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Graham Greene was one of the most prolific of all Catholic novelists of the twentieth century. My review of this work was posted on Amazon today and can be found here.
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Over the last few weeks, I have been paging through recent publications in the area of “Ecclesiology” or the structure of the Church. I find that authors in the present day refer to a published work from 2000, The McDonaldization of the Church by John Drane, a British pastoral sociologist. When I first saw this term, I thought it was a put-on, to tell you the truth. But “McDonaldization” is a stand-alone term in sociological circles with its own Wikipedia site. The term was coined by sociologist George Ritzer in 1993. Ritzert defines The McDonaldization of Society as the process of American economy and culture adopting the characteristics of a fast-food restaurant.
As it applies to Christian Churches, the theory is used to explain, at least in part, why so many have given up on traditional church experience. _____________________________________________________ Pull up a Big Mac and Fries while I spread the menu. Ritzert breaks down the operational principles of a traditionally successful fast-food enterprise into four parts. The first is efficiency, or the optimal method for accomplishing a task. Among other things, efficiency includes the goal of delivering the goods in the fastest amount of time. “The fastest way to get from being hungry to being full.” The second is calculability. Objectives should be quantifiable (e.g., sales) rather than subjective (e.g., taste). McDonaldization promotes the notion that quantity equals quality, and that a large amount of product delivered to the customer in a short amount of time is the same as a high-quality product. This allows people to quantify how much they are getting versus how much they are paying. Workers in these organizations are judged by how fast they are instead of the quality of work they do. The third is predictability – standardized and uniform services. Predictability means that no matter where a person goes, they will receive the same service and receive the same product every time. This also applies to the workers in those organizations. Their tasks are highly repetitive, highly routine. Control – standardized and uniform employees, replacement of human by non-human technologies. ____________________________________________________ In our book at hand, The McDonaldization of the Church, Drane borrows the model for possible clues to the wholesale departure of members from the mainstream Protestant and Catholic Churches. Drane was writing in 2000; I would say that the parallel makes even better sense in 2021, and from this vantage point we get more useful insights into where American Catholicism has fallen into difficulties. I feel the need to state the obvious that the Catholic Church is not the same kind of organization as Dairy Queen or Burger King. However, Drane argues that the McDonald business model is so pervasive in America that it has become the secular template for public organizations, and that Catholics and Protestants alike have succumbed to a McChurch style almost subconsciously. And because of this, much of our public has grown weary of us and—in my opinion—we are paralyzed in regrouping ourselves after the Covid epidemic. Reading the four “McDonaldized” bullet points, it should be clear that any institution shaped to this model is going to have a difficult time with change, no matter from what cause, source, or motivation. In the case of McDonald’s, the twenty-first century saw several significant changes in customer expectations. Notably, many Americans started seeking healthier diets with less fat and more fiber, greater attention to the green movement, and better salaries, benefits, and working conditions for McDonald employees. The popular call for the $15/hour wage found in McDonald employees the poster children for labor reform. And, as more Americans work from home and on laptops, the furnishings and surroundings of the fast-food marketplaces required greater accommodations to these needs. McDonald’s has been perceived as slow to respond to this new environment. When the pandemic arrived in 2020, McDonald’s and other chains of that model found themselves caught flatfooted, having to depend exclusively on super long drive-through lines with a depleted workforce and restrictions on sit-down clients. My Publix Grocery chain reinvented itself immediately to shop for me and deliver the goods. McDonald’s was unable to do that. However, innovation is not a sure-fire recipe for success, either. In his 2008 book Onward: How Starbucks Fought for Its Life Without Losing Its Soul, CEO Howard Schulz, returning from an eight-year hiatus from the company, relates the fuss when Starbuck’s began serving hot breakfasts, perhaps hoping to capture a portion of the McDonald’s market. Every Starbuck’s outlet no longer smelled of coffee, he discovered. Rather, the aromatic ambiance of the coffee shops was burned cheese from the grill, a major turn-off in a business that features multiple exotic coffee blends. Ironically, one of Schulz’s first moves as CEO was company-wide attention to the actual brewing process of a cup of coffee. As research for this blog entry, I stopped into Starbucks yesterday on the way to Costco to see how the shop smelled. Fortunately, it smelled of coffee. [However, I ordered a frosted pumpkin scone with my delicious Pike Place, and at the first bite the frosting broke into a hundred pieces.] What both McDonalds and Starbucks teach is that customers are both traditional and innovative in that they want…and it is critical to listen to the clientele with both ears open. Drane cites William D. Hendricks’ Exit Interviews [1993] to explore how Christians became dissatisfied customers, so to speak, with their institutional communities of worship. At the time Hendricks conducted his studies, about 60,000 Christians in the U.S. were leaving organized churches every week. One interviewee, a returned missionary no less, said this: “I guess my problem with church is not that I’ve lost my faith or feel like it’s hopeless or that sort of thing. It’s more that I am bored with it. I go to church, and I hear sermons and I think, ‘I just don’t want to hear this.’” Hendricks goes on to say that “leaving the church often seems to be a consequence of people dealing with issues of personal maturity and growth in their lives.” [Drane, p. 5] Drane’s own observations tell him that people do not necessarily equate leaving the church with leaving faith. “They also frequently claim that leaving the church is actually a way of maintaining their faith.” One Amazon reviewer made a prescient observation in a post of several years ago about people leaving the church. “I think that half of the people who stay [in the church] feel the same way as people who leave. It would take just one big crisis for them to leave, too.” Indeed, the Covid-19 crisis may have been that deciding moment when, having lived without weekly Mass for extended periods of time, many Catholics have discovered that they can survive—perhaps even thrive—with alternative religious experience, or on the contrary, that they can live without the Sunday community gathering altogether. Covid did not exactly create the mindset of a mass exodus; more likely, it exacerbated an already existent exodus which had [or has] two distinct populations: those who leave the church physically; and those who have left the church psychologically but continue to attend out of habit, social attraction, or family influence. There is no hard research yet on the sociological/religious impact of Covid on Catholic membership, in part because the Delta variant continues to wreak havoc on social life here in Florida and elsewhere as I write today. It pains me to report that, anecdotally speaking, after my pastor requested that everyone wear masks to Mass, a full 40% of Mass-goers do not wear them at my Saturday night Mass, one that historically is attended by many elderly and vulnerable persons. That act of diffidence/defiance has done nothing to warm my heart toward the idea of the Eucharistic meal as a communal celebration of love and concern. Under different circumstances, maybe this would be enough to send me looking elsewhere for genuine religious experience. In Chapter 5, “Celebrating the Faith,” Drane examines the worship experiences of the various churches—he is most taken with Catholic worship—and the fashion in which McDonaldization has shaped even the ways we worship together. It is his conclusion that a fast-food mentality such as those cited above has driven many from regular worship, even if subconsciously. Generally, when someone leaves church worship, the reasons generally given are poor preaching, boredom, and personal irrelevance. All these tags convey a loss of visceral, personal connectedness with both the rites of worship and the congregation itself. I agree to a point with Drane that separation from the Eucharist is not generally a deliberate act of disaffiliation from God. In fact, it may be the most authentic act of an adult’s life, maybe the first, something we should bear in mind in our thoughts about evangelization. Drane states that one of the best analyses of the problems of worship comes from a 1978 directive booklet from the American Bishops, today’s USCCB, entitled Environment and Art in Catholic Worship. Amazingly, this work is virtually out of print in 2021 [and it shows]. But Drane quotes these points from the U.S. bishops over forty years ago: “Liturgy has historically suffered from a kind of minimalism and an overriding concern for efficiency…. As our symbols tended in practice to shrivel up and petrify, they became much more manageable and efficient.” [p. 97, italics the author’s] As examples, Drane points to the manufactured bread wafers used in the Catholic Mass and the limited amounts of water used in Baptism, both of which scream of a minimalism and economy that belie the luxurious outpouring of God’s goodness in the person and actions of Jesus. To this I can add an observation from the late Benedictine liturgist, Father Aidan Kavanaugh, made in my presence at a workshop many years ago: “When we celebrate the sacrament of Confirmation, the greatest act of faith is not that the Holy Spirit is descending from heaven, but rather that the bishop is really using oil.” [Psalm 133:3, “It is like fine oil on the head, running down on the beard, running down Aaron’s beard over the collar of his robes.”] The minimalism and practicality of a corporate mentality infects church architecture. Consider the pews, which render us immobile and prevent