THAT STILL, SMALL VOICE AMID THE PRESS OF WORDS

At this moment in the declining years of the 20th Century, the media are so fecund, so electronically efficient and so fervently competitive that major events like the papal visit are not just reported, they are inundated.

I am part of it; we are part of it. It is a blessing of free expression, but the blessing takes the form of an overwhelming immersion in reportage, analysis and prophecy.

And, as in the midst of any other media blitz, you do get to yearning for a little cool and uncluttered quiet time, to think about the event itself, to let things settle a bit.

A church would obviously be a cool and timely place to ponder matters of belief, and I find myself remembering those movie scenes, more favored in the past than now, when the hero or the heroine--and occasionally even the villain--crept into the near-empty church and thought about things, and maybe took courage and made hard decisions, there in the mellow gloom.

There was sometimes an elderly woman in a head scarf kneeling two or three pews back from the altar rail, saying her beads. Once in a great while (usually unsuccessfully), there was an echoing voice, offering guidance.

The church in the movies was almost always Catholic, not because the world was Catholic but because the visual adornments, the statues, the altar, the votive light, the candles, told you so quickly and emphatically where you were and what you were supposed to know about what the characters were feeling.

The visit of Pope John Paul II, blitz and all, must evoke a range of recollections in those millions of us who made those visitations in childhood--who grew up in the church but whose present relation to it is a dotted line, if not an interrupted line.

“You never break with Rome,” a character says in one of John O’Hara’s novels. What the character was suggesting (I think) was that the power of the attraction the church held in childhood never entirely erodes.

The certainties, sometimes comforting, often fearsome, of heaven and hell, sin, guilt and forgiveness were indelibly received in childhood. So was the tidiness of the rituals, and their mysteriousness, and the notion of an achievable, sustainable purity. And, far from least, in the days when Latin was still used, there was that feeling of timelessness and universality, of which you were now a part.

Your parish priest may himself never have gotten further than the Jersey shore or the Canadian side of Niagara Falls, but you were linked--if you thought about it at all, and you did--with an ancient past and the whole world. (I was with Evelyn Waugh in not so much regretting as actively resenting the end of the universal Latin. It probably betokened a larger incompatibility.)

What the O’Hara character might have added is that you may not break with Rome but you redefine the contract, whether or not you make the changes known to the party of the second part. It is clear from many polls lately taken that, even among active Catholics, there is considerable divergence between private practice and belief and church doctrine.

The process of redefining where you stand and of setting your own theological terms in maturity is certainly not a Roman Catholic exclusive but a more general life process.

The rote lessons--any rote lessons--of childhood yield to a more personal expression of faith, including a faith in self rather than in any notion of a higher power.

One good friend, a former Catholic, has turned to the far sterner certitudes of a fundamentalist Christianity; another friend is a militant atheist who doesn’t mind saying so on a bumper sticker.

Somewhere between are all those of us who cannot dismiss, or do without, the idea of Otherness, the notion of the Unmoved First Mover, but who are uncomfortable with structures and strictures.

The motorcades, the multitudes and the blizzards of attention finally induce a very mixed reaction, a nostalgia for the reassuring certainties of childhood, those memories of incense and fragments of altar-boy Latin, and a harder awareness that in more than one way you can’t go home again.