Practicing Catholic

James Carroll

• Publisher: Mariner Books
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780547416489
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Denominations

A personal examination of the Catholic faith, its leaders, and its complicated history by a National Book Award–winning, New York Times -bestselling author. James Carroll turns to the notion of practice—both as a way to learn and a means of improvement—as a lens for this thoughtful and frank look at what it means to be Catholic. He acknowledges the slow and steady transformation of the Church from its darker medieval roots to a more pluralist and inclusive institution, charting along the way stories of powerful Catholic leaders (Pope John XXIII, Thomas Merton, John F. Kennedy) and historical milestones like Vatican II. These individuals and events represent progress for Carroll, a former priest, and as he considers the new meaning of belief in a world that is increasingly as secular as it is fundamentalist, he shows why the world needs a Church that is committed to faith and renewal. "Carroll, a former Catholic priest who wrote of his conflict with his father over the Vietnam War in An American Requiem, revisits and expands on that tension in this spiritual memoir infused with church history... Readers who, like Carroll, remain Catholic but wrestle with their church's positions on moral issues will most appreciate his story." — Publishers Weekly "Thought-provoking." — San Francisco Chronicle "[An] engrossing faith memoir... a page-turner." — Kirkus Reviews

Chapter One

BORN CATHOLIC

1. PAST, PRESENT, FUTURE

“WHO MADE YOU?” I was asked in catechism class by the nuns at St. Thomas More School. I knew the answer.

“And why did God make you?” The answer to that question remains the very marrow of my being: “To know, love, and serve Him in this life, and to be happy with Him in the next.” Knowledge plus love plus service equals happiness—such was my first arithmetic, and its simplicity formed my lives. There are two lives, I was taught, and they are divided by the moment of death. And, though by now the content of my faith in that next life is thoroughly undefined, it remains the punctuation mark of time as I experience it, making the idea of the future as permanent as the past and the present. And I say “the” future, not “a” future, preferring the article that implies no particularity, exactly because I do not know what to expect. I know only to expect.

As a way to measure the weight of the past, and to carry it forward into the future, belief in Jesus Christ, mediated through the Latin Church, has defined my existence, and still does. In Slaughterhouse-Five Kurt Vonnegut’s Billy Pilgrim writes that on the planet of Tralfamadore, “all moments, past, present, and future, always have existed, always will exist.” But what about the problem of transience here on earth? Is there any way a human can locate himself in eternity? The way I have found to do that is by asking three questions about Jesus: Who was he? Who is he? Who will he be?

So I begin with history, the memory of an actual man about whose actuality I know little but that, in an age of empire, he preferred service over sovereignty, a choice that led the empire to murder him. I know that, because of that preference, and despite his murder, he was recognized by his friends as having unique significance as God’s son, an awareness that struck them during the simple act of eating the meals he had regularly prepared. At table, the serving Jesus insisted that we are all God’s sons and daughters. After his death, that insistence took hold of his friends’ imagination—a taking-hold that, leaving doctrinal questions aside for now, is called the Resurrection. They, too, embraced service over sovereignty.

Jesus was a peasant of no social standing, but his actions and words were compelling. His friends, responding to him as a teacher of Jewish faith and as a resister of Roman occupation, were devoted to him and continued to revere him after death. Because the first followers of Jesus let him down when he needed them most, the community that grew out of their inability to let go of their affection for him was defined above all by its awareness of failure. Yes, what we call sin is a fact, but so is forgiveness. Those followers had forgiveness from Jesus himself, as so many of the stories about him declare. Therefore the Church is the community in which forgiveness is always necessary and always possible.

It matters that only gradually did his friends come to think of Jesus as the Jewish Messiah, and, even more gradually, as the Son of God. It matters that their sacred texts evolved slowly out of oral traditions, and then that the sacred texts themselves were only gradually selected from among many others, equally honored but never officially deemed “inspired.” This book will take up the story of these developments. The point here is that once we understand that doctrines evolved over time, we stop regarding them as timeless. The evolution of doctrine can continue.

