Confession of a Catholic Worker: Our Moment of Christian Witness

By Larry Chapp

Everyone knows there is a "crisis" in the Catholic Church and in the world around us. Some say it is capitalism gone wild. Others say it is the decay of tradition, family, and objective truth. Still others say it is the rise of radical, reactionary conservatism. Though all may not agree on the nature of the crisis, who doesn't agree that there is one, and who isn't worried?

For Larry Chapp, crisis is always the norm of Christian existence. In a cold, dying world choked by greed, the Gospel calls for radical love and radical living according to the Sermon on the Mount. Using the theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar, Peter Maurin, and Dorothy Day, Chapp argues that the real remedy to the disease of sin is not niceness, not political liberation, not fancy liturgical dress, not technical rigor, but a free decision to live totally and joyfully in Jesus Christ, without compromise.

Just as the martyrs chose God over life itself, so each Christian must, in the crucial hour, choose Jesus over all things. Everything hinges on the moment of Christian witness.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ignatius Press
• Release date: Apr 5, 2023
• ISBN: 9781642292084

Book preview

CONFESSION OF A CATHOLIC WORKER

LARRY S. CHAPP

Confession of a

Catholic Worker

Our Current Moment

of Christian Witness

IGNATIUS PRESS     SAN FRANCISCO

Unless otherwise noted, Scripture quotations (except those within citations) have been taken from the Revised Standard Version of the Holy Bible, Second Catholic Edition, © 2006. The Revised Standard Version of the Holy Bible: the Old Testament, © 1952, 2006; the Apocrypha, © 1957, 2006; the New Testament, ©1946, 2006; the Catholic Edition of the Old Testament, incorporating the Apocrypha, © 1966, 2006, the Catholic Edition of the New Testament, © 1965, 2006 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. All rights reserved.

Quotations from Church documents are taken from

the Vatican website: www.vatican.va

Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture quotations are from Revised Standard Version of the Bible—Second Catholic Edition (Ignatius Edition), ©2006 National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. All rights reserved worldwide.

Cover art:

Golgotha II by Lodewijk Schelfhout

Drypoint etching on paper (1918)

Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, Netherlands

Public domain image

Cover design by John Herreid

©2023 by Ignatius Press, San Francisco

All rights reserved

ISBN 978-1-62164-566-5 (PB)

ISBN 978-1-64229-208-4 (eBook)

Library of Congress Control Number 2022950458

Printed in the United States of America

Dedicated to my beautiful

and long-suffering wife, who,

if I make it to Heaven,

will be the reason why

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION: My Intellectual Beginnings and the Crisis That the Gospel Presents

1. The System: Modernity as the Nullification of Crisis

2. The Bourgeois Spirit and the Nullification of Holiness

3. The Liberal Nullification of Prayer as a Public Reality

4. The Cruciform Structure of Christian Existence

5. The Cruciform Structure of Evangelization

6. The Catholic Worker Movement Blowing Up the Dynamite of the Church

CONCLUSION: Quo Vadis, Domine? A Hermeneutic of Kenosis

NOTES

INTRODUCTION

My Intellectual Beginnings and

the Crisis That the Gospel Presents

PART I

A Confessional Book

This is not a book about Hans Urs von Balthasar, Dorothy Day, Peter Maurin, or the Catholic Worker movement in general. This is a book inspired by them and formed within the thought-world that they have created within me. But to understand why it is that these particular thinkers have had such an influence upon me, and why therefore in my old age I have decided to commit myself to penning this confession of faith, you need to understand how I got to where I am now. I do not wish to bore my readers with the details of my life, especially since I tend to despise such narcissistic, therapeutic public displays; but it is my conviction that it is the sheer normalcy of my own life as a quintessentially American tale of spiritual boredom that will also, and for that reason, have resonance with a lot of others who have shared a similar ordinary autobiography. And since I think this is so, I do not think it pretentious of me to develop this confession of mine for public consumption since I think it will find an audience of the like-minded who might find it helpful.

