The remarkable Haretina Kukuri has produced a stunner of an essay about the longevity of the world’s oldest continuously functioning institution, the Catholic Church. She covers many elements of the Church’s structure and positioning in the lives of its adherents. Some of them will strike the reader as “of course” matters, while others display a penetration that prior analysts of the Church have failed to exhibit. A brief taste:
The Church did not build an organisation. It built a civilisation and then took up residence inside it. A calendar organising the year. An architecture dominating every European skyline. A visual grammar that generated most of Western art. A vocabulary that shaped Western law, ethics and political language. A ritual marking birth, marriage and death for the majority of people who have ever lived in the West. Vestments, polyphony, incense, and a dead language retained precisely because a dead language cannot drift.
Above all, a claim about time. A cathedral is a promise made by people who knew they would be dust before the roof closed, financed by towns that could not afford it, carved by masons whose names are lost to everyone but God. Every stone argues that the future is real and that we owe something to people we shall never meet.
That is the actual technology. A company may be copied within a year. A culture cannot be copied at all, because it is not a set of practices but a set of practices plus the centuries that rendered them inevitable.
The extraordinary endurance of that civilization is often overlooked by secular observers. Some would rather ignore it; others gaze upon it in bafflement. Haretina captures the totality of it better than anyone else has done.
I lived in that civilization. When I take a moment to remember it in detail, I realize how badly I miss it.
Long ago, in remembrance of my childhood community, I wrote:
It was an overwhelmingly Catholic community. There were five Masses each Sunday morning, and all of them were attended to capacity and beyond. The parish priests were regarded as higher authorities than any elected functionary. When our pastor was elevated to Monsignor, we young ones were stunned that the town didn't hold a parade.Most of the children attended the parish's grammar school, St. Catherine of Alexandria. Despite St. Catherine's huge class sizes -- classes of fifty were the norm -- standards were high, and the pressure to get in never slackened. The local public grammar school was regarded as a refuge for the children of lazy parents, who didn't care how their kids were taught; it had many unoccupied desks. Competition among the latter-grade students at St. Catherine's was intense; we all wanted to go to the local Catholic high school, Albertus Magnus, and we knew there weren't places enough for all of us.
“Catholic community” has the sense of a unitary noun. The Catholicism could not be separated from the community. In that town, the civil authorities deferred to the parish pastor. Indeed, every home there was filled with crucifixes, votive candles, saints' images, and so forth. When the time came for prayer, a visitor was expected to pray with his hosts. Catholicism was the culture. When a Jewish family moved in, no one quite knew what to do!
This parallels Haretina’s previous essay about the strength and invulnerability of the Mafia culture. When an institution marries itself to the culture of a place so intimately that it can no longer be separated from the life of that place, it has acquired a longevity that secular institutions cannot equal.
The question on my mind this morning is whether it remains possible for a new institution to achieve a similar degree of cultural capture. Religions will always have a large advantage over secular institutions in that regard. In the nations of Europe, the Church has been losing its grip on the allegiance of the people, despite the many markers of its legacy. But other potential cultural appropriators, despite prodigious efforts, have failed to establish themselves with the same degree of firmness. Why?
Because the culture remains Catholic, even in those places where conscious faith and explicit worship have faded away.
Europe is under siege by the tides of migrants from North Africa and the Middle East. Yet these, however numerous and motivated, have not succeeded in insinuating themselves into the culture and practices of the Old World. I predict that they will not. They’re up against a more powerful, more integrated, more satisfying culture than what they’re striving to impose. Their efforts just might stimulate the resurrection and revitalization of what was once called Christendom.
America, originally settled largely by Protestants, developed differently. Catholic culture arrived in quantity mainly after the Civil War. It took hold in districts that were predominantly peopled by immigrants from the persistently Catholic parts of Europe. And where it did, it was strong, as I mentioned above. But it didn’t become the national culture; the orientations and practices of the Protestant sects that preceded it had and have their own grip, not to be easily contested nor displaced.
Yet American Catholicism, if slightly at variance from the European variety, is strong and vital. Catholics amount to a quarter of the national population. A great many “cradle Catholics” who drifted from the Church are returning as the years mount upon them. I was one, and I’ve met several others. It’s common among converts, especially converts from Protestant sects, to embrace Catholic culture completely: the crucifixes, the statues and holy images, the votive candles, the great feast days, the wall sconces for holy water, the ritual prayers, and the other practices promulgated and encouraged by the Church. The culture is as important to them as the faith itself. That culture shields its adherents against a multitude of invasions and infections.
Culture is powerful. Catholics know it. Draw the moral.