In Jesus, after the fact, believers saw the presence of God, and in that faith, what we call Incarnation, they established the key idea of this religion—that human experience, far from being untrustworthy or contemptible, is itself God’s way of being in the world. The Church gives concrete expression to this idea by organizing itself around sacraments, which turn the key moments of life—birth, maturity, marriage, illness, death—into openings to transcendence. God the Great Unknown is nevertheless as routinely present as bread, wine, and a common word of love.

The illuminating meal with Jesus continues as the Eucharist, the Mass, the ritual to which we Catholics make our way each week in order to renew that first awareness. Sovereignty remains the great temptation, as nothing shows more eloquently than the Church’s own history, especially once it embraced the ethos of empire against which Jesus had set himself. But the Church is judged by its foundation, and is continually recalled to service by the memory of its founder. That is why we Catholics go to the table as much to be forgiven as to be fed.

Because all religious language is indirect, a matter of metaphor more than metaphysics, we know precious little about the present life of Jesus—his “presence”—except that at Mass it is “real.” How that is explained—from the first enthusiastic reports of resurrection to the philosophical conceit of transubstantiation—is less important than the visceral conviction that, in the sacrament, Jesus lives. The conviction is sustained by the presence of all those others at the table, which is why we Catholics prefer not to eat alone.

The past of history and the present of ritual point to a future fulfillment, which remains as undefined as it is, in faith, certain. With creation, God has begun something that includes its own forward momentum. When creation became aware of itself in the human person, that awareness carried an invitation to trust the momentum, without knowing where it goes. As we do not understand life’s origins, we cannot predict life’s ultimate fate. Enough to know, with Jesus, that God is God of this creation, and in the very act of creating life out of nothing, God forbids the return of nothing. The one who creates ex nihilo is no nihilist. Life is worthy of trust. The future belongs to God, but so does God’s creation. Therefore God’s creation has the future, too.

Without the Church—its memory of the past, its present ritual, its insistence on a future—I would be an orphan in time, and a prisoner of it. The past is a foreign country, yes, but Catholicism makes me one of its citizens, with my Irish forebears but with all the others, too. The Church is my time machine, taking me back through Rome’s tragic glory, the source of our vitality and vanity; through Christianity’s roots in Jewishness, the tradition that gave Jesus his measure of meaning (and which continues to this day as another mode of God’s presence to creation); through history into myth and all the way back to Adam and Eve, in whom human life itself, including fallibility, could be reckoned as the image of God. So with the future—forward not to spaceships but, according to the faith, to an undefined but sure life with the One who is life’s source and sustenance, a life in which nothing valuable of the past is lost.

“Absolute future” is another name for God, whom we more typically assign to the past.¹ But human experience is essentially a matter of an ever-expanding awareness, which is awareness of both the world and the self. That expansion is what drives the imagination forward, out of memory and into expectation. All of this unfolds in a relationship, for no person comes to awareness alone. The one in relation to whom this expansion of awareness ultimately unfolds, the one we continually expect, is the one we call God. In God the temporal categories of past, present, and future, which seem always to fall apart, fall together. Indeed, they do so in our experience, too, with the present being nothing but the instant intersection of the past and future, with the transitory character of all three being what makes them permanent. The myth of paradise is usually regarded as a story of the old days, but the Golden Age is the one that has not yet come.

Paradise, as Genesis portrays it, is the present moment in which the past and future both are lost. The story of the mistake of Adam and Eve provides us with the doctrine of Original Sin, a peculiarly Catholic reference, given compelling expression by St. Augustine in the fourth century. In fact, Genesis nowhere uses the word “Fall,” and it is important to acknowledge that the dogma of human fallenness, attached to the disobedience of Adam and Eve, comes not from the revealed Word of God but from its early interpreters.² For Catholics, the chief interpreter, in this regard, was Augustine. But sin was not all of it for him.

