Knocking on the Church’s Door: Who Will Greet Me?

I was raised in an anti-religious family; my parents were ethnic Jews, with a strong commitment to social justice and an equal commitment to the Old Left’s Marxian dogma that religion is the opiate of the masses. I accepted their litany of political virtues readily, but not thoughtlessly; that is, I came to know how to defend them ably, and I even learned to refute the wrong-headed opinions of the other side. (I still think the other side is mostly wrong.) My acceptance of my parents’ strong atheism and anti-clericalism was more complicated, probably because they were not willing (or not able) to argue on behalf of them; rather, those views were simply asserted. Religion-talk made me feel vaguely uncomfortable, and prayer embarrassed me, as if someone had belched at the dinner table. I was, unlike my parents, not anti-religious in the strong sense; religion was mostly irrelevant and occasionally moderately intrusive. I had the habit of mind of the Left, but I lacked the philosophical justifications to make atheism and anti-clericalism convictions.

My habit of mind continued unchallenged through my early days as a college student at Berkeley in the mid-1960s. Political and social issues dominated. But during these early college years, there were two small, but I now think significant, awakenings. First, during a strike on campus, one of my professors was prompted to hold classes in a nearby Lutheran church. (It had never occurred to me that there were churches in Berkeley.) He lectured on Thomas More’s Utopia in front of a glorious cross. I recall being surprisingly inspired and moved by the setting. Though I no longer remember the cause of the momentous events that led to the strike that brought us together there, the images and sounds of that day in church will never leave me.

Second, there was a trip home during a vacation, during which my parents played a recording of Tom Lehrer’s witty anti-Catholic “Vatican Rag.” My parents laughed, the assembled laughed, I laughed, but I unexpectedly found myself uncomfortable with this facile anti-Catholicism. How, I asked myself, can we be demeaning the beliefs and customs of Catholics when we are so protective of protesting Buddhists in Vietnam and so supportive of a black Baptist minister and his black Baptist marchers for civil rights? How can we defend Chicano farm workers who are reared in the Catholic faith and who celebrate the Catholic Mass at their public meetings while we make fun of the faith that sustains them?

Catholicism took hold of me during a junior year abroad in Italy. I suspect that its attraction was initially cultural, affecting me in ways that even today I barely understand. In those days in Italy there was a culture of Catholicism, but not hegemonic in the way that postmodernists want us to understand pervasive cultural patterns. It was the culture of an old Catholic people — unassuming, tolerant, and devout in a way that only people who know who they are can be. I saw their Catholicism in their churches, in their art, in their literature, and in their daily language and customs; it was reflected in the most private and quiet recesses of the smallest chapels and in the architecture and design of the noisiest public places. It was, I discovered one foggy mid-winter night, in the most surprising place of all, in their hearts. An Italian friend of mine, a fiery leftist, full of anger at the world’s injustices, critical of all the governmental and economic elites which perpetuated injustice, passed me that night as I was heading back to the dormitory.

“Where,” I said in my improving but still imperfect Italian, “are you going at this time of night?”

“To Mass,” he said, as casually as if he had told me he was going for a midnight snack. (I only later came to understand that he was seeking midnight nourishment.)

On he went and disappeared into the fog, as I stood there literally with my mouth open. It was then that I began to figure it out: I knew that my Italian friend could wander to the end of the earth and that God would bring him back to His Church with “a twitch upon the thread” (Evelyn Waugh), and I knew that the flame in that Church burnt not only for him but for me in the fog and gloom of an Italian winter. I knew then, even as I walked home in the opposite direction, that I really wanted to be going where he was going. I knew that his path to the Church would one day be mine.

I never forgot that the path was there, but graduate school, marriage, children, and career led me away from it. I waited for my twitch upon the thread; I waited for the tugging to become strong enough to lead me back. As my children grew, as I grew more secure in marriage and career, as I reached middle-age, I began to feel the pull ever stronger. I followed the path to the Church’s door, but I was startled by what I found inside: a Church that even my parents might find unobjectionable.

Several attempts at catechumen class proved unsettling. The laywoman in charge talked about spirituality in a disconnected, New Agey way; spirituality became a buzzword, one that seemed tailored to appeal to the marketplace of spirituality consumers, a word designed not to offend and not to mean much of anything, certainly not anything that had to do with the teachings and traditions of Catholicism. Spirituality appeared to me a kind of come-on: “Join us and you too can be spiritual.” (It reminded me of a colleague, who proudly told me that she detests religion, but is still “very spiritual.”) Questions were asked about the teachings of the Church, about liturgy, and about the Church’s stand on a variety of moral issues. In some cases, our leader was clueless (I was able to answer more questions than she); in other cases, we were told that the teachings and obligations of Catholicism were not crucial, because the Church had to have “meaning for you in your own way, according to your own spiritual needs and your own conscience.” Her view of Catholicism was not unlike Hollywood’s reconstruction of Thomas More, in A Man for All Seasons. More, in the Hollywood view, was acting not out of his devotion to the teachings of the Church — out of what it meant to be a Catholic — but out of Protestant conscience: He was merely questioning King Henry’s authority, rather than obeying the Pope’s.

One night a parish priest came to answer our questions. One man asked a rambling question about the Church’s teachings on abortion and how those teachings were to instruct us in our lives as citizens. The priest glibly assured us that he had voted for Clinton because he looked at the big picture rather than particular issues and because the abortion issue would be settled by the courts, legislatures, and new pharmaceuticals anyway. I was dismayed, not because the priest had voted for Clinton (I had too), but because of the casual dismissal of a burning moral issue and because an answer based on Church teachings had given way to calculation based on political and medical science. (I had agonized over my vote for Clinton, and I only voted for him with an appropriately guilty conscience. Besides, I was not a Catholic, let alone a Catholic priest.) Another person asked about Transubstantiation (the priest appeared surprised by the question). It seems that the Eucharist is whatever it means to you; don’t worry about heady distinctions between the Host as body and blood of Christ versus the Host as symbolism. (Flannery O’Connor once wrote in a letter, “Well, if it’s a symbol, to hell with it!”) Today old Tom Lehrer would hardly find a worthy target of his satire.

One of my daughters attends a Catholic high school. The academic education is better than she would get elsewhere in town, but the religious education and the campus ministry, with the exception of a community service requirement, are a curious and sometimes unseemly mixture of therapeutic processes, self-esteem jargon, touchy-feely interactions, and New-Age spirituality. No more “hate the sin, but love the sinner.” Instead, we have: There is no sin (the idea destroys self-esteem), and there are no sinners, only victims. These Catholic educators wallow in dysfunction and pay scant attention to the souls of the youngsters. They flutter at the mention of virtue, and close their ears to the mention of vice.

I know that the Catholicism I seek is still to be found. I found it one summer when I regularly attended Mass at a small Catholic church in North Boston. The parishioners were mostly Italian and mostly old; several of the priests had Italian accents, and some Masses were conducted in Italian. Here the culture of Catholicism is still alive, but it is aging. How will the culture of Catholicism be passed on to me and to future generations?

I have strayed from the path again, but I still feel the twitch upon the thread. I expect to follow the path again, to knock on the door, and to enter the Church, but it will be with a heavy heart.