Secular Catholicism and Practical Theology

Tom Beaudoin
Associate Professor of Theology
Fordham University, Graduate School of Religion and Religious Education
441 East Fordham Road, Keating Hall 303, New York, NY 104589993, USA,
e-mail : tbeaudoin@fordham.edu
Secular Catholicism: Background
Sociological studies have been reporting for many years that, in the United
States, the practice of Catholicism is patterned significantly by two sets of
differences: race/ethnicity and generational location.
1
Indeed, longtime so-
ciologist of Catholic life, James Davidson, recently summarized what many
other researchers have also discovered: generational differences describe
even more deeply the beliefs and practices of U.S. Catholics than racial/eth-
nic differences.
2
Without opposing one to the other, these studies tend to
find coherent and telling shifts in Catholic praxis over the last several dec-
ades, from the practices of those Catholics formed in faith before the Sec-
ond Vatican Council (19621965), through those formed as youth and
young adults during the initial impact of the Council (1960s 1970s),
and now those Catholics coming of age in the decades after the Council
(1980s present). Researchers have found that the constellation of beliefs
and practices that individuals consolidate during adolescence and early
adulthood more or less become a permanent part of identities.
3
Where
one finds oneself during the early to late adolescent years plays a significant
role in giving future faith practice the power of its possibilities and limits.
These studies show that generational differences are Catholicisms open se-
1 I am grateful to Kathleen Cahalan of St. Johns University School of Theology, and to
Fordham University graduate students Tamara Henry and Regina Clarkin, for critical
comments on earlier drafts of this article.
2 James Davidson, Generations of American Catholics, paper presented at the annual con-
vention of the Catholic Theological Society of America, Miami, Fla, 5 June 2008.
3 Sharon Parks, Big Questions, Worthy Dreams: Mentoring Young Adults in Their Search
for Meaning, Purpose, and Faith, San Francisco (Jossey-Bass) 2000.
IJPT, vol. 15, pp. 22 37
Walter de Gruyter 2011
DOI 10.1515/IJPT.2011.024
cret. What then has been learned about the practice of Catholicism in the
lives of most Catholics in the United States?
4
While there may be some disagreement on exact figures, the major
trends are increasingly established: a long-term decline in vocations to
the ordained priesthood and to religious life; a steady decrease in official
sacramental life (meaning fewer marriages, baptisms, confessions, funer-
als); increasingly common marriage of Catholics to non-Catholics; dimin-
ished recourse to annulments when Catholics divorce; a falling off of mass
attendance; rising numbers of Catholics, even majorities, who report views
counter to official teaching, saying women can be ordained (to the diaco-
nate and to the priesthood), homosexuality is acceptable, conscience is the
most important arbiter in moral decision-making, and people from other
Christian traditions and even other religionsor none at allmay be
saved; an erosion of trust and investment of personal resources in the insti-
tutional church and its future; decline in felt Catholic guilt and a sense
of sin; and students who go through Catholic schools but are still likely to
disagree with church teachings.
I propose here several theological points for development: (1) the social
science literature that I have just summarized (of which, naturally, theology
should not be uncritical
5
) indicates an emerging constellation of cultural
practices; (2) this constellation of practices represents not an abandonment
of Catholicism but a kind of lived Catholic theological process; and (3) this
new Catholic culture of secularizing praxis should be an evident and
even privileged focus for Catholics doing practical theology.
Secular Catholicism: Characterization
A practical theologian, concerned with the praxis of lived religion, there-
fore needs an updated schema for imagining one dimension of the current
4 Such studies include: Bryan T. Froehle and Mary L. Gautier, Catholicism USA: A Portrait
of the Catholic Church in the United States, Maryknoll, N.Y. (Orbis) 2000; William D.
Dinges, Mary Johnson, Juan L. Gonzales, Jr. , and Dean R. Hoge, Young Adult Catholics:
Religion in the Culture of Choice, Notre Dame, Ind. (University of Notre Dame Press)
2001; Christian Smith with Melinda Lundquist Denton, Soul Searching: The Religious and
Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers, NewYork (Oxford University Press) 2005; William
V. DAntonio, James D. Davidson, Dean R. Hoge, and Mary L. Gautier, American Ca-
tholics Today: New Realities of Their Faith and Their Church, New York (Rowman and
Littlefield) 2007; Jerome P. Baggett, Sense of the Faithful: How American Catholics Live
Their Faith, NewYork (Oxford University Press) 2009; PewForumon Religion and Public
Life, U.S. Religious Landscape Survey, http://religions.pewforum.org. The ensuing dis-
cussion draws from these studies.
5 Tom Beaudoin, The Ethics of Characterizing Popular Faith, in: id., Witness to Di-
spossession: The Vocation of a Post-modern Theologian, Maryknoll, N.Y. (Orbis) 2008,
76102.
Secular Catholicism and Practical Theology 23
configuration of Catholicism in the United States. It will help if we posit
that the majority of U.S. Catholics today can be characterized as secular
Catholics. With this term, I refer to those with a Catholic heritage, however
nominal, who cannot find Catholicism central to the everyday project of
their lives, and are in varying degrees of distance from what they take to
be normative or prescribed Catholicism. Secular Catholics are typically
baptized Catholics who, by the time of adulthood, find themselves having
to deal somehowwith their Catholicismand do so as an irremediable aspect
of their identity, but whomthose in pastoral ministry or academic theology
often call nonpracticing, nominal, religiously illiterate, relativis-
tic, inactive, fallen away, lapsed, or bad Catholics. Secular
Catholics then learn to call themselves these names. Secular Catholics
find their Catholicism existentially in play at some level that cannot
be dispensed with, but do not or cannot make of it a regular and central
set of explicit and conscious practices.
