Thinking the New Jerusalem: An Advent Meditation

THINKING THE NEW JERUSALEM: AN ADVENT MEDITATION

A question underlying many conversations in American Catholicism today (though often not explicitly discussed) is what the curves and contours of a “truly” Catholic culture should look like. This question has occasionally surfaced in this café’s threads, particularly when proposals to found an authentically Catholic city have been examined. Some groups in the American church are proposing the development of “truly” Catholic communities, whose claim to fame will be that they are explicitly governed by Catholic theological and moral principles.

Utopian thinking is not new to American culture. It has been a strong thread of the culture from the time the Puritans founded their city on a hill—a shining experiment to instruct all the world about what a truly Christian polity might look like. But since Anglo-American Catholicism was founded by groups who had learned to practice their faith non-ostentatiously in a pluralistic religious environment, what is new to the contemporary discussion is the self-conscious attempt today of some groups to fuse the city-on-a-hill mentality with Catholic agendas to influence the public sphere.

Advent is a good time to discuss such ventures. After all, in this liturgical season, we not only look back on the first coming of the Lord in Bethlehem, but forward to his return at the end of history. Throughout Advent, we contemplate the longed-for arrival of the New Jerusalem.

In what follows, I want to think the New Jerusalem. I want to do so in specifically American terms, since I am engaging discussions in contemporary American Catholicism that seem to me to revolve around questions about how the new city on a hill should be imagined. In this posting, I’m taking up a dangling conversation with several posters on previous threads. Intrigued by their talk of building a “truly” Catholic city, I once asked a poster to describe his vision of such a city.

Since I don’t believe that question was ever engaged, I’d like to challenge myself to do what I asked this poster to do: to imagine what the New Jerusalem might look like, built amidst the dark Satanic mills that dot our green and pleasant land. When better to pursue such a vision than in Advent?

As a preliminary, it might be worth noting that there already are Catholic cities around the world—if by “Catholic city,” one means a city with a large percentage of Catholics and a long Catholic heritage. It is also worth noting that each Catholic city is distinctly different from the other. That, too, seems worth noting as a preliminary reflection, since it appears to suggest there is not a single template for “the” Catholic city.

As one looks at the dizzying array of Catholic cities, one cannot avoid coming to the conclusion that a Catholic city must by its very nature be enculturated, must reflect the culture in which it roots itself. There is no rule book that requires all Catholic cities to walk lockstep with each other. Vienna is not Prague; Dublin is far from Rome in more than the geographic sense. New Orleans and Montreal share a certain reputation for being rollicking French cities, but are more unlike than alike, even with their shared French Catholic heritage.

If the Catholic cities of the world are so distinct from each other, do they have anything in common, I wonder? One of the first things I notice is that none of these cities is a theocracy. Catholicism has had its Savanarolas—and, indeed, the monastic strands in our tradition might be regarded as an attempt to build a utopian city on a hill. But on the whole, we Catholics tend not to do theocracy. Our vision of a “truly” Catholic city tends to focus more on a society infused with our core values, than on one whose laws we’ve written and whose courts we control.

As I say this, I feel obliged to confess my own bias. I am exceedingly uncomfortable with the idea of theocracy. Anyone who grew up in a smallish town in the pre-integration American South will be ineluctably familiar with theocratic life. For many of us, the church controlled whether we could shop (or work or play) on Sundays, whether we could buy liquor anywhere in the county, what books the libraries bought and which ones they kept under lock and key, what bookstores could come to our towns, the movies and plays permitted on our stages, and the prayers prayed in our public schools.

There are those who yearn for some version of this theocratic life to be resurrected today. These include not a few Catholics. In listening to them, I often wonder if any of those making such a proposal have ever actually lived in a theocracy. If they had, then perhaps they might have noticed something that was apparent to me from childhood forward, as I grew up in a town with the soul of a church.

This was (apologies to Yeats) that the best among us—and they were few—were those who had the courage to flout the dictates, written and unwritten, of our little church-dominated world, when those dictates demanded the sacrifice of elemental logic or the human treatment of others. Most of us were not in the courageous category. We lacked the courage to flout the dictates publicly, though we did a rather thorough job of transgressing on the sly.

