Andrew Greeley
BACKGROUND
In this essay I will report on research about Catholics and the fine arts. Elaborating sociological theories from David Tracy's work on the Analogical (or Sacramental) Imagination, I have argued for many years - most recently in my summa Religion as Poetry -- that Catholics imagine both God and the world (somewhat) differently from others. They tend to see the Ultimate lurking in the commonplace. They are inclined to view the objects, events, persons and relationships of ordinary life as metaphors for (sacraments of) the Ultimate. Catholics have (or at least had) angels and saints and the souls in purgatory and the mother of Jesus and statues and paintings and stained glass windows and rich rituals and an elaborate Sacramental system. Protestants, by and large and often as a matter of principle, do not.
The Analgoical Imagination is not better than other imaginations which emphasize the absence of God from the world and the distance between the Creator and Her creatures. It is often open to the abuses of folk religion and superstition. Nonetheless, this imagination is what is most distinctive about Catholics, a propensity that keeps Catholics in the Church and presents special challenges, opportunities, and problems for Catholic leadership.
In its 1993 General Social Survey, NORC included a module about culture designed by a committee under the leadership of Professor Paul Maggio of Yale University.1 The data collected made it possible to raise again the question of Catholics and the fine arts, a question which was debated in the nineteen fifties and early nineteen sixties. Might it be that the Analogical Imagination has an impact on Catholic involvement in the fine arts?
The question may seem absurd. While it presided over the fine arts for more than a millennium, the Church in its present Counter-Reformation/Restoration modality could not care less about them. While there may be Catholics working in the fine arts both as performers and creators, they are invisible
Catholics who keep their religion to themselves and whose work is not, to all appearances, influenced by their religion. The Catholic elite whose predecessors lamented the lack of interest by Catholics in culture are now more concerned about ideological crusades of the left or the right. To the extent that they think at all about the subject of high culture, they picture suburban upper middle class Catholics as materialist, consumerist, secularist pagans who have little concern for the mind or the spirit, a position which corresponds to the Vatican's image of American Catholics: affluent couch potatoes who would rather watch a film on video than go to a theater. A similar image exists in the media and academic elite: Catholics are not interested in the fine arts and the fine arts are not interested in Catholics. Catholics are no longer illiterate and anti-intellectual immigrants, but neither have they become sophisticated enough and refined enough to enjoy high culture.
Five questions in the survey were pertinent to the present investigation: I'm going to read you a list of some kinds of music. Can you tell me which statements on this card come closest to your feeling about each kind of music
--Classical Music -symphony and chamber --Opera
Next I'd like to ask you about some leisure or recreation activities that people do during their free time. As I read each activity, can you tell me if it is something you have done in the past twelve months?
-- Visit an art gallery or museum
-- Go to a live ballet or dance performance, not including school performances
-- Go to a classical music or opera performance, not including school performances
FINDINGS
Most would assume, I believe, that either Catholics would be less likely to respond positively to these questions than Protestants or at least their responses would be no different from that of Protestants. What possible reason would lead one to expect Catholics to be more involved? My own expectation was the opposite: The Analogical Imagination would, I thought, lead to greater Catholic involvement.
My expectations were sustained.3 Catholics were more inclined to say that they liked the opera (27% to 19%) and classical music (55% to 47%). Moreover they were also more likely to report attendance in the last year - 24% versus 15% for dance, 21% versus 13% for music, and 47% versus 35% for art gallery visits. Fifty-six percent of Catholics had attended at least one kind of fine arts performance in the last year as opposed to forty-four of the Protestants. Twenty-seven percent of Catholics attended two or more events as did fifteen percent of the Protestants and one out of ten Catholics attended all three compared to one out of twenty Protestants. All the differences are statistically significant.
How can this be so? Members of a Church whose one artistic interest not so long ago was censoring films and only a generation out of the immigrant neighborhoods, how can it be that Catholics are now substantially above the national average in their interest in the fine arts?
First of all, one must consider the possibility that this surprising finding might be the result of demographic and social factors. I elected to use the second set of items for further investigation because they represented actual behavior and sought to account for the greater Catholic propensity to leave the couch for the opera house, the concert hall, and the art gallery. Such variables as age, gender, race, city size, region, education and income reduce the correlation between Catholic and fine art attendance by 36%4
with education and city size being the most powerful predictors: Catholics are in part more likely to attend fine arts performances because they are better educated than Protestants and because they live in large cities where more such opportunities are available. When frequency of Church attendance was added it turned out to be a significant predictor of fine arts attendance and reduced the correlation eight percentage points more. Still the majority of the difference in fine art participation between Catholics and Protestants remained.
