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Remarkable grasp

GLOBAL CATHOLICISM:
Diversity and Change Since Vatican II
By Ian Linden
288 pp. Columbia U. Press $27.50

Reviewed by Tom Fitzgibbon

The complex personality of the world-wide Catholicism of today is featured in this book not as a singular image, but as a collage, a church that varies in governance, geography, and culture. Ian Linden describes four faces of Catholicism, each image distinct from the others. He treats with a panoramic lens the influences of each of these portrayals in a time of enormous upheaval.

First he seeks to define the “global” church, the far-off church American Catholics knew existed everywhere. The global church was certainly distant, and Americans mostly thought of it in images of smiling missionaries in remote countries. Any concern for the church in far-off places came up only in annual appeals for collections at Sunday Mass.

Then there is the “governing” church, headed in Rome and managed locally by the satellite dioceses. Rome lays down the law behind doors that are rarely opened to the public. Reverence for authority defines this level. Church members kiss the bishop’s ring as if he were divinely ordained to his post.

Next Linden explains the “idealized” church that so many of us grew up to believe was sacrosanct in purity and truth, a church centered on parish life with parochial schools and an abundance of nuns and clergy who taught the faith to an obedient laity.

Finally, Linden describes the church as viewed by the rest of the world, an ideological construct rooted in “firm views of the beginning and end of life, bells, incense and vestments.”

All these views are linked by osmotic boundaries, so seeking a truthful presentation of the Roman Catholic Church, Linden points out, would be like listening to a long conversation with four people talking at once. This complex reality set the stage for the enormous convulsion that was to take place as a result of world conflicts, coupled with the sorting out that the second Vatican Council provoked.

For centuries, the Catholic Church has for millions been the guardian and interpreter of the mystery surrounding the life and death of Jesus Christ and the nature of God the Father. The church governed from the Vatican in Rome and kept a strict hand on how the faith was propagated and practiced. For an American Catholic in pre-Vatican II days, the dictate of “pray, pay and obey” was enforced on acquiescent and docile congregations. Life revolved around the local parish. Priests explained the mystery of the faith in homilies many found tiresome, and did not encourage individuals to search for truth.

Most Catholics had little or no knowledge of the inner workings of the church, and the church kept it that way with zeal. The faithful lived in simple innocence—the church showed the path to eternal salvation if you simply obeyed the rules. That the reality was much more complex was hidden away, or never considered.

But beginning dramatically in the early 1960s, Pope John XXIII’s consent to a “sorting out,” as this author puts it, began to expose unsettling inconsistencies. The comfortable certainty of Catholic life was about to be upended by that seemingly benign decree.

The book goes into the fevers and tremors of those convulsions in exhaustive detail. The Council’s beginnings, the eruption of “Liberation Theology,” the emergence of the African church’s relevance to the future, the effects of native cultures, the assassination of clerics in Latin America—all are treated with due respect.

All this analysis, of course, becomes prologue to the present dilemmas facing the church; that part of the story Linden saves for the last chapter, in which he reflects on the church in the twenty-first century. For me this was the most interesting, because Linden’s views and perspective are more readable and relevant to those of us who are seeking to understand the possibilities, good and unfortunate, facing the church that we love. He accurately describes the uproars caused by the issues of priestly celibacy, with its attendant scandals of rape and pedophilia, and the role of women in the church, including the possibility of women’s attaining the priesthood. Rome’s rock-hard refusal to address these issues and its retreat behind a wall of orthodoxy has led to disastrous irrelevancy and indifference to the lives of many communicants. Spirituality has become more personal, and the church has lost some of its legitimacy as arbiter of morality.

Linden’s grasp of the facts is remarkable; he has written an important treatise on modern Catholic history, and his tale is very much worth telling. Forty pages of small-print footnote references attest to his thorough research. Linden’s style, however, often makes the reading difficult, although he occasionally injects a welcome and important clarity. My main reservation is that the story is clouded by detail relevant mostly to scholars, as opposed to those of us facing the decline of our Catholic culture. I would like a more lucid and dramatic rendition of recent history that might illuminate some hope for a redeeming future.

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Tom Fitzgibbon served in the US Army Signal Corps during the Korean War, where he was active in electronic counter-intelligence. As an electrical engineer, he was a division leader at MIT and helped develop the guidance system for the Apollo moon landing program. Upon retirement, he followed his avocation in sculpture and became president of the New England Sculptors Association. He continues his artistic pursuits and also writes anecdotal essays.

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