A Plea to the Clergy from the Pews

Several months ago my pastor began his homily by asking members of the congregation to stand up and mention bad things they had heard in the news recently. People mentioned a hurricane, the shooting of a policeman, a young girl found murdered, and the war in Bosnia. The pastor then read again a portion of the passage from Habakkuk that had been part of that Sunday’s readings: “How long, O Lord? I cry out for help but you do not listen? I cry out to you, ‘Violence!’ but you do not intervene. Why do you let me see ruin: Why must I look at misery?” (Hab. 1:1-3). The pastor went on to ask, “What can God do except what He can do through us? We are the hands of God.” He asked us to search our own hearts in terms of the suffering going on right around us. What were we doing about the homeless in our community? What were we doing about the suffering people in our neighborhood?

I admire this priest’s wholehearted dedication to social justice and his efforts to get his parishioners to take personal responsibility for building it. And yet, the homily left me feeling disquieted and perplexed. Some reflection has helped me clarify what disturbed me about this homily — and so many others I hear.

For starters, I have problems with the theology that underlies it: that God can work only through us. I know that many modern theologians say that it is immature and naive to expect that our prayers of petition will cause God to bring about change. Fr. Richard McBrien, in his Catholicism, states:

In prayers of petition, we explicitly come to terms with our needs and those of other people. We make ourselves ever more sensitive to our obligations to do whatever is possible to fulfill those needs…. Prayer, in other words, does not effect a change in God but in ourselves.

If I understand McBrien correctly, he is arguing that all we can expect to accomplish by prayers of petition is to raise our consciousness and heighten our ethical sensitivity. If this is so, I cannot help wondering about our prayers for those dying of cancer, for a safe trip, for good weather, for a bountiful harvest, for the dead. I suspect that most folks in the pews still feel that their prayers can achieve results that go beyond an improved attitude on their part, that God loves them so much that their needs, honestly articulated and humbly presented, are allowed to play a part in God’s governance of the universe.

The homily and my subsequent reflection on it have caused me to ponder the direction of Catholic preaching over the last couple of decades. I ask myself, “Why am I so dissatisfied?” Certainly one of the most disliked sermons of decades gone by was the hellfire and damnation one. But today any talk of hell or even an admission that damnation is a real possibility seems to be totally taboo. Contemporary priests seem to do everything they can to make their homilies “relevant,” incorporating jokes and anecdotes from their personal experience or from contemporary movies, television, and current events. If sin is mentioned at all, it is almost always social or institutional sin: racism, poverty, sexism, classism, ecological destruction.

Of course, it is true that these sins have a personal dimension. Racism is embodied in one person treating another unfairly because of race. Clearly, all social ills can be traced to the accumulated ramification of millions of individual human acts. Nevertheless, the emphasis in most of the preaching I hear is on the social or political or institutionalized dimension. Perhaps it is the effect of having heard so many homilies of this type, but I come away feeling overwhelmed, helpless. Rather than responding positively to the challenge that I try to make a difference, I feel utterly inadequate to the task. And I ask myself: Are issues of social justice the only arena for my moral life? Do homilies like the one I described simply make people feel guilty and leave them helpless to deal with that feeling? People feel overwhelmed by the problems of poverty, crime, violence, war, and natural disaster. A normal reaction is to wonder, “What can I do?” shrug one’s shoulders, and think of something else.

The old private “me and God” religion is definitely out of favor now. For example, I never hear a homily about prayer, or going to daily Mass, or the value of little acts of self-sacrifice, or — God forbid — any kind of self-discipline or self-restraint. Sexual morality is never talked about, and family life very rarely. Are such things unimportant? Why can’t the Church find the golden mean? I don’t think anyone — not even the staunchest conservative hankering for Latin Masses, benediction with a gold cope, and May crownings — would deny that in the pre-Vatican II Church we heard too little about social justice, care for the poor, and the various social sins. But now it seems that that is almost all we hear about.

