In defense of Felt Banners…

An open letter to lapsed Catholics thinking about what to do this Sunday…

So you left. Can't blame you, really. The scandals broke like a dam in slow motion — years of revelations, depositions, grand jury reports, and names you recognized from the parish bulletin appearing in contexts that made you physically ill. Or perhaps it wasn't even that. Perhaps it was merely the accumulated weight of watching the institutional Church lurch from one embarrassment to the next: bishops who seemed more concerned with their real estate portfolios than their flocks, curial officials who spoke of mercy with all the warmth of a tax assessor, and a general atmosphere of managerial Catholicism that suggested the Holy Spirit had been quietly replaced by a diocesan committee sometime around 1975. And, then, finally was Covid—when the institutional Church seemed to suggest through its mass closures that the Sacraments weren’t really all that necessary after all. [Thank you SSPX for your courage].

You looked at all of this, and you left. You took your baptismal certificate, your first-communion photograph, and whatever remained of your credulity, and you walked out.

And now I am here to tell you to come back. Not because the problems are solved — they are not — but because you never actually left the thing you thought you were leaving. And also because, frankly, the virtue of fortitude exists precisely for moments like this, and you were baptized into a tradition that does not regard "it was uncomfortable" as a satisfactory account of one's spiritual life.

What You Left

Let us be precise about what drove you out, because precision matters here.

You left an institution. You left a bureaucracy staffed by fallible, and in some cases morally catastrophic, human beings. You left the USCCB, which communicates with the gravitas of a faculty senate and the efficiency of a DMV. You left priests who should have been laicized, bishops who shuffled them instead, and a culture of clericalism so thick you could cut it with a thurible.

Fair enough. All of that is real. None of it is defensible. The abuse crisis was not a matter of a few bad apples — it was a systemic failure of institutional nerve that betrayed thousands of the most vulnerable. To say "the Church failed" in this regard is not anticlericalism. It is a fact.

But here is what you did not leave, because it is not leave-able: the Eucharist, the sacramental economy, two thousand years of saints, martyrs, mystics, and theologians who built Western civilization from the ruins of Rome. You did not leave Augustine or Aquinas. You did not leave Dante, or Francis of Assisi, or the anonymous monks who copied manuscripts through plagues and invasions so that philosophy itself might survive. You did not leave the Church Triumphant, which has never once hired a diocesan communications director. And, you didn’t leave because from the moment of your baptism, you were left with an indelible spiritual mark that remains.

What You Will Return To

Now, here is where charity demands honesty, because I will not deceive you about what Sunday morning in the average American parish currently looks like. Brace yourself. This is where fortitude enters the conversation.

You will return to a building that was almost certainly designed in 1971 by an architect who had just read one chapter of The Shape of the Liturgy and then made a series of irreversible decisions. There will be beige. And green. And more beige.

Then, the felt banners will greet you. They always greet you. They have been greeting people since the Ford administration and show no signs of retirement, because removing them would require a parish council vote, three subcommittee meetings, a listening session, and a letter to the diocesan office of worship, and no one has the remaining years of life to undertake this. The banners feature doves — always the doves — rendered in a style that suggests the artist was working from a description of a dove rather than any firsthand ornithological experience. One banner simply reads JOY in letters that have been slowly peeling since the Reagan administration, so that it now reads JO, which is either the name of someone's aunt or an incomplete imperative. And, right next to that one is the one that screams “REJO CE”.

The music will commence. The music is always the hardest part, and I say this as someone who believes in redemptive suffering. The cantor, a person of genuine devotion and unshakeable confidence, will lead the assembly in a gathering hymn written sometime between 1972 and 1985, during a period when Catholic composers believed the Church's primary liturgical problem was insufficient resemblance to a campfire singalong. The guitar will be accompanied by, depending on the parish, a piano played with more enthusiasm than technique, a flute, or in certain advanced cases, a full contemporary ensemble that will perform a Communion meditation that sounds remarkably like a bad 1997 Christian radio ballad, because it is.

