I’m Staying

Seven Reasons Why I Remain in the Catholic Church

Taxis Magazine
Taxis

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By Birthe Mühlhoff*

Hieronymus Bosch (c. 1450–1516), Temptation of St Anthony

There are countless reasons to leave the Catholic Church of late, and in Germany an increasing number of people are doing just that. The revelations of clergymen abusing children and other clergymen allowing it to happen are just the most heartbreaking in a series of scandals. The vocabulary of the Church has become incomprehensible to many ordinary mortals anyway. Those who leave the Church often no longer know why they were in it in the first place. Even among convinced and committed Christians renunciation is now a popular means of protest.

It’s true that in other countries as well fewer and fewer people are attending mass. But since churches, synagogues, and mosques are generally financed by donations, or, as in England, have never been dispossessed, leaving is easy enough. If you are no longer a believer you simply stop going. Since German citizens and residents pay an automatic tax to the Protestant or Catholic Church to which they belong, however, leaving is not merely a spiritual but also a bureaucratic affair. In some German cities a person now has to wait for weeks to get an appointment for the formalities of renouncing membership in the Church; demand for appointments has reached a record high.

For many, one good reason is enough to leave. To convince someone to join the Church would require seventy-seven reasons, if not more. My aim with this essay is not so ambitious. Bracketing the matter of why I am a member of the Catholic Church, here are seven reasons why I intend to remain one:

1. As a member of the Catholic Church, I live knowing that at any given moment somewhere in the world someone is saying the same prayer as I am, and there is a place where I would be welcome. This is no mere touristic perk with a colonial past. Considering that many of the challenges of our time are global in nature, and that I don’t wish to rely on supranational organizations like NATO to promote global understanding, the world-spanning Church gives me at least some faint hope for the future.

2. There’s no doubt that the Catholic Church still rests on a distinction between women and men. It is thus the very antithesis of another organization to which I belong, Die Grünen (the Greens), Germany’s environmentalist party. Since its founding in 1980, the Greens have filled all mandates and party offices on the basis of gender parity, and fights for the acceptance and against the exclusion of homosexuals, bisexuals, intersex- and transgender people and others. Yet what I consider to be necessary, meaningful, and pertinent in politics I do not invariably demand from the Church.

Friends keep asking whether discrimination against women doesn’t bother me. Of course at times it does; that’s what differences tend to do. Do I mind that women are not allowed to be ordained priests? My imagination would be expansive enough for women at the altar, and I find the Church’s theological and historical justifications for an all-male clergy not convincing enough for my imagination to dwindle. The vehemence behind the demands for equality troubles me however. The danger here is losing sight of what the task of a priest is all about. The feminism I want to stand up for refuses to be a purely symbolic politics at best, or, at worst, a new variety of German deference to authority.

Perhaps certain pronouncements of the Catholic Church would sound different if women were better integrated at all levels. Perhaps there would be less cronyism. These are assumptions. In any case, they are not reason enough for me to leave the Church.

Another attempt: It is possible to view the Church’s adherence to distinct tasks for men and women as a relic of the sexual mores of the nineteenth century. In my opinion, however, this conclusion borders on historical obfuscation. Does not every age seethe against the backwardness of its predecessor? Does this anger not always carry the risk of throwing the baby out with the bathwater? If the nineteenth century was too rigid in its morality, maybe there is still some beauty to be found in the morals themselves that far predates the moral-mania of the Victorian Age. I recognize in the Church’s distinction between women and men the imagery of the oldest stories of mankind, from the time before the invention of writing, when we began to pass on knowledge from one generation to the next through stories and songs, and began to follow and adhere to rites; a time when fertility was still a mystery, not a given or simply a problem to be fixed. Today, these tales, myths, and legends are examined by historians; contextualized, shelved, filed away. The Church maintains a living connection to this deep past. In fact, this connection is what constitutes the Church.

3. I grew up Catholic, and halfway through adolescence I started reading Nietzsche. That I would one day believe in God again did not seem possible. But life continues to happen, you experience things; in retrospect, I’d say that I may have come close to losing my mind. Imagine how grateful I was to have been able to call and have someone say that I could just drop by for a talk. Imagine trying to navigate the Internet in search of spiritual guidance and help when even searches for the most simple medical symptoms so easily lead to websites telling you that you’ve got only a few months left to live. For people who are firm in their faith it may be possible to say, “I don’t need the Church, I might as well be a Christian on my own.” That’s hard for me to grasp. In the Church I’ve met some of the craziest people, some of the most broken — and some of the most balanced, introspective and, one might say, sane. For the former I want to be among the latter. And I can only do so if I stay.