The worst among us were the fanatics, the true believers, those with a corner on the truth, the enforcers of the dictates, who wanted their theology and morality to regulate life for the rest of us. It’s worth noting that some of the worst things we did—including drawing an adamant color line between white and black folks, or suppressing women’s aspirations to exercise full personhood—were not done in contravention of church wishes, but had a solid grounding in theological principles, and were supported by the church. In my experience, it’s in the nature of theocratic societies to find nifty theological or scriptural justifications for behaviors that, over the course of history, come to be viewed as absolutely unjustifiable in light of the gospel or the common good, as identified by human reason.

As Savanarola—and Calvin at a later date—proved, theocracies simply don’t work. Our own Puritan city on a hill quickly sank into the slough of the culture that it was so confident it could dominate, though one might well argue that, as a nation, we have never quite given up the suspicion that we Americans continue to represent a shining example of the New Jerusalem to the rest of the world.

It is easy for me to describe, then, what I believe the New Jerusalem built among our dark Satanic mills would not look like. It would definitely not resemble a theocracy. The harder task is to think the New Jerusalem in a non-utopian sense, to identify foundations accessible to all of us in a pluralistic society, on which to imagine a viable experiment in authentically Catholic culture.

Some of those who play the thinking-the-New-Jerusalem game have proposed that G.K. Chesterton puts us on the track when he says, "Wherever the Catholic sun doth shine, There’s always laughter and good red wine.” I’d like to believe that Chesterton was onto something with this proposal, but anytime Chesterton or Belloc is invoked after the middle of the last century, a shadow falls across my heart.

That shadow is the shadow of history. In lands in which laughter and good red wine abounded, six million Jews were murdered in the middle of the last century. The shadow of the Holocaust will now forever fall across Chesterton and Belloc’s view of an authentic Catholic culture. To a great degree, the utopian fantasy feeding their thought was a medieval one. They and their followers idealized the Middle Ages to contrast their church-dominated culture to the soulless industrial civilization of Western modernity.

We can’t go back, however—certainly not now, not after the Holocaust. Not after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Going back will always be going back through the refractory lens of the murderous events of the mid-20th century. Those events show us with a clarity that we would be foolish to ignore now, what happens when the reign of God is forfeited for Christendom, when the church so enmeshes itself in worldly power that it cannot stand apart and say no to the rulers of the world.

We can’t return to a medieval Catholic wonderland, in any case, without reviving medieval prisons—and those prisons will need prisoners to fill them: Jews, witches, infidels, homosexuals. They’ll need torture devices to extract confessions. And if they are true to history, priests will supervise the torture to assure that it does not go beyond the bounds of reason and revelation, and, when the tortured one confesses, clergy and religious will be in the procession that takes her to the stake where her body is burned to save her soul.

No, there’s no going back to that world on which the Catholic sun shone everywhere. As much as I find Augustine’s theology instructive, I think he made a fateful turn on behalf of all Western Christianity when he encouraged the imperial rulers of his day to coerce the Donatists to return to communion: reading the parable of the wedding feast in which the invited guests do not arrive and the host goes out to the highways and byways to force travelers to come inside, Augustine told the secular rulers to make heretics come inside—to force conformity to one faith by coercion, if necessary. That misapplication of the gospel text reverberates horribly down the corridors of Western history, through the period of “holy” wars, pogroms, witch hunts, burning our heretics, right through to the Holocaust.

Thinking the New Jerusalem is a forward-thinking process, not a backwards-looking one. The process is fed by hope: it assumes that no complete or authentic version of Catholic values has ever been realized in history. What moves us forward is the hope that we can build better, more solidly, as we continue to read the gospel generation after generation, and struggle to hear its call with new ears in new cultural settings. The reign of God is both now, in that Christ has manifested it to us through his life and preaching, and yet to come, in that it has never been fully realized in history. It stands before us as a challenge to continue on our pilgrimage, striving constantly to enshrine its values in new cultural adaptations.