At least in the realm of private morality, there is something people can readily get hold of. Moreover, they are, to some extent at least, able to make a difference in the individual lives they touch. But when the pastor scolds us about homelessness, or about the fact that a policeman was shot or a teenage girl killed, or about the war in Bosnia, I for one feel paralyzed. Do we all need to be social activists? Of course, we should give money to support the professionals and volunteers who are actively engaged in trying to change social arrangements and to provide support systems for those who have fallen through the ever-widening cracks in the social structure. But how guilty do we need to feel for belonging to the middle class? What does Jesus expect us to do? As I reflect on Jesus’ ministry, I am struck by the fact that the people in the parables — the Good Samaritan, the widow (of the widow’s mite), the man who found the pearl in the field — were just doing their job; they were going about their ordinary lives. The Good Samaritan did not go out looking for people by the roadside, but when he found someone, he treated him with care and compassion. Certainly those people who perform extraordinary ministries of justice and compassion, who are on the front lines, so to speak, are an outstanding witness to the Gospel. But I sometimes wonder: How powerful a witness are those who live an ordinary life well? Good marriages, families that are loving and joy-filled, a lived sexuality that is pure and faithful — there is no more compelling or powerful witness, I am convinced. Why do we not hear more about these concrete challenges in Sunday homilies?

Is it all a matter of style? Is it just that these are not trendy subjects? Is it that they are not compatible with politically correct multiculturalism, with the tolerance and acceptance of the alternative lifestyles promoted by our society, a society that is so quick to brand as “far right,” “fundamentalist,” “patriarchal,” or “homophobic” any attempt to articulate a coherent moral code?

I sometimes wonder if the reason I hear so much about our obligation to help the less fortunate is that it is one subject that is universally acceptable. It is completely unobjectionable, noncontroversial, and safe. How can anyone possibly object to a homily on helping the less fortunate? Preaching on these themes will anger neither conservative Catholics, who are apt to object to anything they see as deviating from orthodoxy, nor the liberal, “Call-to-Action” types who avidly support social action. As a matter of fact, no Hindu, Muslim, agnostic, or atheist would object to such a theme. On the other hand, a homily that deals with premarital sex or contraception is likely to leave much of the congregation disgruntled, if not downright angry.

There are four big lacunae in homilies these days:

(1) Sexual Morality: I often hear Catholics over the age of 50 complain about the repressive and harsh sexual morality they were taught in their youth. Although there are many jokes about the seven-second rule for kissing and the near occasion of the near occasion of sin, feelings about this matter go beyond joking for some older Catholics, who, in fact, hold the Church responsible for whatever problems and tensions they have experienced in their sexual lives. Consequently, the last thing they want to hear is a homily on sexual morality. And yet, what arena of contemporary life calls out more urgently and desperately for some consistent moral guidelines? Popular culture clearly endorses and encourages premarital and extramarital sexuality. Almost without exception, contemporary movies show bright, attractive young people not culminating, but beginning their relationship by going to bed together. As social justice has moved to the forefront of preaching, questions of sexual morality have been sidelined to the point that they have almost become what sex was for the Victorians — that dirty little secret no one talks about. In our sexually permissive society, we are used to hearing about sex on talk shows or seeing it explicitly depicted in movies. The one thing that makes almost everyone uncomfortable, however, is the idea that there might be some universally binding moral principles and standards that apply to sex — even for consenting adults.

(2) Marriage and Family Issues: For most people today their marriage and family life constitute the center of their moral lives. Our frenetic pace of life militates against the ability to maintain a healthy marriage and harmonious family life. As spouses struggle to work at two or even three jobs, meet all the demands on their time made by school, church, and community activities, and still keep the household running, certainly one of the greatest moral challenges married people face is the decision about how to use their time. Americans are working longer hours. In some cases, people really have no choice, as businesses demand greater productivity in order to stay profitable. In many cases, though, people allow themselves to get caught up in our overworked society; they do it because everyone else is doing it, or because they derive a certain ego satisfaction from it, or because they have built up a big credit card debt and have to work overtime to pay it off, or because they are classic workaholics. Clearly, the decision to take time to nurture one’s marriage and children calls for a decision that is not only countercultural, but is nothing less than heroic. Certainly marriage and family life is a place where our Christian values sorely need to be implemented, yet I cannot remember the last time I heard a homily on this subject.

