A few weeks ago, Bishop Tod Brown of Orange County issued a pastoral letter which is called The Pastoral Letter or, in the DVD produced to accompany it The Letter – both of which are so pretentious as to be totally off-putting.  But we’ll put that aside – the subtitle of The Letter is "Learning, Loving and Living our Faith" – pdf file of the English text here.

It is an interesting letter, because it seems, Bishop Brown is a little worried. He speaks of the masses of children and young people coming for sacramental preparation, and then the almost immediate drop-off of participation and interest after the sacrament has popped out of the vending machine. He says the same of couples coming to the Church for marriage.

He worries about materialism and priorities – are Catholics really any different from the broader culture in its fixation on individualism, materialism and superficial pleasures?

There is discussion of this letter over at The Cafeteria is Closed and some commentors rightly point out that Bishop Brown should be commended for asking the right questions.

• Too, too many of our catechists and teachers have not obtained even basic certification in religious formation. If they do not know it sufficiently themselves, how can they adequately share the faith? And if they do not receive the faith in sufficient clarity and depth, how shall our children grow into strong Catholic adults?
• While Catholics are the largest religious denomination in Orange County, I am told that the second largest are socalled “former Catholics.” I presume that these are good people. Why has the Catholic faith become for them less the priority I believe it needs to be for all of us?

The answer, or at least part of it, is unintentionally contained in the video sent out to accompany The Letter.  It is a sort-of-slick presentation of the matter, replete with folks talking about their experiences of Church, and what they like:

I feel as if I belong…I was looking for fellowship…I enjoy helping others…this has been an incredible journey..

The closing montage is played under a song, of course, and the song is about how we we all join "to shine the light together."

The end. Hardly a word about Jesus Christ. I mean…not much.

This is a hard place we have come to, isn’t it?

For the fact is, that people can find fellowship and community in a lot of places. They can help others through many different venues. Youth can have a great time together and feel good about themselves anywhere.

And if that is all there is to this…well, honestly, why bother? Why not just keep shopping? If someone else does the community thing better…why not go there? If the kids’ programs are better somewhere else (which they probably are)…why not go there?

A couple of weeks ago, I was talking to someone (a Catholic) who is very good friends with a Protestant megachurch pastor in his town. This fellow was telling me that his friend, the pastor, was about to collapse under the pressure of running the megachurch, the specific pressure of The New – of having to constantly create programs to attract folks, to keep them coming, to keep them "on fire," and the pressure of the necessity of him being onstage all the time, of being the central figure on whom all this rested. I believe in his own conversion story, Jeff Cavins speaks along the same line – how exhausting it was as a person engaged in ministry in the Protestant evangelical churches to always be having to think of the Next Big Thing lest people drive down the street to the next Church of the New.

I’ve sensed a similar exhaustion creeping into American Catholic life for a while, and I think this Orange County missive expresses it, perhaps without intending to.

I’m sort of stunned – although I shouldn’t be – by the disconnect between this letter, the DVD and you know…about 1900 years of Catholic life. Not to speak of the New Testament  – not as a proof text or a citation source, but as an animating, identifying, defining thing.  I mean…think about how Jesus speaks of what life and faith is:  Living, knowing and believing that God is Father, King and Lord, that our fundamental relationship in life is to Him, that our fundamental stance to Him is "Thy will be done," that we know where we stand in relationship to Him, we know we need forgiveness, that the world needs redemption, and well…look Who’s here…pitching his tent among us.

Think of how Paul describes this Church and why people should be in it: because of the community and good feelings and the opportunity to help others? No – because this is the way the world is – God has redeemed the world through Christ, and to be joined to this Body is to be joined to Christ, to be renewed, eternally. There is all kinds of fruit from that – sacrificial love for one another, for the poor. Radical life changes that set us apart from the world and the flesh. Unity, love…joy.

But the point is completely the reverse of the assumptions in this letter and 95% of what we hear about the importance of Church – what we hear is that – this a nice place, and you’ll find meaning in a troubled world here.

Is that the Apostolic vision of Church? No – it is, rather – here is the world. This is what happened – it broke. You are part of that brokenness. Here is Jesus, the Son of God, died and risen to life. He has entered the world and mysteriously redeemed it, the fulness of which is not yet visible to our eyes. Jesus lives in this Church, and to be a part of God’s plan for this world, to enter into it – this is where you must be, too. You will be baptized, and you will die and rise with Christ, be a new person, a new creation. You will be part of the Body of Christ, you will let Christ live in you, and you will be filled with joy and you will probably suffer 

This functional-utilitarian-self-fulfillment way of doing Church has failed because it is not true. It is a mixed-up confused consequence of the perceived need to make faith more understandable to the modern person, and the slow acceptance of the total privatization of personal faith – that it is all about my personal spritiuality and no longer about the story of the world. It has resulted in a mode of doing and speaking that is profoundly misleading, leaving many Catholics adrift in the culture, not quite sure why they should go to church on Sunday apart from habit, guilt and the vague hope that they might be "inspired" a bit and their kids might absorb some moral constraints here and there. It is not their fault. When this is what they are taught, this is the fruit.

It is not a matter of being indifferent to the contemporary mindset or where people are. We need only, again, return to Paul, to see how clearly this is recognized from the beginnings of Christian history. And this is what the aggiornomento of the Second Vatican Council was supposed to be about. John XXIII, whom we remember today, before he was Pope, had served in places Bulgaria,  Turkey, post-World War II France, etc – where the Church was under terrible stress, was a minority, where circumstances – of repression, of recovery from a terrible war – demanded attention to the way in which people lived and thought and the challenges they faced – in effectively preaching the Gospel. (His own experience serving in the First World War might have formed him a bit in this regard as well) Aggiornomento, in his mind, was becoming more aware of the environment in whch the Church dwelt and ministered in order to more powerfully preach the Truth – the saving power of Jesus Christ – not to let the Church be shaped by the world. A hard, tricky line to walk. as we know so well. (And as the Church learned many times in the past. The line between working within a culture and selling out the culture has been crossed before.)

We haven’t even touched on the irony that Bishop Brown and his diocese are, of course, featured in Jody Bottum’s First Things piece – as the diocese in which an epic struggle over more traditional practices in one parish have occurred, as well as the diocese in which a very Out n’ Proud priest was kept in his position despite wide knowledge of what he was doing and how he was living, and after he finally left, was kept on the payroll as a consultant. The family members mentioned in Bottum’s piece have written in response to his description of their actions and it is posted here.

So then, one hardly knows what to make of all of this, taking it all together. At all.