#391: The Finish Line

With the 2014 Boston Marathon less than 4 weeks away, the  finish Line has just been repainted on Boston's Boylston Street. So I am re-posting my blog about how last year's bombing transformed that iconic image.

An additional note: since I first posted this, the World Series Champion Red Sox paraded through Boston in November. When they reached the Finish Line, they stopped and placed their trophy on the line with a "Boston Strong" shirt draped over it. Now there are plans for a permanent memorial near the site.

     During the entire week following the Boston Marathon attack, the phrase that stuck in my mind was “the finish line”--for so many reasons.

For Bostonians, the Marathon Finish Line on Boylston Street has now become sacred ground--perhaps it is even becoming a sacred symbol, value, or idea.

Of course, the finish line has always been where the race ends, where the victors are crowned with laurels, where some arrive with arms raised in triumph while others stagger across or even collapsed onto it.   

But for all, since 1897, it has denoted the gold standard of running, since for most runners at Boston the aim is not to win but rather to finish the planet’s most prestigious road race.  Crossing that line is a personal victory for all of them.

But now that finish line has been transformed. It means more than before. One churchgoer returning to one of the Copley Square churches closed off as part of the crime scene said, “Now it’s a starting line too.”

From now on, the finish line is also where the bombs went off.  Future runners will finish only by passing the two spots where three people died and more than 200 others bled.  And very likely the finish line will soon have a memorial to the victims attacked on April 15, 2013.

     For Christians, of course, the symbolic power of the finish line is nothing new, since the Apostle Paul long ago employed the image of athletic achievement to describe his own life as his and approached:

“I have fought the good fight, I have run the good race, I have kept the faith:”--2 Timothy 4:7

And Paul himself was echoing the way the prophet Isaiah viewed life’s need for strength and endurance:

“But those who trust in the LORD will find new strength. They will soar high on wings like eagles. They will run and not grow weary. They will walk and not faint.”--Isaiah 40:31

The stress in both images is not on competition, but on accomplishment, not on winning the race but on finishing the course, not on the contest but on the journey and its destination.

Later Christians built on these images to establish a long tradition of seeing our life as a journey.  This view evolved from seeing life as a race to the image of a pilgrimage which follows its path to its end—but the idea of the race to the finish line was never lost. 

No doubt part of the popularity of the Boston marathon lies in its power to evoke our life’s long struggle to endure all trials and overcome all obstacles until we finally arrive at our natural end.

Sometimes someone’s life actually fits this image.  When my father died last year at 94, my wife said, “He died at the end of his life”--a life that really was a long, fully lived journey to its natural finish (see CrossCurrents #370, “A Quietly Heroic Life”).

But this is not always so.  As Boston 2013 showed and life teaches, the finish line can be moved. 

Runners still on the Boston course after the bombing were stopped short of 26.2 miles.  Yet they were awarded medals for finishing, which meant that for some the finish line was Kenmore square, for others Commonwealth Ave., for others someplace further back along the course.  The finish line moved, caught them unawares, and suddenly ended their races.

The same is true in life, since for some of us the finish line of life arrives well before anyone expects.

I have already written about the child whose life was more like a sprint than the marathon, ending only eight short weeks after his birth (see CrossCurrents #378, “Precious Child”).

As I drafted this piece, another young Boston University student died in a house fire, the 11th BU student to be killed (counting the marathon victim) in the last 12 months.

And on Wednesday, April 17—two days after the bombs and 24 hours before the suspects’ images became public—another runner reached his early finish line.  Our close friends’ son Matthew Shea had suffered leg pains while running high school track; these led to a 10-year-long effort to outrun the cancer infecting his body.  Through several remissions and relapses he not only persevered but filled his life with more acts of courage, generosity, and love than many people achieve in three times his lifespan. He died at 27 knowing, as did his loved ones, that he had run the good race with steadfast hope no matter how fast his finish line was approaching.

In reality, the same is true for all of us.

We are all alike in living our lives as a journey that (for most) is more like a marathon than a sprint.  But we are all unique in that, while we all run the same race of life, each of us runs a personal race on a different personal course.  For each of us, the finish line is different.  For each of us, the finish line is a moving target.  For each of us, its final location cannot be known.  

