[Vision2020] Give Up Your Pew for Lent

[Art Deco]

  [image: The New York Times] <http://www.nytimes.com/>

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February 28, 2013
Give Up Your Pew for Lent By PAUL ELIE

AT 8 p.m. last night in Vatican City, Benedict XVI resigned the papacy. Now
American Catholics should consider resigning too.

The conventional wisdom has it that Benedict’s resignation sharply reduced
the aura of the papal office, showed a tender realism about old age, and
made clear that even ancient Catholic practices could be changed. That is
all true, but the event’s significance is more visceral than that. It has
caught the mood of the church, especially in North America.

Resignation: that’s what American Catholics are feeling about our faith. We
are resigned to the fact that so much in the Roman Catholic Church is
broken and won’t be fixed anytime soon.

So if the pope can resign, we can, too. We should give up Catholicism en
masse, if only for a time.

We are in the third week of Lent, a six-week season of reflection and
personal sacrifice when Christians prepare for Easter by taking stock of
their religious lives. In recent centuries Roman Catholics have observed
Lent by giving up a habit or pleasure, whether red meat, chocolate, soap
operas or Facebook, to simplify their lives and regain their independence
from worldly attractions — their religious freedom, if you like.

Two years ago, Stephen Colbert gave up Catholicism itself. As the comedian told
it<http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/382614/april-25-2011/catholic-bender>,
he swore off Catholicism on Ash Wednesday and made it as far as Good
Friday, when he went on a “Catholic bender.” His riff inverted the old
saying that history repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second
as farce. Mr. Colbert beat the pope to the punch.

In traditional parlance, Benedict’s resignation leaves the Chair of St.
Peter “vacant.” So I propose that American Catholics vacate the pews this
weekend.

We should seize this opportunity to ask what is true in our faith, what it
costs us in obfuscation and moral compromise, and what its telos, or end
purpose, really is. And we should explore other religious traditions, which
we understand poorly.

For the Catholic Church, it has been “all bad news, all the time” since
Benedict took office in 2005: a papal insult to
Muslims<http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/14/world/europe/15papalcnd.html>;
a papal embrace of a Holocaust
denier<http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/26/world/europe/26pope.html>;
molesting by priests and cover-ups by their superiors. When the Scottish
cardinal Keith O’Brien resigned on Monday amid reports of “inappropriate”
conduct toward priests in the 1980s, the routine was wearingly familiar.
It’s enough to make any Catholic yearn to leave the whole mess for someone
else to clean up.

Benedict, the former Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, is a theologian. He would
not have stepped down if he did not think he was setting a sound precedent:
a resignation prompted by physical, not institutional, weakness. That he
felt free to resign suggests that he thinks the church is doing fine. But
countless ordinary Catholics know otherwise.

That is why this Sunday, I won’t be at the Oratory Church of St. Boniface
in Downtown Brooklyn, even though I love it there — a welcoming,
open-minded, authentically religious place.

Instead, I’ll be at the Brooklyn Meeting
<http://www.brooklynmeeting.org/>of the Quakers, who have long invited
volunteers from our church to serve
food to the poor.

Or I’ll be at the Church of St. Luke and St.
Matthew<http://stlukeandstmatthew.org/>,
an Episcopal congregation that hosted the Occupy movement’s relief efforts
after Hurricane Sandy.

Or I’ll go to the Zen Mountain Monastery <http://www.mro.org/> at Mount
Tremper, in the Catskills.

Or I’ll be in Washington, with colleagues who attend Shabbat services at
Georgetown, the first American Catholic university and the first (four
decades ago) to engage a full-time rabbi.

Or I’ll knock on the door of the Masjid Ibadul-Rahman, a mosque on my
block, or the Zion Shiloh Baptist Church, across the street, or L’Église
Baptiste d’Expression Française, on the corner.

I hope and expect to return to the Oratory church the following Sunday. But
I can’t be sure. To some degree, it’s out of my hands, a response to a
calling.

A temporary resignation would be a fitting Lenten observance. It would help
believers to purify and deepen our faith in the light of our neighbors’ —
“to examine our own religious notions, to sound them for genuineness,” as
the American writer Flannery O’Connor put it. It would let us begin to
figure out what in Catholicism we can take and what we can and ought to
leave. It might even get the attention of the cardinals who will meet
behind the locked doors of the Sistine Chapel and elect a pope in
circumstances that one hopes would augur a time of change.

And it might dispel the resignation we feel. Most ordinary believers have
given up hope that the church will change its ways. But Benedict’s
resignation reminds us of a truth we have known all along: change in the
church can happen, even dramatically. If so hidebound an institution as the
papacy can be changed, what can’t be?

Paul Elie <http://berkleycenter.georgetown.edu/people/paul-elie>, a senior
fellow in the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace and World Affairs at
Georgetown, is the author, most recently, of “Reinventing Bach.”


-- 
Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)
art.deco.studios at gmail.com
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