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The Coming Catholic Church: How the Faithful are Shaping A New American Catholicism
by David Gibson
HarperSanFrancisco
350 pp.; $23.95

When asked what he thought about the Catholic laity, John Henry Newman replied that the Church would look foolish without them. David Gibson's splendid if overly sanguine new book partakes of Newman's pragmatism and generosity. By comparison with a leadership which appears, by turns, haughty, repentant, and feckless in the face of scandal, the American Catholic laity seems the very model of sensible, long-suffering maturity. But if, as Gibson contends, the laity is also mounting an unstoppable insurrection in American Catholicism, we might want to know what exactly this regime change promises.

A convert to Catholicism and an award-winning religious journalist, Gibson provides a refreshingly well-informed and judicious survey of American Catholic life, from the steadfast but restless faith in the pews, to the numerous troubles that vex the priesthood, to the confusion and defensiveness that lame the episcopate.

At ease with an array of sources—reportage and commentary, scholarly literature, his own extensive interviews and research—Gibson ranges widely without being shallow. We receive brief but proficient histories of the papacy, priestly celibacy, the American bishops, and the Second Vatican Council, and succinct elucidations of religious sociology, sacramental theology, and the psychology of pedophilia. (The absence of reference notes and a bibliography is frustrating.) But we also get a tad too much of the Polls-Have-Shown brand of pop social studies. (I'm certainly glad that two-thirds of Catholic women rated "high" on a "sexual playfulness scale," but I'm still not sure what it portends for American Catholicism.)

While the sex-abuse scandals provide Gibson a ready point of reference, he realizes they've compounded stresses even more injurious than the ones the bishops have addressed (so far, he shows, with awe-suppressing ineptitude). Catholic women are increasingly impatient, not only with official teachings on contraception and ordination but also with a male clerical culture blinded to its reliance on their labor and devotion. The rising generation of younger Catholics seems indifferent or lethargic about church attendance, moral teachings, and doctrinal authority.

Among priests as well, the scandals have exacerbated larger and more intractable dilemmas. Despite the psychologically illiterate efforts of conservatives to link pedophilia and homosexuality, the exposures have drawn attention to a gay clerical subculture which, Gibson rightly asserts, must be thoroughly uncloseted and discussed as the institutional and theological crisis it poses. And that crisis points to a broader perplexity about the nature of the priesthood itself, a confusion fueled not merely by declining numbers—an attrition which has forced parishes to rely increasingly on lay people for numerous "clerical" functions—but also by a laity which can't decide if it wants "guardians of orthodoxy" or "regular Joes, only better." Gibson sees little chance that these issues will be confronted soon or well by an episcopate dedicated to its "dying mystique" of clericalism.

Still, Gibson finds reason for hope in a "revolution from below" which, occasioned by the reforms of Vatican II, has left almost nothing of Catholic culture untouched. From liturgical innovations (altar girls, lay distribution of the Eucharist and other sacraments) to structural perestroika (parish councils, the expansion of the diaconate), the laity has already effected a metamorphosis in the power relations within the American Church. Arguing from these realities, Gibson sets forth an eminently prudent agenda for greater ecclesial democracy: more power and oversight for lay parish councils and diocesan review boards; lay participation in the selection of bishops; a "careful reimagining of the Catholic priesthood" that would include the ordination of women and the revocation of mandatory celibacy.

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July (Web-only) 2003, Vol. 47