On that Associated Press piece and the future of the Church in America (2024)

Tim Sullivan’srecent piece for the Associated Press on the state of the Church in America has made the rounds in Catholic circles, and it feels like a generally accurate snapshot of where things are and where they’re heading. Sullivan looks at recent developments at St. Maria Goretti parish in Madison, Wisconsin, and Benedictine College in Atchison, Kansas, arguing that they’re emblematic of a broader shift across the U.S. toward a “new, old” Church: Latin and Gregorian chant in the liturgy, cassocks, and habits on priests and religious, and dogma and doctrine back in the conversation.

My home parish and current parish—both in the more liberal Northeast—have seen the same shift: Latin,ad orientem, and kneelers for Communion have become standard again, while guitars, Eucharistic ministers, and altar girls have become rare. In discussing the AP piece with colleagues, they reported similar trends in the South and Midwest. It’s all anecdotal, but also undeniable: love it or hate it, change is afoot all over the country—sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly, sometimes in fits and starts, but all in a similar direction.

And, as Sullivan notes, the change is especially palpable among young people. The young priests and young families who are still showing up in churches are not doing it because it’s expected of them—if anything’s expected of them now, it’s that they will drift away—but because they know they’re lost without it. The Church’s ancient traditions and doctrines are not a suffocating burden but a breath of fresh air—an exciting new discovery of hidden treasure in the muddy and barren fields of relativism.

And as these Gen-Xers and millennials more and more rise up to take the helm of the Church’s institutions, that excitement in our shifting moment will define the Catholicism of the future in this country. In fact, whereas many doomsday voices online have warned of an invasion of indifferentist modernism in the Church, the real internal threat facing the Church in the decades to come may well end up being a radical traditionalist counter-reaction to the Second Vatican Council and all the popes in its wake.

Of course, trying to describe the Catholic Church in broad brushstrokes, even in the narrow confines of one country, is overwhelming; it’s far too big, ancient, and complicated—not to mention paradoxical in its thinking—to be dealt with in any straightforward way. Sullivan thus falls into an old trap: that of superimposing our more familiar political divide onto the Church to sort things out. The words “liberal” and “conservative” appear twenty-five times in the AP piece, and what results are various generalizations about what each of the two “kinds” of Catholics cares about, and the various social and cultural artifacts connected with each—even though Catholic social teaching famously resists the dominant political binary. For Catholicism, theology, not politics, must be primary.

The Associated Press certainly isn’t the first to do take this politicizing approach, and won’t be the last. There are, after all, elements of truth in it: there is indeed a “Catholic right” and “Catholic left,” and that rightness and leftness informs and often warps the way each side approaches the Church; and if order, hierarchy, and tradition define the conservative mind, and openness, equality, and change define the liberal mind, what Sullivan has captured in his piece undeniably overlaps with a surge of order in the Church’s inner life.

But even if we accept this way of framing the matter, the key question is this: Is what we’re seeing arebalancingback toward a proper emphasis on order, or anunbalancingaway from a proper emphasis on openness? In other words: Is the Church recovering from a spiral, or being thrown into one?

Sullivan’s own piece clues us into the answer. After surveying various more extreme factions lumped in under the “conservative Catholic” banner, he makes this observation about the “orthodox movement”: it can seem like “a tangle of forgiveness and rigidity, where insistence on mercy and kindness mingle with warnings of eternity in hell.”

Another Wisconsin priest hadthis fitting reaction to the line: “Sounds like Jesus to me.” Indeed, no one warns about hell more often or more forcefully in the Bible than Christ himself, just as no one invites mercy more clearly or more definitively. And the forgiveness of God’s love is tied, and again and again, to a rigid obeying of his commands (Jn 14:15; 1 Jn 5:3).

Later in the piece, Sullivan focuses on Fr. Scott Emerson, who was appointed pastor of St. Maria Goretti in Madison in 2021, writing: “There was more incense, more Latin, more talk of sin and confession. Emerson’s sermons are not all fire-and-brimstone. He speaks often about forgiveness and compassion. But his tone shocked many longtime parishioners.” Once again, talk of sin and confession—even fire and brimstone—is no “conservative” talking point, just as forgiveness and compassion is no “liberal” one. Both are simply part and parcel of one Gospel, which begins with a summons to conversion and culminates in a summons to love (Mk 1:13; Jn 13:34).

It would be difficult for even a casual reader of Scripture and Tradition not to see in these descriptions of a resurgent “conservatism” a description of basic Christian tensions. Thus, reading between the lines, we find the startling implication: the striking thing about this movement toward orthodoxy is not that such things are being talked about one-sidedly, but that they are being talked about at all. The “conservative” themes—law, confession, sin, hell—have for a long time been not so much secondary as nonexistent. The Church, having identified too intimately with the culture, has been wallowing in more “liberal” talk of forgiveness, mercy, compassion, and love, but without a corresponding, and indeed primary, emphasis on truth.

In short, a distortion of the Gospel is not looming over the Church ahead; it’s spurring her on from behind. And the Church’s shepherds and pastors, preachers and teachers, Brothers and Sisters, and mothers and fathers are striving to correct it. This is what we see in the best of the “new, old” Church: an attempt to recapture what was lost without losing what was gained, bringing out both what is new and what is old (Mt 13:52). The danger of an overcorrection in the other direction will loom—it always has, and always will—but such is her life on the razor’s edge of the Way toward Christ.

Toward the end of the piece, Sullivan quotes Fr. Emerson—himself quoting the existential Thomist Étienne Gilson—on the exaggerated rumors of the Church’s demise: “The Church,” he said, “has buried every one of her undertakers.” If the AP piece is any indication, she also continues to evade every one of her politicizers, while aspiring to the union of all things in Christ.