On Sunday, with my latest broadside on matters Catholics filed and published, I drove with my family up into northwestern Connecticut — just for the drive, no particular destination in mind. We ended up stopping for mass at a shrine near Litchfield, built in imitation and honor of Lourdes, that I’d visited occasionally many years earlier with my parents. The place was mostly unchanged: A big expanse of land, gray and somewhat forbidding on a cloudy day with the trees half-gone toward winter; a grotto where they have outdoor masses in warmer weather; a long stations of the cross ascending a wooded hill to a lifesize Calvary; and various gift shops and outbuildings scattered around the grounds. One of the outbuildings doubles as a chapel, and that’s where the All Saints Day mass was held: In a crowded, close, carpeted space, with a mostly-gray haired congregation (we were some of the youngest people there) dressed in suburban- Catholic casual and packed into too-small chairs on three sides of the altar.

It was the kind of setting that would annoy a liturgical conservative and give a real traditionalist the hives, and while there was no guitar (that I noticed) the style of worship fit the space: The music mostly came from the Saint Louis Jesuits, (“Be Not Afraid,” etc.) the crucifix was dark and abstract and there was no other iconography to speak of, and the priest was a great ad-libber and elaborator, working his own reflections in here and there throughout the mass.

He also gave an excellent homily, one of the best I’ve heard in months. He was older, in his seventies I would guess, he had clearly spent a lot of his priesthood abroad, and he used stories from his travels — saying mass among Untouchable converts in India, visiting a nun-run shelter for battered wives in mafia country in the boot of Italy — as well as his old-school Catholic upbringing somewhere in the northeast to illustrate each of the beatitudes: Here an example of the poor in spirit, here an example of peacemaking, here an example of purity of heart. None of the choices were obvious, most of them were subtle, all of them were moving.

So was the whole atmosphere. As you would expect, the shrine attracts people dealing with illness — as I have been of late; we also lit a candle in the grotto for a friend suffering from cancer — and when the priest talked about November’s month of souls he mentioned how many people there (as I mentioned, it was an older crowd) had lost someone dear to them, and recently. The mood among the massgoers felt devotional, intense, very Catholic, and likewise the demographic mix, with the Polish/Irish/Italian mixture that you get among cradle Catholics in Connecticut leavened by pilgrims from further afield (an older Chinese couple behind us, a cluster of Caribbean women crying along the stations of the cross).

If I were asked to map the Catholicism visible at that shrine onto the theological debates currently dividing the church, I would probably peg the massgoers as loosely “conservative” — older John Paul II Catholics with a strongly Marian flavor to their faith, the sort of crowd that includes at least a few Medjugorje-goers and devotees of Catholicism’s version of Left Behind-style prophecies — while the priest I would classify as more “liberal,” based on his affect and style and age and a few asides in the sermon. But really the place and the people had the kind of “here comes everything” feel that defines a lot of precincts of American Catholicism — pre-Vatican II statuary on the grounds, post-Vatican II liturgy in the chapel, some ’70s Catholicism here and some JPII Catholicism there, some of it in tension and some of it working naturally together, but none of it suggesting divisions that the church could not necessarily struggle through for a while without actually dividing.

That image of a muddle was basically my view of American Catholicism writ large at the end of Benedict’s pontificate: The faith wasn’t obviously flourishing, certainly not in the way that bright conservative talk about a “new evangelization” or a “new springtime” would lead one to expect (did I mention the age of the crowd at the shrine?), but neither was it going to pieces the way it had, for a time, immediately after Vatican II. Decline but not exhaustion was how I described the situation, with persistent post-conciliar divisions but also a real unity in some places, a need for serious rebuilding but a certain doctrinal and institutional stability that many other Christian confessions lacked, and a cultural foundation that was weakened but not as weak as the deepest pessimists tended to believe.

I wasn’t sure what that rebuilding might ultimately look like, but mostly I expected the muddle to endure for a while, and I was very doubtful of visions that involved some sort of dramatic purge of theological liberalism from the church. (Of course I was skeptical of the liberal vision of a church transformed along “spirit of Vatican II” lines as well, but that probably goes without saying.) I found certain other possibilities more appealing: That the church might be able to transcend some of its post-1960s divisions and reach anew for the religious center, or (relatedly) that a form of liberal Catholicism might be able to renew itself, perhaps under Pope Francis’s inspiration, as a more biblically-rooted and orthodox force within the church. And I said as much, repeatedly, early in Francis’s pontificate, and have tried to keep saying so in different ways even as my view of the pope’s goals and intentions has grown more … critical.