CHURCH ATTENDANCE AND FINE ART ATTENDANCE
My theory lead be to wonder whether Catholic church attendance, steeped as it is a sacramental or metaphorical context, would have a special impact on fine arts consumption. If one is surrounded by cultural artifacts (however weakened and compromised) when one worships, one might perhaps also have a greater interest in the fine arts. The first graph illustrates the dramatic support for this expectation. Frequency of church-going correlates dramatically for Catholics with fine arts attendance and does not correlate significantly with Protestant fine arts attendance. The largest differences between Catholics and Protestants in fine arts is concentrated precisely among the regular church-goers. Indeed the interaction between Catholics and church attendance eliminates the difference between Catholics and Protestants.
Some readers will doubtless say that they are not surprised by the fact that Catholics have caught up to and surpassed the rest of the country in interest in the fine arts. But I defy anyone to say that they are not surprised by Figure 1: it is the regular Sunday (or Saturday afternoon) Catholics who are most likely to be interested in the fine arts.
"GRACEFUL" IMAGES AND THE FINE ARTS
Can I demonstrate that this phenomenon is linked to a distinctively Catholic imagination? In my work on narrative religion I have developed a four item scale (which I call the Grace Scale) that measures a respondent's image of God - as mother versus father, lover versus judge, spouse versus master and friend versus king. I discuss the development, rationale, and predictive power of the scale at great length in Religion as Poetry and will not repeat the discussion here. Catholics, as one would expect from Tracy's theory, score higher on the scale than do other Americans. In the present context, the question arises of whether this scale also influences Catholic fine arts participation. Figure 2 demonstrates, again dramatically, that a "graceful" image of God does indeed affect attendance at artistic productions, but only for Catholics. For Protestants there is a (non-significant) negative correlation between the Scale and the fine arts. For Catholics there is strong and positive correlation: the difference between Catholics and Protestants in fine arts participation is concentrated among those who have high scores on the Grace Scale. Not only is there an interaction for Catholics between church attendance and the fine arts there is also an interaction between religious imagery and the fine arts.
GRACEFUL IMAGES AND CHURCH ATTENDANCE
A third link in the chain would be the establishment of a stronger relationship among Catholics between religious imagery and church attendance. Should such a link be established one could well call the emerging model an example of the "liturgical imagination." Figure 3 provides strong evidence of the existence of such a link: there is negative correlation for Protestants between religious imagery and frequent church attendance and a positive link for Catholics. Catholics with high scores on the Grace scale are more likely to go to church while Protestants with a low score are more likely to go to church. Or, perhaps more plausibly, frequent church attendance for Catholics enhances their gracious religious imagery and for Protestants, frequent attendance diminishes such imagery.
The three charts suggest the following model (net of the social structural variables):
* Catholics are more interested in the fine arts not only because they go to church more often than do Protestants but also because those Catholics who go to Church regularly are the ones who are most likely to be interested in the fine arts.
* Catholics are more interested in the fine arts not only because they have more graceful images of God but also because those Catholics who have the most graceful image of God are also the most likely to be interested in the fine arts.
* Among Catholics the link between graceful imagery and regular church-going is positive. Among Protestants it is negative.
In a model fitting exercise, it was found that the model acceptably fit the data.5 A liturgical imagination, a mix of church attendance and graceful images of God, does account in part for the higher rate of fine arts behavior among Catholics. Liturgy and fine arts are linked, a notion which would have been taken to be obvious and beyond debate from Constantine to the Council of Trent.
IMPLICATIONS
The findings reported here are statistically significant, the fitted model is robust. Yet the logic of the argument is delicate; the assumption that religion is story (narrative image) before it is anything else and after it is everything else is strange; the charts, merely pictures, will offend some readers (who have no trouble consuming the charts in USA Today); and the findings seem odd, even bizarre. Who would have thought that Catholics had passed the national averages in interest in the fine arts and that there is a link between religious images, church attendance and the fine arts, though only among Catholics? Moreover the complexity of model does not respond to the need for sweeping generalizations about the laity, which generalizations are so beloved by theologians, religious educators, "liturgists," parish priests and the Pope.
The model may be statistically acceptable because it fits the data, but it is also likely to existentially unacceptable because it does not fit the perceptive structures of many Catholic leaders - especially those who babble about "post-modernity."
In defense of its complexity, I would respond reality is complex: only cautious and nuanced generalizations can possibly be accurate. I hope that some readers will ponder that truth and reflect carefully on my model of the liturgical imagination before they dismiss it out of hand.