6
Secular Catholics are that majority who are occasional, rare, or nearly-
never mass attenders. They may show up late for mass, or sit in the back
row, or never take their coat off, or leave after communion. They may
6 The term secular is presently the subject of intense debate in theological, philosophical,
and sociological research, and in Catholicismit has become a reference of some importance
in official teaching. My use of it here is as a provisional descriptor meant to delimit a space
for alternative thinking about the results of studies of Catholic praxis. It is meant to show
the importance of a new domain for research that a practical-theological form of attention
brings to Catholicism in secularizing contexts, whether that secularity be understood
on the terms of, for example, Jos Casanova, Public Religions in the Modern World,
Chicago (University of Chicago Press) 1994; Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular:
Christianity, Islam, Modernity, Stanford, Calif. (Stanford University Press) 2003; or
Charles Taylor, A Secular Age, Cambridge, Mass. (Harvard University Press) 2007. In
Catholic teaching, consider but three examples suggestive of shifting ecclesial understan-
dings. (1) The way the secular and its cognates are construed in the documents of the
Second Vatican Council. See: Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World,
Gaudium et Spes 43, and Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, Lumen Gentium 31, in
Austin Flannery, ed., Vatican Council II: Constitutions, Decrees, Declarations, Northport,
N.Y. (Costello Publishing) 1996. (2) In John Paul IIs apostolic exhortation Christifideles
Laici 4 and 15, in J. Michael Miller, ed., The Post-Synodal Apostolic Exhortations of John
Paul II, Huntington, Ind. (Our Sunday Visitor) 1998. (3) The recent catechism for the
United States: United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, United States Catholic Ca-
techism for Adults, Washington, D.C. (United States Conference of Catholic Bishops)
2006, 16, 43, 344, 453. Keeping secular Catholicism a tentative and open space for
inquiry, as registering difference from normative or prescribed Catholicism, does
imply a gesture of patience and creative curiosity on the part of the theologian, and in this
sense the present work is a work of advocacy of secular Catholicism. The stance of
advocacy for praxis in practical theology and some of its complexities are helpfully dis-
cussed with respect to methodological concerns in: Franz Wijsen, The Practical-Theolo-
gical Spiral: Bridging Theology in the West and the Rest of the World, in: The Pastoral
Circle Revisited: A Critical Quest for Truth and Transformation, ed. Franz Jozef Servaas
Wijsen, Peter Henriot, and Rodrigo Mejia, Maryknoll, N.Y. (Orbis) 2005, 108126.
Tom Beaudoin 24
say that they graduated from Catholicism after their confirmation. A great
many were educated in Catholic schools. They may read about God or faith
but do not regularly participate in any explicitly religious forum. Secular
Catholics disagree more or less intensely with institutional discourses re-
garding essential tenets of faith and morals. Popular and influential cri-
tiques tend to suggest that secular Catholics are putting something in
place of church, such as sports, consumer indulgences, work, or leisure.
7
They are the ones who may have left the Church intentionally, sometimes
scandalized or disappointed. Many join Episcopal (Anglican), mainline
Protestant, or evangelical churches, and the numbers of ex-Catholics
or recovering Catholics in these communities often becomes noticeable.
More often in Catholicism, people have just drifted away or redefined
their Catholic praxis silently.
8
Even the impending Latino/a majority
shows signs of an emerging secular Catholicism. The fastest growing
group within Latino/as seems to be seculars, most of whom were raised
Catholic.
9
Secular Catholics are trying to live their secularity, which often
includes their own sense of spirituality, with much more investment than
their ecclesiality. There are secular Catholics in most Catholic families in
the United States today. They constitute the widespread and silent penum-
bra of the Catholic Church, and their absence from theological and eccle-
siastical discourse is striking.
Studies of Catholic praxes of faith tend to refer to much of the field of
non-normative praxis with the terms non-practicing or recovering.
But these terms not only fail to capture the richness of contemporary praxis
of faith, they do so by aggregating people under moralistic categories which
do not themselves reflexively call normative Catholic identity and praxis
into question. One is either recovering from a deficient religiosity or is
7 Among many examples, see: Richard Gaillardetz, Transforming Our Days: Spirituality,
Community, and Liturgy in a Technological Culture, New York (Crossroad) 2000; Chri-
stian Scharen, Faith as a Way of Life, Grand Rapids (Eerdmans) 2008. The discussion in
Smith and Denton, Soul Searching, of the moralistic therapeutic deism of teenagers, and
the special religious deficiencies of Catholic youth, has been influential in the United States.
8 On leaving Catholicism for Protestant or other affiliations, see the 2008 Pew Religious
Landscape Survey, http://religions.pewforum.org, and specifically the portion of the 27
April 2009 Pew Forum on Religious and Public Life report Faith in Flux: Changes in
Religious Affiliation in the U.S. titled Leaving Catholicism, http://pewforum.org/ne
wassets/images/reports/flux/Catholic.pdf. See also the helpful discussion of the varieties of
church leaving in: Alan Jamieson, Churchless Faith: Faith Journeys Beyond the Chur-
ches, London (SPCK) 2002; Alan Jamieson, Church Leavers: Faith Journeys Five Years
On, London (SPCK) 2006.
