FATHER & SON, GOD & COUNTRY fames Carroll talks about his father, the church, and his award-winning memoir
Spalding, John D
FATHER & SON, COD & COUNTRY An interview with James Carroll John D. Spalding Joseph and James Carroll were casualties of the Vietnam War-a father and a son who, like many of their respective...
...And then to be in the presence of the pope, which is already a profoundly physical, sensual experience...
...So my father was basically applying that principle...
...He has written nine novels, including The City Below and Mortal Friends...
...And yet I couldn't tell my story without telling at least an important part of their story...
...From an early age I understood my father's motto to be Pro Deo et Patria-church and country, twin loyalties...
...We still have a huge nuclear arsenal, and whatever justification there was for it during the cold war is gone...
...The pope hugged me, and he spoke to me...
...Remember, this was during the Berlin crisis when it seemed sure that the world was going to end...
...SPALDING: Your ordination service at Boiling Air Force base in Washington, D.C., was attended by several Air Force generals, including your father, who were involved with orchestrating the Vietnam War...
...But because I decided not to wait for that, he couldn't in conscience come to my wedding...
...They knew they were losing the war and that the only way to win was to use nuclear weapons, which he wasn't going to be part of...
...SPALDING: Yet your father never said anything publicly against the war, as none of the generals did...
...Drag the golf head...
...CARROLL: Dan was a powerful influence on me first as a poet, before he became famous as an antiwar activist...
...She's not somebody's mother...
...And what was that experience...
...Eventually, he became founding director of the Defense Intelligence Agency...
...CARROLL:That's right, in the sense that I'd spent my life taking in my parents' God or the church's God, but suddenly, with him, it became personal to me...
...Of course, all of this is clothed in the sixties' language of politics...
...I knew how to talk about the politics...
...I've written lots of books, and they're all difficult...
...I'm not a rebel at all-I mean, here I am in my blazer...
...Pacem in terris raises the question whether nuclear weapons could ever be used in a just war, which is the question that no one could ever answer in those years in America...
...And they never have, really...
...And at one level it's a kind of wonderful, humane, wise realism, and at another it condemns us to a kind of inevitable dishonesty with each other that undercuts the integrity of not only the church but one's life...
...But I was quite concerned that I would be intruding on the privacy of my brothers because two of them are involved in the story intimately...
...So there are doors opening in my subconscious all over the place...
...The only fully honest moment we had about this was a totally nonverbal one after I was ordained-I blessed him and had my hands on his head, and he burst into tears...
...I mean hugging today, everybody hugs-"I love you, man...
...His decision was always a mystery to me as a young man...
...We'd simply stopped talking to each other, and I'd never really declared myself publicly...
...But, between us, you don't have to accept the church's teaching on birth control...
...It was a source of enormous happiness to finally encounter Dan Berrigan and even to discover him as a friend, which I did in the seventies...
...CARROLL: It wasn't difficult in the usual sense...
...Those are the years that destroyed this country for our generation...
...I knew how to talk about the personal and the religious...
...These young chaplains regarded our house as a second home...
...Related to that, of course, is the religious transformation, which is about learning that the basic word God has to us is about trust...
...The key to the revolution for me was the discovery that for Jesus, God was Abba, the father, which of course was potent for me because I'm already deeply, if unconsciously, engaged in the struggle to understand God as father in relation to my own father...
...SPALDING: HOW SO...
...By then I'm sure he felt, as many of those military people felt, that he was in a terrible trap...
...SPALDING: One of the things that sealed your decision to become a priest was meeting John XXIII...
...His job: to pick bombing targets in Vietnam...
...That's the basic condition of the pacifist impulse from the nuclear age, and my dad got it...
...SPALDING: What was the most difficult part about writing An American Requiem...
...My father didn't particularly do that...
...CARROL: No...
...CARROLL: Well, this was in February of '69, and by then his life as a general is already in ruins...
...I don't know this at the time...
...My father wasn't...
...It came through afterwards...
...It's a kind of centering act for me...
...CARROLL: No, it didn't...
...But the pope hugged me...
...I know that's controversial, and I'm sure some readers of Commonweal would disagree with me, but that's how I experienced it...
...I'd been through it myself just a little bit ahead of them...
...At thirty-seven, he was commissioned as a general in the Air Force...
...CARROL: Yes...
...But military chaplains, with their ID bracelets, their crew cuts, their fast cars, their robust physiques, all of that-you could be a man and a priest both...
