Vox populi, vox Dei?, or, When faith is vulgar

Let me just say flat-out that I cannot stand the Trinity Broadcast Network and all its cheesy, sleazy minions. They've just bought some holy land theme park, and I can only imagine what new heights of trashiness they're going to reach with it (basically, when it comes to TBN, I'm Ignatius Reilly watching movies at the Prytania). Moreover, the Jesus junk that so many Christians hanker for puts me in a moneychangers-in-the-temple mood.

However, let me tell you a story.

Around 1994, I guess it was, I developed a rosary devotion to Our Lady of Fatima. I prayed fervently, intensely, faithfully for a wife -- or, if that wasn't in God's will, for the grace to accept my single state. Miraculous things began to happen to me. Nothing flashy, but also nothing that I could write off to coincidence. Only after I was engaged to Julie, and she phoned to ask me if I wanted to accept a trip to Portugal being offered us as a honeymoon did I start to connect some dots. We had chosen a church in New Orleans in which to marry, by the name of Our Lady of the Rosary. It just felt right. I had forgotten, if I'd ever known, that on October 13, 1917, in the final Fatima apparition, Mary identified herself as "Our Lady of the Rosary." And it so happened that October 13, 1996, was the day that Julie and I fell in love. I hadn't noticed. Of course a free trip to Portugal had fallen into our laps! I told Julie (who was not yet Catholic, and who knew nothing about Fatima) that yes, we had to take this trip, and that we needed to make a pilgrimage to Fatima to thank the Virgin for her intercession on our behalf.

Then I told her about the Fatima apparitions, which if the story unnerved her Protestant self, she didn't let it show. By the way, 10 years to the day after we fell in love, our daughter was born. We named her Nora Lucia (Lucia, after Lucia, one of the Fatima visionaries). And her patron saint is, naturally, the Virgin). But I'm getting ahead of myself.

In Portugal on our honeymoon, we made a pilgrimage to Fatima, in January. We got off the bus under wet, gray skies, and made our way toward the basilica. We had to walk down the main street of the town. A more gaudy, vulgar display of popular piety I've never seen. There were (literally) glow-in-the-dark Virgin Marys in shop windows. There was "Fatiburger," and "The John Paul II Snack Bar." On and on and on. It was grotesque, and deeply disheartening. By the time we reached the end of the street, we almost wanted to get back on the bus and return to Lisbon.

We walked through a wall of trees to reach the vast asphalt plain in front of the basilica, and beheld a large crowd of pilgrims making their way toward the church. From the looks of things, these were mostly poor people. In front of us, we saw a young couple inching forward. The wife was on her knees, on the wet asphalt, praying as she crawled forward. Her husband stood by her, and next to him stood an older woman -- his mother, or mother-in-law -- holding an infant. It was plain that these humble people were making a pilgrimage to thank the Virgin for her prayers for their baby.

I looked out across this throng and felt kind of ashamed for my judgmentalness. Many of these people were stopping at a chapel on the plain, where there was a big fire going. People were burning candles to the Virgin there, and you could purchase life-size wax figures of limbs and body parts to throw onto the fire as an offering (e.g., you had a bum leg, buy a wax leg). It was profoundly pagan, but people were doing it, and you know, I understood why. It occurred to me as we joined the crowd moving toward the basilica that these poor, or relatively poor, people, people who were far less proud about showing their faith in public than we restrained North American bourgeois Catholics, were also likely to fill the trunks of their cars up with all the Jesus-and-Virgin-Mary kitsch being peddled by the souvenir shops.

Who, in the end, had more faith of the kind that saves and transforms? The tasteless poor, or the tasteful bourgeois?

I don't know the answer to that, and I do believe that religious kitsch can be rather than a manifestation of real faith, an emotional substitute for it. But I left the Fatima plain less secure in my ability to judge these matters. Most of us, I think, have a tendency to think that our own tastes in religious expression strike the correct balance. There's us, there's the frozen chosen, and there's the tacky enthusiasts. But many aspects of Orthodox and Catholic piety strike traditional Protestants as extremely gauche and off-putting (see the reliquary below containing the heart of St. John Vianney, the Cure d'Ars), just as many aspects of popular Protestant piety appall and bewilder Catholics and Orthodox. And I guess most all of it causes secularists to roll their eyes.

What to make of this? For me, I try to ask myself when tempted to condemn as vulgar this or that pious expression, whether this is simply a matter of taste, or if morality comes into it as well. There is a thin, often porous line between the sacred and the profane. If one believes that a fellow believer is profaning the sacred, however unintentionally, then one has an obligation to make that judgment. Aesthetics and morals aren't the same thing, but in the realm of the sacred, they are connected. Nevertheless, it seems to me we should work hard to resist passing snap judgments on the religious expressions of people whose style clashes with our own sense of what is right and proper. I'm pretty uppity about these things, so it's real hard for me. But God sees what's in the heart. As I've gotten older, I've come to be more small-c catholic in my view of religious styles. There are times in my spiritual life when Bach and Palestrina move me to the heights, and other times when nothing can touch me like "Amazing Grace" and "Just As I Am." I have been knocked out by the sensual beauty of the Gesu church in Rome, and similarly impressed by the starkness of a Dominican chapel in England, and a Congregationalist church in Vermont. God can be seen, felt and heard in all of it.

That said, I want to stress that I think it would be wrong to make individual emotion and personal utility the only criterion by which to judge public expressions of piety. But for Christians, it's worth remembering that we worship a Saviour who scandalized those who set standards of appropriateness in his culture by acting on what was in his heart, and in the hearts of those he met. On the other hand, by throwing the moneychangers out of the Temple, he recognized that there are some things that must be kept sacred. It's a hard balance to strike, but in general, I've learned that it's wiser to be generous toward popular piety. Chances are the way you worship strikes somebody as lifeless and stiff, and somebody else as irredeemably vulgar.