The arguments over the new pope are breaking down among the usual lines.
The conservative side views the Catholic Church as a bulwark worshipping science, transgenderism, feminism, vulgar popular culture and other evils of modernism. It loves tradition and the Latin Mass.
The “progressive” side wants to welcome immigrants, legal or not; deify the LGBT community; and focus on poor people, social justice, and artistic freedom.
There may be a way to satisfy both sides.
Two recent books analyze the role of the Catholic Church in light of modern times. One is from a Catholic author who leans right politically, the other from one who leans left. They both have a similar message: Catholicism should engage with modernism and “baptize” the elements that are good. In the past, such an interaction has been good for both modernism and the Catholic Church.
In The Irony of Modern Catholic History: How the Church Rediscovered Itself and Challenged the Modern World to Reform, Catholic scholar George Weigel explores how Catholicism has interacted with modernity over the last several hundred years. Weigel describes the dynamic as “the Church’s relationship to the demise of the traditional political order and the rise of new forms of government (including, but not limited to, democracy); the Church’s relationship to the passing of the traditional cultural order (the displacement of metaphysics at the center of Western intellectual life and the rise of the scientific method as the dominant paradigm of knowledge); the Church’s relationship to the transformation of traditional society into new forms of community (including new forms of economic life).”
Weigel explores how Catholicism went from condemning these modern changes to cautiously engaging with them — and then finally calling for modernism to align itself with the moral laws and teachings of Catholicism. In short, both sides gained, with modernism reminded of its spiritual aspect and the Catholic Church able to shape and enrich the good parts of modernism.
“Cultural and intellectual modernity certainly challenged the then regnant forms of Catholic intellectual life,” Weigel writes. “The modern ‘social question’ posed by the Industrial Revolution and the rise of an urban proletariat eventually compelled a new Catholic appraisal of modern economic life and its impacts on society.” Modernism challenged the Church and made the Church better and more responsive to people by forcing it to respond. The Church responded, making it relevant to more people.
In his insightful forthcoming book The Last Supper: Art, Faith, Sex, and Controversy in the 1980s, Catholic journalist Paul Elie explores Catholicism’s engagements with art and culture in the 1980s. Elie’s theory is that religion didn’t fade in the 1980s — it just became the expression of the “crypto-religious.” Artists such as Madonna, Martin Scorsese, and Andy Warhol saw the spiritual in art, film, dance, and everyday objects.
“As moderns,” Elie writes, “they affirmed the integrity of ordinary experience, in defiance of the Church; as Catholics, they saw the ordinary as imbued with a supernatural presence, in defiance of modernism in the arts.” This caused them “to express their Catholicism furtively—and cryptically.” Elie cites James Joyce as an early modernist example: “In his career, the varieties of crypto-Catholic artistry converge. There’s the artist as an exile from his churchy upbringing, who has put away beliefs as childish things; the artist as a priest of the imagination, who consecrates the commonplace; the artist as at once a rebel and a religious pioneer, who follows the spirit to places where ecclesial institutions forbid it to go.”
Andy Warhol was a Catholic artist who saw “spiritual presence” in ordinary things such as a human face or a bottle of Coca-Cola. “Firm beliefs have softened,” Elie writes, “rituals been left behind, faith in a personal God thinned out or chipped away—but the sense of a supernatural presence remains, often made more intense by its separation from formal religion. Warhol’s attention to the ‘presence’ of the ordinary was the root of his identity as a popular artist; and it put him squarely in a line of twentieth-century writers and artists with Christian preoccupations—made him traditional, not outré.”
PAPARAZZI AND TOURISTS HUNT FOR STRAY CARDINALS AS PAPAL CONCLAVE FEVER BUILDS
The crypto-religious commingling with Catholicism literally wafted into my nostrils on March 3, 1989. On that day, Madonna’s album Like a Prayer was released. I was working in a record store in Washington. The shipment of albums arrived, and when I opened a box, I was hit with the scents of sandalwood and patchouli. Madonna wanted Like a Prayer to “smell like church,” so she had the first shipment scented with an oil associated with the Christian sacred.
Of course, Madonna is no saint. Yet it should be the job of the new pope to catechize and not anathematize such a sinner.