{"id":91,"date":"2015-01-22T21:54:00","date_gmt":"2015-01-23T03:54:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/janetheactuary\/2015\/01\/i-guess-im-just-not-a-fan-of-the-new-bishop.html"},"modified":"2015-02-24T21:38:21","modified_gmt":"2015-02-25T03:38:21","slug":"i-guess-im-just-not-a-fan-of-the-new-bishop","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/janetheactuary\/2015\/01\/i-guess-im-just-not-a-fan-of-the-new-bishop.html","title":{"rendered":"I guess I’m just not a fan of the new bishop"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>
Here\u2019s an interview with Blase Cupich<\/a>, the new archbishop of the Chicago diocese, which he (ok, the assistant who handles his twitter account) linked to earlier today.<\/div>\n

Not a fan.<\/p>\n

He seems to play that same strawman game as Obama likes.<\/p>\n

In particular, he\u2019s asked about bringing new people to the church, or convincing inactive Catholics to return, and says this:<\/p>\n

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\u2014and 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\u2019s book Habits of the Heart in which a woman called Sheila is asked about her own system of beliefs, and she calls it \u201cSheilaism.\u201d We can challenge that. The way to do it is not by saying, \u201cYou\u2019re not going to Mass and so there\u2019s a problem.\u201d Rather, we can say, \u201cWe 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.\u201d\u00a0<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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, \u201cWe\u2019re not going to bug you about church attendance. But here are the poor. Let\u2019s work for those who are disabled.\u201d 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.\u00a0<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

What the pope is about\u2014and what we have to be about\u2014is not a culture of confrontation, but a culture of encounter.\u00a0<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In other words, his strawman is \u00a0the notion of scolding people about not going to church. \u00a0But is solution is so narrow \u2014 \u201ccome to church to do your community service with us\u201d \u2014 that it misses the point.<\/p>\n

Lots of people do community service in all kinds of ways. \u00a0I have an atheist friend who\u2019s constantly posting stuff on facebook about how atheists\/humanists are big into community service. \u00a0You can join the Jaycees, or find a soup kitchen, or be a volunteer tutor, or any number of community service actions. \u00a0Reality 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). \u00a0For that matter, in the \u2018burbs, a lot of the options for \u201chelping the poor\u201d are mostly a matter of \u201cparticipate in or organize fundraisers\u201d as most of the direct helping is done by professionals.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s just not going to fly as a pitch for why to go to church on Sunday mornings. \u00a0And certainly it isn\u2019t an either\/or: \u00a0either you nag them about not going to church, or you offer them the opportunity to help the poor. \u00a0Is this really all that Cupich sees in the church? <\/p>\n

(Back shortly before Christmas, I read a book<\/a> that seemed to suggest that there\u2019s a lot more to it, and that, for young people their peer group is all-important, which he doesn\u2019t contemplate at all.)<\/p>\n

The rest of the interview is a bit more difficult to grab a hold of. \u00a0He\u2019s a bit snakey about illegal immigration, acknowledging that \u201cWe do have to be a country that abides by its laws and secures its borders,\u201d but nonetheless telling us that \u201cwe have invited them by creating this market for employment, and we have to own that\u201d (who\u2019s this \u201cwe\u201d?) and attributing their arrival here to gang violence to be laid at the feet of American recreational drug users. \u00a0He tells us that the German cardinal who wanted to push the recent council on family life towards accepting divorce and gay marriage was just \u201cmisunderstood,\u201d but without specifics. \u00a0And again, as in his installation homily<\/a>, when asked about this synod and the \u201cnature of church teaching,\u201d he returns to the theme of changes: \u00a0\u201cOurs is a living tradition . . .\u00a0It\u2019s about how we\u2019re sensitive to the spirit of the risen Christ moving in our midst, creating something new in the life of the church.\u201d \u00a0\u2014 Which leaves me more than a bit suspicious that he indeed has \u201cchanges\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

UPDATE:<\/p>\n

So, in thinking about this some more, I remembered a commercial I had blogged about<\/a>, by the United Methodists, which took exactly this approach: \u00a0\u201ccome to our church because we help the hungry.\u201d \u00a0And at the time, I thought that the Catholic approach stood in distinction \u2014 but apparently not for Cupich. <\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Here\u2019s an interview with Blase Cupich, the new archbishop of the Chicago diocese, which he (ok, the assistant who handles his twitter account) linked to earlier today. Not a fan. He seems to play that same strawman game as Obama likes. In particular, he\u2019s asked about bringing new people to the church, or convincing inactive […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2209,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[69],"class_list":["post-91","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-archbishop-cupich"],"yoast_head":"\nI guess I'm just not a fan of the new bishop<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Here's an interview with Blase Cupich, the new archbishop of the Chicago diocese, which he (ok, the assistant who handles his twitter account) linked to\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/janetheactuary\/2015\/01\/i-guess-im-just-not-a-fan-of-the-new-bishop.html\" \/>\n<meta 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