9 See the April 2007 report from the Pew Hispanic Center, Changing Faiths: Latinos and
the Transformation of American Religion, http://pewhispanic.org/reports/report.
php?ReportID=75. This point is corroborated by the research of political scientist David
Campbell and Robert Putnam, as reported in David Campbell, American Grace: The
Changing Role of Religion in American Communities, paper presented at Ministry to
American Catholics conference, Fordham University, New York, N.Y. , 6 February 2009.
Secular Catholicism and Practical Theology 25
not practicing true Catholicism. With the termsecular Catholicism, by
contrast, I mean to highlight the creative character of this Catholic praxis,
seeing this outcome of U.S. Catholicismas theologically important on its
own terms. If the literature on deconversion and church-leaving is any
guide, secular Catholics may include the many who call themselves recov-
ering Catholics and who do so because the apocalypses of their lives,
whether dramatic or gradual, were not able to be located on the map of
the faith they had been taught.
10
Contrary to many Catholic apologists,
this does not necessarily mean that they had a deficient religious educa-
tion.
11
This is too convenient a story for us to tell about them.
Many recovering Catholics know as much of what Catholicism is
about as those who still choose the Catholic Church as central (in
more traditional terms) to their lives. To greater or lesser degrees, secular
Catholics are often simply trying to get through their lives, like all Christi-
ans. Although they are not simplistically relativistic, they are often judged
to be cultural victims.
There must be a secular Catholicism, in short, because there already is.
If practical theology cannot construe a secular Catholicism, there will be
little way to more productively frame Catholic praxis in the United States.
Secular Catholicism and Practical Theology
Ruard Ganzevoort has recently undertaken a notably synoptic viewof con-
temporary practical theology and argued that above all, practical theolo-
gians do and should concern themselves with the hermeneutical investiga-
tion of lived religion.
12
Ganzevoort makes a substantial contribution to the
discourse by showing with estimable intellectual patience the probably ir-
reducible complexity of audiences, objects, and methods in practical theol-
10 On deconversion, see: Heinz Streib and Barbara Keller, The Variety of Deconversion
Experiences: Contours of a Concept in Respect to Empirical Research, Archive for the
Psychology of Religion 26 (2004), 181200; Heinz Streib, Ralph W. Hood, Jr., Barbara
Keller, Rosina-Martha Csff, and Christopher Silver, Deconversion: Qualitative and
Quantitative Results from Cross-Cultural Research in Germany and the United States of
America, Gttingen (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht) 2009. On church-leaving, see: Leslie
Francis and Yaakov Katz, eds., Joining and Leaving Religion: Jewish and Christian
Perspectives, Leominster, U.K. (Gracewing), 2000; as well as the work by Alan Jamieson
cited above (n.8).
11 Robert P. Imbelli, ed., Handing on the Faith: The Churchs Mission and Challenge, New
York (Crossroad) 2006; Eamonn Keane, A Generation Betrayed: Deconstructing Ca-
tholic Education in the English-Speaking World, Long Island City, N.Y. (Hatherleigh)
2002.
12 Ruard Ganzevoort, Forks in the Road When Tracing the Sacred: Practical Theology as
Hermeneutics of Lived Religion, presidential address at the biennial meeting of the In-
ternational Academy of Practical Theology, Chicago, Ill., 3 August 2009, http://www.ia-
pt.org/presidentialaddress.pdf.
Tom Beaudoin 26
ogy. These diverse audiences, objects, and methods converge, for Ganze-
voort, on a single task: making theological sense of howcontemporary peo-
ple practice relating to the sacred in their lives. This convergence marks the
distinctive task of practical theology. We have here an illustrative problem-
atic for practical theology: a discipline emerging from a largely Protestant
theological history that is conceptually prepared to hold with a deep theo-
logical curiosity and a wide discursive complexity the many ways that faith
is lived. It is this very problematic that opens a unique space for practical
theology in North American Catholic contexts. On the one hand, Catholic
thought and practice gives practical theology an affirmative yet creative re-
ception beyond Protestantism, as Karl Rahner, David Tracy, and Kathleen
Cahalan have argued.
13
On the other hand, the practical theology emerging
from Protestantism gives Catholic practical theologians the models (like
Ganzevoorts) and the inspiration to find importance, complexity, and cre-
ativity in the praxis of faith, in a word, the significant relativity of faith,
instead of simply the relativized importance of faith in theory-to-practice
models that emphasize the predictability, uniformity, and purported ortho-
doxy of the praxis of faith.
14
Hence this very situation for practical theology
gives importance to the study of a secular Catholicism. It tells Protestant
practical theology something potentially new about the practice of faith,
and it tells Catholic theologians of other disciplines (systematic theology,
moral theology) something potentially new about the practice of faith,
and about the generation of theology.
Theologizing from a United States context, this conceptual vantage for
Catholic practical theology is not an easy one to take. Much of practical
theology in this context is still oriented toward the institutional practice
13 Karl Rahner, Practical Theology Within the Totality of Theological Disciplines, in:
Theological Investigations, vol. IX, trans. GrahamHarrison, London (Darton, Longman,
and Todd) 1972, 101114; David Tracy, The Foundations of Practical Theology, in:
Practical Theology: The Emerging Field in Theology, Church, and World, ed. Don
Browning, San Francisco (Harper and Row) 1983, 6182; Kathleen A. Cahalan, Beyond
Pastoral Theology: Why Catholics Should Embrace Practical Theology, in: Keeping Faith
in Practice: Catholic Perspectives on Practical and Pastoral Theology, ed. James Sweeney,
Gemma Simmonds, and David Lonsdale, London (SCM) 2010, 99116.
