Grown-Up Catholicism – Raised Catholic 192

The following is a transcript from a Raised Catholic podcast. To listen to the episode, click here.

Today is episode 192: Grown-Up Catholicism

Hi friends. I hope you had a great summer and enjoyed some of the replays from the summer contemplation series. I hope they were kind of a touchstone toward your own contemplation, because any intentional time spent with God in whatever way we choose to contemplate Him – in art, in music, in nature, in movement or within church walls – this will always be fruitful because our God is a very good God who longs to be close to us.

For my own summer, I spent some time wondering and praying around a new project. And though I’m not exactly sure what form this project might take, I am very clear on the need I hope to respond to, and on the theme. In today’s episode, I hope to walk you through this idea as an introduction to not only a new series on the podcast, but hopefully, something more too, and it’s called Grown-Up Catholicism.

The American Catholic Church is in a very different space than it was even a decade ago, and if you were born and raised Catholic and have had any association with church at all, I’m certain that you’ve seen the shift toward traditionalism, an embrace of clericalism, politicization of both the clergy and the laity, alignment with political and worldly power, and more. Catholics of every generation have noticed these shifts and have made particular decisions around them – either embracing these changes or distancing themselves from a faith practice they once loved or finding themselves in a kind of confused and questioning in-between. I wonder where you find yourself on this spectrum, friend. Wherever it is, please know that you are very welcome here.

At the same time, I notice more and more in various Catholic settings and in online forums some questions that reveal a real lack of depth of understanding about what our faith actually teaches and a lack of empowerment around an individual faithful’s right and – just being really real here, friends – our responsibility as Christians to study, to wrestle, to encounter God, to discern, and to build and use what our Catechism calls a well-formed conscience to live out our faith lives in a way that is mature, authentic, and fruitful.

On a few Catholic Facebook forums I’m a part of, I will sometimes see questions like, “Am I allowed to do… something or other?” or “Is it okay if I….xyz, “ essentially crowdsourcing via social media what the people think is sinful or good or holy, rather than learning, studying, and prayerfully going to God on their own for answers. In an age where information on something as important as what we believe about God and the world – is both widely accessible and abundant, it just does not make sense to me that modern Catholics aren’t studying and wrestling more than we do. However, this is not totally our fault, is it? If you were born and raised Catholic, it just may be that you were never ever encouraged to dig deep into your faith. Maybe your priest or pastor or some other religious authority was quite comfortable being the only source and summit of every single one of your questions in your faith experience, but this kind of surface faith is not what we’re called to as Christians living out what poet Mary Oliver calls “our one wild and precious life.” These days, we hear more and more Catholics parroting something their favorite Catholic influencer is preaching, or “what Father said at mass,” or what they read online – and then taking on a sort of tribal thinking as their own belief system, fully outsourcing their opinions and principles and negating their own responsibility to know God and themselves and to live a life according to their own faith system and moral center.

Okay so maybe you’re thinking: “thanks for all of that, but what I actually believe in is the one, holy Catholic and apostolic Church.” Okay, to that, I would gently ask, “which one?” The one we hear described by Pope Francis? The one your pastor talks about? The one preached by a Catholic influencer we found online? We don’t have to look too far to see that many Catholics and, yes, clergy too, disagree and disagree strongly on a whole host of issues, both church-related and not, but who’s to say when we Catholics are attaching ourselves to the ‘right’ opinion on these matters, especially considering the scandals surrounding many outspoken pastors, Catholic leaders, and clergy. Although many clergy, authors, and leaders can be helpful guides in our journey to know and own our faith, they should not be the moral authority on how we make our way when it comes to what we believe and how we live our lives with God.

So, all of this to say that I believe it’s well past time for Catholics, whether in the pews or on the margins or those who have stepped out of regular church attendance altogether – to consider what it is we actually believe: to learn about it, to study it, to wrestle through it, to fight for it, and, with the help of the Holy Spirit and Scripture, to discern it for ourselves. After all, as it says in 1Corinthians, “When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways.” Being a grown-up Catholic Christian (or a Christian from a Protestant denomination) necessarily means owning our beliefs for ourselves.

Now, there’s a word for when we examine our faith beliefs, hold them up to the light, consider and study them systematically and authentically, and this word is deconstruction. Though our Protestant brothers and sisters have become comfortable with deconstruction and reconstruction of faith, Catholics who may fear the labels ‘lukewarm’ or ‘cafeteria Catholic’ may find the very idea of deconstruction to be off-limits, and this is really a shame because frequently when Catholics come up against a teaching or a homily or a social media post which just does not sound like Jesus to them, over time, we Catholics tend to just leave, and to leave quietly. When this happens, and it happens so often these days, pastors tend to just let us go without a care or concern (and maybe with a bit of judgment, too) and then we find ourselves unmoored, with a God-shaped hole that we have no idea how to fill. To me, that is the saddest outcome of them all.

