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	Mourning Becomes Roman Catholics The Commonweal July 8, 2011 http://commonwealmagazine.org/verdicts/?p=203 Marian Ronan begins her short but provocative book, Tracing the Sign of the Cross: Sexuality, Mourning, and the Future of American Catholicism (Columbia University Press), by asserting a truism: “For those of us who came to consciousness during and after Vatican II…the decline of the American church at the turn of the twenty-first century was almost incomprehensible…. Forty years earlier, the Second Vatican Council filled many of us with hope and expectation, but since then Mass attendance and financial support have declined steadily, the median age of priests and sisters has skyrocketed, and strife between and within Catholic communities has proliferated.” So far, so obvious. While she agrees with John T. McGreevy that the sexual abuse crisis is “the single most important event in American Catholicism since Vatican II and the most devastating scandal in American Catholic history,” she thinks that the “distress” felt by her and many contemporary American Catholics “can [not] be attributed exclusively, or even primarily, to the clergy sexual-abuse crisis.” Rather, the symptoms of decline were clearly apparent long before the Boston Globe began its Pulitzer Prize-winning series on clergy sexual abuse in January 2002. The reasons for Ronan’s “distress” and that of many other American Catholics “are rooted, in part at least, in the dashed hopes and expectations of a significant portion of the American Catholic community after Vatican II and the inability of that community to acknowledge and work through those losses [italics mine].” That is the heart of the book, the psychological trope, largely discovered or rediscovered by Sigmund Freud in 1915: “mourning and the inability to mourn.” In a communal context, mourning and the inability to mourn “have to do with a people’s ability or inability to tolerate difference and change.” Following sociologist Gene Burns, Ronan argues that the changes resulting from Vatican II “were more ambiguous than is often recognized.” Vatican II did not mitigate the monarchical structure defined at Vatican I. Rather, “it shifted the territory over which the pope claimed authority from the entire world to the arena of ‘faith and morals’…which means, for all intents and purposes, sexuality and gender.” For many American Catholics, influenced by “the apparent triumph of liberal American Catholicism at Vatican II,” “opposition to (or fierce support of) Catholic teaching on sexuality and gender has seemed the way forward, but,” concludes Ronan sadly, “the endless character of these battles suggests their futility. In Tracing the Sign of the Cross, I argue that the way forward instead involves grieving for our dashed hopes and expectations, in hope of a chastened but more productive future.” The heart of the book consists of an insightful analysis of the works of three American Catholic novelists/essayists and one ex-Catholic philosopher of science. The subtitles of the chapters give the game away: “James Carroll’s Liberal American Catholicism,” “Mary Gordon’s Permeable Catholicism,” “Donna Haraway’s Diffracted Catholicism,” and “Richard Rodriguez’s Brown Catholicism.” For those not familiar with, and even for those who are, Carroll’s nine novels and award-winning memoir, An American Requiem; Mary Gordon’s five novels and memoir, The Shadow Man; and Rodriguez’s four collections of autobiographical essays, Ronan’s book serves as a delightful introduction filled with shrewd insight. The governing principle in each of these chapters is to discern how, in their fiction, memoirs, or autobiographical essays, each of these authors has managed to come to terms with, “work through,” the pain and loss associated with the post-Vatican II era. Space doesn’t allow much comment on Ronan’s treatment of the individual authors, except to say that Carroll comes in for the strongest critique, Gordon the gentlest, and Rodriguez the most surprising. Unlike Carroll or Gordon (or Ronan herself), Rodriguez starts off as a political and ecclesiological conservative, but his slow acknowledgment of his homosexuality, and opposition to official church teaching, while praising the American Catholic bishops for their stance on immigration, leads him to an acceptance of loss and of the church as it is and as it will be for the indefinite future that is closest to Ronan’s own position. I’ve left Haraway for last because her chapter is the most difficult. Reading it requires, in my opinion, a doctorate in feminist theory. Besides, she’s only a sometime or ironic Catholic. Yet, I definitely got something out of this chapter, “The Passion of the Oncomouse TM,” if only an affection for said creature, as illustrated by Lynn Randolph: “a large rodent with distinctly human breasts, arms, and hands, stand[ing] in a kind of cell while seven menacing pairs of eyes watch it through observation slits…. On her head is a crown of thorns.” The reference is to a real rodent genetically altered to develop breast cancer for research purposes and then patented. In the final chapter, Ronan describes her own present position by way of a brief autobiography. She writes of the tension between the “nearly rote, industrial-strength Catholicism of my childhood and the modernization and upward mobility inscribed in the rest of my life.” She was a member of the Grailville community from 1975 to 1979. Her commitment to the ordination of women led her to serve on the board and ultimately to become president of the national Women’s Ordination Conference. She speaks of the influence on her of a slew of second-generation feminist theologians and ethicists, especially the Roman Catholic Mary Daly, Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza, and Rosemary Radford Ruether. “Yet Inter Insignores, the 1976 papal encyclical rejecting the possibility of the ordination of Catholic women, was surely a sign of [worse] things to come.” She then concludes: “Beyond the decision to remain a Catholic, I have also decided to stop fighting the internecine Catholic battles in which I have participated for much of my adult life.” She mourns but accepts the death of the dream of a liberal American Catholicism and is increasingly drawn to the prospects and future of Catholicism in the Global South. The book ends: “I continue to find the Catholic tradition, rooted in the transformation of suffering and loss, a source of encouragement and hope in my life. Like Richard Rodriguez, I am grateful to spend my life within the shadow of the Cross.” My only criticism of this extremely thoughtful and engaging book is that it gives short shrift to the possibility of joining another Christian denomination in which the sexuality and gender issues have been won. She writes, “The point of being Catholic, for me, is to be connected with a vast cloud of witnesses extending both back in time and across space.” But aren’t high-church Episcopalians and Anglicans Catholic? Are they not connected to the universal church? Don’t they “trace the sign of the Cross” as often, if not more, than Roman Catholics? Yet, they have women’s ordination, a married clergy, celibate monastic institutions for men and women, and solemnize commitment ceremonies for gay men and women. When Michael Ramsey, archbishop of Canterbury, visited Rome, in the sacristy after a vesper service in which they walked down the aisle of St. John Lateran side by side, Pope Paul VI took off his papal ring, the Fisherman’s Ring, and slipped it on Ramsey’s finger. Was Paul “nuts”? If papal gestures (think of John Paul II praying and probably weeping at the Western Wall) mean as much as papal pronouncements, this suggests to me that the schism between Roman Catholics and Anglican Catholics is over, kaputt! On Gay Pride Day in Boston recently, Tom Shaw, the Episcopal bishop of Massachusetts, a life-professed member of the Society of St. John the Evangelist, and hence celibate, walked with Bishop Gene Robinson of New Hampshire, a gay man in a committed relationship, in the midst of the LGBT Episcopalian community. I’d have given anything to be there. Certainly in my lifetime (I’m sixty-nine—two years older than the oldest of Marian Ronan’s subjects, Jim Carroll), I don’t expect to live to see two Roman Catholic bishops marching in a Gay Pride Parade, except perhaps in drag!
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