Back in the 1980s, during the reign of Pope John Paul II, conservative Roman Catholics minted a pejorative term for their coreligionists who thought independently, sometimes daring to differ with the Vatican over matters including contraception, homosexuality, women priests, and eating meat on Fridays. (Oh, right, the Vatican canceled that restriction a few decades ago--although some churches still put our calendars with half-tone images of fish on every Friday--along with the concept of Limbo as the permanent home of unbaptized babies.) Critics called such free-thinkers "cafeteria Catholics." In 1986, the magazine Fidelity wrote: "'Cafeteria Catholicism' allows us to pick those 'truths' by which we will measure our lives as Catholics." At the time I found this odd, having grown up in the church at a time when, even in parochial schools, we were taught the primacy of conscience. The term also lost much of its sting when national surveys showed that a majority of American Catholics ignored the church's doctrine against birth control and even abortion. But cafeteria Catholicism has had a surprising resurgence recently.
Continue reading The Changing Catholic Cafeteria.
