Deep Down Things: Essays on Catholic Culture

Deep Down Things

Deep Down Things Essays on Catholic Culture Edited by Joseph A. Cirincione

LEXINGTON BOOKS A division of ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD PUBLISHERS, INC.

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LEXINGTON BOOKS A division of Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200 Lanham, MD 20706 Estover Road Plymouth PL6 7PY United Kingdom Copyright © 2008 by Lexington Books All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Deep down things : essays on Catholic culture / [edited by] Joseph A. Cirincione. p. cm. Includes index. ISBN-13: 978-0-7391-2354-6 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-7391-2354-8 (cloth : alk. paper) eISBN-13: 978-0-7391-3008-7 eISBN-10: 0-7391-3008-0 1. Christian life—Catholic authors. I. Cirincione, Joseph A., 1945– BX2350.3.D44 2008 282—dc22 2008018076 Printed in the United States of America

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Generations have trod, have trod, have trod; And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil; And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod. And for all this, nature is never spent; There lives the dearest freshness deep down things . . . . (Hopkins 1877, “God’s Grandeur,” 5–10)

Contents

Acknowledgments

ix

Introduction

xi

Joseph. A. Cirincione, Ph.D.

Section One: Catholic Culture and Everyday Life 1

Catholic Initiation or Christian Initiation of Adults?

3

Paul Turner, S.T.D.

2

The Idea of the Parish

13

Michael V. McDevitt

3

For the Laborer Is Worthy of His Hire

31

Gerald L. Miller, Ph.D.

Section Two: Catholic Culture and the Imaginative Life 4

Writing as Sacrament

51

Ron Hansen

5

Catholic Poetry: An Essai in Definition

59

Patricia Cleary Miller

6

Chesterton’s Catholic Imagination

75

Professor John C. Chalberg

7

The Sacramental and Twentieth-Century French Literature M. Kathleen Madigan, Ph.D. vii

93

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Contents

Section Three: Catholic Culture and Postmodern Life 8

John Dryden’s Journey to Rome: Church Authority and Catholic Culture

109

Joseph A. Cirincione, Ph.D.

9

Today’s Ethicist and the Development of Catholic Moral Doctrine

125

Wilfred LaCroix

10

Philosophy and the Struggle for the Soul of Western Culture

143

Curtis L. Hancock, Ph.D.

Section Four: Ultimate Ends 11

Is There a Catholic Culture?

161

Richard J. Janet, Ph.D.

Index

175

About the Contributors

183

Acknowledgments

I

n bringing this collection to print, I owe a great debt to Dr. Richard Janet—director of the Thomas More Center—for entrusting me with the project (which, after all, began as his brainchild). In addition, I owe my appreciation to the Center for financial support, as I do to the RigbyKnickerbocker Development Fund for faculty in the Departments of Psychology and English at Rockhurst University, as well as the Elaine Bourke Lally Fund for Teaching Humanities (also at Rockhurst University). I again note, “Writing as Sacrament” is reprinted by permission of the author, Ron Hansen, and HarperCollins Publishers, with modifications to the original citations and citation format. I also note, all excerpts from poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins—in the Introduction and at the beginning of each section—come from the 1918 edition of Hopkin’s poems. Finally, I thank my wide Jana for her understanding and patience; and I further thank her, Jayna, Matthew, Marissa, and Bridget for keeping in high spirits with their good humor.

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Introduction Joseph A. Cirincione, Ph.D.

BACKGROUND OF THIS COLLECTION

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atholic studies programs have been popping up at Catholic, as well as secular, institutions of higher education in this country. Some programs have taken on agendas that advocate for Catholicism against threats and attacks from various quarters. Other programs favor studying Catholic thought and culture, variously discovering both admirable and less admirable actions, documents, and decisions of the Catholic Church. The Thomas More Center for the Study of Catholic Thought and Culture at Rockhurst University (a Catholic, Jesuit institution in Kansas City, Missouri) adopted the latter course (1) in line with the request of President Edward Kinerk, S.J., that the Thomas More Center find “ways to enrich, and to make more available, appreciation of the Catholic intellectual tradition,” and (2) in light of the University’s commitment to teaching students “how to think. . . . [and how to] appreciate new concepts and expand their understanding of the world, and to listen with respect to different viewpoints and make informed ethical judgments about critical issues.” When the Center proposed bringing Garry Wills to Rockhurst to speak about his then recent book Papal Sin, Structures of Deceit, some people on and off campus questioned whether this was appropriate. But others believed that Catholicism and the Ignatian tradition both seemed to support the Center in sponsoring Wills and other controversial critics, as well as supporters, of Catholic thought and culture. Both Catholicism and the Ignatian tradition find no contradiction between faith and reason, faith xi

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and knowledge of the world. Neither presumes that Catholics should only study Catholic thought and culture that is above reproach; neither presumes that all Catholic thought and culture is above reproach; neither presumes that Catholic thinkers should only praise or agree with Catholic thought and culture. Pope John Paul II—in his encyclical on this topic Fides et Ratio (September 14, 1998)—notes that humans seek “the certitude of truth and the certitude of its absolute value,” but “the natural limitation of reason and the inconstancy of the heart often obscure and distort a person’s search” (27–28). For this reason, no one person or Center or “historical form of philosophy can legitimately claim to embrace the totality of truth, nor to be the complete explanation of the human being, of the world, and of the human being’s relationship with God” (51). That is why, in a Catholic, Jesuit, liberal education, one should hear many voices, including controversial and conflicting voices, in a search for truth. We can even learn, says the Pope, from those thinkers who are in error (54). In this spirit of open inquiry, the essays in this collection grew out of a course offered to Rockhurst University students and members of the Kansas City community. Dr. Richard Janet, director of the Thomas More Center and author of the final summary essay of this collection, developed the course; and he explained the legitimacy and the value of its attempt to highlight common elements of Catholic culture in the Newsletter of the Thomas More Center. What follows is a condensed version of his explanation as applied specifically to the essays that comprise this book. Not content merely to examine the multiple and diverse expressions of Catholicism as they manifest themselves in a pluralistic world, the contributors to this collection have endeavored to discover and analyze the possible roles and influences of common values comprising Catholic culture. For example, one of the bedrock foundations of the Catholic perspective has been recognition that faith and reason do not contradict but might complement each other. That idea inspired the development of a rich and complex Catholic thought and culture. Despite variations and differences among Catholic believers (e.g., due to ethnic influences, historical contexts, economic class, etc.), this collection of essays seeks common elements or ideas that may have spawned the very phenomenon of Catholic faith and continue to shape it. By contrast, the postmodern perspective that prevails in many quarters today would deny any effort to go beyond the expressions of Catholic thought and culture to find the roots of what we call Catholicism itself. The scholarship in this collection, inspired and informed by faith, is as legitimate as the faith-free inquiries of postmodernist thinkers and might even illuminate some areas of human thought and culture that would otherwise pass unnoticed.

Introduction

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OVERVIEW OF THE COLLECTION In the course mentioned above, different faculty members presented classes on elements of Catholic culture that their disciplines allowed them to explore and elucidate. These faculty members have prepared most of the essays in this collection based upon their presentations. Four outside contributors also prepared essays. Some contributors present critiques of Catholic culture or, at least, reflections that do not merely advocate official Catholic positions. But they do so, much as the Center and the University do, with a commitment to getting at truth. The essays that comprise this collection fall into four sections, including a closing summary essay, all of which attempt to highlight components of Catholic culture that have played important roles over the centuries in various places and among various communities. Since this collection took form at a Jesuit institution, it seemed appropriate to employ the poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins—that famous nineteenth-century Jesuit poet—for the title of the collection, as well as to introduce the different sections of essays: briefly in the introduction and more fully at the beginning of each section. • The first category (of three essays) explores Catholic Culture and Everyday Life where, according to Hopkins, humans are born to a “blight” that afflicts all of us even as “Christ plays . . . / . . . / To the Father through the features of men’s faces.” Consistent with Hopkins’s views, this section begins with an essay on the initiation of adult converts and continues with a review of life in Catholic parishes, both of which articles highlight a Church blighted with imperfections. Yet both also demonstrate how fallen human communities can reflect Christ in human activity, as does the closing discussion of a living wage in the context of Catholic teachings on social justice. • The second category (of four essays) moves out of the ordinary and everyday to detail Catholic Culture and the Imaginative Life, where Hopkins finds human imagination “sing[ing] sometimes the sweetest, sweetest spells,” while “droop[ing] deadly sometimes . . . ,” waiting ultimately “for [each person’s] bones risen.” The first of the essays, on fiction writing, and the second essay, on composing poetry, view the imaginative life as sacramental, opening life to “the sweetest, sweetest spells.” The two remaining essays review how specific Catholic writers, G. K. Chesterton in England and Georges Bernanos in France, practiced their sacramental craft in ways that not only reflect Catholic culture (singing, drooping, and risen), but help to define it, as well.

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• The third category (of three essays) explores Catholic Culture and Postmodern Life, where Hopkins finds women and men facing “Despair” that can and does “feast” on them and where they pray desperately “To dearest him that lives alas! away.” Two of the essays look at how Catholic culture’s view of Church authority has changed over the years (becoming more narrow or restricted) in reaction to the views of modernism and postmodernism that deny the existence and knowledge of “dearest him.” The other essay reinforces the counter-cultural streak in the rational philosophical bases of Catholicism that give some hope and assurance to despairing humanity. Though modernism and postmodernism encourage humanity to “cry I can no more,” both the Catholic philosophical worldview, i.e., the Western Creed, and Hopkins say, “I can; / Can something.” • One final section provides an essay with a wide-ranging review of major components (ultimate ends) of Catholic culture, pulling together many of the threads spun in the preceding essays. In review, moreover, despite blight, drooping imagination, dark nights, and an absent God, Hopkins finds in that “dearest freshness deep down things” faith that “In a flash” even fallen human nature can be transformed into “immortal diamond.” Section One: Catholic Culture and Everyday Life In his essay—“Catholic Initiation or Christian Initiation of Adults?”— Rev. Paul Turner, a parish priest in Cameron, Missouri, and a well-known writer and speaker on the Catholic sacraments, critically assesses a major ceremonial element of Catholic culture. Believing that full initiation is distinct theologically from the reception of baptized Christians into the Catholic Church, he finds it appropriate that candidates for baptism learn “what is unique about the Catholic Church” (5). But he insists that the initiation of adults must remain primarily “baptism into the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ” (10), that is, a broadly Christian evangelism that proclaims “the most fundamental of beliefs: a belief in a God who lives, and in Jesus Christ, whom God has sent for the purpose of salvation” (5). That said, he has a number of suggestions about how Catholic initiation leaders ought to proceed. Once past initiation, the newly baptized members enter parish life and encounter a much broader array of Catholic cultural elements. Rev. Michael McDevitt, a secular Roman Catholic priest (i.e., a priest without the rule of a religious order in the diocese of Springfield-Cape Girardeau, Missouri), explores “The Idea of the Parish” to get at Catholic culture: he proposes “to substantiate from my pastoral experience what is the identifiable Catholic culture of Roman parishes in the United States”

Introduction

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(13). McDevitt finds so many mobile parishioners seeking out new parishes with every move that he concludes that they must find something commonly satisfying. Moreover, among parishioners, three distinct generations—pre-Vatican II, Vatican II, and post-Vatican II—with all of their conflicts find a good deal commonly satisfying. He identifies the sacraments, liturgy, and rubrics on how to celebrate the sacraments as central to the culture that satisfies mobile parishioners from different generations. He also highlights the place in Catholic culture of the neighborhood church with its parish priest, ecumenism, the gospel of social justice, and tensions between generations. He finds, too, four traditions—regarding death, moral living, penance, and the Eucharist—that overlap some of these earlier elements in comprising Catholic culture at the parish level. And, Father McDevitt notes, all of these elements are central to parishes of Asians, Hispanics, African Americans, etc., as well as to the rural and urban parishes that he has pastored. By contrast with the common cultural elements of initiation, sacraments, liturgy (all of which Catholics knowingly seek and can find even when they travel from an Asian parish on one coast to a Hispanic parish on the other coast or an African American parish in the heartland), the common elements of Catholic social teaching may not be so familiar or so readily embraced. Yet Catholicism does speak not only to the worship lives of the faithful, but also to the conditions of their daily existence—to politics, society, the economy. In his essay, “For the Laborer Is Worthy of His Hire,” Dr. Gerald Miller, professor of Economics at Rockhurst University, traces the notion of a living wage back over a century of Catholicism to Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum. Then, he distinguishes between a minimum wage and a living wage—the latter being “enough to support the wage earner and his or her family in reasonable and frugal comfort” (35) and estimated at nearly $40,000 for a family of four in the United States today. Finally, Dr. Miller sets out a living wage “as a target wage to be reached over time, voluntarily and cooperatively, by both employers and employees, through training and productivity enhancements, as employers—through the virtue of social justice—desire to remunerate longterm, loyal employees more justly” (46). Section Two: Catholic Culture and the Imaginative Life Turning from ordinary daily life, where sacrament and liturgy and generous acts may provide epiphanies and raise wonder, and economic conditions may raise challenges, we find that Catholic artists provide sacramental moments to readers through the life of their imaginations. Ron Hansen (prominent Catholic novelist and professor of English at Santa Clara University) claims, in his essay “Writing as Sacrament,” that

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writing is sacramental when “it provides graced occasions of encounter between humanity and God” (52), when it confidently faces “the great issues of God and faith and right conduct” (52). But, as he admits, there is no necessity “to overtly treat Christian themes” (56); for “The job of fiction writers is to . . . give their readers the feeling that life has great significance, that something is going on here that matters” (57). The imaginative life, in brief, provides moments of incarnated glory amid daily life. And Dr. Patricia Cleary Miller, practicing poet and professor of English at Rockhurst University, says very much the same thing in her chapter “Catholic Poetry: An Essai in Definition.” Miller begins by citing Janet McCann—co-editor with David Craig of Place of Passage: Contemporary Catholic Poetry (2000)—who “In her Introduction . . . states that Catholic poetry’s emphasis on the sacraments is what distinguishes it from other kinds of Christian poetry” (60). According to Miller, Catholic poets, like all poets, begin with the sensuous—“with earth and time”—and move toward the universal where they may “see an intersection between time and eternity” (62–63). Both Hansen and Miller illustrate their reflections on Catholic imagination and writing with their own creations. The next two contributors explore the life of Catholic imagination by looking at creations of classic Catholic authors: the works of G. K. Chesterton and twentieth-century French Catholic writers, particularly Georges Bernanos. John Chalberg’s essay on “Chesterton’s Catholic Imagination” argues that, while Chesterton exercised a “fertile imagination” well before he became a Catholic, “his imaginative powers were enhanced by his belief in and commitment to Catholic orthodoxy—and by his ultimate conversion to Catholicism” (76). A college history instructor at Normandale Community College in Minnesota and performer of a one-man show as G. K. Chesterton, Chalberg demonstrates his claim by showing how Chesterton’s imagination led him to experience joy within the orthodox boundaries of Catholicism. Chesterton believed, argues Chalberg, that the doctrine of original sin generated joy due to the Church’s “promise of the forgiveness of sin” (79)—a major component of Catholic culture. Ultimately, for Chesterton, the imaginative wonder of faith—providing “‘fierce pleasure in things being themselves’” (89)—“sets us free” (91). Chalberg points out how Chesterton imaginatively centered the just society of Catholic culture in “family life” (82) whereby he could also throw into high relief another common element of Catholic culture (as Dr. Gerald Miller’s essay on the living wage implicitly suggested): “that modern capitalism and the modern welfare state actually reinforce one another” (84). Finally, however, Chesterton saw—as do Professor Hansen and Dr. Patricia Miller—that Catholic imagination enables us to appreci-

Introduction

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ate the wonder of ordinary daily life. Or, as Chesterton urged, we ought to “use our imaginative powers to appreciate the things we already have, and make those things live” (90). Dr. M. Kathleen Madigan, professor of Foreign Languages at Rockhurst University, promises in her chapter, “The Sacramental and TwentiethCentury French Literature,” to “focus on a work by . . . Georges Bernanos, in order to show how the quality of the sacramental is part of its essence; then . . . [to] highlight this quality as a distinguishing trait of French Catholic literature by comparing and contrasting it with that of other French twentieth-century works” (93–94). Madigan examines Bernanos’ Dialogues of the Carmelites by calling upon Father Andrew Greeley’s The Catholic Imagination and its association of “Catholic art with the quality of the sacramental, which provides a key to understanding the relationship between Catholicism and the French literary imagination” (95). Madigan compares and contrasts Bernanos’ work to Andre Gide’s The Pastoral Symphony, Sartre’s No Exit, Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, and Gilbert Cesbron’s Les Saints vont en Enfer or literally The Saints go into Hell. Her study indicates that Bernanos depicts faith among Carmelite nuns faced by the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution; they accepted death “with hope in life beyond it” (98), whereas Gide provides very little evidence “of the presence of God, or for that matter of hope” (100). The same in many ways is true of Sartre and Beckett, but not Cesbron. What is common to all five works is the “terrible reality” that fills life. For Bernanos and Cesbron there is an essential element of Catholic culture: a “life beyond the misery” (102). And, though politics and religion have undergone and continue to undergo great changes in France, Madigan hopefully suggests that “Traditional signs of grace may become subtler as French literature of the sacramental continues to evolve, but that does not mean that they will be any less pervasive” (104). Section Three: Catholic Culture and Postmodern Life The first of the essays in this group (by Dr. Joseph Cirincione, professor of English at Rockhurst University) may, at first glance, seem out of place in postmodern life given its title, “John Dryden’s Journey to Rome: Church Authority and Catholic Culture.” At first glance, the essay might seem to belong to the previous group of essays on the Catholic imagination. But a closer look at this Restoration poet, dramatist, political and religious propagandist reveals a view of Church authority that continues in John Henry Newman in the nineteenth century and John Neuhaus today—a much broader view than is presently common in Catholic culture and one which Father LaCroix discusses in the very next essay.

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Dryden looked to Church authority as an answer to sectarian factionalism in England, religious strife that in large part fueled a civil war and led to Cromwell’s Commonwealth. The Anglican Church could not, by legitimate authority, function as a final arbiter of the conflicts; “For,” as Dryden asks in his Hind and the Panther, “how can she constrain them to obey / Who has herself cast off the lawfull sway?” (I. 454–55). So, he turned to (i.e., converted to) the Roman Catholic Church where authority, in his view, resided “In Pope and gen’ral councils” (II. 81). For Dryden, as for Newman and Neuhaus, limiting Church authority to some form of Papal authority alone was just too narrow. Yet for many, since the doctrine of Papal infallibility was proclaimed in 1870 (partly to answer the challenge of many so-called modernist threats to the Church), Church authority means Papal authority. Similarly, Fr. Wilfred LaCroix, S.J., professor of Philosophy and a Jesuit priest at Rockhurst University, sees a much narrower role today for moral theologians in the Church, as the Pope and Curia have circumscribed their role—in reaction against the threats of modernism. “Until the end of the nineteenth century, the accepted procedure for Christian moral theologians was to contribute to a developing consensus among those theologians working on a given moral issue,” freely expressing differences of opinion—“even [with] those currently held by the majority” (126; see Newman’s very similar views in Cirincione, 121). But “By the end of the nineteenth century,” under the very same Pope (Pius IX) who precipitated the change from Dryden’s and Newman’s notion of Church authority to the rather different notion of Papal authority, “theologians seldom publicly questioned papal pronouncements on faith and morals, or even pronouncements from the members of the papal Curia” (127). Acknowledging the differences between moral theologians who talked to themselves and ethicists who try “to examine the different positions on an ethical matter and to save as much as possible from the judgments and explanations of all good people” (128); LaCroix nonetheless feels that ethicists can fill some portion of the now defunct role of moral theologians by discovering “that more than one position [regarding particular moral situations] has substantial merit, or that no one position has convincing strength over all others” (133). By contrast with LaCroix’s reservations about Catholicism circling the wagons in the face of modernist and postmodernist thought, Dr. Curtis Hancock, professor of Philosophy at Rockhurst University, argues that it is Catholicism’s responsibility to do just that. In “Philosophy and the Struggle for the Soul of Western Culture,” he laments that “Catholic intellectuals rely significantly on modernist ideas” (143)—specifically, skepticism, naturalism, animalism, and relativism—because these ideas

Introduction

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are destroying Judeo-Christian Western Culture (145–46). In a countercultural attack on the modernist notions that permeate our intellectual culture and insinuate themselves into Catholic culture, Hancock subjects them to a rational critique and offers “an outline and an indication of how modernism can be tested for its reasonableness [and] . . . to show that it is highly problematic” (147). Hancock argues that “Since the Catholic faith has the tradition and the resources to diagnose the errors of modernism, Catholic culture has a clear duty to debate modernist influences in our society” (155). Finally, he looks to philosophy as central to Catholic culture because “It has given Catholic culture the rational resources to defend the Church’s vision of what civilization and culture ought to be” (155). Section Four: Ultimate Ends In a summary article, “Is There a Catholic Culture?”, Dr. Richard Janet, professor of History and director of the Thomas More Center for the Study of Catholic Thought and Culture at Rockhurst University, draws upon the ideas of Christopher Dawson. Janet emphasizes that Christianity and specifically Roman Catholic Christianity played pivotal formative roles in Western culture. Not surprisingly, he sees the search for “Elements of a Catholic Culture” (167) to be quite fruitful. He discovers a number of elements, going back to the “Roots of a Catholic Culture” in “the Incarnation of Christ” (163), as well as perspectives, quite different from those of Protestants. Considering “The Influence of Catholic Culture” (165), Janet looks to “The Catholic [Sacramental] Imagination” (166), variously discussed by essays in both Sections One and Two of this collection. From this sacramental imagination, he finds emerging a number of common cultural elements. First, “Catholic imagination presupposes, the things of earth, humankind included, have been made good by God’s creative act and Incarnation . . . . [and] might transmit God’s grace” (168). Janet also finds other elements common to Catholic culture, including an “emphasis on community” (169); “the concepts of tradition and authority”—discussed by essays in both Sections One and Three—(169); a tendency to countercultural critiques, which the essays in Section Three both discuss and embody; and “a strong appreciation of . . . the occasion of sin, the means of grace, and the possibility of redemption” (171), developed especially by the essays in Sections One and Two. Implicit in all of the essays and most explicit in the works about Catholic imagination in Section Two is “The Catholic cultural perspective [that] opens itself to the drama of every human life and every human community and to the inherent possibility for human goodness and divine grace in an imperfect and sinful world” (172).

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CONCLUSION Coming to terms with Catholic culture may be, for many Catholics, an exercise in self-reflection only, a not invaluable exercise and a worthwhile purpose for this collection to further. But coming to terms with Catholic culture for the essayists and for their readers serves as well to bring us all to a greater appreciation of how “the institutional Church and the popular imagination of creative Catholics have shaped the very nature and direction of Western thought and culture” (Janet 172), an especially worthwhile objective. Consistent with the Mission Statement of the Thomas More Center for the Study of Catholic Thought and Culture, the authors of this collection have aimed “to inspire both Catholics and non-Catholics alike, inside and outside the academic community, to deepen their own knowledge and appreciation of the Christian tradition” generally and Catholic culture particularly. The authors hope to encourage sincere and open dialogue about Catholic culture (in the best tradition of Catholic thought) both to further the inquiry after truth and to enhance fruitful reflection upon Catholic culture and its contributions over time and across cultures.

Section One

CATHOLIC CULTURE AND EVERYDAY LIFE

Áh! ás the heart grows older It will come to such sights colder By and by, nor spare a sigh . . . . It ís the blight man was born for, It is Margaret you mourn for. (Hopkins 1880, “Spring and Fall,” 5–7, 14–15) I say móre: the just man justices; Kéeps gráce: thát keeps all his goings graces; Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is— Chríst—for Christ plays in ten thousand places, Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his To the Father through the features of men’s faces. (Hopkins 1877, “As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame,” 9–14)

1 ✛

Catholic Initiation or Christian Initiation of Adults? Paul Turner, S.T.D.

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hristian initiation should be just that: initiation into the Christian way of life. But in the Catholic Church, the practice of initiation bears the marks of the Catholic culture. Adults may join the Catholic Church either through the baptismal rites of Christian initiation or through the Rite of Reception into the Full Communion of the Catholic Church. If they have never been baptized, adults celebrate the rites of initiation: baptism, confirmation; and first communion—altogether, normally at the Easter Vigil. If they have already been baptized in another Christian community, the Catholic Church will probably recognize their baptism. (There are exceptions; for example, baptism in the name of Jesus and not in the name of the Trinity.) Persons validly baptized cannot be baptized again in the Catholic Church. As members of the Christian faithful, they may be received into the full communion of the Catholic Church in a simple ceremony, followed by confirmation and their first communion. Whereas the baptism of adults in the Catholic Church should take place at the Easter Vigil, the rite of reception may take place at any time of year. When adults are baptized in the Catholic Church, they become Christians. But they also become Catholics. Although the liturgy of the Church stresses that baptism makes one a Christian, the initiating community explicitly works to make the newcomer a cultural Catholic. The two goals are not opposed to each other, but the primary goal of Christian initiation is sometimes obscured by the cultural goal of Catholic initiation. When baptized adults are received into the Catholic Church, Christian initiation does not adequately define what happens to them. The 3

4

Paul Turner, S.T.D.

baptized have already been initiated into another Christian family. And their reception into the Catholic Church has more to do with becoming Catholic than it has to do with being Christian. The influence of a Catholic culture should be more easily seen in the case of the baptized Christian coming for reception, but it is evident even in the case of the formation of the unbaptized.