The focus of my analysis was to account for the greater level of interest in the fine arts among American Catholics. But the important conclusion of the analysis is that Catholic interest in the fine arts reveals a mostly preconscious dynamism - a liturgical imagination linking graceful stories of God and church attendance -- which is at the core of the Catholic religious heritage. There appears to be a distinctive and very powerful liturgical (not "Liturgical") spirituality among Catholics. This (mostly) unperceived liturgical spirituality merits further reflection as a resource and a challenge for Catholic leaders. More theologically, it is a spirituality which reflects the presence of the Spirit - a present and not distant, an analogical and not dialectical Spirit - among the Catholic laity and suggests that the assumption that the laity are Spirit-less is both arrogant and ignorant.
By liturgy here I do not mean "Liturgy" in the ordinary sense it is used among Catholics. Nothing could be more destructive of the liturgical imagination then what passes for "Liturgy" in many American parishes: precious theorizing, cute tricks each week, inarticulate commentators, semi-literate readers, drab music, a multiplication of non-canonical (and hence illegal) rules by various gate keepers (liturgists, religious educators, RCIA directors), and poor homilies. If the liturgical imagination continues to survive, it will do so despite the "Liturgists" and not because of them. Its strength is rooted in the depths of the Catholic psyche with its ability to sense grace lurking everywhere.
CONCLUSION
Those readers who have followed me this far might want to consider the possibility that there ought to be some reevaluations:
Catholic leaders ought to reevaluate their assumption that there is no distinctive spirituality lurking among the Catholic laity. There is indeed such a spirituality and it has real and powerful effects in the world beyond the Sunday Eucharist. We need to know much more about it and how it works. Moreover, we should abandon efforts to impose a spirituality on the laity from the outside which imposes a mine field of canonically illegal rules and regulations on the Spirit within them.
Catholic leaders should reevaluate the "low church" style which is characteristic of much of post-councilor Catholicism. I do not mean that they should think about returning to the Latin Mass or Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament or the Novena to the Sorrowful Mother (though why not to votive candles?). I do mean that they should realize that the Catholic liturgical imagination is rich, dense, and multivalent and is composed of a veritable rain forest of metaphors. New Catholic churches should look like Catholic churches and not like Quaker meeting houses.
Catholic leaders should reconsider the importance of the fine arts in human life. The artist is a "sacrament maker," someone who sees the hints of grace in the world and in human life and illumines them for the rest of us. For most of its history the Church did not consider the fine arts. to be optional. Maybe the leaders of the past perceived something that we today do not see.
Catholic teachers should realize that, depending on the parish, many of the people in the Church on Sunday are reasonably sophisticated in the fine arts, arguably more sophisticated than their priests.
Catholic leaders should be more aware that there are artists and performers among the faithful and that these men and women are pursuing a vocation that is linked to the liturgical imagination and that they are particularly important and valuable resource persons for the Church.
In summary, Catholics are more likely to participate in the fine arts than one might have expected, even when the usual battery of demographic and socio-economic variables are taken into account. Such participation correlates with church attendance but only among Catholics. It also correlates with religious imagery but only among Catholics. Finally, church attendance correlates positively with religious imagery for Catholics but negatively for Protestants. This model, I suggest, reveals a distinctive Catholic imagination which is not only analogical as Father Tracy has argued, but also liturgical.
--
1 A national probability sample of Americans who were surveyed in personal interviews. The analysis on which this essay is based included 1365 Americans who identified as either Catholics or Protestants. In a sample this size there are not enough respondents from other religious backgrounds for analysis - only twenty nine Jews for example. Moreover, with the exception of the Baptists, there are not enough from individual Protestant denominations to make comparisons between them and Catholics possible. NORC has developed a category which enables one to divide Protestants into Fundamentalist, Moderate, and Liberal. In the analysis on which this paper is based comparisons were made between Catholics and Fundamentalist Protestants and Catholics and a combination of Moderate and Liberal Protestants. While the second group of Protestants was more likely to be involved with the fine arts than the former, these two comparisons did not differ substantially from the comparison with all Protestants reported in the present essay.
2 Eight other kinds of music were proposed in the questionnaire.
3 A comment often made about my work in the Catholic community is that I always find what I'm looking for. Thus a hypothesis supported by data is somehow weakened by that support and the integrity of the researcher challenged. The data from the GSS are available at almost every university computer center in the country for those who think I'm fudging the findings.
4 From .14 to .09
5 More precisely in the logic of social science, the null hypothesis that this model did not acceptably fit the data had to be rejected. Technically the chi square was 2.65 with four degrees of freedom. P=.618. 12
Charts
1. Fine Arts Attendance by Religion and Church Attendance
2. Fine Arts Attendance by Religion and Religious Images
3. Church Attendance by Religious Images by Religion
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