We may pace ourselves like marathoners, looking forward to careers and vacations and children growing and marriages and grandchildren and retirement. But that is like saving enough energy to get over Heartbreak Hill and still have enough left for the last few miles to the official end of the race. The fact is that our own personal finish line may not be at the end of the official course (called “life expectancy”). For each of us, the finish line may be just round the next corner.

Yet we run on, filling our lives with as much joy and love and hope and courage as we can before our finish line arrives—and trying always to be prepared for it.

For those who died on April 15, 2013, the marathon’s finish line was their unexpected finish.  For the injured, it was a turning point; their lives are changed forever.  And for all of us, it was the reminder that none of us controls the course we run.

Six days after the Boston bombings, the London Marathon was held amid heightened security.  The runners wore black memorial ribbons and made their intentions clear: they are determined to make a show of strength in the face of violence at Boston 2014. 

So next year we can expect more runners, more wheelchair racers, more midnight cyclists, more volunteers and spectators and memorial honors.  The 118^th running of the Boston marathon may well surpass the record numbers of the 100^th running.

And for all those hundreds of thousands along the course in whatever capacity, as well as the millions watching on TV and Internet, that famous and now sacred finish line on Boylston Street will mean more than ever, especially at 2:50 PM.

Perhaps there will be some special moment of commemoration.  Perhaps the church bells will toll.  And if they do, all of us will know they toll not only for those who died, not only for those injured or traumatized, but for all of us who each day, all our lives, run toward life’s certain, sacred, but unknown finish line.

And that will be our shining moment to show that Boston has found new strength, and will not grow weary.

  © Bernard F. Swain PhD 2013

#415: Was Saint Patrick Catholic?

How the recent controversy in Boston disserves Catholic identity and the Church’s public image.

Back in the 1950s, Father Leonard Feeney made headlines by proclaiming loud and long that no one could go to heaven except members of the Roman Catholic Church.  For that he was excommunicated from membership in the Roman Catholic Church.

Years later Feeney and his followers were officially reconciled with the Church, but their take on Catholic life (ostensibly “hardline” but actually just weird) has not changed substantially.

And now the Feeneyites (officially, the “Slaves of the Immaculate Heart of Mary” out of the Saint Benedict Center in Harvard, Mass.) are back in the headlines.  The principal of their school, Brother Thomas Dalton, withdrew his student band from marching in Boston’s Saint Patrick’s Day parade on the mere prospect that the kids would be marching down the same street as Mass Equality, a gay pride group.

Brother Thomas Dalton

Defending his position in a letter to the Boston Globe, Brother Thomas explained his opposition to associating with the gay marchers:

Jesus Christ once compared the Kingdom of Heaven to a wedding feast. When the king saw a guest not properly attired, he said to his servants, ‘Bind him hand and foot, and cast him into exterior darkness: there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth’ (Matthew 22:13). All that over improper dress; what would he have done to a group parading unnatural lust?

To many readers, Catholic and non-Catholic alike, this talk of “unnatural lust” probably sounds like typical Catholic teaching: backward and mean-spirited and exclusionary.  In fact, Brother Thomas’ sentiments are backward, mean-spirited, and exclusionary--but they are not Catholic teaching.

Brother Thomas is, of course, entitled to his own opinion (as well as to his dubious misinterpretation of a Biblical parable), and he even has the authority to impose his opinion on his students. In fact, when the gay marchers were finally rejected, Brother Dalton reinstated his children in the parade and led them in applauding their “victory.” All under the guise of providing a “Catholic education.”

But Brother Thomas is not entitled to his own facts--and he is not entitled to speak for the Church, let alone speak falsely.  In a time when Pope Francis is finally at long last reversing the appallingly bad (and mostly deserved) PR the Catholic Church has received over the last 20 years, the last thing we need is some loud voice distorting our Catholic identity in public view.

But I fear that many Catholics secretly (or even openly) share this man’s views, or at least believe that these are the Church’s views.  So a little plain talk about the Church’s teachings on homosexuals is timely. Here they are, drawn from the Catechism of the Catholic Church and from statements by the Vatican and the US Bishops:

1.   Homosexual orientation is most often experienced as given and discovered, not chosen--and is not in itself morally wrong or sinful.