14 By such theory-to-practice models, I do not mean one school or another of practical
theology or other practice-intensive theologies, but rather a style of practical theology (or
cognate practice-intensive theologies) that forecloses creativity in the praxis of faith by the
presystematization of praxis, failing to render the content of Christianity reflexively
in the engagement with concrete praxis. It is an approach that suggests that we know
what constitutes Christianity, and thus the primary problemis howto practice it here and
now, in social or ecclesial or ministerial life. In this sense, theory-to-practice can be a
dynamic of many types of practical theology, including the types prioritized in the In-
ternational Academy of Practical Theology (empirical research, liberating practice,
ministry formation), and in practical theologys cognate domains, like pastoral theo-
logy, contextual theology, or ethnic-racial theologies in the United States like Hispanic or
Latino/a theology, Black theology, or Asian theology.
Secular Catholicism and Practical Theology 27
of faith and toward exclusively Christian models. Its key terms are typically
discipleship and the official practices of ministry. There may be a tempta-
tion for Catholic practical theologians to join themselves to this frame as a
way of fostering the saving of the Catholic Church in North America. Prac-
tical theology in this way can be seen as an answer to many of the problems
facing Catholicism. But practical theology has something more to contrib-
ute to the understanding of the practice of faith than intellectual encourage-
ment for pastoral repetition, for the reproduction of the Christianity we
know, in short, for more of the same.
Counter-notes in practical theology are sometimes sounded. For exam-
ple, writing from the United States, Kathleen Cahalan and James Nieman
have argued for a research domain of practical theology that they call
public engagement.
15
In this area, practical theologians analyze gener-
al and ordinary practices from the world in order to test how they
carry meanings, implicit values, and even critiques that affect disciple-
ship. Such work, they observe, remains underdeveloped in contempo-
rary practical theology research.
16
This underdevelopment will be corrected
to the extent that Catholicism in its heteroglossia and in its secular forms
gains traction in practical theology. Two sites for such traction are the
emerging practical theologies of deconversion and of ordinary theolo-
gy.
The emerging deconversion literature has meant to register the varieties
of faith practice in the secularizing contexts of Europe and the United
States. By stressing the study of deconversion, the research of these scholars
(including practical theologian Heinz Streib) makes two theological moves.
First, it highlights the traditional bias of theological study of faith praxis
toward conversion to Christianity and adherence to the religious tradition
in question.
17
Due to this bias, the test for evaluating situations from a
Christian theological perspective shifts into a kind of progress in faith
toward an institutionally (sometimes understood as biblically) defined
goal of orthodoxy or orthopraxis. Of equal importance, the deconversion
perspective emphasizes the process by which a particular faith praxis is left
behind or transcended, so the theological topic becomes not only the com-
plex dynamics of entering and joining, but of leaving and disassociating,
with every conversion-to is also a deconversion-from. Second, this
focus for practical theology is a way of appreciating the decisions people
make in contemporary culture to disaffiliate from traditions, to remain
15 Kathleen Cahalan and James Nieman, Mapping the Field of Practical Theology, in: For
Life Abundant: Practical Theology, Theological Education, and Christian Ministry, ed.
Dorothy C. Bass and Craig Dykstra, Grand Rapids, Mich. (Eerdmans) 2008, 6285.
16 Ibid., 79.
17 See the discussion of the importance of conversion in modern psychology of religion,
and the shift to a deconversion framework, in: Streib et al., Deconversion (n.10),
1831.
Tom Beaudoin 28
partially in traditions, or even to inhabit multiple traditions multiply.
Deconversion as a concept makes room for multiple trajectories in dis-
pensing with a faith identity or praxis. It has roomfor those who move from
one religion, denomination, or praxis of faith to another as an expression of
what they take to be a deeper faith (which is more traditionally the realmof
conversion discourse), although it retains its interest in the practices in-
volved in people moving out as much as how they move in. It is
able to appreciate a palette of forms of leaving a faith.
18
In this way, it
tries to calibrate what Charles Taylor names the proliferation of ways of
finding fullness in our secular age.
19
This research on deconversion
is relatively new, and has yet to make an impact on the U.S. practical the-
ology scene, but would be a welcome intervention that could assist Catholic
practical theologians in thinking about the dynamics of secular Catholi-
cism. The deconversion literature, by taking seriously the emplacement
of faith practices in contemporary social practices, holds much more lightly
than most practical theology a need to understand transformation as a lib-
eration for a kind of already-comprehended ecclesial existence. The theo-
logical rhetoric of promoting Christianity, which one finds in most North
American practical theology, seems muted or even absent from this re-
search, a characteristic of strategic significance for this era of Catholicism.
20
In a complementary way, a proposal for the existence and study of or-
dinary theology has been proposed by practical theologian Jeff Astley. He
ties his study to the renaissance of practical theology in the last generation,
and argues that there are grounds for finding substantial theology not only
among the credentialed in academic and ecclesial life, but also among the
overwhelming majority who are the uncredentialed in pastoral life, those
ordinary Christians who have a way of expressing themselves that so
often seems to provoke evaluation and correction by the cultured theolog-
ical educator (whether pastoral worker or academic). Astley argues that
this ordinary theology can be found in how people talk and act regarding
matters both ordinary and extraordinary, insofar as that talk or action goes
to what he calls living theologically in response to our learning of
Christ.
