Lay Spirituality: From Traditional to Postmodern

Lay Spirituality

From Traditional to Postmodern

Pierre Hegy

Foreword by Paul Lakeland

Lay Spirituality

From Traditional to Postmodern

Copyright © 2017 Pierre Hegy. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.

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Table of Contents

Title Page

Foreword

Introduction and Acknowledgments

Part I: Spirituality and Sociology

Chapter 1: Christian Anthropology

Chapter 2: Individual Vocations

Part II: Popular Religiosity and Devotions

Chapter 3: Dimensions of Lay Spirituality

Chapter 4: The Spirituality of Devotions

Part III: The Post-Vatican II Era

Chapter 5: The Vatican II Explosion & the Church of the Resurrection

Chapter 6: The U.S. Debate about the Role of the Laity

Chapter 7: The John Paul II Spirituality of Mission

Part IV: Postmodern Christianity

Chapter 8: A Protestant Evangelical Church

Chapter 9: A Postmodern Catholic Parish

Chapter 10: On the Charismatic Renewal in Guatemala

Chapter 11: The Spirituality of Social Justice

General Conclusion

Bibliography

Foreword

What, if anything, might be a suitable relationship between Christian spirituality and the discipline of sociology? How can a social science methodology possibly shed light on something so personal and so interior as spirituality? Wouldn’t it be the case, indeed, that anything sociology had to say to shed light on spirituality would inevitably reduce it to a purely this-worldly phenomenon? These and similar questions are raised by Pierre Hegy, a man who as a sociologist and a Christian ought to be well-positioned to offer an informed opinion. In this new work in which he utilizes the well-tried method of participant-observer, Hegy explores the spiritual practices of lay people in a variety of ecclesial contexts. What, he asks, are the fortunes of spirituality inspired by traditional devotions, what of the different approaches brought about during and after the Vatican II years, and how are we situated today in what he calls our postmodern spiritual era? Discussing our current times, Hegy gets down to the hard work of the sociologist/participant and inquires of four variant forms he encounters in a Protestant evangelical church, a Catholic parish, the phenomenon of charismatic renewal, and finally a community especially devoted to the work of social justice.

Hegy’s fundamental concerns will not surprise anyone who is familiar with his valuable work in his book on church reform, Wake Up, Lazarus (2015), or who knows of the important conversations he orchestrates through an internet list-serve on a variety of ecclesiological issues. But it is the method of this work that makes his conclusions even more important. The participant observer gathers real data and this strengthens his extended conclusion in which he raises some familiar questions, now in a new light. How do we go about finding our true calling in today’s church, and how are the possibilities of succeeding affected by the ecclesial cultures of different parishes? How is it that the roles of the laity in ministry today are in some respects less substantial than they were half a century ago in the heyday of Catholic Action, defined by Hegy, following the words of Popes Pius XI and XII, as participation in the apostolate of the hierarchy? His final quintessentially postmodern question runs deeper and raises many familiar but important questions in a new light: is truth multi-dimensional rather than absolute?

Hegy’s is a trenchant and outspoken voice for ecclesial reform, from which many of we who work in ecclesiology, including the present author, have benefited enormously. His work has been even more valuable to the thinking person in the pew, even to many who are not sure whether the pew is any longer where they wish to be. His voice is so important because it comes from the perspective both of faith and of social science, it is driven by a clear-sighted love for that which he challenges, and its passion and compassion are visible in equal measures. For those of us who are concerned for our future roles, especially as laypeople, in a church under stress, Hegy is a marvelous guide.

Paul Lakeland

Fairfield Universilty

Introduction and Acknowledgments

This study of spirituality is based on interviews and participant observation in parishes and small groups. I have spent several years interviewing people in the United States and Guatemala. The implicit question of this research is: What are the various vocations of laypeople today? Past forms of spirituality asked questions like, What is the vocation of priests? The vocation of brothers and sisters in religious life? That of Benedictines, or Franciscans, or Jesuits, or Carmelites? My question is: What are the vocations of individual laypeople? Today each Christian has a special vocation the way every citizen has a special calling in civil society. The vocations of priests and religious are defined by their institutions but the vocation of the laity has to be discovered individually. It is a quest, not a given.

