2/28/13 7:48 PM Which Catholic Church? - NYTimes.

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Page 1 of 3 http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/27/opinion/global/which-catholic-church.html?emc=eta1&_r=0
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OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
Which Catholic Church?
By PAUL KENNEDY
Published: February 26, 2013
Being about the only professor at a liberal, tolerant, cosmopolitan
Western university who is known to be a practicing Catholic
baptized at the age of two weeks I have been asked frequently in
recent times about what I think will happen to the church in the light
of Pope Benedicts resignation. Will it split further, between
conservatives and liberals? Will there be an African pope? When will
there ever be female priests, then bishops? What about declining
attendance of the European congregations (as opposed to the surging
populations in the southern world)?
I sigh. When I turn to my daily newspapers, I sigh further, at the
stereotyping, the false assumptions, the hostility in some quarters,
the focus upon protocol rather than substance, the obsession with
fiscal laxities at the Vatican rather than the proclaimed mission of
Christ. Much of this criticism is boringly predictable; I may be wrong,
but I suspect it might be hard to find a month, for example, when New York Times
columnist Maureen Dowd does not launch an attack upon the papacy and the Catholic
Church. And when the College of Cardinals announces the successor to Benedict, there will
be fervid speculation about the new popes attitude toward divorce, abortion, the Jews,
secularism in Italy, and so on.
That is one view of the Catholic Church, the church of hierarchy, tradition, formalism, its
bursts of reform soon restrained by a return to conservatism. It is the church so familiar to
the minds of secularists, pagans and anti-Catholics everywhere. It is the church of the
19th-century popes. It is the church of infallibility, incense, candles, and of Latin masses.
Pushing it further, it is the church of financial corruption and sexual abuse. It is the church
of stereotype, which is not wise.
In the early 1790s, as Europe reeled under the shock of the French Revolution, the great
English politician and philosopher Edmund Burke warned against condemning an entire
nation, a France of about 30 million souls, for the troubles and wars. Shouldnt we be wary
of condemning a church of roughly 1 billion believers?
On Wednesday last week, I went, as I usually do, to work in the lunchtime soup kitchen of
the St. Thomas More Catholic chaplaincy at Yale University in downtown New Haven,
Connecticut, founded almost 30 years ago to meet the needs of the poor and hungry.
Among our customers, there was the usual group of permanent down-and-outs, meth
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2/28/13 7:48 PM Which Catholic Church? - NYTimes.com
Page 2 of 3 http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/27/opinion/global/which-catholic-church.html?emc=eta1&_r=0
addicts, drinkers, druggies, and dignified older ladies and gentlemen who had recently lost
their jobs and decided to take our food so they could spend their pittances on energy bills.
There was a father with four young kids; the local schools had closed because of a blizzard,
so they could not get their free school lunches. To talk with our clients is sometimes a
revelation. Just a few weeks ago, I talked with a young man (never seen before or since)
who wanted to discuss the poems of Shelley and Keats plus Eliots Four Quartets!
The helpers at the soup kitchen are all volunteers; they would never expect to be
remunerated. Not everyone is Catholic, but most are. They are the parishioners who live
around Yale and come in for Sunday Mass and collegiality. They are the Yale students who
also work in the downtown evening soup kitchen, or in the mens overflow night shelter. A
number of them are going off to Guatemala in mid-March to help rebuild a village still
hurting from the civil wars. They welcome guest speakers and participate in theological
discussion groups. This is not a dead or decaying church. It is vibrant and pulsing,
rejoicing also in the beauty of the services (especially the sung Masses) and the sheer
intellectualism of the homilies. It is our Catholic Church. Nobody is leaving it. What
happens in Rome is, well, distant.
A few Sundays ago, the Gospel featured that very familiar tale of the Good Samaritan
(Luke 10:25-37). A man going to Jericho from Jerusalem was assaulted by robbers, then
left to die in the ditch. A priest came by, and rode on. A Levite came by, and did not stop.
But the despised Samaritan stopped, took the unknown victim to an inn and paid for all
that he needed. Note that the benefactor did not assist a family member, or a college
friend, or a favored charity. Thats simply not enough. Even the pagans do that! scoffed
Jesus in another address.
The litmus test is whether you help the unknown, the desperate-looking person at the soup
kitchen, the beggar on the street. At the end of his striking homily upon this passage, the
remarkable Catholic chaplain at Yale told us bluntly: This is the test. Do you love your
unknown neighbor as yourself? Do you love your dirty, hairy, smelly, dispossessed
neighbor as yourself, and will you reach out to help? Loving your God, and loving your
known and unknown neighbors as yourself, is the core. Everything else, said Father Bob,
is footnotes. Wow. The married-priests issue is a footnote; the female-priests issue is a
footnote; so is divorce, contraception, Latin Masses, changes in the liturgy, even perhaps
the death penalty.
What matters is your reaching out to help. Thats the sole question you will be asked when
you reach the Pearly Gates.
Does this mean that Catholics do not need a worldwide church structure? Not at all. We
need the parish, the parish priest, the parish church, where most of us will be baptized,
take Communion and confession, get married and eventually enjoy the last rites. But those
parishes reside under the protective umbrella of a diocese and its bishop and the line
from a bishop goes straight to Rome.
The physical parish church offers not only a place for public worship but also a place for
study groups, social and fund-raising events, soup kitchens and the like. Nobody, surely,
wants to be like the early Christians, wandering through deserts and hillsides, without a
physical place of worship, without roots. We need the Church Physical, just as we need the
Church Ethical and the Church Social. Even the modest Quakers, with their great
commitment to prayer and social justice, need meeting houses, organization and a
network.
But no one launching an attack upon the papal elections, Vatican finances, sexism and the
rest should think that they are attacking Catholicism per se. From my perspective, our
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2/28/13 7:48 PM Which Catholic Church? - NYTimes.com
Page 3 of 3 http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/27/opinion/global/which-catholic-church.html?emc=eta1&_r=0
A version of this op-ed appeared in print on February 27, 2013, in The International Herald Tribune.
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Catholic Church is vibrant, helpful, intellectual, and working in so many ways to fulfill the
message to love God and to love, and reach out to, ones unknown neighbor. Everything
else is, well, footnotes.
Paul Kennedy is Dilworth Professor of History and director of International Security
Studies at Yale University; and the author of many books, including The Rise and Fall of
the Great Powers.
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