'WHAT I THINK ABOUT THE ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH': A Personal Memoir
Elshtain, Jean Bethke
'What I think about the Roman Catholic Church' Fourth in a Series A PERSONAL MEMOIR JEAN BETHKE ELSHTAIN I have had a long, troubled relationship with the Church. (I learned to call the Roman...
...Indeed, there was only one church: a stern white affair with a barren interior featuring rows and row of extremely hard wooden benches...
...But I shared Camus' expectation...
...At the appointed time I was transported the necessary distance in order to attend Lutheran Catechism school...
...I remained dissatisfied...
...Such exotic faiths as Catholicism and Judaism (although one was never quite sure whether Judaism counted as a religion or not given the disbelief of Jews in the Incarnation) were suspect...
...Let me begin at the beginning...
...My classmates sat in stolid silence...
...Augustine's gloomy bifurcation between the City of God and the City of Man, based as it was on the notion that man's conscience belongs to the City of God and thus supersedes any loyalty to a state viewed as little more than a "band of criminals" which "by recruiting more criminals, acquires enough power to occupy regions, to capture citizens, and to subdue whole populations . . .", was resurrected by the Catholic anti-war left...
...I flirted with Catholicism or railed against it from afar, rather like an admirer who sees so many flaws in the unapproachable beloved that she doesn't wish to bring the relationship to fruition but can't quite give up on her ideal notion of what the troublesome creature should be...
...This lasted two weeks or so...
...Loss of the religious and secular faiths in which one was raised is a long, complex process involving the world outside and the world within...
...There were, in fact, no practicing Catholics in my town-unless they somehow celebrated mass at home...
...1 was no longer a Christian if by that one meant adherence to a particular creed...
...Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved," he answered...
...Perhaps the loss of faith is really a loss of innocence...
...As painful as that may be, it isn't necessarily bad...
...I recalled the words of St...
...I committed to memory all the fine points which distinguished Transubstantiation from Con-substantiation...
...I did a lot of nose thumbing at You Know Who...
...I was convinced of my own intellectual and moral superiority as a bright, young, up-to-date Protestant as I compared myself with those of my age group still captured by what was a defunct institution soon to topple of its own volition...
...Or was God merciful enough to forgive us our self-deceits...
...And end it should...
...I began to think about the Church again-or about a thread in its tradition which reemerged in those halcyon days of protest and risk...
...My memories of my Presbyterian days involve pleasant Sunday School teachers and printed Sunday School lessons with pictures of Jesus in postcard colored glory: open-faced, rosy-cheeked, white, Anglo-Saxon features, long, wavy light- to dark-brown hair...
...The only time I encountered living Catholics occurred when a Catholic family, with two girls my own age, moved to town...
...This local church was called "non-denominational" by the townspeople but the minister was a Presbyterian...
...But as I lay awake at night and thought of Luther's angst, his tortuous journey to the belief that he truly believed, I decided that I understood his fear and anguish and I could draw no comfort from his faith...
...There are systems of oppression and exploitation to fight and to condemn...
...Although my family was Lutheran, the nearest Lutheran Church was ten miles away so until I reached the age at which young Lutherans go to Catechism school I was, I suppose, a little Presbyterian...
...I asked my minister how I could be certain I had faith...
...The new girls were tough rowdies who had freckles and Tried to Get People into Trouble by drawing others in on their mischievous pranks...
...I tried to relax in the assurance that faith and not good works mattered where one's eternal soul was concerned...
...King lost...
...Agnosticism was undoubtedly the final answer: the proper position for the historian and political scientist-in-becoming...
...Nothing more...
...Raised in a Christian family, I just hadn't sloughed off the recrudescence of the past quite efficiently enough...
...A posture similar to that of Vonnegut's Bokonon who, as the world ices over, lies on his back "grinning horribly, and thumbing my nose at You Know Who...
...But St...
...I learned to call the Roman Catholic Church 'the Church' as a student of medieval history and it has been 'the Church' ever since...
...Secular rule and dominion were ordained by God to achieve earthly peace and justice...