2.   Given the inherent dignity of every human person, the Church teaches that “homosexual persons, like everyone else, should not suffer from prejudice against their basic human rights.”

3.   Violence in speech or action against homosexuals “deserves condemnation from the Church’s pastors wherever it occurs.”

4.   “Every sign of discrimination in their regard should be avoided.”

5.   Nothing in the Bible or Catholic teaching can be used to justify prejudicial or discriminatory attitudes and behaviors toward homosexual persons.

Note than none of this stopped Brother Thomas Dalton from using the Bible to imply that Catholic teaching DOES justify his discriminatory attitude.

Of course, Catholic moral teaching also finds no justification for homosexual acts. But the moral objections are essentially the same as the Church’s objections to masturbation, artificial contraception, pre-marital sex, adultery, coitus interruptus, oral and anal sex, etc.—namely, that only marital procreative sex is morally legitimate. Everything else—not just gay sex—violates natural law.

In other words, official Catholic morality opposes all those acts but not the people who perform them. Such opposition therefore provides no grounds for treating those people differently from anyone else--and that goes for homosexuals as well as for all the others!

Thus gays and lesbians have the same basic rights as all other human beings, and must be protected from discrimination like anyone else.  This principle holds even if we accept official church teaching on homosexuality as a “disordered” orientation.

In short, the Church sees active homosexuals as sinners.  But to be consistent, to avoid discrimination, one must treat them as we do any others whose behavior is called immoral.

Thus a true “hardline” would insist that the Saint Patrick’s Day parade exclude anyone who engages in masturbation, premarital sex, oral or anal sex, adultery, contraception, theft, lying, slander, cheating, etc—as well as any Catholics who deliberately ate meat the previous Friday (the second Friday in Lent). 

This would result, of course, in a very short parade,  made up mostly of marching Protestants.  Throw in the exclusion of those engaging in drunkenness and natural lust, and there would be precious few onlookers left to cheer the children marching (practically alone!) for Brother Thomas Dalton’s school.

So singling out gays is wrong, not because we are not entitled to disapprove of their behavior, but because we are not entitled to judge them while ignoring everyone else.

When Pope Francis famously said “Who am I to judge?” with reference to gays, he was thinking of two things.  First, Catholic tradition dictates that only one person can judge whether someone has sinned--namely, the sinner himself!  That’s why Catholics confess their sins, rather than being denounced for them.  Sin requires that one violate one’s conscience--and no one knows my conscience but me. 

Second, the pope had already described himself as “a sinner.” His point, of course, is that Catholics believe that sin is a universal phenomenon within the human family.  We all sin.  To judge that homosexual activity is sinful merely lumps gays in with the rest of us.  Far from justifying their exclusion, it confirms their inclusion in the company of sinners.

In this sense, the Saint Patrick’s Day parade is a parade of sinners, cheered on by thousands more sinners.  And it always has been. Who are we to judge that gays have no place among us?

Certainly, any such judgment cannot claim to represent true Catholicism.  And any event in honor of a Catholic saint is hardly enhanced by the proclamations of those who distort Catholicism and confuse the public. If we believe Saint Patrick was Catholic—and he was—then our celebration should reflect Catholic tradition, not distort it.

God willing, Brother Thomas Dalton’s band will someday learn about true Catholicism—but not, I fear, at his school.

  © Bernard  F. Swain PhD 2014

#414: The Pope and His Saint: 10 Keys to Understanding Francis

Here are 10 reasons why our first Jesuit pope may in fact be the greatest “Franciscan” of all.

Once a pope makes the covers of Time and Rolling Stone, it’s obvious the PR machine is hard at work shaping that man’s public image.  This makes Pope Francis both more visible and easier to misunderstand, since PR is prone to pigeon-hole people so that our impressions of them are reduced to the mental equivalent of sound-bites.  When Rolling Stone says Francis is to John XXIII as Keith Richards is to Chuck Berry, it creates a sharp image for a generation raised on rock music, but gives us no insight into the difference between guitarists and popes.  To understand this pope, we need a more nuanced perspective.