MOTIVATION AND EVANGELIZATION Many motives inspire people to join the Catholic Church. Once a relationship has been established, Church ministers or volunteers offer catechetical formation and a series of liturgical rites to assist inquirers on their way. According to a recent study, the primary reason why anyone wishes to join the Catholic Church is to unify the religious faith of the family. Not all those wishing to join the Church are married. But of those who are, fully 83 percent have Catholic spouses. The second strongest reason people cite is a spiritual need and hunger related to family, health, death of a loved one, a feeling of emptiness, or an inspiring experience. Third, people may feel lonely or a need for an authentic community (United States Conference of Catholic Bishops [USCCB] 2000, 7). People have found themselves drawn to the Catholic Church through a variety of means: “personal invitation, Catholic spouses and family, sacramental preparation, Catholic schools, inquiry meetings and classes, bulletin notices and announcements, Catholic revivals, parish fairs and socials, newspaper and radio spots, billboards and flyers, mailings, ‘bring a friend’ events, pew cards for visitors, censuses, and home visits” (USCCB 2000, 14). The Catholic Church is notoriously poor at evangelical efforts that other Church communities perform well. Whereas other Churches send their membership door to door to solicit recruits, or telephone homes to announce their presence, Catholics typically wait for people to say they’d like more information about the Church. However, as indicated above, when Catholics do reach out to their neighbor, they yield positive results. Evangelization should be part of every Christian’s life. But the Catholic culture does not evangelize well, perhaps out of some desire to be different from Churches who do, perhaps out of some smugness that the most excellent products should not need marketing in order to be sold. The Catholic culture limits the amount and kind of evangelization that Catholics do.

Catholic Initiation or Christian Initiation of Adults?

5

PRECATECHUMENATE: CATHOLIC APOLOGETICS OR EVANGELIZATION? The unbaptized interested in joining the Catholic Church go through a period of formation called the precatechumenate. Then they establish a formal relationship with the Church through a ritual called the Rite of Acceptance into the Order of Catechumens. Once the Church designates them as catechumens, they are considered members of the household of Christ and enter the period properly called the catechumenate (see throughout International Commission on English in the Liturgy [ICEL] and A Joint Commission of Catholic Bishops’ Conferences and Bishops’ Committee on the Liturgy [BCL] 1988, Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults [RCIA]). Baptized adults seeking to join the Catholic Church cannot enter a precatechumenate properly called because they are already baptized. However, most parishes invite them into a preliminary stage of spiritual reflection and simply blend them into the sessions called the precatechumenate. During the precatechumenate, “faithfully and constantly the living God is proclaimed and Jesus Christ whom he has sent for the salvation of all” (RCIA 1988, 36). According to the rite, the focus of the precatechumenate is quite narrow. It is pure evangelization, bringing the gospel to those who may not yet have heard it. The precatechumenate proclaims the living God and Jesus Christ. It intends to determine if those who are interested in the Church have the most fundamental of beliefs: a belief in a God who lives, and in Jesus Christ, whom God has sent for the purpose of salvation. At first, this purpose of the precatechumenate may seem unnecessary. For those who grew up in a Christian milieu, it might seem ridiculous to inquire whether or not people believe in God or in Jesus. But these foundational points are absolutely critical in baptismal preparation. Faith rests on these pillars. Consequently, the liturgy of the Church directs that the content of the precatechumenate should be evangelical. However, many parish catechumenate programs, aided by published catechetical manuals, stress another goal during the precatechumenate. They use this period to describe what is unique about the Catholic Church, a kind of Catholic apologetics. This is not completely out of line. Inquirers are indeed wondering what makes Catholics different. Why do Catholics pray to Mary? Why are the saints so important? Why can’t priests get married? Why do you stand, sit, and kneel so much at church? Why do Catholics confess their sins to a priest? And so on. Inquirers may not so forthrightly ask questions about the Church’s sexual mores, but they certainly wonder about these matters: Why is sex outside of marriage wrong? Why is homosexuality

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wrong? Why is birth control wrong? Why doesn’t the Church recognize divorce and remarriage more easily? And so on. The precatechumenate should handle the basic questions of faith posed by inquirers. They may set the agenda during this first period of formation. But the liturgy has more basic issues in mind: God and Christ. The period of the precatechumenate is the initial indicator that the community has two goals in initiation: Christian initiation and Catholic initiation.

SYMBOLS OF THE PREBAPTISMAL AND BAPTISMAL RITES A series of rites precedes baptismal initiation. After the Rite of Acceptance into the Order of Catechumens, catechumens may experience word services that include anointing with the oil of catechumens. At the end of their formation they attend the Rite of Election, usually at the cathedral under the presidency of the bishop. The bishop formally calls them to be among God’s elect, those chosen for baptism. During the period of purification and enlightenment, which usually coincides with Lent, they undergo the three scrutiny rites and celebrate the presentations of the Creed and the Lord’s Prayer. They also celebrate preparation rites on Holy Saturday morning. These rites entail an expansive use of symbols. In the Rite of Acceptance, for example, those to become catechumens gather outside the door of the church, a symbol of their crossing over a threshold of faith. They receive a sign of the cross and are invited to reverence a book containing the gospels. Both events signify evangelization: catechumens are becoming acquainted with Christ and his holy Word. In other rites, oil will signify sealing in good catechesis and sealing out evil influences. The names of the catechumens, symbols of their very selves, will be called aloud at the Rite of Election. They will hear the Creed and the Lord’s Prayer, two texts that define the community’s belief and inscribe its central prayer. In the rites of initiation those being baptized will experience the cleansing, destructive, and restorative power of water. They will be anointed and consecrated with perfumed oil. The imposition of hands will signify the calling down of the Holy Spirit. These neophytes will receive special clothing: a white garment, the uniform of the body of Christ. They will hold a lighted candle, a sign of the risen Christ who personally fills their lives of faith. Most gloriously, they will share in the Eucharist, the body and blood of Christ under the forms of bread and wine, symbols of the staff of life, sacrifice, and the joy of sharing a meal. All these symbols help unfold the meaning of the rites they accompany. But they do something else. They announce a foundational spiri-

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tuality of Roman Catholicism. We are a religion of concrete symbols. We use the stuff of the earth: fire, water, oil, bread, wine, threshold, and word. We use natural symbols. The preponderance of these symbols expresses what makes us culturally Catholic, not just Christian. This connection with the earth is one reason why the Church’s liturgy seems Luddite. It eschews slick electronic media. It has accepted sound reinforcement and electric lights, but never to the elimination of live music and candles. Even the pipe organ remains a preferred musical instrument over its electronic cousins because it relies on metal, wood, and air to produce its sound. Baptized candidates for reception into the full communion of the Catholic Church have an optional set of parallel rites in the United States, but they do not explore the full range of symbols listed above. They do celebrate confirmation and communion at the time of their reception. The rites of Christian Initiation, then, are celebrated by means of very Catholic symbols—a panoply of them, all rooted in the natural elements of the created world. In every way, they announce belief in a Creator who constantly intervenes in human life. However, even though all these symbols profess a very Catholic piety, and even though catechetical formation centers for a large part on how Catholics differ from other Christians, the liturgy of the Church is very clear about its goal for the catechumenate: the Christian initiation of adults. One is baptized into the body of Christ. No baptismal formula states, “I baptize you into the Catholic Church in the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.” Baptism primarily concerns a relationship to Christ and the Church—in the broadest definition of Church. All Christian baptisms accomplish what Catholic baptism does on its fundamental level: it makes someone a Christian. And that is the primary goal of initiation.

FULL COMMUNION Nonetheless, the Catholic Church sees itself as the primary expression of Christianity. American culture, however, disagrees. American culture tends to neutralize the differences among Christian Churches and between Christians and other believers. It is not uncommon to hear even a faithful Catholic say about divergent believers, “Well, we all have the same God.” Or, “We all travel different roads, but we are seeking the same goal.” The Catholic position was reiterated during the jubilee year of 2000 in Dominus Iesus, a document that ironically caused very little jubilation among other Christian denominations. The document, authored by the

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Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, states that the Catholic Church is the continuation of the Church Jesus founded upon Peter. With the expression subsistit in, the Second Vatican Council sought to harmonize two doctrinal statements: on the one hand, that the Church of Christ, despite the divisions which exist among Christians, continues to exist fully only in the Catholic Church, and on the other hand, that “outside of her structure, many elements can be found of sanctification and truth,” that is, in those Churches and ecclesial communities which are not yet in full communion with the Catholic Church. But with respect to these, it needs to be stated that “they derive their efficacy from the very fullness of grace and truth entrusted to the Catholic Church.” (Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith 2000, 16)

According to the Congregation, the Church Christ founded exists fully only in the Catholic Church, and imperfectly in other faith communities. Elements of sanctification and truth can be found outside the structure of the Catholic Church, but the fullness of Christ’s Church, the Congregation states, is found only in the Catholic Church. The document made no reference to the ecumenical dialogue that continues between the Catholic Church and many other ecclesial communities. These dialogues had been given much life after the Second Vatican Council issued its Decree on Ecumenism, Unitatis redintegratio. Dominus Iesus said nothing much different from the Decree on Ecumenism, but it took a different tone. The Second Vatican Council’s decree admitted past failures and promoted discussions and prayer leading toward unity. It catapulted Catholics into ecumenical dialogue. Dominus Iesus seems to curtail discussion. It takes a more authoritarian tone, where the Council’s document was more conciliatory. Dominus Iesus admits that inter-religious dialogue presupposes equality, but only in regard to the dignity of human persons, not to doctrinal content. It says the Church must be primarily committed to proclaiming “the truth definitively revealed by the Lord” (Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith 2000, 22). Thus, in the opinion of Dominus Iesus, evangelization comes first, dialogue second. The language of Dominus Iesus shed light on the very title of the rite used for receiving baptized Christians into the Catholic Church. The first English translation of this rite called it Reception of Baptized Christians into Full Communion with the Catholic Church (ICEL and BCL 1976). But the final translation changed the title to Reception of Baptized Christians into the Full Communion of the Catholic Church (ICEL and BCL 1988). (Note: the Latin title had not changed. The English title was made more precise.) The change of preposition from with to of revealed a world of theology. Christians baptized in another ecclesial community do not enter communion with the Catholic Church. They enter the communion of the Catholic Church. The Catholic Church does not share sacramental communion

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with other Christians. Those who are in the ecclesial communion of the Catholic Church share sacramental communion. To the theologians of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, when people join the Catholic Church they are not just transferring over, as the occasional politician switches from the Republican to the Democratic party or vice versa. Rather, a healing is happening. One who was outside full communion is received. This thinking fits with the history of the rite of reception. The early Church also faced the dilemma of Christians inside and outside the orthodox Church. Some were baptized by schismatics or heretics of Christianity. Others joined another sect after baptism in orthodox Christianity. Schismatics were reconciled with handlaying by the bishop. Heretics were reconciled with handlaying and an anointing (Turner 1993, 85–92). Although the Catholic Church does not formally label as heretics those who were baptized in other ecclesial communions, the rite of reception uses the historical and liturgical grammar that makes this assumption. For those involved in the ecumenical dialogue, this is not pretty. The rite of reception carries with it a tone of reconciliation. The liturgy and theology of the Catholic Church, therefore, have a different interpretation of the rite of reception than the actual people who undergo it. Officially, the Church sees the rite of reception as a restoration to the unicity of the Catholic Church. But most baptized candidates in the average parish see this as a way to bring a common religion to their marriage and family. Their interest relates to the house church, not to the universal church. The interests of Catholic culture should have free reign in the case of baptized Christians preparing for the rite of reception. The whole process is not a matter of Christianization, which has already happened. It is a matter of becoming Catholic.

A CATHOLIC CULTURE OF INITIATION There is, then, a Catholic culture influencing baptismal initiation and the rite of reception. Even though the rites of initiation for the unbaptized are called rites of Christian initiation, and even though their preparation assumes that inquirers are coming to Christ and only then by implication to the Catholic Church, the preparation for and celebration of initiation are unabashedly Catholic. So are the results. In cases of both the unbaptized and the baptized, joining the Catholic Church aligns a person with all that the culture perceives to be Catholic. New members may get the uniformity they desire for the faith of their household, but they also acquire personal identification with everything that is Catholic.

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The catechumenate is no longer a uniquely Catholic phenomenon. The Catholic Church pioneered its restoration in the wake of the evangelization of nations after the sixteenth century and of the liturgical renewal in the twentieth century. But other Christian Churches are now restoring the catechumenate as well. For example, the United Methodist Church has produced Come to the Waters (1996). And the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America has published Welcome to Christ (1997). Both build on the work begun by the Catholic Church, broadening the catechumenate’s appeal to Christians of other denominations. The liturgy of the Church, echoed now by other Christian Churches, has as its aim the Christian initiation of adults. But the exercise of the catechumenate in the Catholic Church has also become an enculturation into Catholicism.

MANAGING THE CATHOLIC CULTURE If its practitioners perceive Christian initiation as Catholic initiation, they will undo the heart of the rite. Enculturation into Catholicism must take place, but the overall goal should remain broad. It is a goal that all Christian Churches share: baptism into the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Catholic culture means to influence initiation, but it should be managed. Initiation should preserve its Christian center. The symbols of initiation need constant attention. Although the natural symbols will always speak to every human culture, cultural symbols will vary their meaning according to time and place. The rites of initiation call for symbols of affection, like a handshake, embrace, or kiss. They call for accepting a cross and reverencing a book. They call for music. When the Catholic Church adapts these symbols to fit the culture, it affirms the overall work of Christian initiation, while it practices a very Catholic piety: the use of a culture’s signs and symbols to express belief in God’s plan of salvation through Christ. As with any organization, the Catholic Church has developed its own vocabulary. Special terms help the Church express the uniqueness of our organization and beliefs. The vocabulary of the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults, however, is quite obscure. Terms unknown even to many Catholics include catechumen, election, scrutiny, and mystagogy. The acronym RCIA confuses those unfamiliar with it but has remained strangely popular. Such terms lift the catechumenate out of everyday experience and suspend it in a realm that seems detached, unreachable. The retranslation of these terms into more common language might help the efforts of Christian initiation, while allowing the Catholic Church to spread the news by what it does best: connect the quotidian with the divine.

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All Christian spirituality is rooted in community. Especially at the eucharist, the central celebration of faith, Catholics express belief together. In regard to baptism, the entire community of Christians shares the responsibility for the initiation of new members (RCIA 1988, 9). Inquirers will be joining a community of believers, not just a system of beliefs. The catechesis and rites of the catechumenate express this communitarian aspect of Christianity if they emphasize the role of all the people. Catholics, like other Christians, can be lulled into a privatized spirituality. Many find it difficult to think and pray as a community, rather than as individuals. But the catechumenate seeks this approach, formation in the midst of community, an essential ingredient of Christian spirituality, a particular challenge to the cultural Catholic. Catholic spirituality could also be more faithful to its place within the broader Christian perspective. Parish teams working on the precatechumenate should keep the focus of this period on Christ. Many times these sessions leap into the kind of catechesis more properly the venue of the following period of formation, the catechumenate itself. During the period of the catechumenate, the team has ample time to unfold the mysteries of Christ to catechumens. But during the precatechumenate, those interested in the Church ask their questions and the leaders keep refining their spiritual quest. Its goal is Christ. Keeping Christ at the center needs to be the core of all Catholic tradition. Catholic culture can even be perceived in the gifts the newly baptized receive. After an Easter Vigil baptism, the neophyte may receive gifts from friends and family. Many of these are praiseworthy items in and of themselves: missals, rosaries, and lives of the saints, for example. But they reinforce a privatized spirituality that puts the newly baptized in prayerful isolation of the very community he or she has just joined. The best gifts for the newly baptized will help them integrate into the broader Catholic community not just by its devotional symbols but also by its communitarian life and worship. Catholic initiation leaders will express their belief about baptism more clearly if they move the rite of reception out of the Easter Vigil and into another occasion during the year. Although adult baptisms should be celebrated at the Easter Vigil, receptions of baptized Christians may take place any time of year. “It is preferable that the reception into full communion not take place at the Easter Vigil lest there be any confusion of such baptized Christians with the candidates for baptism, possible misunderstanding of or even reflection upon the sacrament of baptism celebrated in another Church or ecclesial community, or any perceived triumphalism in the liturgical welcome into the Catholic eucharistic community” (ICL and BCL “National Statutes for the Catechumenate” 1988, #33). Celebrating these events separately will help nuance the precise nature of baptism, a participation in the death and resurrection of Christ.

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CONCLUSION Adults joining the Catholic Church come unbaptized and baptized. The unbaptized go through a process culminating in rites called Christian initiation. The baptized culminate with reception into full Catholic communion. Catholic culture influences the way Catholics welcome new members—the means of evangelization, the content of catechesis, and most importantly the ritual symbols of initiation. Catholics think their new members are joining the Catholic Church more than joining the Christian Church. They tend to think themselves different from other Christians. Consequently, the specifically Christian thrust of the catechesis and liturgy that prepares for baptism sometimes eludes Catholic leaders. In the end, a member of the Catholic Church is also a Christian. But the making of a Catholic belongs more to Catholic culture. The making of a Christian belongs to initiation.

REFERENCES Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. 2000. Dominus Iesus: On the Unicity and Salvific Universality of Jesus Christ and the Church. Evangelical Lutheran Church of America. 1997. Welcome to Christ. Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress. International Commission on English in the Liturgy (ICEL) and A Joint Commission of Catholic Bishops’ Conferences and Bishops’ Committee on the Liturgy (BCL). 1976. Reception of Baptized Christians into Full Communion with the Catholic Church. Washington DC: Publications Office of the USCC. ———. 1988. “National Statutes for the Catechumenate.” In Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults (RCIA), 363–69. Washington, DC: Publications Office of the USCC. ———. 1988. “Reception of Baptized Christians into the Full Communion of the Catholic Church.” In RCIA, 275–86. Washington DC: Publications Office of the USCC. ———. 1988. Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults (RCIA). Washington, DC: Publications Office of the USCC. Turner, Paul. 1993. Sources of Confirmation from the Fathers through the Reformers. Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press. United Methodist Church. 1996. Come to the Waters. Nashville: Discipleship Resources. United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. 2000. Journey to the Fullness of Life: A Report on the Implementation of the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults in the United States. Washington, DC: Publications Office of the United States Catholic Conference (USCC).

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The Idea of the Parish Michael V. McDevitt

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am a secular Roman Catholic priest assigned by a diocese in the United States of America to pastor a territorial parish. We diocesan priests do not have a rule of a religious congregation or order to follow; therefore, we are secular clergy, not regular, and there seem to have been very few rules for us up until now. American Catholic parishes are responsible for many secular cares and really are not given many blueprints to follow, so we might well ask, “what is the culture of such Catholic parishes?” Mission statements have become very popular these days. Many churches and educational institutions and even businesses have them. My mission here is to substantiate from my pastoral experience what is the identifiable Catholic culture of Roman parishes in the United States.

MY PERSONAL SPIRITUAL JOURNEY Everybody calls me “Father Mike.” I was ordained thirty-six years ago as a priest for the Roman Catholic Church in the United States. When newly ordained, I was an associate pastor at the affluent, strongly German, farming parish of St. Augustine’s in Kelso, Missouri. Later, I was pastor for a year at Our Lady of the Ozarks of Forsyth, Missouri, ministering primarily to retired folks. Then there were eleven years as pastor of a brand new parish in the rapidly expanding city of Springfield, Missouri. At first, a warehouse cathedral, that is, Butler Building, served well for a newly established parish to celebrate Mass. Later, the parishioners and I built our liturgically correct contemporary church of St. Elizabeth Ann Seton. 13

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Next, as the pastor of Sacred Heart in Poplar Bluff, on the Black River in Missouri, I was stationed with a community of faith which is 114 years old. For a substantial number of years, Asian and Filipino medical people have been very active parishioners there because of the presence of multiple medical facilities; the parish has recently been experiencing a surge of Hispanic Catholics. Presently, I am pastor of the one-hundred-year-old St. Agnes Cathedral parish in Springfield, Missouri. The only experience of being a pastor that I haven’t had is being in a cosmopolitan inner city. However, as a seminarian in my last years of theology studies, I worked during the winters and summers for three years at Immaculate Heart of Mary—in the African American project housing area in the west end of Louisville, Kentucky. With this background I have formed my vision of the Catholic culture of a parish.

THE CATHOLIC PARISH PRIESTS OF AMERICA This following little piece of religious prose, The Perfect Priest, was making its rounds several years ago. Results of a computerized survey indicate that the perfect priest preaches exactly 15 minutes. He condemns sin, but never upsets anyone. He works from six until midnight and is always a janitor. He makes $60 a week, wears good clothes, buys good books, drives a good car, and gives about $50 weekly to the poor. He is 51 years old, has been preaching for 50 years. He is wonderfully gentle and handsome. He has a yearning desire to work with teenagers, and spends all his time with senior citizens. The perfect priest smiles all the time with a straight face because he has a sense of humor that keeps him seriously dedicated to his work. He makes 15 calls daily to parish families, shut-ins, and hospitalized—spends all his time evangelizing the unchurched and is always in his office when needed.

Why does this image tickle our funny bones? Because one of the major defining elements of American Catholic parishes is the personality of the parish priest assigned as pastor or associate pastor to a local community. One of the priest/professors of my theological studies put it this way: The specific role of the priest, I would venture to say, is to make the Paschal Mystery come alive in himself, and the People of God, by the ministry of the Word and Sacrament and by what subsidiary means his personal capacities may suggest. To this he is commissioned in fellowship with others and only in fellowship with others is it fully operative. In fellowship with others, with the Bishop, with fellow presbyters, with the People of God. (Polycarp Sherwood, O.S.B., 1970, 9)

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The author of the Old Testament book of Ecclesiastes was Qoheleth. The exact meaning of the name Qoheleth is debated. Since the Hebrew word qahal refers to an assembly, Qoheleth probably means someone who calls forth or presides over a meeting. The Greek word used to translate qahal is ekklesia, a citizens’ assembly in ancient Greece. The title Ecclesiastes is really a demarcation that the preacher is the one who calls the community of faith together—a type of a religious barker. In American Catholicism the local priest is an essential part of his parish. In 2002, the tremor caused by the scandal of pedophilia within the American Catholic clergy even witnesses to this relationship of Catholic pastor to his parish. My point here is truer than we care to admit. The impact of a Catholic priest upon a parish does not seem to be found to this degree within the pastoral leadership of other Christian denominations, except perhaps for the major Protestant mega congregations that have recently developed in some of the larger cities of the United States. Our concern in Catholicism is, of course, that the local parish not be in any way a personality cult but, rather, a Christo-centric community!

THE NEIGHBORHOOD CATHOLIC CHURCH There really are no set designs for neighborhood ecclesial communities. But it is with one’s neighboring parishioners—often described as a community of faith under the patronage of some saint—that most people in America experience Roman Catholicism. Many of our Catholic parishes are dedicated to the memory of a particular saint, and along with statues of Mary and Joseph, have elaborate shrines dedicated to patron saints. Indeed, the Little Poor Man of Assisi is a very popular Catholic saint and many American parishes have memorials to him. In fact, in my own diocese, we have just opened a new parish called St. Francis of Assisi, Nixa, Missouri. What is a Roman Catholic parish if it is not unique within our Protestant religious culture of America? Catholics are different. Indeed, Catholics in the United States seem to be extremely creative in detailing religious components that make up a distinctly Roman experience of Christianity. From the multiple institutions of Catholic schooling, to Knights of Columbus anti-abortion memorials, to exquisite stained glass windows and pews with kneelers, to bingos (possibly not as exclusive to Roman Catholicism as they once were) and raffles, to marriage annulment cases, Catholics do it differently from other Christians in the United States. I once was showing a child of another Christian tradition the inside of the local Catholic church building. In offering his youthful gratitude to me, he stated his thanks for my showing him a cathedral! This idealized

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grandeur of Roman Catholic churches (as opposed to most Protestant sanctuaries) is one of the defining elements of our tradition. Many people outside of our tradition enjoy viewing architectural elements of our worship spaces. From the outside looking in, and for those of us inside as Catholics, liturgical environment defines a foundational part of our identity as an ecclesial people. The liturgists warn us that what we construct as our worship edifices will later define worship itself. Catholics love their liturgy and often are critical of how Mass is celebrated. Driven by their faith, generation after generation of Roman Catholics in the United States has sacrificed to build neighborhood church buildings for their parishes. In an effort to take into account adult maturity, current initiation of those joining the Catholic Church ideally respects the story of everyone’s spiritual journey. We allow the consideration of one’s personal experience of grace to dominate our church today. If the Catholic Church has gone through any positive renewal in the last forty years, respect for everyone should stand uppermost as a feature of the Vatican II Church. One does not have to be in the adult world very long to discover that along with personhood comes baggage, and this is true of the spiritual journey. The local church becomes enfleshed by the folks who make up parishes. The following unpublished poem expresses one person’s journey into a parish community, with both the individual and the parish carrying baggage but demonstrating respect: Sanctuary I came to the Church Not so much to find God, As seeking refuge from a world Where love does not exist for some And people have become disposable. I was weary of suspicion’s reign And always armed against hurt. At first, I believed I’d finally found a peaceful place. They welcomed me, smiling lovingly And talking about how God loves us. After a while, I began to see That some of their words were empty; Some of their piety an act And justice was still a crippled thing. Suspicion crashed back into my life And I took up all the armor against hurt That I’d been convinced to lay down. As I headed for the door To leave that place, a knowing came;

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I could not leave, There were no more undiscovered lands. But because I had entered, The door to my heart was permanently Wedged open just a little And God had entered and settled inside. He showed me then That peace cannot be searched out In places or in people. The only place where it can be found Is in tender human hearts, And mine is the only one I can hold accountable for anything. So I went back inside and looked around. I saw that some of the people there Needed me because I believed More than they could.