I cover three basic spiritual traditions, that of the traditional devotions (part II), that of Vatican II and the post-Vatican II years (part III), and the new trends of postmodernity (part IV).

Traditional devotions like the rosary and processions go back to the Middle Ages, while the veneration of saints is as ancient as the early Christian martyrs. These devotions are called popular because they are people’s devotions, that is, lay-centered and lay-directed. I will give examples from Guatemala where they are a mass phenomenon, and from the U.S. where they are alive in ethnic enclaves like that of the Italian Americans. There are also clergy-centered devotions. After the Council of Trent and especially since the nineteenth century, the papacy has shown great interest in fostering the devotions of the Blessed Sacrament, the Forty Hours, the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary, frequent confession and communion, and the collective recitation of the rosary in church or Marian societies (chapter 4).

The spirituality of Vatican II and the post-Vatican II era is more complex. Vatican II was followed by enthusiastic renewal in parishes and institutes of religious life. I describe such a parish in chapter 5 in The Vatican II Explosion. This parish has survived in its reform-mindedness to this day, while being challenged by the problems of the contemporary church: alienation from the institutional church, perceived insipidity of its rituals, secularization of its gatherings, and the fascination with Eastern spirituality.

The spirit of the 1960s came an abrupt end in 1968 with the assassination of M.L. King and Bobby Kennedy, the election of President Nixon on a law and order program, the crushing of the Spring of Prague by Russian tanks, and the escalation of the Vietnam War. It is also in 1968 that Paul VI published Humanae Vitae which increasingly polarized the church. The spirit of Vatican II lingered on but the restoration mentality progressively took over. I will first look at the debate in the U.S. over the role of the laity in the church (chapter 6).

John Paul II dominated the post-Vatican II era (chapter 7). He was a giant on the international scene. His motto don’t be afraid threw zizany (havoc) into the communist camp and galvanized the fighters of the culture war in the West. He is most remembered for his apocalyptic vision of the gospel of light vs. the cultures of death. Laypeople were to be the foot soldiers of this war, under the leadership of the hierarchy. He made a definitive impact in Christifideles laici by asserting that ministry was the exclusive domain of the ordained while the mission of the laity was in the secular world. The American bishops clarified this position in Co-Workers in the Vineyard of the Lord by creating a new category of lay workers, the ecclesial ministers, but they assigned no mission to the rest of the laity.

Four chapters describe four different forms of postmodern spirituality: a Protestant evangelical church (chapter 8), a Catholic parish (chapter 9), the charismatic renewal (chapter 10), and a church centered on social justice (chapter 11).

The Protestant church of Bayville is a good example of postmodern strong religion, which is defined by spiritual dedication through the born-again experience, intentional communities meeting several times during the week, and a strong sense of mission leading to many missionary endeavors. Of prime importance to Protestant evangelicals is their theology of salvation as grace through the death and blood of Jesus Christ. This theology also raises the question of its intellectual justification, namely its biblical hermeneutic or the lack of it.

Two main characteristics of the parish of San Miguel are mystagogy and its 150 small communities involving about one thousand parishioners. Among their practices are holy hours in homes, neighborhood open-air masses in streets or public places, posada celebrations in nine different homes before Christmas, and the Stations of the Cross during Lent, each week in fourteen different homes. Mystagogy is a major dimension of the eucharistic celebrations either in neighborhood churches without a priest or in the parish church with special emphasis on communion rather than elevation-transubstantiation. This parish is built on trust and the empowerment of the laity, which explains its success.