So as in most things it is best to begin at the beginning. When I was a young man, my own upbringing was quintessentially postwar American: suburban, middle class, patriotic, and Midwestern. I attended decent, but not great, public schools and received a better-than-most catechetical formation for that era at my local Catholic Church. Lincoln, Nebraska (my hometown), had been preserved from the worst of the post–Vatican II insanities, and therefore my experience of Catholicism was a rather ordinary affair of Sunday Mass attendance and sacramental preparation. And when I got confirmed in the fourth grade (why so early I cannot recall), all catechetical formation ceased. And I was quite happy about that since as I grew older I found religion to be a dreadful bore and saw in none of the catechesis I had gotten anything that rose, even remotely, to the level of something interesting. I was a nerdy little Munchkin of a kid—bookish, gangly, and obsessed with science—and could most often be found in my underground lair (my basement bedroom) reading books on evolution and astronomy, while listening to my Monty Python albums.

I became convinced at about the age of twelve that God, even if he existed, was some distant entity that you would meet when you died so long as you had been a good person in this life, and that all of the religions of the world were equally adept at making us into such good persons. But since you could also be a good person without being religious, I just did not see much point to religion at all. And after all, don’t religions cause wars and wasn’t Hitler Catholic . . . or something? I did like meatless Fridays since for my family that meant eating shrimp instead of beef or chicken, which was a delightful step-up in culinary enjoyment. Heck, I even liked fish sticks so long as they were drenched in cocktail sauce (still do, actually). But on the whole, religion for me was just a monumentally drab affair of silly men in colorful costumes talking about ancient miracles that most likely had never happened, distributing little tasteless wafers of bread that looked like poker chips, after a boring ritual that was nothing more to me than something to endure before hitting the post-Mass breakfast at Perkins. I loved praying the Agnus Dei at Mass but only because it was the telltale signal that the entire affair was fixin’ to wrap up and bacon and Belgian waffles were soon to follow. It is kind of the same feeling one gets at the end of Beethoven’s ninth when you know the fat tenor has sung his last "Tochter aus Elysium" and the rousing ending is soon to follow. But the words of the Mass were no Schiller to me, and the hippie lady who smelled of jasmine and cigarettes directing the folk group was no Beethoven.

And don’t get me started on the homilies. Mein Gott in Himmel, they were awful. Almost all of them could be summarized as follows: It is nice to be nice to the nice. I sometimes also refer to this type of preaching as lettuce homilies, as in, Let us go forth and love our neighbor, which, in the context of all that preceded it in the homily, really meant nothing more than I learned from my second grade teacher concerning lunch-line etiquette. This was the infamous beige Catholicism of bourgeois—spiritual rice cakes that challenged nothing, said nothing, and stood for nothing beyond the culturally obvious. And it was all shot through with a don’t rock the boat ethos lest the envelopes start to disappear from the collection basket. After all, somebody needed to pay for all of those Catholic schools that churned out future lapsed Catholics by the millions.

What is the point to this sarcastic trip down memory lane? The point is that despite some of the idiosyncratic oddities of my own personality and history, there is an all too typical and, I think, paradigmatic script embedded in that narrative. And by script I do not mean a superficial set of intellectual ideas that are a mere gloss on our deeper, truer selves. Rather, I mean this is how we think most aboriginally and it is what defines for us what is truly real.

And once I rediscovered the beauty and the depth of my Catholic faith (through reading G. K. Chesterton and John Cardinal Newman, mainly), I decided to commit my entire life to the living out of a counterscript to the script given to me by my suburban American cul-de-sac culture of spiritual indifference. And so off to seminary I went as a very young man of nineteen years. The year was 1978, so the high silly season of post-conciliar Catholicism was still in full vapor, which had an enormous influence upon my young mind. My worldview, if you can even call it that, was a simple narrative of good guys versus bad guys. The bad guys were the liberal, dissenting Catholics with their low church, egalitarian, fellowship Catholicism of felt banners, denim vestments, pewter chalices, and The Pill. The good guys were the conservative Catholics who believed and upheld proper doctrine and discipline. And my idiocy consisted in the fact that I thought that orthopraxy would flow from orthodoxy like morning from night. How quaint.

As I entered the seminary, I was full of an energetic agitation at the state of the Church and spoiling for a fight with the liberal infidels. Like a mini me Torquemada I was ever vigilant to spy out the slightest whiff of heretical chicanery. Unfortunately, my career as an inquisitor did not pan out since I was sent to a very conservative seminary where we were taught philosophy from the old neo-scholastic manuals, which I poured myself into with great vigor, confident that I was receiving orthodox Catholic philosophy. However, over time my intellectual curiosity kicked in and I began to have serious philosophical and theological questions that my neo-scholastic manuals did not answer. I became intellectually restless and dissatisfied with the manuals, and indeed so much so, that my only defense was to dismiss it all as "temptations from el diablo. Surely, I thought, it is the Devil who wants me to question the manifestly Catholic" manuals and to abandon the path of orthodoxy.