The first great theologian of the Western Church, Augustine elevated self-consciousness into an occasion of grace, and he did that through his self-consciousness as a writer. In his works³ Augustine defined, in effect, the markers of the momentum of creation, from simple being to being alive to being aware to being self-aware. From Homo sapiens, that is, comes Homo sapiens sapiens—the creature that knows it knows.⁴ Each individual human, however modest his or her circumstances, is all of creation aware of itself, across all of time and space. Human consciousness, even in its finitude, is unbounded in its reach. In that unboundedness Genesis saw an “image” of God, and Augustine saw God’s way of being in the world.

Augustine’s Confessions is a monument to one man’s exploration of his own experience, and his bold assertion is that in such exploration, the man can find his way to God. If the book I am writing has a license, it comes from Augustine—however short of Augustine’s achievement this work falls. Its premise is opposed to all those—from Augustine’s time to our own—who insist that the only way to God is through the authorized dogmas of orthodoxy, which are overseen by an ordered hierarchy. Augustine, ever alert to the dangers of narcissism, was a defender of orthodoxy, but at a deeper level, “winding down through the spirals of memory,” he was an exemplar of the search through human experience as the surest path to sacred illumination. The tensions we have already noted between past, present, and future gave shape in Augustine, for example, to a threefold mode of temporal consciousness in which he recognized nothing less than traces of the Trinity.

In Augustine’s supremely self-aware writing, the outrageous proclamation of Genesis, that human life is the very image of God, is applied to one life; one man applying it to himself. Augustine is a treasure not only of the Catholic tradition but of Western civilization, for in taking individual experience so seriously, as divinity’s own analogue, he planted seeds that sprouted into the literary genre of autobiography—and ultimately into the idea of democracy, which assumes the primacy of self-evidence. (“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights . . .”)

Yet Augustine’s reading of the Adam and Eve story is remembered as having put a cold stamp on the Christian mind, and that—more than his glorious celebration of self-exploration—must give this book its starting point.⁵ For him and others under the influence of philosophies that disdained physical existence in favor of the spiritual, the fateful sin, which Genesis defined only symbolically—eating fruit of the tree of knowledge—had a decidedly sexual component.⁶ That its first consequence was the shame Adam and Eve felt at their nakedness—“I was afraid because I was naked, so I hid”⁷—seemed to prove the point, and Catholicism was suspicious of sex ever after. “Concupiscence” is Augustine’s word for that suspicion, and I am sure it was the first four-syllable word I was ever taught to say.

There is an irony in the Catholic doctrine of Original Sin. A primordial fallenness was a shadow descending on the millennia to darken every life, even at its conception. But the expectation of moral disappointment is so thoroughly drummed into us that the Church’s own fallenness, evident most in its laughable claim to be unfallen, is not finally disqualifying. Speaking generally, Protestants believe that a church (small c, the visible institution) should seek to replicate the Church (large C, God’s invisible creation). When a church fails to do this, Protestants feel commissioned to leave the church (small c) to start a new and better church (again, small c). Catholics take for granted the universal condition of self-centeredness from which every person and institution needs to be redeemed. Yet the Church is always rendered as capital C. It’s imperfections do not disqualify it from being God’s. The Church, that is, is only its people. What’s the point of leaving? “To whom shall we go, Lord?” Peter asks Jesus.⁸ This can lead to a quietist tendency to acquiesce in the face of scandalous behavior, and Roman Catholics often do. Tyrannical popes? Abusive priests? The hypocrisies of the annulment game? Mafia money in the collection basket? Catholics hold to the principle of ex opere operato, which literally means “by the work worked.” Just by the proper performance of the ritual, an officiant in the state of mortal sin nevertheless validly enacts the sacraments. The priest at Mass can be drunk, but the bread is holy. Braced for the worst, we are not as surprised as we should be when it comes. That, too, is central to the story this book tells.

