In my latest column for OSV News, I look at May’s four loudest days on Catholic social media and declare with absolute certainty that — all the hysteria and huffpuffing aside — the growing division within the Catholic Church will continue, and the rifts will widen. Polarization in the church will expand (no matter who is pope or what layperson shakes the cherry trees for picking or how daintily the bishops turn good Christian advice into weary platitudes no one is hearing) until Catholics can come together in acknowledgement of one outrageous indictment that I am making against every one of us, and by an event we’ve stopped thinking about as supernatural.
For some this might feel like I’m going over some familiar, Strange Gods territory. That may be true. But I really, really believe in my heart of hearts that if we can look at this grave mistake we’re all making, all-day-every-day at our great peril (and admit that none of us are guiltless — that we are united in a very basic sin and in need of one thing), then there is a chance — a slim one but it’s on the board — that we can change the trajectory of where we are headed by uniting at the the thinnest place between heaven and earth…
Oh, we still display the “I love Jesus” certificate on the mantel, but now the burnished calves of our fervent ideas stand before it, reflecting what truly enthralls us — our politics, our celebrity obsessions (be they priests or entertainers), our outsized liturgical scruples (“he’s not holding the paten correctly!”) or our need to deconstruct (“a clown at a Woman-preached Liturgy of the Word!”), our focus on our climate or sexuality or gender, our gadgets and — most destructively — the chaotic black mirror of our smartphones. Their addictive invitation to fall ever-more deeply down the echoing well of thought-narrowing self-reflection draws us away from silence and the natural world, where we may so readily find something greater than ourselves.
We may have our best shot at unifying as church if we can place ourselves at the feet of Christ and admit to this grave missing of the mark — this soul-deadening sin of permitting everything else, even our vision of church, to come before him.
I’m an idolator; you’re an idolator; this whole body is sick with idolatry. If we can start there, admitting our shared portions of this collective sin of idol-worship, asking the Lord’s pardon and resolving to be more aware, there may be hope for unity.
Like St. Benedict in his Holy Rule, I am proposing nothing “harsh or burdensome” in this column. Quite the opposite, for people who would like to see an end to the polarization of Catholics, this is really a very easy way, and place, to begin. If you’re interested, please read the rest here.