On being a misfit

One of the things I hear my Bishop say with regularity is that Catholicism is counter-cultural. He has spoken of the counter-cultural choice young men and women make when they enter religious life. He emphasizes the counter-cultural lessons taught in Catholic schools. He makes a point that our faith, the core message of our evangelization, is counter-cultural.

Just between you and me, I haven’t meditated very deeply nor very often about being counter-cultural; but I guess the Bishop has said it often enough now that he has my attention. As I spend a few ergs on the subject, I don’t find the fruits of contemplation altogether pleasant. What I hear the Bishop saying is that who we are and what we do don’t mesh very well with society.

Catholics, it seems, spent the better part of the last 200 years trying to fit into the American mainstream. Now we’re affluent (statistically, anyway). We’re well educated. Studies indicate that people actually like having us for neighbors. We made it; we’re in.

Now that we’re in, however, good golly, Miss Molly, it looks like the thing to do is to get out – and particularly while the getting is good. More properly the expression is: be in the world, but not of it.

Now I don’t want to be putting words into the Bishop’s mouth, but what I hear him saying is that good practicing Catholics are a bunch of misfits. He would never say that, probably, but that expresses for me what “counter-cultural” means.

Perhaps the popular connotation of misfit evokes images of green whiskers and opium dens. Misfit is a harsh sounding word that makes people uncomfortable. Even so, is seems a verbal shock helps me to get the idea.

The idea is that nobody can follow both God and Mammon. To that assertion comes a round of qualifications and denials – not necessarily “O yes you can,” but “You can’t have too many clothes or too much money,” or the running assumption that acquisition of wealth is devoutly to be wished.

The gospel of the modern world is relativism: you do your thing and I do mine and moral standards are what I say they are. The Catholic Church rejects that idea, no matter what the degree of acceptance Catholics have found. And while the Church repudiates the simplistic yes/no codes of scriptural literalism, the Church also rejects that there’s no such thing as right and wrong. Right and wrong still do exist.

The key premise of the best-seller The Closing of the American Mind illustrates the position well:

Americans have becomes so relativistic that not to have a moral position has become a moral position. Somehow it’s become immoral to have convictions, because that means that I’m asserting that I’m right, which means that somebody else is wrong, and that’s not right. Don’t laugh. This hogwash is becoming a deeply ingrained American value system.

So, we Catholics have made it into the American mainstream, and look what we’ve found. We know that to authentically practice this faith of ours we now have to be misfits again.

Perhaps we can assert enough moral influence to change all that, but I suppose I’m skeptical. I appreciate the way the Bishop lets us in on the truth of the matter. “Counter-cultural”: that says it nicely. – T.R.

written by Thomas A. Russell
first published in the Lafayette Sunday Visitor on October 25th, 1987