So—to get to the point, finally—how to imagine the New Jerusalem in America today? In what follows, I am going to offer an idiosyncratic and highly selective set of principles, based on my initial suspicion that a new American version of the city on the hill will break with the temptation to theocracy, and will always be suspicious of the meddling impulse of Puritanism. Many of the versions of “authentic” Catholic culture that I see being bandied about today strike me as far more American—in the sense that they continue the Puritan impulse—than authentically Catholic. They want to control and coerce people to at least external conformity, in the name of retrieving the culture for Christ, or of setting a countercultural example. This Puritan impulse to control for the sake of external conformity is not Catholicism at its best, though one can point to many examples of that impulse at work throughout Catholic history.

In my view, an authentically Catholic culture would be one built around clear, foregrounded notions of the common good. People constructing a social order built on Catholic principles would care far more about upholding the common good, than about coercing others to adopt their theological ideas or moral conclusions.

As a case in point: issues of sexual morality remain open to discussion in Western society, and for good reasons. Western societies are not of one mind about the use of artificial contraceptives, about the place of gay and lesbian people in society at large, etc. Catholics are far from united regarding these issues, and if polls are to be believed, Western Catholics have in large numbers rejected papal teaching about artificial contraception.

In pluralistic societies seeking the common good, there could never be an authentically Catholic attempt to coerce all of society to adopt peculiarly Catholic beliefs about such issues, unless it could be proven that such coercion serves the common good. With regard to gay and lesbian persons, the only justifiable ground I can think of for supporting such coercion is if it can be proven that gay people represent the threat to family life that many on the religious right—Catholics included—maintain is the case. If such a threat is not there, it seems to me that there are compelling ethical reasons to allow for a diversity of opinions and self-expression regarding this issue, insofar as those opinions and self-expression do not undermine the common good.

An authentically Catholic society would take such a stance if only to distance itself from a dynamic that has run all through Catholic history, and has resulted in much shame for the church. This is the scapegoating dynamic that was applied, for instance, to Jews for much of Christian history. Compare the things historically said about Jews in Christian societies—dirty, sneaky, evil, demonic, crafty, infectious, infiltrators of the government and economic system, actors who mimic normal people only to overthrow us, anti-family and anti-children—and one sees immediately what is at stake in much Catholic anti-gay rhetoric.

The common good cannot be achieved without wide-ranging, inclusive, unfettered dialogue. An authentically Catholic society would be one in which people talk—and talk a lot, and talk about everything. People have to talk in order to effect the common good because it is never self-evident where the lines lie, the lines that promote the common good. Those lines only become visible when we talk together, and when no one’s contributions are suppressed or overlooked.

Over a decade ago, I had the privilege of being a member of the first group of Western religious educators to visit the Soviet Union after Communism fell. One of the things that struck me as we toured Moscow was how much people talked. Go to churches, and you’d find clusters of people outside them, chattering away. Drive down the city streets, and you’d see people gathered on sidewalks and street corners, talking with obvious passion.

I remember asking one of our tour directors, who had been in the Soviet Union before the Iron Curtain was lifted, if this had been the case in the past, and he said not at all. On his previous visits, people had scurried around in silence, afraid to make eye contact with each other, afraid to talk to anyone in public.

I have concluded that one of the signs of the demise of a repressive regime—and thus one of the signs of the coming of the New Jerusalem—is wide-ranging, passionate, inclusive dialogue. An authentically Catholic culture makes a special place for such conversation. An authentically Catholic culture formalizes this public conversation and builds protected spaces for the marginal to have freedom to make their dialogic contributions.

The common good can never be achieved if individuals are not given the opportunity to achieve their full personhood. An authentically Catholic culture never stops repeating Irenaeus’s statement that the glory of God is a person fully alive. Such a culture does all it can to give everyone a chance to fulfill his or her personhood; it does all it can to oppose and remove impediments to such fulfillment of one’s life vocation. It does so because it recognizes that the gifts of everyone—and, perhaps often, of those disregarded and overlooked—may be necessary for the salvation of us all.

An authentically Catholic culture gives a special place to conscience, following Aquinas’s insight that we have an obligation to follow our informed consciences at all cost, since conscience is God’s voice within. Newman’s statement—to the Pope, yes, but to conscience first—also has a special place in the heart of an authentically Catholic culture. In such a culture, conscience is so cherished that the educational systems of the society place as much emphasis on educating it as on educating the mind—authentically Catholic education focuses on educating the heart as much as the head.