21
Here, Astley has chosen an evocative phrase in which to anchor
his study, but this phrase is not unpacked directly. It seems to signal many
meanings: learning of Christ as the catechetical or instructional study of
18 Ibid., 93112.
19 Taylor (n.6), 5 ff.
20 See the illustrative discussion of the characteristics of practical theology in the United
States in: Mary Elizabeth Moore, Purposes of Practical Theology: A Comparative Ana-
lysis between United States Practical Theologians and Johannes van der Ven, in: Her-
meneutics and Empirical Research in Practical Theology, ed. Chris A.M. Hermans and
Mary E. Moore, Boston (Brill) 2004, 169195
21 Jeff Astley, Ordinary Theology: Looking, Listening, and Learning in Theology, Burling-
ton, Vt. (Ashgate) 2002, 1.
Secular Catholicism and Practical Theology 29
Christ (that is, the power of learning about or studying Christ); learning
of Christ as a first encounter, initiation, or introduction to Christ (that is,
the power of initial exposure to Christ); Christs education as known by us
(that is, the learning that Christ himself underwent and how that positions
howwe experience him); our learning as such that is of Christ (that is,
the education we get that is in some sense christic, whether or not it is ex-
plicitly about christology). I highlight the many possibilities of this evoca-
tive phrase because, for Astley, ordinary theology is just such a rambunc-
tious (but not random) collection of attitudes toward Christ that are carried
by lay Christians. Ordinary theology is a kind of theology that expresses
how faith comes and goes and should sensitize practical theologians
to its existence and contours. This requires two substantial changes of theo-
logical perception on the part of academic theologians. First, academic the-
ology must learn to value ordinary Christian faith as relativistic, tied to per-
sonal, emotional events and stories, and expressing the ways people have
learned of holding life together. Second, Astley suggests that academic the-
ologians do not stop being ordinary theologians as academics.
22
The
qualities he finds in ordinary theology are found in academic theologizing
as well, suggesting that academic theology is a way of doing ordinary the-
ology in a more professionally appropriate register, but in which the or-
dinariness of the life of the theologian still structures the discourse.
What do the practical theologies of deconversion and ordinariness have
in common, and why do they matter for the Catholic turn to practical the-
ology? These two literatures seemto share an ethical intent: to do theology
that will encourage people to live with integrity whatever their faith praxis
must be. To be sure, these theologies retain the traditional sense from prac-
tical theology that this discipline is invested in howfaith and life interrelate.
Even so, deconversional and ordinary theologies contribute something of
theological significance by developing an ethics of practical theology.
That is, evangelization and discipleship are backgrounded or reinterpreted
as service through research into the faith integrity of the other. By commit-
ting ourselves to the study of the strangeness of the faith praxis of the other,
we refine our conceptual tools, learn more about faith, and see where Chris-
tian habitations can lead in our culture. This is not to abandon a critical
function for theology, but rather to raise a deeper question: asking about
howthat critical function has maintained the religious status quo and failed
to acknowledge complexity, creativity, and invention in faith praxis. In the
words of Ganzevoort, the practical theologian becomes one who, with and
for others, traces the sacred.
23
The training of pastoral workers for this
vantage point on faith will likely become increasingly important if ministry
in the United States is to appreciate its calling in the present, and if practical
22 Ibid., 4595, 123162.
23 Ganzevoort (n.12).
Tom Beaudoin 30
theologians have an important role to play in defining this ministerial edu-
cation.
24
The importance of comprehending the worldliness of practice in
practical theology (to combine Cahalan and Niemans suggestion with
Mary McClintock Fulkersons recent study
25
) may have a particular Cath-
olic heritage worth recalling: the empirical approaches associated with the
development of theological research at Nijmegen and their contributions to
practical theology. Johannes van der Ven has discussed howhis Department
of Pastoral Theology at Nijmegen constituted itself in the 1960s, in re-
sponse to the Second Vatican Council, as distinct fromsystematic theology,
and then later reconstituted itself as a Department of Empirical Theology.
26
The faculty had an ongoing conversation over many years and even decades
about the pastoral responsibility of theological education. The Department
realized by the 1970s that there needed to be a multi-pronged dialogue
within that was constituted by pastoral theologians, psychology of reli-
gion and clinical experts, and religious educators. Fromthese developments
came a set of practical theological debates (and by nowmany publications)
around the concept of empirical theology, which not only share a Cath-
olic provenance but are of significance for comprehending secular Cathol-
icism. The very idea in the present article to take the social-scientific re-
search on Catholic praxis and render a theological description-evaluation
of it has been inspired in part by the spirit of this empirical theological
movement. Van der Vens works show how the social sciences, including
social-scientific reports that display the thoroughly variegated character
of religious practice, are critical companions for practical theologians.
27
24 Spiritual direction and pastoral counseling are the practices of ministry that are closest to
the orientation I advocate here, insofar as these are pastoral arts that have been theorized
as putting themselves theologically at the service of the integrity of the person. Janet
Ruffing, Spiritual Direction: Beyond the Beginnings, New York (Paulist) 2000; Pamela
Cooper-White, Shared Wisdom: Use of the Self in Pastoral Care and Counseling, Min-
neapolis (Fortress) 2004.
25 Mary McClintock Fulkerson, Places of Redemption: Theology for a Worldly Church,
New York (Oxford University Press) 2007, argues that the practices of Christian life and
worship in the interracial church she studied cannot be understood apart from the social
practices of race, class, and dis/ability across which the ecclesial practices are placed.
26 Johannes van der Ven, Practical Theology: An Empirical Approach, trans. Barbara
Schultz, Leuven (Peeters) 1998, 1 ff.
