Or, if you want to be all historically accurate, I guess you could say it’s that talking to communists is like talking to Catholics.  Still, the similarities are striking.  Really, this is true for anyone with a certain ideological purity, and the same could be said for libertarians, or intense pacifists, or anyone with serious assumptions (obviously this is true of all of us –we are all supported by assumptions, but since some people’s assumptions are in the minority, theirs becomes more obvious). So, look at this:

1. There is no such thing as orthodoxy.  A Catholic friend (who is orthodox) told me this.  There is either Catholic or non-Catholic.  This is the case for dogmatic communists as well: of course, they would not admit they were dogmatic, or even orthodox.  They’re simply right.  Hence, ideology.

2. Wrongness is not possible.  If there’s something inconsistent, it is never the Party or the Church or the Market (depending on if you’re commie or Catholic or libertarian).  These simply cannot fail.  It would be impossible.  And so there’s a cool maxim in this: “Intellectual honesty seeks the truth; ideology seeks to prove itself true.”

3. Growth is not possible.  If you’re already perfect, you have no need to grow.  Instead, if a change is needed, it is never acknowledged but rather denied for as long as possible until it is accepted as though it always existed.  The differences between Vatican I and Vatican II, for example, really do resemble some of the stark changes in 1984 in which “eternal wars” change all the time.

All of this is not to deny that I love the Church, or that I do believe certain fundamentals within it really do never change.  Nor do I deny that the Holy Spirit works to guide that Church.  It’s just that I think we all ought to act like grown ups about acknowledging an argument and the possibility of change.

This past weekend–on Easter no less–I went to the Philly art museum with my family. I was particularly struck by Monet’s  painting, Poplars, which is stunningly simple: it’s just three trees and their reflections in a pond, each forming a continuous pink line for the entire height of the painting with the three lines divided in the middle by the ground-line. The work, I think, perfectly anticipates abstract expressionism as there is only a vague commitment here to actually presenting real physical objects. Monet seems much more concerned with how color and shapes work with each other. Now, of course, visual art has always been about color and shapes, but you see an increasing movement represented in Monet from representations of “reality” in some form all the way to someone like Rothko who wants to figure out how shapes and colors work on their own.

The Church has a reputation for not liking a lot of modernist stuff for some of these reasons–it’s supposedly more committed to representation than abstraction. I’m not sure if that’s true, but I do understand the attraction to art that is not quite so abstract. It’s not that I don’t like or appreciate abstraction. I do. But too much of it feels like a thought experiment, a means of making a point more than making art (if that distinction is worth anything). A perfect example of this is the difference between Picasso’s early super-Cubist stuff (like the Guitar Player) and the raw power of Guernica. Nobody would deny that Guernica is cubist, but its figures and narratives make much more of a visceral and not simply rational connection. You could say the same for Leger’s The City. My thoughts on a lot of contemporary art generally mirror what some critics say about secular modernity: it’s interesting, it’s important, but it’s not particularly meaningful. It’s, as Weber might say, disenchanted.

So what does all of this have to do with the Church? There’s been a lot written about the resurgence of religion, or the idea of post-secularity. I think that a lot of the new commitment to stories in art is dealing with the same societal trends, a reaction to the potential “emptiness” of a secular world. But here’s the thing: stories don’t work so well in abstraction. They need figures, and those figures need bodies and a certain physicality. And while there are certainly tremendous precedents for visually representing the body in other parts of the world–think of various tribes in Africa and traditions in South Asia–I think that Roman Catholics are the best bet we’ve got in terms of Western Europe and the U.S (at least once the pagans all got pulled into Catholicism). (For more on how this relates to modern art, see this link on the Catholic sources of four major artists).

So our world really needs Catholicism, or at least a Catholic sensibility, and it needs Catholics to remind us that the sacred is not just out there, or is not just something to be found once the world is rejected. It is interesting how the extremes of Protestantism and Buddhism– real life is outside this world or real life is suffering–both are so opposed to the Catholic insistence that grace works here, now, and that God’s grace only functions via the human body and the oil and water and ash of this world. (Yes I know those are gross caricatures of Protestant and Buddhist rejection. However, my point is that there is space for those rejections in those traditions, while such a rejection would be impossible for Catholics).

