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A SPECIAL SECTION |
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 Michael Johnson's Letter from London |
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Needs A Good Shake-Up |
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Pedophile priests aren't
the church's only woes
By MICHAEL JOHNSON
of TheColumnists.com
The two-room schoolhouse in rural Indiana where I learned to read and write was run by the fearsome Sisters of St. Joseph, and I grew up believing every word they said. The parish priest who lived alone in the red brick house beside the church was an equally awesome figure, so saintly he was barely human.
As a child, I was putty in their hands. What they preached--kindness, humility, clean living--seemed the best way to live one’s life. I even refused to go to Camp Tecumseh after the first summer because the non-Catholic kids cussed too much.
Living among the rough farm boys of Midwestern hog, corn and cattle country, I was feeling pretty good about my moral superiority at the age of 12.
I went on the serve as an altar boy till 17, never questioning the Roman Catholic dogma.
What happened to that cozy cocoon?
By 18 I had gone away to college, and “poof” went my faith. In about two weeks, I turned my back on a lifetime of devotion. I simply looked around and saw that others were living perfectly honorable lives without the religious trappings.
One of my genes may have gone wrong, but once out on my own I failed to get any inspiration from the ritual of the Church or imagined contact with a supreme being. I like H.L. Mencken’s take on this situation, which I recently came across in “A Mencken Chrestomathy”: “I can no more understand a man praying than I can understand him carrying a rabbit’s foot to bring him good luck.”
As a result of my past, and my clean break from the Church, I can see a bit more clearly today when I read the headlines about the pedophile priests. Taking a 50-year perspective, this is only the most recent chapter in the steady decline of the Church. A shame, too, because it all started so well for me.
I meet so many ex-Catholics today that I can assert with confidence that the Church is at fault, not the congregation. The Church calls us “fallen away” Catholics, never acknowledging that the ideology is so badly administered that it turns people away.
To be fair, the Protestants are in no better shape over here in England. The drafty, spired pre-Victorian stone structures, relics of the heyday of the Church of England, stand nearly empty except for a handful of aging faithful on Sundays. Only Christmas and Easter and the occasional big funeral bring out the flock, such as it is. Another generation and the C of E may be dead. Even the vicars are saying so.
But the Catholics have really done it to themselves this time. The offending priests, driven mad by celibacy, have sought relief in that last forbidden zone, molesting the defenseless child. Worse, the bishops and cardinals have proven too weak and cowardly to face up to the problem. The Big Lie has infested the highest councils of a once proud institution.
The Chinese court had a more reliable system. They took no chances with sexual misconduct and invented the eunuch. Funny I don’t hear the priests suggesting that to Rome.
Yet I’m not sure it is fair to reject the Church and its Christian teachings because of a small percentage of men enraged by testosterone. I have better reasons. Personally I felt betrayed a long time ago, and I was never molested. Two turning points stand out in my memory--when the Latin Mass was dropped in favor of local languages and when suddenly, from one day to the next, it was no longer a mortal sin (read: eternity in Hell) to eat meat on Friday. One day it was, one day it wasn’t. Who could ever take Hell seriously again?
I was married in the Church, but in France, where things are different. And I have baptized my children, but I cannot really explain why. I guess we felt they would be more free to make their own choices as they grew up. They have not remained in the Church, nor have any of my five brothers and sisters. (My mother was an Irish Catholic and so she lived by the Church's anti-contraception law. There would have been 10 or 12 of us if she had started sooner.)
After my idyllic childhood and my separation from the Church I found myself involved once again with Catholicism when I moved back from Paris to work for McGraw-Hill in New York. I bought a house in Tarrytown, in Westchester County, and enrolled my grade school children in the local Catholic school. It was reputed to be better than the public school, Sleepy Hollow (appropriately, ‘Sleepy’ for short). The catch: to get a discount on tuition, the entire family had to join the congregation and actually attend Sunday Mass--contributions to the collection plate welcome.
Here I saw the Church operating in the fast lane, a place very unlike the Midwest where it is still about 1950. The modern Church of the New York suburbs was a surreal scene in which the head priest, who ruled over both school and Church affairs, was Father Norman. He bleached and sprayed his hair and bragged that he designed and sewed his own vestments. The school kids held their noses as he swished by in a cloud of perfume strong enough to make your eyes water. His sidekick was Father Andre, who wore an auburn wig and made me uncomfortable with excessive eye contact.
I hit rock bottom when I was pressed into service as Catholic Bingo Nite helper, bossed around by 150 hopped-up pensioners shouting at me, “How about some coffee over here!”
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made quite a pair of buddies. Nobody ever accused them of making any girls pregnant. |
Eventually “Father” Norman was removed when it was discovered that he had no training in the field of education. And one of his teaching nuns left the school a short time later, parents whispering that she was pregnant. If she was, Norm had nothing to do with it, that’s for sure.
The idea that either of those priests could inspire spiritual renewal was ludicrous. The congregation seemed to turn up on Sundays mainly for social reasons--or to get the lower tuition for their kids--and Christian charity toward each other was the last thing on their minds. There was a clear-cut hierarchy in this crowd: Irish on the bottom, Italians in the middle, and everyone else striving to be on top of each other. Blacks were not part of this scene.
Suffering through the irrelevant ramblings of Father Norman’s Sunday sermons drove me to distraction. To avoid screaming out in the middle of his platitudes, I bought a copy of Stendahl’s “Le Rouge et le Noir” in French, painted the edges of the pages in metallic gold, taped a cross on the front, and called it my Sunday Missal. My nose buried in this book once a week, I had to stifle giggles as Julien Sorel got up to his antics, including invading ladies’ bedrooms and leaving at sunrise “with nothing further to desire”.
Catholics hate to admit it, but Protestants are often better at holding their audience. I recall being intrigued by Billy Graham’s grandiose orations and by the riveting sermons of Bishop James Pike of San Francisco’s Grace Cathedral back in the 1960s. They both had the charisma that modern priests seem to lack. Admittedly Bishop Pike ended up censured by the Episcopalians but he could never be accused of the sin of boredom.
Perhaps the ultimate indignity for the American Catholics was the very public summoning of the U.S. cardinals to Rome last month to be lectured by the Pope about the abuse of children. I must say they hid their shame masterfully. The red-robed leaders of the American church hopped off the plane as if they were on vacation, boarded limos to the Vatican, met with the Pope, and held a press conference afterward, apparently enjoying the attention. The world cringed.
It would be reckless to predict the demise of such an ancient institution as the Catholic Church. It has survived the Spanish Inquisition and Martin Luther. It will survive the pedophile priests. But someone needs to shake it to its foundations.
© 2002 by Michael
Johnson. The illustrations are from IMSI's Master Clips Collection,
1895 Francisco Blvd. E., San Rafael, CA, 94901-5506, USA.
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