27 As an index of how far this approach can be from the kind of authoritative Catholic
theological statements made in the United States, consider the following report that
includes a statement by Thomas Weinandy, executive director of the United States Bis-
hops Secretariat for Doctrine and Pastoral Practices, regarding the Secretariats recent
report asserting that Reiki is superstitious and incompatible with Catholic faith. Ac-
cording to one news report, Weinandy said that the bishops did a purely academic type
of research, in the sense that we read books and went to web sites and we amassed a huge
amount of material, but we didnt interviewanybody. Jerry Filteau, Reiki: Good Health,
Secular Catholicism and Practical Theology 31
His studies on theodicy, for example, are a rich example of what can hap-
pen when the actual praxis is privileged in discussions about everyday
theological life.
28
The many debates about the status of normativity in
this approach signal that van der Ven has touched a theological and pastor-
al nerve.
29
The deepening turn to an ethnographic consciousness in practi-
cal theology
30
confirms the productivity of this trajectory inspired by the
Second Vatican Council. The influence of empirical theology and of ethno-
graphic theological consciousness has not been significant in U.S. practical
theology in general, and even less so in U.S. Catholic theology. While Nij-
megens history and van der Vens research extend well beyond the period I
summarize here, this is a useful memory for practical theology among Cath-
olics and at Catholic institutions in North America, especially as practical
theology develops now among Catholics in the United States a generation
after it did in Europe.
Practical theologies in Catholic contexts thus have a potential contribu-
tion to make to understanding a mission to (as well as mission from)
this emerging culture of secular Catholics. This rich well of theological
awareness has yet to be tapped by official Catholic consciousness and
may be stewarded by Catholics in practical theology. We are probably
near the very beginning of understanding what this means. The church is
in need of a bridge to communicate with the new culture of secular Cath-
olics.
31
A New Practical Theology for U.S. Catholicism?
Scholars have argued that a major impetus behind the rebirth of practical
theology from the 1980s forward was the decline of mainline Protestan-
tism.
32
Has it been that Catholicisms continued disavowal of its own crisis
has played a part in keeping practical theology frombeing seen as urgent for
Catholicism? Although academic and ecclesiastical theologies do not speak
of a decline of mainline Catholicism, such would be a rough and ready
Spiritualityor Only Superstition?, National Catholic Reporter, 16 April 2009, http://
ncronline.org/news/spirituality/reiki-good-health-spirituality-or-only-superstition.
28 Van der Ven (n.26), 157224.
29 See Johannes A. van der Ven and Michael Scherer-Rath, eds., Normativity and Empirical
Research in Theology, Boston (Brill) 2004; Chris A.M. Hermans and Mary E. Moore
(n.20).
30 The recent works are many. One accessible introduction is: Mary Clark Moschella,
Ethnography as a Pastoral Practice: An Introduction, Cleveland (Pilgrim) 2008.
31 Cardinal Oscar Andrs Rodrguez Maradiaga, e-mail message to author, 7 April 2009.
32 Kathleen Cahalan, Three Approaches to Practical Theology, Theological Education, and
the Churchs Ministry, International Journal of Practical Theology 9 (2005), 6494,
representing something of a scholarly consensus on this point about the recent origins
of the new practical theology.
Tom Beaudoin 32
description of the findings of most surveys of U.S. Catholics over the last
decade. How might one avoid coming to such a conclusion in regard to
a faith tradition from which one-third leave, and whose steady numerical
state is propped up only by new waves of immigrants? No contemporary
religious tradition has lost as many adherents in the United States as the
Catholic Church.
33
Could it be that the slow emergence of practical theol-
ogy within Catholicismin the last several years is a symbol of recognition of
the decline of mainline Catholicism?
34
Jerome Baggett concludes his re-
cent study of Catholic faith praxis with sobriety, if not a hint of optimism:
One iteration of American Catholicismhas clearly ended, but another has
begun. Less dogmatic, exclusive, and institutionally dependent, as well as
typically far less sure of its own bearings, it is hardly less religious than what
has preceded it.
35
Practical theologians working on Catholic praxis in the United States,
insofar as they are committed to theologizing from and for the real
faith situation, are in a position to make their own contribution to the
larger renewed global practical theological enterprise, marked as it has
been historically by Protestant problematics. A strong turn to practice in
this Catholic theological context cannot avoid working with the ways in
which Catholic praxis represents something of a disorientation of what
is presumed to be traditional Catholic faith. This Catholic practical theol-
ogy will complicate the overemphasis on discipleship that one often finds
in practical theology, particularly in the North American scene. Yet to do a
Catholic practical theology in the United States is to theologize in relation
to a religious tradition that has become a major secular phenomenon. It
could be said with justice that Catholicismin the United States is producing
secular Catholics, and practical theology would underscore the ways that
secular Catholicism is a negotiation with the religious tradition and the
American context, and not simply a capitulation to U.S. culture or a wide-
spread loss of faith. It is difficult to emphasize how unusual such a per-
spective would be both in ecclesiastical and academic Catholic theology, let
alone in contemporary practical theology in North America. It may be that
Catholic practical theology, or practical theology done in relation to U.S.
33 Pew Forum on Religious and Public Life, Faith in Flux: Changes in Religious Affiliation
in the U.S: Leaving Catholicism, http://pewforum.org/newassets/images/reports/flux/
Catholic.pdf. Those who have left Catholicism outnumber those who have joined the
Catholic Church by a nearly four-to-one margin (p. 1).
34 When Raymond Webb presented a paper many years ago on the state of practical theo-
logy to the renewed practical theology group in the Catholic Theological Society of
America, he did so as an analysis about why practical theology would have been helpful to
bishops with regard to the sex abuse scandal. Raymond Webb, Catholic Practical
Theology: Challenge and Opportunity, paper presented at the annual convention of the
Catholic Theological Society of America, Cincinnati, Ohio, 7 June 2003.
