Culturally Catholic

I’ve heard it asked many times why people continue to identify as Catholic if they don’t believe the Pope is infallible, don’t agree with all the church’s teachings, don’t go to church or give money, and reject the church’s cover-up of child abuse. Honestly, it’s a good question, but the insistence from non-Catholics that you’re not a “true” Catholic is a little hurtful since they don’t seem to bother to try to actually find out the answer to this question. So here’s my take.

For people and families from certain cultures, Catholicism has been hugely influential on the history and traditions of those cultures. Even if you don’t believe in the teachings or find aspects silly, even if you recognize the terrible things done by the church and by people in it, it also positively shaped your cultural identity. It is a direct connection to your history and ancestry. It shaped the foods you grew up with, the values you have (even if they disagree with the actual religious teachings), the traditions you celebrate, who your family is and what they experienced.

I can’t appreciate Italian Renaissance art without recognizing the immense influence the religion had on it, and more than that, that is part of how I identify with it. For good or bad, that is MY culture. I appreciated Asian art – I love Japanese textiles and fabrics – I appreciate Shinto and Buddhist influences on traditional patterns and artistic ideas, but that is not my culture. Understanding a religion is a way to understand the culture in influenced, but I cannot personally identify with a culture through means I have not experienced.

I’ve heard it said that perhaps we need new secular traditions to replace the religious ones to make it easier for people who don’t actually believe in Catholic teaching to stop identifying with it. That is reasonable. But any new traditions will not have the connection to an individual’s personal history, or really, anyone’s history. People like to point out holiday traditions such as those associated with Easter or Christmas that are not really Christian as evidence that traditions can be adapted. But those traditions are still part of that same cultural history, evolving over centuries. Christmas may not have the intended religious meaning to a former Catholic who is now atheist, but they can still celebrate in the same ways just as their ancestors continued to celebrate with pagan traditions despite no longer believing those. Those traditions mattered and continued culturally, even if no longer religiously. Catholicism, I think, is like that.

Eventually, yes, I think people who no longer really believe in the Catholic form of Christianity will stop identifying it with. But that’s something that takes time – generations even – because religion is so closely linked to the cultures in which it exists and itself evolved.