But from early on under Francis I also had doubts (which I expressed in those same pieces) about whether a unify-and-transcend move was really possible in the current religious context. And if you’d asked me for a prediction two years ago, I would have expected that the reforming Francis era, like the restorationist Benedict era, would reveal the limits of any kind of top-down strategy for revitalizing the church, and leave Catholicism on the ground to keep just muddling through the post-Vatican II, post-John Paul II landscape, dealing with tensions and divisions but holding things in synthesis as best it could, and awaiting a longer time horizon before a definite path to renewal became apparent or the next big turning point arrived.

And as I salvo back and forth with the liberal theologate and the champions of a transformed view of Catholic marriage (or, as they prefer, a reformed pastoral approach to the same), I must say: That muddling through looks pretty good right now. It looks a little like the shrine in Litchfield, the kind of place that fits neither a sweeping restorationist vision for the church nor the aggressively-liberalizing vision of the Jesuit academy, a place that’s probably less a seedbed of revitalization than a kind of way station, a theological-liturgical bricolage, between different eras in the church’s history … but that for the time being delivers the consolations of Catholicism to people (myself included) in need of them, and does so without the feeling that you’re in the thick of an ecclesiastical battle while you’re on your knees in prayer.

Of course my critics, the supporters of what now appears to be Pope Francis’s clear agenda on second marriages and the sacraments, would retort that they aren’t the ones throwing lines like “welcome to the battlefield” back at their fellow Catholics; indeed, their whole (public) pitch is that the changes to the church’s marriage discipline that they support right now are just another form of muddling through, and that it’s only conservative hysterics (a group that includes an awful lot of bishops, cardinals and theologians, but I digress) who see some kind of radical discontinuity here, some sort of doctrine-shaking alteration, rather than a modest pastoral tweak.

I think they’re very wrong of course: I think the doctrinal and pastoral are intimately bound together, that the ordinary graces of the church exist because of its firm moral teachings rather than in some kind of tension with them, and I think that the war that broke out in the last two synods on the family is very much a war of choice for liberal Catholicism – launched in part out of optimism about the ground to be won with a clear progressive shift, and in part out of fear that muddling through with the post-1968 truce on doctrinal change is handing the Catholic future to conservatives.

But it’s the nature of civil wars that both sides think they’re aggressed-upon, both sides think the other is absurdly bellicose and that theirs is the side of restraint and sweet reason. Sometimes all that can be said for certain is: And the war came.

Except that it hasn’t fully come. It’s joined in the realm of blogs and tweets and op-ed columns, the realm of hacks like yours truly and distinguished Catholic theologians who may or may not incline toward heresy, and there it’s going to continue, and needs to continue on some level, both because doctrine really does matter and because of what the Francis era has revealed to us about the extent of theological division in Catholicism.

But as far as the church as an official teacher goes, the church as a permanent settler of questions — well, there the actual outcome of the synod was itself a characteristic post-Vatican II muddle, a compromise that offered more to liberals than the last two pontificates but also less than they (and Francis) plainly desired, and that didn’t take Catholicism over the precipice into doctrinal self-contradiction or Anglican-style geographical schism.

And though that muddle is too much of one to be a permanent solution on these issues, though in the long run I think the church will either reassert its teaching more firmly or go further down the path to liberalization and schism (or both!), for now the synod’s outcome really could be simply left alone: The pope could go back to talking about poverty and climate change, the intelligentsia could have its fights and different Catholic communities could continue to trace their particular trajectories.

I know I’m now on record girding for battle, but as Pope Francis ponders (and previews?) his post-synod exhortation it’s worth stressing one last time that he really could choose to just leave things where they are. There is still time for the war he’s started (or, if you prefer, that conservatives have started) to be contained, still time for his pontificate to take a different course than the one it’s been on ever since he elevated Walter Kasper’s proposals, still time for Francis to choose the muddle that John Paul and Benedict bequeathed to him over the war that would be required to go where many of his friends and allies would have Catholicism go.

Again, no muddle can last forever. But even in a muddle, even shot through with tensions and contradictions, the church delivers grace. I found a little of that this weekend; I hope that all Catholics can continue to find some in the territory ahead; and I hope, I very much hope, that when it comes to navigating that landscape, the Holy Father turns toward a different path.