ARTICLES

A Civilization Lost

LEADING CALIFORNIA HISTORIAN'S VIEW OF CHURCH

By Stephen Schwartz

Kevin Starr, the state of California's official librarian, is the "leading historian of California," according to the Economist magazine. Less well known is that he is both a Catholic activist and Catholic intellectual, serving as a longtime member of the Catholic Commission on Cultural and Intellectual Affairs, and as a regent at Saint Mary's College and Saint Patrick's Seminary.

Born in San Francisco in 1940, Starr graduated from the University of San Francisco, then gained a doctorate in American literature from Harvard University. He is the author of numerous books on California intellectual and political history. Beginning with his 1973 study, Americans and the California Dream, which quickly became a classic, Starr has produced a grand, epical series of books on the emergence of a unique civilization on the Pacific Coast. He is now under contract with Alfred Knopf to complete a major work on Catholics in America, emphasizing social and cultural considerations.

But Starr modestly declines the mantle of premier Catholic intellectual in California. "The leading Catholic intellectual in California is federal judge John Noonan, Jr., of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals," he said affably in a recent interview. He noted a list of other nominees as well, including Nobel Prize for Literature laureate Czeslaw Milosz, former national poet laureate Robert Hass, both of them faculty of the University of California, Berkeley, and Professor Kenneth Jowitt, their colleague in Berkeley's political science department.

If Starr is reluctant to accept kudos for his literary activities, he is anything but hesitant in discussing his Catholic faith and his belief in the Catholic personality and destiny of California.

"San Francisco is a profoundly Catholic city," he declared. "The names of all the local communities are a roll call of saints, the spires of Catholic cathedrals, churches, and shrines -- St. Mary's, SS. Peter and Paul, St. Francis' Shrine -- are visible throughout the city, so that everywhere one looks one is reminded of the Catholic presence here."

Catholicism is as much an intellectual factor in the San Francisco landscape as a physical and institutional one, according to Starr. "We are the first and oldest continuous tradition here," he insisted. "And long after the political battles have subsided the Church will remain and it will still be a Catholic San Francisco."

Starr is alarmed, however, at the prospect that expansion of the Catholic community in this country will take place without the cultural formation traditionally associated with Catholic life.

"On campuses around the state Catholics have arrived," he said. "They are functioning at the top levels of society, in education and the professions, but they are not that self-conscious as Catholics. They are missing an enormous part of the Catholic heritage. They were not nurtured on the rich, complex intellectual tradition of Catholic civilization."

Starr forthrightly blames the intellectual gap in contemporary Catholic life on the inept and irresponsible application of Vatican II.

"The new Catholics are more like Evangelical Catholics, in a certain way," he said. "The rich Catholic intellectual legacy was not transmitted to them, because in the wake of Vatican II the clergy walked away from formal Catholic culture as being irrelevant. It is up to the young people now to rediscover the depth, the richness, and variety present in Catholic civilization -- from Meister Eckhardt to Orestes Brownson and Mother Seton to the novels of Francois Mauriac."

Starr expressed pleasure at Pope John Paul II's recent encyclical stressing the importance of Catholic philosophers and concentrating on Saint Thomas Aquinas. But he warned that "because the vast, rich range of the Catholic intellectual tradition was repudiated by [the spirit of] Vatican II, the church today appears intellectually disarmed."

He recalled the larger presence of Catholicism in American life decades ago. "Thirty years ago Bishop Fulton Sheen was on television and embodied it all; he appeared in his cassock, [whereas] priests today don't want to wear cassocks. He represented the deep, instinctive civilization of the church, in contrast with a church where priests do not even want to wear black shirts and clerical collars. It's a trivial detail that goes hand in hand with the entire repudiation of Catholic civilization."

Starr has responded to the intellectual and cultural impoverishment of the post-Vatican II Church through a personal commitment. "I have compiled a bibliography of 300 Catholic classics," he said. "I give copies to young Catholic students at USC. I tell them they have to take on the responsibility of educating themselves in the glories and the richness of Catholic civilization because the priests and nuns have given it up."