Everyone knows that Francis is Jesuit.  And everyone knows he named himself after Saint Francis of Assisi.  So is worth asking: why choose the founder of the Franciscans rather than the famous Jesuit missionary Francis Xavier?  And the answer opens the gate to deeper understanding, for it turns out that our new pope is, in many ways, as much a “Franciscan” as he is a Jesuit.

Most Americans have a vague sense of Saint Francis’ importance.  San Francisco bears his name.  The California missions reflect the legacy of Franciscan missionaries.  The San Diego Padres are named after them. Some Americans attend Franciscan schools, and many coffee-lovers know that cappuccino is so named because its color matches the traditional Franciscan “capuche” (hood).

But to grasp this pope’s “Franciscan” identity, one must look to Saint Francis himself.  In a recent re-reading of Donald Spoto’s biography The Reluctant Saint, I found 10 ways in which the pope echoes the saint.  Each is a key to a fuller understanding of Pope Francis.

1. Identifying With the Poor.  Saint Francis made the poor a chief focus of his work.  This was a radical move in a time when (much like ours) the Church was seen as a place of privilege and ambition.  Spoto says “Francis’ identity with the social fringe could have been seen as a revolution against the Church.” He also points out that Francis chose poverty for himself as well.  This “did not primarily mean having no possessions but rather not been possessive about anything or anyone”--to make sure that nothing wedged into the bond between himself and God.

Pope Francis has likewise made the poor his priority from day one, and his work and lifestyle in Argentina and in Vatican City embody a commitment to a simple detachment from possessions.

2. Action Over Theory.  Saint Francis was a man of prayer, but he was no theologian.  Rather than ponder the subtleties of scripture, he acted out its Gospel spirit.  Thus he mixed contemplation and action, breaking the monastic tradition of cloistered living.  This fusion of the “via contemplativa” and the “via activa” proved a powerful inspiration for several 20^th century heroes: Thomas Merton, Dorothy Day, Dag Hammarskjold, and Martin Luther King.  And it inspires Pope Francis today as he calls for a Church that proves its spiritual values by acting them out. This contrasts sharply with Benedict XVI, who never escaped the persona of an ivory-tower intellectual more comfortable in his study that in the trenches.

3. Preaching Peace and Service.  Saint Francis was known as a powerful but simple preacher, and Spoto tells us that the theme of his preaching was “Invariable: peace among individuals.” By this Francis meant the refusal to seek vengeance to defraud, to hurt others--but also it meant “the conformity of every life to the spirit of the gospel, which meant an ethic of loving service.”

Clearly Pope Francis has embraced Peace as his own theme: thus his early decision to wash the feet of prisoners (men and women, Christians and Muslims alike) and his recent public appeals for peace in Syria and Ukraine.

4. A New Model of Evangelization.  When Saint Francis abandoned the old monastic model, he introduced a new but simple strategy: he went out to people, “meeting them wherever they were and speaking to them in their own language and style.”

From the day of his election, Pope Francis has modeled himself on the saint: asking for the crowd’s blessing on his first appearance, wading into the slums of Rio during World Youth Day, proclaiming to clergy everywhere the need to become less enclosed, less “self-referential,” and to reach out to others.  When an Italian journalist (a non-believer) published an open letter to the pope, Francis personally called him to arrange an interview.

5. Rejecting Anger.  Saint Francis’ time was tainted, like ours, by corruption among clergy.  Yet he urged only charity in confronting them:

We must be careful not to be angry or disturbed at the sin of another, for anger and disturbance impede charity in us and others. 

In fact, this was the saint’s attitude to everyone: public sinners, reprobates, even felons.  That same attitude has been the pope’s all along.  He began by calling himself a sinner, uttered his famous “Who am I to judge?” about gays, and has proclaimed that atheists and non-believers can be good people and even partners in building peace and justice.  He has made himself a model of charity like his model saint. 

6. No Condemnations.  This attitude led both the saint and the pope to proclaim a God of mercy rather than condemnation. As Spoto observes:

There was in Francis none of the sanctimonious sensor; he rarely alluded to damnation, and he pronounced no condemnations against any person or any specific belief.  Such a loving, positive of the embrace of the Gospel had not been heard of in anyone’s memory. 