Nevertheless, my questions persisted, and therefore on my own I began reading modern philosophers like G. W. F. Hegel, Immanuel Kant, and Martin Heidegger—thinkers I scarcely understood—and then brought the questions they raised, as far as I understood them, to my neo-scholastic texts, seeking in vain for answers to the issues they raised. There were no answers. There weren’t even questions. Just endless diatribes against modernism, subjectivism, and historicism, that only a steadfastly deductive Thomistic method could hold off, rooted in the certitudes of dogma as the first principles for all that then followed. And that is what it was: a holding off of alleged errors in a defensive mode of thinking that was critical of any idea that did not arise from the scholastic tradition. Heck, we did not even read Thomas Aquinas, lest we misunderstand him, and got instead a desiccated diet of arid commentaries. It was fortress Catholicism contra mundum. And worst of all, it was so horrifically boring that no seminarian would ever remember a word of it out of pure self-defense. For me, it constituted a theodicy problem since I could not accept that an all-good God would allow his Church to turn the exhilarating exuberance of the Gospel into the coma-inducing pottage I was being forced to read.

What I found attractive in the modern philosophers, despite their manifest errors, was their concern for the role played by human subjectivity in our knowing and the category of history as a constitutive metaphysical principle at the very core of human experience. The neo-scholastics dismissed such topics as dangers to be overcome since their vagaries could undermine the timeless and irreformable dogmas of the faith, which stand astride, and above, history and subjectivity like blocks of immovable granite. This is of course a bit of a caricature, and there were some neo-scholastics who did indeed attempt to address these issues; but in my experience as a young student, all I found were endless deflections concerning these deeper existential questions. I also found it all profoundly propagandistic in favor of a peculiarly modern form of Catholicism—ironic, considering their putative concern for tradition—since I knew enough Church history to see through the mythology of unchanging Catholicism and its constant glossing over of the real history of doctrinal development. It was also strangely silent on the ugly underbelly of the tradition wherein, through papal bulls and so on, the Church countenanced not a few perfidies that we would deem today to be morally grotesque. But like the crazy, unstable uncle hidden in the attic, the manuals preferred to treat such embarrassments as a sub rosa secret off limits to discussion.

Most of my fellow seminarians were intellectually uncurious and of a pietistical bent, who didn’t care in the slightest for such questions, trusting, it would seem, that no future parishioners would ever have a crisis of faith while struggling with similar questions. There is nothing, evidently, that a good novena to Saint Thérèse can’t cure. And I like the Little Flower. And novenas. But talking to these guys about philosophical matters was like mailing a letter to yourself and then expecting something novel when you opened it. To make matters worse, a few of them were also bona fide psychosexual weirdos riddled with all manner of fetishized obsessions. I am glad that I was a skinny and ugly library rat since that saved me from their advances.

I bring the issue of sexual deviancy up, not for prurient purposes, but to highlight the fact that this is when it first began to dawn on me that orthodoxy was no guarantor of orthopraxy. And that really rattled my confidence in my good guys versus bad guys narrative. It was the first shot across the bow of my tidy little thought-world and unsettled me deeply. Indeed, many, if not most, of the dysfunctional predators I knew were hypertraditional theologically and liturgically, and well formed in the path of holiness via contractual Catholicism and its various cathartic ablutions. For them, Catholicism was a perfect world of indulgence followed by indulgences, where Alfred Kinsey and Cajetan lived peacefully together. Indeed, it seemed to me that the few liberal seminarians that were there were far more human in a healthy way than the conservative ones were, and I found a rapport with them that surprised and shocked me. To this day I find that I am often far more at home with my pot-smoking liberal friends, whose worldview is a total hot mess of secular/pagan, syncretistic drivel, than I am with the pinched-up fiddleback fussbudgets I know who strike me as closeted skeptics in search of something—anything—to hang the hat of certitude on. There is nothing wrong, of course, with seeking after the deep certitude concerning ultimate things that faith in Christ brings. But that is an altogether different thing from the invention of reactionary and romantic ecclesiological/ideological constructs of a false orthodoxy of role-playing inauthenticity. I was repulsed by the ecclesiastical cosplaying of so many of my traditionalist seminary classmates who even before getting ordained had closets full of the latest Tridentine fashions, purchased from some shop in Rome at great cost.

