Exploring Catholicism

Having been asked to write something further on my introduction to the Catholic Church (see my “Discovering Catholicism” in the March NOR), I initially reacted with cau­tion. I have been warned more than once that the bark of Peter is leaky; there are problems: bad clergy, acrimonious politics, perhaps even the abuse of power. I’m sure this is all true, but from where I stand as a new Catholic, these things seem trite in comparison to the spiritual riches I am finding.

I recently realized that my conversion was, at least in part, an answer to a prayer of mine. I had been subject to this vague and in­explicable feeling that I needed to grow more — but within my Protestant understanding there was nowhere to grow toward. I was raised in Presbyterian and Lutheran Sunday schools; they gave me a thorough spiritual foundation. But all the teaching I subsequently encountered was beginning to seem like watching reruns.

How could I grow closer to Christ? It seemed the only answer lay in being a mis­sionary or a preacher. But I felt distinctly uncalled to either calling. Certainly, loving more like Christ loved was part of the answer, and I don’t pretend to have accomplished that, but something else was missing. I felt this loss most acutely while at the C.S. Lewis Society Summer Workshops at St. Andrew’s (Roman Catholic) Priory on the high desert of Valyermo, California. Just standing in the chapel there, one seemed to tremble on the brink of eternity. There was something much bigger here and somehow I was on a plateau below it, held back.

When I became Episcopalian I felt as though I had moved a step closer. The liturgy and the sacrament were there. There was Fr. Alan Jones, and some ecumenical interplay with Catholics, but for me the vague hunger was still there. The brothers at Valyermo, especially Fr. Luke, who tirelessly answered questions, seemed to exude quietly something I couldn’t trace. The real kicker for me was Flannery O’Connor’s short story “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.” The character called “the Misfit,” a homicidal maniac, tells his vic­tim that,

He [Jesus] thrown everything off balance. If He did what He said, then it’s nothing for you to do but throw away everything and follow Him, and if He didn’t then it’s nothing for you to do but enjoy the few minutes you got left the best way you can….

Halfway measures were no good. And so I prayed to go deeper, a little fearful perhaps that what I was asking might take me on a costly, painful journey. Perhaps it still might. But looking back now, I am astonished to find that the answer to my prayer was my conver­sion. I feel as though I’d been wading in a stream up to my ankles and have just stepped over a barrier into a bottomless sea.

The only way I can account for this is to conclude that Protestantism is “thin” Chris­tianity. Religion needs to be thin and thick. A thin religion has moral direction and a thick one has mystic depth. I wonder if the Ref­ormation was not an attempt at reductionism, an effort to force Christianity to be “rational.” It’s as if, seeing abuses on the thick side of Christianity, the Reformers tried to trim that side off, reduce the faith to scruples, and make it pocket-sized. Perhaps the later attacks of 19th-century German Protestant theology — the attempt to trim the supernatural out of the faith — were the inevitable consequences of the trimming that began with the Reformation. And the trimming continues. In trying to make Christ less and less divine, those German theologians and their successors today have let Him slip away to the point where it’s debatable whether modernist Christianity is Christianity at all.

The most misunderstood elements of Catholic (as well as Anglican) Christianity are the deep, the mystic elements. The fear of the liturgical and the mysterious has driven many Protestants (literally: Protesters) into a ration­alist scrupulosity. Some forms of Protestantism get mighty thin indeed, so much so that a sour puritanism results. In reaction to this other Protestants (forever protesting, it seems) go overboard in the opposite direction and in­dulge in a too often vapid charismatic frenzy.

Then there is the fear of papal authority. I keep waiting and waiting for some great mis­statement to come out of the Church’s teach­ing office, but it just doesn’t come.

A little over a year ago I was reading an article in the evangelical Protestant magazine Christianity Today about a California priest with New Age leanings who fancied himself a guru and wished to mix one part Christianity with one part spiritualism and one part monism. Before reading very far I thought, “Someone ought to stand up and tell this guy he’s wrong.” In the next paragraph the Vatican’s Cardinal Ratzinger did just that. There, that’s why I became a Catholic. I wanted to be in a church where someone was not only willing to defend the Gospel but had the authority to make it stick. If this guru-priest had been Episcopalian he’d probably have been made a bishop. I grant there’s much to be said for open-mindedness, but being a Californian my­self, I can say that a lot of what is passed off as open-mindedness here is empty-headedness.

A lot of this fear of ecclesial authority seems to be peculiarly American. Rugged in­dividualism doesn’t exactly fit in with a hier­archical, authoritative church. I hear Protes­tants grumble that they don’t want anyone telling them what to believe. But the fact is, those same people, if evangelical, let Ss. Paul, Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, and Peter tell them regularly. It seems funny that many “rugged individualists” don’t mind instruction so long as it’s from a dead writer — who isn’t around to tell them what he really meant to say.

The last of my most recent discoveries has been a great relief to me. I have always felt a great discomfort with what is passed off as “witnessing.” The image that immediately comes to mind is of buttonholing passersby on Hollywood Blvd. and asking them if they know the “four spiritual laws.” Admittedly, I am a poor salesman, but there’s something hideous about treating people like customers and the Gospel like a commodity. This seems to me a typically American contortion of Christ’s command to spread the Gospel. And what’s more, despite all the apparent success this method has, I have yet to meet anyone instantly converted this way who now has a mature walk with Christ. Believe me, I’ve been looking. All the Christians I know came by a long and hard road. All the non-Chris­tians (and plenty of the Christians) I know consider this a bizarre practice, and I would have to agree. What really drove this home for me was the time I was eating lunch with some fellow English teachers of no religious persuasion. They were snickering at Jimmy Swaggart and Jim and Tammy Bakker. Then one of them added, “But that Mother Teresa is some lady.” There it was.

Only the foolish and easily misguided fall for the slick salesman. Is that the sort of “conversion” we want? But the quiet, self-sacrificial, Christ-like way of a humble nun silences the most cynical of critics. That is Catholic witness: the witness of not only words but action. Leave the telethon and amusement park Christianity to hucksters. Let Christ shine through us: That’s a better form of witnessing than florid and honey-tongued rhetoric. The best kind of verbal witness is one grounded in action and seen in one’s life.

And so I plunge deeper into the faith. A metaphor that comes to mind is St. Paul’s on milk and meat. Recently I’ve been delving into Romano Guardini, John Henry Newman, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and others. The list goes on longer than I can see, and each is a bite of red meat for one who has long since tired of the taste of milk. The Catholic exper­ience may not be rationalistic or reductionistic, but it has certainly generated a formidable intellectual endowment, not least in the last two centuries.

This brings me to an awkward question. At the risk of sounding smug and unecumenical, I fear I must say, as a literary man myself, that this problem of milk and meat is apparent in the literary world too. I mean, outside of such Anglicans — such near-Catholics — as C.S. Lewis and T.S. Eliot and Charles Wil­liams, where are the Protestant equivalents of Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh and Fran­cois Mauriac and Flannery O’Connor? Where are the “meaty” Protestant literary figures? Perhaps some Protestant readers can help me with an answer.