive to non-religious people … but at the same time, very many of them don’t want to do what it takes to be authentically religious. This is a challenge for us. Intuitively, it seems to me that we have to make our habitation — not just our houses, but the world we live in — seem more sacred.

I suppose someone who supported what the Diocese of Superior approved at their cathedral, with the Native ceremonial, would say that they were simply making the place sacred, or celebrating its sanctity, using vernacular Indian forms of hallowing. I can honor the intention, but still insist that this is just not done in a traditional Christian temple, and as part of a traditional Christian ritual. What it does, seems to me, is to convey the idea that the liturgical rites of the Catholic faith are there not to call us out of ourselves, but to be fiddled with to be a vehicle of communal self-expression.

And a Christian who believes that this kind of thing is beside the point — that the real question is, “Is Catholicism true?” — is making a very serious mistake when it comes to maintaining and passing along the Christian faith. Again, this is not a theological point, but a psychological one, a sociological one, even, perhaps with Eliade in mind, an anthropological one. The message of the Catholic faith, and of any form of the Christian faith, is not confined to what it teaches in its catechisms, but the way those abstract truths it proclaims are lived out concretely, especially in worship.

Goodness, this went on longer than I intended. Well, what do you think? I’m not interested in an argument over Catholicism vs Orthodoxy vs Protestantism. I’m much more interested in a discussion about the connection between belief and worship, between the sacred and the profane, and so forth. As ever, please let’s proceed with charity and respect. I welcome disagreement, even strong disagreement, with my position, and I encourage you all to disagree with each other, as your conscience and convictions lead. But please, let’s remember we are all friends here, and we are here to learn from each other.