How I Became a Street Catholic
I have gradually come to realize I’m a “street Catholic.” That is, I’m on the outside now and yet still looking in.
A Street Catholic is someone who has chosen to stand apart, no longer sitting in a pew but waiting and watching on the outside, from “the street” where we encounter the Others. (Although I’ve come to embrace the theological insight “there are no Others.”)
And please do not confuse a Street Catholic with a dissident or a “lapsed” Catholic, even if they too have chosen to stand apart in some way.
A street Catholic is someone who understands that not only is the planet burning (in the forests of Canada, in our cities, at the polar icecaps) but our very societies are aflame with fear and distrust of each other. To me and my fellow Street Catholics, that means we have to run toward these fires.
From a spiritual dimension, a Street Catholic embraces the radicality of the Magnificat, the great Marian prayer (found in Luke 1: 46–55), in order to move beyond the Blessed Mother solely as cultural icon toward the mestizo brown figure whose face is now that of the world church.
And whose song is one of resistance to worldliness and social sin through world transformation.
She thus represents the world’s poor — i.e., the majority of mankind on earth. You can see all this more clearly — from the street.
So with all that in mind, I offer the following definition:
Street Catholic, noun phrase
- A Catholic who imagines himself/herself as having left a comfortable pew in order to take up a symbolic “outsider” position on a street somewhere outside the sanctuary;
- A Catholic who has heard and is acting upon Pope Francis’ call to “go out to the peripheries”.
- A Catholic who works for solidarity with the poor in resistance to bourgeois Christianity;
The image of the outsider contemplating an institution in slow-motion collapse is not a new one. I think of the elderly St. Augustine in North Africa, hearing the news in 410 that the Goth leader Alaric, a professed Christian, had finally succeeded in entering the city of Rome before pillaging it for four days, leaving behind a landscape of corpses and ruin.
In a similar vein, Thomas Merton referred to himself as a “guilty bystander.” There’s Henri Nouwen’s wounded healer at work in what Pope Francis calls the world as a giant field hospital. Or we could think of Simone Weil’s comment, “Attachment is the great fabricator of illusions; reality can be obtained only by someone who is detached.”
Is the best stance for lay Catholics today to stand apart from the institution until it heals itself? Could such a position actually be a form of faithfulness?
I don’t attempt to answer such questions, I simply want to leave them hanging in the air.
