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Many Catholics were hasty to assume that the opening ceremony of the Olympics went out of its way to “mock” the Last Supper.
The instant outrage the tableau aroused — right or wrong — tells a larger story about something that has happened in Catholic life across the last four decades. But it has not been the only recent indicator.
In a January report on religious liberty the U.S. bishops told us somewhat alarmingly of their concern that “the very lives of people of faith” are threatened in the United States.
Cardinal Timothy Dolan inveighed in June against New York’s proposed Nonpublic Dignity for All Students Act with complaints about “bullying” Catholics and forcing Catholics to “toe the line on “gender ideology.”
One of the first attacks leveled at Kamala Harris once she became the presumptive Democratic nominee for president was that she “hates what [Catholics] believe.”
We Catholics have come to prize a little too much being outsiders set against the culture and the world. Quite often, Catholics seem crouched defensively as though the church were under constant attack.
That’s not a coincidence. For several decades, Catholics in the U.S. have been taught to see the world as a hostile place set against us, and to think of ourselves as a “sign of contradiction” set against that world.
This point of view has been nurtured within the church for two generations. Forty years can make it seem like Catholics always have seen our relationship with the world this way. We have not. And, in fact, that idea does not reflect our tradition very well.
The world as a partner
No matter how the 1962-65 Second Vatican Council called the church to turn toward and embrace the world — indeed, no matter how St. Augustine reminded us that our faith “does not repeal or abolish” the laws and norms of the world in which we make our earthly pilgrimage — we Catholics insist more and more on what historian Leslie Woodcock Tentler has called “Catholic difference.”
We have come to be intoxicated by being different, standing apart, and the idea that the world is out to get Catholics.
It was not always this way. Vatican II itself proved that while the world is not the same as the Church, the Church can and must see the world as a partner.
The world is the field of salvation given to the church (Matthew 13:38).
A sign of contradiction
A temptation to stand apart from the world has always dogged the Church. The last 40 years have seen Catholics succumb thoroughly to that temptation, desiring to be a “sign of contradiction.”
That phrasing — “sign of contradiction” — deserves particular attention. We find it in the Gospel of Luke (2:34) and in the Acts of the Apostles (28:22).
But the phrase came into its recent popularity during the John Paul II papacy. He used the phrase as early as a 1979 Angelus message, three months after his election.
But Pope John Paul began to speak of Catholics as a sign of contradiction to the world with considerable frequency after 1987.
A quick search of the Vatican website discloses 45 uses of the phrase “sign of contradiction” during the John Paul II papacy, 39 of which came in 1987 or later.
The Seventh General Assembly of the Synod of Bishops which took place in October 1987 may well have been the turning point that gave so much life to that oppositional, “sign of contradiction” narrative that we live with even today.
Addressing “the vocation and mission of the lay faithful in the church and the world,” the synod took up the most neuralgic questions that had dogged the church since Vatican II.
They included the role of women and the participation of laypeople more generally in church leadership.
In 1987, NCR described that synod as the “first clear test of strength between papal loyalists and post-Vatican II church leaders” — we might say, between those who preferred to restrain the Council’s reforms and those who intended to press them forward.
Looking back, it seems clear that those who preferred to restrain the Council prevailed, and something shifted in the church after the 1987 synod.
The influence of leaders like Milwaukee’s Archbishop Rembert Weakland and Chicago’s Cardinal Joseph Bernardin waned.
Others like Boston’s Cardinal Bernard Law and New York’s Cardinal John O’Connor ascended, and the overall trajectory of the U.S. bishops has traced the path of their influence since 1987.
It seems inescapable that under Pope John Paul the church began to embrace its identity as a “sign of contradiction,” a church in opposition to the world. Read more
- Steven P. Millies is professor of public theology and director of The Bernardin Center at Catholic Theological Union in Chicago.
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