Warning: Messy, free-ranging post ahead.

Last week, Bishop Paul Loverde issued a pastoral letter on pornography.

We stand at a threshold – either we can continue to allow this plague to spread with fewer and fewer checks, or we can take concrete steps to uproot it in our lives, our families, our neighborhoods and our culture.

We are a people called to share in the pure and noble vision of God and His creation. We are also a people whose future glory has been bought with the precious sacrifice of our Lord Jesus Christ. We must never forget the high cost of this purchase.

A free people can combat the tremendous moral, social and spiritual danger of pornography with great courage. My fervent prayer is that Catholics, other Christians, and all people of good will understand this threat, confront it, facilitate true healing, and ever more fully live out our God-given use of human sight.

Also check out the Diocese of Colorado Springs’ special section on the problem in their paper.

It is a very good thing to have a bishop speak forthrightly on this – given the mixed nature of most congregations, it is probably a huge challenge for a priest to be able to preach on the matter, but I think it could be done, with a mixture of direction and indirection, if that makes sense. Usually the best way to do such a thing rhetorically is to pose questions, looking straight into the congregation’s "eyes."

This whole matter falls into the category of "contemporary problems that Catholic pastoral ministers ignore." Not, of course, when approached individually, but in terms of the image presented to the public. When people think about the differences between the "evangelical" mode of doing church in this country and the Catholic mode, most of the conversation usually comes down to the level of the relationship between church and "real" life. People like the evangelical-megachurch way because it seems very practical to them – and it is. The emphasis is on getting the lost to bring all of their lostness to the Lord, fix it, and live in an environment of continued, practical, every day support.

Which has its own perils, as we’ve seen, as the Gospel transforms into another form of self-help, a transformation many Protestant critics see just as clearly, if not more so, than the rest of us.

But the emphasis remains – I, as a believer, am to take responsibility for knowing the Lord, searching the Scriptures and binding my life, in all of its aspects, to God’s Word. The purpose of the Church is to provide support for that, support which can take many different forms as in, say sermon series on marriage, a plethora of youth programs, financial seminars, counseling, etc.,etc.

And so it is in the evangelical world, taken as a whole, that you find very aggressive ministries addressed at specific problems – they come and go, of course, as concerns come and go, but I think my ultimate point is that there is a fluidity and flexibility one sees in that world, in terms of meeting the needs of people as they’re living now that you don’t see in Catholicism.

You can say that it’s always been such, that this is the consequence of a hierarchy, but you’d be wrong. When you actually study Church history, you find a great deal of fluidity and flexibilty, of new responses to new situations popping up all the time, some more or less spontaneous and diffuse, others inspired by individuals. The hierarchy has existed to sift and winnow and suppress when necessary, but really the history of Catholic spiritual and pastoral practice is pretty stunningly diverse.

There’s value in caution. Inestimable value. As I said, the fluidity of the contemporary American "evangelical" (knowing the wide range of the term, oft discussed here) approach tends to cycle, to wear out, to lose its Christian focus, to grab onto cultural trends and let itself be defined by them, and so on.

I don’t know what I’m talking about would look like on the ground. But the fact that Bishop Loverde is a pioneer in this regard is rather startling. Everyone knows that the two most lucrative elements of the Internet are pornography and gambling.  The general culture revels in crudeness to an unbelievable extent. "Porn star" is no longer a derogatory term, folks. Ponder that.

I have been pondering these issues for a couple of weeks, since Mark Shea’s discussion on his blog about what Catholic pastoral life looks like on the ground – the focus there being the difficulty of some folks finding a way to connect meaningfully with their Catholic faith in the context of their parishes. On the page, it’s great, but step into a parish, his commentors said, and life is pretty different, as a whole.

I’ve also been pondering it in the context of "niche" Christianity – the Jesus is my Boyfriend thread of last week, and the story, also from last week, about A Christian movement to bring men back into church, a movement that’s a reaction against the perceived feminine emphasis of modern Christianity. (A frequent concern in Christianity – in 19th century Britain and America, the movement was  called "Muscular Christianity.")

This post is rapidly not making sense. Let’s see if I can rescue it:

I am glad to see Bishop Loverde’s letter. It is evidence of someone in leadership in the Church trying to help Catholics really connect their faith in Christ with the difficulties and challenges of living life here and now.

This ability to make such a connection, I think, is one of the strengths of American evangelicalism – again, broadly construed.

For some reason, for many Catholics, the nature of this connection between what they stand and profess in Church and what they then proceed to do with their time, bodies and priorities over the rest of the week, is not made very clear by those engaged in pastoral leadership.

Such was not always the case.

What happened? Must we have the "over the past 40 years" discussion again?

Perhaps.

What happened can, I think, be brought down to three points:

1) The collapse of Jody  Bottum’s tree full of swallows at Capistrano. A clear conviction that faith and life were firmly connected was embedded in that tree. You lived with saints who looked after the various parts of your life, to whom you looked for inspiration and strength as you dealt with the sick, pursued your daily labors, confronted illness and so on. Prayers, prayers and more prayers supported you and pointed you to God as the solution for your problems and source of your strength at every hour of the day, for every purpose. In a tight Catholic culture, you could not escape the spiritual rythym of a year in which you were constantly called to examine your life – on a weekly basis, every Friday, to contemplate the sacrifice of Christ on the cross and put your own puny sacrifice of abstinence, and by extension, whatever other sacrifices were a part of your life, willingly or unwillingly, in the context of that Cross, in the context of No Greater Love.

2) The moral revolution of the 20th century and the Church’s total inability to deal with it. The reluctance to speak, to grapple with the thorny issues, say, of contraception and so on – as difficult as all of that is pastorally, and it was difficult, and remains so – the reluctance, the silence, sent a message: There are parts of life in which faith is irrelevant.

3) The wrong kind of lay formation.  It’s something to consider at far more length, but let’s just say that the general pattern of lay formation, which basically took the skeptical, present-oriented, tradition-bashing content of most seminary education, reprinted it on handouts and passed it out to people to discuss as they shared their stories – hasn’t worked. In the context of everything else, it hasn’t worked.

There’s much more to say. There is a lot of fear out there, among ordained clerics and lay unordained clerics, about too much flexibility. There is a huge amount of fear out there of seeming "too conservative" or "too fundamentalist" or "too pre-Vatican II", which results in discouraging of things like ministries in apologetics, good solid Scripture study or even rosary-praying and such. ("The crazies" one priest I knew called the small group that came early to daily Mass to pray the rosary.)And again, caution is good and necessary. But too much caution coming from the wrong reasons and fears ends up squelching the Spirit.

I’m not looking at "programs" – and that’s a whole other post. I’m trying to think what a parish would look and sound like in which folks really were encouraged to and actually did make the connection between what they’re living in their homes, families, workplaces and social lives and life in Christ. What a parish would look and sound like in which the sacramental and spiritual life of the Church was perceived as…life. I don’t think that parish looks like the typical model of the American megachurch, with a zillion support groups and ministries directed at every demographic under the sun. I’ll bet some of you are part of that kind of parish I’m wondering about.

Are you? Hash this over with me…Hash over the reality that seems to imbue American Catholicism, a divide personality:

Gripe #1: The Church tries to intrude in matters that are none if its business. What I do in my personal life, what I should think about immigration, etc.

Gripe #2: The Church doesn’t help me relate faith to life. It’s just not practical!