...In the old days, to enter the church was to turn your back on political engagement...
...That was always a powerful motivating factor in my father's life...
...Given how strongly I felt at the time, and how clearly wrong the war was by then, and how Nixon and Laird were continuing it-one mere little reference to napalm seemed awfully weak to me...
...And when I was a priest, and later found myself contemplating the decision to leave the priesthood, this mystery at the center of my father's life became paramount to me though, as you know from the book, we never had a satisfactory, honest discussion about it...
...FATHER & SON, COD & COUNTRY An interview with James Carroll John D. Spalding Joseph and James Carroll were casualties of the Vietnam War-a father and a son who, like many of their respective generations, were torn apart by the battles that raged at home, forever divided in their clash of loyalties...
...I'd like to think he would have, and that he would have realized that, in the end, we were together...
...It was a religious experience in the way that the church wants to be for people...
...And 30,000 more Americans are going to die...
...It's not Irish Jansenism, that's for sure...
...Deeply sensual...
...So to discover that Jesus had gone through his version of this very same experience made Jesus a friend forever...
...It's the adult Jesus, thirty-three years old, in the arms of his mother at age fourteen...
...As long as the war continued, I would get up every day and do my modest part in the effort to end it...
...He was of the generation for whom it was inconceivable that [patriotism and religion] should ever be in conflict...
...carroll: She was a woman who found a way to affirm all of us, even when she wildly disapproved of what we were doing...
...SPALDING: So it was a great risk for him to leave...
...And of course he's showing his seminary education there, because epistemologically he's able to distinguish between theory and practice...
...He was an American, and it had a religious aspect for him-it was a piece of this hierarchical world view he had which was ultimately a religious world view...
...I can't imagine I would have published a book they would have found wounding...
...SPALDING: You didn't write as much about your relationship with your mother...
...My father's senility took him away from me before we could do that...
...So there it was, right there...
...SPALDING: When did you first want to become a priest...
...fames Carroll tells the story of their struggle which revolved around fiercely different understandings of God and country, faith and honor...
...CARROLL: Mostly playing golf...
...SPALDING: Which was what...
...And if the internal truth is "We don't accept this," but the external truth is, "Of course we accept this," then you've got a real problem...
...By 1969 they were no longer speaking...
...And I did not come to that easily or quickly...
...And it was with Pope John that I felt a very contented sense that this was meant for me...
...When I met my wife my father was already in decline, and by the time our children came along he was infantile...
...SPALDING: You write that it wasn't until you met the pope that you believed in God...
...It was the failure of the reform movement that undercut my ability to be a priest...
...He said that it's the pope's job to lay out general principles and that it's the job of those who are "in-the-know" to apply them...
...Slow up...
...It was a foretaste of death, and there is nothing like a foretaste of death to put us in touch with the religious question, since, after all, religion comes to human beings out of the foretaste of death...
...Of course, the main thing the book did for me was give me a way to look at his life, not judgmentally but respectfully...
...Especially Dennis, who was a draft resister, and Brian, who was an FBI agent...
...Joseph Carroll was a reserved man, sure of his own authority and the system that had given him extraordinary success...
...And I understood what he was telling me...
...Edgar Hoover's inner circle...
...It's a way of saying, "Trust me, God your father...
...An American Requiem won a National Book Award in 1996...
...He was central to the American Catholic transformation of our understanding not just of the war but of our place in society...
...CARROLL: Well, I was so unforgiving of myself...
...And see, once I saw chaplains I was really lost because they were masculine...
...Where's the disconnect here...
...When fames entered Saint Paul's College, the Paulist Fathers' seminary, it was 1963, a period of ferment in the church, and soon he realized he was becoming what his father considered "the wrong kind of priest...
...CARROLL: [Laughing] Yes, and Cardinal Spellman put his hand on my shoulder and said, "I want to ordain you...
...And you can't have an experience like that without wanting to talk about it with somebody, which is what the ministry is about...
...Quietly, proudly pleased...
...And that's the same thing that ends his career-trying to do the right thing as a patriotic officer [he'd refused to back the Nixon administration's push to build antiballistic missiles...
...And so I was prepared for the visit with Pope John by our visit to Rome, and the grandeur of Rome and the grandeur of Saint Peter's, and the magnificent art...
...My assumption at the time was that he was weeping because of me...
...But going through high school and coming of age sexually and discovering the pleasures of girls and life in the world-all of that did set up a conflict for me, and I realized that to become a priest I really had to say no to something...
...And sure enough Laird and Kissinger and Nixon embraced the illusion that we somehow might be able to pull this thing out, so they spent 30,000 American lives, another million Vietnamese lives, and six more years...
...Tell us how they were a motivation for you to write it...
...SPALDING: You describe your father as a "fluent patriot" whose sense of himself, as a father and a general, depended on the survival of the world of hierarchy...
...And yet my rejection of the war was exactly what he raised me to do...
...I felt that it was a fulfillment of my religious wish...
...This was 1969, very late in the history of the war, and I had not openly confronted my father about it-even though he knew I was opposed to the war, even though we'd argued about Phil Berrigan, even though I had participated in demonstrations outside his office at the Pentagon...
...And it didn't matter whether the top of that hierarchy was Henry Kissinger or Pope Paul VI or Cardinal Medeiros [archbishop of Boston...
...Which was news to me...
...His father felt betrayed by Carroll's antiwar activity...
...CARROLL: She was heartbroken by the whole thing...
...I couldn't do that any more...
...How had your feelings changed...
...Not that I'm a misbehaver...
...The gulf between father and son deepened further when Carroll left the priesthood in 1975 to pursue another calling-as an author...
...SPALDING: How did your mother respond...
...How did she react to your decision...
...CARROLL: This was again a physical experience for me, but it was about fear...
...In your sermon you referred to Ezekiel's "valley of dry bones" and asked, "Can these bones live...
...And the love of the priesthood was vivid in my family life...
...SPALDING: When did Daniel Berrigan become an influence on you...
...Carroll criticized his father for not understanding his opposition...
...So it was very clear to me from that moment that I had to write this book...
...In his haunting memoir, An American Requiem: God, My Father, and the War that Came between Us (Mariner Books/Houghton Mifflin, $12, 280 pp...
...I knew the words...
...And because the priest presided over the world of those feelings it seemed very natural to me to be drawn to the priesthood...
...And my father had this palpable sense of the coming nuclear war...
...Years later you realized it wasn't cowardice...
...We don't ask that question any more, but we should...
...SPALDING: Did writing this book give you a sense of closure...
...Even though there was a lot of antagonism and conflict, we were intensely involved with each other right to the end...
...Yet it was impossible for me to be at Boiling, in that season, and to give my first sermon as a priest without somehow, somehow letting him know, letting them all know, that no, not for one minute did I accept this thing...
...CARROL: Right...
...CARROLL: Personal-well, there were a number of things about that...
...It's why there is this built-in irony of being Catholic...
...It took me a long time...
...And I'm at Saint Peter's, and what is Saint Peter's a celebration of...
...We discussed An American Requiem, "God, his father, and the war that came between them...
...I wanted to be a priest who was also a poet, and the one really first-rate poet who was a priest was Daniel Berrigan...
...Once the war ended, it was like, "Now what...
...I took great pleasure in being close to the altar and watching the Eucharist...
...Carroll: It's a wonderful irony of our relationship that the person who had first joined it for us was, of all people, Pope John XXIII, who begins to raise questions in his encyclicals about basic assumptions of American policy...
...He doesn't do it-he doesn't become a priest...
...I don't know what I would have done...
...This is not a family that disintegrated...
...And that became very palpable to me-another kind of religious experience...
...And every time I swing I know what I did wrong even before I see what the ball does, because I can hear my father's voice...
...SPALDING: The other key to your decision to become a priest was when your father told you, in 1961, that he believed nuclear war was inevitable...
...And it was great...
...Being a priest in those years was heavenly...
...Head down, you lifted your head up...
...SPALDING: It was your parents' great wish that you would become a priest, and at times they encouraged you indirectly...
...So it came as a bit of a surprise to me to find him on the front rank of the war protest...
...it may not end in a nuclear exchange, but it is going to end...
...She's somebody's girlfriend...
...He felt very trustworthy to me...
...SPALDING: What was his reaction...
...Obviously that was merely a pretext...
...And that's built into the terrible mistake the church has made in our lifetime on all these sexual matters, I think...
...I've simply finished the business as best I can with the rest of my life and other relationships...
...SPALDING: You wrote that your father thought Pope Paul VI's plea for peace before the United Nations in 1965 was naive...
...I'd already decided for myself, in some way, that I was going to become a priest, but that's when I actually told my father for the first time...
...He was a great golfer, and it was his one recreation...
...And the Eucharist is still the place where I draw the most solace in my life...
...Two years later he married the writer Alexandra Marshall, with whom he has two children...