2. DE PROFUNDIS

I was born in a hospital named Little Company of Mary, on the South Side of Chicago, but really I was born in Original Sin. I associate the idea, in my first sense-memory, with the stench of the nearby stockyards, which gave me my dominating metaphor for hell. The yards were laid out, fifty years before I was born, in a perfect square, a mile on each side, straddling the terminal points of three great railroads. Their multitudinous activities, all designed to turn flesh into coin, were organized in a huge maze of animal pens. Tens of thousands of cattle, sheep, and hogs were daily run through long rutted chutes into one of two mammoth slaughterhouses from each of which tall graceful chimneys rose like the upraised fingers of a man going down for the third time. Into the air from those chimneys streamed tons of ash and smoke, the only unused vestige of animals that had been turned into hams and dressed beef as well as glue, brushes, and fertilizer. A cloud of sulfur dioxide poured into the prevailing winds that carried it across Chicago, but the most ferocious stench suffocated my neighborhood, Back of the Yards. It was the concentration of all the foulness. The odor was in the very wood of the floors I learned to crawl on. My nostrils first opened to the stink of death.⁹

The doctrine of Original Sin was the idea in the presence of which my religious awareness first opened. The cries of animals being sacrificed are part of this story, as are the cries of children being born. “Out of the depths I cry unto Thee, O Lord,” Psalm 130 begins, and I am sure that was the first psalm that ever registered with me. I knew what crying was, and I could guess what “depths” were. De profundis: even the Latin phrase by which the psalm is known is like a rod in my memory. The past has us by the throat even as we come into the world awash in blood. The stockyards give me my religion.

Animal sacrifice, after all, was the moral improvement, whatever the stench, that replaced human sacrifice, the breakthrough in consciousness, embodied in the story of Abraham, Isaac, and the miraculous ram that took the boy’s place upon the altar. The story was taken as God’s signal that the blood of a human person would never be required again. De profundis must have been the music I was hearing when I began to think this way. The line from that psalm takes me back so far in memory, and the Abraham-Isaac story pushes back even further.

But memory itself is the revelation. The past has the very future by the throat. How did I first learn this? Once again, memory tells me—a specific memory. It is a memory, intriguingly, of something that occurred at Mass, which is the symbolic sacrifice in which die animal—the Lamb of God—has itself been replaced by a man.¹⁰ God wills human sacrifice after all, but the beloved son this time is God’s own. Judging by the fact that, when I was on my knees at Church that morning, my chin did not come up as high as the edge of the pew in front of me, I could have been no more than five or six years old when the thing happened. I was next to my father. My mother was on the other side of him, and beside her was my brother Joe. The car-sized radiators on the nearby wall were hissing, a sound I attached to the other peculiar aroma, besides the yards, that stamped my youth—the perfume of candles and incense. It was the early morning Mass.

What I knew to wait for from other Masses I had attended was the happy jangling that broke the gloom when an altar boy shook his fist full of brass bells, filling the air. At last the ringing came, but this time, instead of craning toward the altar to see where the sound was coming from, I glanced up at the people around me. Just as I did, they all brought their closed fists sharply against their breasts while muttering something I did not understand. The bells faded, and I realized that the people having hit themselves was somehow tied to that glad sound. Then, before I could begin to take in what was happening, the bells rang out again, and once more the congregants slammed their fists against their breasts, saying something. This time I saw the blows for what they were, acts of real violence, cued to the bells. The bells rang and the people hit themselves. It happened once more. Three times the bent worshipers struck themselves hard enough to make me feel the pain. Domine, non sum digitus, they were saying, in unison with the priest. Domine, non sum dignus. Domine, non sum dignus. Much later, I would understand: “Lord, I am not worthy . . . Lord, I am not worthy . . . Lord, I am not worthy . . .”

An adaptation of what a Roman soldier said to Jesus, the full pre-Communion affirmation continues,“. . . but only say the word, and my soul shall be healed.”¹¹ But the people around me never made it as far as that act of hope, much as the prayer of de profundis never, in my hearing, went on to the promise of redemption. Unworthiness was all there was for these people, the depths their only home. Such explicit meaning eluded my consciousness, of course, but its emotional truth landed on me with full force. Associating the abject gesture of fist on breast with voices crying de profundis, I knew that something of enormous importance, as much for me as for the people I was part of, was happening right then. An oceanic question opened in my breast: What are you doing? And why?

The people from whom I spring were defined by the Chicago stocky...