Years ago, I mean about five years ago, I had a discussion with a Latino friend of mine, a clergyman, about how Americans only want middle-class spirituality.
He and I were discussing why the Neo-Catechumenates were so successful with the Latino population, few which attend the Latin Mass in the Middle West.
We came up with several reasons why religion in the main in the Midwest is bonded to middle-class values.
Here are the points as I remember them, a list resembling some of the Modernist heresies condemned so long ago.
1) Religion is fine as long as it does not interfere with daily life.
2) Religion is fine as long as it underpins the American Dream.
3) Catholicism must be main stream to be successful.
4) Family comes before community at church, which means not socializing with those at Mass.
5) Paganism is part of life-especially middle-class lifestyles, which have money to dabble in the occult and pagan. So what?
6) To be zealous is to be dangerous and a trouble-maker-one must, above all things, conform to the majority.
7) To be really middle-class one must be a conformist and a consumerist first and foremost.
8) Aspirations for wealth on earth are more important that voluntary poverty, just as marriage is more important than choosing celibacy (the Protestant influence on the Catholic middle-class is heavy).
9) The poor "you will always have with you" means not that it is your duty, but no ones.
10) Middle-class Catholics are Democrats first and Catholics second.
11) To be orthodox is to be too Roman and not enough an "American Catholic".
12) Christ was of the middle-class (ROFL-there was no middle class in Bible times).
And, so on. The spirituality of the middle classes is this-"Yes, I want to be holy, but without suffering, without pain."
Hey, folks, that is not "costly discipleship" but "cheap discipleship" to refer to Bonhoeffer. I read the Cost of Discipleship at the age of 22 and this book changed my life. Middle class spirituality refuses the yoke of Christ.
One quotation will do for today.
"costly grace confronts us as a gracious call to follow Jesus, it comes as a word of forgiveness to the broken spirit and the contrite heart. It is costly because it compels a man to submit to the yoke of Christ and follow him; it is grace because Jesus says: 'My yoke is easy and my burden is light.' "
If Catholicism doesn't hurt, it is not the mode of holiness in your life.
