Why Rome and America need one another

By JOHN L. ALLEN JR.
Chicago

I’ve been in the Chicago area the early part of this week, speaking on Sunday evening at Sts. Faith, Hope and Charity Parish in Winnetka, and then on Monday evening at the Sheil Catholic Center at Northwestern University. In both cases, my subject was the relationship between Rome and America.

I tried to make two basic points: 1) communication between Rome and America is often complicated by a “cultural gap,” and 2) addressing this misunderstanding is important because, at bottom, Rome and America need one another.

Excerpts from my remarks are below.

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I’ve spent the last six years as an American correspondent covering the Vatican, with one foot perpetually in each of two worlds – Rome and the United States. When I first arrived in the Eternal City, it was easy to be impressed by the similarities between the two, since they both move within the framework of a common Western culture. I saw the same Hollywood movies advertised, the same laptops and cell phones, the same satellite TV providers and ATMs, and the only difference seemed to be that everything was in Italian. Hence it was natural to assume that the Vatican is basically an Italian-speaking analog of an American bureaucracy, that a Vatican official thinks essentially the same thoughts as an American bishop, and so on, only with more hand gestures and inflection.

Only with time did it become clear to me that language was merely the tip of the iceberg in terms of the deep “cultural gap” that divides Rome and America. It would be flip to say that “Americans are from Mars, Romans from Venus,” but there’s more than a smidgen of truth to the perception of being on different planets.

My observation is that Vatican officials and American Catholics often think they’re talking to one another, but in many instances they’re actually talking past one another, making deceptively similar statements that mask different psychological and sociological assumptions, and that mean very different things to each of the two parties. Sometimes they’re sitting in the same room, having the same experience, but drawing vastly different conclusions about what it means – and usually assuming the other party sees things the same way.

To take just one small but telling example, consider the difference between American and Roman views of time. In the United States, we have a “microwave” culture. If we perceive a need, we want that need satisfied immediately. If there is a problem, we want a plan to resolve it by the close of business. If you don’t have such a plan, it’s either because you’re lazy or you’re in denial, and either way it’s unacceptable. Our motto tends to be that of Homer Simpson who, when told that it would take 30 seconds for a fried meal, responded: “But I want it now!”

Rome, on the other hand, is a culture notoriously accustomed to thinking in the long term. Its motto tends to be, “Talk to me on Wednesday, and I’ll get back to you in 200 years.” Rome is in that sense a “crock-pot” culture. The idea is that the food simmers for a much longer period of time, but if you get the ingredients right, it will be much more satisfying.

I’ve sat through countless Roman conferences and watched people shaped by these two different cultures try to make sense of one another. In a typical Roman symposium, each day will feature keynoters with meaty addresses, followed by several speakers delivering related reflections. Perhaps there will be a bit of time at the close of each morning and evening session for a few questions, though normally these are lengthy rhetorical exercises from the floor rather than real Q&A. There is very little of what most Americans would recognize as “discussion,” except during coffee breaks. This process goes on for three days or so, and then everyone goes home – no vote, no plan, no concrete “outcome.”

The typical American will walk away frustrated, if not scandalized, by the experience. In light of limited resources and the urgency of the challenges facing the Church, many Americans believe, the fact that three days were wasted on nothing but talk seems irresponsible. The typical Roman, on the other hand, believes that rushing into conclusions when facing complex challenges is a prescription for fruitless effort. Only an American, some will whisper, would regard careful reflection a waste of time. Such experiences, they believe, will bear fruit in more carefully considered pastoral plans down the line.

What Americans may see as negligence or denial, in other words, many Romans experience as self-discipline and perspective. This is not to deny, of course, that sometimes the Vatican is far too slow to engage crisis situations, or that sometimes Americans have the habit of shooting first and asking questions later. The point is rather that quite often both sides misread the psychology of the other.