Clearly the pope has gone out of his own way to avoid anathemas, stressing God’s mercy at every turn and conveying the strong message that God’s church welcomes everyone.  Spoto refers to the saint’s “habit of forgiveness,” and we see this constantly in the pope.  Witness his recent moves to honor and rehabilitate the founder of liberation theology, Gustavo Gutiérrez, after years of Vatican censorship. 

7. Getting Beyond Rules.  When one of his friars became deathly ill fasting on Francis’ orders, Francis realized that his true power had to depend on something beyond rules:

From this time, he was on the alert never to set down all require adherence to an abstract set of laws; the norms of charity and good example would henceforth always take precedence.

When the pope washed the feet of laypeople instead of seminarians, when he refused to live in the papal palace, when he rode with fellow bishops to pay his own hotel bill, when he carried his own luggage--on all these occasions, Pope Francis shown a willingness, even a penchant, for making good example his priority even if it meant going beyond the rules, protocols, and customs that surround the papacy.

8. Courtesy.  Saint Francis was from a moneyed family. Early on he aspired to knighthood, and all his life he remained a francophile--so the spirit of chivalry was built into his character: “Ever the courtly knight, Francis believed that kindness and gratitude superseded mere human prescriptions.”

So for him, simple courtesy was often reason enough to set aside the usual norms.  When his old friend Jacoba arrived at his deathbed, she was challenging the rule against women in his private quarters.  But his chivalrous spirit prevailed even as he lay dying: “The command against it need not be observed in the case of this lady,” he said.

Pope Francis, like any pope, lives a life apart from others, yet he repeatedly demonstrates his own chivalrous nature.  Whether he is donning funny hats, waving a soccer jersey, joining a group of teens for history’s most famous “selfie,” kissing a man afflicted with skin disease, or simply allowing a young child to hug his leg while he continues preaching, the pope’s public appearances offer ample evidence of his natural kindness and warmth.

9. Doctrinal Conservatism.  Saint Francis broke no ground on church teachings.  Not only was he not a theologian or bishop, he was also essentially conservative in relation to the controversial movements of his day.  Against the heretical Cathars, he praised the material world.  He remained faithful to the Church’s creeds, he did not favor distributing vernacular bibles.  He did not even claim the right to preach doctrine at all.

So too, Pope Francis shows no inclination to challenge official teachings.  Rather, he seems bent (as was his namesake) on challenging the failure of even his fellow bishops to live up to those teachings or present them in an authentic way.  He seems especially convinced that many bishops have strayed from the central priorities of our tradition.  Like his namesake, he models a focus on the radical core of Catholic tradition over a preoccupation with its bells and whistles.  Ironically, this promotes a radical renewal without touching doctrine!

10. Resistance from the Guardians of the Status Quo. Spoto describes the gap between Saint Francis’ hopes for his “lesser brothers” and the clerical order the Franciscans became, and blames that gap on church officials bent on protecting the existing hierarchical system from Francis’ radical vision:

The hierarchy of the church, struggling to retain its identity against the tide of Muslims and heretics, simultaneously admired and feared Francis of Assisi…In the end, as institutions will do, the church did away with everything that identified the friars with the poor…The lesser brothers became a clerical order.”

Similarly, there are rumblings about disquiet among both the curia and the hierarchy about Pope Francis’ agenda--and the blogosphere is full of “traditionalist” Catholics already convinced this pope is dangerous, a heretic, or even the antichrist.

The difference, of course, is that Pope Francis has power that Saint Francis never had.  He can and has fired bishops, curial officials, and bureaucrats.  He can enforce his vision for a genuine, kind, non-judgmental Church that reaches out and makes service to the poor its priority.

In short, dealing with resistance is the one area where being a pope offers the advantage over being a saint!

But all told, these 10 qualities go long way to explaining what makes our new Francis tick.  For all his Jesuit training and experience, he clearly takes special inspiration from the saint whose name he chose, and whose rare qualities he echoes so loudly today.  In that sense, Pope Francis may be the greatest “Franciscan” of all.

  © Bernard  F. Swain PhD 2014

#413: Struggling to Evangelize? Meet the Beatles!

