Smile when you say 'Starbucks': responses to Eugene McCarraher - response to Eugene McCarraher, Commonweal, September 12, 1997 - includes response from Eugene McCarraher

Readers tempted to think that Eugene McCarraher overstates our current dilemma should take a look at an article in America (September 13, 1997). Thomas P. Sweetser, a Jesuit priest who directs the Parish Evaluation Project, recommends a "filling station" model for an effective parish. "Everything," he says, "would be geared to knowing the needs and desires of [parishioners] and responding to those needs. The liturgy would have to be adjusted and adapted to a variety of situations and circumstances. The people attending would come from a wider environment than the area within the classical parish boundaries. People would be attracted and drawn to the Eucharist because it 'fit' them" (italics mine).

There is a grain of truth in what Sweetser says, but in the end he presents us with an image of the church as provider-of-consumer-goods-and -services headed up by Jesus, the greatest marketing consultant of them all. What we have here is a hot-off-the-presses example of McCarraher's "velvet revolution."

McCarraher is right to deplore the ideology of choice ushered in by this revolution. And he is right to see Vatican II as a culmination rather than a commencement of the takeover of the church by a managerial elite. But it seems to me that this "velvet revolution" has not been a triumph of an accommodated laity alone. It has also been a triumph of an accommodated clergy. While McCarraher acknowledges the role of clerics in his account and rightly rounds up some of the usual suspects (Ireland, Ryan, and Kerby), he seems to blame the church's embrace of U.S. corporate culture entirely on the laity. I think the clergy had more than a hand in it.

Dorothy Day thought the same, back in the twenties, when she encountered what she later called "the scandal of businesslike priests." Likewise in the forties, when she noted the University of Notre Dame's role in creating the bomb; and again, when she tangled with Cardinal Francis Spellman over the grave-diggers' strike. My point is this: Sweetser's church-as-filling-station approach is a recent instance of a long history of clerical accommodation to the mores of the managerial class.

Focusing on the responsibility of both laity and clergy for this "velvet revolution" is important for two reasons. First, it should remind us that our present predicament derives not from an emergent laity, but from an emergent Americanized laity "empowered" by an Americanized clergy. Second, if we do not see this revolution as the result of a mutual failure, we might indulge in yet another round of lay-clergy feuding, and thus avoid addressing a real pastoral crisis: Many young Catholics in the position of having to "choose" their Catholicism are, ironically, choosing a version that favors obligation, service, and love over "choice." These young people do not seek a Eucharist that "fits their needs," but pray that their needs will be transformed by the Eucharist. If we fail to show them how such a transformation can occur, we will fail them utterly.

Michael Baxter, C.S.C., teaches in the theology department at the University of Notre Dame.

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