“Sanctuary” was written by Robby Robinson, a person who came into the church after the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965) through the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults (RCIA). The revised rites of Catholic initiation in the United States were studied in the 1970s and the vernacular, official version of the RCIA for America became effective on July 1, 1988. I helped Robby join the Church when the RCIA process was just starting in the United States. Robby is a laywoman who has been Coordinator of Religious Education in several small parishes in Oklahoma and Missouri.

COMMONALITIES AMONG CATHOLIC PARISHES IN THE UNITED STATES The four traditional marks of Mother Church are that she is one, holy, catholic, and apostolic. From the outset we would be defeating our study of the existence of a specific Catholic culture if we were to say that no two Roman parishes are exactly the same. Because of the peculiarities of diocesan affiliations and the particular abilities of individual personnel in local parochial leadership, there are certainly variations. Yet in the Catholic parishes of the United States, there exists a commonality which defines our church. It is interesting to note that in such a mobile society as is the American experience, many Catholics make a positive transition several times in their lives: from one parish to another they find Mother Church over and over again. How does this happen? What is this Catholic subculture? Hidden agendas and expectations of Catholics can be successfully satisfied when members of our church transfer from parish to parish.

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Although individual Catholics and parishes may be different, Ecumenism became a popularly identifiable Roman Catholic term with the Second Vatican Council of the 1960s. Our Protestant Christian sisters and brothers in the United States now allow us to occupy other sacred ground, which they may still be observing from a distance. Indeed, after these forty years of intensive dialogue, common religious respect for the various Christian traditions could be much better. Nonetheless, Catholic parishes in the United States do mimic elements that come from American Protestantism: for example, there are Bible study groups, evangelism (or in Catholic circles evangelization), fellowship halls, gospel music, Pentecostal prayer meetings, finance and building lay administrators similar to church trustees, tithing, committees made up of non-clerics akin to lay deacon boards. There are those in some quarters who question whether the Catholic Church in the United States has moved too close to the Protestant traditions of Christianity. Yet American Roman Catholics remain with open ecclesial arms extended to our separated brethren and will do so until at last the various Protestant denominations may choose to push us away. Indeed, the Decree on Ecumenism, Unitatis redintegratio (Vatican II, promulgated November 21, 1964) officially denotes many efforts of the American Catholic parish of today. But even with the Ecumenism common to American Christianity, we Roman Catholics are different. In America we are pigeonholed as being high church because of our liturgies. We celebrate the ancient tradition of having seven Sacraments that are foundational to our religious identity; indeed, we are identified as a religion by these ceremonies. Catholic subculture in America is not only experienced but it is also legislated. Rubrics are the directions written in red print in liturgical books to give the proper order on how to celebrate the Sacraments. Although some variations are now allowed, contemporary minds may view the Roman Catholic ceremonials as highly controlled, routine, and repetitive. Catholic practitioners of the very traditional interpretation of liturgy, as well as those of the extremely loose application, see our liturgical spectrum as quite wide and even off the charts. But this set of seven Catholic ceremonies remains essential today to Roman religious culture in America. Many parishes have very active liturgical committees in place. The integrity of the Church’s seven Sacraments even takes precedence over ecumenical efforts. The United States occupies a tremendous place of power in the twentyfirst century that is not without its liabilities. The Pastoral Constitution of the Church in the World, Gaudium et Spes (Vatican II, promulgated December 8, 1965) has been a challenge to Catholics everywhere and to American Catholics with their substantial financial resources. Peace and Justice Committees, Social Concerns Groups, St. Vincent de Paul Societies, Parish Kitchens and Food Pantries, and Family Life Commissions are just some

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examples. These real expenditures of parish effort are duplicated time and time again to create a contemporary American Roman Catholic milieu of a Gospel of social justice. In some ways, parishioners see the integrity of their celebration of the Sacraments as directly related to their parish’s being involved in efforts to help others. A distinctive feature of Catholicism is that we look at the Church as the Mystical Body of Christ (Pope Pius XII, Mystici Corporis Christi, June 1943), and belief in God is tethered to our very belief in the Church. St. Paul in his First Letter to the Corinthians (12:14–26) gives us the image of the church as the Body of Christ. In 1992, the Bishop of Springfield-Cape Girardeau in Southern Missouri, John J. Leibrecht, D.D., Ph.D., wrote a pastoral letter, published in our diocesan newspaper, The Mirror (April 3, 1992), entitled “The Parish: A Presence and Work of the Lord.” Bishop Leibrecht divides this pastoral letter on the parish into various subheadings. His themes are that parishes reflect the Risen Christ, they continue Christ’s presence in the world, they continue the Mission of Jesus, and they are communities; indeed, they are Eucharistic communities. Leibrecht goes on to state that parishes are called to prayer and to the missions of evangelizing and teaching. Under the subheading of Parish Structure, Leibrecht says, “Whether the parish be described as the Body of Christ, the people of God, as vine and branches, or as a community of faith, order is necessary” (10). The Bishop concludes that there are essential connections that parishes have with a diocese and the universal Church. In his final remarks, Bishop Leibrecht reflects: The name of my parish is St. Joseph, Sacred Heart, Immaculate Conception. In the final analysis, however, the name of every parish is Jesus Christ . . . . To name a parish St. Joseph, Sacred Heart, Immaculate Conception is a traditional Catholic practice. Such names, in a unique way, simply reflect an individual article of human truth about the encyclopedic God-made-man, Jesus. (11)

The Catholic American parish, as the household of God listening and obeying God, must be a light to the nations, modeling and making a spectacle of herself as the very Bride of Christ. Avery Dulles, S.J., a priest now named a Cardinal of the Church, wrote the Introduction to Vatican II’s conservative Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, Lumen Gentium (promulgated November 21, 1964), in Abbott’s 1966 book The Documents of Vatican II. In his books Models of the Church (1974) and The Resilient Church (1977), this very same Jesuit Cardinal, Avery Dulles, gave us the idea that there are multiple models by which we can view the Church of Jesus Christ. The pastoral perspective of the Church on the most down to earth level is horizontal, parish-by-mission-parish establishing a subculture throughout the world, though not of the world. Possibly this comprehensive and

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universal aspect of every Catholic parish is what Bishop Leibrecht was referring to when he used the adjective encyclopedic (the widest range of all enlightenment) when referring to the God-made-man, Jesus.

THE REALITIES OF THE PARISH John Henry Cardinal Newman (1801–1890 C.E.) published a monograph in 1873 entitled The Idea of the University in which he ventured the opinion that far and away the majority of education goes on outside the academic classroom setting. With the real world of contemporary universities, his idea of true learning for life at these educational institutions may be questioned. But when it comes to the idea of parish, Roman Catholicism becomes alive and enfleshed. From a pastoral point of view, the parish is a place that provides food for the soul (Eucharist), fresh water for eternal life (Baptism), shelter for the ecclesial flock (a place to worship), and a protection against enemies (prayer and education and formation). The Latin word pastor (now priest, deacon, or lay administrator) is called to be a good shepherd of the parishioners under his or her care. The original Greek paroikia (parish) means dwelling near. But the truth of the matter is that the term parochial may give the impression that nothing else exists outside of one’s local faith community. For instance, some fundamental Protestants go so far as to rebaptize every new member of their local assembly. But we cannot allow the phenomenon of parish life to define believers so narrowly. Parishioners are the local Christian neighbors who are on their journey to eternal life together. There are other church neighborhoods, however, which are doing the same thing. The more successful parishes have a way of working together. A woman who heralded from a large metropolitan parish with multiorganizational structures once sent a letter to me about her transfer to a new location in the world and into a parish much reduced from what she was accustomed to. She narrated that the little parish had the same concerns as the metropolitan parish. For instance, would there be enough money in the small parish’s coffers to respond to the liturgist’s request to change the two Mass candles which were now only nubs, and could the maintenance person also be allowed to purchase wasp spray for the ceiling over the altar? It does not take much to realize that finances and the physical plant are practical concerns, along with the liturgy, that drain much of the efforts and energies of every parish. Stewardship of time, talent, and treasure are more recent additions to the contemporary culture of a Catholic parish. The parish is commonly the first locus of a Catholic’s pattern of financial contributions and acceptance of church fund-raising for the spread of the Gospel. It is often where one is challenged to become a volunteer.

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I am afraid that in the vast universe of issues many times things of little consequence to Salvation History can drive a local community of faith into disarray. Because of the very nature of authority in Roman Christianity, these brush fires usually do not last long because some force makes its authority felt, and that’s that. To a point, Catholic parishes in America may have assimilated various democratic habits. Yet administrative and ordained authorities with personally assumed dominance over a ministry are real elements of the local situation. There is the influence of tradition systemic and realized in every single Roman Catholic parish in the United States, if not the world. (See John Paul II and the piety of Divine Mercy Sunday now celebrated on the last day, a Sunday, of the Octave of Easter.) When some parishioner says “We never did it that way before,” a project can be stopped in mid-air until all the religious and parochial viewpoints are heard, or until some higher authority can be invoked. Interestingly enough, Catholic parochial efforts also include inactive members who have fallen away. Many do return to being active and their influence is felt in many parishes. The Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults is often used as a vehicle for returning Catholics to come back to the Church. Sometimes returning, fallen away Catholics romantically try to recover something they feel that they may have lost long ago; on the other hand, some come back with what they see as valuable elements of their experiences when they were out of the church. The subculture of many Catholic parishes has religiously and even politically conservative and liberal tensions working themselves out on the fringe of local Church life. Some Catholics are getting involved in more traditional practices of former times, and some parishes revel in the fact that they are reestablishing pious ceremonies of antiquity. However, after thirty-six years, I can say that, by way of inclination and disposition, most American Roman Catholics are tolerant of others and moderate to a fault. It takes a lot of effort and real education on an issue to get individual Catholics and, even more, so a parish riled up on matters that count. In the eyes of Catholics, there is no middle ground. Either parishes are very active and successful, or they are dying. Truth be said, there are many parishes that really do just struggle to maintain themselves. Like Martha in the Gospel, the tendency is for the local faith community to commit itself to the heresy of activity, sponsoring events for the sake of keeping parishioners busy. Some of our parishes function like middle-class country clubs, sponsoring golf tournaments and women’s Catholic Bridge tournaments. There are trips to the casinos and volunteer lists for this month’s Vegas night. Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, Little League sports, soccer and youth trips to New Orleans, Habitat for Humanity and bowling leagues are on Catholic parish calendars all the time. Frequently, parish dinners are better than local restaurant fare. Scheduled weddings and baptisms seem to be listed

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without comment along with the social events of a parish. Only the more creative parishes are able to officially demark in their weekly bulletins what is more central to discipleship. There ought to be some accounting for the amount of energy that an event can drain from parish resources. Should a parochial funfest involve as much interest as the parish’s celebration of the Triduum? It seems as though many Catholic parishes cannot critique the expenditure of their energies. In many cities and towns in the United States, membership in a local Catholic Church is to be socially alive. American Protestantism is also giving into this same heresy of activity, though both they and we Romans seem to have members of our congregations who are speaking up now as critical prophets. There are at least three distinctive groups in a parish: the pre-Vatican II believers whose sentiments are not dying out as quickly as one might suppose; the Vatican II Generation; and finally the post-Vatican II people who are really struggling. As one can easily see, this Church Council of the 1960s is a defining moment for all levels of church life. Although all sixteen documents touch the American parish to some degree, among the Vatican II decrees, declarations, and constitutions, seven are notable for our purposes: the Constitution on Sacred Liturgy, Sacrosanctum Councilium, December 4, 1963; the Decree on the Instruments of Social Communication, Inter Mirifica, December 4, 1963; the Decree on the Bishops’ Pastoral Office in the Church, Christus Dominus, October 28, 1965; the Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation, Dei Verbum, November 18, 1965; the Decree on Apostolate of the Laity, Apostolicam Actuositatem, November 18, 1965; the Declaration on Religious Freedom, Dignitatis Humanae, December 8, 1965; and the Decree on the Ministry and Life of Priests, Presbyterorum Ordinis, December 8, 1965. All of the documents of the 1960s Council changed Catholicism of that time and the way Catholics see themselves today. Since the Vatican II Council, the Catholic Church has been and continues to be touched by the Holy Spirit in ways that seem unprecedented by way of the suddenness of impact. These decrees, declarations, and constitutions caused an implosion of ministries and, at the same time, major dysfunctions for the Church.

CHURCH MOVEMENTS: MARKS OF DYSFUNCTION OR THE SPIRIT? There are a substantial number of folks who question the compatibility of the efforts of post-Vatican II people with the wider Church. George Weigel writes a weekly column, The Catholic Difference, syndicated in fortyplus American newspapers. Most recently, in his book The Courage to Be

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Catholic: Crisis, Reform, and the Future of the Church (Basic Books, 2002), he has defended the romantic attempts of the post-Vatican II people to recapture the faith of former times. Weigel writes that many post-Vatican II people possessively see their Church in a contemporary crisis and want to be more conventionally orthodox than, in his words, the Catholic Lite (7), Vatican II generation. These polemical fundamentalists can be seen, for example, in Mother Angelica and EWTN—Eternal Word Television Network—or the summer youth conferences sponsored by the Franciscan University of Steubenville, Ohio. In order to be the traditionalists they want to be, these younger Catholics go to Mass daily, study classical elements of the faith and church history, do devotions and read the Bible in their personal effort toward substantive formation. A very small church group, the Neo-Catechumenate Way of new students of faith, founded in 1967, also attempts to enthusiastically revisit the primitive kerygma of Christianity. At Saint Peter’s Square on May 30, 1998, the artist/musician and layman, Kiko Argüello, founder of this group, was one of four speakers to be handpicked by the Pope to speak. Needless to say, with some distrust in the Church of gnostic groups emerging, these very groups themselves distrust the wider Church. Since Vatican II has made its influence felt, parish life, which had a tendency to be inner-directed, is now more outer-directed. In former times, to be visited by the priest for the annual block collection and counted on the parish rolls were very important. Today, by being part of small base communities (a notion from Latin America), or seeking out intentional communities, or exercising specialized ministries, even to creating renewal groups outside of parish boundaries, the faithful are experimenting with new ways of doing things. Lay catechists have taken up a real role in Catholic evangelism. From at least the 1970s, feminism and strong Catholic women leaders have been phenomena within the Church. Even more so in 2008, there is the disappointment with the American Roman Catholic clergy. In our hearts, we know that voices of the faithful or lay Catholic parish leadership forums now have more of an incentive to legitimately represent the Church. There is no going back. Catholics see themselves as a sinful, pilgrim people worthy of redemption. “Where two or three are gathered in My name” (Matthew 18:20), Jesus our Savior is present and the Church exists. Traditionally, Catholics have been faithful in receiving the ministry of their clergy and vowed religious, and feel indebted to them. Far and away the contemporary Church is now made up of laity with their sensus fidelilum (the laity’s perspective) which must be honored. Footnote number 40 in Vatican II’s Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, Lumen Gentium (November 21, 1964) states that the “sense of the faithful” was a favorite theme of John Henry Cardinal Newman.

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Some contemporary commentators ask the question whether Mother Church of the twenty-first century is at the point of critical mass, ready to explode. Universal church scars do leave their mark on local parishes. There is the sinful, scandalous, and criminal behavior of some of our church members from history and at present. But “You are Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church, and the gates of the netherworld shall not prevail against it” (Matthew 16:18). Normal parishioners believe these words of Sacred Scripture as much as they believe in their orthodox teaching concerning about Catholics the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist. There is something resilient (Avery Dulles, S.J., 1977, The Resilient Church: The Necessity and Limits of Adaptation). There is a religious survival of the fittest of those of us who have our Roman Catholicism properly grounded and live the call to perfection. God calls us to perdure. Although we may not understand how the progress of our beloved faith is presently going to work itself out, “the gates of the netherworld shall not prevail.” We Catholics interpret this promise of Jesus as referring to the Institution of the Roman Catholic Church. What makes Roman Catholic parishioners so strong in their allegiance to the Church? How the following elements fit together is even more mysterious to those of us who are her adherents.

FOUR COMMON CATHOLIC TRADITIONS There are four common traditions or practices or emphases that permeate Catholic parish life: those surrounding death, morality, penance, and Sunday Mass. “Most Catholics do better than other people when it comes to death,” said the non-Catholic owner of a local funeral home. Catholics have official ways of confronting death. I know that the Sacrament of the Sick is among the seven Sacraments of the church, but I recall my first pastor telling me—in 1971 when I was a new priest—that I gave out the Sacrament too casually. In fact, he, as a monsignor of the Church, had only anointed three living people in his fifty years of ministry. So, I remember the old qualification of being in extremo mortis (at the last moment of death). When death visits a Catholic home, the Church is to be called in. The fact that parishioners telephone parish rectories when someone is seriously hurt in a car accident or dying of cancer, tells us that Catholics are taught to ask God’s help when someone is seriously ill and dying. Fourteen Stations of the Cross adorn the sidewalls of many Catholic churches and graphically portray the death journey of Jesus. Catholics teach their very young to memorize the prayer Hail Mary which contains the closing words “pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death.”

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Catholic funding maintains legions of church and parish cemeteries as holy ground, second in sanctity only to the acreage where the church edifices stand. Memorial plaques adorn parish churches as remembrances of deceased members of the family. Mass Intentions often are designated for the repose of the souls of our beloved dead. There are the wake services, reception of the body at church, vespers for the deceased, and funeral liturgies celebrated by fellow parishioners, who provide condolence meals afterwards. A successful parish has an updated ministry to the elderly, making sure that aged parishioners are currently anointed. Catholics confront death with crucifixes portraying the corpus of Jesus on an old Roman instrument of death, with pietas of a grieving Mary holding her deceased Son on her lap, with purgatorial societies praying for the dead. In some ways Catholics could be seen as preoccupied with suffering and death. Carmelite spirituality and parish missions often help parishioners to pass through the dark night of the soul. Catholics are taught to accept death and the tragedies of life. Secondly, Catholics know that true discipleship involves morality/ good works. Catholics are taught as children to memorize the Ten Commandments according to the Greek numbering of the Old Testament, the Septuagent. Most Protestants follow the original Hebrew numbering. In recent times well-meaning believers have Ten Commandment placards staked out on their front lawns. Yahweh is the faithful one and we prove ourselves as God’s people by living these ten classical statutes from the Bible. The moral concerns of the Ten Commandments and deference given to sinfulness are treasured in Catholic quarters. The Scriptures tell us that the Lord will never walk away from those who keep these ten precepts. All believers in the Judeo-Christian tradition know this. Catholics actively teach morality and ethics to their children even perhaps to the fault of neglecting to make the Scriptural connections. Sin and the formation of conscience are important themes in Catholic circles. Moral theology is a discipline of study for Mother Church. The proper mores and the failure of personal and societal sin are common Catholic themes. The ethical magisterium of the Church seems to be very public and all pervasive. Supposedly Catholics know what sin and guilt are. Roman Catholics have a tremendous corpus of moral teachings to nourish their commitments to their religion. Morality is, perhaps, even more important in the Catholic parish than reading the Bible from cover to cover. There is not an all-pervasive effort in Roman Catholicism to quote scripture passages to establish a specific ethical challenge to live by. How, in fact, do Catholics read the Bible? Most Catholics are still comfortable having the Bible read to them publicly. As we look at this question, we first have to ask the question how long has adult literacy been universal?

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More or less only in the last century in our own country. Personal Bibles were not even available to the common person until after the Gutenberg Press, six hundred years ago. Therefore, even for recent generations of Catholics, we have had the customary experience of having Bible passages read to us within the official liturgies of the Church. Since Catholic tradition goes back at least 1,900 years, we are very comfortable having the Sacred Scriptures read to us by others. In another sense, the Bible is fully reflected as the living word of God when it is read as a faith community experience. Historically, Catholics in parishes were not encouraged to read the Bible for themselves until the twentieth century. As a third defining Roman Church element, there is a categorical imperative to discipline one’s bad behavior. Catholics do not realize that this maxim has a strong tether to the Bible. Franciscan spirituality within the Church says there is a necessity to do penance for sin. (See Outline of the History and Spirituality of the Franciscan Penitential Movement by Father Raffaele Pazzelli, T.O.R., 1978, 3.) The Latin penitentia is the translation of the Greek word metanoia, both words translating what the great St. Paul meant as conversion. Catholics know how to eat fish on Fridays during Lent, with some parishes having Friday fish dinners all year long; they know that they are to fast an hour before receiving communion and all day on Ash Wednesday and Good Friday; and Catholics know how to offer up prayer and almsgiving as sacrifices. Penance develops selfdiscipline. Discipline is a tremendous help to self-development. In the 1973 educational document of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, To Teach as Jesus Did, a consistent element of Catholic education propounded was the value of the discipline of Christian morality (8; see also 9, 11, 20, 23, 41, 107, 111). Many would agree that the American Catholic Church truly speaks a challenging prophesy in putting together this connection of personal discipline and education. There is the somewhat controversial, but significantly influential, twentieth-century Catholic movement known as Opus Dei. It originated in Spain in 1928. Since the 1980s, Opus Dei is the only personal prelature in the Roman Catholic Church. (A personal prelature is an entity within the Catholic Church that is defined by a group of persons rather than by a geographical area, such as a diocese, headed by their own intact authority structure.) This organization, relatively small in the United States with only 3,000 core members, is a very secretive and conservative Catholic association. Lay members, under the spiritual direction of their handpicked ordained Catholic priests, are to live lives of holiness in the workplace and at home. Opus Dei numeraries and their associates are dedicated to be companion workers to the Pope and to traditional Catholic praxis. Its members are to exercise self-denial in their lives. Having their own Opus

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Dei prayers and customs, their “plan of life” includes daily Mass, the rosary, spiritual reading, and mental prayer. Even if one is hesitant about some Roman Catholic penance practices, all Catholics expect a certain self-discipline among fellow church members. Criticism of ourselves and the fraternal correction of others is part of the Catholic amendment of life. Though basic individual human rights are essential, Catholic culture stops short of free license. Even if we feel we are correct, our Church teaches us that we do not have the right to impose ourselves on others or to manipulate others. Catholics are taught that the individual should sacrifice his/her own wants and desires for the good of others. The Sacrament of Penance celebrates for Catholics what has been elucidated here. Fourth and finally, of all the public rites celebrated by Catholics, the weekly schedule of Masses throughout the year is the apex of parish life. I once wrote to my parishioners the following in the St. Elizabeth Ann Seton Parish Newsletter (July 1984, 1–2): Sunday Mass is at the heart of Catholic life. We are told that one can judge the health of one’s Catholicism by one’s love for the Mass . . . . We don’t delude ourselves in thinking that our parish’s celebration of the liturgy leaves nothing to be desired. Maybe the charm of our Sunday services is the constant weekly struggle to do better with our worship offered to the Lord. So many, including we priests, do put so much of ourselves into these parish celebrations of the Eucharist, that I am sure everyone appreciates the efforts and are inspired. But the Eucharist is more than what we as human beings put into it. We believe that Jesus gave us the memorial of His body and His blood! The Lord Himself initiates and sustains what we do when we come together for the Eucharist. Please consider the following points: A. Liturgy Itself The Symbols and words of Mass are beautiful; but they are empty if we individually and as a community fail to see them within the context of faith. They are only a means whereby we attempt to reach God. As followers of Jesus, this is the way we believe He wants it done. If we rely on how a priest holds his hands or how beautiful it all looks, we will eventually be disappointed. The symbol should lead us on to an awareness of (1) God and His activity in our lives, and (2) our attempts at living the Christian life. The symbols soon wear out if we do not pass beyond them to real prayer. Granted, there are certain adverse limitations on the Mass which a mixed group of all ages raises, and the personal habits of a priest may encourage; but this is a reality, and the way any group of human beings function when the lines of age, talent, and interest are attempted to be bridged.

