I guess I’m just not a fan of the new bishop

Not a fan.

He seems to play that same strawman game as Obama likes.

In particular, he’s asked about bringing new people to the church, or convincing inactive Catholics to return, and says this:

The other piece of this is finding ways to bind up the wounds of people, to reach out to those who have been alienated from the church for one reason or another—and be very programmatic about finding ways to invite them back. When it comes to young people, we should challenge the tendency in society to want to go it alone. I think of the scene in Robert Bellah’s book Habits of the Heart in which a woman called Sheila is asked about her own system of beliefs, and she calls it “Sheilaism.” We can challenge that. The way to do it is not by saying, “You’re not going to Mass and so there’s a problem.” Rather, we can say, “We have an opportunity to better society and to better the common good. We work for the poor. Come and work for the poor with us.” 

Pope Francis recently met with the Pope St. John XXIII Community, which was created in the 1960s to address the problem of young people who were alienated from the church. What this group did was to say to them, “We’re not going to bug you about church attendance. But here are the poor. Let’s work for those who are disabled.” This has been a public association of the faithful for almost fifty years. Pope Francis celebrated their work. So there are many ways we can do it. 

What the pope is about—and what we have to be about—is not a culture of confrontation, but a culture of encounter. 

In other words, his strawman is  the notion of scolding people about not going to church.  But is solution is so narrow — “come to church to do your community service with us” — that it misses the point.

Lots of people do community service in all kinds of ways.  I have an atheist friend who’s constantly posting stuff on facebook about how atheists/humanists are big into community service.  You can join the Jaycees, or find a soup kitchen, or be a volunteer tutor, or any number of community service actions.  Reality is, other than some inner city parishes, I suspect that the majority of venues for serving the poor or the disabled or the needy, in general, are outside the church, and certainly outside The Church (that is, outside Catholic churches).  For that matter, in the ‘burbs, a lot of the options for “helping the poor” are mostly a matter of “participate in or organize fundraisers” as most of the direct helping is done by professionals.

That’s just not going to fly as a pitch for why to go to church on Sunday mornings.  And certainly it isn’t an either/or:  either you nag them about not going to church, or you offer them the opportunity to help the poor.  Is this really all that Cupich sees in the church?

(Back shortly before Christmas, I read a book that seemed to suggest that there’s a lot more to it, and that, for young people their peer group is all-important, which he doesn’t contemplate at all.)

The rest of the interview is a bit more difficult to grab a hold of.  He’s a bit snakey about illegal immigration, acknowledging that “We do have to be a country that abides by its laws and secures its borders,” but nonetheless telling us that “we have invited them by creating this market for employment, and we have to own that” (who’s this “we”?) and attributing their arrival here to gang violence to be laid at the feet of American recreational drug users.  He tells us that the German cardinal who wanted to push the recent council on family life towards accepting divorce and gay marriage was just “misunderstood,” but without specifics.  And again, as in his installation homily, when asked about this synod and the “nature of church teaching,” he returns to the theme of changes:  “Ours is a living tradition . . . It’s about how we’re sensitive to the spirit of the risen Christ moving in our midst, creating something new in the life of the church.”  — Which leaves me more than a bit suspicious that he indeed has “changes” in mind that go far beyond administrative reorganization or new ways to reach out, and, when he does make it as far as delineating specifics, will be fairly radical.

UPDATE:

So, in thinking about this some more, I remembered a commercial I had blogged about, by the United Methodists, which took exactly this approach:  “come to our church because we help the hungry.”  And at the time, I thought that the Catholic approach stood in distinction — but apparently not for Cupich.