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A Peruvian Pessimism in the Catholic Church?
by Alejandro Bermudez 

Why do some Catholics just hate good news?

For decades, the Latinobarometro – a survey that compares political, social, cultural and religious tendencies among Latin Americans – has always shown Peruvians to be the most pessimistic people in South America.

Year after year, Peruvians top the survey when it comes to the number of people who respond “worse” to the question, “How do you think next year will look compared to this one?”

Even though since 2005, the country has entered one of the best periods in its history, Peruvians keep answering the Latinobarometro question with the same answer: “worse.”

The strange thing is that the alleged pessimism doesn’t show up at all on Peru’s Main Street: Peruvians are buying more new cars and houses than ever; restaurants can’t expand fast enough to keep with the demand; couples are marrying younger and families are having more kids.

This is hardly pessimistic behavior. An enterprising sociologist has recently decided to dig a little deeper to find out why Peruvians say the future is gloomy, but act as if better times are ahead.

Here’s what he found: Peruvians are actually extremely optimistic about the future, and more so than ever. But the shadows of so many past events still loom very large, and they are afraid – yes, simply afraid – of being disappointed by another national setback.

The vast majority of interviewed Peruvians admit that there are no reasonable facts to make one think that things will go south, but since “you never know,” it is safer to “be prepared” and think that by some act of God, things could get worse.

I found a completely different kind of fear of happiness among some Catholics after the announcement that the Vatican was getting ready to receive, for the first time since Henry VIII’s split, hundreds of thousands of Anglo-Catholics back into the fold of the Catholic Church.

It was not the irrational fear of poor Peruvians of being “jinxed” by joy. It was instead a very deliberate desire to be bitter about the Vatican’s initiative.

Personally, I was elated. I thought this was one of those moments that Catholics have been waiting to celebrate since … I was going to say Lepanto, but let’s stay Peruvian here. So let’s just say since a long time ago.

Before you think I am too naïve, just remember that I make a living as a journalist. I have long lost any expectation that the media has any capacity to concede that the Catholic Church can have anything but problems, much less a glorious moment.

The stories trying to show how this magnanimous and historic decision from Pope Benedict was going to be either irrelevant or bad for the Catholic Church were predictably ridiculous.

Everyone would lose with this move, they argued: the influx of Anglicans into the Catholic Church would cause unbearable pressure for married priests, very few Anglicans/Episcopalians would “pope” and, probably my favorite – the whole deal would cost “an awful lot of money.”

But again, the starting point of the secular media is that there is never a happy angle to a major Catholic news story.

I was curious how some “spirit of Vatican II” groups, like Future Church or Call to Action, would react to this momentous occasion.

Their reaction has been a reverse of the Peruvian syndrome: an undisguised distaste for the pope’s embrace of conservative Anglicans and a vague, wishful thinking that the newcomers will somehow resuscitate their graying, 1970s theology of sexual liberation, abortion and women priests.

Forget about the fact that the most tradition-loving, liturgically-conservative and anti-relativistic Anglicans are coming into the Catholic Church. And forget, too, that the Catholic Church could receive, just in the first stage, nearly half a million – yes, that's half a million – enthusiastic Christians who have been waiting for this moment for many decades.

The last time something of this kind happened was the Union of Brest-Litovsk in 1596, when millions of members of what is now the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church decided to accept Peter’s authority and seek communion with Rome. They came in, yes, with many married priests, and nothing changed then in the celibacy front. Because, more importantly, they came with a love for the pope and an evangelizing zeal that brought great renewal into their new spiritual home.

That is the bottom line of what is really happening here with Pope Benedict’s upcoming Constitution. We Catholics should be shamelessly rejoicing.

 

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(The views expressed in this column are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of Headline Bistro or the Knights of Columbus.)