There are about 140 million Catholic charismatics in the world, about double the American Catholic population. In the charismatic groups I observed there are at least three levels of participation: the general assembly meeting once a week, the coordinators who often meet a second time during the week, and those leaders who continue their formation for five to ten years. The purpose of the latter is preparation for the participants’ special vocation. The charismatic renewal has produced outstanding lay vocations by following the structure of religious life which begins with the novitiate (here, a special retreat), continues with the years of formation, and leads to specialized ministries. Most charismatics are evangelists, that is, missionaries of the gospel. It is this evangelism that explains their success in Latin America (chapter 10).

The spirituality of social justice is not based on any doctrine: Gandhi was a Hindu and Martin Luther King a Baptist. From the history of civil rights movement we learn that it takes the voice of a prophet—Rosa Parks and M. L. King in Montgomery and Fr. Pfleger in South Chicago—to wake up the masses from the slumber of racism and injustice. Anybody can join the movement. There are no prerequisites and it is the duty of all citizens to promote the welfare of society. Yet in King’s campaign, as at St. Sabina in South Chicago, it is the Sermon on the Mount that provides the strongest impetus for social justice. At St. Sabina the peace protests are rooted in the liturgy and biblical studies. There the peace activists found that their call for social justice is a true vocation. To work for justice is truly the vocation and mission of the laity in the world (chapter 11).

* * *

A few words have to be said about the methodology followed in this work. I follow the outsider-insider methodology which predicates that any outsider can learn the culture of insiders the way immigrants learn the language and customs of their host country. Sociologists can similarly learn the various languages of Christianity and Catholicism, more specifically the languages of theology, scripture, canon law, history, etc. The methodology of outsider-insider is generally practiced by anthropologists and psychologists: one does not have to be a Maya to study a Mayan culture, and one does not have to be psychotic to understand psychotic mental states.

When one learns the customs and language of insiders, one is likely to become involved in their on-going debates. Alexis of Tocqueville visited the United States for only about a year, but he became involved for years in the discussion of American democracy and the tyranny of the majority. I will similarly get involved in the theoretical issues raised by my research.

I advocate a proactive stand in sociological research. Psychology takes a proactive stand in favor of people’s psychological health. The various fields of sociology (education, race relations, social inequality, family life, etc.) all take proactive stands, usually in the form of policy proposals at the end of a given research. Sociology of religion does not; for most of the twentieth century it has been hostile to religion, predicting and expecting its demise. Today this hostility has turned into distant empathy as sociologists often compare religious traditions rather than show interest and knowledge in one in particular. I advocate a proactive stand in favor of the religion one is studying. There are many examples of such an attitude. Priest-sociologists like Joseph Fichter and Andrew Greeley obviously took such a stand. Dean Hoge, a Methodist, took a similar attitude in his numerous studies of Catholicism. I call such proactive research a pastoral sociology of religion.¹

There are two issues raised in the first two chapters. First, is the supernatural so otherworldly that it stands beyond reason and cannot be studied sociologically? In the first chapter I oppose supernaturalism and the supernatural. In the supernaturalist perspective, revelation, salvation, the miracles and the sacraments or ordinances are seen as opaque to reason. I will discuss this topic at length in chapter 8 in the context of a Protestant evangelical church. The second issue is that of individual Christian vocations, more specifically lay vocations. I will discuss it at length in chapter 2 and 6 and pursue it throughout the book.

* * *

There are many people I have to thank for their contribution in this work. First of all the numerous people I have interviewed. They have all been very candid and open about their personal lives although for many of them I was a stranger. They implicitly validated the main thesis of this book that everyone has a calling or vocation, and that of sociologist is an important one in academia.