 Cultural historians have said that the Beatles “changed everything”--and that includes the US Catholic Church. 

As Catholic leaders try to cope with slipping numbers (of sacraments, worshipers, and revenue), they struggle to address cultural factors, often beyond their control, that altered the environment for Catholic life over the last several decades.  The Beatles are a significant case in point.

I have long considered the JFK assassination to be the event that closed the complacent social stability of the immediate post-war period in America (“the fifties”) and opened up a new era of turbulent cultural change (“the sixties”).  So it’s natural for me to see the Beatles’ US debut on the Ed Sullivan Show, just nine weeks after JFK was shot, as America’s first taste of the decade ahead.

With Ed Sullivan

  Hence CBS titled last week’s 50^th anniversary celebration of that event “The Night That Changed America.”

The 50th anniversary "Beatles Reunion"

To see how that change touched Catholic life, one must first recall the impact of the Beatles on pop music, in order to gauge their long-term cultural impact.

When hip-hop, dance, and “bubble gum” pop began to take over the music market in the mid-1990s, it finally ended rock & roll’s reign as America’s dominant pop music—a reign that lasted more than 40 years.  No type of popular music had ever dominated record sales, ticket sales, and the airways for such a long period.  In the past, popular music generally had shifted from one generation to another.  But Rock’s long reign meant that children born in 1990 grew up hearing the same music--often the same songs--their grandparents heard in the 1960s.  And the Beatles made this happen.

When the Beatles arrived on the scene, rock & roll was reeling from the loss of Buddy Holly and Elvis Presley, and had lost most of its popularity and power after only 10 years.  Record sales were bottoming out, and the airwaves were dominated by singers like Lesley Gore, Bobby Vinton, and the Four Seasons.  One heard few guitars, fewer pianos, and virtually no rock bands. Rock was on the verge of falling into minor cultural status, the same way that Swing, Big Bands, New Orleans Jazz, and Rag music had each fallen from popularity after brief periods of dominance during the 20^th century.

"The Night That Changed America"

But the Beatles changed all that, reintroducing the classic sounds of rock: guitars, drums, strong backbeat, and voices in harmony. Their runaway popularity opened a floodgate for the British Invasion, bringing The Rolling Stones and dozens of other rock bands in their wake.  This in turn reinvigorated the US rock scene, which generated hit-making bands for another 30 years.

In short, the Beatles saved rock music and, in doing so, laid a major pop-art foundation for the transformations of the sixties.  Once Bob Dylan followed their lead and went electric, rock was destined to become the defining music not just for baby boomers but also for their children.  Those children are now the very adults and parents who make up the largest group of “de-churched” Catholics in America.  In that sense, evangelizing means reaching out to a generation raised in the rock culture made possible by the Beatles.

But the Beatles change more than music, of course. They changed hair styles, language, and above all an attitude toward conventional ways and wisdom.

If John Lennon shocked Americans by suggesting that the Beatles had become “more popular than Jesus,” the shock was all the more acute for those who knew that he spoke the truth.

After their famous 1965 Shea Stadium concert, the Beatles retired from public performance.  So more than half of their career was spent recording music they never played in public.  For five years, this meant no tours, concerts, radio, or TV--no live performances of any Beatles songs written after Shea Stadium.  Such a move was without precedent, and remains unique today.  The Beatles became the first and only real “recording artists” in pop music.  We inherit the “standards” songs they created by the dozens not (as with traditional standards) as sheet music, but as actual, definitive performances by the authors themselves.

They abandoned the practice of marketing albums with one or two hit singles and ten unknown songs.  Instead, they produced albums full of songs that were radio hits in their own right, without ever being singles.

They also abandoned the common practice of singing music written by professionals songwriters, releasing albums written entirely by themselves, a practice that became the norm for rock bands everywhere ever since.  Thus it was no longer enough to sing or play, one also had to become a songwriter.

With the release of “Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” in 1967, they broke new barriers. They invented the “concept album,” where the album’s songs, rather than a random collection, were related to a single theme.  They also printed all the lyrics on the album.  These innovations also took hold across the industry.