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Michael V. McDevitt B. The Mystical Body, the Church The people of God, who are themselves Christians, attempt to become the spiritual body of Christ when they come to the Liturgy. Having become one with Our Lord and one another at Communion, they are sent out at the end of Mass to present to the world the image and message of God. We actually become the voices, hands, and hearts of the Christian God in the eyes of our fellow man. If we are understanding, our God is seen as understanding. If we are not, God is seen as harsh. The Catholic people as Church are in a very real way sent out at the end of Mass as the Mystical Body of Christ—actually bringing His love to our world. C. The Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist: As Catholics we must believe that Christ is really and truly present in the sacrament of the Eucharist for, besides Sacred Scripture saying so (Matthew 26:26–28 / Mark 14:22–24 / Luke 22:19–20 / 1 Corinthians 11:23–25 / John 6:51) the terms of the New Covenant are between God the Father and God the Son. Our Mass, besides being a “thanksgiving offering” to the Father through the Son, is also a renewal of this New Covenant. Much Old Testament symbolism of a covenant ceremony is present in the Mass. Christ for our part has to be present to renew the New Testament with God, his Father. The Sunday Eucharist should be what we look forward to all week long and should be the source of our spiritual nourishment for the week ahead. As Catholics we cannot and do not take lightly the Sunday obligation to participate in liturgy. We are now asking everyone who has been more or less casual about this ancient tradition of ours to reconsider their practice and habits.

No matter what the statistics are, Catholic parishes in the United States have to respond to an essential expectation of their parishioners to provide for Mass; hence, the recent influx of international priests into our country. Yet in our less than idealistic world today, with such a radical decrease of vocations in the United States in the last forty years, we now have a ritual for Sunday Celebrations in the Absence of a Priest (United States Conference of Catholic Bishops 1996).

CONCLUSION These four elements distinctly circumscribe so much of what goes on in the Roman Catholic parish: how Catholics seem to be preoccupied with death, live out their faith ethos essentially by practicing morality, do penance for their sins, and understand their Sunday Mass obligation. National Roman parishes of Asians and Hispanic congregations, as well as African American Catholic Churches, may vary somewhat in these practices (Quinceaneras for Hispanic girls turning fifteen years of age rival

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what we Anglos do for our daughters’ weddings); yet they still live out a discipleship with Jesus, identifiable with other Roman Catholic parishes of the United States. Although ecclesial dogma teaches that bishops enjoy the fullness of priesthood and diocesan territories form the local Church, most Catholics identify with their neighborhood faith communities headed by a person exercising the role of pastor—a priest, or a deacon, or a religious sister, or a lay catechist. This pastoral setting of a flock with a caring shepherd is recognized as the ideal of what Church is and what parishes are. If the philosophical discipline of Phenomenology were stringently applied to the subculture of all American Catholic parishes, one would find a distinctively Roman stage for the locus of God’s grace. I will bring my own story to an end here. If it is well written and to the point, that is what I wanted; if it poorly done and mediocre, that is the best I could do. Just as it is harmful to drink wine alone or water alone, whereas mixing wine with water makes a more pleasant drink that increases delight, so a skillfully composed story delights the ears of those who read the work. Let this, then, be the end. (2 Maccabees 15:37–39)

REFERENCES Abbott, Walter M., S.J. 1966. The Documents of Vatican II. New York: Herder and Herder. Coriden, James A. 1996. The Parish in Catholic Tradition: History, Theology, and Canon Law. New York: Paulist Press. Duggan, Robert. 1996. Parish Liturgy: A Handbook for Renewal. Kansas City: Sheed and Ward. Dulles, Avery, S.J. 1966. “Introduction” to Lumen Gentium (Dogmatic Constitution on the Church). In The Documents of Vatican II, edited by Walter M. Abbott, S.J. New York: Herder and Herder, 9–13. ———. 1974. Models of the Church. Garden City, New York: Doubleday. ———. 1977. The Resilient Church: The Necessity and Limits of Adaptation. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Forster, Patricia, and Sweetser, Thomas. 1999. Transforming the Parish: Models for the Future. Franklin, Wisconsin: Sheed and Ward. Froehle, Bryan T., and Gautier, Mary L. 2000. CATHOLICISM USA: A Portrait of the Catholic Church in the United States. Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate (CARA), Georgetown University. Mary Knoll, New York: Orbis Books. Gibson, David. 2003. The Coming Catholic Church: How the Faithful Are Shaping a New American Catholicism. New York: Harper One. Greeley, Andrew. 2004. The Catholic Revolution: New Wine, Old Wineskins, & the Second Vatican Council. Berkeley: University of California Press. International Commission on English in the Liturgy (ICEL) and A Joint Commission of Catholic Bishops’ Conferences and Bishops’ Committee on the Liturgy

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(BCL). 1988. Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults (RCIA). Washington, DC: Publications Office of the USCC. Keeler, Robert F. Parish! 1997. New York: The Crossroad Publishing Company. Leibrecht, John J. April 3, 1992. “The Parish: A Presence and Work of the Lord” (Pastoral Letter from Bishop Leibrecht, Diocese of Springfield-Cape Girardeau, Missouri). In The Mirror (Catholic Newspaper of the Diocese of SpringfieldCape Girardeau): 5–12. McDevitt, Michael V. July 1984. “Dear Parishioners.” Parish Newsletter of St. Elizabeth Ann Seton Parish, Springfield, Missouri: 1–2. Newman, John Henry. 1982. The Idea of a University. Ed. Martin J. Svaglic. Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press. Pazzelli, Raffaele, T.O.R. 1978. Outline of the History and Spirituality of the Franciscan Penitential Movement (The Origins of the Third Order). Rome: Unpublished manuscript. Pope Pius XII. June 1943. Mystici Corporis Christi. Robinson, Robby. 1984. “Sanctuary.” Unpublished poem. Sherwood, Polycarp. 1970. “Alleluia: Papers of Polycarp Sherwood, O.S.B.” Resonance 5.1: 9–12 Steinfels, Peter. 2003. A People Adrift: The Crisis of the Roman Catholic Church in America. New York: Simon & Schuster. United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. 1996. Liturgy Documentary Series, Volume 10: Sunday Celebrations in the Absence of a Priest. Washington, DC: Publications Office of the USCCB. United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. 1973. To Teach as Jesus Did. Washington, DC: Publications Office of the USCCB, Weigel, George. 2002. The Courage to Be Catholic: Crisis, Reform, and the Future of the Church. New York: Basic Books.

3 ✛

For the Laborer Is Worthy of His Hire Gerald L. Miller, Ph.D.

The harvest is abundant but the laborers are few; so ask the master of the harvest to send out laborers for his harvest. . . . Stay in the same house and eat and drink what is offered to you, for the laborer is worthy of his hire. (Luke 10:4, 7) There is a dictate of natural justice more imperious and more ancient than any bargain between man and man, namely, that wages must be enough to support the wage earner in reasonable and frugal comfort. (Pope Leo XIII 1891, 45) “Working full-time and year-round is, for more and more Americans, not enough.” (Barrington 2000, A2)

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resently there are at least 140 living-wage ordinances that have been enacted across the United States, coupled with numerous additional living-wage campaigns currently in progress. Such legislation involves a great deal of controversy regarding issues of economic and social justice, but is primarily centered on a view that the strict market approach to wage determination results in unacceptably low wages for the working poor. The argument often takes this line of reasoning: if market wage rates are not high enough to lift certain full-time workers out of poverty according to our own governmental poverty thresholds, then legislation establishing a living wage is required. This argument gains further strength in a 31

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weak economy characterized by large layoffs, high unemployment rates, and stagnant wage growth. Underlying such legislative enactments is the mathematics of the current federal minimum wage, recently increased for the first time since 1997 to $5.85 an hour. Full-time work at the minimum wage now equates to $12,168 annually. This is below the latest poverty thresholds for a family of four, a family of three, and even a family of two (see U.S. Census Bureau 2006). Thus, living-wage legislation calls for an hourly amount greater than the national minimum wage. Available evidence suggests that this position is not without foundation. A report by Linda Barrington, of The Conference Board, “shows that an American holding a full-time job in the late 1990s was still as likely to fall below the official poverty line as a similar worker in the 1980s, and more likely to do so than a full-time worker in the 1970s. . . . Working fulltime and year-round is, for more and more Americans, not enough. This is not the outcome one would expect from the longest economic expansion in economic history” (Barrington 2000, A2). Even in the face of such information, the arguments against livingwage enactments are many and varied, emphasizing that the effects on small businesses and specific, especially service-oriented, industries are negative; that the results on local economic development and the recruitment of new business are harmful; that many more low-wage workers are covered by such legislation than full-time, year-round heads of households; that there are already government programs in place, such as the EITC (Earned Income Tax Credit), for such workers; and that there ought not to be any further government interference in the marketplace. The acceptance of such arguments is strong, backed by decades of articles and position papers, and the preponderant weight of the economics profession itself. One of the most fundamental tenets of all of economics is reliance on, and acceptance of, the market solution as being, ceteris paribus, a more optimal position than can be attained by any degree of governmental interference. Supply and demand forces are to be left alone in the determination of equilibrium in the marketplace. Supply and demand will set the appropriate market price, the amount to be bought and sold, and even the wages of workers. Thus, what a person is paid, the hourly wage rate, should be determined by the free play of market forces. Governments, trade unions, and others should desist from interfering with market wage rates. In fact, the essential argument from economists regarding market intervention is that those very people the interference is designed to help will invariably be harmed economically and otherwise as unintended consequences of such non-market action.

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And yet the influence of the economics profession has not been sufficient to silence ongoing calls, usually from religious, social, and labor reformers, joined by politicians, especially those representing poor local districts, for market intervention on the part of the working poor. Part of the explanation for a lack of complete acceptance of the economists’ position lies in the very economic success that the economics profession has helped engineer in the United States. The greatest economic success in American history, the record economic expansion of the 1990s, has, by its tremendous positive impact on incomes and wealth formation, also served to emphasize the increasingly large economic gap between the rich and poor in the United States—a gap that persists. For these religious, social, labor, and political reformers, the great imbalance, and therefore injustice, of the differential, market-dictated rewards at both ends of the wage/earnings distribution, serves as the baseline motive force for change. Evidence of this imbalance abounds: over the past several decades, there has been what Brookings Institute economist Gary Burtless calls a “startling increase” in the gap between wealthier and poorer Americans. . . . Earners in the top quintile make almost 20-fold what earners in the bottom quintile make; that margin has doubled over the past two decades. The top 1% of earners holds about 40% of the country’s wealth, or more than double the percentage of only a quarter century ago. . . . No less an authority than (former) Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan has declared that a widening income gap potentially poses “a major threat to our security.” . . . It isn’t asking too much to ask that the rising tide of the world’s most innovative and successful economy lift rowboats as well as yachts. (Hunt 2000, A27)

The imbalance that the market solution has led to between the rich and the poor in the United States has become a constant source of criticism regarding the optimality of the free market outcome. This large and growing gap in income and wealth between the rich and the poor is one major reason that those who find these results of market forces unconscionable, including the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), have begun pushing for “policies that increase the minimum wage so that it becomes a living wage” (USCCB 1999, 10).

HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT OF THE LIVING-WAGE CONCEPT According to the original exposition of the living wage principle by Pope Leo XIII in Rerum Novarum (1891), . . . each worker, as head of a household, had a right to a wage sufficient to maintain himself, his wife, and children in reasonable comfort. (Worland 2001, 15)

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But what exactly is a living wage? Although one can find references to such terminology in the past, the widespread use of living-wage terminology is a relatively modern phenomenon. Nevertheless, as a concept it has a long and storied history and, interestingly enough, the idea of a living wage predates the minimum-wage legislation that the living wage is now being resurrected to enhance. Philosophers, theologians, economists, popes, presidents, politicians, social and labor reformers, and others have weighed in on the essential principle, using varied terminology, such as fair pay, just wage, or family wage. The Catholic Church, through what has come to be known as Catholic social teaching, has commented on this issue for over one hundred years (see Miller), and this commentary clearly illustrates continuing issue refinement over time. Statement of the living wage concept begins with Pope Leo XIII, in his classic 1891 papal encyclical, Rerum Novarum (Encyclical on Capital and Labor), which explains that “there is a dictate of natural justice more imperious and more ancient than any bargain between man and man, that wages must be enough to support the wage earner in reasonable and frugal comfort” (45). By 1931, Pope Pius XI wrote, in Quadragesimo Anno (Fortieth Anniversary of Rerum Novarum): “in the first place, the wage paid to the workingman should be sufficient for the support of himself and his family. . . . Social justice demands that reforms be introduced without delay which will guarantee every adult workingman just such a wage” (71). Moreover, as Stephen T. Worland notes, “evidently, for Pius XI, the achievement of wage justice requires compliance with two different principles. The wage rate must, first, allow the firm to stay in business, and second, provide the worker with income sufficient to support himself and his family” (Worland 2001, 15). These writings of the Catholic Church began impacting the world by being reflected in social and political observations and enactments. As Worland points out, “. . . American commentators made the policy inference that the natural right to a living wage provides the justification for minimum wage legislation. In 1906, Father John A. Ryan, the ‘labor priest’ who became the New Deal’s favorite Catholic theologian, took Pope Leo’s principle to mean that ‘as protector of natural rights the state ought to compel employers to pay a living wage’” (Worland 2001, 15). On June 25, 1938, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed into law the Fair Labor Standards Act, establishing a national minimum wage of $0.25 an hour. By 1944, in his State of the Union address, Roosevelt stated: we have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. “Necessitous men are not freemen.” People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff

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of which dictatorships are made. In our day these economic truths have become accepted as self-evident. We have accepted, so to speak, a second Bill of Rights under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all regardless of station, race, or creed. Among these are the right to a useful and remunerative job (and) . . . the right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation. (n.p.)

In 1963, Pope John XXIII added, in Pacem in Terris (Peace on Earth): “furthermore—and this must be specially emphasized—the worker has a right to wages determined by criterions of justice, and sufficient, therefore, in proportion to available resources, to give the worker and his family a standard of living in keeping with the dignity of the human person” (20). Pope John Paul II, in 1981, in Laborem Exercens (Human Work), tightened and extended the argument, using the term family wage: “just remuneration for the work of an adult who is responsible for a family . . . what is called a family wage—that is, a single salary given to the head of the family for his work, sufficient for the needs of the family without the spouse having to take up gainful employment outside the home.” The Catechism of the Catholic Church defines a just wage as “the legitimate fruit of work. To refuse or withhold it can be a grave injustice. In determining fair pay, both the needs and the contributions of each person must be taken into account. . . . Agreement between the parties is not sufficient to justify morally the amount to be received in wages” (1994, #2434). The idea of a living wage, promulgated by Pope Leo XIII in 1891, has since been developed and refined through the concepts of fair pay, a just wage, and a family wage. All share the baseline definition that such a wage should be enough to support the wage earner and his or her family in reasonable and frugal comfort. This right to earn enough was boldly put forward by FDR, as noted earlier, as a major tenet of a second Bill of Rights.

SPECIFYING THE LIVING WAGE Past Efforts The “living wage” must also be a “sustainable wage.” . . . Strict quid pro quo commutative justice requires that the amount of this wage equate with the value of the worker’s contribution to production. And microeconomic theory indicates that a wage so proportioned to productivity (to the “value of the worker’s marginal product”) would indeed be sustainable. (Worland 2001, 15–16)

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Over the course of its history, the issue of a living wage has been long on discussion and short on specification; that is, an actual dollar amount specification of a realistic living wage has not taken place. Some will object that there have been numerous living-wage specifications made in dollar amounts in recent history; indeed, there are at least 140 of them now. The reality is, however, that these living-wage laws are really just enhanced minimum-wage enactments. Historically, the case for a true living wage, specified in an actual dollar amount, has simply not been made. The words describing a living wage have been stated; the amounts have not. Using the label living wage, but attaching it to an enhanced minimum wage, does not make such a minimum wage a real living wage. Where, for instance, is the supporting argument that these enhanced minimum wages would, say for a family of four, provide a family wage, a “just remuneration for the work of an adult who is responsible for a family . . . what is called a family wage—that is, a single salary given to the head of the family for his work, sufficient for the needs of the family without the spouse having to take up gainful employment outside of the home?” (Pope John Paul II 1981,19). Current Efforts This argument persuaded the Vermont legislature to shelve a living-wage proposal. A legislative study committee found that raising Vermont’s $5.75per-hour minimum wage to a higher living wage of $8.50 would disrupt employment in hotel, restaurant, retail and other industries. A better policy would be a modest wage increase to $6.50 or $7 coupled with various tax, job training, education, health care and other initiatives, the committee recommended in a December [1999] report. (Hirschman 2000, 40)

Current hourly amounts for actually specified living wages range from just above the previous national $5.15-hour-per-hour wage to as high as $13.00 an hour depending on the benefits (such as health insurance) paid by the employer (see Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now [ACORN] for Living Wage Resource Center). But the reasons for specifying the actual wages far exceed attempts to quantify the living wage. The reasons for living-wage enactments across that United States today are many and varied (see Hirschman; Pollin and Luce; and websites of ACORN and Economic Policy Institute for more on issues listed below). Eight selected reasons appear below. • Growing Service Sector Over the past two decades especially, there has been a growing number of working poor employed in the low-skill, low-experience service industry. As a group, these jobs increase rather than decrease

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the ranks of the working poor, for this is often low-pay employment with few or no benefits beyond mandated FICA payments. • Governments Outsourcing Formerly Permanent Public Jobs In the name of efficiency and cost-cutting measures, more and more low-end public jobs at the local, regional, state, and national levels are being outsourced. Cost savings are achieved principally by lowering benefit-payment liabilities for the governmental entities, especially for pension and retirement plans, as well as for health, dental, and life insurance for permanent full-time governmental employees. Ironically, paying the same group of workers a living wage is sometimes required of government contractors receiving contracts from those very same public authorities outsourcing the jobs in the first place. • Comparisons to Economic Development Programs Corporate tax abatement programs, such as Tax Increment Financing (TIF), provide millions of dollars in tax savings and incentives to attract new business and industry, in addition to promoting expansion of existing businesses. Reformers argue that millions of dollars are benefiting corporate development, while little or nothing is being done for workers. Living-wage enactments are sponsored as a way to correct some of this imbalance. • Favorable Economic Circumstances Even though the U.S. economy has ended its historic, record-breaking expansion, the economic pie that all Americans share has grown tremendously since the early 1990s; and it is the case that in such a sustained strong economy, real economic benefits are more and more deeply diffused throughout the entirety of the economy. Though there have indeed been sectors that have suffered economically in this economy, the data clearly show statistically significant improvements for a majority of Americans during the 1990s to present-day. The glaring imbalance between these economic gains and full-time work that earns below poverty-threshold income led some cities and counties to enact living-wage legislation. • Share the Wealth Much as the previous reason, this fifth reason finds that the absolute size and continuing growth in the income/wealth gap between America’s richest and poorest has been and will continue to be important sources of recriminations aimed at the economic system itself. Moreover, all of the concern over this imbalance is not just on the part of social reformers and activists; influential business notables

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have publicly declared this mounting imbalance between the economic haves and have-nots must be addressed, because some see it as potentially destabilizing for the open-market structure of the American economy. As noted earlier, “no less an authority than (former) Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan has declared that a widening income gap potentially poses ‘a major threat to our security.’ There are huge social and political prices to be paid by those left behind. . . . One of America’s economic giants touched on the issue of wealth creation and the equitable dispersion of that wealth. ‘Both,’ he noted, ‘are very important.’ That was Bill Gates” (Hunt 2000, A27). As one remedy to this inherently destructive development, living-wage laws can help to reduce the size and some of the psychological sting of this income/wealth gap. Certainly, living-wage enactments will not close the gap. Nevertheless, such wage minimums allow some to extract themselves and their families from at least formal poverty—poverty measured by government threshold amounts—and this carries not only economic, but also social and psychological benefits. • Welfare Reform Welfare reform that is true reform must include the realistic possibility that those weaned from welfare are able to support themselves and their families at an earnings level above poverty. There is little incentive, beyond being forced off of welfare, for able-bodied adults to work full-time if they have little prospect of extracting themselves and their families from poverty. Indeed, there is a tremendous disincentive in such a circumstance. Those involved with welfare reform have not overlooked such a disincentive. Attempting to bring adults off of welfare and into the working, taxpaying economy has provided impetus to the livingwage movement around the country. • Hidden Costs of Low Wages The welfare reform movement has also brought into sharper focus the hidden costs of low-paying employment. Not only are the very lowest paid, full-time, adult workers not able to pull themselves and their families out of poverty; but many are, in fact, also economically dependent on public programs because the family remains mired in poverty. EITC, food stamps, child-care assistance, and federally sponsored hot lunches are just some examples of the ongoing public costs of low-paid employment. A living-wage program not only can help adult, full-time workers reach economic self-sufficiency and pay more taxes, but can also

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significantly reduce some of the hidden public costs of keeping lowpaid workers and their families viable economically. • Activism and Human Rights Groups: Religious, Social, Labor, and Political Activism and human rights advocacy have also been behind many living-wage efforts. There are national and international groups, including the United for a Fair Economy coalition, the Economic Policy Institute, the United Nations (Declaration on Human Rights), and the World Trade Organization; religious organizations, such as the National Interfaith Committee for Worker Justice, the Office of Social and International Ministries of the U.S. Jesuit Conference, and the USCCB (United States Conference of Catholic Bishops); and community action groups, such as local chapters of ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now), that have committed themselves to organizing efforts to promote living-wage legislation. A commonality among these activists and human rights advocates is concern for the working poor. Although many of the groups are considered by mainstream America to be somewhat left of center with regard to this issue, these organizations have had a powerful effect throughout the land. Certainly many of the present living-wage enactments are based on such group-coalitions, especially at the local level. Despite the many arguments for a living wage, the bases used to specify differing living wage rates throughout the country—that is, the bases for the actual amount of the living wage called for—are much less numerous. Essentially, the bases for the actual amount of the living wage have been those for enhanced minimum-wage legislation. For many, a living wage and the federally mandated minimum wage are inextricably linked. Worland criticizes the NCCB on just this point, noting: “as a matter of fact, linking the right to a living wage with the political push for a higher legal minimum wage, as the USCCB (formerly NCCB) has done, distorts Catholic teaching on wage justice and . . . could be a disastrous guide for public policy” (Worland 2001, 17). According to the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, the original purpose of a minimum wage was to prevent exploitation of workers and provide unskilled and part-time workers with a wage floor. Today the minimum wage has evolved into an antipoverty tool and part of the safety net for primary earners in poor families. Some, like Worland, resist the identification of a living wage with the minimum wage on historical and philosophical grounds. Further uncoupling of these two concepts is mainly due to the fact that the minimum wage is too low

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for any realistic statement of a true living wage. The present minimum wage falls well short of allowing even a small family to live above the poverty line. But focusing on the living wage separately from the minimum wage is quite controversial.

CONTROVERSY REGARDING LIVING WAGE EFFORTS The concept of a “living wage” sounds simple enough. Pay people enough money to support themselves and their families in decent living conditions. Pay them enough so they won’t be poor. But the living-wage controversy is anything but simple. Armed with dueling economic studies, advocates and opponents are battling across the United States to win the heads and hearts of local politicians and voters. A living-wage backlash has bubbled up in other states (besides Vermont), too. Four states—Kansas, Michigan, Arizona, and Louisiana—have considered bills to prohibit local governments from adopting their own minimumwage requirements. . . . (Hirschman 2000, 35, 40)

Living-wage legislation is certainly not without controversy. In fact, such enactments stir up all of the negative attacks, just recently put forward once again, that surround periodic minimum-wage increases at the national level (see Hirschman; Pollin and Luce; and websites of Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now [ACORN] and Economic Policy Institute). Arguments against the living wage include: • Governmental Interference in the Marketplace Clearly the present legislation regarding a living wage in various cities and counties around the United States represents governmental intrusion into the marketplace. Indeed, such enactments often only extend to sectors wherein the local or regional government can exert the power of governmental policy on private vendors through the letting of public contracts. It can hardly be expected that the economics profession will support such market interference, and rightfully so. Governments hardly have a stellar track record of only beneficial outcomes flowing from their incursions into the marketplace, their attempts to control the forces of supply and demand. • More Than Enough Governmental Programs in Place Not only are there already enough governmental welfare and employment assistance programs in existence—there are already too many. America’s poor do not need another government handout program. Numerous government policies have led to the development of a culture of poverty and welfare that many are not able to escape. Moreover, it is a culture of dependence that perpetuates itself

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through succeeding generations raised on these government welfare policies. Government policies have already not worked, and there is an excessive number of them. Such governmental enactments should be pruned back, not increased. • Effects on Small Businesses The negative effects of this type of legislation on businesses in general, especially small businesses, are always brought out in discussions of this type. Ratcheting up of the minimum wage is always fought on the basis of its harmful effects on small businesses, so a much higher living wage would just exacerbate the situation. Small businesses simply cannot afford to pay such increases in wages and will be forced by such enactments to let go of those employees who are the least skilled and, therefore, the least productive. These are the very people, the working poor, whom the legislation is supposedly attempting to help. Thus, a living-wage law will not eventuate into a living wage being paid to the working poor, but will, in fact, lead to no wage being paid at all, as they lose their jobs altogether. Living wage regulations will harm entry-level job seekers, as they force employers, especially small businesses, to reduce their workforce to accommodate the higher, mandated wages. • Destructive Economic Effects on Certain Industries In addition to the negative effects on small businesses noted above, many argue that certain industries will suffer more than other industries through wage-increase legislation, specifically, low-wage service and retail industries, such as fast-food, janitorial, entry-level department store retail sales, and the like. An undue burden will be placed on employers in these industries who will, in turn, be forced to raise the selling price of their services and products accordingly. • Negative Effects on Local Economic Development A city or county with a living-wage law will decrease the attractiveness of that area to potentially new employers and even drive some current businesses out of the vicinity. This will make it more difficult to keep the locale economically viable for all workers. • Inclusion of Non-Heads of Households This issue deals with the composition of the population of working persons to whom living-wage legislation extends. In other words, it would surely not make good economic sense to pay entry-level, single teenagers living at home a living wage. It should not pertain to retirees already receiving substantial pension and Social Security benefits. It is not appropriate legislation for part-time workers.

