NEW CATHOLIC POLITICS

In The Washington Post magazine yesterday, the cover story explored the lives of a few young Catholic adults living as neo-monastics. It focused on Laura Cartagena, co-founder of Simple House, a new organization with homes in Washington, D.C. and Kansas City:

Laura’s quest to serve God has meant, in essence, turning her back on the material comforts and professional aspirations of her suburban upbringing. And there are others just like her at Simple House and a growing number of Christian “intentional communities” across the country, where residents share a living space as well as a common spiritual purpose. For the devout Catholics and evangelical Protestants in their 20s and early 30s attracted to these communities, it is not enough to attend church, pray before every meal and spend hours at Bible study. It is not enough to ask, “What would Jesus do?” The preferred question is: “How did Jesus live?”

At Simple House, as at other Christian intentional communities, the answer demands devotion and sacrifice. None of the missionaries at Simple House has an outside job. Laura earns just $200 a month to minister to about two dozen families in Southeast, doing everything from delivering food to helping a couple deal with their daughter’s suicide attempt. She and her housemates have taken vows of poverty, obedience and chastity. They pray every morning and evening and attend Mass daily. In their rowhouse on T Street NW, they have no TV. No Internet. No alcohol inside the house. And no sex. Ever. What the young women lack in amenities, they make up for in sightings of rats and roaches. This is what it looks like to reject careerism and affluence in pursuit of spiritual fulfillment. This is what it looks like to become a modern-day radical.

Let me put my cards on the table: I admire these young Catholics. So much of the discussion in American Catholic circles centers around whether you ought to be a conservative or a progressive Catholic. These young people are Catholic period – not orthodox or traditional, just Catholic. If the facts of the story are true, their lives are devoted to serving the poor and going to Mass daily and praying; living in community with your peers and abstaining from sex until marriage; developing an ascetic lifestyle and possessing an Incarnational view of reality. They are, by my lights at least, the real New Faithful.

Not that every one of them is holy and pious; late in the story, one proclaims her desire to be a “corporate whore” and raise a family with plenty of material possessions; some enjoy the material pleasures of going home occasionally and going shopping. Yet their lives show the power of being a Theological Catholic and not just a Cultural Catholic. To her credit, author Darragh Johnson interviewed people who have been helped by those at Simple House:

When asked about the Simple House ministry, many on the receiving end of its efforts use the words: “They are a blessing.”

For 19-year-old Angelica Williams, the fact that Simple House exists has been revelatory. “When we needed food,” she marvels, “they came by and gave us food. I actually thought, I’m like, ‘There are nice people in the world.’ ”

For Carol Bowman, who is 55 and lives with her daughter and 9-year-old grandson, Simple House offers not just aid but “friendly conversation, and that’s nice.” Some of her neighbors, she concedes, “do say, ‘That girl have a lot of white people comin’ in that house.’ Well, it’s church people, and they might be white, but . . . they real friendly, and they help people.”

And then there’s Kimberlee Campbell, who met Laura and Clark in April 2004, four months after she gave birth to her fifth child. She writes, in an e-mail from her Facebook account:
“I really was going through a deep depression at that time. I felt really alone and just wanted to die . . . I remember coming home from work one day and I could not stop crying . . . and I remember asking God to please help me.”

In fact, I would make a further point: the story shows the perils that afflict Cultural Catholics. Affluence; materialism and consumerism; careerism and ambition – I hear little about these topics on Sunday sermons, but they corrode our relationship with God and our fellow men. Of course, some Catholic parts of the country are relatively immune from affluence’s spiritual torpor; and with the deepening recession, more areas will live this way.

That said, I do think the story might have touched on the problems of neo-monastics. How about spiritual pride? How about having naïve views about the expense of supporting a family? As someone who worked in the Jesuit Volunteer Corps briefly, I struggle with these maladies.

Yet the story shows indirectly how American Catholicism, rather than American society as a whole, which is the point of the story, has grown soft, self centered, and spiritually arid. This theme resonates with me. I know plenty of Catholics who make sacrifices every day – to exercise regularly, stay fit, save up for a vacation. They just don’t make sacrifices for their faith and God. The beauty of this story is to show what happens when you do – strength of soul, wisdom, peace and serenity, and the love of the most vulnerable.

Update: Clark Massey, a leader of A Simple House, is someone to watch for. His answers in the Washington Post’s discussion Monday revealed a man who seems to possess the Four Cardinal Virtues. Although I think he slights the importance of guilt and anti-consumerism, his grasp of Catholic thought is impressive. Consider this exchange when he was asked whether social workers and community activists can do just as good of a job as religious workers:

Clark Massey: All acts of Goodness are beautiful. I don’t know how a secular person can avoid burnout. There isn’t enough recreation in the world to make up for the stress of that type of job.

I do believe that God interfaces with people in many mysterious ways, but these mysterious ways aren’t a good substitute for religion.

The worst anti-burnout attitude is to start measuring your gifts. People often try to give less in order to sustain themselves. This doesn’t work. It makes people bitter. This doesn’t mean you give into abusive situations or deny yourselves the things you need. Christians have been known to fall into this measuring attitude too (it even occasionally happens at Simple House). This is not the attitude of Jesus on the Cross.

Later, Massey elaborated on his point:

At the risk of sounding trite, it is only through prayer that we escape pessimism and cynicism. If volunteers don’t pray and recreate, they burn out.

Burnout is not a necessary or desirable stage of the spiritual life. It is a sign that something went wrong.

Besides pessism and burnout rubbing off, there is the idea that we need to ‘fix’ or ’save’ someone. This attitude creates burnout, and it leads to a savior complex. You know this attitude has taken hold when you experience intense disappointment at the failure of a some plan or strategy.

As JH noted in the comments section, Massey added that he believes that Catholic Charities will be more spiritual than materialist.