All this while their music evolved in all directions at once, incorporating classical forms, British music hall, country music and blues, and even Indian music and electronic avant-garde.  By the end of their brief careers, “rock music” denoted a musical range that had not existed even six years before.

Finally, the Beatles began Apple records, and became their own publishers.  To this day, their music is released on the Apple label.

In short, the Beatles broke virtually every existing rule of the music business, and in fact re-wrote those rules.  As Dave Groh said at the Ed Sullivan TV special last week, “The Beatles knew no boundaries.”

All this raises two questions.  First, how did they get away with it--how did they break all the rules and survive?  Second, what effect of that have on American culture?

The first one is easy.  The Beatles got away with it because their brilliant music made them so popular they could flaunt all the commercial conventions, do everything their own way--stop touring and promoting and appearing live--and still dominate record sales with every album.  And they sustained that brilliance-driven-popularity until they broke up.

What effect did this all have?  Well first of all it meant that the Beatles exhibited palpable irreverence for the established conventions of both their industry and the culture at large.  Like true sixties icons, they questioned authorities at every turn and often decided to simply go their own way.  And they inspired many others to follow suit.

But notice that, for the Beatles, “going their own way” did not mean fighting the system, or simply transferring from one record label or manager to another.  It meant taking their fate into their own hands without institutional support.  They no longer depended on impresarios to produce shows, agents to promote them, company executives to tell them what to do, marketers to tell them what would sell, or accountants to tell them how much to spend on the next album.

In other words, the Beatles declared their independence from virtually all of the institutions that had previously controlled nearly everyone in their field.  They pursued their careers and lived their lives as if they were perfectly content to continue on without needing those institutions at all.  By breaking from those institutions, they modeled a kind of existential freedom to others-- and, given their iconic status, “others” meant tens of millions of baby boomers and their children.

The Beatles were not, of course, the only cultural force moving to such “existential freedom” in the 1960s.  The folk movement, the civil rights movement, the student protests, the antiwar movement, and the feminist revival all fueled the growing feeling that depending as little as possible on institutions and institutional authority, traveling light and living “free,” was the best way to live.  Thus life became not about following rules, but about making choices.

The Beatles’ example inspired Steve Jobs, who considered them to be the very model businessmen of a new age. He named his company after theirs and dedicated himself to building a computer business that broke all the rules upon which IBM’s monopoly depended.  Apple computers won, and IBM’s dominance declined.

All of which brings us finally back to evangelization.  Catholic leaders seeking to reach out and welcome disaffected baby boomers and their children (Americans between 15 and 65) face an obvious cultural barrier.  Such leaders represent a massive institution with a highly visible authority structure.  They lead a Church that too often presented Catholicism as a set of rules to be followed under the threat of punishment.  Yet their target population has embraced a culture that prizes personal freedom, distrusts authority, dislikes institutions, and prefers to break rules whenever possible.

If it seems too much of a stretch to credit the Beatles for this gap between institutions and the 15-65 group, recall that the original “generation gap” of the sixties began with a clash between parents and their sons over the length of their sons’ hair.  More than any other image of the counter-culture’s rejection of conventional authority and institutions, long hair was the iconic emblem of a rebellious generation.  And where did those kids get their idea to adopt long hair as the sign of their personal declaration of independence?  Why, that idea came, of course, from the Beatles!

That generation approaches retirement today, but they and their children still prefer to live without depending on institutional rules and conformity to conventional ways. 

So our efforts at evangelization would do well to pause and “meet the Beatles”--that is, consider how we can approach people who are perfectly content to live without the institutional Church.  We’re asking them to join a faith community, and “community” is certainly a congenial notion for anyone raised in the 1960s.  But to the extent that “faith community” becomes code for institutional structures or rules, we risk alienating the very people we want to reach.

Our culture’s loss of respect for institutions, in other words, affects the church as much as (perhaps more than) any other institution in our culture.  We must acknowledge this fact, recognize that it results from factors beyond our control, and then think how to lighten our own institutional baggage as we reach out to others for whom such baggage will never be an attraction. 

Perhaps we can start by listing to the Beatles “Speaking words of wisdom: Let it be.”

  © Bernard  F. Swain PhD 2014