Blessings of Civic Presence

A few weeks ago, a friend was telling me how, at the old Catholic church in Auburn, after Mass, as people were gathered outside, cars would sometimes drive by and the people inside would yell insults at the church attendees. That was the old church, which was on one of the major streets downtown, with constant traffic at close distance, and the church opened directly out on the street. 

I was thinking about this as I was walking in downtown Opelika this morning, and noted how much of a civic presence the First Baptist Church has there. There is the Lee County Courthouse on one side of the main square, with its tall steeple, and on the south side of the square is the Baptist church, a huge white neoclassical complex with its own rival steeple. The church is not merely an institution of private worship; it is almost a public civic monument. The grounds of this church even enshrine the city’s Confederate memorial, a stone obelisk topped with a Confederate soldier toting a rifle. 

Contrast this with the new Catholic church in Auburn, which was built on cleared forest a mile north of downtown. This church doesn’t open onto the street; it opens into an interior hall. Few people stand outdoors after Mass, much less the conspicuously-vested clergy, and even if they did, there would be a vast expanse of parking lot between the doors of the church and the nearest street. And even if the church opened onto this street, it is a street where the cars drive so fast that they wouldn’t have much time to take notice of anything. And even if there were pedestrians, they may only be the occasional jogger on the sidewalk on the opposite side of the street.

There will never be anyone to drive by and yell anti-Catholic slurs at Auburn’s Catholics after Mass. We have retreated out of the civic sphere into the suburbs, into a private oasis separated from fast-moving disengaged motorists by an expanse of trees and lawn and ditch and asphalt.

Losing that 60s-era cupcake spaceship downtown was no loss, but the presence there was. At least they are building a Catholic student chapel closer to downtown. Hopefully it will be designed so that the students and clergy are blessed with the inconvenience of standing by the street after Mass so that they might be persecuted.