...You say that when you left the priesthood her unspoken question was, "How does the mother of an ex-priest get to heaven...
...Happiness itself...
...my mother was devoted to it, and there were often priests around the house, especially in the military...
...It was irresistible...
...Trust in your life...
...Whoa...
...I want my children to know that...
...The relationship between me and my father is an open wound-that's all...
...What were the sources of his patriotism...
...Even an uneducated and unsophisticated youngster like me could not stand in the presence of the Pieta and be unmoved by it...
...Defending it was his one real passion," you write, "his vocational calling, and his religious duty...
...It was really glorious...
...And then to be ordained and come to Boston University as a chaplain where my job was to talk about these very things to kids who were desperate to have a language for what they were going through...
...I was appalled that that was the most I could do...
...But as it happened they didn't react that way...
...I was an altar boy, and I can still remember the feeling of tranquillity and blessedness on those early mornings before serving six o'clock Mass with the monsignor...
...So even though I knew I'd hurt her, there was never any doubt in my mind she would be at my wedding, which she was...
...The grief I felt for the loss of John Kennedy in 1963 and Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy in '68 was in the context of just as powerful a happiness to be part of this movement which was partly about the Vatican Council and Pope John, partly about civil rights and Martin Luther King, partly about the peace movement and Daniel Berrigan...
...john spalding: You dedicated An American Requiem to your wife and your children...
...She is why we stayed together as a family...
...And to be a teen-age boy looking at that statue-it's subliminal...
...It's a disastrous moment in my father's life...
...It's like she's my girlfriend- she's beautiful, like my girlfriend...
...My mother was just a very loving woman...
...Nor did he understand really how ironic, and how tragic, the story of me and my father was...
...More than any other person he broke that connection between Deo and patria, and invited the reverse of it-that if you really are committed to God then you have to question your country...
...My mother never lost hold of her Irishness and loved carrying Irishness into our family life...
...was to go back into the hierarchical world and behave...
...And these were the days before we used to hug each other...
...I'm sure he'll live in history as a great Catholic figure in this country...
...He went to seminary at age thirteen, and left at twenty-five with a superb education...
...I'd still be a priest today if the reforms of Vatican II had taken and if the church of John XXIII had become what it was in the process of becoming...
...But if we set aside that question, I think he would have found it to be the truth...
...Wait a minute...
...Thrilling...
...I'd say this was because my father could never honestly confront it himself...
...John D. Spalding's writing has appeared in the Christian Century and other magazines...
...And I had the language...
...The truth of his own experience and the tragedy of it, really...
...But I could not go back into that hierarchy and behave in religious terms, because by then the movement to renew the church had failed...
...After the service you viewed this reference to the war as self-indulgent and an act of cowardice because you felt you'd merely infuriated your father...
...If they'd said, "This is my story and you can't tell it," it would have been a crisis...
...He was an FBI agent who captured the notorious Chicago gangster Roger Touhy in 1942, and quickly rose to become a trusted member off...
...The Italian church is very sensual...
...The closest anyone has come to saying anything was McNamara in his memoir, In Retrospect, which is a deeply flawed attempt to confront these questions, though I give him credit for attempting it...
...SPALDING: Your father originally intended to become a priest...
...Even today, whenever I swing a club, I can hear this voice in my head, "Don't bend your elbow...
...The people who created the war-my father's generation of colleagues, McNamara's people-are all gone...
...I paid acute attention to him and read everything he wrote...
...One was the experience of friendship and community, and to discover that my own impulses and intuitions were trustworthy...
...james carroll: Neither my wife nor my children knew my father except as a senile old man who was incapable of relating to them personally...
...But what Martin Luther King was saying, and ultimately what Daniel Berrigan and others were saying, was, "No, no, to be in the church is by definition to be politically engaged...
...CARROLL: A huge psychological risk...
...My father and I-the conflict gets joined...
...The reason he stated was because I had not been properly dispensed from my vows...
...It's as if it isn't there, but it is there, and we're still spending billions of dollars to maintain it, to improve it...
...And the answer to "Now what...
...It's why we can have a radical rejection of contraception when the pope and bishops understand that every priest in the world goes into the confessional and has the authority to be pastoral in the confidential discussion with a penitent, saying "Our principle rules out contraception, but if in the practice of your life you find that impossible, then God is not going to judge you, and I am not going to judge you...
...Nixon has just become president, and Nixon, Laird, and Kissinger have just reiterated that they will not lose this war...
