Canceling

A retreat is an odd mental space. The Core Committee of Southeastern Pennsylvania WOC met all day on September 24 and decided it would be a good idea to attend a presentation by the Director of the Office for the New Evangelization for Archdiocese of Philadelphia, Meghan Cokeley. “What Can We Do? The Role of the Laity in a Time of Crisis” was paired with a dinner at the Trinitarian Sisters’ Mother Boniface Spirituality Center. We anticipated an opportunity to talk with other lay people at dinner and to dialogue with Meghan after her presentation.

Grateful for the casual supper, three of us from WOC talked pleasantly with Trinitarian Sister Sara Butler and were later joined by two other lay people. Judy Heffernan had her “Ordain Women” button, so our agenda was not hidden, and we described ourselves as members of Intentional Eucharistic Communities (IEC); Ellie Harty spoke about being a member of a progressive parish as well. The six of us shared about our communities, Marie Collins’s recent speech here, and other resources in our area, including a residential IEC at the Trinitarians for post-college Catholics.

The presentation, which will be hosted at other locations around the archdiocese, addresses the sex abuse crisis and how laity can respond; questions were entertained afterwards. The February issue of our newsletter, Equal wRites, will consider the content in detail, so I am not going to summarize it now. But I have not been able to disengage from what happened after.

Another odd mental space is “cancel culture,” a phrase used in social media to describe rejection. An explanation by Meredith Clark, a professor at the University of Virginia’s department of media studies, was described in the New York Times. “Canceling, she said, is an act of withdrawing from someone whose expression — whether political, artistic or otherwise — was once welcome or at least tolerated, but no longer is.” This explanation pinpoints change – once, the canceled person was OK. Now, not, and that break is communicated.

It’s an online phenomenon, but not exclusively. Recently, the Times published six vignettes about cancel culture; the first is set in a Catholic high school. And even former President Obama has weighed in:

Mr. Obama spoke repeatedly of the role of social media in activism specifically, including the idea of what’s become known as “cancel culture,” which is much remarked upon, but still nebulously defined. It tends to refer to behavior that mostly plays out on the internet when someone has said or done something to which others object. That person is then condemned in a flurry of social media posts. Such people are often referred to as “canceled,” a way of saying that many others (and perhaps the places at which they work) are fed up with them and will have no more to do with them. … “That’s not activism. That’s not bringing about change,” he said. “If all you’re doing is casting stones, you’re probably not going to get that far. That’s easy to do.”

After the talk, we helped Meghan pick up the extra materials from the chairs and initiated a dialogue about women in church leadership. After a few brief exchanges, we were canceled, right there, in person. Meghan walked away, saying we have nothing to talk about. We were astonished, hurt, shaking – canceled.

This sudden immersion into the Catholic culture wars, the “spiritual combat” that characterizes the response to Pope Francis, according to Austen Ivereigh, might have been anticipated. Not all of the Core Committee felt we would be tolerated if we were honest. As the editors of the NCR say this week, “What Pope Francis has introduced in the synod process is literally unscripted territory for a church that, in recent decades, has merely pretended at dialogue about important issues.” I hope we did not wish to “merely pretend” – but we did want to be heard, as we were at dinner about the IECs and in the question period after the talk.

The odd space of the SEPA WOC retreat is being in a bubble of hope and fear: that this time the reaching out could result in a conversation. The odd space of the canceling is the bursting of that bubble. Are we naïve to think we are modeling ourselves on Francis, quoted this week about Paul’s approach to Athens, “building a bridge”? To believe the Pope is speaking about what we can expect from our church: “empathy,” not “hostility” or “contempt”? Certainly not canceling.

And please, dear God, let us not cancel others ourselves. Let us keep creating those bubbles of hope and fear because we honestly believe that bridges can be built.