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The underlying controversy here deals with how such living-wage laws can be written to exclude such groups. Retirees can be full-time workers. Some teens live at home, but some actually are heads of households with children. Such legislation is bound to include persons for whom such enactments are not appropriate and possibly not include members of the working poor who are proper candidates for a living wage.

DEVELOPMENT TOWARD SPECIFICATION OF A LIVING WAGE Just remuneration for the work of an adult who is responsible for a family . . . what is called a family wage—that is, a single salary given to the head of the family for his work, sufficient for the needs of the family without the spouse having to take up gainful employment outside the home. (Pope John Paul II 1981, 19)

In order to begin actually putting a dollar amount to the intended meaning of a living wage, a specific family circumstance needs to be isolated and focused upon to allow necessary comparisons. The usual family structure for this type of analysis is a family of four. It will also be assumed that the wage earner discussed, from this point forward, works full-time, year-round and is paid for 2,080 hours yearly. Given this basis of understanding, we may consider some present dollar amounts of important indices in Table 3.1. These various annual dollar amounts can help move toward an actual dollar-specification of a living wage. To do so, however, requires that a true living wage be clearly defined. A living wage is a family wage, earned by an adult head of household, working full-time and year-round, which allows the family a standard of living in keeping with human dignity and frugal comfort. • It is a wage sufficient to allow one working adult to support the household without the other adult, because of economic necessity, having to secure employment outside of the home. • It is a wage that supports a life that is balanced, with some leisure, and is becoming to a human. • It is a wage that allows parents enough time and resources to raise their children properly. • It is a wage that does not require public assistance to achieve a standard of living in keeping with human dignity and frugal comfort. With this understanding in mind, what would be the dollar amount specified for such a living wage in the United States today? Possibly the

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Table 3.1. Present Dollar Amounts: Toward Specifying a Living Wage Index

Description

Annual Amount

Poverty Threshold, 2006

Family of Four Persons Two Related Children Under 18 1 adult at $5.85 hr.  2,080 hrs. 2 adults at $5.85 hr.  2,080 hrs. 1 adult at $7.25 hr.  2,080 hrs. 2 adults at $7.25 hr.  2,080 hrs. Average Annual Expenditures for FourPerson Consumer Units Average Annual Expenditures for FourPerson Consumer Units Median Income for Four-Person Families

$20,444

Federal Minimum Wage—Current [2007]

Federal Minimum Wage—Projected High [2009] The Family of Four Project 2001 Bureau of Labor Statistics Consumer Expenditure Survey 2005 Administration for Children & Families Estimated 2007

$12,168 $24,336 $15,080 $30,160 $60,927 (estimated to 2007 by author) $62,215

$66,111

most appropriate approach does not begin from the wage-rate side of the issue. When the argument does, it invariably is seen as an enhanced minimum-wage specification and the dollar amount is in constant comparison with the present minimum wage. Hence, compared to the current minimum wage of $5.85 an hour ($12,168 annually), living-wage enactments— for example, above $13.00 per hour (more than $27,000 annually) in some cities in California—seem to be a huge increase, whereas, in actuality, they fall well short of a true living wage for a family of four. If the proponents of a living wage continue to start from the wage-rate side of the issue, they will find themselves in a constant uphill battle with opposing forces and, consequently, struggling mightily to reach their intended goal. Although there will certainly be ongoing research regarding what methodology should be used to determine a realistic living wage for a family of four, some data do exist that can allow a starting point in this determination. Studies of family expenditures like the Consumer Expenditure Survey (2005) of the Bureau of Labor Statistics or The Family of Four Project (2001) of the Heritage Foundation may represent a better method for an initial calculation than a simple comparison to the current minimum wage. In this approach, the calculation begins in a needs-based manner. That is, what are the needs of a family of four to live with some dignity in the United States today?

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Presently, the yearly expenditures in an average four-person family are upwards of $60,000. For purposes of comparison, the median income for four-person families in the United States is around $66,000. These two dollar-amounts yield initial values for comparing current minimum-wage and living-wage laws. Such wage ordinances, even at the high-end— above $13.00 per hour ($27,000 annually)—are clearly far below national averages for expenditures by a family of four. Based on the definition and criteria above, it is difficult to conceive of a true living wage in the United States currently being less than $40,000 per year for a family of four. Indeed, $40,000 annually to live on, for a family of four in the United States today, might not even achieve the level of Pope Leo’s frugal comfort; but such an amount would be much closer to the neighborhood of a true living wage than any present minimum- or living-wage legislation.

THE LIVING WAGE AS A TARGET WAGE At this point in his analysis, Pius XI could have . . . called for passage of a law specifying a legal minimum wage. Instead, he cites the virtue of social justice to explain how the tension between sustainable wage and living wage is to be resolved. . . . . . . According to Pius XI’s exposition of the connection between the virtue of social justice and the natural law, the employer’s responsibility to the human community does not end when he pays the wage that matches value produced by the worker. For if that sustainable wage falls short of the living wage, the virtue of social justice imposes a further moral obligation on the employer. He must make his best efforts to help the worker increase the value of his work so that his productivity earns him a living wage. He is required, for example, to introduce training programs, apprenticeships, educational fringe benefits, i.e., those measures that enhance labor productivity. (Worland 2001, 15–16)

A true living wage is not a minimum wage or even an enhanced minimum wage. This essay is not calling for or specifying a minimum wage of $40,000 annually. A living wage is not an appropriate target wage for teenagers living at home or retirees with liberal pensions, plus Social Security benefits. A living wage is not an appropriate target wage for workers who only work part-time or workers who are not desirous of being in the labor force year-round. A living wage is not an appropriate target wage for most entry-level work. A living wage, as offered here, is not an amount to be legislated at any level—federal, state, or local. This essay does not argue for more livingwage laws.

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As defined above, a living wage is a family wage, earned by an adult head of household working full-time and year-round and, even then, might be based on some consideration of years of service and experience. Even so, clearly few, if any, employers would or could move quickly to a realistic living wage, even for only the appropriate working poor. Thus, the approach taken here is that of considering a living wage as a target wage over time. An example might illuminate this very important point more clearly. An adult with a high school education, working full-time and yearround, is married and has two minor children. The other adult is at home full-time with the children and manages the household. The adult employed outside the home has worked reliably for the same company for over ten years and currently earns $10.00 an hour based on local market conditions. An employer might want to pay an employee like this a true living wage because of seniority, loyalty to the company, quality of work, and because of an employee’s financial inability to meet employee-required contributions to company-subsidized health, dental, or life insurance plans, as well as company-sponsored 401k or retirement programs. The employer knows that getting this worker to a living wage quickly fails any rigorous test of economic logic; but the employer now uses a living wage as a target wage to measure the employee’s actual wages against, and then to develop, in conjunction with the employee, an individualized strategy of training and productivity enhancements to help the employee reach this target wage over time.

CONCLUSION So what is a living wage really? To many, it is just more misguided, utopian nonsense, put forward by activists—religious, social, labor, academic, and political—who have never run a real business or met a payroll. Critics note, ironically and tragically, such efforts would harm the very people, the working poor, whom such activists are supposedly trying to help. Ultimately, the living wage, many believe, will rightly take its place in the dustbin of history alongside other utopian socialist programs that simply do not work. No doubt, views akin to these have been and will continue to be expressed regarding a living wage. Business people, those who would actually have to pay a living wage if it is ever to be viable, have reacted and continue to react disapprovingly overall. As a group, they respond negatively to any proposed increases in the minimum wage. Now, were a true living wage, which is substantially higher than any minimum wage, to

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come along, one could expect the level and tone of the criticism—indeed, derision—to mirror proportionately the increase in the amount. This outcome can be assured if a living wage is legislated, as it has been so far and as the minimum wage has been. Minimum-wage legislation, at any level of government, that attempts to reach a true living wage, will likely be ridiculed and defeated. Business owners, taxpayers, and more conservative politicians alike will fight such a large, across-the-board increase in wage rates. And, according to their take on economic reality, rightfully so. To reach an honest living wage, especially quickly, would be an impossible jump in labor costs to most employers. Further, trying to reach a living wage by way of the legislated minimum wage will fail. And, because terminology like a living wage is being used, falling short of a real living wage will also decrease the chance of appropriate workers getting an actual living wage over time; for employers will use the lower, enhanced minimum-wage amount as the measure to achieve. The process will stop short of attaining a true living wage—far short. For a family of four in the United States today, an initial and very conservative statement of a true living wage is estimated at $40,000 annually. This is to be viewed as a target wage to be reached over time, voluntarily and cooperatively, by both employers and employees, through training and productivity enhancements, as employers—through the virtue of social justice—desire to remunerate long-term, loyal employees more justly. The living wage initially specified here would be somewhat more than $19.00 per hour. Although this would be a substantial increase in wages, even over time, people need to maintain some perspective on a living wage at $19.00 an hour. According to calculations by United for a Fair Economy, if the $5.15 per hour minimum wage had grown in value between 1990 and 2000 at the same rate as the pay of chief executive officers, it would have risen to $28.91 an hour in 2005 dollars or just above $60,000 yearly (United for a Fair Economy 2007). Clearly, all businesses are not in a financial position to move toward this target wage at this time. But companies that reward top management with millions of dollars yearly can afford to tie, over time, the earnings of the lowest paid, long-term, loyal employees to this concept of a living wage. The long tradition of Catholic social teaching and the demands of social justice unequivocally steer efforts toward a living wage for families to allow them to live with human dignity, for the laborer is worthy of his hire.

REFERENCES Administration for Children & Families, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. March 6, 2006. State Median Income Estimates for Optional Use in Fed-

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eral Fiscal Year 2006 LIHEAP Programs and Mandatory Use in Federal Fiscal Year 2007 LIHEAP Programs. www.acf.dhhs.gov/programs/liheap/guidance/ information_memoranda/im06-05.html (accessed September 18, 2007). Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN). Living Wage Resource Center. A Compilation of Living Wage Policies on the Books. www .livingwagecampaign.org (accessed October 11, 2007). Barrington, Linda. June 14, 2000. Does a Rising Tide Lift All Boats? The Conference Board Inc. Quoted in Jacob M. Schlesinger, “Working Full Time Is No Longer Enough,” The Wall Street Journal (June 29, 2000): A2, A12. Bureau of Labor Statistics, U.S. Department of Labor. Consumer Expenditure Survey, 2005. http://www.bls.gov/cex/ (accessed October 11, 2007). Catechism of the Catholic Church. 1994. New Hope, Kentucky: Urbi et Orbi Communications. Economic Policy Institute. www.epinet.org/content.cfm/issueguides_livingwage _livingwage (accessed October 11, 2007). Heritage Foundation. 2001. The Family of Four Project. http://www.heritage.org/ research/features/familyof4/chapter3/chapter3.cfm (accessed October 11, 2007). Hirschman, Carolyn. July 2000. “Paying Up.” HR Magazine, 35–41. Hunt, Albert R. April 20, 2000. “A Flawed Protest Actually Produces Some Good Results.” The Wall Street Journal, A27. Miller, Gerald L. 2001. “Catholic Social Teaching at the Millennium: The Human Condition in Light of the Gospel.” In Catholicism at the Millennium, edited by Gerald L. Miller and Wilburn T. Stancil, 123–38. Kansas City, Missouri: Rockhurst University Press. Pollin, Robert and Luce, Stephanie. 1998. The Living Wage: Building a Fair Economy. New York: The New Press (CUNY). Pope John XXIII. 1963. Pacem in Terris. www.vatican.va (accessed October 11, 2007). Pope John Paul II. 1981. Laborem Exercens. www.vatican.va (accessed October 11, 2007). Pope Leo XIII. 1891. Rerum Novarum. www.vatican.va (accessed October 11, 2007). Pope Pius XI. 1931. Quadragesimo Anno. www.vatican.va (accessed October 11, 2007). Roosevelt, Franklin D. January 11, 1944. “State of the Union Address.” http://www .presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=16518 (accessed October 11, 2007). Schlesinger, Jacob M. June 29, 2000. “Working Full Time Is No Longer Enough,” The Wall Street Journal, A2, A12. United for a Fair Economy. 2007. CEO Pay Charts. www.faireconomy.org/ research/CEO_Pay_charts.html (accessed October 11, 2007). U.S. Census Bureau. 2006. Poverty Thresholds. www.census.gov/hhes/www/ poverty/threshld/thresh06.html (accessed October 11, 2007). United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. 1999. Faithful Citizenship: Civic Responsibility for a New Millennium. http://www.priestsforlife.org/magisterium/ bishops/faithfulcitizenship99.htm (accessed October 11, 2007). Worland, Stephen T. 2001. “Just Wages.” First Things 110: 14–17.

Section Two

CATHOLIC CULTURE AND THE IMAGINATIVE LIFE

As a dare-gale skylark scanted in a dull cage Man’s mounting spirit in his bone-house, mean house, dwells— ....................................................... Both sing sometímes the sweetest, sweetest spells, Yet both droop deadly sómetimes in their cells Or wring their barriers in bursts of fear or rage. ......................................................... Man’s spirit will be flesh-bound when found at best, But uncumbered: meadow-down is not distressed For a rainbow footing it nor he for his bónes rísen. (Hopkins 1877, “The Caged Skylark,” 1–2, 6–8, 12–14)

4 ✛

Writing as Sacrament Ron Hansen

W

hen Saint Jerome translated the Bible into the Latin Vulgate, he chose the Latin sacramentum, sacrament, for the Greek mysterion, mystery. We understand those words to be quite different, but their difference is an efficient way of getting at my argument that good writing can be a religious act. In the synoptic Gospels mysterion generally referred to the secrets of the kingdom of heaven, and in Saint Paul’s Epistles, to Christ himself as the perfect revelation of God’s will. Tertullian introduced the term sacramentum as we know it when he talked about the rite of Christian initiation, understanding the word to mean a sacred action, object, or means. And Saint Augustine further clarified the term by defining sacraments as “signs pertaining to things divine, or visible forms of an invisible grace” (Betlyon 1985). Eventually more and more events were seen as sacraments until the sixteenth century, when the Protestant Reformation confined the term to baptism and eucharist, the two Gospel sacraments, and the Roman Catholic Council of Trent decreed that signs become sacraments only if they become channels for grace. Twentieth-century theology has used the term in a far more inclusive way, however. The Oxford Companion to the Bible describes sacraments “as occasions of encounter between God and the believer, where the reality of God’s gracious actions needs to be accepted in faith” (Suggit 1993).

“Writing as Sacrament” is reprinted by permission of the author, Ron Hansen, and HarperCollins Publishers, with modifications to the original citations and citation format.

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FICTION WRITING AND MYSTERY Writing, then, can be viewed as a sacrament insofar as it provides graced occasions of encounter between humanity and God. As Flannery O’Connor noted in Mystery and Manners, “the real novelist, the one with an instinct for what he is about, knows that he cannot approach the infinite directly, that he must penetrate the natural human world as it is. The more sacramental his theology, the more encouragement he will get from it to do just that” (“Novelist and Believer” 1969, 163). Even secular interpretations point to the fiction writer’s duty to express the Mystery at the heart of metaphysics. In the famous preface to his novel The Nigger of the “Narcissus,” Joseph Conrad defined a fictional work of art as a single-minded attempt to render the highest kind of justice to the visible universe, by bringing to light the truth, manifold and one, underlying its every aspect. It is an attempt to find in its forms, in its colours, in its light, in its shadows, in the aspects of matter, and in the facts of life what of each is fundamental, what is enduring and essential—their one illuminating and convincing quality—the very truth of their existence. (1971, 49)

The highest kind of justice to the visible universe often leads to the highest kind of humility about ourselves. Writing about craft in The Art of Fiction, John Gardner held that “the value of great fiction . . . is not just that it entertains us or distracts us from our troubles, not just that it broadens our knowledge of people and places, but also that it helps us to know what we believe, reinforces those qualities that are noblest in us, leads us to feel uneasy about our faults and limitations” (1984, 31). Writers seeking to express a religious vision often help their readers by simply providing, as Gardner puts it, trustworthy but inexpressible models. We ingest metaphors of good, wordlessly learning to behave more like Levin than like Anna (in Anna Karenina), more like the transformed Emma (in Jane Austen’s novel) than like the Emma we first meet in the book. This subtle, for the most part wordless knowledge is the “truth” great fiction seeks out. (1984, 63)

But I have identified in my own experience and that of many other Christian and Jewish writers that there comes a time when we find the need and the confidence to face the great issues of God and faith and right conduct more directly.

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FICTION WRITING AND RELIGIOUS FAITH My first published book was Desperadoes (Hansen 1979), a historical novel about the Dalton gang from their hardscrabble beginnings, through their horse-rustling and outlawry in Oklahoma, to the fatal day in 1892 when all but one of the gang were killed in bank robberies in their hometown of Coffeyville, Kansas. “Crime does not pay” is a biblical theme, as is the book’s focus on honor, loyalty, integrity, selfishness, and reckless ambition—the highest calling Bob Dalton seems to have felt was to be as important as Jesse James. But my own religious experience does not figure greatly in Desperadoes; most people read the book as a highfalutin Western, a boyswill-be-boys adventure full of hijinks and humor and bloodshed. I fell into my second book because of the first. The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (Hansen 1983) is another historical novel, but is far darker than Desperadoes because I was far more insistent on a Christian perspective on sin and redemption and forgiveness. These were bad guys I was writing about, guys who were sons of preachers but did the wrong thing so blithely and persistently it was like they’d got their instructions all bollixed up. If Jesse James was a false messiah for those Southerners still in civil war with the finance companies and the railroads, then Bob Ford was both his Judas and his Barabbas, a selfimportant quisling who hoped to be famous and who got off scott-free for the killing of his famous friend, but who was hounded out of more than one town afterward until he ended up as a saloonkeeper in Creede, Colorado. There, he himself was killed at the hands of a man who claimed he was evening the score. It’s a form of bad sportsmanship for fiction writers to complain that too few reviewers pick up their subtexts, but in fact I was disappointed that the general reading of the book on Jesse James was pretty much as it was for Desperadoes. Hidden beneath the praise were the questions: Why is this guy writing Westerns? When oh when is he going to give his talent to a subject that matters? In his essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” T. S. Eliot asserted that great writing required a perpetual surrender of the writer as he or she is in the present in order to pay homage and service to a tradition of literature in the past. “The progress of an artist,” he wrote, “is continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality” (1969, 7). I was following Eliot’s precepts in the wholesale subtraction of my own personality and the submersion of my familial and religious experiences in my retelling of history in my first two novels, and yet I was frustrated that my fiction did not more fully communicate a belief in Jesus as Lord that was so important, indeed central, to my life.

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The English novelist and critic G. K. Chesterton wrote in his conclusion to Heretics: “A [writer] cannot be wise enough to be a great artist without being wise enough to be a philosopher. A [writer] cannot have the energy to produce good art without having the energy to wish to pass beyond it. A small artist is content with art; a great artist is content with nothing except everything” (1986, 198). Everything for me, and for Chesterton, was the mystery of the Holy Being as it was, and is, incarnated in human life. Everything for me, to go even further, was the feeling that Christianity is difficult, but that Christianity is worth it. I finally got around to a fuller expression of that in my third novel. Mariette in Ecstasy (Hansen 1991) concerns a seventeen-year-old woman, Mariette Baptiste, who joins the Convent of Our Lady of Sorrows in upstate New York as a postulant in 1906. Her older sister, Annie, or Mother Celine, is the prioress there and on Christmas Eve, 1906, Mother Celine dies of cancer and is buried. On the next day, Christmas, Mariette is given the stigmata—those wounds in the hands, feet, and side resembling those that Christ suffered on the cross. Whether Mariette is a sexual hysteric full of religious wishful thinking or whether her physical wounds are indeed supernaturally caused is the subject of the novel. I first thought about writing Mariette in Ecstasy after finishing Saint Thérèse of Lisieux’s Story of a Soul. She was the third of her sisters to enter the Carmelite convent of Lisieux where her oldest sister was prioress and, like Mariette, she soon became a favorite there. You may know that Thérèse was just fifteen at the time she entered religious life and she did so little that was outwardly wonderful during her nine years as a nun that when she died of tuberculosis at twenty-four one of the sisters in the convent with her feared there would be nothing to say about Thérèse at the funeral. She did perform the ordinary duties of religious life extraordinarily well, emphasizing simplicity, obedience, and self-forgetfulness over the harsh physical mortifications that were common in France at the time, and she impressed some with her childlike faith in God the Father and with her passionate love of Jesus. She can seem sentimental at times, and there are psychologists who’d diagnose Thérèse as neurotic, but then there are people like me who have a profound respect for her in spite of her perceived excessiveness. When you have a tension like that you’re half the way to having a plot. About then, too, I happened upon Lettres Portugaises, a collection of letters falsely presumed to have been written by Sister Mariana Alcoforado about her frantic love affair with a French courtier in the eighteenth century. At one point she supposedly wrote the Chevalier de C—: “I thank you from the bottom of my heart for the desperation you cause me, and I detest the tranquility in which I lived before I knew you” (Alcoforado 1893, 77–78). I was stunned and excited by that line. Emotions like that, I knew, would

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be at the heart of the novel. I hatched a tale influenced by both those books in which I pretended that the nun I’d modeled on Saint Thérèse of Lisieux would have a kind of love affair with Jesus, with all of a romance’s grand exaltations and disappointments, and its physical manifestation would be Christ’s wounds from the crucifixion. Further reading about religious women and the phenomenon of stigmata acquainted me with Anne Catharine Emmerich, Louise Lateau, Theresa Neumann, and, in particular, Gemma Galgani—all of them stigmatics in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Some parts of the letters that Mariette writes in the novel are paraphrased from confessions written by Saint Gemma Galgani in 1900 and included in a hard-to-find book called Letters and Ecstasies. Quotidian life in my fictional religious order, the Sisters of the Crucifixion, is based on Thomas Merton’s account of the Cistercian life in The Waters of Siloe. The mass hysteria hinted at in my book was a product of my looking into Aldous Huxley’s fascinating history, The Devils of Loudun. Simple scenes of the sisters at work and recreation were inspired by a book of photographs taken at the Carmelite convent in Lisieux by Thérèse’s sister Céline. The first investigation of Mariette’s stigmata is taken from the medical diagnosis of Padre Pio’s stigmata in the 1920s. Cribbing and stealing from hundreds of sources, I finally allowed my factual sources to be distorted and transmuted by figurative language, forgetfulness, or by the personalities of the fictional characters. I hoped to present in Mariette’s life a faith that gives an intellectual assent to Catholic orthodoxy, but doesn’t forget that the origin of religious feeling is the graced revelation of the Holy Being to us in nature, in the flesh, and in all our faculties. If I may be permitted the immodesty of quoting a review, I was trying to stake claim, as Pico Iyer put it, to “a world as close and equivocal as Emily Dickinson’s, alive with the age-old American concerns of community and wildness, of sexual and spiritual immensities, of transcendence and its discontents” (1993, 496). Saying the unsayable it possibly was—I felt free to try it because I knew the book would get published somewhere, even if it were a small press, and I knew the books I liked best were not those that seemed tailored to contemporary tastes but those that were unfashionable, refractory, insubordinate, that seem the products not of a market analysis but of a writer’s private obsession.

FICTION WRITING AND ARTISTIC FREEDOM But in my rebellion against what Yale law professor Stephen L. Carter has termed “the culture of disbelief” (1993), I did not feel obligated, as

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Catholic fiction writers in the forties and fifties often did, to be conformist, high-minded, and pure, as if I were seeking a nihil obstat from the chancery. As Robert Stone pointed out in “The Reason for Stories,” his essay on moral fiction: It must be emphasized that the moral imperative of fiction provides no excuse for smug moralizing, religiosity, or propaganda. On the contrary, it forbids them. Nor does it require that every writer equip his work with some edifying message advertising progress, brotherhood, and light. It does not require a writer to be a good man, only a good wizard. (1990, 75)

In fact there may be no obligation for a Christian writer or artist to overtly treat Christian themes. Writing about “Catholic Novelists and Their Readers,” Flannery O’Connor affirmed fiction writers whose only objective was being “hotly in pursuit of the real.” She elaborates by noting that St. Thomas Aquinas says that art does not require rectitude of the appetite, that it is wholly concerned with the good of that which is made. He says that a work of art is good in itself, and this is a truth that the modern world has largely forgotten. We are not content to stay within our limitations and make something that is simply a good in and by itself. Now we want to make something that will have some utilitarian value. Yet what is good in itself glorifies God because it reflects God. The artist has his hands full and does his duty if he attends to his art. He can safely leave evangelizing to the evangelists. (1969, 171)

Evangelization for Jesus was generally by means of parables that were often so bewilderingly allusive that his disciples would ask for further explanations of his meaning. Mark has it that, “he did not speak to [the crowds] without a parable, but privately to his own disciples he explained everything” (Mark 4:33–34). Christ’s parables are metaphors that do not contract into simple denotation but broaden continually to take on fresh nuances and connotations. Parables invite the hearer’s interest with familiar settings and situations but finally veer off into the unfamiliar, shattering their homey realism and insisting on further reflection and inquiry. We have the uneasy feeling that we are being interpreted even as we interpret them. Early, pre-Gospel versions seem to have resembled Zen koans in which hearers are left hanging until they find illumination through profound meditation. A kind of koan occurs in the Gospel of Luke when Jesus compares the kingdom of God to “leaven which a woman took and hid in three measures of flour, till it was all leavened” (Luke 13:21). We are challenged, in Jesus’s parables, to figure out how we are like wheat sown in a field, or lost sheep, or mustard seed, or the evil tenants of a householder’s vineyard, and in the hard exercise of interpretation

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we imitate and make present again the graced interaction between the human and the divine. My fourth novel, Atticus (1996), was a retelling of what’s often called the parable of the prodigal son, though it’s the father who’s most truly excessive, having far more love and forgiveness than his son feels he deserves. Without giving away too much of the plot of what is, after all, a mystery, I can offer this: Atticus is the story of a Colorado rancher named Atticus Cody who, when he hears that his wild and wayward son Scott has committed suicide, journeys to a town full of expatriated Americans on the Mexican Caribbean in order to recover the body. While there, Atticus happens upon enough factual oversights and inconsistencies to infer that his son was murdered, and he tries to find out who the murderer is. Mariette in Ecstasy is a parable of a young woman’s quest for God; Atticus is a parable of God’s continuing quest for an intimate relationship with us. Each focuses on seekers, for religion and fiction have in common the unquenchable yearning to achieve the impossible, fathom the unfathomable, hold onto what is fleeting and evanescent and seen, in Saint Paul’s words, “as through a glass, darkly” (1 Corinthians 13:12). CONCLUSION I hesitate to say more for fiction is far better experienced than interpreted. And so it is with sacraments. To fully understand a symbol is to kill it. So the Holy Being continually finds new ways to proclaim itself to us, first and best of all in the symbols of Christ’s life, then in Scripture, and finally in created things, whether they be the glories of nature or art or other human beings. And those symbols will not be objects but actions. As theologian Nathan Mitchell puts it, “Symbols are not things people invent and interpret, but realities that ‘make’ and interpret a people. . . . Symbols are places to live, breathing spaces that help us discover what possibilities life offers” (Mitchell 1993, n.p.). The job of fiction writers is to fashion those symbols and give their readers the feeling that life has great significance, that something is going on here that matters. Writing will be a sacrament when it offers in its own way the formula for happiness of Pierre Tielhard de Chardin. Which is: First, be. Second, love. Finally, worship. We may find it’s possible that if we do just one of those things completely we may have done all three. REFERENCES Alcoforado, Marianna. 1893. The Letters of a Portuguese Nun. Translated by Edgar Prestage. London: David Nutt.

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Betlyon, John W. 1985. “Sacraments.” In Harper’s Bible Dictionary, edited by Paul J. Achtemeier. San Francisco: Harper & Row. Carter, Stephen L. 1993. The Culture of Disbelief: How American Law and Politics Trivialize Religious Devotion. New York: BasicBooks. Chesterton, G. K. 1986. Heretics. In The Collected Works of G. K. Chesterton, edited by David Dooley, Vol. 1, 37–207. San Francisco: Ignatius Press. Conrad, Joseph. 1971. “Preface, The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’.” In Conrad’s Prefaces to His Works, edited by Edward Garnett, 47–54. New York: Haskell House Publishers Ltd. Eliot, T. S. 1969. “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” In Selected Essays, 3–11. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc. Gardner, John. 1984. The Art of Fiction. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Hansen, Ron. 1979. Desperadoes. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. ———. 1983. The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. ———. 1991. Mariette in Ecstasy. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. ———. 1996. Atticus. HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. Iyer, Pico. 1993. “Review of Mariette in Ecstasy” by Ron Hansen. Partisan Review LX.3: 493–96. Mitchell, Nathan. 1977. “Symbols Are Actions Not Objects—New Directions for an Old Problem.” Living Worship 13.2: n.p. O’Connor, Flannery. 1969. “Novelist and Believer.” In Mystery and Manners, edited by Sally Fitzgerald and Robert Fitgerald 154–68.. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. ———. “Catholic Novelists and Their Readers.” In Mystery and Manners, 169–90. Stone, Robert. June 1990. “The Reason for Stories.” Harper’s Magazine 276.1657: 71–76. Suggit, John N. 1993. Sacrament. In The Oxford Companion to the Bible, edited by Bruce M. Metzger and Michael D. Coogan. New York: Oxford University Press.

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Catholic Poetry: An Essai in Definition Patricia Cleary Miller, Ph.D.

“Can one hear oneself close one’s eyes?” (Stilgoe, 1994, ix)

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atholic Poetry: What do these two words mean when paired? Is Catholic Poetry an entity? We might ask further: What do these two words mean when separated? And we might step back into less specific questions: What is religious poetry? Can these two words be separated? The answers to these questions are various. Certainly there are poets who are Catholic and who are closely identified with the Roman Catholic Church: Karol Wojtyla (Pope John Paul II), Thomas Merton, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Thérèse of Lisieux. Other Catholic poets are known better without the qualifier: Denise Levertov, Dana Gioia, classicist Robert Fitzgerald, as well as Nobel laureates Seamus Heaney and Gabriela Mistral. And many Christian poets who are not Roman Catholic write religious poetry deeply appreciated by Catholic readers: T. S. Eliot, W. B. Yeats, John Donne, George Herbert. Other poets who write ecstatically are not usually associated with a church: William Wordsworth, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson. These gradations notwithstanding, it is indeed possible to define an entity entitled Catholic Poetry, and to list and study its practitioners. Of course a full study, or even a detailed list, of Catholic poets would far exceed the scope of this essay; the essay will rather work toward a definition of Catholic poetry and religious poetry, before discussing the writer’s own work as an example of both. 59

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What does Catholic poetry look like? It may be characterized by its relation to the seven sacraments of the Church—which mark life’s important passages (baptism, confirmation, marriage, holy orders, sacrament of the sick) as well as the quotidian (communion, confession); and to the liturgy, which marks the seasons (Christmas, Easter) and the lives of the saints. It uses as symbols various objects associated with church rituals. And it is devotional, expressing the prayerful emotions of the poet.

EXAMPLES OF CATHOLIC POETRY Some good current examples of Catholic poetry may be found in David Craig and Janet McCann’s anthology, Place of Passage: Contemporary Catholic Poetry (2000). In her Introduction, McCann states that Catholic poetry’s emphasis on the sacraments is what distinguishes it from other kinds of Christian poetry. She notes that objects associated with the sacraments—baptismal font, chalice—“have their own power,” and that “the little blessed things we tend to keep on our persons . . . rosaries, medals . . . prayer cards, stamped with the names of departed loved ones . . . provide an enhanced sense of life in this world and the continuity from one generation to the next” (20). Organizing their volume around the church year—the great feasts as well as “ordinary time” (with a special section for the poems of Pope John Paul II)—Craig and McCann eschew “direct sermonizing, . . . opting instead for poems that illuminate rather than instruct.” McCann adds, “Some of these poems are expressions of pure joy at the gift of faith. What the poems tend to share is this sense of the sacramental—the belief that there are holy people, places, acts, and things, and God may be approached through them” (20). The editors also include regional, ethnic, social justice, and missionary types of poetry (21–22). Liturgy, sacraments, mementoes and blessed objects, and private devotions form a connection with God, remind the believer of God’s abiding presence—the numinous; they indicate intersections between time and eternity, between the created and the Creator. Trying to express this constant Incarnation, poets search for vocabulary at once concrete and evanescent; they reach for sounds and rhythms beyond their own experience of language. McCann explains that many of the poems they included in the book “are touched with that sense of the imperfect that is our nature, and because they know that they can never be perfect, they dare more” (21). To illustrate these concepts, let us look at several poems from various sources. David Craig’s “Psalm #1,” appearing in his and McCann’s anthology, continues the original Psalm’s description, “Happy the man who fol-

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lows not the counsel of the wicked” (Psalms 1:1), with timeless examples: “He does not linger with scoffers” in bars, but “He sweats all day in Presence, / mumbles among his tools” (2000, 1, 6–7). In contrast, the wicked “sees what he is / as drives, no one behind the wheel” (13–14). His way “is a desolate field and offers / the nothing no one can take” (19–20). The narrator of Dana Gioia’s “The Room Upstairs” recalls a mountain climber to whom years ago he rented his upstairs room. The climber, once badly lacerated in a mountain rescue, suffers “Wounds deep enough to hide your fingers in” (2000, 67). After his death in another climbing accident, the young man appears to the narrator, “’I’m cold. Just hold me. I’m so very cold’” (99). As the man holds the ghost, it slips “silently away / like snow between my fingers . . . .” (105–06). In Gioia’s “The Country Wife,” a woman “makes her way through the dark trees / Down to the lake to be alone” (1996, 1–2). She sees “The night reflected on the lake, / The fire of stars changed into water” (15–16). While making bread, the woman in Denise Levertov’s “The Acolyte” thinks of “the way / the dough rises and has a life of its own” (2001, 15–16), of “the way / the sour smell changes / to fragrance” (18–20; “[S]he wants to make / bread that is more than bread” (29–30). In “The Tide,” Levertov’s speaker asks not only where God is, but also what God wants. She writes, “perhaps God wants / something quite different. / Or nothing, nothing at all” (2000, 6–8). She speaks of one who, dreaming of travel, wakes to discover “you have not left / to begin the journey” (25–26). She concludes that “emptiness / is a cup, and holds / the ocean” (36–38). None of these poems explains itself; indeed, were they to do so they could not be considered good poems. The poets do not say too much; they allow the objects to become symbols in the mind of the reader, to reverberate, and thus to communicate more with each rereading. A good poem takes many risks: going where words cannot go, being misunderstood, being thought autobiographical, taking on a life of its own. Religious poetry faces additional problems: didacticism, parochialism, sappiness. The above poems take the first set of risks, while avoiding the second set. Their audience extends beyond the parochial: it may be catholic as well as Catholic. Similarly, the intensely devotional poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, T. S. Eliot, Therese of Lisieux, John Donne, George Herbert appeal to people in many times and places. Hopkins finds “God’s Grandeur” and “Pied Beauty” everywhere: in crushed oil, the smear of toil, the brinded cow, the dappled trout (1985, “God’s Grandeur” 3, 6; “Pied Beauty” 2–3). Eliot ends his agonized description of the dark night of the soul, “The Waste Land,” with the hopeful “Shantih shantih shantih,” which he explains is “the formal ending to an Upanishad, “The peace which passeth all understanding” (1963, 434, and note to this line). The carefully crafted poems of Thérèse

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use biblical imagery and the vocabulary of intense longing and love. Addressing Jesus as her little brother in “Our Divine Lord to St. Gertrude,” the motherless young nun writes, “Remember Thou that Mary’s holy arms / Thou didst prefer to any royal throne” (1–2). John Donne, seeing angels trumpeting the Last Judgment “At the round earths imagin’d corners,” begs God to “Teach mee how to repent” (1941, “Holy Sonnet VII,” 1, 13). While admonishing “Death be not proud,” he predicts that “death, thou shalt die” (1941, “Holy Sonnet X,” 1, 14). He prays “Batter my heart, three person’d God”; he pleads, “I / Except you’enthrall mee, never shall be free . . .” (1941, “Holy Sonnet XIV,” 1, 13). George Herbert celebrates “Lent,” “The British Church,” “Sunday, Church Music” in language at once specific to his time and meaningful to ours: In “Lent” he prays, “Yet, Lord, instruct us to improve our fast / By starving sin, and taking such repast / As may our faults control. . .” (1964, 43–45).

MORE PATTERNS OF TRANSCENDENCE All these poets typify the many whose orthodoxy shows patterns in the crazy quilt of time and points to the worlds beyond words. Such patterns, such transcendence, may also be found by poets we might call heterodox (not in the sense that their beliefs are heretical, but that they are simply other). William Wordsworth, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, for example, pondered the seasons, their own yearnings, the cycles of death and resurgence, in rhythms variously of railroads and streams and hymns. Wordsworth’s heart “leaps up” at daffodils, rainbows; he accepts sadly, in “While Not a Leaf Seems Faded,” the “bitter change” as summer yields to autumn, which predicts “frost and snow” (1984, 6, 13). Whitman sees the face of Christ in the dying Civil War soldiers (“A Sight in Camp in the Daybreak Gray and Dim” [1982, 14–15]). In “A Song for Occupations,” he sings, “In the labor of engines and trades and the labor of fields I find . . . / the eternal meanings” (1982, 2–3). Dickinson dreams of “Rowing in Eden” during “Wild Nights—Wild Nights!” in the thunderstorm, in romance (1960, #249: “Wild Nights—Wild Nights!,” 9, 1). While not specifically sacramental, their work points thoughtfully, often ecstatically, beyond the bonds of earth and time. As we have seen, many poets, of various spiritual persuasions, write in this vein. They begin with earth and time: without the senses, through which comes all knowledge, we cannot get beyond. Poetry starts with images—of sight, sound, taste, smell, touch—and mainly with the first two: with word pictures, with rhythms, with the heartbeat, with the echoes arising from rhyme and alliteration and assonance. It is the par-

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ticularity of the image, presented with carefully crafted details, that leads to the universal. And the universal—that which many individuals, alone in their own countries and time periods, diachronically and synchronically dispersed, recognize as metaphorically accurate for them—may lead them to see an intersection between time and eternity. Images from Eliot’s “Four Quartets” illustrate this point: the circling petals of the rose; the pattern on a Chinese vase; the dance of Shiva—his hands indicating, bestowing, preserving, stopping human life; the country dance that celebrates the change of seasons; and, most significantly, the mysteries of Christmas and Easter (1963, “Little Gidding” V, 46; “Burnt Norton,” V, 6; “Burnt Norton” II, 1–6 , respectively). When else does time stop, does one have the sense of being “out of time,” in rhythm with the turning earth? Staring at the wise old face of an infant, galloping across the summer fields, listening to Beethoven, looking at Monet’s Nympheas, making love—we could go on. The artist—of words or paint or music—waits for these moments, falls into and records them. And through his craft, he floats beyond the self. In this space, nonspace is God; but, paradoxically, God is also in the details observed by the senses. McCann notes, in her Introduction, that some poets believe that “the world’s truths are metaphoric” and that others “find the surface of the world as revealing, not fading against, the face of God” (2000, 21). The important thing for the poet who would so transcend is to wait. Respectfully. Homer and Milton would call it wandering. To Keats it is imagining. To Seamus Heaney it is gazing. As William Stafford told me in a private conversation, art comes in little ways that are so unpredictable that we can’t engineer them (1985). Further, the poem he was writing when he died advises, “Be ready for what God sends” (1993). Robert Frost declares, “No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader” (1967, vi). If he respects his craft and trusts his trackless wandering, the poet will find himself somewhere new. And about what will he write? About what he observes. And learns. Donald Hall, recent United States Poet Laureate, whose beloved wife Jane Kenyon died a few years ago, says that all poems are about the loss of love. Another United States Poet Laureate, nonagenarian gardener Stanley Kunitz, blissfully married for many decades, says the only two topics are love and death. Miller Williams says that poets must write about “the writeaboutable.” Art is free; in its variety of opinions and approaches, it is democratic. And even rebellious. Some would argue that this makes it like religion, that great religious leaders—Christ, Buddha, Mohammed—have always broken with the status quo, have always seen the world and man’s relation to God in new ways.

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THE FUNCTION OF CATEGORIES And so how can we hold on for long to a category like Catholic poetry? Or religious poetry? How can poetry not be religious? Indeed, how can any act not be religious? It is interesting to observe people who say they are not religious, to watch how they live. They tend to be reverent. The mountaineer and geologist John Cleary refuses to attend Mass, even on Christmas, but asserts, “I’m just such a traditional Catholic.” Casey Jones, journalist and collector of Native American art, served an inner-city parish as its volunteer groundskeeper for many years. Some say that art is a bridge to God. The traditional Catholic view of the sacraments and symbolic objects and practices is that they serve this function. One might say that bridges can be helpful if you think you need them; but you really don’t need a bridge to God. If you use your senses, if you are alert, any path will take you there. Or, said another way, you are there; a children’s book by Joan Walsh Angland tells of a little girl to whom, when she just sits still, the little woodland creatures come. You don’t even have to pray, just to be. Joyce Dickey, in her last years of living with multiple sclerosis, totally paralyzed, unable to talk or to swallow, still somehow, mysteriously to all observers, had joy in simply being alive. Every day before celebrating Mass, Father Tom Wiederholt used to advise his parishioners, ”Put yourselves in the presence of God.” Realizing that they are already there, he now says, “Be aware that you are in the presence of God.” When he was dying, Jack O’Toole called in his pastor to administer the Last Sacraments, then feinted, “Forget it, Father. I don’t believe in God.” The alert young cleric riposted, “That doesn’t matter, Jack. The only important thing is that God believes in you.” Indeed, we read in Genesis that God walks in the garden in the afternoon. God does not need to be approached. God IS. Immanent, numinous, transcendent, here. We do not have to look for God. But there are ways that we can be aware of His presence: through all things sensual, imaginative, rational. Drums, dancing, chanting; in the quiet Friends Meeting, the Gospel choir, the sedate Anglican service—all carefully planned. All scriptures use words rhythmically, musically to tell their stories, to give their advice. The services, the windows, the color, and chiaroscuro all help the worshipper be aware of the merging of space and time with the timeless. Art and life, time and the timeless, the religious and the secular, God and man: these are not the same; no one would argue that they are. Yet there are seamless connections. Pulling them apart is messy. More interesting for the poet—even as he works methodically, rationally within his craft—to trace their convergences. Listing, tracing, defining Catholic poetry is useful and even fascinating, to a point. But after a while the

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exercise may confine; one wants to ask who is in, who is out, and who are the audiences. Better to leave off the qualifying adjective. Poets get nervous with adjectives, adverbs; they tend to bleed the strong nouns and verbs we depend on. (Still, one must be wary of proscription: Gaston Bachelard calls himself “’a philosopher of adjectives’” [Stilgoe 1994, ix]); Wordsworth and Whitman sometimes revel in adjectives. In his long narrative poem Gunslinger, the poet Ed Dorn had a talking horse who constantly admonished, “Don’t describe” (1995). One must not draw a line around something ineffable and fence it in. It will die. It will not be itself. Poets are advised, “Show, don’t tell.” Actors are told, “Don’t indicate. Just smoke, open the door. Don’t act, just do it.” In this essay I do not want to survey the contemporary scene: I do not want to get corralled. Categories are myriad. The twentieth-anniversary catalogue of New Letters on the Air: Writers on Cassette lists its interviewees first alphabetically and then by prize (Nobel, Pulitzer, Booker, National/American Book, National Book Critics Circle) and by ethnic group and subject matter (Native American, Hispanic, Black, Beat). Other classifications people make include Religious Poetry, Love Poetry, Nature. American, English, French, Chinese, Japanese. Lyric, Narrative, Formal, Traditional, Free. All are useful classifications: national, ethnic, diachronic, synchronic, form, subject matter. Catholic poetry could fit into, could overlap these categories. What distinguishes it bears repeating: it is sacramental; it can be organized liturgically around the seasons and the seven sacraments. It assumes the fall of man, the spiritual journey, the possibility of repentance, the promise of redemption, the presence of God, the contradictory impulses of human nature. Some details of the sacraments and of the spiritual journey may be specific, if not unique, to Catholic poetry; yet much poetry takes the seasons into account (we must constantly ask, “What is the weather like?”); and everyone is also involved in the events the sacraments touch: love and loss, birth and death, coming of age. Catholic poetry may be reverent, devout, righteous, even pious. It can be bad poetry when it is technically dull, overly pious, insular. A web site under Catholic Poetry calls up some sappy sing-song clumsy parochial verse. Catholic poetry is at its best when it uses specifics to transcend boundaries, when it uses language in a fresh way to express universal truths, ultimate mysteries: the human need for unity, for time stopping, for living the fact of the Incarnation.

START WITH A PICTURE My own work begins with a picture. I hesitate to call it a vision—to some readers that would suggest the bizarre: Joan of Arc had visions, but

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twenty-first-century academics should not; Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross talked directly to God, but a thoroughly modern person would not in public admit such activity. I prefer to think in the terms of Bachelard, who wrote that poetry appears in the “isolated image,” in “reverberation” (1994, xv–xvi). Thus, sound and sight and smell, externally stimulated yet appearing in the mind. One stares out a window, daydreams in church or at a concert; one overhears the odd line of conversation, flinches at midnight radios and backfires and shots; one’s house smells like one’s grandmother’s. And then past present future merge; as Bachelard says, “the poetic act has no past” (xv). And Eliot in “Four Quartets” writes, “Time present and time past are both present / perhaps in time future, / And time future contained in time past” (1963, “Burnt Norton” I, 1–3). “Perhaps A Ruined Abbey” is as exact a description as I could craft of an archway I saw in my mind while at Mass. The poem is an attempt to fix the physical details of what the speaker could and could not see, to stay calm amid the frustration of not knowing what she was looking at. (I prefer to call any first-person narrator the speaker and to name the main character the persona in order to step back from the autobiographical.) The you in the poem is probably the beloved, or a person whom I wants to know better, wants to trust but does not yet. You may be God. The poem is in blank verse, thirty-three five-beat lines in two stanzas—sixteen and seventeen lines, in a rhythm that waxes and wanes with the speaker’s level of frustration. In the first stanza she catalogues what she thinks the arch might be; in the second she focuses on what she can know—the weather, the grass. At the end of the poem, when I leans in fatigue against the stone, she finds some comfort in “its cool smooth surface against my cheek.” Like Captain Ernest Shakelton, the apostles on the road to Emmaus, Eliot’s pilgrim in “The Waste Land,” she senses but cannot discern the presence of a person near her. (I did not notice these connections until long after I wrote the poem.) Once the poem was finished, the archway took on a life of its own. I saw it in paintings and photographs. Then, a month after the poem appeared in a journal, I found myself at a place unknown to me, Glastonbury Abbey, legendary burial place of legendary King Arthur, built on a spot where some believe Joseph of Arimathea took the young boy Jesus. There was the ruined abbey of my poem. Perhaps a Ruined Abbey When I think of you I see an archway— mossy, cool, of scratchy granite, ancient Roman gateway to—I cannot tell: perhaps a ruined abbey, Norman cloister where monks still chant; or Gothic Salisbury Cathedral, bombed-out and half-restored. Some

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might build a party palace, restaurants, condos. I do not know: this field that stretches far away and even to the wine-dark sea; a low green plain, a wasteland where something used to be—or never was or will be; a wilderness; a field where sheep could safely graze, where a child could wander; an edge, a precipice down which a child could abruptly tumble, grab a protruding root, hang shrieking unheard above the black and roiling rocks. I do not know; I cannot see beyond the arch; I do not see the building or even the wall from which the arch springs. I do not know if it is a monastery. There are green vines, but no clematis or wisteria. Somehow I know it is Spring. The air is moist; no rain, neither hot nor cold. The path is sandy, damp. The grass on either side is closely cropped. It’s a low Roman arch, just wide enough for two to pass abreast. Perhaps it leads to Italy; but this seems more like England. I can’t tell if you are on the path behind or beside or in front of me. I can’t tell if you are here at all. I feel your presence but I don’t know where you are. I approach the gate, close my eyes, lean against the stone, feel its cool smooth surface against my cheek.

