The indispensable Catholic journalist John L. Allen writes:

As the synod rolls into its second week, yet another way of understanding the fundamental divide is coming into focus: The gap between those who believe the demands of classic Catholic teaching on sex, marriage, and the family may be unrealistic or inappropriate for some share of the contemporary population, and those convinced that it’s widely attainable in the here-and-now.

Perhaps one could call the latter position the “Yes We Can!’ brigade at the 2015 synod.

(Presumably, the irony of applying Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign slogan to a bloc of folks who would generally be seen as cultural conservatives isn’t lost on anyone.)

Many in this camp suspect that advocates of a more “pastoral” approach on matters such as homosexuality and divorce have quietly thrown in the towel on the idea that it’s reasonable to expect lifelong faithful marriage to be the norm, or that divorced and civilly remarried Catholics shouldn’t be sexually intimate, and so on.

The “Yes We Can!” faction wouldn’t deny that many people don’t actually live those teachings, but they insist that it can be done, and fear that by not encouraging people to do so, the Church clearly risks selling them short.

More:

The “Yes We Can!” camp, however, believes Church teaching isn’t just an ideal, but a practical way of life, though without minimizing the sacrifices it may entail. As they see it, the synod’s message ought to be, “You’re called to this, and we’re going to have your back in pulling it off.”

Boy, did this ever make me want to cheer. When I became a Catholic in 1993, I committed myself to living chastely, as the Church required. This was a desert experience for me, who was not used to denying himself in this way, but it was a desert experience that brought me out of bondage to my own disordered desires. It was hard, but it was necessary, and it was necessary because it was hard.

At virtually no point did I believe, or have reason to believe, that the institutional church and its ministers had my back. In fact, the silence from the pulpits was total. There is, or was, no sense in contemporary American Catholicism that asceticism is a normal part of the Christian life, and that we might help each other bear those burdens. One of the reasons I sympathize so instinctively with gays and lesbians like Wesley Hill and Eve Tushnet, who keep raising the issue of the Church needing to make affirmative space within its life for same-sex attracted Christians who seek to live celibacy, is because the loneliest and most difficult period of my life as a new Catholic was the four years in which I struggled to be celibate, before I married.

I didn’t need Father to remind me every week in his homily to keep my pants up. That’s not the point. What I could have used was any sign that the life to which I had submitted, in obedience to what I believed was the truth, mattered to the Church. The message I constantly received from the silence in the parish(es) was: You are wasting your time trying to live out these teachings. Nobody here cares about this stuff, so why should you?

I knew what kind of Egypt I had been delivered from, and that memory, plus a strong prayer life, strengthened me in the journey. But the institutional Church was worthless in this struggle. I knew I had a strong ally in Pope John Paul II, but Rome was very far away. Thinking back on it, the heart of the problem was the culture of the American church, in which the idea of dying to self to live in Christ was an alien concept. I was deeply struck the other day by the e-mail I received from a young Catholic I met in Charlottesville, and posted here. This part:

The Church’s shedding of Her ancient liturgy, ascetic and disciplinary practices, and the destroying Her sacred buildings and art leading up to, during, and after Vatican II is one of the greatest losses to Catholicism and to the West in recent history.

… comes especially to my mind when I think about the “Yes We Can” Catholics. Last night, on the flights home, I read a short but dense book a reader sent me, a work of social science analysis called How Societies Remember, by Paul Connerton, a social anthropologist at Cambridge University. It is one of the most important books I have ever read, and one I now see as key to the Benedict Option. I’ll post on it later today, but for this discussion, I can say that the book shines a Klieg light on the Catholic reader’s observation above. Connerton describes modernity, driven by the logic of capitalism, as a “worldwide clearing operation” regarding historical memory. Modernity, he says, is a condition of  “deliberate forgetting.” Connerton writes:

Under the conditions of modernity the celebration of recurrence can never be anything more than a compensatory strategy, because the very principle of modernity itself denies the idea of life as a structure of celebrated recurrence. … The operation of this system brings about a massive withdrawal of credence in the possibility that there might exist forms of life that are exemplary because prototypical. The logic of capital tends to deny the capacity any longer to imagine life as a structure of exemplary recurrence.

In everyday language, Connerton is saying that living in modernity makes it all but impossible to believe that there is a way of life that we should follow — that is, that our desires should be ordered around a certain ideal, one given to us instead of chosen, and that we should observe certain practices to incarnate that ideal in our own lives. “Life as a structure of exemplary recurrence” means living as an order one submits to for the sake of conforming to a sacred ideal that comes down to us from the past. Note well that Connerton is writing not as a theologian, but as a social scientist. What he’s saying at bottom is that the very structure and logic of modernity is radically antithetical to anything like historic Christianity. “[I]nvented rites … are palliative measures, façades erected to screen off the full implications of this vast worldwide clearing operation.”

