STIMULUS IS DOUBTING A GIANT

Press, 26 July 1989, Page 17

STIMULUS IS DOUBTING A GIANT

The Catholic Church, the biggest and oldest form of Christianity, has undergone many crises over the centuries including schisms and the Protestant Reformation. In the last two decades it has had a deepening crisis. ANABRIGHT HAY talks with a questioning Catholic, Lucinda Vardey, an Englishborn author who runs a literary agency in Canada.

‘Perhaps the Church ... has already arrived at the point of Christian unity intended by Vatican ll’

‘The contemporary Roman Church is now made up of groups of extremes’

Being a catholic is about doubting, says Lucinda Vardey. For Vardey, writer, literary agent, and. questioning Catholic, doubts about one’s personal innermost faith and the Church make Catholicism more stimulating. The Catholic Church, while a formidable, authoritarian institution, is also large enough to embrace a variety of opinions, she believes. In researching her recently published book, “Belonging,” in which a questioning Catholic comes to terms with the Church, she spoke to many Catholics — lapsed and otherwise. All had a different definition of Catholicism. It is this Catholicism, with a small “c,” which Vardey believes, has ensured the Church’s survival through the centuries. “Catholics can seldom ignore the faith, or the Church, or the fact that they are Catholic, even if they have lapsed or favour agnosticism.” Born in England in 1949, the eldest of a family of five children, Vardey was convent-edu-cated. Her father was the only non-Catholic member of the household, and her mother strove to maintain the Catholic tradition. "I realise now that I was no different from a number of my contemporaries. Church attendance was duty in our lives, like doing housework or helping around the house.” She says she remains a Catholic and could not be anything else. "I get a lot of spiritual sustenance from it and find I need communion a lot.” The bible has very little to do with being a Catholic, according to Vardey, who says that Catholicism is more involved with symbolism, catechism, rules and regulations. The sacraments are central to Catholicism. “Belonging” traces Vardey’s physical and spiritual journey from convent school to maturity, comparing her own experiences with those of other Catholics from many walks of life and parts of the world. Drawing extensively on Catholic literature and the teachings of Christ and His Apostles, she examines many issues confronting the questioning Catholic. Vardey does not shy away from the thorny moral issues on which the Catholic Church has firm views. These are treated with humour, insight and warmth. She believes many Catholics will laugh again and feel nostalgic when reading her experiences of convent life. Included were breast-development tests carried out by nuns, and a novel wake-up call which involved nuns pulling back the sheets and peeping up young girls’ nightdresses.

She fainted regularly from the overpowering smell of incense at benediction or from the effect of too much fasting and abstinence before communion. The nuns succeeded in rearing young women fully aware of the strength of women, she says. In her chapter on love and sex, she says, “It is not up to Rome to tell us whom we should love, how we should love and what we should do to express it.”

Vardey’s views and those of other Catholics on contraception, in-vitro fertilisation and abortion are discussed in a chapter entitled “The Body as Temple.” Vardey says she admires Christians who are brimming with the joy of living — a joy rare in Catholics.

A devotee of the ritual and the romantic trappings of Catholicism, Vardey says that being a Catholic is difficult and involves a fair amount of duty and not much joy. She much prefers questioning people, who while not that happy

with the world, are prepared to look for another way. "We’ve been brought up to say that this world is a trial and the next world is going to be great; so we should hang in there.” Like many of her generation, the question of staying or leaving the Church only arose after leaving home. Vardey decided to stay and kept attending Mass, but abstained from receiving communion when taking artificial birth control or when in sexual relationships. “We were an angry bunch of

people. We had no time for the Pope and his rules and regulations. They didn’t fit in with what we were doing: trying to live as Christians, occasionally going to Mass — avoiding communion because we knew we had sinned, avoiding confession because we considered it a farce.”

At such a point many Catholics undergo the psychological process of peeling away guilt and confusion in an attempt to reconcile personal beliefs with the Church.

Vardey says she and her fellow questioning baby-boomers

are members of a “vast majority,” many of whom are returning to the Church and who financially cannot be ignored. Well educated, well off, and unwilling to put up with doctrines they do not believe, these Catholics are going to have to be listened to if the Church wants their much-needed financial contributions.

Many intelligent Catholic clergy, Vardey says, are listening.

Such clergy welcome questions and discussion, seeing it as chal-

lenging, stimulating, and a useful feedback. “They know they haven’t got the answers to everybody’s emotional problems and they are fed up with people asking them.” But not all clergy are so open or so intelligent, Vardey says. “Nowadays the priestforce has become a holy alternative to the secular army for many a society outcast or social misfit.” “Allowing priests and nuns to marry would only give more freedom of expression to clergy at the diocesan and parish level,

making it harder for the Vatican to control its forces.” At a time when it is vital that the Church attract appropriate men and women to the religious life, the wrong people are signing up, or no-one is signing up at all. Hard-line clergy are being appointed in some areas by those who worry about a possible loss of power, Vardey says. “Hopefully the Pope will go back to how the Vatican was before, which was quietly head office when the Pope prayed for us as opposed to travelling around the world running up vast

sums which the Church cannot afford.” While the Vatican cannot compromise or be trapped, it is issuing fewer blanket statements on moral issues such as birth control, Vardey says. Most people were now following their own consciences on such issues. “Catholics sometimes misinterpret the meaning of the ’faith,’ seeing it as the code of Catholic existence, when, in fact, it is a collection of Vatican-manufac-tured instructions for religious robots.” The crux of the dilemma of the questioning Catholic appears to lie in an inability sometimes to realise that Catholicism is composed of a variety of divisible parts. Vardey says that if people place those parts in the perspective of how they affect personal beliefs it is much easier to accept the Pope and the Vatican in daily life. A dichotomy, she writes in her book, now exists between the institutional Church and its staff and the spiritual Church and its laity, who are pushing for more openness and dialogue. The institution will never go away because the Church is very much part of the secular world as well as the spiritual, she says. Catholic constitution and the Church’s methods of government have not undergone any radical change in the last few centuries. “It is imperative for Catholic people to speak out, through the sophisticated electronic media, about their dissatification with Rome’s unyielding stubbornness over contemporary issues.” It cannot be refuted, she says, that much more open dialogue and understanding between the clergy and the increasingly significant laity are necessary for the future of the Church. But since the Second Vatican Council the growing power of evangelism and its hold over the news media have influenced the manipulative practices of a sort of pseudo-liberalism in Catholic parishes. Every Catholic whom Vardey interviewed for her book held up the Jesuit order as one they thought they could respect. But she believes the Jesuits have lost their prominence as an individual force to be reckoned with.

Instead there exists a special intelligence force, made up mostly of priests from a number of orders who think the old way and work on behalf of the Vatican as religious head hunters for a type of central intelligence agency know as Opus Dei. “The contemporary Roman Church is now made up of groups of extremes.”

Vardey says the ecumenical movement has offered many advantages for Catholics, one being Rome’s recognition of a more broadly based united Christian people. This enabled more informal and open discussions with other denominations.

“Perhaps the Church of the Catholic people has already arrived at the point of Christian unity intended by Vatican II.” Vardey believes that one has to define one’s personal faith and then try to fit that defination into the institution, instead of trying to fit a preconceived image of what a good practising Catholic should be.