Unboxing the Church – The Catholic Thing

“There are not one hundred people in the United States who hate The Catholic Church,” famously opined Venerable Servant of God Fulton Sheen, “but there are millions who hate what they wrongly perceive the Catholic Church to be.” I’d go a step further: if there’s one thing that people, regardless of their religious affiliation, feel competent and confident to speak on, it seems to be the Catholic Church. Everybody seems to know what it teaches and why, and, by extension, why it’s dead wrong. Rarely does one hear people speak so dismissively about other religious traditions or institutions, say Buddhism, Hinduism, or even Islam, all of which our culture has decided to various degrees are deserving of a certain deferential respect.

Given the prominence of Catholicism even in 21^st-century America – as well as the tens of millions of “former Catholics” (the second largest religious group after Catholics themselves) – one could say that familiarity breeds contempt.

Yet familiarity does not necessarily breed accurate knowledge, as Catholic writer and podcaster (and former Episcopalian priest) Andrew Petiprin argues in his new book, The Faith Unboxed: Freeing the Catholic Church from the Containers People Put It In. Over eight chapters discussing eight of these inaccurate “boxes,” Petiprin sets the record straight in ways that even long-time, practicing Catholics may find surprising.

Petiprin begins by noting that the Church is not an ideology such as liberalism with its specifically progressivist and individualist bent; nor is it conservative in the sense that it is strictly traditionalist or perfectly aligned with the Republican Party.

Christ Himself repudiated those who placed their faith in the traditions of men. (Mark 7:1-13) As much as the Church upholds Holy Tradition as a source of divine revelation, she also possesses a certain revolutionary impulse in her repudiation of even long-standing cultural norms if they are opposed to the Gospel, whether we are talking about ancient Rome or indigenous peoples in the Americas.

Moreover, as Petiprin observes, the word “Catholicism” never appears in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, nor is it in any official Catholic document: “The Church is not a way to navigate reality, but rather the experience of reality. The Church is not a collection of ideas to lay atop human society, but the organization of humanity.”

The Church is also not a “denomination.” While Protestant denominations “come and go, come together, and break apart,” the Catholic Church asserts herself as the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church, and history has borne out that identity.

The Catholic Church does not even recognize “denominations” as such, but rather ecclesial communions that, via their sacraments, enjoy various degrees of communion with her. Petiprin cites St. Paul as perhaps the earliest critic of this idea that the Church could be divided into denominations: “Is Christ divided? Was Paul crucified for you? Or were you baptized in the name of Paul.” (1 Corinthians 1:13)

Is the Church an institution? Petiprin thinks not: “Human beings create institutions, whereas God created the Church.” I might quarrel with denying the Church is some sense an institution (she is, after all, composed of humans), but he has a point that the Church is not solely a this-worldly institution, one whose role is strictly defined by her various social programs rather than the salvation she offers.

Such a conception neglects the fact that the Church is the body of Christ, with the Eucharist at its center: “The Catholic Church is the experience of the common destiny of man – eucharistic man – transformed into Christ by Christ, living in a present that intersects with eternity.”

People may join clubs, but “joining” doesn’t apply in the same sense to the Church. Though similar to a club, the Church demands a certain doctrinal and liturgical uniformity; she is also, to cite a phrase of James Joyce’s, “here comes everybody.” This is evidenced by the arresting diversity of her saints: priests and nuns, kings and queens, nursing mothers and widowed fathers, poor farmers and respected doctors.

Many of the saints were the types of people you’d probably enjoy sitting down with over a cup of coffee or a pint of beer; others were so bizarre it’s hard to imagine what a conversation with them would even be like.

In response to a common criticism in Protestant circles, Petiprin argues that the Church, far from being an escape from the “liquid modernity” of our culture or the collapse of splintering, fissiparous Protestantism, is a home, a “place of freedom and responsibility.”

Nor is she a dictatorship defined by entrenched clerics lording over the laity, but a place where, through the sacraments, we gain incomparable power over our passions and liberty to pursue the good and become our most authentic selves: “The straitjackets and iron bars are all out there from the Church’s perspective, not in here.”

Finally, the Church is not a mere “preference” like so many of the fleeting attachments we make in the atomistic, ungrounded modernity we inhabit today. By Baptism, we are united to Christ and His Church indelibly, so much so that even if we reject her, the Church still beckons to us as one of her own. The Church speaks of “lapsed” Catholics rather than “ex-Catholics.”

One thing I admire particularly about Petiprin’s trenchant analysis is the breadth of his knowledge. The Yale graduate and former Fellow of Popular Culture at the Word on Fire Institute effortlessly moves between citations from the ancients – such as Plato’s Dialogues – to references to some of the most popular films and television programs of the last decade, including Game of Thrones. 

I was especially delighted to find in The Faith Unboxed an extended discussion of one of the films of Eric Rohmer, one of my favorite directors. Like so many of the examples offered in this excellent little book, the success of Rohmer – a practicing French Catholic whose films implicitly communicate Catholic teaching and who is one of the greatest post-war independent filmmakers – shows how much we lose if we keep the Church in boxes of our own making.