I am particularly indebted to the following individuals who have read parts or all of this book: Anthony Blasi, editor of the Pax Christi San Antonio newsletter; Marie Conn, professor of religious studies at Chestnut Hill College in Philadelphia; Joseph Martos, expert on the history and theology of the Catholic sacraments; Patrick Hayes, archivist at the Redemptorist Archives of the Province of Baltimore; Christopher Rupert, SJ, expert on the scientific study of prayer; Michael McCallion, professor of Catholic social analysis at Sacred Heart Seminary in Detroit; Francis Berna, OFM, professor of theology and ministry at LaSalle University in Philadelphia; Daniel Levine, emeritus professor of political science at the University of Michigan; and William Shea, director of the Center for Religion, Ethics and Culture at College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts. They helped me avoid digressions and write in a rational tone without polemics.

1. Hegy, Wake Up, Volume II, chapter

1

.

Part I

Spirituality and Sociology

Spirituality and sociology are not generally thought of as having much in common, but much can be learned from applying sociological analysis to ideas and practices pertaining to spirituality. Let me start with a broad overview of the beginning of Christian spirituality, and next the origin of the sociology of spirituality.

Universal spirituality consists of following one’s conscience. Religious spirituality consists of practices inspired by religious beliefs.

As a first approximation, spirituality can be defined as self-transcendence or more simply as following one’s conscience. This definition makes it clear that all humans are spiritual in one way or another, whether religious or not. In a second approximation, spirituality can be defined by beliefs and practices. The latter are inter-related: it is through practices that one disciplines oneself in order to live according to one’s beliefs, and it is through beliefs and practices that one is usually identified as a member of a given church. Beliefs and practices vary within and between churches. Within the Catholic tradition I will distinguish three schools or spiritual paradigms; the traditional Catholic devotions in Part II, the spirituality of the post-Vatican II era in Part III, and postmodernity in Part IV. Let us begin with a brief history of the very beginning of Christian spirituality.

A new spiritual practice emerged in the third century when men and women began to seek isolated places for prayer and penance. Antony of Egypt is the best known of the early desert fathers. His life story, published by Athanasius only five years after his death, popularized a new model of Christian life throughout the Roman Empire. His spiritual conversion took the form of a rejection of the world that quickly became paradigmatic in monasticism. One Sunday in the year 270 or 271, he heard the gospel reading at church that said, If you would be perfect, go, sell what you possess and give it to the poor. Moved by these words, he gave up all that he owned and retreated into a cave outside his village. Contrary to his expectations and wishes, hundreds of visitors came to visit him for inspiration and counsel, and over time a great many monasteries came into being, and like a father he guided them all.¹ At his death in 256, there were hundreds if not thousands of monks in the deserts. The Monastery of Saint Antony, founded at that time, is still in existence today.

The example of Antony has been followed ever since. Spirituality usually implies a certain rejection of the world, in Christianity as in other world religions. This rejection can be justified by St. Paul’s opposition between "natural man (psychichos anthropos) who does not accept what is taught by the Spirit of God and the spiritual man" (pneumatikos anthropos) who does (First Corinthians, 2:14−15.) It would be simplistic to oppose the spirit of God to the flesh or the devil: not all spiritual things are good (spiritual behaviors can be inspired by selfish motives), and natural impulses are not necessarily evil. This issue will be discussed in the next chapter on human nature.

Attempts to understand spirituality from the perspective of sociology are relatively recent. The first attempts to measure spirituality were made by Moberg, and also by Paloutzian and Ellison in the late 1970s, who all identified spirituality with religion. Up to the 1960s there had been no reference to spiritual needs in the prevalent measurements of happiness and life satisfaction; this prompted Paloutzian and Ellison to propose a scale of spiritual well-being. Their conception of spirituality was based on a traditional Christian view of human nature; It is the spirit of human beings which enables and motivates us to search for meaning and purpose in life, to seek the supernatural or some meaning which transcends us, wrote Ellison in his 1982 presentation of the Spiritual Well-Being Scale. It is the spirit which synthesizes the total personality and provides some sense of energizing direction and order.² Unfortunately, he did not explain what he meant by spirit, out of fear of getting bogged down in specific theological issues or a priori standards of well-being which may vary from one religious belief system or denomination to another.³ If the notion of spirit was obvious to Ellison, this is not generally the case today. Moreover, spirituality is not necessarily related to religion. Today we are confronted with the challenge of defining the notion of spirit in a more neutral way.

