Sociology and human chemistry of parishes

It would be interesting to see a professional sociological study of the personnel and atmosphere of different parishes.

Let me confine myself to the Catholic Church.

I have only hearsay evidence, of course, apart from places I’ve seen myself, even in Ireland; but the following seems to be general – and common sense.

A ‘mainstream’ Catholic parish typically has a wide spectrum of human types. It’s not a small club of like-minded individuals. One is likely to be rubbing shoulders with a neighbour with whom you have absolutely nothing else in common. And most people like to ‘go with the flow’. And in Ireland for many generations, when essentially the entire population was Catholic and regular churchgoers, it was the time in the week when you met your neighbours and caught up with all the latest news and gossip. (But there was also an unwritten rule that you didn’t finalise business transactions, or make business plans, on a Sunday).

Vatican II closed in 1965 and almost immediately there was a gradual but steady series of ‘changes’. Different people reacted differently. At a certain point, some people (not others) began to feel, ‘This isn’t right’, which could progress to ‘This can’t go on’ and then to ‘This has got to stop.’ I’m not discussing the details of the ‘Changes’ here, but the human reaction. Now some people are by temperament very easy-going; others are more inclined to look with constructive - or sometimes destructive - criticism - and others are more willing than others to step out of line.

The ‘Traditionalists’, who were inclined to resist the changes, even if privately, were from the very beginning made to feel by the hierarchy that they were out of step, out of touch. When the SSPX began to set up actual Mass Centres, they were accused of being in schism. Most laypeople were not intellectually, educationally or emotionally equipped either to work through the legal ramifications, or to join the Trad Mass Centre and endure the epithet of Black Sheep.

Now this is the point. The more easy-going type was far less likely to join an SSPX parish than the more cross-grained type (‘without prejudice’ to the actual rights or wrongs of the situation) and this had important implications for the human chemistry of the congregation. In a word, it was a skewed cross-section of the population who would be there. Now there is more than one reason why a particular individual would choose to go to Mass with an SSPX priest instead of his local mainstream parish; but it is undeniable that the Trad Mass-centres tend to have more than their share of Awkward Customers.

And there is one special sub-group – The Over-Zealous Layman! GKChesterton, in his autobiography, when recounting his process of conversion from atheism, via different stages, to Catholicism, writes that at the last stage, the worst obstacle to his deciding on the final step was precisely the Over-Zealous Layman. He writes, ‘Priests know the Faith, know what they are doing, and when to give an individual soul a little breathing space. But the Over-Zealous Layman rushes in where angels fear to tread’. You do find different versions of this – they are to be found among the charismatic inclined as well as the ‘Trads’ – but I admit that my personal experience is that they are a commoner phenomenon in Trad parishes than elsewhere – in fact, in some, they are a positive menace! An SSPX priest told us once (at a Men’s Retreat) that they are the bane of the priests - they hang around outside the church before or after Mass, buttonholing newcomers and haranguing them – and that is usually the last we see of the newcomer.

So to put it another way… there is more than one way to Get it Wrong. The type who is inclined

to indolence is far less likely to end up in a Trad Mass Centre than one who is inclined to scruples (as we call it - stressing over a gnat and swallowing a camel). One thing the Trads definitely don’t go in for is ‘Love Bombing’ – that not-quite-sincere overdone welcome to the newcomer.

Spiritual Pride? I won’t lay that only at the Trads door – I see plenty of it in the mainstream also. The trap is to consider oneself better than the others – one, because they can prove the trad case from Canon Law, or from a collected set of horror stories about Novus Ordo Masses; the other, because they are (apparently) on the side of the huge majority of layfolk and clergy, up to and including the Pope. [Yet at a TLM (Traditional Latin Mass) not only is the pope, but also the local diocesan bishop, prayed for in the prescribed part of the liturgy, at every single Mass].

I have not in this posting mentioned the many different shades of the current situation. I will only give my take on it: the present state of the Catholic Church is one where uncertainty and confusion and plain ignorance is rampant to an extent not seen since the Sixteenth and Seventeen Centuries: in this situation, people of goodwill find themselves on opposite sides of various controversies: and a little Charity goes a long, long way. Let us forgive each other for our particular failings and keep our eye on the ball, which is: the private and public worship of God.