us from seeing one another as we share the common meal of people of faith. I come close to breaking my ankles during the kiss of peace. But more than that, the very sermon of the Mass is a neatly packaged ferverino that says little to engage the passions that true religion engenders. I believe it was the famous theologian Karl Barth who told his students that when they finished their preaching, their listeners should desire to stand up and request to be baptized again. Drane’s summary of the McDonaldization process stresses that the customers get the same thing every visit at every location. This is a recipe for stagnation. Although I was never a big McDonald’s fan, at some point I abandoned them entirely for Panera’s or Dunkin’s or Barney’s as my life, my health, and my tastes evolved. There is good research [certainly bolstered by anecdote] that those raised as Catholics have moved on to other churches, generally either the Episcopal Church or one of the Evangelical communions. I wish I knew what they were looking for and how we failed. Looking at Catholic life, we don’t really have the collective pastoral skill of listening to and deciphering with our people—all of them—as they navigate their faith lives through the decades of their adulthood. In my darker moments, I fear that our hierarchy does not really want to know—for reasons that are very understandable to those that are unconscionable. Equally troubling is an internal assumption that we have all the answers to what we believe to be the important questions in the journey of faith. Management decides, customers pay. We assume that the Holy Spirit’s primary gift is compliance, an assumption that short circuits the divine charisms poured out at the initiation sacraments of Baptism, Confirmation, and Eucharist to every new member of the Body of Christ. The novelist Graham Greene confided to the priest instructing him for baptism that he could believe everything the church teaches, except that he wasn’t sure about the existence of God. The priest baptized him anyway, aware that Greene’s wrestling with the God question was itself a sign of divine stirring. Presumably, they continued to partner on Greene’s journey. A business that does not habitually hear the legitimate needs of its clientele is in trouble. Perhaps the efforts of Pope Francis to establish the concept of Synodality—a Spirit-filled sharing of faith, insight, and direction—may become a template for the post-Covid era Church. For the moment, at least, we can hope that the church learns from the mistakes of a McDonaldized era, at least to the degree that the restaurant manager visits each table to hear the diners every night. The biographer Richard Greene opens his epic biography of the Catholic novelist Graham Greene [1904-1991] with a scene from the author’s life in 1951 where he served as a British journalist [and possible spy for England’s MI6?] in the heart of Viet Nam. The French were fighting a losing battle to hold their colony; the final defeat would occur in Dien Bien Phu in 1954. Graham Greene was nothing if not a front-line reporter, and he joined the French in a coastal assault from the Gulf of Tonkin south of Hanoi.
Despite heavy fire, Greene stops to survey the damage around him. “It reminded him of the Blitz, but with many more corpses, some sticking out of a canal. In a sight he would never forget, he came upon a mother and her tiny son dead in a ditch. They had wandered into the field of fire between the French and the Viet Minh and had been brought down by just two shots, apparently French. Greene remembered especially ‘the neatness of their bullet wounds.’ These were his people—Catholics.” [p. xi.] Greene, thinking his own life might be coming to an end, found a Belgian priest who heard his confession. Despite being abandoned in the field by the French who suspected he was a spy given his World War II duties in intelligence, Greene navigated himself to the relative safety of the South. This and similar experiences in Viet Nam provided him the setting for one of his best-known novels, The Quiet American [1955]. In 2007, long after Graham Greene’s death, President George W. Bush, then engaged in the Iraqi War, made a remarkable reference to The Quiet American in a speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars. “In 1955, long before the United States had entered the [Viet Nam] war, Graham Greene wrote a novel called The Quiet American. It was set in Saigon, and the main character was a young government agent named Alden Pyle. He was a symbol of American purpose and patriotism—and dangerous naivete. Another character describes Alden this way: ‘I never knew a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused.’” [p. xiii.] Richard Greene’s biography, A Life of Graham Greene: The Unquiet Englishman [2021] is worthy of a read on many levels. Few people live as complex a life as Greene; few—probably no—writers produced a canon of memorable novels and plays as Greene in the twentieth century; few lived Catholicism in quite the fashion as Greene, which is not to say he was saintly. At first, I was inclined to say that his life merited a long stretch in Purgatory. But his biographer gives us plenty of detail to appreciate that Greene’s life contained its full share of anxiety and doubt. He suffered from depression and early in his adult life attempted suicide via a round of Russian roulette. His conscience was well developed with an eye toward impoverished populations and his soul could be roused to deep-seated anger at the sight of injustice. He took special interest in the various revolutions in Central and South America, and elsewhere, finding himself in the turmoil that resulted in the martyrdoms of Father Oscar Romero and the four American church women in El Salvador. Graham Greene was the son of an English headmaster and exposed to book reading and inspiring story telling in this academic setting. Later he would write that “early reading has far more influence on conduct than any religious teaching.” [p. 8] This recollection is not as cynical as it may seem, for most of Greene’s career writing was value laden. I have long believed that good literature has a valuable role in catechetics. Greene began to write as a student at Oxford University, and for a time was a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain, even hoping to visit the Soviet Union. It was during this period of his life that he suffered from major depression. His biographer writes that Greene was later diagnosed as suffering from bipolar disorder. “Over the years he was always reckless and inclined to boredom; suicidal depressions would sometimes give way to euphoria; he was thrill-seeking, promiscuous, and hard drinking; he misused drugs—common enough features of the illness.” [p. 15] It is certainly true that Greene possessed large amounts of energy. When one looks at his body of written work and his extensive travels, it is amazing that he possessed the self-control and discipline to produce tightly edited novels. After graduation he began his career as a journalist and set off to cover the Irish troubles as a free lancer at some considerable risk to himself. In another piece called “the Average Film” he made irreverent reference to worship of the Virgin Mary. He received a correcting letter from a fervent Catholic, Vivienne Dayrell-Browning, and within several weeks he was in love with her. Browning, on the other hand, was in love with the idea of consecrated virginity in the Catholic tradition. Greene courted her energetically to the point of introducing himself to Catholicism. In a happy coincidence Greene approached a priest, George Trollope, for his conversion instructions. Trollope had been a seasoned actor before entering the seminary as a “late vocation.” His biographer comments that “Greene detected a sorrow in Trollope, a yearning for his old life. [p. 43] In his autobiography Greene confides that his biggest struggle with Catholicism was not its doctrines, but belief in God, period. Greene met with Trollope at least twice a week and even accompanied him on his pastoral rounds. His respect for Trollope as well as his affections for Vivienne were the determining factors in his acceptance of baptism. He admitted later that he did not have much emotional connectedness to Catholicism until he went to Mexico and witnessed the persecution of Catholics. However, his biographer cites numerous examples of Greene’s seeking consolation His 1937 foray into Mexico was the inspiration for his most “Catholic” novel, The Power and the Glory [1940]. Some considerable planning went into this trip, the brainchild of the Catholic publisher Frank Sheed in conjunction with the Vatican and Mexican Church authorities. Greene, by now a visible force in the literary world, would tour the country to document a novel on the anticlerical Mexican government which had arrested and executed many Catholic priests. Biographer Greene details the novelist’s navigation of the country where anticlerical dictators were gradually being replaced but where functioning parish churches were still few. In Tabasco Greene encountered the true “whisky priest” he would immortalize in his subsequent novel. A fugitive priest living in a nearby swamp would come into civilization only during the night. A doctor would tell Greene that he brought one of his sons to the priest for baptism. “He is what we call a whisky priest.” The drunken priest insisted on naming the boy “Brigitta.” [p. 119] The Power and the Glory proved to be the most famous of Greene’s novels and the one most overtly identified with his Catholicism, eccentric as his practice might be. Greene fretted then and throughout his life about the meaning of a Catholic novelist, wondering how a Catholic sense of the soul and of providence altered the craft of fiction. Biographer Greene put it this way: “a good writer who happens to be a Catholic is going to be different from a writer who happens to be something else.” [p. 106] Curiously, Greene was sometimes at odds with various components of Catholicism. In the 1950’s the Vatican considered banning The Power and the Glory on the grounds that its portrayal of the whisky priest would scandalize the “simple faithful.” [pp. 248-250] When The Quiet American was published in 1955, many Catholics on the right in the United States were offended by the caricature of a meddling, dangerous U.S. bureaucrat. The Quiet American [1955] captivated me when I read it for the first time during the Covid lockdown last year. [See my Amazon review.] Although it is not “overtly Catholic” the theme of the work is the immorality of first world colonialism. For a reader with a historical bent, this is a chilling work that details the ugly underbelly of the expulsion of the French from the Vietnamese peninsula in 1954. The title of the book is a parody: the young American bureaucrat never stops talking and exhausts the aging British war reporter who tries to save him from himself. Greene produced this work about five years before the United States began sending the first wave of advisors which would lead to the wholesale Viet Nam war of the 1960’s ans 1970's. Greene’s career took him to Hollywood, where several of his novels were made into movies through the twentieth century, but his wanderlust continued to take him around the world and particularly where there was “action,” which generally meant social upheaval. He was one of few people to visit Cuba and interview Fidel Castro. Castro confided to Greene that he believed the Catholic Church and communism had much in common. Greene had been sympathetic to the revolution and the overthrow of Batista, but as he came to know the new generation of Cuban reformers, he remarked “I do not wish to live long enough to see this revolution middle-aged.” [p. 375] Greene made several forays into El Salvador during the country’s bitter civil strife during the 1970’s and 1980’s, even intervening in the hostage negotiations involving Salvadorian rebels and three captive businessmen. The murders of Father Oscar Romero and the four American religious women missionaries were appalling to him. But by this stage of his life Greene was no wide-eyed idealist. His biographer writes that “It is usually assumed that Greene was swept along by enthusiasm for rebel movements. He wasn’t.” [p. 467] He was a close observer of the U.S. handover of the Panama Canal and a confidante of Panamanian president Omar Torrijos, who confided to Greene that, like the author, Torrijos had a depressive and self-destructive streak. Greene returned to regular observance of the sacraments in his later years, in part through a close friendship with a priest who vacationed with him for years. He placed great store in the prayers of other people and having Masses offered for his intentions. He still carried an agnostic strain and did not like the authoritarian style of Pope John Paul II. He maintained a close friendship with the Catholic theologian Hans Kung and thanked him for “helping me keep one foot in the Catholic Church.” In his final reflective years Greene sometimes considered that he might have been a better fit in the Episcopal Church. But his biographer offers a telling point: “The Catholic church was where almost a billion of the world’s poorest people brought their deepest yearnings, and Graham Greene was unlikely to walk away from that.” [p. 503] Richard Greene’s biography is a captivating piece of literature in its own right. This is a lively narrative of an intriguing human being and the world in which he resided. Richard Greene is respectfully honest and balanced. He leaves critical analyses of Graham Greene’s work to specialists while at the same time inviting the reader into the formative influences of the writer’s mind. The biographer’s treatment of Graham Greene’s Catholicism is satisfying to the point that we have some sense of how an imperfect practitioner of the faith can still convey his religious values. It was this imperfect Graham Greene who serves as a hopeful paradigm for every one of us who still labors with internal regions of unbelief and human failure—in his story, and in his stories. The Amazon link to Richard Greene’s biography, The Unquiet Englishman, is here. There is a Graham Greene website which features information on everything Greene, from his books to walking tours of all the cities he visited, which can be found here. Many of Graham Greene’s books have been made into movies. The trailer for The Quiet American is here; for The Power and the Glory, here; for Our Man in Havana, here. Normally, when I select and review books for the Catechist Café, I turn to major publishers such as Paulist Press or Yale University Press. But today’s offering comes from a longtime friend—one of my “campus ministry gang” from the 1970’s when I served as a college chaplain. Say what you will about Facebook, but nothing beats it for meeting old folks with good memories. Thus it was that I reconnected on FB with Claudia Verruto Bernstein [Claudia Verruto back then] and learned of her 2012 work, “The Last Day I Had a Daddy.”] Having read the book this weekend I was immediately captivated by two qualities. First, this is a very brief but captivating story narrated in a child’s voice but with an adult’s hindsight; and second, there is a treasure of here of catechetical and mental health wisdom for any of us who care for children and shape their religious outlook.
Louis Verruto is remembered by his daughter as a very attentive and affectionate man. He operated a small shoe repair shop close enough to his home that the author, at the age of seven, was able to ride her bike to meet him at closing time and accompany him home. In the evenings he would contribute to her piggy bank and read her a story. One of his most important projects as the narrative begins is his work on his daughter’s First Communion shoes, in preparation for her big day just three weeks off. As we readers know where the story is headed, there is a nervous anticipation in this description of an idyllic domestic existence. The author quotes herself at the time, “I can’t imagine how this day could be any more perfect.” [p. 7] Life stopped being perfect on a glorious fall afternoon. I can recall my own reactions in 2001 to learning from police at 4:30 AM that my 26-year-old stepson had been killed suddenly on his way to work by a drunk driver, but I was 53 years old at the time and my primary concern was my wife. Awful as it was, my own safety and sanity was not turned upside down. Consider, though, the multifaceted dimensions of crisis experienced by a child. We are privy to the author’s reactions in sharp detail, which give us immense insight in how to care for youngsters in such circumstances. Elizabeth Kubler-Ross’s stages of grief—shock, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance—are as applicable to children in many respects as to adults, and they play out in the author’s post-mortem reactions in ways that are uncanny, though students of Kubler-Ross remind us that “these stages occur neither with predictable regularity nor in any set order.” The author’s anger wells up with her First Communion, for example, where she had prayed earnestly for a miracle on her big day, that by some divine intervention she might see her father when she processed into church. “I was mad at the angels. I was mad at Sister Regina. There were no miracles because if there were, Daddy would have walked home with me, just like always. And I was mad at daddy! Why didn’t he come? Why?” [p. 34] If anecdotal evidence means anything, I have encountered adult patients who told me they were still angry that as children they were not permitted to attend the funeral of a loved one in the family. Fifty years ago, this was the accepted wisdom of the times, and the author’s mother had her stay with relatives in another town during the five days around the funeral. When I interned for family psychotherapy in 1988 my supervisors were adamant that children should participate in family funerals. As I write this entry, my wife Margaret reminded me that in some cultures grieving widows or other adult relatives throwing themselves on the coffin was de rigour, a sight that might indeed unnerve a child. However, a child does not need to go to the graveside to have a meaningful involvement in what Catholicism considers a cathartic encounter with God. How we talk about God and death to children in catechetical or instructional settings requires exquisite care. Language that suggests God is the administrative agent who terminates life prematurely for his own purposes can be easily misinterpreted, as happens here. [pp. 32-33] The author recalls “I remember what Sister Regina said at school: if you pray very hard, miracles can happen. Mommy said that the angels took daddy up to Heaven. Maybe if I prayed very hard, they would bring him back. A miracle, my miracle.” As well intentioned as we are, our guidance language is heard in absolutes: if God taketh away, God can giveth, too, for the right effort. Kubler-Ross came to recognize the bargaining stratagem in her own patients. Thousands of Catholic adults visit Lourdes every year with the same hope. Little mystery as to why the next stage in grieving is depression, which in children and adolescents can manifests itself in irritability and anger. The author admits to a significant period of angry depression which only began to lift through the ministrations of her older brother, also named Louis, a young man whose wisdom far exceeded his age. Louis intuitively drew from the richness of the Catholic tradition of sacramentals, or holy signs. He explains to her that “[T]he heart is like a camera, Claudia. It takes pictures of who we love and our mind is like the photograph album the pictures are stored in. The pictures are called memories. And we have lots of them with Daddy.” [p. 46] The author herself may have subconsciously drawn from this sacramental stream in her multiple allusions to her First Communion shoes from her father, which I would wager she still owns today. The loss of a parent in the prime of life is a difficult subject to address. Would I recommend this work to young people? I would say this. The author intended this work for young people, and probably for the people who care for them. We live in a world where children rehearse for school shootings. If we do not address death in our family and religious settings, how do we and they become skilled in ministering to young people in various states of grief and loss? Ministering in these circumstances calls for a measure of counterintuitive measures. Avoiding pain is not always a productive or healing strategy. I would note, too, that young people are sometimes the best helpers of each other. I would recommend to catechists, for example, that they consider a work such as this for group discussion, perhaps concurrently with parent groups. Amazon is presently out of the book. You can contact the author at (1) The Last Day I Had a Daddy - Posts | Facebook The British author Graham Green [1904-1991] reputedly converted to Catholicism to endear himself to a girl friend, but his novels and correspondence give evidence of a livelong love and struggle with the meaning of life, for which Catholicism provided the most useful metaphors of his inner turmoil. His most famous work, The Power and the Glory, [1940] has bestowed upon us the immortal figure of “the whiskey priest,” caught up in the Mexican persecution of Catholics earlier in the century.
I came to Greene somewhat late in life and began my association with The Quiet American [1955]. This work appeared one year after Dien Bien Phu, the siege in which Vietnamese forces drove the colonial French from the peninsula and set the stage for the subsequent internal struggle over Viet Nam that would draw hundreds of thousands of American troops into a bloody Asian quagmire. Neither the author nor the characters in the book can see this far into the future, as the narrative is set in the early 1950’s while the French struggled to hang on, but to the reader of 2021 the tale is rife with foreboding of what lie ahead for the people of Viet Nam and the United States. My childhood catechetics instilled in me the reality of two ultimate judgments: a personal one at the time of my death and a final universal one at the end of time. After a lifetime of reading and experience it is harder for me to sort out how they overlap in Venn diagram fashion. My theological and psychological experience has taught me that there is no true personal sin, i.e., an immoral act or attitude without social consequences. Even the most secret of evil transgressions is a wound to the Body of Christ. On the other hand, how accountable am I for the sins of my forefathers, or for that matter, of the dishonesties and crimes of current institutions that make up my world, including church, government, business? Greene, very much aware of his personal weaknesses even after his conversion to Catholicism, appears to struggle with such questions. The Quiet American is a story that screams for judgment but placing it is elusive. Based in Saigon, the narrator is Thomas Fowler, a grizzled British journalist on assignment to cover the last days of French colonial control of the Vietnamese peninsula. He has a wife back home and something of a common law wife, Phuong, in Saigon with whom he drinks, copulates, and smokes opium. He has no discernible friends but several associates who keep him informed—ranging from local Vietnamese to French officers, all of whom keep him informed in the ways that are useful to career journalists. He identifies as a cynic with little or no sympathies, though one of the intrigues of the work is the discovery that his spiritual lethargy is not as moribund as he advertises. It is more likely that Fowler, having covered the full World War II era, is both fatigued by that experience less than a decade earlier and captivated at some level by what his instincts tell him is an important story unfolding before him. With his seniority he can return to England, but he chooses not. He could join his fellow members of the press in the safe and sanitized overnight field trips to the region of Hanoi for scripted conferences from French military spokesmen, but he elects not. Instead, he puts himself periodically into contested regions of combat where Vietnamese freedom fighters are closing the circle around the main French military bodies, hoping his reports will clear censors for his superiors and readers back home. Into Fowler’s world drops Alden Pyle, the “quiet American.” In the 2004 edition of this novel by Penguin Books, Robert Stone observes in the forward that the title of the book is steeped in irony; Greene’s coded joke is the only quiet American is a dead American. [p. vii] Pyle drops into the midst of this Vietnamese hell fresh from the Ivy League, naïve, loquacious, idealistic to a fault. He appears to be the consummate state department bureaucrat from Washington, an American observer of all three parties in the struggle on the ground. Later it becomes clearer that Pyle’s roots may be more Langley than Georgetown, as some American readers later suggested that Pyle’s character was inspired by Colonel Edward Lansdale, the early American advisor who befriended the Diem regime in the early days of American involvement. This was not the case; Lansdale did not go to Viet Nam till after 1955. For all his book knowledge and brave talk, young Pyle is out of his element in a war zone and fastens himself to Fowler, who finds his certitudes more than annoying. Pyle is consistently the butt of the older man’s sarcasm and contempt, but he doggedly preaches an optimistic American worldview. Stone suggests that Pyle is the foil for European—particularly British and French—readers who resented the new American post World War II dominance as European colonialism came undone. He notes that American Catholic readers addressed the book with some consternation. Fowler tolerates his companion until the latter becomes enamored of Fowler’s partner Phuong; to no one’s surprise, Pyle addresses the matter of his affection for Phuong with Fowler directly, in a candid discussion of which man would be the better partner as Phuong sits in the same room with no say in the deliberations, calculating how to make the best of the ultimate determination. The scene is an apt metaphor for the plight of indigenous populations when world powers extend their reach. Fowler may be tired, cynical, and no man’s saint—but he has not stopped living, either. He begins to have second thoughts about the wife back home and his plans to divorce her. More to the point, he cannot be totally unmoved by the course of events around him. In a moment of alcoholic candor, a French drinking companion, Captain Trouin, lays out his own existential pain. “You are a journalist. You know better than I that we can’t win. You know the road to Hanoi is cut and mined every night. You know we lose one class of St. Cyr every year. We were nearly beaten in ’50. De Lattre has given us two years of grace—that’s all. But we are professionals: we have to go on fighting till the politicians tell us to stop. Probably they will get together and agree to some peace we could have had at the beginning, making nonsense of all these years…. You would not understand the nonsense, Fowler, you are not one of us.” [p. 144] Fowler becomes witness to a terrorist attack nearly at his doorstep, an event which seems to cast about his soul looking for loose strands of a moral sanity, and the work closes with a somewhat different man than we meet at the beginning. Agnostics, it seems, experience conversion, too, though in Fowler’s case the change will come in small increments. Certainly, one agent in his change is Pyle, whose idealism and single mindedness prove to be the ingredients of confident evil and his ultimate destruction. Captain Trouin would be proved right about the French in 1954; sadly, very few American Catholics gave pause to Graham Greene’s remarkable prophesy of what Pyle’s ideology might do to the United States in the 1960’s and 1970’s. Any thoughtful reader will take away significant personal wisdom on this tale of moral struggle. Going back to my earlier remarks, I am struck at the interplay of individual and corporate moral responsibility. This is clearest in the life of Alden Pyle. Greene goes to some trouble to describe Pyle’s formative university years—his worn copy of The Role of the West pops up repeatedly in the narrative—to make the case that Pyle is the product of Western culture, more specifically, American Exceptionalism, before the term was invented. Pyle’s individual sins prove to be deadly but executed in the cause of those who had formed him. Fowler, of course, is the child of England, of whom it was said that the flag never set upon the empire. But again, Greene goes to considerable length to describe Fowler as a solitary man who understood that the French war he was covering was a repeat of similar colonial conflicts waged by his own country. What Trouin had said about his French Army was equally true of Fowler’s own countrymen. And yet, in the epilogue of the novel, Fowler finds an empathy that transcends ideology and isolationism. Only a Catholic could end a novel with the lament, “how I wished there existed someone to whom I could say I’m sorry.” [p. 180] A review and discussion of Sister Margaret Carney's new introduction to the life of Saint Clare, the Franciscan foundress, can be found on the Church History stream of the Café, posted April 20, 2021.
In the April 6, 2021 New York Times, book reviewer Dani Shapiro offered an interesting take on memoirs: “Pity the poor memoirist. The urge to excavate memory does not tend to come from a place of contentment.” Our book at hand, James Carroll’s The Truth at the Heart of the Lie: How the Catholic Church Lost Its Soul [2021] is a dual memoir, of Carroll’s formative life in the Catholic Church—which he carries as far as his leaving the Catholic priesthood in his 30’s nearly a half-century ago—and his concurrent memoir of the development of the Catholic Church from the universal call of Jesus into the Kingdom of God to its present position of cultic power as a male dominated institution preciously guarding its discriminative standing.
I came to know the author through his novel The Cloister [2018, see my review] and to appreciate his skill at balancing multiple narratives between the covers of one text. In The Truth at the Heart of the Lie the dual narrative is Carroll’s youth and the Catholic Church of his old age. He avoids the pitfall of memoirs--what Shapiro cites as revenge and justification bordering on self-congratulation--by writing to discover—or evaluate—his own early faith experiences and how he himself became enfolded in clerical culture. As a laicized priest myself close to Carroll’s age, I can testify that there is a visceral wonderment in seniority at how I came to priestly life in the pre-Vatican II era, how I ministered through it, and why I left it. As a reviewer I do not have Carroll’s skill at intertwining narratives, so I will focus first upon the man and second on his analysis of “the heart of the lie.” Carroll’s description of growing up Catholic is captivating. His early devotion to Jesus as his best friend is a testament to Father James Martin’s 2021 observations about the validity of early childhood mysticism in his Learning to Pray. But Carroll was more than devout: he reflected from an early age on God’s involvement in humanity and what theologians refer to as justification, reinforced by frequent attendance at funerals as an altar boy. His best boyhood friend Peter was Jewish, and in the late 1950’s “no salvation outside the Church” was still taught to Catholic school children. That Peter was persona non grata to the reward of afterlife struck Carroll as unfair and troubling. The crippling polio of his younger brother posed an early introduction to the randomness and meaning of evil and suffering. A pious heart and a critical mind in the same young persona created a stress which carried into his teenaged years. Carroll’s family life was complicated. Probably the major domestic influence in his life was his relationship with his father and his work. The senior Carroll, an espionage specialist, became a high-ranking Air Force officer at the Pentagon and, during young Carroll’s high school years, at Wiesbaden Air Base in Germany. The author describes his father as somewhat distant, professionally absent from the home, and discrete in the extreme. The unspoken expectation was that son would follow father into the Air Force, a career holding no interest for Carroll, who seems to have deliberately scuttled his chances for the Air Force Academy with subpar academic performance in high school in Wiesbaden. The Wiesbaden high school years were formative in another sense. Carroll became acutely aware of the imminent dangers of nuclear war. He and his friends had traveled into East Germany on occasion and observed firsthand the tensions at the border. When Carroll senior was reassigned to the Pentagon, the author returned to the U.S. and entered Georgetown University. One of the more dramatic accounts in this work is a night during the Cuban Missile Crisis when Carroll is told by his father to head to the countryside with the family when full nuclear war broke out. Knowing that flight from atomic weapons was a fool’s journey, and growing contemptuous of his father’s militarism, Carroll announces his choice of career—the priesthood. The author admits a sad irony about his relationship with his father. As he became more pacifist and outspoken through the 1960’s and the expansion of the Viet Nam War, his relationship with his father deteriorated to the point that they were barely speaking in 1969, the year of Carroll’s ordination to the priesthood. He had no way of knowing that his father, within the secrecy of the Pentagon, was becoming increasingly frustrated in the management and expansion of the war, to the point that President Nixon relieved him of duty for his opposition. During his Georgetown years the author encountered the Paulist Fathers, an American community devoted to publishing, journalism, and evangelization. Eventually he entered the Paulist seminary in Washington, D.C. and was ordained in 1969. His seminary years coincided with the Civil Rights Movement and the expanding Viet Nam War as well as the new directives coming forth from the Council Vatican II [1962-1965]. By the time of his ordination, the author was estranged from the American Church hierarchy which, in the manner of Cardinal Francis Spellman of New York, strongly supported the war effort. Carroll suffered a crisis of conscience at his ordination on the issue of professing obedience to what he saw as an institution of dubious claims on his conscience; while he proceeded through the ordaining rite, he felt remorse. “As I stood and crossed the sanctuary to take my place on the cold stone floor, lying prostrate in formation with my classmates, I felt awash in guilt.” [p. 235] For all his pain, Carroll served a respectable five years as chaplain to Boston University before leaving the priestly ministry in a conflict with the Boston archdiocese over liturgical disciple, an episode I will relate later. At this point I will turn to the author’s analysis of “the lie” at the heart of Catholicism, a discussion interspersed throughout the book. Carroll remains a Catholic and has throughout his long career, but he has embarked upon a “Eucharistic fast” in response to the institutional failure of the Church in the matter of addressing child abuse by the clergy. “The nub at the center of the notorious Roman Catholic sexual predation is an idolatry of the priest and of the priestly status that goes by the name of ‘clericalism.’ It is a malignity marked by a cult of secrecy; a high-flown theological misogyny that demeans all women and fosters an unbridled male supremacy; a suppression of normal erotic desire; a hierarchical domination of priest over lay people; and basing that power on threats of a doom-laden afterlife, drawn from a misreading of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. The inbuilt rank-obsession of the clerical system thwarts the virtues of otherwise good priests, and perverts the message of selfless love that the Church was established to proclaim.” [pp. 9-10] While one might argue with the intensity of this charge, it is undeniable that every element of Carroll’s indictment carries historical bases that enjoy varying degrees of agreement among scholars today. He does not invent new theses to explain Church history but brings together a variety of strands of historical interpretation from a variety of disciplines. He examines the first century identity of early Jewish followers of Jesus and the division that erupted within that community after the Roman destruction of Jerusalem in 70 A.D. The Gospels, he contends, written after this catastrophe, embodied for all time the relationship of Christians and Jews as one of dominance, with Christians citing betrayal of the Messiah Jesus as a justification of exercising condemnation and persecution of their former Jewish brothers until virtually this day. [Coincidentally, as I pen this entry, I received word that the Catholic Swiss theologian Hans Kung has died at the age of 93. Kung’s advocacy of greater union and reconciliation with Jews won him considerable suspicion and censure by the Roman Curia on the eve of Vatican II in the early 1960’s.] From its first century roots, Carroll contends, what we know today as the Church devolved from an organizational principle of service to one of power that in a variety of ways the Church has fought to maintain over two millennia. Much of this book describes three primary foci of power: justification, sexuality, and clerical caste. In Carroll’s assessment of the way we are justified or raised to heaven, the text of Matthew’s Gospel [Matthew 16:19] had placed an enormous power with the priestly caste, the unchallenged power to save or damn the Christian faithful. The author, torn by his own youthful, troubled conscience as we saw above, encountered during his seminary years an alternative to the high-risk moral power of the confessional in the insights of the Swiss Lutheran theologian Krister Stendahl [1921-2008]. A long-time professor at Harvard Divinity School, Stendahl reoriented the author toward a new understanding of justification rooted in “a gracious God whose faithfulness to the promise inherent in the very act of creation weighs infinitely more than any imagined ‘faith’ on the part even of a perfectly repentant human.” [p. 217] A Church empowered with the infinite judgement of the sacramental keys, as Matthew’s Gospel was interpreted through much of history, would inevitably generate a particular moral anthropology and theology of sin and the tendency of humans toward evil. Here the author turns to sexuality and the inordinate