Listening Religiously in Hope of Hearing the Right Words

She’s reclining in a soft lobby chair in the Anaheim Marriott, a middle-aged woman wearing a cross around her neck, at once awash in the spirit of the lamb but wary of the wolf.

Linda Daleo Topdjian is but one in the throng of Catholics at this weekend’s Religious Education Congress in Anaheim, which brings teachers and clergy together for refresher seminars and increased understanding both of their religious work and contemporary issues. She teaches Catholic catechism to fourth- and fifth-graders in Sun Valley and comes to these conferences to stay certified. It is a conference she takes very seriously. She says you need to get re-certified every three to five years; this is her 10th consecutive conference.

“I come every year, because I want to,” she says. “It teaches you new things.” She says the conference adds “a couple more dots” to her life and that “it’s like going to college for three days.”

So, yes, she is just where she wants to be. And yet, she is edgy, because it’s about 45 minutes before the start of her next scheduled seminar. It’s a seminar the computer kicked out for her--the only one she has a ticket for--because the one she wanted to attend was full.

What’s upsetting her is that the listed speaker, identified as an “ex-priest and catechetical author,” was among those vilified in a flyer distributed by a group of conservative Catholics. The flyer is headlined “WARNING” and identifies various speakers as “dissenters in sheep’s clothing.”

Topdjian is taking the warning seriously. “People wouldn’t be picketing if it was not real,” she says. “Nuns were passing out the flyers, so you know they’re not fake. It (the flyer) is saying you don’t want to be confused, and I don’t. I don’t want to hear a man lie.”

Forty-four years old and the mother of an 11-year-old daughter, Topdjian is a school cafeteria worker in addition to her weekend catechism teaching. She is recently divorced.

“I don’t want him to confuse my thinking,” she says of the speaker. “He’s an ex-priest. I don’t like the sound of that. What’s an ex-priest doing here? Why should he get a pedestal? Why not get his own convention?”

Characterized by changelessness over the centuries, the Catholic Church has gone through some upheavals in the last generation. Vatican Council II in the early 1960s left many conservative Catholics thinking the Church had gone too far. More liberal members today think the Church isn’t changing quickly enough to maintain its credibility with its parishioners.

Topdjian doesn’t consider herself rigidly doctrinaire. She says the Church needed to revise some of its age-old practices and teachings and that there were reasons for the historic changes that came from Vatican II.

But she still supports the papal ban on birth control and adheres largely to the catechism of her youth, which established certain truths and taught that the Pope and the Bible are the sources of knowledge, not conference speakers of uncertain conviction.

“I’m tired of priests who are fly-by-night,” she says. “I can’t believe how many hypocrites there are today. This (conference) is supposed to be the real McCoy.”

What is the danger in anything he might say? I ask her.

“He would be misleading people, who could in turn mislead the children,” she says. “It all starts at the beginning.”

The flyer says her upcoming speaker’s works have “been designed not to teach doctrine but to stimulate zeal for his version of Utopia.”

She doesn’t like the sound of “his version of Utopia,” she says. To her, it’s a signal that he’s applying his own interpretation of heaven and “that he’s not teaching doctrine--what the Bible and the Pope have to say.”

Topdjian thinks she can exchange her ticket for another workshop if she doesn’t like what she hears. “If he’s going to be controversial, a lot of people are going to walk out,” she predicts.

The whole thing actually sort of mystifies her. How, she asks, does an ex-priest get clearance to give a seminar? “It sounds like the cable channel,” she says. “Anybody who’s got money can get on TV.”

Enjoy the weekend, I say as we part company.

“We always do,” she replies. “I just hope he’s not too upsetting. I won’t stay if he says bad things.”