So, in this new series, we will look at a few practical topics from a grown-up Catholic perspective: how grown-up Catholics vote and engage with politics, how grown-up Catholics give, how we serve, how we consume and use media, how we think about death, how we become salt and light, how we judge, how we lead, and more. And in this series, I will not tell you how I as a Catholic do these things, but instead, I will offer a model on how I discern and decide with the help of the Holy Spirit to do these things. I’ll use scripture, contemplation and prayer as I describe my process, and I’ll encourage each one of us to learn and wrestle and form our consciences with the Holy Spirit to come to a clearer understanding of how we want to operate in the world and our faith with this one wild and precious life we’re given by God who longs to accompany us in this process.

My intention for this series is that it be descriptive, not prescriptive. The very last thing I want to do, friend, is to add my voice to the many Catholic leadership voices who will tell you how to vote, or who to love or what to wear (honestly, can you imagine!), but I do want us to dig in and find out for ourselves how our beliefs align with what we and God together decide is the right thing to do in these areas and more. Not because someone else told us to, not because the group we belong to are all doing it that way, but because we and God worked it out in prayer and study and we are willing to stand on that good ground – us and Him – together.

In Matthew, chapter 7, it says:

“Watch out for false prophets. They come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ferocious wolves. By their fruit you will recognize them. Do people pick grapes from thornbushes, or figs from thistles? Likewise, every good tree bears good fruit, but a bad tree bears bad fruit. A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, and a bad tree cannot bear good fruit.Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. Thus, by their fruit you will recognize them.

Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. Many will say to me on that day, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name and in your name drive out demons and in your name perform many miracles?’Then I will tell them plainly, ‘I never knew you. Away from me, you evildoers!’

Therefore everyone who hears these words of mine and puts them into practice is like a wise man who built his house on the rock. The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house; yet it did not fall, because it had its foundation on the rock. But everyone who hears these words of mine and does not put them into practice is like a foolish man who built his house on sand. The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell with a great crash.

When Jesus had finished saying these things, the crowds were amazed at his teaching,because he taught as one who had authority, and not as their teachers of the law.”

In this series, we will aim to make sure we know exactly where our house is built, to build our house on the rock, and to build our own authority as daughters and sons of a living God with whom we are in authentic relationship. And I’m wondering, friend, does this sound good to you? Exciting? Maybe a little scary? Yes, probably all of those things and more, and, I just want to tell you, friend, that’s kind of what faith should feel like, because what we believe about God and the universe and our neighbor and ourselves is critical, foundational to living a good and holy life, a life we will one day answer for, and so it is important to use the tools that God has given us to discern for ourselves. So yes, high stakes and maybe a bit scary too, I know, but there’s one thing we should always remember as we walk out this road of grown-up Christianity. When we walk with Jesus, friend, we are never walking alone.

Thanks so much for being with me today, friend. If you need me, you can find me on Instagram @kerrycampbellwrites, at Substack at kerrycampbellwrites.substack.com, or on my website at kerrycampbell.org. Thanks so much for rating, reviewing, subscribing and most importantly, sharing this podcast with a friend. That makes a real difference in growing our community, so thanks. If you would like to support this podcast financially, there are a couple of ways for you to do that in the show notes, along with some resources related to today’s episode, so do check all of that out, but before we go, let’s pray together.

In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, amen.

Oh God, in this one wild and precious life we’re living, we long to draw close to you as you really are, and to learn and grow in this season as your beloved children, so please open our minds, eyes and heart to receive your guidance and leading in this time. As it says in Psalm 121, we know that you, Lord, will keep us from all evil. You will keep our lives. Lord, you will keep our going out and our coming in from this time on and forevermore. So, for us and our dear ones, in the name of Jesus and wrapped in the mantle of Our Mother Mary, we pray. Amen.

Well, thanks so much for listening today. I hope to see you over on substack to chat about this topic, but until then, I’ll see you next time.

Show Notes

I’m back from a summer break with a new series and today I’ll tell you all about it. I hope the Grown-Up Catholicism series is a blessing to you!

Thanks as always to my friend, Peter Vaughan-Vail, for providing the beautiful harp music you hear in this and every episode.

Here are some resources I hope will help you to engage with this week’s topic in a deeper way for yourself:

1. Podcast: ⁠The Examen with Fr. James Martin, SJ ⁠

2. Video: ⁠How to hear from God through His Word, with Priscilla Shirer⁠

3. Audio Book: ⁠Adult Christianity and How to Get There, by Ronald Rohlheiser, OFM and Richard Rohr, OFM⁠

4. Book: ⁠Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life, by Richard Rohr, OFM⁠

5. Article and Podcast: ⁠God is Always Talking to Us, with Beth Moore on Viral Jesus with Heather Thompson Day⁠

6. Article: ⁠Lectio Divina Beginner’s Guide⁠ from Busted Halo