Reading the book — and I’ll explore this more fully in a subsequent post — I felt the full weight of the young Catholic’s statement. You hear these kinds of things from Traditionalist Catholics all the time, but thinking of it in light of the “Yes We Can” Catholics, gave me a certain perspective on my own experience. The institutional church in America, by and large, does not care to produce holiness, but rather happiness. It embraced the “worldwide clearing operation” of modernity in the Sixties, and turned away from the rites and practices that formed Catholics by teaching them to experience life as a structure of exemplary recurrence. People like me didn’t fit into the new, this-worldly church order. This was a difficult thing to come to terms with.

Fortunately, there are within the Catholic Church communities of resistance — joyful resistance, even. The amazing Leah Libresco, for example, is a one-woman dynamo of joyful resistance, and it’s impossible to spend any time around her, as I did this past week in Washington, and despair about the future of American Catholicism. In the early part of the last decade, a priest friend in New York grew weary of listening to me and another Catholic pal griping about the failures of the institutional Church. He said, in effect:

“Everything you say is true, and if you two sit around waiting for the institutional Church to get its act together, you’re sunk. But you don’t have to do that. You have the Catechism. You can go on Amazon.com tonight and order a library that would have made Aquinas envious, and have it at your home in a few days. You in the laity can do this on your own. What are you waiting for?”

His point was that by remaining grumpily docile, we were collaborating in our own spiritual ruin. He told us that his parents raised him and his siblings through the catechetical and spiritual disaster of the immediate post-conciliar era, when you had to be radically countercultural, even in the face of the institutional Church, if you were going to form Catholic children properly. Today, the priest said, we have far more resources to draw on to fight the disorders of modernity, especially as they manifest themselves within the institutional Church. We only lack the courage and the imagination to lay hold of them, and put them to use.

That priest was right. Is right. I think about how radically different my experience of Catholicism as a single man would have been had I had people like Leah around — or, to fault myself, if I had known back then how much I would need community to walk this difficult path, and opened myself up more to the opportunities that were there at the time (CL, for example), instead of being standoffish, because I was getting my sea legs as a new Catholic, and wasn’t sure what to do. That life cannot be re-lived, and in any case, I have found in Orthodoxy what I thought I was going to find in Catholicism when I converted. Still, the Connerton book has helped me to understand more deeply why the Church was a lonely place for me as a new, single Catholic who wanted to live out the countercultural truths of Christianity, especially regarding sex and sexuality.

Here’s a story from Crux about a young Catholic now at the Rome synod on behalf of Catholic orthodoxy. Excerpts:

And then there are those Catholics who hope that bishops talk about challenges such as divorce, gender theory, and homosexuality not because they want the Church to liberalize on these issues, but because they believe Catholics must find better ways to engage a skeptical world about the beauty of traditional Church teaching.

Alix Verdet is in the latter camp.

She’s come to Rome from France on behalf of the Association pour la Formation Chrétienne de la Personne, a Catholic organization that promotes the teachings of St. John Paul II, based at a Benedictine abbey dating back 1,000 years in Solesmes, France, a village about 150 miles southwest of Paris.

Solesmes. There’s your Benedict Option, folks. More:

“The doctrinal and the pastoral are the two sides of a single mystery,” she said. “They can’t be separated.”

If bishops go soft on doctrine, even in the face of opposition from the laity, she fears the Church will be seen as wishy-washy to its most devout adherents.

“If the teaching of the Church would change because of fashion, I wouldn’t be interested in it, because it would be like politics,” she said.

Still, she hopes that the synod is able to articulate creative ways to engage those whose lives might not be in accord with Church teaching.

“We all have friends who are divorced, who are gay, and we are asking God, ‘What is the response you want us to give them?’” she said. “I’ve met some gay people who have asked 10 priests for help, but they couldn’t help. Nothing. That’s not normal.”

Oh, but it is.

See, this is why the Synod worries me greatly, even though I’m not a Catholic, and even though I think Pope Francis is not necessarily wrong in wanting to reform some of the procedures for pastoral reasons. If these proposed reforms were to take place within a church culture that still valued the ascetical element of Christianity, one that still believed in fasting, and that had a robust culture of practices that helped its people order their lives according to God’s revelation, instead of the modern world’s preferences, there would be little problem. As it is, though, Alix Verdet’s point about the Church devaluing eternal verities is a powerful one.

Liberal Catholics and their fellow travelers look at orthodox Catholics and see people who just want to punish gays, lesbians, and heterosexuals who don’t want to conform their sex lives to the Church’s teaching. What they do not and, I think, will not see, is that orthodox Catholics believe that these teachings, however hard, are both true and liberating. “You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free,” said Christ. What did he mean by that? He meant that the only real freedom is freedom that we find when we live our lives, and order our loves, according to His teaching — which, for Catholics, is revealed in Scripture authoritatively interpreted by the Roman Church. In my own case, the three or four years I lived as a single Catholic, struggling with chastity, were very, very difficult. A time in the desert, for sure, a period of suffering and loneliness that made no sense to me at the time — but in the end, it helped save me. In How Dante Can Save Your Life, I talk about it this way: