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Book Club: The Catholic Books You Haven't Had Time To Read

To stay current, shop judiciously, and spread your education dollar.

Graham Greene's "The Quiet American" [1955]

5/4/2021

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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]   
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Light of Assisi: The Life of Saint Clare [2021]

4/21/2021

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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. 
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The Truth at the Heart of the Lie: How the Catholic Church Lost its Soul

4/8/2021

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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.”
 

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Longing for an Absent God: Faith and Doubt in Great American Fiction

2/25/2021

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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?       
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The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse

1/23/2021

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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. 
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The Catechetics and Preaching of Today's Catholic Novels

1/10/2021

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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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Don't Run to Barnes & Noble Just Yet

11/20/2020

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The question most frequently asked here at the Café these days is: do I have to read the entire McCarrick Report on my computer? Where can I get a bound copy?

Unfortunately, no hardcopy is presently available unless you download the report to a ream of paper. All the links at various news services take you to one place, the Vatican’s copy. I would imagine at some point the text will get a hard cover and a gift box, but for the moment its availability is limited to an on-line pdf file. There is no arguing the cost: this link is free. I can say from years of Church ministry that the most economical way to obtain a church document of any type is by downloading the file to your Ipad or tablet. You can store the report on your Ipad in the handiest app; in my case, I downloaded it to Kindle, and Voila! Rest assured that when the published form is released in hardcopy, it will not be cheap. The Warren Commission Report on the assassination of Present John Kennedy runs $19 on paperback and $30 hardcover as of this morning on Amazon, and that text is over 50 years old.

If you would rather read published descriptions and analyses in online newspaper or magazine format, here are some suggestions:

National Catholic Reporter has the best and most detailed journalistic investigation and analysis of the content and reactions to the McCarrick Report. Reporter is a national lay-operated Catholic newspaper begun in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1964. Reporter has many enemies who consider it slanted left and even heretical, but this publication was printing serious analysis of the clerical abuse scourge twenty years before the Boston Globe breakthrough in 2002 and serves the Church well.
  
The National Catholic Register was founded in 1927 and is probably the first choice of priests and bishops. At its website, the Register describes its work: “Our mission is to provide a perspective on the news of the day as seen through the eyes of the Magisterium [i.e., Teaching Church]. We assist Catholics in engaging the culture with confidence in the saving and sanctifying Gospel of Jesus Christ.” But the paper has not pulled its punches on coverage of the McCarrick Report. It is owned by EWTN.

Crux describes itself as “a news site dedicated to offering the very best in smart, wired and independent coverage of the Vatican and the Catholic Church.” Crux was founded by the Boston Globe in 2014 and became totally independent in 2016. I respect and consult it in large part because of its editor, John L. Allen, one of the most respected Catholic journalists across the full spectrum of the Church. Crux is particularly respected for its Vatican coverage.
 
Catholic News Service or CNA, founded in 1920, is the official journalistic arm of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops or USCCB. Generally, its focus is aimed at issues of importance to the bishops in American life, and its news stories are subscribed to by many local Catholic diocesan papers.

 
All the above have generous online presence as well as weekly or bi-weekly mail editions. I much prefer the on-line services. Crux is free though a donation is requested for regular use. Reporter is $53/year for immediate on-line news and U.S. mail delivery. Register is $50/year, but it does offer a free email Church news service update for free. CNA requests a donation if possible. 
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Can You Hear Me, Church--part 2

10/9/2020

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This is the second part of the review of Sister Thea Bowman: Do You Hear Me, Church? [2020] by Peggy A. Sklar, released as Sister Thea [1937-1990], has come into the formal process of investigation by the Church for determining her sainthood. In the first post below, I outlined her early years in the Deep South [Canton, Mississippi] as a precocious and observant middle class African girl living in a Jim Crow state where doctors like her father were refused admitting privileges in the region’s hospital. A turning point in her adolescent awakening occurred when a Catholic community of sisters, the Franciscan Sisters of Perpetual Adoration, established a school in 1948 which Bertha, [Sister Thea’s Methodist baptismal name] attended. Her involvement with the sisters included conversion to Catholicism, and at age 15, acceptance into the community’s formation program. Bertha, assigned the name Thea, completed her formation, and began school teaching as Sister Thea, first in Wisconsin and then in her hometown of Canton.
 
After several years of school teaching, Sister Thea was granted permission to attend Catholic University in Washington, D.C. I noticed in a second reading of this book that Sister Thea lived in a campus dormitory residence, and not a local convent. Although a very button-down conservative institution today, CU in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s was a forum for every religious, social, and political cause. [I was a student there at the time.] It appears that Sister Thea was able to network with the burgeoning black awareness movements on campus, a profound experience for an adult who had lived as a black minority of one in her professional world. She evidently gained respect for her energies on behalf of black artistic expression and education, and received an invitation to speak at Howard University, also in D.C. But Sklar observes that Sister Thea was able to balance her personal involvement in black cultural awareness activity with an ambitious and challenging course of studies on her way to an M.A. in English in 1969. Her master’s thesis reflected her admiration of St. Thomas More [1478-1535], the Chancellor of England martyred by Henry VIII. Sister Thea, familiar with More’s writings such as his Utopia, wrote her thesis on an early work of More [1503], “A Rueful Lamentation on the Death of Queen Elizabeth,” the mother of Henry VIII.
 
It would seem a curious choice for one who is remembered today for raising black consciousness to liturgical expression in the Catholic Church, but as early as her Howard University address she expressed her passion that the key to advancement of her race was education, and by extension, Catholic education as a cultural and evangelization strategy. Her Catholic University years coincided with controversies in many northern cities, notably Boston, about school bussing, i.e., black children transported to public schools in affluent neighborhoods where the quality of instruction was superior. As if to confirm her passion, she remained at Catholic University to pursue her doctorate; she also taught undergraduate courses at CU in black literature
 
In 1970 Sister Thea was invited to a conference of African American sisters in Pittsburgh hosted by the Sisters of Mercy, forerunner to the National Black Sisters’ Conference. [See the NBSC’s current on-line status here.] She had undertaken the doctorate to enhance a career in university teaching at her community’s Viterbo College. For her doctoral dissertation, she returned to St. Thomas More and his Dialogue of Comfort against Tribulation. Sklar writes that Sister Thea was attracted to More’s rhetoric “to explain his belief and actions.” [p. 48] Sklar brings home the depth of Sister Thea’s academic commitment to emphasize her deeply founded belief that the education of young African Americans was the key to full equality in America.
 
Upon receipt of her doctorate Sister Thea returned full time to Viterbo College in La Crosse, Wisconsin [later, a university] where she taught English literature and chaired the English Department. She was invited to present a three-week summer seminar, presumably on Thomas More, at Oxford in England upon the completion of her degree, which gives us something of an idea of her standing in the international academic community. That said, she was also a free spirit in the classroom, innovative in her methods of engagement and her efforts to develop independent thinking and experiencing—though she was old fashioned in her tough grading standards.
 
To this point in her life, she was recognized as a colorful and brilliant religious order teacher and researcher in the inner life of the English language, something of a rarity for a woman of color. Her image as the Apostle of Black religious experience in America did not fully emerge until she returned to her hometown of Canton, Mississippi, to live with or near her elderly parents, with her community’s approval. Fortuitously she was hired by her local bishop, Joseph B. Brunini, himself a remarkable advocate on behalf of the Black Catholic experience and a major supporter of St. Augustine Seminary in Bay Saint Louis, Mississippi, where suitable black candidates could study for the priesthood.
 
Brunini created for Sister Thea the diocesan position of “Diocesan Consultant for Intercultural Awareness for the Diocese of Jackson.” This proved to be one of those deliciously broad job descriptions where an energetic self-starter with a clear vision could go where the Spirit willed her and draw from her rich experiences in both English and Black Society. Her official duties included “designing a variety for diverse audiences, including children, teens, and adults, to break down the existing barriers between cultures.” [p. 54] Under this mission were listed other populations including Hispanic, Native American, and Asian communities as well.
 
Her presentations and programming would appropriately fall under the description of thoughtful evangelicalism. When I worked at St. Mary’s in Anderson, SC, in the summers of 1970 and 1971, I had noticed that many of the Black youth of multiple churches in our section of town turned out eagerly for any summer’s day activity I scheduled—bible stories, games, sports, etc.-- but on Sunday only older and more successful Black members came to Mass. Catholicism’s dignity and ritual appealed to the more successful African-American population. The high-spirited, swaying, song-filled Biblical rubric we associate with Black worship, particularly but not exclusively in the deep South, never made much inroad into Catholic parochial life. Conversion to Catholicism meant conversion to a white ritual of stability for blacks, even if as in Anderson the Charleston SC diocese maintained both white and colored parishes.
 
Many bishops of the South—in partnership with religious communities in the twentieth century—showed considerable energies in evangelizing African-Americans in the South, with these efforts dating back to at least the 1930’s. After Vatican II concluded in 1965, the adaptation of the liturgy and the style of evangelization made it permissible and possible to celebrate Church life in the evangelical style of cultural Black experience. My impression is that Black Catholicism suffered the same throes of adjustment as white Catholicism—high levels of enthusiasm for innovation among some, and an angry grief at the disruption of the known in others. I have not had the opportunity to review Sister Thea’s writings or addresses—she died in 1990, before the age of the new electronics--but she seems to have appreciated the dynamics of her time.
 
Her style invited listeners to experience God in the idiom of their cultural experience, Among other things, she set aside her religious habit in favor of a colorful dashiki to exemplify a return to native culture. [See the cover of Sklar’s book.] She invested considerable energy in forming choirs and integrating Black music into Church life, in part to help her own people recover their heritage. In the fall of 1987 Sister Thea served as contributor and editor for GIA Publications’ Lead Me, Guide Me, The African American Catholic Hymnal, songs, and psalms for liturgical use.  
 
Her position with the Jackson, Mississippi Diocese allowed her to travel widely to several continents for conferences and addresses to energize Catholic movements of cultural awareness. Diagnosed with cancer in 1984, she suffered a fatal relapse and died in 1990. She had once described her life as “a shooting star.” By the numbers, she was right. Her full-time work as an evangelist of Black Catholicism lasted but twelve years, but she continues to be celebrated in a variety of ways. Siena College, my first priestly assignment, renamed a building after Sister Thea this year; the previously honored demoted individual was none other than the Catholic writer of the South, Flannery O’Connor. There is some irony in that.
 
As a student and English scholar, Sister Thea devoted much attention to precision and logical exposition. As an evangelical, she eschewed wordy cerebral expression for a holistic and sensual encounter with God. I hope that future scholars will be successful in piecing together her paper and experiential remains with the same skill she addressed St. Thomas More. Thirty years removed from her death, one wonders what Sister Thea would have made of the decreasing number of practicing Christians in the United States, or for that matter, the interracial response to the killing of George Floyd this past summer. The process of her canonization will no doubt progress or fall on our ability to understand where her brief life has taken us.   
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Can You Hear Me, Church--part one

9/18/2020

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I am more than a little surprised that in a year filled with strife and moral debate over racism in the United States, there has not been more attention paid to the initiation of canonization steps for Sister Thea Bowman [1937-1990] at the request of her home diocese of Jackson, Mississippi. Bertha Bowman was a youthful convert to Catholicism inspired by white Catholic religious sisters ministering to her black community [“Thea” was the religious name assigned when she entered the convent some years later]. From Peggy A. Sklar’s introduction to Sister Thea for Paulist Press [2020], I came away with the thought that Sister Thea is one of those people who zoom across the sky for a relatively short time but leave words with lasting potential. [She died of cancer at the age of 52.]
 
If Sister Thea is canonized, it will not be in recognition for having lived a lifetime behind cloister walls. Her life was remarkably diverse: sustained by an optimistic ego strength and devotion to a multi-cultural God that reached far beyond Western European Catholicism per se. Her diversity begins on her street. She lived on the “black side” of the street that divided her native Canton, Mississippi. Crossing the line was always trouble, even when the Bowman family dog wandered into Caucasian territory. No matter that Bertha’s father was a physician and her mother a retired schoolteacher. When Bertha, a late-in-life child was born, her father delivered her at home as Canton had no hospitals that would treat African American women.
 
Bertha, born in 1937, grew up in a stimulating household with two professional parents—her biographer describes her simultaneously as energetic, playful, and social. Her tea parties were occasionally integrated as circumstances permitted. A significant contribution to Bertha’s future was her mother’s voice and cultivation of music. Sklar identifies a community leader named Mother Ricker who taught the neighborhood children in her home Bible songs with accompanying Scripture stories. It is worth reflecting upon the Scriptural and devotional spirituality of Black evangelical song and worship: the music and sermons are drawn heavily from the Hebrew Scriptures, psalms of deliverance and the intervention of God to right the wrongs inflicted upon his chosen people. Even academic Black Theology today carries this salvific characteristic. It was not until the twentieth century and the ecumenical renewal of Scripture scholarship that trends such as Liberation Theology and Women’s Theological Studies took their places on many Catholic campuses [often kicking and screaming, to be sure.]
 
Bertha’s education was a major worry of her parents, who understood the “separate but equal” philosophy was a grave handicap to most black youngsters seeking a better future. It is little talked about today how Catholic bishops and certain religious orders pioneered Catholic evangelization in the South among African Americans. In 1946 Catholic Bishop Richard O. Gerow of Natchez, Mississippi asked the Servants of the Holy Trinity to develop a Catholic community. Catholics southern missionaries were not “poaching” from other Christian denominations; in fact, two-thirds of the African American community around Canton was unchurched. A pastor was named, and eventually the Franciscan Sisters of Perpetual Adoration—including a nurse-- arrived in Canton to establish a school. [In 1884 the Plenary Council of Baltimore had mandated a parochial school in every parish in the United States.]
 
It is an interesting thing that of the first 94 students enrolled in this new Catholic school, the most enthusiastic to see it launched were black professionals—including the children of Protestant ministers. Bertha Bowman’s parents enrolled her, and Mrs. Bowman volunteered. As is true today, the local Catholic Church became a magnet of social services, particularly for mothers and children. It is hard to know how many converts were brought into this Canton church, but I have to suppress a smile whenever I hear the phrase “new evangelization” because the old time religion of St. Francis of Assisi seemed to be highly effective, thank you very much. [My own order of Franciscans began such work in the 1930’s.]
 
We do know of one convert—Bertha Bowman. Sklar describes the deep impression on Bertha made by the sisters of the parish. Bertha converted to Catholicism at 10, but her desire to follow the sisters’ example led her to seek entrance into the community itself. Her wise parents understood the culture shock of relocating from the Jim Crow south to the German sisters’ formation/mother’s house in Wisconsin. But at age 15, a determined Bertha and a sister chaperone made the trek via segregated trains to the upper Midwest to La Crosse, Wisconsin.
 
For Bertha, her cultural and social world turned upside down. She found herself a distinct minority of one, a black candidate in a white religious community. As every newbie to religious life quickly learns, the admirable members one meets in the field are not always representative of the entire community. Sklar is not overly specific about racial slights to the new applicant, noting that “she also had to adjust to the comments and behaviors of some of the sisters, not all of whom were as kind or accepting of her as those she knew in Canton.” [p. 21] But the author tells a good deal when she observed that Bertha’s learned practice of subservience around white people in Canton served her well during the formation years. The candidate from Canton had to adjust from the traditional cooking of the Deep South to the sui generis German cuisine of the northern sisters. And despite her parents’ best efforts on behalf of her education, she tested several grades behind her new northern peers.
 
Bertha persevered, however, and graduated from high school in 1955. She took the habit as a postulant to the religious community and began her studies at Viterbo College. She fell ill to tuberculosis and lost about one year of her formation to recovery at a TB sanitorium in Wisconsin, too ill to undertake even basic college studies at a local college. In 1956 she had sufficiently recovered to take the next step pf her formation, novitiate, a time of intense reflection upon vowed community life. As part of her entrance rite into the novitiate, she was given the religious name “Thea” meaning “of God” and not incidentally close to her father’s name, “Theon.” Novitiates in general are strict with greater isolation from the world; the overall theme is the prospect of vows at the end of the two-year period, an intense scrutiny of one’s spirituality, understanding of the order’s mission, and one’s capacity to live the vows and community life.
 
Having completed her novitiate and taken simple vows in 1958, Sister Thea was ready for field work and assigned to a Catholic school in La Crosse. Sklar comments that some parents at her new school were “alarmed” by her placement. Sister Thea taught a combined fifth and sixth grade class with little or no training, a practice known as the “twenty-year plan” in its day, when sisters went to summer school to the cusp of middle age to complete a bachelors degree. Sister Thea, age 21, did more than survive; she seems to have thrived in the classroom on the strength of her cheerful personality, her imagination and innovation, and strong bonding with parents.
 
When serious canonization investigations begin, and when the definitive biography of Sister Thea is written down the road, it will be fascinating to review the minutes of superiors’ assignment meetings, for orders varied in the amount of input allowed from members as to their preferences of career studies and assignments. My professor of New Testament Studies in the seminary told me that he had submitted a request in his seminary days to earn a doctorate in botany to teach in a Franciscan college. Sister Thea’s career track is intriguing. After two years teaching in La Crosse, she was transferred to, of all places, her hometown of Canton, Mississippi, where she taught in the Catholic elementary and high school over a seven-year span. It is here that the author describes the more intimate details of segregation.
 
The social indignities and the economic hardships of Southern black individuals prior to the 1960’s Civil Rights Movement are hopefully well-known among those familiar with American history. Sister Thea had departed Canton as an adolescent; now she was returning in 1961 as a professional woman, a habited Catholic nun, just as the movement was gaining national attention and regional opposition. Sister Thea’s ministry in Canton was an empowerment of personal dignity and faith. She labored to restore an appreciation of Black heritage, prose, and hymnody through her teaching and evidently in her other parish ministrations.
 
The word or gestures of “empowerment” can be heard in several ways. To much of the white establishment, empowerment sounded subversive and threatening. Her passion for music, for example, led to her fifty-student choir recording an album in 1967, The Voice of Negro America, composed of fourteen spirituals. It was clear to many, including some in her own convent who feared for their safety that Thea was not just another Franciscan nun teaching the alphabet to the poor. Her vision for her students—and her own people, for that matter--was broader, loftier, and concretely Biblical.
 
Thea was pursuing her summer “twenty-year plan” at Viterbo College, but around 1966 she transferred to Catholic University in Washington, D.C. in pursuit of a degree in English literature. She would study at Catholic University until 1972, earning her doctorate in English Language, Literature, and Linguistics. Pursuit of a doctorate in any decent school is quite expensive and takes a member out of circulation for productive community service for some time. I can only guess that her religious community was preparing her for college teaching, but again it would be intriguing to assess the community’s decision. Was she being brought north due to racial tension, or was her community prescient about her gifts to the broader American Church?
 
I am wrapping up part one of this post with one of those odd coincidences of life. For two years Sister Thea and I attended Catholic University simultaneously [1969-71]. As a doctoral candidate, she was teaching undergraduate courses and I could have signed up for one of them in my last semester. However, I took “urban planning” instead. I had no clue who Thea was or what her course was about. True Renaissance Man here.               
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The Catechetics of a Spy Novel

7/25/2020

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I have been dragging anchor over the past week or two in meeting deadlines for those who check in to the Catechist Café for information or book leads. My last substantive post was the life and times of Lord Acton, which required a good deal of reading and independent research, and frankly wore me out. Facebook, which posts new alerts to Café entries, reminds me that there have been only five posts in 28 days, a considerable reduction from those early days of 2015 when the goal was a heady daily informative piece. Mix in the oppressive Florida heat and the limitations imposed by the Covid-19, and you can see where my inkwell might be going dry.
 
So I took stock yesterday and went back to the original mission of the Café, to educate and stimulate those veteran ministers of Church life, best represented by the teachers and catechists, and to attract those adults of college education or its equivalent who are searching for identity as present day or former Catholics. When I was in high school, we studied Gresham’s Law, i.e., bad money drives good money out of circulation. The same, unfortunately, is true of Church publications and teaching programs. Enmeshed in politics and culture wars as well as a resurgence of a seventeenth-century trend known as Jansenism, which devalues human energies and learning in the search for God, our Church is not well. The Café was founded as the friendly site to find the middle road in the Kingdom of God.
 
Plumbing the Catholic experience in study, travel, the arts, and religious experience can take us in many directions and fire up greater personal interest in the Church that many love and many despair of. On Sunday afternoon the Amazon Prime Truck stopped by our house to deliver a book for my wife, Margaret. She is a member of a very stimulating book circle where each member is reviewing separate texts for 2021. Doing her due diligence, Margaret is now the owner of one of this summer’s hottest selling books, currently rated #47 in Amazon’s multi-million bookseller’s empire. I was telling her on Sunday that I need a novel to read, that my brain was “all work and no play.” So, she said, “try this” and she flipped me a hard-cover copy of Daniel Silva’s The Order. [released July 20, 2020]
 
I had no idea that The Order was Daniel Silva’s eighteenth book based upon the fictitious Jewish art restorer and senior Israeli spy Gabriel Allon. Consequently, I was not prepared for the plotline which involves the mysterious death of a pope [Paul VII, the fictional successor of John Paul II in the story] and the upcoming papal conclave in the Sistine Chapel to elect Paul’s successor. The unfolding of this “who dunnit?” will probably come fairly easily to fans of this genre, though some of the early Amazon reviews from readers suggest that the intelligence master Allon, now approaching middle age with a younger wife and two small children, might be showing his age a bit [read: few catastrophic violent events.] However, a terrorist catastrophe at the Vatican a few years earlier resulted in Allon’s saving the pope’s life and his becoming intimate friends with Pius VII and particularly his personal attendant in the papal residence—in case you were wondering how an Israeli master spy embeds in the preparation of a papal election.
 
Solving the mysteries, in my opinion, was less compelling than descriptions of the forces at work to seize control of the Catholic Church. I was not overwhelmed by The DaVinci Code [2003] years back because the plot seemed too farfetched. Sad to say, the forces at work in The Order are easy enough to see in real time today with the potential to do real damage. The book takes its name from a religious order gone rogue in the name of “saving” Catholic Western Civilization, in league with the new wave of Western nationalism, the rise of neo-Nazi elements in Europe and the United States, and ultraconservative money. When I read a book like The Order, which millions of Catholics in the United States will do during the dog days of August and Covid isolation, I regret that we overlook the catechetical opportunities that fall into our laps to explain the nature of the Church—its healthy and holy powers and its perpetual Achilles heels.
 
With that in mind, I cooked up a “catechetical guide” or Q&A drawn from various sections of The Order. If you read the book, or even if you don’t, when your friends come to you with “Catholic questions” you’ll be ready to address them honestly. Also, the issues bandied about in this book are currently being investigated by critical Catholic journalistic circles or have long histories, and I have attached links where helpful.
 
Have there been suspicious papal deaths in recent history?
In my lifetime the only death with a shadow is that of Pope John Paul I on September 28, 1978, after a reign of 33 days. A variety of papal household contradictions on the circumstances of discovery raised eyebrows, and no autopsy was performed. Conspiracy theorists say he was murdered because he planned an overhaul and reform of the “Vatican Bank” whose practices attracted an investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice among other law enforcement agencies. The film “Godfather III” addresses the general corruption of Vatican monies. But Pope John Paul II, upon his election, apparently did not see evidence of personal foul play in the death of his predecessor.
 
Can a papal conclave be purchased?
[If you need a refresher on how popes are elected in conclaves, the Encyclopedia Britannica has an excellent brief history here.] From the time of Constantine to that of Napoleon, the election of a pope would have had to meet the approval of the Holy Roman Emperors, who were not above military and other coercive means to get the Bishop of Rome they wanted, for any of a wide range of political reasons. As late as 1939, Mussolini allowed a conclave to elect Pius XII on the grounds that as a lifelong diplomat, Pius XII would not embarrass the Duce’s regime publicly/  
 
The new late twentieth century makeup of the College of Cardinals—with the red hat being conferred upon churchmen of all continents, affluent and starving—certainly enhances the opportunities to purchase influence. The isolated leaders with major public health and economic struggles can be more welcoming to the overtures of senior well-placed churchmen in Rome or elsewhere, cleric or lay, who can do them and their dioceses some good with charitable infusions of cash for a clinic, for example.
 
From two cases that dominated American newspapers, Bishops Theodore McCarrick [2018] of Washington, and Patrick Bransfield [2019] of Wheeling, West Virginia, we get a picture of what a Church bribe might look like. An interesting point in real life and in the novel is the lack of recipients’ efforts to hide such payments. In The Order, most recipients deposited their seven-figure awards in the Vatican Bank! I must add editorially that Pope Francis has not released the results of the McCarrick and Bransfield investigations as was promised in 2019, which suggests that monetary influence is still in play in many parts of the administrative Church; the names of high ranking churchmen who received payoffs in these two scandals have yet to be revealed.
 
Why is winning a papal election worth all the trouble?
Two goals top the list: clusters of cardinals may want something to happen, or they may want something not to happen. In the [second] conclave of 1978, many cardinals wanted to break the grip of Italian clergy on the selection process, and they wanted to show solidarity with Catholics behind the Iron Curtain and other totalitarian regimes. Both objectives were met in the election of Karol Wojtyla—a non-Italian Pole whose election so stunned and disturbed the Communist Bloc nations that John Paul II was shot nearly fatally three years after his election.
 
The ideology of a pope—any pope—affects the world’s stock market and global economy as well as a nation’s internal politics. There are over one billion Catholics throughout the world, enough to shape public opinion. As a very general rule, a papal candidate known to be traditional, predictable, and orderly would be preferred by most world governments; a true radical reformer candidate—anti-war, moral critic of capitalism, green environmentalist, etc.—would probably not be invited to speak at the G20.
 
What about the candidates? Does their spirituality play a decisive role in how electors might be inclined to vote? 
Generally speaking, cardinal electors assume that the men they vote for are no more or no less holy than they themselves are. Given that most Cardinals come up the ladder through Church administration as bishops or curial officials, overall their spiritual identities tend toward Church ministry and management. A papal candidate is expected to be a good communicator and evangelist more than a mystic.
 
As The Order underscores so well, most voting Cardinals have history—good, controversial, deeply personal, and in some cases, disqualifying. In the NETFLIX film “Two Popes,” Benedict XVI admits to the future Francis I his failure to face the wide network of predatory priests and particularly bishops. Cardinal Bergoglio in turn confesses his failures to protect social reformist priests under his charge from imprisonment and torture at the hands of the right-wing Argentinian government. The Curia has a reputation for intelligence gathering on both personal and administrative missteps of bishops, leading theologians, and papabile [those considered papal front-runners.] I would not be surprised to learn that national intelligence gatherings include papabile in daily “housekeeping” around the time of a conclave.
 
Voting Cardinals outside of Rome arrive several days before a conclave and are housed together to give them time for prayer, rest, meals, drinks, long walks, and of course scuttlebutt about those perceived by the media and in certain Church cliques as papabile. Although a confidential decorum is expected, the oath of secrecy--and its penalty of excommunication--is not administered until the doors of the Sistine Chapel are locked. However, the voting Cardinals are still free to discuss candidates and vote tallies with each other throughout the conclave.
 
Do we know what happens inside a papal conclave?
For all the oaths and confiscation of cell phones, there are several narratives of recent conclaves provided and/or confirmed by the participants themselves. A largely forgotten but intriguing read is Peter Hebblethwaite’s The Year of Three Popes [1979] which covers both conclaves of 1978. But much closer to our own time is the compelling The Election of Pope Francis [2019]. The author is Gerard O’Connell, a journalist who has covered the Vatican since 1985. He was the TV studio analyst for the Canadian Broadcasting Company’s live coverage of the conclave. O’Connell’s wife, Elisabetta Pique, is the Vatican reporter for the Argentinian newspaper La Nacion. The couple had been friends with Cardinal Bergoglio for years before his election, and O’Connell predicted his election on the CBC. The new Pope Francis called them within a day or so of his election.
 
Having read O’Connell’s work myself, I have the feeling that the strict secrecy of papal conclaves may be a thing of the past. Conclaves will never be televised, and non-voting observers will not be admitted, but the process might become more transparent, a quality desperately needed in the contemporary Church. A good number of cardinals talked freely to O’Connell, and none of them has been excommunicated to my knowledge. The tallies of each ballot are reported, along with tidbits such as serious considerations of both Cardinals Dolan and O’Malley of the United States as papabile. O’Malley, in fact, tallied as high as fourth in one ballot.
 
Is planning and lobbying going on right now for the next conclave?
Indeed, there are three books currently on the market laying out pastoral profiles for the next pope, by journalist-authors Russell Shaw, Edward Pentin, and George Weigel. Weigel was Pope John Paul II’s biographer, and from reviews I have read, he would like the next pope to govern in the mold of John, conservatively and traditionally. Weigel’s book created a news story when New York’s Cardinal Dolan sent a copy of Weigel’s book to all 200+ cardinals around the world, an act that in Roman circles would be regarded as an infamia.
 
One of the most powerful themes of The Order—the “facilitating crisis,” one might argue--is the two millennia persecution of Jews by Catholics and Christians. Is this a fair rendering?
Historically, hatred and persecution of the Jews roots back to two erroneous theological traditions which, while repudiated today by scholars of all reputable religious academies, are still a staple of poorly catechized Christians. The first is early frustrations of Jewish-Christians to convert their temple brethren to belief in Jesus as the new messiah. The destruction of the Jerusalem temple by Rome in 70 A.D. was interpreted as God’s final rejection of his once holy people and their replacement with Christianity.
 
The second tradition dates to the Gospel of Matthew, written years after the fall of Jerusalem. Consider Chapter 27: 24-25 of Matthew’s account of Jesus’ Passion: When Pilate saw that he was getting nowhere, but that instead an uproar was starting, he took water and washed his hands in front of the crowd. "I am innocent of this man's blood," he said. "It is your responsibility!" 25All the people answered, "His blood is on us and on our children!" Christians soon coined the term deicide [“the killing of God”] to brand the entire people of Abraham a despised race.
 
In the novel, the Jewish spy Gabriel Allon consistently reminds his Catholic clerical friends of the sufferings of his people at the hands of the Church. For example, Allon explains to one cleric that guards and executioners at the notorious Holocaust death camps were likely to be practicing Catholics, to which his listener has no answer. His accusations throughout the book are more than fair; worse, our history of antisemitism is not a major staple of preaching and catechetics today. Catholicism has not yet experienced its “Jewish Lives Matter” moment.
 
All things considered, could the next papal conclave resemble that of The Order, particularly in terms of fault lines? 
Pope Francis appears to be in good health, so the next conclave could be several years off. A few things can be reasonably assumed. The economic impact of the Covid-19 virus has virtually just begun. One example: next week the Covid-19 rental relief program comes to an end in the United States. The gap between rich and poor will be enhanced even in the traditionally affluent countries. In Third World nations the picture would be bleaker.
 
In many countries, including the United States, the Church has become entangled in the so-called “culture wars,” unwisely in my view. Subsequently the temptation of political parties and establishments and independent Catholic organizations, such as the Knights of Columbus, to exert influence on Church life becomes greater. The nationalist and neo-Nazi movements are discussed at some length in The Order, particularly in Europe. The current anti-Christian acts of terror, such as desecration, along with the perennial rages against Judaism, reflect multiple issues, at least one being the identification of Christianity with colonial oppression.
 
The continuing absence of Vatican transparency regarding finances is a critical problem. Not only does it scandalize Catholics, but the secrecy obscures the sources of gifts and makes the compromise of all Church business real possibilities. In the Bransfield 2019 report, still not released, the names of ten of the eleven bishops who received gifts were not identified. The eleventh, Archbishop Lori of Baltimore, was the Vatican’s investigator and publicly donated his $10,000 to Catholic Charities.
 
The Order devotes itself to crimes and politics in the Church; it does not much wander into the spiritual side of religion except to take note of moral guilt. Consequently, it is unclear how the victor of the fictional conclave will address the spiritual hungers of his people, particularly as he himself has history. In real life a new pope will face the “Archimedes Problem.” Archimedes, the Greek inventor of the lever, claimed: “Give me a place to stand and I will move the world.” Every pope must pray that his place to stand was not ill-gotten.  
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