Fighting a Catholic Subculture

Barbara Nicolosi blogging at the Church of the Masses has a insightful post at "The Real Patron of the Arts" She is also the founder of Act One that trains and mentors Christians of all denominations for careers in mainstream film and television. Oh and she is a big BSG (Battle Star ) fan which I love.

She is referencing an interview she did for the magazine by Catholic United for the Faith, which is called "Lay Witness."

The theme of course has vital it is for Christians be involved in the arts. She has an intriguing and yet troubling observation that Hugh Hefner contributes more to the "arts" than The Church. That sadly the historic "Patron of the Arts" is no longer. That is the Church. She references what John Paul the II and Benedict have said about the urgent need for Christians to engage the Mass media and the arts.

She then talks about her own contribution which is Act one. She states in part:

I would say the next thing we want is committed Christians. We have all denominations. I’m very sad that we have had so few Catholics go through the program. I have gone to these schools—the Catholic schools, the special Catholic schools—I’ve gone to them all several times and spoken there and pleaded, and what I find there is that kids do not have any apostolic drive. After getting these great Great Books educations, what they want to be is maybe a DRE in a small country parish in the backwoods where nobody will notice them and they can just shut the world down and out.

You know, there’s nothing apostolic in that. St. Paul could’ve done that—the Church would be nothing if we had done that. We have not received a mandate to head for the hills.There is something wrong in a Church in which we are preparing kids to only play in the Catholic subculture. [whispers] There was never supposed to be a Catholic subculture! You know what disciples do in the Catholic subculture? They have personality fights and power struggles. Well, I’d rather be martyred by the world and the devil than be killed by a fellow Catholic because they don’t like the way I say the Rosary or something.

Well let me say as someone that lives a Catholic Life in a small country parish in the backwoods we appreciate all these folks. In fact bring them down here we need them!!! However she has a point and notice she is talking about schools that are the par excel lance of Catholic Orthodoxy. At least this is her observation.

I agree there should not be a Catholic Subculture. That is not our Calling despite some of the let us return the catacombs talk I hear more and more.

Being in the world is messy business and gosh knows that the Catholic Church and her members do not always come out unscathed. However much of the World , especially the West, has been living off the contribution of Christian and especially Catholic Thought and Faith. It is now in need of some serious replenishing!!

One of the most insightful articles I have read about the state of Christianity is called
THE THREEFOLD WITNESS OF THE CHURCH:THE CATHOLIC PETER, THE ORTHODOX JOHN, AND THE PROTESTANT PAUL.

Catholics claim all three of course but I can not deny his insight. The whole thing is worth a read but these are a few of his thoughts on the Catholic Peter that I think is revelant to what Mrs Nicolosi is talking about:

Throughout her long and bumpy history, the Roman Catholic Church has been, I believe, the church that has most fully engaged the world around her. While Orthodoxy withdraws and Protestantism divides, Catholicism wrestles and grapples and gets her hands dirty. She makes mistakes (lots of them) but presses on nevertheless—ever struggling and yet ever maintaining her integrity and identity. Like Peter, she grows and learns without ever quite losing that rashness and impulsiveness that defines her (for good and for ill). When God changed Jacob’s name to Israel (“he who wrestles with God”), he surely meant it as both a compliment and a criticism.
The Israelites born out of Jacob’s loins proved (like Peter and the Catholic Church) to be wrestlers with God: now embracing his Word and with it setting the world on fire; now resisting that same Word and running after the world. When at her best, the Catholic Church (like Peter at Pentecost) stands boldly before the crowd proclaiming the message that is a stumbling block to the world; at her worst, she elicits the very rebuke that Jesus gave to Peter: “ ‘you do not have in mind the things of God, but the things of men.’ ” Yet still, ever and always, she persists and remains herself: a rock thrown in the river to trouble the water.....

God has, I would submit, chosen the Catholic Church to keep alive the spirit and witness of Peter in all of its contradictory (or, better, paradoxical) extremes. If she is to complete her mission, if she is to continue to stand (to quote Newman again) as “proof against the energy of human skepticism,” if she is successfully to rescue the freedom of thought “from its own suicidal excesses,” then she is going to have to be a bit stubborn and stiff-necked at times. That is not to absolve her of guilt when her stubbornness falls into pride and sin and disobedience, but it is to assert that her flaws and frequent slips are part and parcel of that divine mission which she, and she alone, has been given the grace to fulfil.....

I linked Peter above to the theological virtue of hope, and indeed, the older, wiser, chastened Peterof the epistles begins his first general letter by praising God for giving us a “new birth into a living hope” (1 Peter 1:3). To read 1and 2 Peter is to peer into a mind and a heart that have learned patience and humility and fortitude. Tame he is definitely not (cf. his condemnation of false teacher in 2 Peter 2), but his years of ministry and persecution have taught him to look ahead and to trust in the promises of the Lord: “The Lord is not slow in keeping his promise, as some understand slowness” (2 Peter 3:9).

His eyes are trained forward, and he has learned finally what it means to be in the world but not of it. Throughout that long theological and sociological experiment we call the Middle Ages, the Catholic Church strove to find the right balance between full investment in the world and radical disengagement. Her Petrine vision of hope taught her to live in a suspended state of tension poised between her political and aesthetic attempts to perfect society and culture and her more monastic impulse to dismiss this earthly field as a vale of tears and focus only on the Kingdom to come. Two extremes kept in perpetual tension by a Church that never ceases to wrestle with man and the world. “There are an infinity of angles at which one falls,” writes G. K. Chesterton (that other great Anglican convert to Catholicism) in Chapter VI of Orthodoxy, “only one at which one stands.” Perhaps Rome’s greatest and most vital legacy is that she has continued to stand when she should have fallen flat on her face a dozen times. And in this above all is she truly the living theological and institutional embodiment of the spirit and witness of St. Peter.

In other words the idea of a Catholic subculture is not exactly in our DNA. We this Sacramental people , a very Incarnational people, are suppose to be the Culture!!!