...I kept a personal record, my belief barometer...
...Mostly, however, I didn't think about Catholicism or the Church...
...Augustine, damn him, kept nagging at me after I read the Confessions for a medieval history course...
...Daniel Berrigan, his brother and his compatriots nagged away, pricking the American conscience, using drama, symbol and metaphor to condemn America's sordid moral priorities...
...This meant in practice that I had faith (although I had learned, of course, that one was saved by faith alone...
...Oh yes, the consumer cornucopia in which goodies were dispensed in disproportionate amounts to successful little American boys and girls was never supposed to end...
...This jean bethke elshtain is an assistant professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst...
...A stouter heart than my own for that task...
...Could such self-deception damn one's soul...
...Then I was told that the person who had faith would automatically, as it were, perform good works...
...It wasn't yet Berkeley and Free Speech but it was getting there, slowly, as the society trembled with the inchoate rumblings of what we enthusiastically believed would be great change...
...A few of us, meanwhile, organized in support of civil rights and social justice...
...Luther's Small Catechism, as carefully as I had read and memorized it, hadn't provided a satisfactory answer...
...Energized by Kennedy, touched by King and Pope John XXIII's simple caring and concern, we marched and leafleted and petitioned...
...That didn't last long and I was shortly thereafter transmogrified into that most urbane and well-mannered of contemporary beasts, the liberal agnostic...
...Their actions gave voice to my own horrified realization of the failures of American society to face the truth about itself, its unwillingness or incapacity to confront its own cultural "crimes of birth," its refusal to correct the discrepancy between the dream and the reality of American society...
...For St...
...been dispensed with by Modern Science...
...I also worked very hard to repress the fact that I had been moved to tears when my instructor read passages from various of the medieval saints in class...
...When the Church makes common cause with those who struggle for earthly justice and equality I may not overcome my many years of railing and flirting with it from afar (in other words, there shall be no marriage) but I will gladly join hands in a struggle to ennoble the earthly realm by eliminating from it those systems of privilege and exploitation which do violence to the bodies and spirits of human beings all of whom are equally children of God...
...of hypocritical injunctions concerning venial and mortal sins which Catholic youths blithely ignored because they knew "they could pay the priest and he would forgive them...
...The last vestiges of the Cold War...
...Well, it is something which is always there: one secure point of reference in a fragmented and apparently random world...
...Political dissent and despair...
...It was, as one com-entator on the Berrigans observed...
...Yes, I do," I replied, "but what if I don't, deep down where even I don't know about it but God will because He knows all...
...Usually He was standing in verdant pastures or strolling down pathways bordered by delicately colored flowers tending towards pale reds and pinks...
...The Church knows nothing of this dalliance...
...This is what he said: What the world expects of Christians is that Christians should speak out, loud and clear, and that they should voice their condemnation in such a way that never a doubt, never the slightest doubt, should rise in the heart of the simplest man...
...Vietnam was a long way off...
...A democratic socialism, erected on a foundation of respect for persons, on a belief in the dignity of each and every human being in the eyes of God and man, owes much to Christianity...
...Catholicism smacked of an encrusted, archaic, unenlightened tradition which hadn't kept pace with the March of History...
...I'm happy that it's there, but then I'm happy that Long's Peak in my home state of Colorado is always in the same place when I journey westward each summer...
...did not bolster Catholicism in my eyes...
...To this end, the Church must as never before confront and come to terms with socialist theory for of all the possibilities for restructuring society, for narrowing if not eliminating the unconscionable gap between the many poor and the few rich, for providing minimal dignity in the form of clothing, shelter, health care and education, socialism offers the clearest alternative to the exploitative present...
...But the secular faith being the only faith left (the others having been destroyed by the acids of sci-entistic rationalism) I clung to a flagging belief in Progress and liberal Reason...
...The person who knows she doesn't know and what's more doesn't give a damn...
...Thomas Aquinas, for example, man was a political and social animal...
...First I called myself an atheist...
...Jejune hopes for the New Frontier and the Great Society faltered then festered into personal as well as political wounds...
