Often, traditionalist or “conservative” Catholics cannot comprehend why rock music might be important for the theological life, and often, too, “liberal” Catholics affirm secular music’s importance. Radically progressive Catholics frequently join conservatives in dismay, but for different reasons.

However, all these positions tend to share a particular positioning of the Catholic believer: the stress is placed on mediation. Whether the exuberant humility of the traditionalist who looks to the Catechism or the conservative blogosphere for the matrix of permissions that constitute that complex of juridicisms known to Catholic modernity as “orthodoxy,” or the modest liberality of the liberal who looks to modern theology and its defense of both lowbrow mediations (“the people,” “Our Lady,” “sacramentals,” “relationships”) and of a theoretical “mediated immediacy” itself as the very essence of Catholicism, we are said to be Catholic beings who are nestled in the inevitability of a wombish concentricity of that through which divinity gives itself or meaning is procured. There is a striking convergence on the fomentation of a Catholic soul with mediation as its essence, which is another way of saying, with a sense for mediation, a respect for it, a connatural respondency to the exhortation to the mediation, being who a Catholic is.

In this construction of Catholic sensibility, one sees how it is possible that so many “believers” can stay in the Church and recognize each other as Catholics—even and often particularly through the mutual resentments of left and right that characterize the struggles over Catholic identity. To be Catholic within these — pardon the expressions — influential rhetorics or discourses, is to live with the exhortation to mediation, to desire the mediation. The predicament and the ambiguity of Catholic identity, then, is the desire for mediation. Remember that it is mostly Catholic progressives who defend the importance of locating mediation in that hardly assailable modern and romantic site of self-identity, the (Catholic and analogical) “imagination.” (This is what helps structure the scene, so confusing to outsiders, of liberal Catholics who can occupy a church with a patriarchal authority structure, who are typically deferential to Catholic authority, and who develop elaborate hermeneutics of authority and call those hermeneutics central to Catholicism itself. Mediation is a Catholic theodicy of practice.)

My point is not to critique these functions of mediation for the purpose of “exposing” their fraudulence or contingency but to try to appreciate their ascetic functioning for a Catholic postmodern subjectification, discipline, habitus: that is, the way in which the traps for identity are also houses, the way that one is ruled so as to be able to live, the tragedy of governance in religious identity, the small creativities that are predicated on docilities, all of which render the practice of fomenting Catholic identity thoroughly ambiguous, and that this ambiguity goes all the way down.

Tom Beaudoin

Hastings-on-Hudson, New York

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