...He thought I was so unlike him...
...CARROLL: He would have been offended by the violation of his privacy, certainly...
...Religion is basically an answer to the question, "What happens to us when we die...
...CARROLL: He was pleased...
...So it really did confirm my wish to be a priest...
...Good news, because I was already politically awakened...
...Subliminally, it's fantastic...
...Not unrelated is the fact that I'm also hearing the same messages from that great preacher of the word, Martin Luther King, Jr., who shows me what the ministry means- that it's a political calling...
...Trying to have a girlfriend, trying to be in the Air Force, trying to think of another way to live...
...Carroll senior had also been a seminarian who hoped fames, the second of five sons, would pick up his abandoned calling to the priesthood...
...There was something disturbingly effete about some of the parish priests back home...
...Constitutionally, I'm a good citizen...
...And I believed in God...
...SPALDING: You say you were transformed by your experience with the Paulists in three ways: personal, religious, and political...
...He embraced reform theologians like Hans Kung, he supported Martin Luther King, Jr., and he protested the war...
...What is integrity if not a match between internal and external truth...
...I didn't understand a word he said, and I wasn't even sure if he had spoken English...
...Really, like a brother...
...John Kennedy had addressed himself to me and had invited me to be politically engaged, and I wanted to be...
...spalding: You write that the end of the war diminished your reason for being a priest...
...Dried and burned by time, and by desert wind, by the sun, and most of all by napalm...
...SPALDING: How did you spend time with your father growing up...
...I didn't know this at the time-but why is this so moving to me...
...There was no question of my not being a Catholic, or a Christian believer, but I couldn't serve the hierarchical structure of the church any more as a priest exactly because I could no longer keep that secret-"Oh yes, I accept the authority of the church...
...There's some response in him that doesn't let him do it, and he refuses, because he realizes that if we don't change the way we resolve conflict in the era of mass weapons then the human race is finished...
...I realized that after all that kneeling in the early morning shadows of the first Mass, and after a lifetime of religious sensibility, that it was mine, and that I'd been in flight from it...
...But he hugged me, and I leapt instantly to the idea that this was God...
...As a youngster I took pleasure in being his caddie, and then as a teen-ager I took up the game and he became my instructor...
...With God at the top somehow...
...I was not dragged into it kicking and screaming...
...And I would hope that he'd have read the book and recognized that...
...CARROLL: He was typical of that generation of the sons and daughters of immigrants who were both deeply grateful for what this country gave them and quite determined to establish their American identity...
...But looking back on it, I think he had so much more to weep about...
...Recently I met with Carroll in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where this spring he is a fellow at the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government...
...So I wrote it, and of course I sent them the manuscript and then held my breath...
...Explain...
...But I did it consciously, freely, and I wouldn't want to be understood as claiming there was a lack of freedom in my decision to become a priest...
...And you see I'm seventeen years old, and I've just come alive sexually, and I've just come alive to all this stuff, and I want it...
...It was just unfinished business...
...Carroll: My priesthood had come to be defined in relationship to the war, especially because I was a campus minister at a very antiwar university...
...It's a celebration of this very thing...
...And, of course, the world is going to end...
...And one of the things that's interesting about the Pieta, of course, is how young Mary is...
...Which was true hell- true hell...
...Such as when you were fifteen and first met Cardinal Spellman at your home, and your parents had told him privately that you were destined for the priesthood...
...And if he hadn't gone to seminary he'd have been a worker in the stockyards...
...IS spalding: What do you think your father would have thought about An American Requiem...
...CARROLL: I was raised in the Irish church, which is anti-sensual...
...A young man trying only to do the right thing, the good thing, in response to an urge from some place he doesn't know...
...CARROLL: As a young child I was naturally religious, and by that I mean I felt at home at Mass and in church...
...Once, my son, who was three or four- he's fifteen now-shrank back in fear from my father, and this was such a shock to me because I realized that he knew nothing of my father-what a great man he was and what a great life he'd lived...
...And if there's a tragedy in all this it's that my father raised a son who is exactly like him but that we never recognized each other as such...
...Jesus is in the arms of somebody's girlfriend...
...And he's an expert in the world of practice...
...It was too loaded, too painful, and I think he felt too guilty about it...
...He was of tremendous importance to me, and I still admire him enormously...
...But more to the point, the war had undercut my ability to claim a place in that hierarchical world, because to oppose the war was to step outside of it and say no to it...
Vol. 124 • May 1997 • No. 10