influence of St. Augustine’s influence upon Catholic thought. Augustine’s interpretation of Adam and Eve and his construct of original sin and pessimism over human sexuality is reasonably well known. Carroll goes on to explain Augustine’s understanding of Eve as temptress, an interpretation that has played heavily into the narrative of justifiable patriarchal dominance of women in both church life and the culture of Western Christendom. The issue of celibacy is the third leg of Carroll’s stool of dysfunction and institutional deceit. The prohibition of a married clergy is seen by the author as a cultural protection of the hierarchy’s power, eliminating the troublesome distraction of wife and children in order to solidify the “black wall” of hierarchical authority and secrecy. The issue of women in the Church is one of acute memory for Carroll, as it was an immediate factor in his decision to abruptly leave the active priestly ministry in 1974. He was ordered by his bishop to fire his associate campus minister at Boston University, a religious sister, for allegedly offering the Eucharist at a students’ Mass while Carroll was absent. Carroll refused and resigned immediately. He admits to feeling blindsided by her at the time, but later came to regret his insensitivity to the commonplace slights of women ministers in the Church. Clearly, a man whose 60-year professional resume includes priesthood, journalism, history, and literature, has seen these conditions up close for his entire life. The tipping point, it seems, that prompted this book is a fear that the Church has still learned nothing from its mistakes, exemplified in several episodes of Pope Francis’ limp responses to very recent abuse scandals in Ireland, the United States, India, Argentina, and elsewhere. Equally pressing is the author’s age, as he appears eager to lay out a plan of Church reform in his final chapters, “Hope is a Choice,” [pp. 305-309] and “A Catholic Manifesto: An Anticlericalism from within.” [pp. 311-319]. In his final thoughts, Carroll argues that “to simply leave the Catholic Church is to leave its worst impulses unchallenged—and its better ones unsupported.” [p. 308] His exhortations to reform energy rests on the belief that many Catholics share his frustration and are waiting for an effective roadmap to cut at the heart of “the lie.” Unfortunately, I fear this may a poor read of the parochial landscape. I could enter my computer rolodex right now and find ten friends who would rally to the cause, but we are all the author’s age cohort, a dying breed who have matured with both the promises and the lies of the institutional church. Amazon reviewer George OJ may have a precautionary insight when he wrote “Most of the book (in line with its subtitle - no complaints here) is Carroll’s personal memoir, admittedly a beautifully written one, if occasionally wrapped in guilt and regret, unfortunately too late to be useful.” It is noteworthy, too, that this week’s Gallup Poll reveals the baseline of church membership for all Americans has dropped below 50%, the lowest percentage in the eighty years of such poll taking. Two points for reflection in closing. First, the preoccupation of most congregations in the foreseeable future will be survival, and reformers will need to make the case that churches thrive when their conduct reflects their founder. Second, while nearly all churches are hemorrhaging members, there may be greater diversity in why people leave. The Gallup Poll does not indicate causes. In short, even with other pressures, Catholicism in the United States and elsewhere will need to address its specific sins—which means that Carroll’s memoir may survive as a memorial for “changing those things that need to be changed.” Nick Ripatrazone is representative of Catholic laity envisioned in the reforms of the Council Vatican II [1962-1965]. With the decline in numbers of ordained priests—particularly American born priests—it is up to lay men and women to create and interpret the new paradigms of contemporary Catholic experience. Ripatrazone, a frequent contributor to the Jesuit “America Magazine,” among other journals, is both a creative thinker in his own right and a summarizer and proselytizer of the Catholic literary scene for the general public. In this work he turns to Catholic novelists--those still immersed in the faith, those in alienation, and those selectively engaged to Catholic culture.
Ripatrazone is intrigued with Catholic authors; he admits that the title of his work, “Longing for an Absent God,” is colored by the literary differences between lapsed and practicing Catholic writers, as the former “have felt the severe, sensuous nature of Catholic belief [and] they understand what it means to have God absent from that space.” In truth, Ripatrazone is more relevant than he knows, for the term “lapsed” may very well apply to Catholics still in the pews with some regularity. What better term than “Absent God” to describe the parochial pain of vapid preaching, shallow devotionals, assembly line hymnals, and one-dimensional moral hectoring that thoughtful Catholics typically endure with dogged loyalty to their children or an imbedded hope of recapturing the grace of youthful conversion in an adult medium. Ripatrazone begins with a treatment of Flannery O’Connor [1925-1964], the Deep South Catholic and the only Catholic author of her age to be invited to trendy Georgetown cocktail parties [where she once famously proclaimed to liberal hosts, “If the Eucharist is just a sign, then the hell with it.”] O’Connor famously detested devotional fiction, or as Ripatrazone puts it, “work plied for the arrow of evangelization.” O’Connor’s canon is remarkably slim but brutally frank, rich symbolic journeys to the despair of emptiness. Her unspoken theology, which is true of several of the authors addressed here, is that only the lost and abandoned can truly embrace saving grace when it comes. O’Connor is an excellent paradigm to open a survey of authors who are remarkably diverse in literary style, subject matter, and theological outcome [intended or otherwise.] Some authors address Catholic life head on. The ordained Catholic deacon Ron Hansen [1947-] made his bones with “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford” but Ripatrazone focuses on Hansen’s “Mariette in Ecstasy,” set in a Catholic convent as a more intrinsic challenge to faith and the soul. Catholic institutions—so rich in imagery and rite—have been the setting of much fine literature, and the author examines the writing of Minnesota’s Louise Erdrich [1954-], specifically “The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse.” Here we have the confluence of a young woman’s search for faith with her impersonation of a missionary priest tending to a poor Ojibwe reservation while wrestling with celibacy and memories of her former convent life. In a strange sort of way this seemingly disheveled tale meets most of the rules of Aristotle’s internal unity, which in our context here we would call saving grace. Erdrich’s setting of Native American life is an example of the broader settings of Catholic writers. Graham Greene’s [1904-1991] famous whiskey priest character in Mexican-set “The Power and the Glory” is followed by O’Connor’s depictions of southern U.S. culture in her short stories. Walker Percy [1916-1990] is synonymous with Louisiana and the emerging South of the Civil Rights era., and Andre Dubus [1936-1999] the Cajun-born short story writer who described how Catholic sacraments “soothe our passage through life.” One of the longest treatments in this work is Ripatrazone’s commentary on Don DeLillo [1936-], a chapter called “Cultural Piety: Don DeLillo’s Catholicism without Belief.” DeLillo himself admitted in a 2010 lecture that “There’s no escape from the Jesuits.” DeLillo is the best example of Ripatrazone’s Agnostic Catholic who can never truly break it off. Noting that a Catholic is raised with the idea he might die any moment, DeLillo believes that even his unpracticed adult Catholicism “removes a hesitation that a writer might otherwise feel when he’s approaching important subjects, eternal subjects. I think for a Catholic these things are part of ordinary life.” “Longing for an Absent God,” at two hundred pages, sets the table for greater exploration of Catholic literary life at a time when American Catholicism, in its “New Evangelization,” has been casting about for a methodology to evangelize and intensify the life of Catholics in the pew, a number which decreases with alarming regularity, for about a quarter century now. Ripatrazone has opened the door to the possibility that Catholic artists of the pen may be serving up realistic templates for Christians torn by sin and doubt and the improbable roads to God’s grace. A gutsy new paradigm for parish adult faith formation? A few weeks earlier I posted a review of Nick Ripatrazone’s Longing for an Absent God: Faith and Doubt in Great American Fiction [2020]. Longing for an Absent God explores both the identities of significant Catholic novelists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and their vision of life as impacted by Catholic upbringing. For example, the noted author Flannery O’Connor observes that the Catholic novelist begins from the vantage point of Original Sin, or the flawed imperfections of human subjects, and works along the tortuous road of seeking God’s ever-present grace.