35 Baggett (n.4), 239.
Secular Catholicism and Practical Theology 33
Catholic praxis, may keep practical theology open for the radical program
for Christian experience it has occasionally given its promise to be.
Can we thus further specify the character of a U.S. Catholic contribution
to practical theology?
36
Indeed, it is a new kind of evangelization, a differ-
ent understanding of description of and advocacy for the praxis of faith. In
Catholic terms, Catholic theologians can take a new evangelization in a
new direction for the greater field of practical theology.
Part of the importance of the deconversion literature is that it reveals the
politics of practical theological work to date in both Catholic and Protes-
tant contexts. Conversion has long been valorized in practical theology
over against its silent other, deconversion.
37
Making practical theology a
technology for potential deconversion enacts a kind of mission to and
for the already converted, sharing in the conviction of recent Catholic
catechetical documents that due to the challenges to Christianitys vitality
in Western culture, Catholics who have been raised in the faith themselves
need a deeper evangelization, a catechesis unending.
38
The inference now,
however, would be quite different: that a mature deepening of faith
might in fact lead to a deconversion, faiths releasement or refiguration
away from a presumed orthodoxy.
Much of the Catholic ecclesial or theological literature concerning the
situation of Christianity in postmodern and religiously pluralistic contexts
contemplates the possibility of conversion from one religion to another re-
ligion, especially to true from false religion, or even conversion in a second
religious faith without giving up the first (for example, in the conversations
about multiple religious belonging
39
). Catholic theologies of incultura-
tion share in this conversional rhetoric, typically arguing that greater atten-
tion to culture has significance for the purpose of deeper conversion of the
believer in a specific context. Catholics after the Second Vatican Council,
then, seem constantly to be talking about the value of ongoing conver-
sion, especially within Catholicism. All this talk of movement in one di-
rection, however, of a deepened faith that respects the given religious cat-
egories that will contain the newconvert and allowa journey down into the
depths of that tradition, signals a reluctance to explore the possibility of a
backward breaking up, a dissolution, a fragmentationa deconversion, a
holy departure from religious belief, community, and tradition.
36 The following reflections are developed from Chapter 10 in Beaudoin (n.5).
37 For deconversion from the perspective of literature and autobiography, see: John D.
Barbour, Versions of Deconversion: Autobiography and the Loss of Faith, Charlottesville,
Va. (University Press of Virginia) 1994.
38 This is an important theme of the authoritative catechetical document by the Con-
gregation for the Clergy, General Directory for Catechesis, Washington, D.C. (United
States Catholic Conference) 1998.
39 Catherine Cornille, ed., Many Mansions? Multiple Religious Belonging and Christian
Identity, Maryknoll, N.Y. (Orbis) 2002.
Tom Beaudoin 34
As summarized above, the processes of deconversion, the lives of those
who leave the faith, are almost never the focus of theological reflection,
having disqualified themselves from the ability to bear a disclosure about
the faith, and not just its aberrations or imperfections. Ex-Catholics
or Recovering Catholics make many Catholic theologians and pastoral
workers uncomfortable, and so have yet to be generally seen as a potential
source of real insight about the adult life of faith, indeed as one possible
outcome of a Catholic theological life.
40
As John Barbour argues in his
study of deconversion narratives in literature, however, the insights of
those who have conscientiously rejected Christian beliefs ought to play a
role in Christian self-definition, especially if such definition is the work
of a self-critical Christian theology.
41
Catholic practical theologians
are poised to show the larger field of practical theology how a willingness
to relinquish Christian faith to the service of a truth not comprehended by
the faith can be had today and can serve as a decompression chamber of
considerable length and complexity into a new Catholic theology. This is
a very particular way of saying that faith can be the midwife of doubt,
and that one can love the truth one learns in church so much that one ex-
periences a commencement from the church. One can fall so deeply for
Christ that one falls through Christ (with Christ, and in Christ) into an un-
foreseen relationship to truth.
Should it proceed, this Catholic practical theology would have as its ob-
ject the constitution of practice (including and especially Catholic faith
praxis) through a critical account of theological knowledge, attempting
to test how Catholic theology can make critical and particularly reflexive
sense of practice in faith and culture. It is therefore important to place Cath-
olic practical theology in the turbulence of what we know of practices
themselves, of their historicity, diversity, and ambiguity. As Kathryn Tanner
has so well explained, [p]ostmodern ideas about culture suggest what his-
torical studies of Christianity confirm,
42
namely, what disciplines such as
sociology and anthropology reveal : the often messy, ambiguous and porous
character of the effort to live Christianly. Theologians, she adds, have
yet to make the leap.
43
Catholic practical theologians who operate in re-
gard to secular Catholicism, however, may now be so prepared.
40 See the popular books by: Earnie Larsen and Janee Parnegg, Recovering Catholics: What
To Do When Religion Comes between You and God, San Francisco (HarperSanFrancisco)
1992; Joanne H. Meehl, The Recovering Catholic: Personal Journeys of Women Who
Left the Church, Amherst, N.Y. (Prometheus Books) 1995.
41 Barbour (n.37).
42 Kathryn Tanner, Theories of Culture: A New Agenda for Theology, Minneapolis (Fort-
ress Press) 1997, 110.
43 Kathryn Tanner, HowI Changed My Mind, in: Shaping a Theological Mind: Theological
Context and Methodology, ed. Darren C. Marks, Burlington, Vt. (Ashgate) 2002,
115121, at pp. 120121.
