Dear Friends at Saint Frances Cabrini Parish and Saint Mary’s Immaculate Conception Parish:
Praised be Jesus Christ! As I write this, due to the nature of print deadlines in our increasingly non-print world, I do not yet know the outcome of the American elections which (hopefully- fingers crossed!) wrapped up in the morning hours of November 4th. In the absence of any prophetic and advance knowledge of the specific outcome on my part, I think it is still safe to offer two general points of observation regardless of the results.
One observation is that the increasingly fractured and conflicted nature of our American political and social culture is the result of the loss of what could be termed a common cultural narrative. A “narrative” is a socio-political and philosophical term that describes a common, over-arching story that gives shape, meaning, and direction to a whole group of people. Narratives carry within them their own ideals, as well as the answers to challenging questions that arise as groups and nations move through history. These days we call them “mission statements” on a smaller scale, and we invent and re-craft them at the drop of a hat.
For a long, long time, America’s “mission statement” had to do with cultural markers revolving around freedom, opportunity, and equality as outlined by a small group of national, mythical heroes called “the founding fathers” (plus Abraham Lincoln added in), and as safeguarded by sacred documents called “the Declaration of Independence” and “the Constitution,” and the “Bill of Rights,” (plus the “Gettysburg Address” added in). Young school children all across the country, and every immigrant who came to these shores, were all systematically initiated into the same, cultural American narrative that we spoke of quite often in quasi-Biblical language. Much of the narrative, and public cultural language, was heavily and explicitly Christian.
To some extent, every nation has what I am describing: a cultural narrative. What made America’s especially critical was that the common narrative was the one thing uniting what would otherwise be a very diverse collection of people living together in one location who, when living on some other patch of ground around the globe, would have been at war with each other. We overcame the cultural, religious, and ethnic divides of Old Europe by instead agreeing to mutually buy-in to a new, generically Christian, common national narrative. The American Civil War was fought chiefly over the question of how to understand this narrative, with the question of slavery as something of the sub-issue in the argument. The war was so bloody in part because both sides knew that the very nature and future of this fragile, social-contract experiment was at stake. America did survive, with Lincoln and his Gettysburg Address emerging as the newly-added heroes to the story of our classic mythological founding. Which is why in nearly every grade school classroom in this country up until the 1980’s, there was ALWAYS a portrait of Washington, Lincoln, and an American Flag.
Without passing judgement on whether it was right or wrong, in the past several decades the common narrative I am describing has been intentionally dismantled and discredited. It is now seen, more and more, as a story of oppression as told by the (temporary) victors in a cultural, ethnic power struggle that marginalized some peoples for the gain of other peoples. The rhetoric of our dominant cultural voices and institutions, including ironically enough that of the government itself, is increasingly hostile toward this narrative.
Whether or not the old narrative has to go is a question for another time, but what is clear is that when one tosses out a common narrative, and the old stories are all re-invented, it leaves a nation de-stabilized at the core. What emerges is the battle, or the civil war, over what to replace it with. The new narrative. That is the fight that America is passing through right now. Neither of our main presidential candidates in this election possessed the capacity to fix this struggle, and in fairness to them, it is now beyond any one person’s ability to fix. Only time will tell if America can survive the loss of its founding narrative to the degree that we have now de-constructed it. It’s akin to a person receiving a DNA transplant. If they could survive such a thing, technically they are no longer that same person.
My second observation is much briefer: the collapse of the American common narrative makes it even more pressing for us as Catholic Christians to make sure that we are striving to faithfully hand-on our own narrative which is of course ancient. We have to know our biblical stories, our heroes the Saints, our charter documents such as the Creed. We have to know that what unites us all across time, space, and ethic lines are the real bonds of the Sacraments. Our commandments are not optional. Rather, they require us to love, to respect, and to be people of justice and mercy regardless of whatever civic nation is coming and going around us. Even if we feel more and more like foreigners as Christians in this country, we do still live here. Our Christian story and narrative is what will carry us forward, and hopefully one day we will again be able to allow our Christian story to be a dominant influence on the fragmented culture around us. Only God knows what shape all that will take. Regardless, we know what our faith requires of us, and we must continue to live it fully. Our citizenship is in heaven, Saint Paul says, and from it we gain our true Savior.