We could go on multiplying examples of this “cultural gap.” Another classic instance is differing attitudes towards law. For Anglo-Saxons, law is a lowest common denominator of civil behavior, and hence we assume that laws are meant to be obeyed. If we find that people aren’t obeying a given law, it’s a problem, and we either crack down or change the law. In Mediterranean cultures, on the other hand, law is more an expression of an ideal, and there’s tremendous room for subjectivity in interpretation and application in a concrete set of circumstances. Anyone who’s ever driven the streets of an Italian city knows what I’m talking about. The bar tends to be set high, with the implicit understanding that most people, most of the time, will far short to varying degrees.

This is a constant source of misunderstanding when the Vatican issues a draconian-sounding decree, which immediately elicits howls of protest from the United States about it being unrealistic or inhumane. Vatican officials are routinely exasperated by the reaction, since they fully expect that pastors and bishops will exercise good judgment about how it ought to applied in individual cases. Most recently, we saw this dynamic with the document from the Congregation for Catholic Education on the admission of homosexuals as seminary candidates. No one in Rome, including the authors of the document themselves, believes that it means absolutely no candidate with a same-sex orientation should ever be admitted to Holy Orders. They saw it as a call to careful discernment, not a blanket ban. (Admittedly, American Catholics can to some extent be forgiven the protest. As the old joke goes, we often have the worst of both worlds – Roman law applied by Anglo-Saxon bishops!)

All of this could perhaps be seen as amusing, were it not for the way that the cultural gap so often renders communications between Rome and America adversarial. Of course, complaining about the hierarchy is the favorite indoor sport of Roman Catholicism, and we will never live to see a completely tension-free relationship between any local church and the Vatican. Yet the particularly acrimonious attitudes that many American Catholics often have towards the Vatican, and that Vatican officials sometimes have towards the United States, must nevertheless be a source of concern, because at bottom Rome and America need one another.

For one thing, the papacy is, like it or not, where the buck stops in the Catholic Church, and for that reason alone local churches have a strong motive to keep their relationship with the Vatican green. As Professor Robert Taft, an American Jesuit who has taught for decades at Rome’s Orientalum, memorably puts it: “If you want to swim in the Catholic pool, sooner or later you have to make your peace with the lifeguard.”

Even setting that aside, however, there’s another consideration. American Catholics live in an enormously powerful secular culture, one shaped by traditions of rugged individualism, free-market capitalism, competition, consumerism, democracy, and the philosophical presuppositions of the Enlightenment. That culture exerts a formidable tug on our imaginations, our sense of ourselves, our judgments and our priorities. As Catholics, sometimes we are more evangelized by this culture than evangelizing of it. Our bond with Rome is therefore a crucial tether to the basic principles of our Catholic identity. This is what Rome at its best does in every generation, calling us back to our distinctive sense of self that given cultures may obscure or attempt to swallow up.

Yet Rome needs America too, because a constant danger for those who do this necessary work in the Holy See is to mistake a given form of historical expression with an eternal point of the faith. Rome’s charism is to some extent to be careful and cautious, while local churches experiment and create. This is the yin and the yang, so to speak, of the Catholic system, and it only works when both forces are in harmony. Rome has to be renewed through the vitality of the local churches, because only in this way does the universal Church discover new and more effective means of bringing the Gospel to the men and women of our time. The Church would be terribly impoverished, for example, if the American experience of church/state relations had not helped to shape the declaration Dignitatis Humanae at the Second Vatican Council on religious freedom – a teaching which became a cornerstone of the pontificate of John Paul II. The Catholic experience in the United States has a staggering variety of contributions to offer the universal church, and it is tragic when misunderstandings get in the way of that exchange.

I’m not naïve. Ultimately, no amount of improved communication will paper over the real differences in perspective and priorities that sometimes divide mainstream American Catholic sentiment from the Vatican’s way of thinking. But perhaps the acrimony can be reduced, so that at least conversations can unfold on the basis of accurate perceptions of the other, and disagreements can be rooted in differing approaches to shared values.