"On Eagle's Wings" will appear. It always appears. It is the liturgical equivalent of a relative who shows up uninvited to every family gathering — you've stopped expecting them not to come; you've simply learned to smile and endure. You will feel things during this moment. They will not be holy things. They will be things in the vicinity of a mild existential crisis and homicidal rage. This is normal. This is, in fact, an invitation to practice what Aquinas identified as fortitudo — the virtue that moderates fear and daring, enabling the rational soul to endure difficulty in the pursuit of the genuine good. Thomas was writing about facing death on a battlefield, but he was also, in a spiritual sense, writing about "Gather Us In" and “Table of Plenty”.

The homily will run between eight and twenty minutes, a range so wide as to be meteorologically useless. It may be excellent. More likely it will contain a personal anecdote about the priest's childhood dog, a quotation misattributed to either G.K. Chesterton or Pope Francis, and a central thesis that could be summarized as "be nice." There will be a moment where he pauses for emphasis and you will mistake it for the end and begin to stand for the Creed, but it will not be the end.

The Sign of Peace will expand to fill whatever time is available, because the suburban American parish has interpreted this rubric as a networking event. You will shake fourteen hands. Someone will hug you. A child will wave at you from three pews back. It is not without its charms, though it does rather interrupt the anamnesis.

Why You Should Come Back Anyway — And Why "Comfort" Was Never The Point

Here is the argument that no one making comfortable religion will make to you, because it is not comfortable: you were not promised a beautiful liturgy. You were not promised competent bishops, or aesthetically coherent worship spaces, or music that does not make you want to drive into the sea. You were promised the Body and Blood of Christ, the forgiveness of sins, and eternal life. The contract does not mention production values.

The virtue of fortitude is not the virtue of enjoying difficulty. It is the virtue of enduring it for the sake of the genuine good, without either cowardice on one side or recklessness on the other. The cowardice, in this case, is leaving. Not because the grievances aren't real — they are — but because "I cannot sit through another responsorial psalm performed in the key of smooth jazz" is not, when held up against the Eucharist, a proportionate reason to abandon the sacramental life. The martyrs faced lions. Polycarp was burned alive. Maximilian Kolbe starved to death in a starvation bunker at Auschwitz and offered to do it in another man's place. You are being asked to sit through "Here I Am, Lord" for four minutes on a Sunday morning.

Fortitude scales to the challenge. But it does not disappear simply because the challenge is aesthetic rather than mortal. The tradition asks you to hold on, to show up, to stay — not because the institution deserves your loyalty on its own merits right now, but because the truth that underlies the institution remains the truth regardless of what the institution does with it. The Eucharist is either what the Church says it is, or it is the most elaborate and inexplicably persistent community theater in human history. If it is what the Church says it is, then every scandal, every episcopal coward, and every felt banner becomes secondary — a wound in the Body, not the death of it.

The Church is not well. It has not been well in various ways for centuries, which is one of the stronger arguments for its divine origin, because any purely human institution run this badly would have collapsed by the Council of Nicaea. It is still here. It will still be here. The question is whether you will and where the destiny of your eternal soul is directed.

One Practical Note

If your parish is genuinely unbearable — and some are, and this is not a small thing — it is worth knowing that the Traditional Latin Mass exists in more places than you think, that the Divine Liturgy of the Eastern Catholic Churches is both valid and transcendently beautiful, and that even the most aggressively contemporary suburban parish usually has a silent early-morning weekday Mass attended by seven elderly women who will pray for you with a ferocity that would unnerve a lesser saint.

Find your people. They are there. They know about the banners. They are also, stubbornly, still Catholic — which is, in the current moment, itself an act of fortitude.

Come home. Bring your anger. Bring your grief. Bring your critical faculties entirely intact. The REJO CE banner will welcome you with whatever letters it has left.

And remember, the Eucharist is not the banners.

It never was.