Anyways, while we worry about Obama and Notre Dame, I’d like for us to worry a bit about making sure that the Catholic artistic tradition no longer produced the maudlin, er, stuff that will turn up if you do a google search for Catholic art.

PS–Of course, I’m aware of the psychological power of a landscape or a still life. Yes–especially for landscapes and something like Van Gogh’s Room at Arles. So you don’t need physical figures. But there’s something about landscapes, or in Van Gogh’s case, a room–that make a narrative implicit. And anyways, I’d say that a lot of still life paintings are more impressive than they are moving–and when they are emotionally powerful, its because of some sort of obvious symbolic connection–think of the difference between when Cezanne paints fruit and when he paints skulls.

Maybe.  That’s what this poll says, anyways.  But it’s my hunch that we Catholics are actually just more understanding and forgiving–we see the universe as bigger and more complicated than simple right and wrongs, which makes it hard for us to be interviewed in surveys.  But that’s obviously not an empirical assertion.  Anyways, read the article here:

American Catholics are more liberal than the general population on social issues like divorce and homosexuality, despite the Catholic Church’s longstanding conservatism on both issues, according to a new survey.

Catholics are more likely than non-Catholics to say that homosexual relations, divorce, and heterosexual sex outside wedlock are morally acceptable, according to an analysis by Gallup pollsters released on Monday (March 30).

There’s really nothing new in this article, which is about various progressive/liberal/not-Republican/Republican-but-voting-for-Obama/etc.  folks who want to change the way the Catholic Church views abortion.  It’s an interesting conversation, and I’m glad it’s getting mainstream press.  However, it’s important to be clear that conversations like this have been going on for some time:

The new effort is causing a fissure in the antiabortion movement, with traditional groups viewing the activists as traitors to their cause. Leaders worry that the approach could gain traction with a more liberal Congress and president, although they do not expect it to weaken hard-core opposition.

“It’s a sellout, as far as we are concerned,” said Joe Scheidler, founder of the Pro-Life Action League. “We don’t think it’s really genuine. You don’t have to have a lot of social programs to cut down on abortions.”

The diverse group that has come together to try a different tack includes prominent pastors such as Joel Hunter; Samuel Rodriguez, president of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference; Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good; Sojourners, a progressive evangelical organization; and RealAbortionSolutions.org, a coalition of Catholics and evangelical leaders.

Others include Catholics United, a progressive Catholic lay group; Richard Cizik, vice president for governmental affairs of the National Association of Evangelicals; the Rev. Thomas Reese of Georgetown University’s Woodstock Theological Center, a prominent Jesuit thinker; and Nicholas Cafardi, former dean of the Duquesne University School of Law and a Catholic canon lawyer.

This is an important conversation that we need to keep having:

The right to life remains a highly important and sensitive topic. Republicans have been trying to sell themselves for so long on the basis of judicial appointments and the supposed “fifth vote” to overturn Roe, sometimes you wonder if they realize how selecting judges on that basis disserves the rule of law. It also keeps Republicans perennially looking like the gang that can’t shoot straight—given the number of “fifth votes” they’ve already appointed to the court, from Sandra Day O’Connor to Anthony Kennedy to David Souter.

The Democrats had a brilliant strategy on abortion this year: Don’t play the futile court speculation game. Instead, Obama’s team promoted life in ways that don’t depend upon a Supreme Court vacancy and cooperating nominee. Specifically, Obama had the Dems commit to promote life with enhanced social and economic assistance. This idea had traction—the Catholic vote literally switched from Republican to Democrat, going (in preliminary numbers) 55-45 for Obama nationwide, which is amazing given the amount of outright lies and falsehoods the GOP was purveying about the president-elect on this issue. (Not to mention the co-conspiring clergy the Republicans captured, who were literally preaching that voters would go to hell for voting for Barack.) The Republicans became the party of fear and damnation rather than solution or respect for life. As a consequence, Pennsylvania, Indiana, Ohio, Michigan, and Virginia are in the Democratic, not the Republican, column.