After his participation in the 1971 White House Conference on Aging Moberg set out to study spiritual well-being quantitatively. Gathering survey data from Sweden and the United States, he developed several indexes of spiritual well-being. For him the two most important indicators were traditional Christian beliefs (Jesus Christ as savior, God as creator, the Holy Spirit, and life after death) and common religious practices (private prayer, church attendance, and Bible reading).⁴ For Moberg spirituality belongs to man’s inner resources and to the supernatural and nonmaterial dimensions of human nature.⁵ He did not define these terms, which presents a special challenge for sociologists today.

Raymond Paloutzian and his colleagues pursued the social scientific study of spirituality on their own and published their Handbook of the Psychology of Religion and Spirituality. The second edition in 2013 covers the major developments over the last decade in a dozen chapters. In their introductory chapter, Defining Religion and Spirituality, we are given twelve definitions of religion and thirteen of spirituality from a variety of sources; the content of these definitions depends in large measure on their authors’ assumptions.⁶

* * *

These first two chapters provide a general introduction to the sociological study of spirituality and define some of the basic issues that will be discussed in this book. In the first chapter I discuss assumptions associated with St. Paul’s opposition between natural man and the things of the spirit of God. The following two assumptions undergird the present study.

1. Supernaturalism. Do the things of the spirit lie totally beyond reason and empirical observation? In that case there is little room for the sociological study of spirituality, a position which I reject.

2. The question of human nature. What is the relationship between natural man and the things of the spirit? Traditional Christian anthropology understands humans to be body, mind and spirit; hence we must investigate the meaning of these terms. The second chapter will present an investigation into the spirituality of the Christian vocation, and this will be done in three steps:

1. Christian initiation symbolizes entrance into a new life.

2. All people follow a life-dream or mission, without which life seems chaotic.

3. All Christians (and non-Christians) have a personal vocation or mission in life.

1. Athanasius, The Life of Antony,

43

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2. Ellison, Journal of Psychology and Theology,

331

−

32

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3. Ibid.

4. Moderg, Subjective Measures,

4

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5. Ibid.,

351

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6. Paloutzian and Park, Handbook,

28

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1

Christian Anthropology

I will discuss two basic assumptions of a Christian anthropology, one about the nature of religion as supernatural versus supernaturalist, and one about the spiritual nature of human mind.

I. The Supernatural and Supernaturalism

Religion and science often take opposite stands in reference to the supernatural when the former espouses conservative positions in social matters and the latter defends liberal ones. How can the two be reconciled? A second issue is that of supernaturalism when some Protestant and Catholic theologies present the supernatural (e.g., revelation and miracles) as closed to human understanding; this doctrinal supernaturalism emphasizes faith at the expense of reason. A third issue comes from supernaturalism in the social sciences when they treat the supernatural as unknowable. Again, how can the two be reconciled? Finally, the rejection of the supernatural, not only in society but also in religion, raises the issue of secularization.

1) Religious sacralization versus scientific de-sacralization

The discourse of religion is about the holiness of God; very often, however, it also sacralizes religious power. Thus Lumen Gentium, the Vatican II Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, repeatedly speaks about the sacred teaching authority of the church. The Israelite religion, too, sacralized its institutions, provoking the anger and condemnations of prophets. Not a stone of the Jerusalem temple will be left on another stone, prophesized Jeremiah and Jesus. For the prophets, only God is sacred; temples and church institutions are not.

Obedience has been used to justify concentration camps, genocides, violence at war, and police brutality.

