With Catholics and Catholicism in the news this week, I’m recalling all of the times in my life (for very different reasons in my 20s, 40s, and 50s) I’ve been asked how can you still be a Catholic?
I was born and raised Roman Catholic.
Growing up in Boston in the 1960s, that was true of pretty much everyone I knew. Our pediatrician was Jewish, of course, and there was the delicious pumpernickel bread from Kasanof’s bakery that we always had with Irish boiled dinner; oh, and there was that one building we drove by on the way to my grandmother’s house with unfamiliar symbols on it, but those were the only exceptions I remember until I attended Boston Latin School. Everything else and everyone else was Roman Catholic to some degree.
In Boston, you identified yourself not simply by the section of the city you lived in, but by the parish church you attended. We lived in St. Peter’s, but on occasion attended St. Kevin’s or St. William’s, which had the best donut shop across the street (there was always a bakery across the street). And when my parents switched from Sunday morning to Saturday afternoon Mass, we drove over to St. Christopher’s. All without leaving the Dorchester section of Boston. Now for the past 30 years I’ve lived in a town without a Catholic church.
There were lots and lots of kids in our neighborhood; lots of Peter’s, Paul’s, and Mark’s and lots of girls named Mary or Maryann or Maryellen or … The number of Mary’s in my life had dropped significantly by the time I got to Harvard – a state I didn’t realize until that night sophomore year that I sat in with the Holy Cross Band during the second game of a basketball doubleheader at the old Boston Garden.
My first grade teacher (public school) brought each of us a medal blessed by the Pope from her summer trip to Rome. In spring of second grade, we dressed in our white suits and marched by the hundreds from the parish school to the church for our First Holy Communion. At the end of eighth grade (seventh grade for the kids in Catholic school) we donned robes (red for boys, white for girls) and marched again for Confirmation – our ranks reduced a bit, but the numbers still strong.
In between, we attended Children’s Mass every Sunday in the lower church, quickly learning to respond immediately, in unison, and en masse to the sound of the nun’s wooden clapper signaling when to stand, sit, and kneel.
Along with the Church, we transitioned from Come Holy Ghost to the folk hymns of the 60s. We were one in the spirit, we were one in the Lord. They would know we were Christians by our love.
Growing up in the 1960s, in the midst of the space race, a lot of my attention was focused on the heavens, as well as on heaven. I never saw myself as an astronaut walking on the moon, but I could clearly picture myself sitting in front of one of the consoles at Mission Control in Houston or in Bethpage at Grumman designing the next generation of vehicles bringing astronauts to moon and Mars (surely we would be making regular visits to by Mars by then).
As my universe expanded in the 1970s, I found myself drawn to the lives, works and writings of philosopher scientists such as Pythagoras, Aristotle, and Socrates; Descartes, Pascal, and Voltaire; Popper, Marx, and Sartre; and Einstein. At the same time I was reading, St. Augustine, St. Francis of Assisi, Thomas Merton and Hans Kung, and listening to old recordings of Bishop Fulton Sheen. I also watched Billy Graham and Oral Roberts when they appeared on TV, and in the 1980s even tuned in a couple of times on Sunday night to see what Jerry Falwell was all about.
During my first week in college, I attended a spaghetti supper at the Catholic Student Center. Not to be confused with the spaghetti meals offered by the Moonie’s, usually found in the park near Grendel’s Den; or with the crustless cucumber sandwiches and spanakopita served with sherry at the Master’s Tea every other Friday afternoon. Indoctrination and free food are always a powerful combination.
After college, I followed in my father’s footsteps, teaching mathematics at Don Bosco, a Catholic technical high school in Boston, while getting an M.Ed. up the street at Northeastern. Upon arriving at the University of Minnesota for my doctoral program, one of my first stops was at the Newman Center, where I ended up helping teach a Sunday School class. At the same time, I met a lot of Lutherans and joined other graduate students on an intramural basketball team called The Secular Humanists.
I’ve never spent a whole lot of time trying to reconcile the science and religious sides of my life. I don’t see the point in that exercise. If I needed to find a rational explanation for everything and only accepted things based on empirical evidence, I never would have chosen a career in educational measurement and psychometrics, let alone survived in state testing for more than three decades.
I don’t ascribe any more meaning to intervals in the Bible than to intervals on a reporting scale. Both are arbitrary and are intended to convey a story.
I mean, seriously, we are operating in a world of latent traits, have faith in IRT, vertical scales, equating, and believe in a central overarching, omnipotent guiding force that cannot be defined, comprises multiple distinct parts but is really one unified entity, and apparently is the one thing in measurement that cannot be measured and cannot be assigned a number. As a Catholic, as they say, I’ve been preparing for psychometrics my entire life.
I attend Mass religiously mostly because I think that it’s important to stop, for at least an hour each week, and acknowledge that there is something more important than the mundaneness and the noise that surround us.
I separate the many failings and shortcomings of the people leading the Church (mostly men) from its fundamental precepts in the same way that at an early age I learned to separate the failings and shortcomings of the people in government (mostly men) from the nation’s fundamental precepts. I pray for both and never considered leaving either.
Nevertheless, I understand the thoughts and feelings and accept the choices of family, friends, and colleagues who have moved on to different denominations, religions, or chosen to have no religion in their life.
But I have also seen enough sickness and suffering to understand the wisdom in the words of that controversial kicker’s teammate’s girlfriend, “Holy orange bottles, each night I pray to you. Desperate people find faith, so now I pray to Jesus too.” In the same vein, I struggle to understand why our pastor is so vehemently opposed to euthanasia – accepting of medications created to prolong life or improve its quality, but not of those to ease its end.
When the pandemic closed down churches they gave us a prayer to replace being able to receive Holy Communion. I learned the prayer, but I also ordered a box of communion wafers on Amazon and searched for a pyx on eBay to place on our makeshift “altar” next to my iPad as we livestreamed Mass. I’ll accept that a priest must be “present” for the transubstantiation. But why would I think (or believe) that God can turn bread and wine into His body and blood but would be stymied by the internet. Call me sacrilegious.
I try to obey the Commandments, but don’t get terribly worked up over whether they should or should not be displayed in public places. In general, I don’t find it constructive to attempt to make the beliefs of the Church and the practices we promote the law of the land. I do, however, think that the establishment and free exercise clauses of the First Amendment are misunderstood, misinterpreted, and misapplied as often as its provision for free speech.
I work constantly to avoid the seven deadly sins (i.e., pride, greed, wrath, envy, lust, gluttony, and sloth), to practice faith, hope, and charity, and to love my neighbor as myself. To embrace the Golden Rule and to judge not others, lest ye be judged. Live as you are called.
And every day I try to live by the words of the prayer that my father clipped from a newspaper and carried in his wallet:
May I always put the needs of others before my own.
May I so love my family, friends, and co-workers that they see only Your goodness in me.
May Your love and Your light shine through in everything I do.
I value my education, opportunities, and accomplishments, but as I learned from the words and example of my father, I know that none of those things have given me greater joy in life and none of them is more important than my vocation as husband and father.
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay
Embrace the Absurd 