One such author is Louise Erdrich [1954-] who in a 1995 interview stated that she was raised "with all the accepted truths" of Catholicism alongside significant rooting in her Ojibwe Native American roots in Minnesota. Ripatrazone highlights her work as an example of Catholic cross-cultural experience, as many of her novels are inspired by Native American life. I was intrigued by the title of her 2001 work, The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse, and even more so by the premise, a most unusual marriage of Catholic and Ojibwe life. As this story goes, in 1996 a chancery bureaucrat, Father Jude Miller, is sent to a remote Ojibwe reservation near the U.S.-Canada border to investigate a report of miracles attributed to a Sister Leopolda, a deceased member of the convent community at the reservation. For many decades, the reservation Catholic church has been shepherded by Father Damian Modeste, now in extreme old age and in many ways sheltered and protected by the tribe for his long and faithful service. Father Damian rouses himself for his visitor, for he has much to share…and much more to hide. Father Damian’s biggest secret is his identity. He is not a priest. He is in fact Agnes DeWitt, who came to pastor this church back in 1912. Her journey began in a convent as a seventeen-year-old postulant who was deriving excessive worldly pleasure from her mastery of Chopin at the piano. Young Agnes leaves the convent in fulfillment of her carnal pursuits and settles for a time with a powerful common law arrangement with a farmer-lover until their relationship is untimely and tragically ended. When Agnes has a near death experience in a natural catastrophe that kills the real Father Damian en route to his mission, Agnes decides to assume his identity in a conversion event that is part existential trauma and part coming home, so to speak, to what was most natural to her. In her first Mass upon arrival, for the convent community, “the Mass came to Agnes like memorized music. She had only to say the first words and all followed, ordered, instinctive. The phrases were in her and part of her. Once she began, the flow was like the river that had carried her to Little No Horse. In the silence between the parts of the ritual, Father Damian prayed for these women in his charge.” [p. 68] If the sacramental role was assumed so naturally, life among the Ojibwe would be a greater challenge. Her first pastoral crisis, literally hours after her arrival, involved a tribal dispute over wives. This elongated scene introduces not only the major players and families who will love and challenge the priest throughout Father Damian’s career, but it puts into focus the ambiguity that many Catholic missionaries have faced in their attempts to overlay a Western European Christian creed and code upon an indigenous culture. One of the undercurrents of the community of Little No Horse was the gnawing sense of defeat and ongoing irritation at the intrusion of European, and later American, colonialists. In an NPR interview on this book in 2001, the author cited a quote from the Catholic feminist theologian Mary Daly, “Conversion is the most loving form of destruction.” Perhaps as a woman Agnes has a finer appreciation of “loving destruction” and exercises her ministry accordingly. For while she sublimates her earlier feminine experiences of intimacy and love for the sake of her pastorate, she never eradicates her past from her living memory. Her resolve is tested when a younger priest is sent to the mission by the bishop to hone his pastoral skills under Father Damian’s tutelage. It is here that Agnes must make a second conversion, a rededication to her missionary work. Agnes/Damian, over many years, comes to appreciate and respect her people, in the aggregate and as individuals. Many were Catholic, a good number were not, but Agnes developed close ties with those who eschewed public commitment to a foreign church or, like the tribal elder Nanapush, embraced an earthy but profound wisdom of life from his ancestry and personal observations. Over the chessboard one summer afternoon Damian accuses Nanapush of trickery in his strategy. Nanapush replies, “You’ve been tricking everybody! Still, that is what your spirits have instructed you to do, so you must do it. Your spirits must be powerful to require such a sacrifice.” [p. 232] Nanapush maintains a respectful silence, however, as do the few others who know or suspect that Father Damian is a woman. The most significant threat to Agnes’ secret comes just before the end of her life in 1996, when the visitator investigating Sister Leopolda’s sainthood cause makes an extended stay, which opens his tired, middle-aged eyes to a great many mysteries beyond Leopolda. But those “demanding spirits,” as Nanapush called them, intervened in salvific ways, if not conventional ones. If we were to recommend Last Report to a Catholic reading circle, what points of discussion would we submit to the facilitator. Of course, one can argue that this work belongs nowhere near a Catholic endeavor, given the deceit upon which the story line rests. [In August 2020, a priest in Detroit discovered on a home video that his infant baptism was defective and invalid, and thus his ordination to the priesthood was invalid as well. See story.] I do not condone deceit, either, and objectively speaking, Agnes DeWitt’s assumption of the priestly role was wrong on many levels. I would point, though, that our actual Catholic experience in the United States is hardly free from clerical and episcopal deceits. We have learned in recent years that functioning priests were active pedophiles, routinely reassigned by complicit bishops. Are these deceits less egregious than Father Damian’s? Again, as Flannery O’Connor reminds us, the Catholic novelist writes from the ground up, from sin to conversion. The most obvious talking point would seem to be the issue of women’s ordination, but to raise that issue here is not faithful to the novel’s text. Agnes does not present as a woman priest. The struggle over her role as a Catholic cleric is an internal one, not a tribal issue. It is highly unlikely that the Ojibwe patriarchal mores would have accepted a woman priest in 1912. Moreover, Agnes herself feared that the inevitable discovery of her true sex after her death would shake the Catholic community, leading her to some extraordinary means to prevent this from happening. However, this novel does raise valuable questions about the priesthood itself and the fashion in which it is lived. There are three priest figures in the tale—Agnes, the young associate, and the chancery visitator. All of them are broken people in some sense, and all are impacted—one can argue favorably--by encounter with the Ojibwe reservation. One can reflect upon a clerical life that tends toward the one dimensional, i.e., a life which resists the impact of two-way encounter in which the baptized enrich their shepherds as much as the other way around. One can argue that even the faux priest dies rich from a life of such communion, a point that is not lost on the visitator, who begins to wonder if he is investigating the wrong saint. There is, to be sure, food for thought in this story about “evangelization.” In my youth we called it “missionary work,” and every self-respecting seminarian was expected to go through a phase of reflection about going to foreign lands. My order had extensive missions in Bolivia, Jamaica, and Japan, among other places. I will admit that I did not give it much thought, but I understood the common wisdom of the time, “to make disciples of all nations.” In recent years there has been much public discussion about whether the missionaries to what is now the United States were unintentionally colonialists as much as evangelizers to Native American peoples. The template of Father Damian’s mission to the Ojibwe is remarkably sound. Vatican II permitted liturgical accommodations for the needs of indigenous peoples, but this story for the most part predates the Council [1962-1965] and the Latin Mass would have been normative, even on the reservation. The mission church provided regular confessions, communion was brought to the sick, and those unbaptized were visited and invited by Father Damian. But it was the priest’s willingness to share the full life of the tribe that seemed to have been his most effective witness. Reservation life was harsh by any measure. [Even in 1996, the visitator went offsite when possible for good coffee and hamburgers]. Father Damian mastered to a fair degree the Ojibwe language—no mean feat—and engaged in the various celebrations and sorrows of the community’s life. Perhaps the greatest witness was the dedication of one entire life to the community. “Greater love than this no man hath, to lay down his life…” There is a universal message here about “making converts.” Talk, even religious talk, is cheap without the sacramental sign of engagement at cost. Agnes DeWitt/Father Damian, the priest without portfolio, crossed a cultural divide to bring a universal experience of Christ, by staying for the long haul to underwrite her message. One of the pleasures of the Christmas Season was a new acquisition for the Catechist Café Library, Longing for an Absent God: Faith and Doubt in Great American Fiction [2020] by Nick Ripatrazone. The December 7 edition of The Presbyterian Outlook provides an excellent brief review here, but I will add some of my own thoughts as well. The premises of the author are twofold: [1] to highlight the significantly large number of Catholic novelists and their works throughout the twentieth century, and [2] to assess the impact of their experiences with Catholicism upon the stories they weave.