And that brings me to the intellectual watershed moment of my life. I finally took all of my frustrations to my spiritual director, Father Anton Morgenroth, a German convert from Judaism whose family had fled Germany at the beginning of Hitler’s reign of terror. Father Morgenroth was a giant of an intellect who had known Balthasar. He listened to my tale of woe and, realizing that the time was right and that I was ready for it, gave me a copy of Balthasar’s Love Alone Is Credible and ordered me to read it under pain of eternal damnation should I fail to do so. I read the book in one night and was immediately aware that there existed an entire world of theological discourse that was asking the same questions I was and was putting into words what I could only inchoately intuit. My questions! It was as if a jar of unstable nitro had gone off in my head as I immediately saw that I was not crazy, that el diablo was not tempting me, and that my questions were legitimate. It was a tough book to read, and yet strangely not boring, since the Christ presented in its pages was a burning and bracing challenge. In point of fact, it was the road to Damascus moment of my early life.

And from that point forward, and over the ensuing three years, Father Morgenroth gradually and gently tutored me with various ressourcement thinkers as our guide. There they all were before me: Maurice Blondel, Charles Péguy, Henri de Lubac, Romano Guardini, Marie-Dominique Chenu, Louis Bouyer, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Dietrich von Hildebrand, Hans Urs von Balthasar, and many others. There were also literary figures like Georges Bernanos and François Mauriac, and philosophers like Josef Pieper, Étienne Gilson, Jacques Maritain, and Gabriel Marcel. In my intellectually immature state, it was like trying to get a sip of water from a firehose. Nor did I agree with everything that I was reading (especially with Yves Congar and Chenu.) But it was an introduction to a particular kind of theological pedagogy that altered my intellectual path from that moment forward.

There are several points I want to draw from this personal narrative. First, I tell my story because I do not think it is idiosyncratic but is rather broadly descriptive of the frustrations many ressourcement thinkers faced before the Second Vatican Council as they fought to be heard above the din of the debates between modernists and old-line traditionalists. I also think that the sad binary of progressives versus traditionalists that I experienced is also the broad experience of most modern Catholics, many of whom can tell biographical stories eerily similar to my own. The power of that binary is a perduring blight that has disfigured the proper reception of the Council and that now threatens to scuttle the heroic effort of Pope Saint John Paul to chart a theological course, rooted in ressourcement thought, that transcends the impasse. The binary has once again returned with a vengeance, like a COVID variant eluding all vaccines, and with the battle lines even more pronounced, as both sides hunker down in their hardened, ideological bunkers, hurling salvos at each other from afar over the no man’s land of a tired Church. The center is not holding, and the strong gods of tribal loyalties have returned.

This is deeply saddening to me since it is a disturbing recapitulation of a debate that I hoped was over. It is an interminable debate incapable of resolution since the war between the binaries is a civil war, a cage match between feuding backwoods cousins. The gravitationally locked binary stars of traditionalism and progressivism are both rationalistic in a bad, modernistic sense (i.e., they both have an attenuated view of reason as something that pertains primarily to measurable things and strict logic) and are stuck in an Enlightenment model of the relation between the objective and subjective realms. The progressives favor the subjective and the traditionalists the objective, but they both tend to treat the one as the subverter of the other. There is no room at the inn for viewing reason as most especially reasonable when it is a celebration of dappled things, as the effluence of the mind’s essentially poetic and symbolic landscape, and as the natural reaching out of the creature toward its one and single final end in the Triune God. And like all modern thinkers smitten with isms, they are both utopian purists who read history as a justificatory narrative for their own ideological prejudices, which means that neither one has a proper view of what constitutes a tradition.

The hypertraditionalists romanticize and idealize a past that never was for the sake of terrorizing the present as they seek a field of wheat without tares. They freeze-frame postmedieval Catholicism, and especially Tridentine Catholicism, and hold it up as the only true form of the Church; then, with anachronistic fervor, they read the early Fathers through the lens of scholastic categories rather than the other way around and accuse ressourcement thinkers of introducing novelties as they seek to interpret the tradition nonanachronistically. Furthermore, they separate nature and grace into principles extrinsic to each other in order to preserve the idea that God owes us precisely nothing, all the while ignoring the fact that God actually wants to give us—all of us—everything. Theirs is