Experiences that challenge our taken-for-granted assumptions have been shown to have a significant role in forming our consciences and educating our hearts. Experiences that allow us to see the Other as human in the same way we are human foster sound consciences. An authentically Catholic culture places a premium on poetry, reading, travel, on welcoming the stranger, if only because the stranger always brings to us a whole world previously unknown to us.

For those unable to travel physically, an authentically Catholic culture remembers Emily Dickinson’s insight that one can know what a wave must be without ever gazing on the sea: sympathetic reading brings us places that we will never visit in the flesh. An authentically Catholic culture also meditates often on Augustine’s statement that the world is a book, and those who do not travel, read only a page. In a truly Catholic city, people are encouraged to travel, even when they never leave their armchairs, so that they can rise daily above parochialism, against the misguided belief that any one person, culture, or religion has the corner on the truth market.

The authentically Catholic culture gives pride of place to the symbolic. It does so precisely because of the Augustinian observation I’ve just quoted: the world’s a book. The sacramental system of Catholicism is inherently symbolic. It is based on the recognition that the divine is mediated to humans through the created world. God becomes flesh. God is Word. God touches us in water, bread, wine, oil, hands laid on heads.

Such a religious system must rely on symbol, since the sacramental principle yields symbolic expressions of the divine-human encounter. The strong reliance on symbol recognizes that no statement, no human word, can ever sum up the complex meanings to which a symbol or analogy points. There is a recognition in authentic Catholic culture that all speech about God is analogical, a limping human attempt to formulate in human words an experience that transcends human language. There is also a recognition that the words of many different people are needed to formulate adequate expressions of the divine, since God transcends all cultures, genders, nations. We each glimpse only portions of a picture far larger than any of us can see completely, and we need all the bits put together to see a larger picture.

An authentically Catholic culture naturally gives a special place to food and drink, because the God who has become flesh, who reaches into our world through the created realm, sits at our table. Our central religious act is to share a meal together. The holy bread is never separated from daily bread in authentic Catholic cultures; there is a recognition that we encounter God in a unique way at the Lord’s table, but that we also encounter God at our own tables as we break bread with others. There is also a strong recognition in the authentically Catholic culture that breaking the Lord’s bread together requires us to be attentive to whether others have daily bread on their tables. We struggle to help provide that bread for those who lack it precisely because we believe that we encounter the Lord in the Eucharist.

Because of its respect for symbol, metaphor, analogy, an authentically Catholic culture welcomes anthropology, sociology, psychology—the human sciences—into theological and ethical dialogues. It does so because there is a strong awareness that one can never talk about the meaning of doctrine or moral teaching without examining how these affect the real lives of real people. The effect of doctrine—its reception—is as much a part of the authentic meaning of doctrine as are the words in which doctrine is formulated.

The respect for symbol issues in a respect for the arts in all their diverse forms in authentic Catholic culture. Catholic cultures value art, because God walks in human flesh. Authentically Catholic cultures have a special iconographic place for Mary, and because they accord Jesus’s mother such a special place, they are also distinguished for their exceptional respect for women’s insights and women’s experiences—along with the insights and experiences of children. In a world dominated by patriarchal imaginations, authentically Catholic cultures are countercultural, because of the primacy accorded to women and because children are cherished and protected.

Because authentically Catholic cultures respect words for their sacramental significance, they look askance at phrases that debase the coinage of language, and turn profound insights into easily mouthed phrases that only skim the surface of thought. An authentically Catholic culture will place a polite moratorium on overused but essentially empty words like “intrinsically,” or vacuous phrases like “life-giving” and “life-denying,” when these are applied to marital intimacy by celibate clerics.

And in the New Jerusalem, bishops will walk among their flocks, seeing our faces and touching our hands, as Jesus did, or as John XXIII did when he slipped out of official garb and the clutches of the Vatican to walk the streets of Rome. Bishops in the New Jerusalem will not even consider using the Eucharist as a political weapon to enforce conformity to the political agendas of the hierarchy, because they will instinctively recognize that such a use of the Eucharist departs from the authentic Catholic tradition. Instead, they will be among their flock seeking those who have been wounded, who have been alienated by pastoral leadership, and trying to mend the problems that are keeping these lost sheep from the Eucharist.

Well, Advent is for dreaming, isn’t it?

William D. Lindsey