Secular Catholicism and Practical Theology 35
Insofar as there is a new secular Catholicism emerging in the United
States, the study of this Catholic praxis gives a unique research program
for the future, focusing on these questions: How is secular Catholicism
like and unlike secular Judaism, and why do studies of the lived religion
of young Catholics and Jews find so many similarities between them?
44
Who are secular Protestants and how do they compare? In attempts to reg-
ulate practice, how are Catholic pastoral authorities dealing with this new
Catholic situation? How can practical theologians work with social scien-
tists to construct studies that can calibrate the Catholic praxis of faith be-
yond official measures and definitions? In a tradition like Catholicism
where institutional authority has been so influential on ecclesial and aca-
demic theology, whom and what do practical theologians represent?
Practical theology within Catholicism finds itself in a privileged mo-
ment. Lessons from twentieth century Catholic theological developments
should give it inspiration. Over the last several decades, Catholic theology
had to learn to incorporate what it had long resisted due to magisterial re-
striction: the careful study of scripture. Catholics learned this from Protes-
tant theologians. Within a few decades, theological comprehension of
scripture became intrinsic to academic theological curricula and a resource
for everyday Catholic faith and practice. During that same period, Catholic
moral theology and spirituality experienced a remarkable renewal that also
introduced a new (and continued) negotiation with magisterial authority.
Part of the establishment of these new domains was that moral theology
and spirituality started giving themselves histories, establishing continuities
of disciplinary discourse that are particularly effective for a tradition like
Catholicism that is so committed to thinking in terms of history, longevity,
and continuity.
45
Does practical theology in Catholic contexts, and partic-
44 The recent major studies of youth and religion in the United States conducted by the
National Study of Youth and Religion have offered many examples of Jewish and Ca-
tholic youth overlapping in faith praxis. Indeed, at many points, it is remarked that Jewish
and Catholic youth are the religious cohorts most like each other, although this study
tends to cast their similarities in mostly negative terms, as religiously illiterate, dein-
stitutionalized or detraditionalized, highly Americanized moralistic therapeutic deism.
See examples in: Smith and Denton (n.7). See also: Christian Smith and Patricia Snell,
Souls in Transition: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of Emerging Adults, New York
(Oxford University Press) 2009.
45 The examples by this point are voluminous, but symbolic of the historicizing cons-
ciousness of these fields are two influential works: John Mahony, The Making of Moral
Theology: A Study of the Roman Catholic Tradition, New York (Oxford University
Press) 1987, and the many scholars collaborating in the monumental multivolume
Christian Spirituality project: Bernard McGinn, John Meyendorff, and Jean Leclercq,
eds., Christian Spirituality: Origins to the Twelfth Century, New York (Crossroad) 1985;
Jill Raitt, Bernard McGinn, John Meyendorff, eds., Christian Spirituality: High Middle
Ages and Reformation, New York (Crossroad) 1987; Louis Dupr, Don E. Saliers, John
Meyendorff, eds., Christian Spirituality: Post-Reformation and Modern, New York
(Crossroad) 1991.
Tom Beaudoin 36
ularly in Catholic North America, likewise have an opportunity to claimits
debt to a Protestant heritage but also to speak with its own Catholic inflec-
tion and remain a present-centered discipline committed to faith praxis but
also to elaborate for itself a history? Practical theology need not prove as
revolutionary in the Catholic theological curriculum as scripture studies,
moral theology, or spirituality in coming decades in order to begin to realize
its radical prospects. Yet no other discipline in Catholic theology in the
United States is so well situated to critically appreciate and problematize
(that is, to mediate) the cultures of secular and institutional Catholicism.
Abstract
Amajority of Catholics in the United States today do not attend Mass regularly, disagree
with church teachings, and do not make Catholicism the kind of priority that is prescri-
bed by church leaders. Many continue to think of themselves in relationship to Cathol-
icism, but it is a relationship outside normative Catholicism. It is a secular Catholi-
cism. Practical theology aids in thinking theologically about this phenomenon, insofar
as practical theology offers ways of critically appreciating faith praxis in regard to the
empirical, ordinariness, and deconversion. Practical theology also stands to gain from
such an encounter, in developing a deeper foothold in Catholic praxis and Catholic theo-
logical discourse in the United States, complementing the influential historically Protes-
tant character of its discourse.
Zusammenfassung
Eine Mehrheit der gegenwrtig in den Vereinigten Staaten lebenden Katholiken besucht
die Messe nicht regelmig, stimmt mit der katholischen Lehre nicht berein und rumt
dem Katholizismus nicht die Prioritt in ihrem Leben ein, die die Kirchenleitung von
ihnen fordert. Viele verstehen sich nach wie vor als Katholiken, aber sie leben diese Be-
ziehung auerhalb eines sie normierenden Katholizismus. Es ist vielmehr ein skularer
Katholizismus. Praktische Theologie befrdert die theologische Reflexion dieses Phno-
mens, insofern sie Wege anbietet, Glaubenspraxis in Bezug auf Erfahrung, das Gewhn-
liche und Dekonversion kritisch wertzuschtzen. Die Praktische Theologie profitiert
selbst von dieser Auseinandersetzung, da sie so einen tieferen Halt zu gewinnen vermag
in der katholischen Praxis und im katholisch-theologischen Diskurs in den Vereinigten
Staaten, in Ergnzung zum historisch einflussreichen protestantischen Diskurs.
Secular Catholicism and Practical Theology 37
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