...I was a rather earnest young person and I assumed it reflected badly on the Church if children who belonged to it were ill-mannered and coarse...
...1964 Gulf of Tonkin...
...of superstitions occasionally dressed up as a picky and arid philosophy which got itself bogged down in consideration of incomprehensible and irrelevant trivialities...
...What, finally, do I think of the Church...
...I was not untroubled by religious doubts as I entered high school...
...As the barometer fell to nearly zero I wanted to rebuild...
...of snooty bishops, cardinals, and popes laden with sumptuous garments who wandered through meaningless rituals featuring smoke, candles and mumbled Latin...
...of monks and nuns who hid away from the world and did nothing "useful" for society...
...Another Kennedy dead...
...I found it completely unfathomable that presumably intelligent individuals could truly believe anything so patently ridiculous as the transformation of the wine and bread into the actual body and blood of Christ...
...But I know what I expect of it in a time of pervasive despair: there are hungry to be fed, trembling to be clothed, homeless to be housed, frightened to be comforted...
...I know that there is ferment and change within the Church...
...Augustine in Book IV of The City of God: "In the absence of justice, what is sovereignty but organized brigandage...
...I was born a non-Catholic and I became, at an early age, an anti-Catholic...
...But too often to those of us outside it the ferment seems, at best, focused on rather arcane or trivial matters...
...My burgeoning rational skepticism carried me from initial doubt of Christian dogma to a rejection, a sloughing off one-by-one of the creation of the world as recounted in Genesis, the existence of the Holy Ghost, the virginity of the Virgin Mary, and, inescapably (but with fear and trepidation) the Incarnation, individual immortality-all of it gone...
...People focus on their dwindling resources as inflation mounts, jobs are lost, and corporate profits rise...
...Well, the war is officially 'over.' Protest has subsided...
...1963 Assassination...
...Then I became a deist .after studying the Enlightenment and reading Voltaire...
...I remembered the words from an essay by Albert Camus I had read years before, an essay on what the unbeliever expects from Christians...
...Time passed...
...What if one believed one had faith but really did not...
...I entered upon my devoted, intense Lutheran period...
...A few advisors...
...Several indicated they thought such "irrationality" had (thank god...
...I don't think much about the Church anymore...
...That they should get away from abstraction and confront the blood-stained face history has taken on today...
...Tweaks her nose at the frivolity and fundamental absurdity of religion...
...But end it must...
...I learned of all the shocking horrors and abuses against which Luther had mounted his protest...
...I began undergraduate school as a major in history and I plunged myself into a painful rethinking of the grounds of both my political and religious beliefs...
...He was always surrounded by benignly smiling followers, benignly smiling children, or both...
...I viewed my own reaction as an atavism...
...Surely if anyone should speak to condemn the slaughter of innocents, I thought, it ought to be Christians...
...A restructured society, one not dedicated to the protection of the pursuit of private profit, might well move to fulfill both the Thomist vision of secular dignity and justice as well as the Marxist concept of the non-alienated society in which people truly become themselves as they share in labor for the common good...
...The very word 'atheist' threw me into deep gloom...
...not Christianity, but Americanism which has been tried and found wanting...
...My faith lay in the secular repository and I wasn't going to draw all my savings , out of the bank at once...
...The Eisenhower era was laid to rest and the student movement was just beginning...
...We spent most of our time memorizing the questions and answers from Luther's Small Catechism...
...I began to question Martin Luther's faith, that unceasing, fearful confrontation with a wrathful and just God on His own terms...
...But I found myself drawn, nonetheless, to the concept of the respublica Christiana, to that compelling medieval drama, the contest between regnum and sacerdotium, to the notions of grace and selfless sacrifice for others or one's faith (all so at odds with the predominant modern notion of the human being as a rational, cautious calculator of self-interest), and to the beauty, richness, opulence and grandeur of much of that medieval tradition which found its culmination in the soaring spires of Gothic cathedrals...
...This was not so much the result of strictures from my family as my absorption of the parochial attitudes which predominated in my rural, small town environment...
Vol. 102 • November 1975 • No. 17
