Show notes
The life of St. Francis of Assisi has produced some of the most colorful and inspiring stories in the Catholic tradition. One of the most famous recounts his mystical experience at the chapel of San Damiano. As he had looked for Christ among the ruined humanity of lepers, so he looked for Christ among the ruined structure of an abandoned chapel. Asking for guidance on how best to serve the Lord, Francis heard Jesus speak to him from a tattered, Byzantine-style crucifix: “Francis, do you not see that my house is falling into ruins? Go, then, and repair it for love of me.” Francis set about rebuilding the chapel and eventually established a convent for women religious adjacent to it. Early commentators such as St. Bonaventure were quick to see in Christ’s words to Francis a broader, spiritual metaphor: “the Church that the voice was pointing out to him was the one that Christ purchased for himself by his blood.”[1] Bonaventure was no doubt correct to see in Francis something much more than an amateur stone mason, but his gloss points to a persistent tension between theology and culture, a tendency for universal theology to overpower the particularity of culture. That St. Francis wrote so little and fulfilled his mission by having the wounds of Christ written on his own body stands as the most powerful rebuke to theological abstraction. We moderns, alas, tend to be more comfortable with abstractions, a theology of the cross rather than the cross itself. San Damiano is a metaphor; it is also stones. Catholic culture today needs fewer metaphors and more stones.
Catholics in America once grew up surrounded by stones. The stones of their churches, the stones of their schools, the stones of the industrial city. That this Catholic life coincided with what is now often referred to as “pre-Vatican II Catholicism” should not lead us to confuse it with the life-style of those who currently claim to defend “pre-Vatican II Catholicism.” Those longing for the supposed certainty and unity of the past rarely know anything of the life lived by urban Catholics in the decades before the Council. The relative lack of popular theological conflict during that period reflected less theological uniformity than the priority of an alternative source of faith. Let us call this source, in a word, stones: the physical, geographic life of living in a neighborhood where all of one’s material and spiritual needs were met within walking distance, where churches rubbed up against factories, schools against grocery stores, libraries next to movie theaters. And bars, bars everywhere.
The concentration of so much of life in a small space indeed fostered insularity, even a kind of tribalism; the sociologist Herbert Gans titled his early 1960s study of a neighborhood of Italian Catholics in Boston, The Urban Villagers. Still the geographic dislocations of American life since World War II have not diminished tribalism so much as forced its migration to other locations, most especially “social media”—virtual “communities” possessing all the vices of the tribe with few of the virtues of authentic community.
The world of the Catholic urban village rarely makes it into the debates that animate contemporary Catholic cultural commentary. Sadly, so many of those best able to tell the story of this world, especially those who came of age in the 1960s, left the Church as adults. I was, nonetheless, pleasantly surprised recently to find unsought evidence for the enduring hold of this world on at least one famous ex-Catholic, Bruce Springsteen. A couple of years ago, I found myself watching the Tony Awards. Just at the point when I believed I had fulfilled my obligation to be aware of the current state of Broadway’s cultural depravity, the stage cleared, leaving only a man and a piano. Bruce Springsteen performed an excerpt from his Tony Award winning one-man show based on his memoir, Born to Run. Over a simple, hypnotic chord progression, Springsteen spoke:
I grew up on Randolph Street with my sister Virginia, she was a year younger than me, my parents Adele and Douglas, my grandparents Fred and Alice, and my dog Saddle. We lived spitting distance from the Catholic church, the priest's rectory, the nuns’ convent, the Saint Rose of Lima Grammar School, all of it just a football's toss away across the field of wild grass. I literally grew up surrounded by God. Surrounded by God and all my relatives. We had cousins, aunts, uncles, grandmas, grandpas, great grandmas, great grandpas, all of us were jammed in five little houses on two adjoining streets. And when the church bells rang, the whole clan would hustle up the street to stand witness to every wedding and every funeral that arrived like a state occasion in our neighborhood. We also had front row seats to watch the townsmen in their Sunday suits carry out an endless array of dark wooden boxes to be slipped in the rear of the Friedman's Funeral Home long black Cadillac for the short ride to Saint Rose cemetery hill on the edge of town. And there all our Catholic neighbors, all the Zirillis, and the McNicholases, and all the Springsteens who came before, they patiently waited for us. Now when it rains in Freehold, when it rains, the moisture in the humid air blankets the whole town with the smell of moist coffee grounds wafting in from the Nescafe plant on the town's eastern edge. You know, I never cared for coffee, but I loved that smell. It was comforting, it united our town just like our clanging road mill in a common sensory experience. It was a place here, you could hear it, you could smell it.[2]
There is no moral to this story. There is, simply, presence. Springsteen would never be so naïve as to imply that people were better in the Freehold of his youth than they are today; the tone of lament in his recitation simply affirms that people were, for better or for worse, more connected. For Catholic culture, connection is itself a kind of virtue—necessary, not optional, not discretionary.
Still, Springsteen’s loss of faith speaks to the limits of community. As post-World War II American Catholics emerged from their urban enclaves, the communal faith of their childhood simply could not withstand the onslaught of alternative messages—really, alternative faiths—relentlessly promoted by an all-pervasive consumer culture. The experience of American Catholics since the Second Vatican Council shows the need for something deeper than a merely communal faith.
It also reveals the limits of a rigorously internalized, individual faith. Poor catechesis alone cannot explain why so many American Catholics find so little to attract them to the life of the Church. The evangelization of culture must avoid falling into the trap of intellectualism, as if it can be achieved by setting Catholic books, movies, and websites against their secular counterparts. Catholics will, for the foreseeable future, be outgunned in such a battle; more seriously, they will have allowed the secular world to set the terms for the fight. The early Church Father Tertullian famously observed that Christians set themselves apart from the world most powerfully through their way of living. Pagans looked on with amazement and gasped: “See how they love one another.”[3] The post-Christian West has appropriated the word “love” beyond all usefulness as a way to communicate the distinctness of the Christian message. The word “community” may face similar challenges, but the experience of urban Catholicism in America offers correctives to the dangers of abstraction or sentimentality. Would that one day our modern pagans will look on Catholics and say, “See how they live together.” For that day to come, we need to talk less about the Church and more about churches: built to last, built with stones.
[1] These quotations come from Ivan Gobry, Saint Francis of Assisi (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2006), 42-43.
[2] Bruce Springsteen, “We Lived in the Shadow of the Steeple,” Tony Awards Performance, 11 June 2018, Radio City Music Hall, New York City, USA. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N3E2ajPN0Wo
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