"Large numbers of clergy were unhappy with their lives and departed after Vatican II," he said. "We have a lost generation of embittered National Catholic Reporter types who wanted to Protestantize the church and they did not succeed. In the more radical sisterhoods there are fewer and fewer candidates today. But a change is visible."

Starr believes the church retains important monastic resources. "Certain orders, like the Conventual Franciscans have not forgotten the legacy of Catholic civilization," he said. "Orders such as the Dominicans are now attracting young men. The Dominican sisters at Mission San Jose are flourishing. I was just at Mount Saint Mary's Seminary in Maryland -- I saw a group of bright, gifted young men, very proud to be seminarians, and proud of the culture of the church."

For Starr, the culture of the Church, and the Catholic nature of California culture, are central themes. "The key question is -- what is the Catholic quality of civilization in California? The Catholic content here is at a very high level. It was at the core of the state's founding; the Utopian Catholic impulse represented by the Franciscan missionaries laid down the basic identity, the cultural DNA, of the state. The early settlers were Catholics, throughout the Spanish period."

"The question of Catholic culture is important," he said."Our theology is based on finding God in the world, just as God appeared in the world as Christ. The incarnation is the first and last principle. We Catholics try to hold the world together; culture is not an idle ornamentation of our religion. It is sacramental."

In his view of the mystery of the eucharist, Starr also cleaves to tradition. "The liturgy is not there just to be pretty," he commented. "I feel the power of the Latin mass and I miss it totally to this day." He is pleased that, thanks to Pope John Paul II, "local people can petition for the reintroduction of the Latin mass."

But he also stresses his repudiation of gratituous factionalism. "I consider myself a conservative Catholic but not an embattled one," he said."I am totally episcopal as a Catholic," he said. "I am not interested in splitting away. Where the bishop is, there is the church," he said. "I constantly welcome correction by the church where I was wrong, and I will never join a splinter group."

Yet Starr is deeply concerned about the condition of the Church in an increasingly secularized America.

"The Church is taking an unjustified beating on sexual relations," he said. "The Church stands for dignity in these matters, because the Churchsees sexuality as a direct projection of the principle of God as love and believes that human sexuality and love represent principles derived from God."

He expresses outrage at the fate of women in America's hedonistic society. "What can we say about the position of women in a society that supports things like Hustler magazine?" he asked. "The Church stands up continuously for the rights of women," he said.

But here, too, the intellectual flakiness of the post-Vatican II Church is a visible problem, he acknowledges. "Because the church lacks an active group of intellectuals in this country prepared to defend it, its efforts for women suffer."

He is also worried about the Church's relations with the other monotheistic faiths on intellectual and cultural questions. "A real dialogue between Jews and Catholics has dried up in this country because Catholics have walked away from their intellectual tradition; they have given up on the whole sweep and drama of the presence of Catholicism in the U.S., which is as much involved with the shaping of social justice in America as with religious faith."

Starr trusts ordinary Catholics, rather than the clergy, to guarantee the Church's survival in America. "The clergy is not as intellectual as it used to be, and those who are intellectual are alienated from the laity," he said. "The laity are more conservative -- they don't buy the post-Vatican II hostility to Holy Father and to the magisterium."

One of Starr's main present commitments is his position as chairman of the California Gold Discovery to Statehood Sesquicentennial Commission, which, between now and the end of the year 2000, will commemorate the 150th anniversary of statehood in 1850. He is cautious about the church-baiting that has come to dominate discussion of early California history, in which the Franciscan missionary Junipero Serra has come under attack from "politically correct" advocates for the California Indians.

"My work as a state official, on the statehood commemoration, does not involve a program that is either Catholic or non-Catholic," he said. "The state has honored Serra. The state does not participate in Serra-bashing, and those who do will act on their own."

Starr is confident that California will one day return to her Catholic roots. "The blood of the martyrs in California, in the Spanish colonies in Florida, in the French missions in Canada, and the thousands of priests in remote frontier communities herald our spiritual destiny."

TOP