Why I am still Catholic: troubled times in the church prompt a convert to speak of what sustains him

Richard K. Taylor

I was raised in the Quaker faith and became a Catholic in 1982 at age 49. For the first time in these subsequent 22 years, many longstanding Catholic friends are telling me they are seriously considering leaving the church. Others say they are hanging on by their fingernails. Most of these friends are active in their local parishes. They serve as eucharistic ministers, lectors or soup kitchen volunteers. These are faithful people who are grieving over a church they love.

They say it is very hard, even heart-wrenching, to be Catholic these days. Everywhere they turn, there are painful realities that undercut their commitment to the church: sex abuse scandals. Bishop cover-ups. Retrogressive changes in the liturgy. The fading hope that women's leadership gifts can ever be expressed in ordination. The lowly status of the laity, whose talents, intelligence and experience are largely disdained by the hierarchy. The church, these longtime Catholics say, treats them like children.

So they ask themselves: Why do I stay? Why am I still Catholic? When I try to answer this question for myself, I find that I am troubled and often outraged by the same things that alienate my Catholic friends. For now, though, the basic answer is that so far as I can discern, this is where God calls me to be. I believe that the good, the true and the beautiful in the Catholic church still far outweigh the bad, the false and the ugly.

Here is my inventory of the good.

First and foremost, I find enormous goodness in my local parish, St. Vincent de Patti in Philadelphia. (I'm sure many Catholics would say the same about their own parishes.) In spite of our many human failings, this is a place where people of faith really are trying to be disciples of Christ and to love God and one another. We practice collaborative ministry between laity and the ordained. At times in our spirited liturgy, it is as if we are catching glimpses of the radiant church as the living Christ meant it to be.

I find goodness and beauty in the small "c" (universality) of my parish and of Catholicism in general. Like no other church, Catholicism embraces people of all cultures, races, ages, classes and nationalities. I know that some parishes are mostly one race, but rarely are they one class. I'm blessed to see this in my own inner, city parish. When we gather for worship, I watch young and old, whites, blacks, Latinos, Asians and people of various other ethnicities reverently coming together. The homeless, released prison inmates, persons with mental and physical disabilities are welcomed, along with people who are well-off. People of all sexual orientations praise God together. I know that this wonderful universality will happen again and again, "24/7," as the Mass is celebrated around the world.

I love the sacraments, and I love the Mass. I can't imagine my life without the ability on any day to join my brothers and sisters--along with the angels and saints and choirs of heaven--in praising and thanking God. I can't imagine not being nurtured by the body and blood of Christ.

The Mass is central, but it is only part of the immense spiritual richness of Catholicism that I treasure. In addition to the liturgy we have the lives of the saints and mystics, the great prayer traditions, devotion to Mary, spiritual direction, the multiplicity of retreat centers, the wonderful books on spirituality--all have helped me enormously in my spiritual journey. Where would I be without them?

In addition, I value the priesthood and vowed religious life. That is a big step for a person raised in eastern seaboard Quakerism, which is entirely lay-led and has no ordained clergy. But some of the finest, most dedicated and, yes, holy people I have ever met are priests and nuns. As much as I may be appalled by what a few clerics do, it is priests and sisters who, again and again, have shown me the face of Christ.

When I'm not reacting negatively to some pronouncement that seems absurd, I also appreciate the existence of the teaching magisterium of the church. For all its human faults, heavy-handedness and sometimes arrogance, I believe it is largely responsible (along with the Holy Spirit) for upholding the truth that is in Christ. The magisterium helps keep us on track. It helps hold us together and contain our tensions, rather than splitting apart, as has happened so often in Christian history. It helps us honor Jesus' prayer "that they may all be one" (John 17:21).

I find tremendous goodness in the centuries-old tradition of Catholic social teaching, which Pope John Paul II and others before him have articulated so well. I love its affirmation of human dignity, social justice and the common good, its protection of the unborn, its linkage of faith with works, the wisdom it gives about how to transform the world to be more like the reign of God. I know of no other religious body that has the depth of Catholic social teaching.

And it's not just talk. Every year I go to a conference organized by the U.S. Catholic Conference, the bishops' administrative arm. Social action directors and community activists--500 or more priests, vowed religious and lay people--come together with bishops and other Catholic leaders to learn about each other's work for peace, justice and the integrity of creation. They represent tens of thousands of other Catholics from their home dioceses with the same commitment. My friend Jim Wallis, a Protestant leader and editor of Sojourners Magazine, says that such organized Catholic efforts represent the most powerful lobby for justice and peace in this whole country.

The preferential love for the poor, so central to Catholic social teaching, also finds expression in hundreds of Catholic hospitals and thousands of Catholic social service agencies throughout the country. My own inner-city parish has over 20 ministries, mostly run by lay people. In our services to the homeless and marginalized, it sometimes seems as though Jesus himself were coming directly to us in what Blessed Mother Teresa called "the distressing disguise of the poor."

Many years before becoming Catholic, I "accepted Christ as my Lord and Savior," as our evangelical friends would say. For me, a deeply lodged anchor of my Catholicism is the absolutely central place it gives to Jesus Christ. Every time we meet, we not only reaffirm our faith in Christ but are nourished and challenged, by Word and Eucharist, to live out our Christian faith in daily life.

At times the church has expressed its faith in horrendous ways. At times it has taught untenable things, like supporting slavery or demeaning Jews. On occasion, it still supports the untenable (for example, its teaching against contraception and women's ordination). But at its best, it has never wavered in upholding its core belief in Jesus Christ. At its best, it has held Jesus before humanity, not only theologically but embodied in Christ-filled human beings who take up their cross and follow him. Catholicism is a marvelously, unambiguously Christ-centered faith. I find that very good, true and beautiful.

Many of my disheartened friends may find it hard to believe that in spite of the rigid directives often sent from Rome, the Catholic church is amazingly open to positive change. The Mass is now in the vernacular, not in Latin, as it had been for centuries before. Biblical scholarship, which had been rejected for so long, is now accepted. The laity is affirmed as having a baptismal dignity equal to that of priests. The church no longer sees itself as the one and only path to salvation. The church has confessed its mistake in holding the Jewish people responsible for Christ's death and, in this pope, is reaching out to repair the breach between Judaism and Christianity. All these positive changes have occurred just in the last 50 years.

These reforms make me believe that the injustices in which the church is involved today can and will be changed. As Martin Luther King affirmed, "the are of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice." Already, out of the sexual abuse scandals have come not only creative groups like Voice of the Faithful but books, conferences and prophetic voices calling for a profound transformation so that the church can more nearly be like the community of Jesus' vision. I think a church like that is worth struggling and sacrificing to help bring about.

Many of my questioning Catholic friends feel deep anger toward the church along with despair that it will ever change. I don't think anger against injustice is a bad thing. St. Augustine said:

Hope has two lovely daughters:

Anger and Courage.

Anger that things are not what they ought to be;

Courage to make them what they might be.

If we stop with anger, we'll be frustrated and tempted to withdraw. We need courage, I think, to make the church what it might be. And prayer. And love.

[Richard K. Taylor is a proud grandfather of nine and an active member of St. Vincent de Paul Church in Philadelphia. In the '60s, he worked on Martin Luther King Jr.'s field staff.,]

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