(3) Prayer and Private Devotion: I find it curious that many Catholics these days are very respectful of the idea of Zen meditation or Sufi mysticism, but if you bring up the rosary or Ignatian contemplative prayer, they are likely to snicker or make derogatory remarks about the old pre-Vatican II “me-and-God” piety. We hear a lot about how “we are Church,” we find God in community, but I never hear much encouragement to develop a richer personal prayer life. Certainly prayer is at the heart of Christian life. “Pray always,” Jesus exhorted His disciples. But if we don’t have an active prayer life, we “don’t have a religion,” we “just have a philosophical system,” as Scott Alexander, a professor at Indiana University, has said.

(4) The Creed: At Sunday Mass Catholics recite the Creed, but how much thought do they give to the words they say? What does it mean, for example, to affirm that Christ was “begotten, not made” and that He “came down from heaven”? The beliefs enumerated in the Creed, so carefully articulated by the early Church, are what distinguish Christianity from all other religions and philosophical systems. Giving some sustained attention to these core beliefs might stimulate and enrich the faith of the congregation and make the recitation of the Creed riveting rather than tedious. Writing in a recent article in Touchstone, Theodore Pulcini, an Antiochian Orthodox priest, forcefully makes the case for paying more attention to our core religious beliefs:

In a pluralistic culture like ours, people use religious affiliation and practice as ways of differentiating themselves from “the others” in society at large. Any religion that wants to capture the imagination and to command the loyalty of its adherents must be able to provide this kind of particularity against the homogenizing forces at work in the cultural mainstream…. This is precisely the flaw of the collapsing [modernist] churches. They have so conformed to the mainstream that their subcultures have been neutralized, making them increasingly irrelevant in the identity formation of their constituents.

I am not suggesting that social justice is not an appropriate subject for homilies. We do need to hear about our responsibility to the poor, the sick, and the suffering — including our suffering planet. What I am saying is that it should not be the only subject. The Catholic Church has a tendency to swing from one extreme to another. Because in the past there was an overemphasis on personal piety, and because there was inadequate attention paid to the needs of the poor and other issues of social justice, now we have the other extreme, where that is almost the only acceptable subject for preaching.

I belong to the generation of Catholics whose young adulthood coincided with the Second Vatican Council. I was 20 when the Council convened. As the Council progressed and concluded, we were exhilarated and hopeful about the changes in the Church. We were confident that liturgy in the vernacular would lead to more meaningful worship and a rejuvenated faith. We were heartened to think that our children would never be subjected to the harsh, repressive kind of moral teaching that we had been given. They would not be distracted by rules like no meat on Friday, and would instead be taught what is really important, like caring for the poor. The irony of all of this is that, just as we had hoped, our children have had worship in their own language, have been exposed to little or no harsh, negative moral teaching, have heard next to nothing about sin or hell, have heard a great deal about our obligation to help the poor, sick, and homeless, and about the evils of war and ecological destruction — and most of them are absolutely bored with religion and find the Catholic Church completely irrelevant to their lives. They do have compassion for the poor; and many of them volunteer in homeless shelters, tutor inner-city children, and even give a year or two of their lives to serve the poor in Third World countries. But they are smart enough to know you don’t need to be Catholic or even Christian to do these things.

All the major world religions preach the need to help the less fortunate. The Unitarians, many of whom are atheists or agnostics, are known for their humanitarian efforts. So why be a Christian? By their indifference and their failure to maintain even minimal ties with the Church, many of our young people are showing that they have no answer for that question. Perhaps homilies that focused more on Christ, Scripture, and the distinctive aspects of Catholic belief and praxis would — if nothing else —make Catholicism appear more interesting and challenging to our young people, who might then be intrigued enough to look a little more deeply into it.

I realize that my experience with homilies is not universal. I am sure there are priests who preach on the four subjects that I claim never to hear about. I do believe, however, that my experience is fairly representative of many dioceses.

The Christian life, like love in that old song, is a “many-splendored thing.” It requires that we take our sexuality very seriously, treat it as a gift from God, and practice a demanding sexual morality that is definitely countercultural. It asks us to make hard — even heroic — choices in order to nurture loving marriages and families. It recognizes that, although we belong to a community of faith, we are also each, in one sense, alone before God and responsible for building a personal relationship with Him. Finally, it proudly proclaims a creed that is deep and rich and full of mystery. This, then, is a plea to those who are entrusted with the sacred duty of preaching to broaden the scope of their homilies. n