<i> American Catholicism:</i> And Now Where? by John Deedy (Plenum: $18.95; 298 pp.) : <i> Once a Catholic:</i> Prominent Catholics and Ex-Catholics Discuss the Influence of the Church on Their Lives and Work by Peter Occhiogrosso (Houghton Mifflin: $18.95; 371 pp.)
What is the worst sin? Mass murder? The torture of the innocent? The starving of orphans? Not even close.
According to the canon law of the Roman Catholic Church, the most heinous sin, absolvable only by the Pope, is the rape of a nun in solemn vows by a priest in solemn vows upon an altare privilegiatum --in a basilica. At least it used to be, until the latest reforms were promulgated. That this was so for so many years points, one might say, to an exquisitely, palpitatingly Gothic strain within the Catholic Church beyond anything even its more fevered detractors might have imagined. On the other hand, if we were to have a try at a little Chestertonian paradox, we might counter that, by such an interdict, the church asserts the profound seriousness of one’s sexuality, one’s word once given, and one’s sacred relationship to God against all who would trivialize these things. This established, it is easy to show that, by keeping one’s integrity and respecting everyone else’s, one will never get near the unthinkable sins being ticked off at the outset.
But if you were reared in Protestant America, no amount of dashing wordplay will unconvince you that the people who could dream up such a sin are a bunch of twisted, unhealthy creeps. The distinguished Jesuit canonist who calculated that this act of basilical ravishing carries the heaviest canonical sanctions of all used his discovery to entertain (and, no doubt, wake up) his students at a certain Midwestern seminary. He performed this felicitous task for many years, never failing to evoke hilarity. (The young priests before him, who had also been reared in Protestant America, were keenly aware that Rome was not Wisconsin.)
How hard it is to draw a bead on Catholicism, which runs all the way from the rococo dreams of pale Latin priests to the good-natured heartiness of Midwestern Jesuits who don’t take themselves too seriously. How does one focus on 850 million people--or even on the 50-odd million Catholics who live in America? John Deedy’s “American Catholicism: And Now Where?” takes the sociological route. It is full of statistics and social theory. Peter Occhiogrosso’s “Once a Catholic” takes the anecdotal route. It is composed entirely of interviews. Both routes have their pitfalls, for each can falsify the reality that it claims to capture, just as my bizarre canonical factoid is too small, odd and perfervid to stand for the whole.
Deedy sees American Catholicism on the ropes and gasping. Barely half of American Catholics attend weekly mass, as opposed to nearly 75% in 1958. The population of sisters is down by 73.5% from the peak of 1964, and there has been a similar drop in the supply of priests. As for new recruits, he quotes Richard McBrien’s commentary on a 1984 Catholic University study of male religious vocations that “the vocation crisis is as much qualitative as quantitative” and that current recruiting and training practices favor the “more dependent, institutionally oriented, sexually indifferent and conservative” chaps. Meanwhile, the gap between pew and pulpit widens ominously. Attendance at Sunday mass in urban areas is plummeting (down to 28% in Brooklyn, for instance). A majority of Catholics consider religion to be “largely old fashioned and out of date,” as opposed to 66% of their Protestant neighbors who feel that religion “can answer all or most of today’s problems.” Eighty percent of American Catholic women of child-bearing age and their spouses use “artificial” contraception in flagrant disregard of papal teaching. And only 12% of Catholics under 30 rate the sermons they hear as excellent.
Deedy’s villain is Pope John Paul II, who, in his zeal to restore orthodoxy and consensus, is threatening to knock out an American church already weakened by the blows of Paul VI’s anti-birth control encyclical and the creeping lures of affluence. The problem with this script is that, though Deedy heaps upon us statistic after statistic, incident after incident, quotation after quotation, the villain is never clearly seen. Who is this John Paul II, and what does he mean to destroy? In this book, he functions almost like the invisible figure of Sauron in “The Lord of the Rings,” whose very name evokes terror, though we know nothing about him.
Deedy gets important things wrong. He imagines, for instance, that John Paul would, if he could, turn back the Second Vatican Council’s historic Declaration on Religious Freedom. He seems not to know that the declaration’s most earnest episcopal supporter in the council was the then-archibishop of Krakow who as the first Polish Pope devoted a great part of his first encyclical letter to a defense of the declaration. “Can anyone on this earth be surprised,” asked John Paul II of the Polish bishops assembled at Auschwitz, “that a Pope who came from the archdiocese which contains this camp started his first encyclical with the words Redemptor Hominis (“Redeemer of Mankind”), and that he devoted it in full to the cause of man, the dignity of man, the threats facing man, the rights of man?”
Like many American Catholics, Deedy does not understand this Pope. He does not see that the Pope is passionately supportive not so much of the imagined needs of bourgeois Christianity as of the daily life-and-death struggles of such people as in the Aquino revolution in the Philippines and that he prays (and works) for similar results in Korea, Chile and even Eastern Europe. This Pope would reinvigorate not only Catholicism but Eastern Orthodoxy by incarnating in his person the authority and courage of the ancient Christian bishops. The threat of his authority has been taken so seriously by the Soviets that they allegedly were impelled to attempt a papal assassination as the whole world looked on. Whether or not the Kremlin is, in the controversial phrase, “the focus of evil in the world,” this Pope is surely the focus of love, the first Pope of the whole world, a universal father. With every fiber of his being, he supports the oppressed, the outcasts, the rejects. Perhaps he is right--essentially--to slight the whining of the West.
If Deedy’s book is full of unfocused near-ideas, Occhiogrosso’s is almost uncharacterizable, as changeable as a mood ring. He omits entirely whatever questions he asked the 26 interviewees (both practicing Catholics and ex-Catholics), and so they seem to chatter on improbably, if amiably, from subject to subject. But, though he has removed the scaffolding from view, he is a fine interviewer--or he could not have got the results he gives us. This would be the book to put in the hands of John Paul II if he were out to understand American Catholicism, and I doubt whether, for all his greatness, he does understand it. The book is sometimes silly (Bob Guccione on sex); sometimes muddled (Maura Moynihan, Daniel Patrick’s daughter, on Christ and Krishna); sometimes mean (Jose Torres on machismo ). But it is also often funny (Christopher Buckley, George Carlin, Christopher Durang), holy (Sister Joan Chittister, Daniel and Sidney Callahan), and profound (Terrence Sweeney, Michael Novak, and Wilfried Sheed). It was Sheed who, in a story about driving through Sag Harbor, Long Island, reminded me of why I am still a Catholic:
“And I saw three hopelessly fat, plain girls, who by the sound of it were also stupid, and I thought that a certain pagan friend of mine might quite reasonably say, ‘Why do these fat, ugly people marry and procreate and produce such hideous children?’ And I thought, no Catholic would ever say that. Nobody is altogether worthless to us. . . .”
The church, said Donne, is Catholic; so are all her actions. She makes room for the fetus and the fat girl, for every kind of cripple and every defenseless thing. And even for me.