I wish I could remember the author [possibly George Bernard Shaw?] who was asked whether he wished to go to heaven or hell after his death. The response: “Well, I suppose I should say heaven as the safe bet, but in truth I think all the interesting people will be in hell.” I am not quite as cynical as all that, but it is hard to imagine a good novelist—and that includes Catholic novelists—who has not come to know evil very well. Our youthful Catholic catechetics has drilled in us the idea that the nature of Catholic living is perfection. The thoughtful adult Catholic comes to appreciate that life is uneven, unfair, cruel, and seeks an interpretive key. The Catholic novelist, true to his or her art, presents a “take” on human existence that brings the eternal to the moment, or at the very least, provides consolation to the soul that for whatever reason has despaired of a tradition once loved. This work’s author, Nick Ripatrazone, is a student of novels, a critic who has written for Rolling Stone, GQ, The Atlantic, The Paris Review, Esquire, The Poetry Foundation, Outside, The Sewanee Review, Commonweal, The Kenyon Review, and America. He approaches Catholicism and its artists with both admiration and some wonder that more Catholics are not conscious of their American confreres who have made their bones in the literary world. In truth, beauty for its own sake, ars gratia artis, is not a noticeable staple of present-day catechetics. The overemphasis on moralizing from lectern and pulpit dulls the curiosity to see God’s hand in an old sot of a burned-out cleric. Alas, Graham Greene’s “Whiskey Priest” in The Power and the Glory [1940] is a graced moment tasted by relatively few. Ripatrazone divides Catholic novelists by generation [Myles Connolly’s Mr. Blue of 1928 versus Phil Klay’s Redeployment of 2014 and the Gulf War] and by what might be called for want of a better term, intensity of engagement with Catholic life—e.g., cradle Catholics, converts, and the fallen-away. These are not always smooth distinctions--many Catholics never totally break away--and the author’s title seems to emphasize alien former Catholics, those writers who, despite Catholic upbringing and in many cases quality Catholic education, have disengaged from regular practice and write in the quest to find new mediums to address “the mess” of modern living. But a surprising number of those in full communion make major contributions, energizing the possibilities of Catholic conversation with the marketplace of thought and primarily experience .They all bring worthy bread to the table. Ripatrazone highlights Catholic authors through the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, but he begins with the ever-controversial Flannery O’Connor [1925-1964], a devout if eccentric Catholic woman from Baptist Georgia. Blunt and uncompromising in person and in her works, O’Connor once attended a dinner where new theories of the Eucharist were being discussed, O’Connor famously declared “Well, if it’s [only] a symbol, to hell with it.” She believed in Real Presence, in the host and in human experience. Her belief in God’s immanent presence extended through her short stories and novels, which are not for the faint of heart. Marked by surgically detailed accounts of humans at their worst. O’Connor defended her style, observing that “violence is strangely capable of returning my characters to reality and preparing them to accept their moment of grace.” I have read Wise Blood [1952] and seen the 1979 movie adaptation with a magnificent performance by actor Brad Dourif. O’Connor is currently enjoying a renaissance of academic interest among with censure in some quarters for her southern racist views. The author proceeds to Dan DeLillo [b. 1936] as an example of a writer who cannot shake his Jesuit education despite his misgivings about religion, which he describes in an interview as “interesting as a discipline and a spectacle, as something that drives people to extreme behavior.” [Little wonder Wikipedia lists Flannery O’Connor as one of his literary influences.] DeLillo recalled his religion courses at Cardinal Hayes High School as convincing him that he was a “failed mystic,” which may account for an important theme in his works, the outsider versus the crowd. Ripatrazone cites Underworld [1997], End Zone [1972], and White Noise [1984]. Ron Hansen is also the product of Catholic education and a daily Mass attendant, bearing nostalgia for the drama of the Latin Mass. Hansen’s first novels, including The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, were not overly Catholic themed. But in 1991 Hansen produced Mariette in Ecstasy, a drama of a 17-year-old postulant in a 1906 convent. I was amazed that such a highly acclaimed Catholic novel slipped under my radar. Ripatrazone calls this “the rare book lauded by both The Village Voice and diocesan newspapers.” An Amazon reader exclaimed “It's the kind of book I would have LOVED to have read in a devout Catholic book group, but only a prayerful group of practicing Catholics who actually live what they believe.” For all of that, Ecstasy “asks readers to follow belief toward its logical conclusion. If the sisters in the convent seek Christ, they must be ready to receive him in their midst. They are not. They are petty. They want a God of the mind but not the body. That, it seems, would eliminate the mystery and neuter their theology.” [p. 29] Catechists and homilists have the luxury of operating in an a-sensual and a-sexual world of concepts; the downside of this luxury is an intellectual negation of the mystery of the Incarnation, where God assumes flesh, not theorems. The Catholic novelist carries the burden of marrying God’s love and purpose to the human flesh which, though scarred by sin, is capable of communion with God-in-flesh. Catholic novels are not always overtly Catholic in their settings—see Flannery O’Connor, for example, “who loathed devotional fiction”—but they are true to the language of the honest confessional. The struggle of sexuality, identity, and faith is brought home vividly in Louise Erdrich’s The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse [2001]. I purchased this on Ripatrazone’s review and have completed about half of it through this writing. Erdrich [b. 1954] operates a bookstore in Minneapolis which includes Native American artwork. She is a thoughtful and eclectic Catholic—her bookstore contains a restored confessional—and she herself is a product of German and Chippewa blood. Her upbringing exposed her to significant Catholic and Ojibwe religious worldviews. Her Last Report is a tale of a missionary priest, Father Damien, who devotes his life to pastoring a far-flung Ojibwe mission near the Canadian border. But this is no ordinary pastor, and his pre-Ojibwe days take us to his true origin, as Sister Cecelia, aka Agnes DeWitt, a young nun who discovers her sexuality through her mastery of piano classics. The erotically awakened sister leaves the convent for full self-discovery, and after several ecstasy-agony adventures, assumes the identity of a new missionary priest killed in a spring flood in yet another quest for identity, in this case a conversion; upon offering her first Mass at the mission, she experiences a sense of destiny and permanence. On the face of it, executing a sixty-year ecclesial fraud may strike one as the consummate sacrilege. But human life is deeper than our language’s ability to define or compress it. Erdrich masterfully narrates the inner experience of this faux priest, to the degree this is possible, but also the interior lives of her parishioners. We cannot judge morals till we know the culture, in this case the world of Ojibwe peoples whose lives and outlooks are scarred by Anglo-Saxon intrusion, poverty, conflicts with other tribes, and internal tensions over traditions including polygamy. [Last night’s evening read described the impact on the tribe of the Spanish flu.] So, this narrative becomes a tale of a broken priest shepherding a broken people. There is prophesy here for Catholicism of 2021, where we are still reeling from the double lives of priests [and cardinals, for that matter] who stole the innocence of children much as colonial expansion snuffed out the integrity of Native American culture. Who indeed has committed the greater sin? Does clericalism eviscerate priestly identity just as sure as false impersonation? Such a question is never asked from a Sunday pulpit, where our sermons are generally the “loathed fiction” that Flannery O’Connor detested. Last Report gives us much to think about in our preconceptions about social justice and particularly evangelization, but there is more to it than that. Ripatrazone does not carry his book to its logical conclusion, but he implies that the Catholic novelist has been and remains the true conscience of the Church, and for all people of good will. Aristotle, in his Poetics, spoke of drama and tragedy as a catharsis, a washing of the emotions. In our time the tales of Catholic novelists wash away the clutter of frivolity and deliver reflections of the Word that was sent to save us, soul and body. |
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