Identify Imaginatively With the Church?

I read a short but interesting article the other day in Commonweal magazine, the May 7th edition, by columnist Cathleen Kaveny, entitled "A Darkening." She began the article by describing a debate at Notre Dame between atheist Christopher Hitchens and Dinesh D'Souza, on the question "Is Religion the Problem?" The event turned out not to be about the role of religion, but about the existence of God. Apparently she was not terribly impressed with the debate, though she seemed to acknowledge that Hitchens was the "more agile debater."

No, the thrust in her article was toward the believing community, and what might "pry Catholics loose from their faith." She felt that a much more effective assault on faith would be to "question the reliability of the community that mediates the identity of God -- the Church. If your computer network crashes, it doesn't take the Internet with it. Yet when the church crashes, many Catholics find that access to God has been permanently impared." You could see where this was going.

Ms. Kaveny goes on: "Many Catholics who survived the first wave of the crisis ... are now floundering. But why? On a purly intellectual level, nothing has changed. On an affective level, however, it's all becoming too much. The breadth and pervasiveness of the crisis darken our religious imaginations, and seep into our worship and prayer. ... The challenge posed here isn't at the level of logical analysis, but at the level of imaginative association and affective identification. That's why the evident involvement of the pope, the Vicar of Christ and the symbol of the Church's unity, in the transfer of priest-abusers hits many people so hard."

That caught my attention. My own religious imagination is ABSOLUTELY CRITICAL to me; it's my imagination that offers me the way through which scripture comes alive, and it's the faculty that best enables me to know, love, and follow Jesus. Sure, I can study scripture and theology -- knowledge goes only so far. My prayer life uses imagination to place my heart and soul in the times and places in which Jesus spoke and acted. Mess with that, and you seriously mess with my entire spirit.

What I think Ms. Kaveny is saying is that the international scope of the sex-abuse scandal -- much more so than when it was seen primarily as an American problem -- has seriously damaged our ability to identify ourselves proudly and affectively as members of our Catholic community of believers. Well, of course!

Her haunting conclusion: "And effective response to the crisis will take more than truth commissions to find out what happened in the past and policy committees to protect children in the future. It will take the development of new ways of enabling believers to identify imaginatively and affectively with the Church." She's on to something, and this is worth some serious thought.