In “Chartres,” “I lose my bearings” in watching clouds moving over the cathedral, in the ecstasy of love and of prayer. The blue of the sky and of the lover’s eyes become one, and because the speaker becomes dizzy while looking at the clouds over the cathedral, she imagines that she is floating with God. My idea for the poem began when I looked up at the sky over the cathedral. The poem ends with this image, but starts with the lover’s touch and the speaker’s reaction to it. The poem is one sentence, eight alexandrines. While the poem fell into this form, I hope that the long lines (six beats, eleven to thirteen syllables), unpunctuated, pull the mind along languidly but deliberately so that, like the speaker, the reader will lose his bearings and will not be able to tell which comes first: blue eyes, blue sky, God. Chartres Sometimes when you touch me somewhere I don’t know where it is so astonishing I arch my back up to meet you smiling above me and throw my head back

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“Priests Pavane in Sheer White Gowns” mixes up sights and sounds and scents in Notre Dame de Paris: the organ trills become a hurricane; the sermon drones into a harangue; lilies, roses, thorns, virgins, mothers all merge into the desperate wife. She becomes disoriented by the heavy incense, loud music, droning sermon, stifling air during Sunday Mass; then all images become cruel—words from the sermon and the scripture readings, the statues of the Virgin and of Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, even the flowers. She remembers with horror the begetting of her children. She remembers her husband’s indifference: “You walked along white cliffs / and never called to me.” She remembers her desperation: “I butted my head / into the low moon and hollowed it out.” Finally, in the present, she feels the ground give way: “The green sky rushes past.” At first the speaker controls her observations; she lists images and events methodically. Five of the first six lines are end-stopped. Most of the following twenty-one lines are enjambed, or run-on. Her horror at the disparity between the comfort she seeks (the “surrogates” of stained glass windows and lacy architecture) and the reality she finds (in the sermon’s call to action and the stoical lives of the saints) intensifies through the poem’s twenty-seven lines of irregularly alternating pentameter and hexameter. The last line is impossibly long—sixteen syllables, six irregular feet, culminating in her complete dislocation as she feels herself falling from the cliff where her husband had walked without her. Priests Pavane in Sheer White Gowns The faithful file into Notre Dame de Paris. Priests pavane in sheer white gowns, gold chasubles embroidered green for hope. The incense stings my eyes. The organ trills filigrees of light. Through the hurricane the organ storms a march of triumph. Bodies lean into the typhoon, ballerina arms sway. The incense stings my eyes. The priest’s voice goes on and on: “Hospital for Foundlings, Hospital for Sick Cardinals . . . .” No cures or treatments, just a cold cloth to my head and a knife to my veins. Life for them is too brief for the summer breeze licking my back. They come here for surrogates, for jeweled windows, lace walls, white lilies, incense, chanting. The only word we need is “alleluia,” not Saint Paul and his thorn

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of Satan. The incense stings my eyes. The Virgin holding the Christ Child stands on a stone column banked by lilies—trumpet cup and shaft face opposite ways. Saint Therese cradles her thorny roses. Why did she walk barefoot on frosted floors, eat the tubercular sputum of her dying sister? Why must we all be virgins? That first summer in Paris my white lace gown did no good, and on the fifth night my sobs echoed in the stone courtyard; and four children sprang from your falling asleep on top of me. You walked along white cliffs and never called to me. I butted my head into the low moon and hollowed it out. The green sky rushes past.

In “Praise Him” the speaker is methodical throughout, describing exactly what she sees as she walks up the snowy hill to Saint Joseph’s Trappist Abbey near Boston: the clock tower in the town, the cracked asphalt road, the icy river. Once in the chapel, she feels lost and lonely; distracted by an ugly overhead light, she cannot pray. Then she imagines she hears the voice of God coming from the direction of the light bulb, mockingly wise, admonishing her, basically, to “buck up, Old Girl. And be grateful.” The form is stark, like the landscape and the mood: six stanzas in variations on the Japanese haiku and tanka. All but the third stanza are tercets of five, seven, five syllables; the third is an elongation of this haiku stanza, in five, seven, five, seven, seven syllables. It is my hope that the form reflects both the earnestness of the speaker and a certain sense of levity at that earnestness. Praise Him (At Saint Joseph’s Trappist Abbey) The moon-faced tower behind me scraped the dull sky. I walked up the hill through old snow still white, iced, dusk-gleaming, over swiftsnagged gun-blue river, on cracked macadam, to pale sun sliding behind low stone arches, bell tower, chapel. Ostracized behind visitors wall, old pilgrim lost in a thicket, motherless child, I closed my eyes against the dark. Above me, one electric light and the

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“Last Words” describes a life-sized stone sculpture of Christ on the Cross and a performance of James MacMillan’s piece for choir and orchestra. As the poem progresses, the speaker, who keeps repeating, “I do not feel transported,” disappears and Christ lives—and finally dies—in the sculpture and the music. The poem is in two sections: the first focusing on the sculpture—the sights; the second on the music—the sounds. The form is irregular, following first the eye of the narrator as she describes the shadows on the sculpture and what she wishes she were feeling; then following the rhythm of the choir and orchestra, the motions and grimaces of the conductor, and finally and overwhelmingly, Christ’s words and breathing. Last Words “Seven Last Words from the Cross, for Choir and String Orchestra,” by James MacMillan. Performed by the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir and the Tallinn Chamber Orchestra, at Redemptorist Church, 16 February 2002 I. Christ on the Cross is white marble, his crown is a braid of marble. Nailheads sparkle like rubies in his wrists, his chest is pierced, a black stain, a hollow. He is dead, his face is grey. I do not feel transported. Deep violet is the color of his shroud, amethyst are the shadows under his arms, and along his ribs, and behind his legs. He is dead, his face is grey. I do not feel transported. Fra Angelico would have made him smile at me; in Florence the music would have transcended. But here he is dead, his face is grey. I am sitting directly below this large marble statue. Two choirs sing his last words in some language; it may be English; I do not feel transported; my ring is the color of his shroud.

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II. The second choir sings so high we cannot hear it, our ears hurt, our nerves vibrate, Jesus thirsts, he sucks the bitter sponge, he bears his insults but he thirsts the more, he cannot swallow gall, he thirsts the more. The wind blows, it rattles the bones, blows past the bones, blows past and blows against the void, echoes against no echo. Rattles the air. His pulse pounds his temples, his bones pound, he writhes, he cannot break, if he could break he would die now die now die now to pulse to pain to bone pounding he cannot breathe he cannot die. The conductor’s mouth screams— a Grunewald Christ— Father Father. The violins are erinyes. Stop the vibration, the fury the slow pulseless agony— Oh stop the buzz the swarms of bottled flies. He cannot breathe, he cannot die, please bring the sword to pierce his heaving chest— if he cannot get air in, the sword could let all air out. The music drags on without air, the air drifts away away—far it drifts away away, the sound recedes. No sound— No sound— It is finished It is finished. Consummatum est.

CONCLUSION Catholic poems, religious poems, poems, take many forms. It is interesting and useful for the scholar, the teacher, the student to categorize them. Categorization helps us manage time and space. But at the moment of creation, the poet does not usually categorize. The poet, I believe, tries to connect the concrete and the mystery worlds between which he lives much of the time. He wants to slow time down, to hold on to the moment,

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to cry out with Ovid, “slowly slowly may ye run, oh horses of the night” (“lente currite, noctis equi” in “Elegy XIII,” “He Entreats the Dawn to Hasten Not Her Coming”).

REFERENCES Bachelard, Gaston. 1994. Introduction. In The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard. Trans. Maria Jolas, xv–xxxix. Foreword by John R. Stilgoe. Boston: Beacon Press. ———. 1994. The Poetics of Space. Trans. Maria Jolas. Foreword by John R. Stilgoe. Boston: Beacon Press. Craig, David. 2000. “Psalm #1.” In Place of Passage: Contemporary Catholic Poetry, edited by David Craig and Janet McCann. Ashland, Oregon: Storyline Press. Craig, David, and McCann, Janet, eds. 2000. Place of Passage: Contemporary Catholic Poetry. Ashland, Oregon: Storyline Press. Dickinson, Emily. 1961. “#249: Wild Nights—Wild Nights!” In The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, edited by Thomas H. Johnson. Boston: Little, Brown. Donne, John. 1941. “Holy Sonnets VII, X, XIV.” In The Complete Poetry and Selected Prose of John Donne and the Complete Poetry of William Blake. New York: Modern Library. Dorn, Ed. 1995. Gunslinger. Introduction by Marjorie Perloff. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press. Eliot, T. S. 1963. “The Waste Land.” In Collected Poems 1909–1962. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc. ———. 1963. “Four Quartets.” In Collected Poems 1909–1962. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc. Frost, Robert. 1967. “The Figure a Poem Makes.” In The Complete Poems of Robert Frost, v–viii. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston. Gioia, Dana. 2000. “The Room Upstairs.” In Place of Passage: Contemporary Catholic Poetry, edited by David Craig and Janet McCann. Ashland, Oregon: Storyline Press. ———. 1996. “The Country Wife.” In Rebel Angels: 25 Poets of the New Formalism, edited by Mark Jarman and David Mason. Brownsville, Oregon: Storyline Press. Herbert, George. 1964. “Lent.” In The Works of George Herbert, edited by F. E. Hutchinson. London: Oxford University Press. Hopkins, Gerard Manley. 1985. “God’s Grandeur.” In Poems and Prose of Gerard Manley Hopkins, edited by W. H. Gardner. London: Putnam. ———. 1985. “Pied Beauty.” In Poems and Prose of Gerard Manley Hopkins, edited by W. H. Gardner. London: Putnam. Jarman, Mark, and Mason, David, eds. 1996. Rebel Angels: 25 Poets of the New Formalism. Brownsville, Oregon: Storyline Press. Levertov, Denise. 2000. “The Tide.” In Place of Passage: Contemporary Catholic Poetry, edited by David Craig and Jean McCann. Ashland, OR: Storyline Press. ———. 2001. “The Acolyte.” In Contemporary American Poetry, 7th ed., edited by A. Poulin Jr. and Michael Waters. New York: Houghton Mifflin.

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Lisieux, Thérèse. “Our Divine Lord to St. Gertrude.” http://www.catholicfirst.com/ thefaith/catholicclassics/sttherese/poemsofsttherese3.cfm. Accessed on January 2, 2008. McCann, Janet. 2000. Introduction. In Place of Passage: Contemporary Catholic Poetry, edited by David Craig and Jean McCann, 19–23. Ashland, Oregon: Storyline Press. Ovid. Elegy XIII, “He Entreats the Dawn to Hasten Not Her Coming.” In The Love Books of Ovid, http://www.sacred-texts.com/cla/ovid/lboo/lboo19.htm . Accessed on January 2, 2008. Poulin, A., Jr., and Michael Waters, eds. 2001. Contemporary American Poetry. 7th ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Stafford, William. 1993. www.tomfolio.com/AuthorInfo/authors/williamstafford .asp. Accessed on January 13, 2008. Stilgoe, John R. 1994. Foreword to the 1994 Edition. In The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard. Trans. Maria Jolas, vii–x. Boston: Beacon Press. Whitman, Walt. 1982. “A Sight in Camp in the Daybreak Gray and Dim.” In Walt Whitman: Complete Poetry and Collected Prose, edited by Justin Kaplan. New York: The Library of America. ———. 1982. “A Song for Occupations.” In Walt Whitman: Complete Poetry and Collected Prose, edited by Justin Kaplan. New York: The Library of America. Wordsworth, William. 1984. “While Not a Leaf Seems Faded.” In William Wordsworth: The Major Works, edited by Stephen Gill, 341. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Chesterton’s Catholic Imagination John C. Chalberg

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hesterton’s Catholic imagination? In this modern world of ours the word Catholic (with a capital c) cannot possibly be an adjective modifying the noun imagination. Such a juxtaposition seems, well, unimaginable. And if those two words are so joined, that joining is consistent with the modern temptation, nay the modern compulsion, to dismiss the notion of a Catholic imagination as an oxymoron or to ridicule it as an impossible flight of imaginative fancy. This is especially the case if the Catholic in question is an orthodox Catholic, which is exactly what Gilbert Keith Chesterton eventually became. After all, what is an orthodox Catholic, if not a dogmatist? And what is a dogmatist, if not someone who either refuses—or is forbidden—to think imaginatively? Was G. K. Chesterton, heaven forbid, a dogmatist? Of course he was. And no less than Chesterton himself would have instantly conceded as much. More than that, he was of the rather dogmatic opinion that everyone was a dogmatist of one sort or another. Not that Chesterton was completely dogmatic on this point. He qualified that dogmatic statement by dividing his dogmatists into two types. There were—and are—dogmatists, such as himself, who freely admitted to being dogmatic. And then there were—and are—dogmatists who deny that that is what they are. Chesterton knew the type even in his day. They preached tolerance and yet practiced the worst sorts of bigotry (usually anti-Catholic bigotry) imaginable. One need exercise only a very small amount of one’s imagination, Catholic or otherwise, to conjure up examples of these modern dogmatists in this ever so modern world of ours.

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Think about that curious word homophobia for a moment. Modern advocates of tolerance use it routinely in reference to those who oppose the gay rights agenda. The centerpiece of that agenda is gay marriage. If our modern world should step ever more deeply into modernity—or postmodernity—by making such a marriage legal, will those who continue to stand in opposition be charged with hate speech if they openly declare that opposition. To ask such a question is to answer it. Chesterton was fortunate enough to live at a time when no one could have imagined a world in which gay marriage would be celebrated and hate speech would be prosecuted. But that did not prevent him from advertising his dogmatism or from spotting dogmatic thinking among his enemies. If anything, his dogmatism helped him to see the dogmatism spouted by those who insisted that they were not dogmatists. So let it be stipulated that G. K. Chesterton was a very dogmatic fellow, whether the subject was Catholic orthodoxy or English politics or modern morals. But permit me to suggest that he was something more than that. Permit me to suggest that he was also a man of great, even rambunctious, imagination. That imagination was no doubt enhanced by his youthful reading of fairy tales. It would later be reflected in his own writing of fiction and in his considerable artistic talent. The young Chesterton, to be sure, was not always filled with a sense of things transcendent. But even then he possessed an active imagination. Certainly it is safe to say that he was a man of imagination long before he became a man of faith. As an artist and a story teller, he could hardly have been anything else. But more to the point—and this is my point—he remained a man of fertile imagination after he became a Catholic. If anything, his imaginative powers were enhanced by his belief in and commitment to Catholic orthodoxy—and by his ultimate conversion to Catholicism. If this stance seems paradoxical, so be it. After all, this will be far from the first time that G. K. Chesterton has been associated with the notion of paradox. It will also be far from the last such association within the confines of this brief essay. But perhaps the ultimate paradox of Chesterton’s intellectual and spiritual lives is that he saw no contradiction between these two lives. In fact, he would finally proclaim that he did not achieve complete mental emancipation until he had become a Catholic. To explore this proclamation, we shall examine Chesterton’s views on the joy of Catholicism, its twin emphases on sin and humility, its moral ideals, the ideal of a just society in light of both capitalism and the welfare state, Christian morality and modern materialism, the imaginative wonder— and power—of faith and, finally, catholic imagination as a springboard to intellectual liberation.

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A FEW HARD FACTS ABOUT CHESTERTON In one sense Chesterton’s formal conversion in 1922 was a very large step indeed. In another, perhaps paradoxical, sense, it was a very small step. But before we leap more daringly into the pits of paradox or head off on flights of imaginative fancy or wander away into the mists of history, let’s nail down a few hard facts. Gilbert Keith Chesterton was born on May 29, 1874. He died on June 14, 1936. In between he wrote more books and essays, poems and novels, than most of us will manage to read in a lifetime. One of those books was titled Orthodoxy. Published in 1908 (and continuously in print since then), it has been called his most Catholic book. But, in point of cold, hard fact, its author was not yet a Catholic. In a formal sense, Chesterton’s conversion did not take place until he was nearly fifty years old. Nonetheless, Orthodoxy offers us a solid piece of evidence that Chesterton was a Catholic thinker well before he decided to take that at once small, and yet very large, step which made him a Catholic communicant. Small? Yes, small, if only because he was already a Catholic in the large sense of that term. And small also because he was already a man of imagination in the small sense of that term. Small step? Small sense? Once again the problem—or perhaps it should be the possibility—of paradox rears its truthful head. Were you, dear reader, expecting ugly head? Sorry to disappoint you. And sorry to confuse you. But in truth Chesterton saw nothing ugly about the notion of paradox—and nothing confusing about it either. If anything, he employed paradoxes as a way of getting at truth. In the same way, he used his imagination as a way of approaching truth. Just as he ultimately found Catholicism to be the Truth.

IMAGINATION, ORTHODOX BOUNDARIES, AND JOY Which brings us back to the small sense of Chesterton’s imagination. It was small in the sense that it was rooted in and consistent with boundaries. Boundaries? To Chesterton boundaries were anything but confining. Certainly they were not impediments to the exercise of his imagination. In truth, and paradoxically so, Chesterton understood that boundaries existed not to hem people in, whether literally or figuratively, but to set people free, mentally free, that is. Now, the adult Chesterton always considered himself to be a free man. As such, he certainly thought of himself as a man who exercised free will. Did his conversion to Catholicism place new limits on this exercise? Not

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in Chesterton’s mind. If anything, he went to great lengths to point out that it was only after he had come to know orthodoxy that he experienced what he called “true mental emancipation” (Orthodoxy 1986, 363). For that matter, it was only after he had come to know orthodoxy that Chesterton thought he had truly begun to experience joy. In that sense, Chesterton, like C. S. Lewis, was “surprised by joy.” And once he experienced that sense of surprise for the first time, Chesterton wanted to repeat this experience again and again. To him, maintaining a sense of joy was critical to maintaining one’s mental health. No doubt the pre-Catholic Chesterton was a joyful fellow. But the Catholic Chesterton was even more joyful. The experience of being received into the Church did not stifle his sense of joy; if anything, it enhanced it. At the same time, Chesterton understood despair. In fact, the young Chesterton experienced deep despair. The Catholic Chesterton transcended that despair. In doing so, he came to understand something else as well. He understood that despair did not stem from being weary of suffering. On the contrary, it stemmed from being “weary of joy.” Once again, here is an imaginative Chesterton turning things upside down and speaking a simple truth at the same time. The automatic assumption of the modern world, whether in Chesterton’s day or our own, is that paganism, whether ancient or modern, is the religion of joy, while Christianity is at all times the religion of sorrow. Not so, concluded Chesterton paradoxically—and truthfully. At the heart of paganism at all times is “pure sorrow,” while at the heart of Christianity is “pure joy” (Orthodoxy 1986, 363). Conventional wisdom has it that Christians are kill-joys. Such wisdom is conventionally expressed by those who raise the specter of the dreaded religious right. This specter constitutes the great bogeyman of modern American life. It is that because it stands athwart the sexual revolution of modern American life. A good ten years ago, when I was in Calgary, Father Ian Boyd of the Chesterton Review told me that such conventional wisdom was on display in an exchange between actor Robert Duvall and a CBC interviewer following the release of The Apostle. According to Father Boyd, Duvall was asked if he was frightened by the power of the religious right in America. His answer may not have frightened his interrogator, but it certainly must have surprised her—and in a way that must have been anything but joyful to her. No, he replied, the power of the pagan left in America was much more frightening to him. Now, Robert Duvall may or may not have read his Chesterton, but he was making a Chestertonian point—and in a most Chestertonian manner. G. K. Chesterton, however, was not simply concerned with the power of paganism. After all, he could imagine something much worse, namely, the utter joylessness of paganism. This is especially true of modern pa-

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ganism with its joyless pursuit of wealth, its joyless pursuit of things, its joyless pursuit of pleasure, especially sexual pleasure, and its joyless pursuit of health. On this last score, Chesterton was bemused by modern man’s belief that the care of one’s body was the way to health. To him the mark of a truly healthy man was carelessness. Seldom was he inclined to exercise his better than three-hundred–pound self. Why? Because he thought that no one should resort to such joyless pursuits simply because one was too fat, or especially because one loved oneself. Only if one was careless enough—and joyful enough—to love other things, things such as horses and high mountains, should one bother to bestir oneself to take exercise. Chesterton was willing to concede that joy could be the “small publicity” of the pagan. But his greater insight was that joy was the “gigantic secret” of the Christian. Once again the obvious question is why? And once again the playful Chesterton, which is to say the imaginative Chesterton (who also happens to be the paradoxical Chesterton), comes into focus: Christians were joyful because they believed in original sin, which belief Chesterton fully and happily came to share. After all, he concluded puckishly, original sin was the “only part of Christian theology that could actually be proved” (Orthodoxy 1986, 217).

JOY, SIN, AND HUMILITY Provable or not, the doctrine of original sin provided fallen man with what a joyful Chesterton thought was the “only cheerful version” of life imaginable (Orthodoxy 1986, 217). There I go again. Cheerful? Because original sin at least offered man hope that a wrong use of the will could be righted. To Chesterton, belief in original sin ought not to produce despair. If anything, such belief led naturally to the conclusion that “our natures were made for beatitude” (Orthodoxy 1986, 217). In a very real sense, then, the good news of the gospel was the good news of original sin, paradoxically speaking, that is. And the good news of Catholicism, to Chesterton, is the promise of the forgiveness of sin. After his 1922 conversion, Chesterton was often asked why he had decided to become a Catholic. His answer, when he chose to give one, was invariably the same: it was the only religion that claimed to rid him of his sins. And once he had converted, he could not imagine being anything else. In this sense there were limits to his Catholic imagination after all! Rivaling Chesterton’s imaginative power was his equally powerful sense of humility. Here I go again. How can humility be powerful? In Chesterton’s case it surely was, as it should be in the life of every

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Christian. After all, if one lives a Christian life, one lives in awe of God and of God’s Church. How then could one be anything other than humble? But, Chesterton was wont to add, being in a state of humility did not mean hanging one’s head in humiliation. Rather, it meant bowing one’s head in humility. In Chesterton’s case, this humility was also grounded in his conviction that pride was the “poison in every other vice” (Pride: The Supreme Evil 1988, 147). In one sense, Chesterton saw nothing wrong with pride, rightly understood. Surely a man could be proud of his wife or his heroes or his Church. But he thought it was something else again to take pride in one’s own accomplishments or virtues. That kind of pride approached the sin of pride. And the prevalence of that sin was sufficient proof to Chesterton that the puritanical prohibitionists of his day were wrong twice over. They mistakenly took pride in their own Puritanism—and in their campaign to force it on others. Puritans were wrong to ban beer and burgundy, because beer and burgundy were gifts from God—and gifts for which we should express thanks, Chesterton liked to add, by “not drinking too much of them” (Orthodoxy 1986, 268). These same prohibitionists were wrong on a second count as well. In their campaign to rid the world of what they considered to be an evil, they revealed that they could not avoid the temptation to commit the sin of pride. Chesterton summarized both wrongs as only Chesterton could. To him, most of the evil in this world did not result from staring mindlessly into the bottom of a beer glass, but from staring longingly into a looking glass. Here again Chesterton turned to his Church to help him maintain a sense of humility, as well as engender a sense of humility in the faithful. Only the Church, he believed, had the strength to take on this task. And it had that strength, because it had been founded on the rock that was a truly humble man. As Chesterton put it, when Christ chose someone upon whom to found His Church, He might have turned to the brilliant Paul or the mystical John. Instead, he turned to a shuffler, a coward, and, yes, even a snob, which is to say he turned to a man. Who better than a humble and humbled Peter to give the Church the strength to carry on the formidable task of combating despair and joylessness and pride in this world? After all, a Church is not just a rock; it is also a chain. And a chain is no stronger than its weakest link (Heretics 1986, 70). According to Chesterton, the individual links of that chain, which is to say individual communicants, were strongest whenever they emerged from the confessional. He understood that modern man had nothing but disdain for those who engaged in the “morbid” practice of confessing their sins to a priest. Here again, Chesterton’s unique genius was to turn the tables on these critics of the Church. To him the truly morbid thing

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was not to confess one’s sins, but rather to conceal them, and perhaps even “let them eat your heart out”—which he deemed to be the “allegedly happy state of mind of many modern people living in highly civilized societies” (“The Fault of the System” January 8, 1908, n.p.). Such a line may strike some as suggestive of a very unChestertonian note of disdain, which, if true, would have left him a very short step away from that poisonous sin of pride. But Chesterton invariably caught himself before he actually committed that sin, even if he did not always stop short of the sins of gluttony and sloth. In any case, his Church was always there to try to stop him. And so was the confessional. In Chesterton’s view, a Catholic who entered the confessional—and who did so with humility—was not doing so out of a sense of morbidity. And when that same Catholic left the confessional he had no reason to feel morbid. How could he when he was standing at the dawn of his own beginning? For, as Chesterton put it, in that brief ritual of confession God had “truly remade him in His own image” (The Autobiography of G. K. Chesterton 1954, 319).

SIN, THE CHURCH, AND MORAL IDEALS Chesterton is justly praised for Orthodoxy, a book that can be found on many a list of the one hundred most influential books of the past century. And his The Everlasting Man, published in 1925, has been credited by no less than C. S. Lewis for convincing him to reject atheism for Christianity. But other books among his post-conversion writings deserve our attention as well, on their merits and because they contribute to our understanding of his Catholic imagination. Such is surely the case with The Thing. “The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.” This is one of Chesterton’s most quoted lines (from What’s Wrong with the World [1990, 61]). And while this superb sentence cannot be found in The Thing, it nonetheless expresses a frame of mind that infuses this book. And frame, after all, is always the key word for Chesterton, who was always returning to the importance of having a frame to one’s life, as well as frames or boundaries in one’s life. Only then can one legitimately exercise free will. Only then can one fully put one’s imagination to work. Only then can one imaginatively take risks, not with the certainty of living an error-free life—and surely not with the certainty of living a sin-free life—but always with the certainty that accompanies those Christian ideals, difficult though they may be to live by. This notion is important to keep in mind at all times. Chesterton certainly thought so. And if it was important for him to keep such a notion in mind during his seemingly innocent time, it is even more important during this seemingly less innocent time of scandal within the Church.