In the Catholic Church holy obedience is due Holy Mother Church. This obedience is to take the form of submission of intellect and will. The social sciences have accumulated much research about some disastrous effects of obedience from concentration camps, genocides, and wars (e.g., in Vietnam and Iraq) to police brutality. Many crimes have been justified in the name of obedience. By sacralizing the status quo, religion often appears as a conservative force strongly criticized by social scientists. Catholicism has also been a force for social change, for instance in Latin America, as we will see. Moreover, churches may be conservative in one area and factors of change in another. On the other hand, the social sciences may also be a factor of intellectual obscurantism when they propagate narrow-minded positivism and reductionist theories. The social sciences have also promoted greater social justice. They can also be a factor of religious improvement in the form of pastoral sociology or psychology, which I will consider in the next section.

2) Supernaturalism in religion and science

The modern opposition between the natural and the supernatural arose in the context of theological discussions about faith and reason. William of Ockham in the fourteenth century held that the existence of God cannot be known through reason alone, and that things revealed by God and believed in faith could even contradict reason and logic. Gradually, the term supernatural, which in the Middle Ages, meant something beyond the realm of nature but not contrary to reason, came to denote something outside the realm of experience and even contrary to the laws of nature. I call this otherworldly conception of the supernatural supernaturalism.⁷

The term super-natural first used in about 1525 came to mean that which is not subject to the laws of physics, or more descriptively, that which is said to exist above and beyond nature.⁸ Around the turn of the seventeenth century, Francis Bacon proposed a method based on observation and experiment for the study of nature. His views on empirical knowledge were accepted and developed further by philosophers such as Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, David Hume, and John Stuart Mill. Today, both the physical and the social sciences accept that nature can be known through observation and rational analysis; what lies beyond nature is literally super-natural, that is, unknowable.

Supernaturalism—the belief that the object of religion ultimately lies outside the realm of reason and possibly stands against the laws of nature—can be found in church documents and is generalized in the social sciences. Let me give examples first in Christianity and next in sociology.

Doctrinal supernaturalism

William of Ockham taught that only faith gives us access to theological truths. The ways of God are not open to reason, for God has freely chosen to create a world and establish a way of salvation within it apart from any necessary laws that human logic or rationality can uncover.⁹ Ockham introduced the notion of fideism or faith without rationality, which opened the door to religious subjectivism. The Protestant Reformation established the principle of sola fides sufficit, meaning that faith alone, not good works, sufficed for salvation. Among Protestant evangelicals today, sola fides is often taken to mean Believe, and don’t ask questions, because the Bible is said to be free of errors. The Catholic equivalent is Obey, and don’t ask questions, because the magisterium is authoritative and the pope infallible. In both cases, fideism brings with it a hefty element of anti-intellectualism. Academic theology seeks a rational understanding of faith and hence avoids falling into supernaturalism, but popular theology preached from the pulpits may discourage rational inquiry either in Protestantism by claiming biblical inerrancy or in Catholicism by invoking infallibility. The popular theology of the pulpits is the only one known by most church goers and the vast majority of sociologists.

Sola scriptura as ultimate authority often leads to church divisions and doctrinal supernaturalism.

Martin Luther, the father of the Reformation, was both disaffected by corruption in the Catholic Church and dissatisfied with the seemingly self-serving explanations for the doctrine of papal authority and the practice of selling indulgences. He therefore turned to the Bible as the only basis of faith, and sola scriptura became the ultimate authority for most Protestants. Unfortunately, the teachings of the Bible are open to conflicting interpretations, and today there are over 31,000 Protestant denominations with different creeds.¹⁰ The dream of the fundamentalists in the early twentieth century was to unite all Protestants around the doctrine of biblical inerrancy and the rejection of biblical criticism, but their anti-intellectualism resulted in a form of religious positivism which even today insists that the biblical creation story is a scientifically true fact. This again is popular theology, the one available to most faithful and social scientists.

On the