Skateboarding in churches?
Craiyon.com AI generated images posted on r/weirddalle
The latest book of Luigi Giussani in English is To Give One’s Life for Another, as edited and filled out with commentary by Julián Carrón. This book was set as the text for School of Community, the regular meeting of the Catholic group Communion and Liberation (CL). My participation with CL goes back about 20 years, although recently I’ve become a bit lapsed. It’s complicated, but let’s say that I’ve benefitted from local, national, and international leaders of CL, but that I also have criticisms at the local, national, and international level as well. While there may be disagreement within CL right now, I don’t have a dog in that fight. I’m mainly interested in myself. And while what follows is a critical look at one part of something Carrón has written, I’ve also benefitted from things Carrón has said in the past.
When I picked up To Give One’s Life, I noticed a kind of disconnect between myself and a topic in Carrón’s preface. He recounts a moment of alarm when he saw a slideshow about repurposed churches. This alarm is not original to Carrón, having been cited in a 2020 article on Catholic decline (from EARS, the European Academy on Religion and Society). This 2020 article cites three causes: distrust due to scandals (that is, widespread child sexual abuse by Catholic priests and its ongoing coverup by bishops); increase of the welfare state in Europe (the state replacing the Church as the source of social assistance); and the rise of non-traditional families (in the article, specifically the impact of divorce and its stigma within churches). I liked the title of that article so much, I adapted it for this post.
Why my disconnect with Carrón’s reaction? Firstly, anytime someone starts talking about the state of church buildings, I always remember Peter Maurin’s Easy Essay “Building Churches”: “Charles Peguy thought / that the faith that builds Cathedrals / is after all the thing that matters.” Secondly, I think of my own experience of seeing dioceses repeatedly close city churches in order to chase after white Catholics to the suburbs, themselves fleeing the arrival of Black families. Thirdly, I think of a dear friend who loves the Abbey of San Galgano and said that he felt that without its roof it signified an openness to God. The abbey was the place where St. Galgano thrust his sword into the ground as a renunciation of violence and earthly power, trading force for the cross. Fourthly, I know of a couple of these churches bought by people and repurposed— either to save the beauty that’s there or for utility. Many of these churches in the US were built for immigrant communities that have long since assimilated.
Carrón’s argument in this paragraph is brought out the best in the sentence following the paragraph: “By not proposing itself at the level of ontology [being], as a living event capable of corresponding to man’s deepest desires, a Christianity reduced to morals progressively lost all attraction” (x). Along with this core argument, however, is some baggage particular to Carrón, which I am personally not interested in.
“As long as the cultural context was homogenous and the Church played the role of a principal actor, the morality born from Christian culture, though it earned less and less consensus, still held up. When the social context became more diverse and multicultural, however, everything changed. The process of erosion that had begun was suddenly accelerated. It was striking for me when, recently, I saw images of churches that had been transformed into night clubs, movie theatres tennis courts, and swimming pools. Hunkering down on a defense of morals— though correct in its principals— did not stand up to the contrary mentality running rampant, gaining more and more ground and imposing new values and new rights (x, emphasis mine).
To be blunt, the tone of this passage is preoccupied with culture war concerns. The main concern is the “decline in ‘the morality born from Christian culture.’ I notice especially that Carrón speaks of ‘the morality’ as if the Christian experience (experience, not culture!) hasn’t generated countless moralities in its history. In contrast to the 2020 EARS article, the reason he offers for this decline is diversity and multiculturalism with the disastrous result, in his opinion, of the imposition of new values and new rights. Following this paragraph with a comment about the need to propose Christianity “as a living event capable of corresponding to man’s deepest desires,” Carrón puts the cart before the horse. In order to defend traditional morality, he seems to say, we must propose Christianity as a living event. I would say instead, let’s propose the faith and see what happens.
To understand culture war and its origin, I think of Massimo Faggioli’s book, Joe Biden and Catholicism in the United States. Faggioli locates the origin of culture war anger in the lost empire syndrome:
“Nearly sixty years ago, in December 1962, United States Secretary of State Dean Acheson famously said in a speech at West Point Military Academy, ‘Britain has lost an empire but has not yet found a role.’ The same is true of the United States and the Catholic Church, although perhaps the Church is more aware of the need to free itself from the fantasies of the past” (123, emphasis mine).
Don’t get me wrong: I’m not suggesting Carrón introduced a novelty into CL. But instead I think he has perhaps amplified a tendency, an ambivalence, or ambiguity that was there from the very beginning. Again, although I’m talking about CL, I have never had any leadership status or insight into the leadership workings of CL. I’m engaged here in a personal work, a purification of the charism of CL in myself.
[update: 7/13/2022. I did some keyword searches at ScrittiLuigiGiussani.org, and the phrases “new values”, “new rights”, “multiculturalism” only come up with reference to this book (English search results). “Diversity” is a key word for Giussani, but most always as a positive.]