It’s admittedly hard to untie the abortion knot, but here’s a thought: Republicans could have moved a constitutional amendment that would presume life to begin at conception, while further providing that no government, federal or state, is competent to legislate on the question absent a supermajority. The effect? Taking the Supreme Court’s “activist” thumb off the scale against life while at the same time avoiding the criminalization of a woman’s freedom. This is not the ideal Catholic position, but it’s closer, and the Catholic Church has less standing to complain about a grant of freedom that could then be fairly influenced by the moral instruction associated with a woman’s religious choice.

This is important work:

In a bid to improve strained Catholic-Muslim relations, the Vatican hosted scholars, imans and clerics from both religions Tuesday as it opened a three-day religious conference.

The forum aimed to counter the effects of a speech two years ago by Pope Benedict XVI that angered many in the Islamic world.

The meetings will culminate in a papal audience and is intended to help the two faiths find common ground. The closed-door forum, which gathers 29 scholars and clerics from each religion, started Tuesday and will last through Thursday.

The Vatican said in a statement the first day was dedicated to the “spiritual and theological fundamentals” of the two religions, and the second will focus on “human dignity and mutual respect.”

Clearly Newsweek has not been paying attention to this blog, or any Catholic discussion in the past two years.

In fact, look at their art for the article, posted above.

It’s pretty impressive, actually, how similar some of the progressions have been:

What all this suggests is that, in this and coming election cycles, we may see a new model for the Catholic vote, one whose participation more closely resembles that of Jews, 75% of whom are overwhelmingly pro-Democratic, while a devout minority, the Orthodox, tends more strongly Republican. If you break the Catholic vote down in roughly the same pattern, you get something that looks like the current national spread. According to most reliable data, slightly less than one in four Catholics now assist at weekly Mass and are more open to GOP policies, while the overwhelming majority of their co-religionists have cast their lot with the Democrats’ domestic and foreign policies.

First, a conversation between Dionne and another bishop and then more controversy in Scranton:

“What I believe, and what the church teaches, is that one abortion is too many. That’s why I believe abortion is so important. But in light of this, there are many other issues we need to bring up, other issues we should consider, other issues that touch the reality of our lives.”

Those issues, Bishop Zavala said, include racism, torture, genocide, immigration, war and the impact of the economic downturn “on the most vulnerable among us, the elderly, poor children, single mothers.”

“We know that neither of the political parties supports everything the church teaches,” he added. “We are not going to create a culture of life if we don’t talk about all the life issues, beginning with abortion but including all of them.”

This guy is getting creepy.

I can understand holding a position as a bishop, but to deny other bishops exist–well, that violates the whole Catholic point of community and communal accountability–across time and across space. That’s why I’m Catholic–because I believe no one person is accountable, so we are responsible to our tradition and our peers and the Holy Spirit.

Martino’s recent letter on voting was the centerpiece of this NYTimes story, and according to this story in The Wayne Independent yesterday, Martino “walked the talk” as he crashed a parish forum on the election and rebuked the panelists (who seem to represent diverse political views) for a one-sided discussion that included the U.S. hierarchy’s voter guide, “Faithful Citizenship,” but not his letter. The money quotes:

“No USCCB document is relevant in this diocese,” said Martino. “The USCCB doesn’t speak for me.” “The only relevant document … is my letter,” he said. “There is one teacher in this diocese, and these points are not debatable.”

Martino apparently wanted the forum canceled. Many broke into applause at his “intervention,” while about a quarter of the audience walked out. Martino soon followed. Ugly for the parish, for the diocese, for civil discourse, and for the hierarchy, which seems increasingly divided. They are to meet after the election to discuss their collective response. This sort of witness is clearly not working. As Rocco notes, Martino wasn’t present at last November’s USCCB meeting in Baltimore which passed the Faithful Citizenship statement with 98% approval rate.