Yes, I think that "story" is the most constructive way for me to think about the way Catholicism is expressed in the public venue. It is not just Catholicism, either -- it is a key feature in modern society generally speaking.
Beyond that, I think story-making is a feature of human intellect. Perhaps a primary one. Someday I'll try to build out this argument with more supporting detail, but right now I want to hurry through in outline form because soon it will get busy in the household.
Narrative theory has become a thing in psychology as well as to philosophy. The idea in psychology is that how successful people are in overcoming their past trauma is partly dependent on the nature of the story they tell themselves. Often their story has to replace in their minds the one told to them by those who traumatized them.
So when I describe the arguments of the different Catholic "genres" as working to large extent as stories rather than logical treatises, I'm not being dismissive. It's a way for me to understand it -- after all, my background is in literature. And ultimately, the Christian story is, over all, a story.
John O'Malley SJ, an influential Church historian, made the case that the Vatican II Council was and is an event, not just a collection of documents. By "event" he means something fairly technical but the broad picture is as follows (from a First Things review of his book):
O’Malley does not claim that the bishops in council actually voted to launch a new Catholicism. In this version of the spirit over the letter, what the council said is far less important than how it was said. The council was, he says, a “language-event.” The style is the substance is the spirit of the council. Eschewing scholastic language, “it thus moved from the dialectic of winning an argument to the dialogue of finding common ground.”
More obviously, it was also a religious and historical event:
It is commonly said, and with good reason, that the Second Vatican Council was the most important religious event of the twentieth century. If media coverage is a measure, it was second only to the war in Vietnam during the four council sessions from 1962 to 1965. It is also said to have been the largest deliberative meeting in history, with more than two thousand participating bishops from around the world, along with hundreds of theological experts (periti) and ecumenical observers who did much more than observe.
Because it was so much anticipated, so much covered during all its stages, and because it affected everyone's life so much -- not just all Catholics especially in media-influenced cultures, but all those around them as well -- for all these reasons, it is difficult not to have a "take" on the council even today.
And where other events like the World Wars or the moon landing have somewhat receded into the past, the Council seems more like the invention of the printing press or the computer. It is with us, late and soon. The mass you attend or don't attend, what you do or don't do for Friday penance, what you think of the pope, how you consider your vocation -- the whole thing can't be avoided unless you consciously stay away from it, which in itself takes a good deal of energy or failing that, a complete indifference to the whole Catholic project.
So it is inevitable that there will be stories.... narratives. That is how people deal. And inevitably, "founding myth" type stories have a loyalist aspect. You can see that all the way back to Scripture and to Homer and Virgil. Your story says a lot about your alliances, what you think is important, who or what is your adversary, your conflict. All stories have to have difficulties to overcome, a protagonist, some type of antagonist. A starting point, a crisis -- eventually a resolution -- an anticipated one, when you're in the middle of it, which is where we are now.
I'll leave it there for now. Just to complete the picture, I think it's important to note that the basic Catholic story is that of salvation history -- the one told in the Creed. Presumably all Catholics are in accord with that basic outline, so where our stories diverge is in our present historical circumstances.
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