Now, though, an obvious question presents itself: Besides being a museum, what else will the cultural center do? In particular, what issue or set of issues will the team of scholars being assembled there devote its attention to?
Here’s a modest suggestion. Let the academics and intellectuals who will hang their hats at the John Paul II Cultural Center concentrate especially on mapping what needs doing to rebuild the Catholic subculture.
This seems be a natural question for a “cultural” center to tackle. And it’s urgent. For by now it is clear that the entry of American Catholics into the cultural mainstream and the collapse of the Catholic subculture during the last half-century had some deeply troubling results.
As Catholics assimilated, they became very much like everybody else. What that means in practice can be seen in declining Sunday Mass attendance (about one Catholic in three on any given weekend), a precipitous drop in priestly and religious vocations, and acceptance of secular views on morals.
Obviously there are many causes at work here. But the collapse of the Catholic subculture that began in the late 1950s definitely is one.
It didn’t occur by accident. As some historians acknowledge, it was partly engineered by Catholic intellectuals who sought to speed up assimilation and saw the subculture, with its network of strongly Catholic institutions and organizations, as an obstacle.
For a highly readable account of the process that ensued, consult Charles R. Morris’s shrewd popular history, American Catholic (Times Books, 1997). Calling the self-inflicted Catholic Kulturkampf that he describes a “fearsome exercise,” Morris writes:
“It was nothing less than the dangerous and potentially catastrophic project of severing the connection between the Catholic religion and the separatist American Catholic culture that had always been the source of its dynamism, its appeal, and its power.”
Others agree. Sociologist Joseph A. Varacalli, in Bright Process, Failed Community (Lexington Books, 2000), calls what happened a “debacle.” Now, he says, American Catholics need to “roll up their sleeves and start the painful process of putting the pieces…back together again.”
That means rebuilding a subculture. With all its limitations, the one of the past had some important strengths. Indeed, for a time back in the 1940s and 1950s — as Morris and others show — it may have positioned the Catholic community to become the main culture-forming agent in America. But the subculture was scrapped, the moment passed, the opportunity lost.
What’s needed is not mere replication of the subculture that was — the construction of a Catholic theme park, as it were — but the shaping of a subculture grounded in institutions, organizations, and programs that reflect the authentic spirit of Vatican Council II and are able to undertake the new evangelization urged by the present pope. Without that, the slippage of the last several decades will go on.
Building a new Catholic subculture will be no small task. It will take a lot of serious thought and careful planning. That is where the John Paul II Cultural Institute and its resident scholars come in. One of them told me a while back that their first order of business would be deciding what they would do. Now you’ve got my suggestion, friends.
(This article courtesy of the Arlington Catholic Herald.)