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Chesterton has often been portrayed as an innocent at large in a wicked world. Nothing could be further from the truth. He has also been accused of being at least a facile, if not a downright Pollyannaish, optimist. But nothing could be further from the truth. Given our fallen state, and given his belief in that state, it did not take much imagination on his part to appreciate the power, nay the seductiveness, of sin in everyone’s life. In fact, Chesterton was always struck by how much easier it was to commit a sin than to avoid doing so. Whenever he happened upon the story of a particularly awful crime in the London tabloids of his day, Chesterton invariably stopped to ponder not just the awfulness of that crime, but the awful realization that he might have committed it. That sort of imaginative realization may or may not have come naturally to him. But in any case it was consistent with his Catholic theology. As he expressed that theology in the book of essays that he titled The Thing, he contended that sins can be expiated in the Church, because within the Church there is a “test and a principle of expiation.” More than that, and this is especially important to remember today, “Catholic abuses can be reformed, because at least there is a prior admission of a form” (1990, 219). Chesterton was far from oblivious to the obvious, namely, the presence of sin in the world and within the Church. But he insisted on something else, something that ought to have been obvious then—but wasn’t—and something that ought to be obvious today—and isn’t—namely, that the “world will do all that it has ever accused the Church of doing—and do it much worse, and do it without any standards for a return to sanity” (The Thing 1990, 218). In a chapter of The Thing, entitled “The Revolt Against Ideas,” Chesterton confronted head-on the subject of corruption within the Church. There was, for example, corruption within the monasteries of the Middle Ages. Chesterton readily conceded as much. But in a very real sense that concession was a compliment to the monasteries. After all, he noted, “we do not talk of the corruption of the corrupt” (232). For his part, Chesterton was willing to make this alliterative concession: there was such a person as the “avaricious abbot” (233). At the same time, he could not resort to alliteration to condemn the corrupt capitalist of his day. The former could actually be corrupt; the latter could not. The abbot violated his ideals; the capitalist, however, had no ideals to violate. “Mere greed and pride” infected medieval institutions, and “mere greed and pride” are always part and parcel of modern capitalism. The difference is that medieval man was aware of his sinfulness, while modern man is not (233). Chesterton did not deny that many medieval men failed miserably when it came to the daily business of actually living up to their ideals. But he demanded that his enemies—and those of his Church—grant in return

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that many modern men are more miserably, and yes, more disastrously, living without any ideals at all. Which is another way of saying that they are failing to live within a frame or within boundaries. Which is another way of saying that modern men prefer to deny free will than to exercise it. Which, paradoxically speaking, is another way of saying that modern men refuse to live their lives in a truly imaginative fashion.

CAPITALISM, THE WELFARE STATE, AND A JUST SOCIETY One more paradox is in order here: Chesterton’s ability to live within a frame continues to make it so difficult to pigeon-hole him today. It is not that his imagination ultimately took him outside of any frame. Rather, it is that his imaginative thinking cuts across so many of our contemporary boundaries. Catholics who prefer to be pigeon-holed on the left might appreciate Chesterton’s criticisms of modern capitalism and its soulless failings. For that matter, one doesn’t have to search very hard to find an angry Chesterton on this subject. In the essay that concludes What’s Wrong with the World, Chesterton’s anger is immediately apparent: “Not long ago I read that certain doctors and school authorities proposed to deal with the problem of lice in poor districts by sending out an order that all little girls should have their hair cut short.” Why, wondered Chesterton, did it not occur to these same officials to abolish lice instead? Why did it never occur to them that the “problem of lice in the slums is rooted in the wrongness of slums and not in the wrongness of hair?” (1990, 217) What will be next, he wondered further. “Soon they will be twisting necks to assure clean collars, or hacking feet to fit new boots.” Before any of this could happen, Chesterton asked his readers to think for a moment about one little girl, a poor girl with long red hair. And then he asked his readers to think about her father. Having been forced to neglect her hair because of his poverty, that father was forced to see it abolished in the name of hygiene. But in the world of modern capitalism, Chesterton added, that father “doesn’t count.” To be sure, Chesterton wanted him to count. More than that, he thought that that father should count. And even more than that, he thought that that father would count, because the day might come when he would lead a mob for the “most conservative of reasons” (What’s Wrong with the World 1990, 217). A conservative mob? Is this Chesterton at his most crazily paradoxical or his most insightfully paradoxical? In other words, when it comes to hair, is this the Chesterton who leads his readers to pull theirs out? He surely did not see all mobs as conservative. But he did see a place for the legitimacy of mob action, especially if those who joined mobs had legitimate reasons for doing so. And Chesterton certainly thought that

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the father of that little girl qualified. In that sense, a mob could well be a conservative phenomenon. An increasingly angry G. K. Chesterton then proceeded to take his readers through the following sequence: Because of the red hair of an urchin in the slums of London, modern civilization would be set on fire. And perhaps it would happen just like this: “Because a girl should have long hair, she should have clean hair. And because she should have clean hair, she should not have an unclean home. And because she should not have an unclean home, she should have a free and available mother. And because she should have such a mother, she should not have a usurious landlord. And because there should not be such landlords, there should be a redistribution of property. And because there should be a redistribution of property, there shall be a revolution” (What’s Wrong with the World 1990, 218). And when that day came, Chesterton concluded, the “little urchin with the red hair will not have it cut short like a convict’s. Instead, all the kingdoms of the earth shall be hacked about and mutilated to suit her, because hers is the human, nay, the sacred image.” And in the name of preserving that image, concluded Chesterton the Catholic distributist, “there will one day be a just society—and a time when not one hair on her head shall be harmed” (218). It should be noted that Chesterton’s vision of a just society was not only an attack on the modern welfare state, but also an attack on modern capitalism. In fact, it was Chesterton’s great insight, his imaginative insight, his distributist Catholic insight, that modern capitalism and the modern welfare state actually reinforce one another. More than that, the two often work hand-in-hand. Chesterton understood as much long ago. In his essay “The Dreadful Duty of Gudge,” to be found in What’s Wrong with the World, he posited two types: Gudge, the capitalist, and Hudge, the socialist. While each in theory claimed to be devoted to family life, each in fact was destroying family life. Looking toward a day in the not-toodistant future, Chesterton painted a word portrait of Gudge, who sought to “tighten the domestic bonds that do not exist,” and Hudge, who wanted to “loosen the bonds that no longer bind” (212). Did either really want to keep the family at all? Chesterton didn’t think so. After all, if Gudge wanted the family to survive and flourish, if he really wanted it to be strong enough to “resist the savage forces of commerce,” he would work to equalize property. And if Hudge was genuinely pro-family, he would gladly accept the “natural restraints of the family, the distinctions and divisions within the family.” He would not just glumly endure, but enthusiastically advocate the ideal of a “woman being womanly,” which to Chesterton did not mean “soft and yielding,” but “handy, thrifty, rather hard, and very humorous.” More than that,

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Hudge would have to accept the reality of a childish child, which is to say a child who is full of energy, which is to say a child who is as eager to accept authority as he is to eat his vegetables (212–13). In truth, neither Hudge nor Gudge was very interested in preserving family life in England—or anywhere else, for that matter. Chesterton’s “horrible suspicion” was that Hudge and Gudge were in fact in secret partnership against the family, even as each claimed to be advancing the lot of women. Here, Chesterton’s “horrible insight” became one of his most telling insights, namely that Hudge and Gudge were equally determined to evict the woman from the home. Gudge, the capitalist, preferred women workers because they were cheaper; Hudge, the socialist, wanted women to be free to live their own lives. Gudge’s world would be filled with “steady and obedient workers,” which is to say (as Chesterton wrote) a world of “sacking and sweating and bisexual toil, all of which are totally inconsistent with the free family and are bound in the end to destroy it,” leaving a “smiling and prophetic Hudge” to comfort us with his progressive vision that the family is simply an outmoded institution—and one which “we shall soon gloriously outgrow” (214). When it comes to the future of the family, Chesterton has very little to say that should be comforting to modern liberals—or to what passes for much of contemporary conservatism. After all, don’t both parents have to work outside the home today? And given that economic reality, shouldn’t government step in to help them via subsidized day care? Other economic realities dictate corporate policy. Corporations must pay more attention to the bottom line than to any other line, must they not? And they must be able to move employees from city to city like so many pieces on a chess board, must they not? More questions of a similar nature could be posed, but these should suffice to make the point—and to give both liberals and conservatives either pause or an excuse to dismiss Chesterton for thinking thoughts that both have decided ought to have nothing to do with the world that exists today.

MODERN MATERIALISM AND CHRISTIAN MORALITY Is Chesterton really so out of touch with today’s world? Not if we pay attention to his Catholic imagination. To be sure, our allegedly facile optimist, that is, G. K. Chesterton himself, has long been accused of dreaming of a world that didn’t exist at the time that he entered it, didn’t come into being during his heyday as a journalist, doesn’t exist now, won’t exist in the immediate future, and shouldn’t be so much as dreamed about in any foreseeable future. If there was a Chestertonian “golden age,” his critics say, it ended with the dawn of the Renaissance and the Reformation.

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Such charges did not trouble Chesterton when he was alive and writing. Nor should they trouble those who would apply Chestertonian ideas and principles to today’s problems. And the reason for all this collective calm clearly has something to do with the timelessness of Chesterton’s Catholic imagination, the frame of which has always been centered on family life. Here, cultural conservatives can find an ally in Chesterton, even if country club conservatives have to be troubled by, if not openly dismissive of, his adamant opposition to corporate capitalism. If the preservation of traditional family life is at the heart of G. K. Chesterton’s brave old world, as it surely is, then there can be little doubt as to which side is Chesterton’s side in today’s culture wars that swirl around the much beleaguered family. Chesterton, of course, predated not just our culture wars, but World War II and the Cold War as well. However, he did not predate the rise of Bolshevism. In fact, at the time of his death in 1936, it appeared to many in the West that Soviet-style communism was not just on the rise, but would eventually triumph and, more than that, deserved to triumph, given the apparent failure of capitalism. Writing not long before his death, Chesterton detected that the great fear of the day was that the great heresy of Bolshevism would destroy everything in its path. Did he fear Bolshevism? No. Was he among those Western fellow travelers who favored Bolshevism? No again. Well then, he surely must have been at the forefront of those who condemned the great heresy that was Bolshevism. Not really. The object of Chesterton’s worries and wrath in the mid-1930s was less the great heresy of Bolshevism than it was the next great heresy, which he defined as the “practical evil of monopolist materialism.” Neither Bolshevism nor its “step-sister socialism” was a serious threat over the long term, because each was grounded in what Chesterton deemed to be the “thin theory of collectivism” (“The Next Heresy” June 19, 1926, 232). Thin theory? Was this just another Chestertonian venture into alliteration? No. By thin, he simply meant that collectivism ran against the grain of human nature. And if the theory of Bolshevism was not enough to consign it to the dustbin of history, why then the actual practice of Bolshevism would surely accomplish the same end. Or so predicted Chesterton well before there was a Cold War in which the United States acted to contain this great heresy. To Chesterton, the next great heresy (of modern materialism) was far more dangerous, because it was far more seductive, far more consistent with our easily seduced human natures—and far more prevalent in the very bosom of the very country that had taken the lead in containing communism. Moreover, if Chesterton was convinced that the United States in particular and the Christian West in general had little reason to fear that Bolshevism would ever destroy anything in its path, he thought he had

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grave reasons to worry that monopolist materialism would destroy something in its path. That something was Christian morality. In the name of resisting this gathering heresy, Chesterton called upon “those who called themselves conservative” to rally themselves “or soon there will be nothing left to conserve.” More specifically, he called upon those who would “conserve the traditions of my own creed and communion” to recognize that it was capitalism, and not Bolshevism, that was their “actual and active antagonist” (“The Next Heresy” June 19, 1926, 233). Chesterton concluded that those who subscribed to his Catholic “creed and communion” had on occasion been charged with being behind the times. Surprising as it might seem (but shouldn’t), Chesterton readily conceded that the charge had a good deal of merit. More than that, he hoped that it did. Even more than that, he assumed that it did. In the first place, the “human ministers” of the Church were always in the position of dealing with the last heresy, rather than the next one. For example, in the middle of the nineteenth century, a Catholic could be found defending almsgiving against the Malthusian heresy. At the end of the nineteenth century a Catholic could be found defending private property against the Marxian heresy. Where might that leave a Catholic of the twentieth century? Chesterton thought it was high time that members of his “religious tradition” stop worrying about the Bolshevik incarnation of Marxism and start worrying about monopolist materialism and the full head of steam that this next great heresy was already gathering. And those who were the steamiest (pun intended) were not limited to a “few straggling, struggling socialists.” Rather they predominated among the “exultant” rich, or those who had resolved to “enjoy themselves at last” and who were determined that “neither Puritanism nor socialism nor Catholicism shall hold them back” (“The Next Heresy” June 19, 1926, 233). Chesterton, the historian of heresies old and new, could take some comfort from his judgment that “most heresies die faster than they can be killed.” Nonetheless, he was compelled to concede that some heresies did have a longer shelf life than others, especially those heresies that were all too consistent with our fallen state. Chesterton was at best a reluctant futurist, but he did venture to predict that the “practical evil of monopolist materialism” would last much longer and do far more damage than the “brief interlude of Bolshevik materialism” through which his world was then passing (“The Next Heresy” June 19, 1926, 233). Why was our facile optimist so pessimistic on this point? Because the roots of this heresy ran as “deep as nature itself, whose flower is the lust of the flesh and the leer of the eye and the pride of life” (“The Next Heresy” June 19, 1926, 233). Only the most prideful and only the most determined leer could avoid seeing the “signs of the times that are all around.” Were Americans somehow exempt from this? Not according to

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Chesterton, who would actually spend a good deal of time in the United States in 1921 and again in 1930. In fact, Chesterton worried that Americans might be “especially, if unfortunately” susceptible to this “practical evil.” After all, the “madness of tomorrow is not in Moscow, but in Manhattan” (“The Next Heresy” June 19, 1926, 233). In yet another of his post-conversion books, The Well and the Shallows, Chesterton dwelt further on this prophecy in an essay titled “The Surrender upon Sex.” In it, Chesterton launched an attack on the “sham liberality” of the birth control movement, which he sought to redefine as the “birth prevention” movement, because what it really amounted to was “few births and no control” (1990, 367–68). When it came to matters sexual, Chesterton found the modern will “amazingly weak and wavering.” Was the Catholic will just as weak and wavering? He hoped not and prayed not, as he took refuge in his definition of a Catholic as someone who had “plucked up the courage to face the incredible, even conceivable idea that something else may be wiser than he is” (The Well and the Shallows 1990, 369). Chesterton found real wisdom—and a measure of hope—in the Church’s stand against the sexual revolution of his day, as well as the Church’s specific opposition to birth prevention and to divorce. On the latter front, Chesterton found reason to worry that the “marble” was already turning to ice; and the ice, in turn, was melting with great rapidity. Would the Church hold the line against the inevitable argument for divorce, which was that anyone who sought a divorce insisted that his or hers was a special case. To which Chesterton tersely replied, “as if every case were not a special case” (The Well and the Shallows 1990, 370). Because every case was, in its own special way, a special case, Chesterton thought that the Church was right to refuse even the most special of the special cases; for once the world admits the legitimacy of the exception, then that exception is on its way to becoming the rule.

FALLEN HUMANITY AND THE IMAGINATIVE WONDER OF FAITH Before dismissing Chesterton as hopelessly irrelevant or the world as hopelessly lost, let us ponder one more Chesterton insight. As bad as the world was during his lifetime, and as bad as it is today, Gilbert Keith Chesterton always sought to remind us that what we call the world was never going anywhere, at least not in any direction that either the “old optimistic progressives” or the “old pessimistic reactionaries” thought it was going. To Chesterton, the world was never merely getting better or getting worse. Instead, the world of his day and ours was doing what it

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had always done and would continue to do, which is to say it “wobbles” (The Well and the Shallows 1990, 364). The progressive was inclined to think that he inhabited a bad universe, but one that surely could be made better. The reactionary, on the other hand, was convinced that he lived in a bad universe that surely would get worse. And then there was G. K. Chesterton who knew that he lived in a good universe, even if it got much worse instead of better. Life, as Chesterton saw it, was less like a ladder than a seesaw. And not so surprisingly, his Church agreed. On the one hand, Chesterton reminded his readers that the Church never held that “wrongs could not or should not be righted.” But he also pointed out that the Church reminds its adherents that they should not count on the “certainty of comforts becoming more common or cruelties more rare, as if there was an inevitable trend toward a sinless humanity” (The Well and the Shallows 1990, 364). What then should each of us try to do, as the world goes merrily on with its wobbling and the Church goes steadily on reminding its wobblers just what they should be wobbling toward? Let’s begin by asking what we wobblers should not do. Chesterton himself began to answer that question by asking his readers not to hate humanity—or despise humanity—or refuse to help humanity. Fair enough. But it is important to remember that he also asked us not to trust humanity, whether collectively or individually. If you like, he shrugged, be a monarchist, but do not trust a monarchy. If you prefer, he sighed, be a democrat, but do not put your trust in universal manhood suffrage or in any child of man. Better, instead, simply to remember that we are all children of God. To G. K. Chesterton, the only beacon in the night was Faith. And only Faith could help us remember that we are never at the beginning of any endless and expanding dawn—or in the midst of an endless and everdarkening night. Instead, we are always poised at the beginning of an ordinary daily dawn. When Chesterton paused at the end of an ordinary day, he stopped to utter these words on his knees: “Dear God, here lies another day during which I have had eyes, ears, hands, and the great wide world around me. And tomorrow begins another. Why am I allowed two?” (Ward 1943, 62). And when he awakened the next morning to discover that he had been given another miraculous day, he thanked God again for the wonder—and the wonderful ordinariness—of it all. “The world will never starve for want of wonders,” Chesterton repeated endlessly, “but only for want of wonder.” By those wonderful words he did not mean that we must be provided with an endlessly expansive menu of increasingly awesome wonders in order to be fully alive. Instead, it was his way of urging each of us to appreciate the wonder of ordinary daily life, to take a “fierce pleasure in things being themselves,”

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to be excited by the “wetness of water, the fireyness of fire, the steeliness of steel, the unutterable muddiness of mud” (Ward 1943, 108–09). If that is not vintage Chesterton, there is no such animal. If that is not vintage Chesterton, then perhaps this is: “The whole object of real art, of real romance—and, above all, of real religion—is to prevent people from losing the humility and gratitude which are thankful for daylight and daily bread . . . to teach them to feel in the sunlight the song of Apollo and in the bread the epic of the plow” (“The Leopold-Loeb Case” 1990, 411). What is most needed, he believed then and we should believe now, “is intensive imagination.” By that he did not mean imagining the unimaginable. He did not mean imagining the future or imagining some perfect world or perfect time. Rather than turning our imaginations outward, whether into time or space, he thought we should turn “our imaginations inward.” Did he mean unto ourselves? No. Instead, he urged that we use our imaginative powers to appreciate the things that we already have and make those things live. To Chesterton, the idea was not merely to seek “new experiences, which rapidly become old experiences.” Rather, it is “learning how to experience our experiences . . . how to enjoy our enjoyments” (Orthodoxy 1986, 279). And the more ordinary the experience, the greater the enjoyment. Buried in all of this is that wonderful word imagination. Now, when Chesterton asked us to “turn our imaginations inward” he was not asking us to worship the god within us. Of all the “horrible” religions, he wrote in Orthodoxy, the most horrible is the worship of the “god within.” More often than not, the notion that “Jones shall worship the god within means that in the end Jones shall worship Jones” (Orthodoxy 1986, 279). Let that Mr. Jones and everyone else worship the sun and the moon; let him worship cats and crocodiles instead. In sum, encourage Jones to appreciate the great variety of God’s creations, but discourage him from worshipping the one creation above all others that he is sorely tempted to worship, namely himself.

CATHOLIC IMAGINATION AND CATHOLIC FREEDOM In Chesterton’s time and ours, the Church has been criticized for rigidly suppressing all variety in life. Chesterton himself found such criticism to be both mystifying and frustrating. After all, it was his experience that Catholics tended to be highly individualistic types—which is why he thought there would—or should—never be a Catholic party in England or in America. He knew himself and his fellow communicants well enough to know that Catholics have always taken heart from the few transcendent truths on which they did agree, as well as a great deal of

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pleasure in disagreeing on everything else. Which is to say Catholics are free to be dogmatic about those few transcendent truths; and once they have freely accepted those truths, they are free to fight among themselves and with everyone else about everything else. In America Catholics were not compelled to agree that the slave states ought to have won the Civil War or that Andrew Jackson was a savage or that Lincoln was an abject failure or that Wilson was an arrogant schoolmaster. Such opinions were not part of any Catholic order. Quite the contrary, they illustrated Catholic liberty, “which is to say the real liberty of the mind that the modern world no longer possesses” (The Thing 1990, 265). In an essay titled “The New Groove,” Chesterton was struck by this line from a Tennyson poem, Locksley Hall: “Let the great world spin forever down the ringing grooves of change” (The Common Man 1950, 102). In this line Tennyson betrayed the “secret,” nay the “crime,” of his own intellectual world and much of the world that came after it. To Chesterton, Tennyson and his fellow moderns had been preoccupied with grooves, and especially with staying in a groove so long as it was a “groove of change.” Why, wondered Chesterton, did the modern mind prefer to think that it was in a groove rather than a rut? Why did the modern form of progress seem to mean traveling ever more quickly along one line and in one direction, leaving no one in a position to indulge the “adventuresome curiosity” to stop—or the even more “adventuresome courage” to go backwards? (109). And what is a Catholic but someone with the courage to think—and live—outside the grooves? Who but a Catholic has the transcendent imagination to believe in miracles and the genuine freedom to live a truly imaginative (which is to say fully adventuresome) daily life? According to Gilbert Keith Chesterton, to ask such questions was to answer them, even in the face of something as daunting and seemingly dogmatic as the Ten Commandments. Chesterton readily conceded that the Ten Commandments might seem to be confining and, yes, dogmatic, especially to modern man. But, as our jolly Englishman was wont to remind us, because there are only ten of them, it must mean that only ten things have been forbidden. This simple realization ought to leave the best and the worst of us plenty of room to exercise the imaginative powers that God has given us. It certainly leaves us more room than modern materialistic philosophies do. To Chesterton, such philosophies amount to nothing more than chains that bind us—or consign us to an inescapable rut; Christianity, on the other hand, constitutes a sword that sets us free, free to live our own daily lives, free to experience the wonders of daily life. As a result, Christian existence is a story that might end up any number of ways, because there is always an element of free will in every

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Christian’s story. Modern man has a terrible time twice over. He has a terrible time with the concept of free will and a terrible time believing that Christians can live free lives, both of which leave modern man in the strange, nay the paradoxical, position of being determined to bring freedom into a Church where it already exists. This is not only wrong-headed, but also potentially quite dangerous. After all, as Chesterton warned us nearly a century ago, “almost every modern proposal to bring freedom into the Church is simply a proposal to bring tyranny into the world” (Orthodoxy 1986, 330). And it requires very little imagination, Catholic or otherwise, to wonder where that story line might be leading us today.

REFERENCES Chesterton, G. K. 1954. The Autobiography of G. K. Chesterton. New York: Sheed and Ward. ———. January 8, 1908. “The Fault of the System,” Daily News, n.p. ———. 1986. Heretics. In The Collected Works of G. K. Chesterton, edited by David Dooley, Vol. 1, 37–207. San Francisco: Ignatius Press. ———. 1990. “The Leopold-Loeb Case” (The Illustrated London News, September 20, 1924). In The Collected Works, edited by Lawrence Clipper, Vol. 33, 408–11. San Francisco: Ignatius Press. ———. 1950. “The New Groove.” In The Common Man, 108–17. New York: Sheed and Ward. ———. June 19, 1926. “The Next Heresy,” G.K.’s Weekly, Vol. 3, 232–33. London: The Allied Press, LTD. ———. 1986. Orthodoxy. In The Collected Works, edited by David Dooley, Vol. 1, 209–366. San Francisco: Ignatius Press. ———. 1988. Pride: The Supreme Evil (The Illustrated London News, August 22, 1914). In The Collected Works, edited by Lawrence Clipper, Vol. 30, 146–50. San Francisco: Ignatius Press. ———. 1990. The Thing: Why I Am Catholic. In The Collected Works, edited by George Marlin, Vol. 3 133–335. San Francisco: Ignatius Press,. ———. 1990. The Well and the Shallows. In The Collected Works, edited by George Marlin, Vol. 3, 337–534. San Francisco: Ignatius Press. ———. 1990. What’s Wrong With the World. In The Collected Works, edited by George Marlin, Vol. 4, 33–222. San Francisco: Ignatius Press. Ward, Maisie. 1943. Gilbert Keith Chesterton. New York: Sheed and Ward.

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The Sacramental and Twentieth-Century French Literature M. Kathleen Madigan, Ph.D.

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