4. Time and again people say that the Church will soon have to close shop because membership numbers are plummeting. This assumes that the Church is some sort of enterprise that is still selling video games in plastic boxes in the age of the Internet and so is being pushed aside by the progress of time. Frankly, anyone who argues in this way has not only missed the point about the Church but has also failed to understand economics. To assure its existence the Church does not require an armada of small investors who scheme to drive up its stock, as if it were a company like GameStop. All that’s required for the Church to take place is two or three people. The Church, as strange as it may sound to non-Christians, forms a community of the saints and the dead. Its vitality is not measured by membership numbers, nor even by the moral integrity of its members. The purpose of the Church is not exhausted in its being a good thing, a big charity operation, which it fails at when its members screw things up. The Church is a spiritual body, not a business.

5. The Church is resistant to reform of any sort, critics say, resistant to change. From the same corner, I hear praise of early Christianity, when everything was still authentic and simple, free of clerical encrustations. It seems the 2,000-year history of the Church cannot have been so completely without changes and reforms after all. What’s certain is that, at least in Europe, I cannot think of any existing organization as old as the Catholic Church. Perhaps this helps in fathoming why the Vatican has yet to bring itself to give its blessing to same-sex partners, even though the German law on the right to marry came into force what seems to be an eternity ago — October 2017.

No one can seriously deny that the world is changing rapidly — technologically, socially, climatically. Do I even want the Church to keep up with the mind-boggling pace of these developments? My general enthusiasm for progress certainly leaves room for exceptions. The Church is to society what my 92-year-old grandmother is to my family: I don’t talk to her on the phone to get specific advice about my life. But talking to her about my life does help me enormously. Of course the Church is not up-to-date; it never was. If an organization that sometimes seems so alien to our present times can secure a niche for itself in society, I welcome that and gladly stand up for it.

6. The Church is a living exchange with the past. In this respect the Church is conservative in a broad sense, not a primarily political one: it conserves. When I read the Desert Fathers or Saint Augustine or Thomas Merton or, as I have in recent weeks, Simone Weil, I do it not so much out of historical interest, to enrich my general education, or because someone from the past has demonstrated considerable literary talent. I read these authors because I assume that I can still learn something from a person who lived over a thousand years ago. I wouldn’t dare think of asking Saint Augustine what he thought of nuclear power plants or the moon landing. But in a conversation about faith the distance in time plays a negligible role, as does death which separates us.

I distrust my own personal horizon of experience. My “horizontal” experience— in my job, my expertise in finding affordable housing in expensive cities, and my general knowledge — may be vast, but in the transcendental or “vertical” direction, I consider it insufficient. I am afraid of the hall of mirrors where my limited imagination will lead me. If one wants to approach God in any way, then the best thing to do is go for a dive through the abundance of other people’s experiences in order to marvel at the sea of human ignorance.

You can read a book on your own of course; you don’t need the Church for that. One doesn’t even need libraries or bookstores or any sort of institution for that anymore, one could say. Fortunately, the Church also happens to be a living exchange of living people. I wonder, would I ever have discovered on my own that the foreign minister of Romania had written a great book about angels if it had not been recommended to me by a fellow Christian? I had assumed I could bypass the white fluttering creatures. Andrei Pleșu’s Despre îngeri [On Angels] (2003), sadly not available in English, showed me that I hadn’t even asked myself what angels actually are.

7. It’s rather rare for people to congratulate me on my faith, but it does happen every now and then. They say: The Church must be a great source of strength for you; it must be wonderful to be part of a community. These conversations always leave me somewhat irritated. I don’t have much in common with the majority of people in the community; often we don’t share the same views at all. For me faith is not a way to “recharge my batteries,” as they say, but rather a constant source of unsettledness: a confrontation with a congregation of people whom I did not choose, with theological beliefs I did not choose yet that are challenges to me. To believe does not mean to be free of doubts. On the contrary: Every night I go to bed with the thought that I might be on the wrong path, that I am harnessed to the cart of some incorrigible older gentlemen who don’t know what they are doing, and that I serve their dubious interests by writing a text like this one. It is a productive unsettledness of the sort that does not emerge from meetings with close friends who agree with me and make me feel great. From this unsettledness things can arise, ones with old-fashioned names like humility and love of your neighbor and for which there are as yet no substitutes. So why not stay with them?

*Birthe Mühlhoff (M.A. Philosophy 2017) is a writer and translator based in Germany. [This text was previously published in German in the Süddeutsche Zeitung, April 4, 2021.]

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