Keeping Faith

At first, I didn’t want to read “American Catholic,” fearing it would be one more journalistic attack on the church (of which I have read my fill). But it isn’t. It’s journalism of a very high order. In telling a cracking good story with a wonderful cast of rogues, ruffians and some remarkably holy and sensible people, Morris is helped by the fact that he’s Irish, both because of his Irish way with words and because the story, as he tells it, is nine-tenths Irish. Which is fair because even though only 14% of America’s Catholic population is Irish, they have contributed far more than that to the color, organizational skill and leadership of the American Catholic pilgrimage.

Morris had originally planned to subtitle his book: “How the Irish Built a State Within a State,” culminating with the enormously successful Catholic subculture of the 1950s. As a child of Slovak parents in a parochial school, I well remember the Pennsylvania Catholicism that Morris evokes, although there are pockets of it he barely knows: the Slavs and other Eastern Europeans; and even the Anglo-Saxons like the ancestors of Archbishop Rembert Weakland of Milwaukee, who go back to the first ships to bring Catholics to Maryland, the Ark and the Dove. Just the same, I learned to dance the Irish jig in the sixth grade; the school blackboards were green and when I won the 100-yard dash at the Irish Day picnic at Kennywood Park, I gave my name as “O’Novak.” I also learned to return with good humor--and above all, quickly--the put-downs of Irish priests, nuns and buddies, and I took it as a compliment when asked, incredulously, if I was Irish too.

What makes Morris’ tale so good is that it is journalistic history, not academic history, combining a journalist’s good eye--like Chaucer’s in “The Canterbury Tales”--for the story and the meaning of the thing with a vivid love of the telling detail and the personalities who pass through it. He wants us to enjoy what he has enjoyed, to be sad about the things that saddened him and to love what he has loved, and to his credit, his loves are ample.

I rejoiced, for example, at his colorful account of the International Eucharistic Congress held in Chicago in June 1926. More than a million Catholics from all over the nation poured into the city in what became the largest movement of travelers the country had ever seen. The congress was led by Chicago’s beloved George Cardinal Mundelein(who later on called FDR “Frank”--who in turn called him “George”). Papal Legate Giovanni Bonzano, a friend of Mundelein’s from his student days in Rome, traveled from New York on a special train in seven special cars painted cardinal red at the orders of the Catholic president of the Pullman Co. The entourage sped past crowds of tens of thousands at every station along the right of way from Albany, through Rochester, Cleveland and points west to Chicago. At Soldier Field, which was crammed with 400,000 people, the legate was preceded to the altar by 12 cardinals, 57 archbishops, 257 bishops, more than 500 monsignors and thousands of priests and nuns. A choir of 62,000 Chicago schoolchildren disrupted protocol and cheered wildly when their cardinal ascended the altar; flustered nuns ran up and down the aisles trying to quiet the children.

A few days later on June 24, beginning at 4 a.m., 800,000 pilgrims traveled in packed trains to the elegant new buildings Mundelein had erected on a 1,000-acre wooded site that he dearly hoped would become the campus of a major university but that was fated instead to serve as the most impressive diocesan seminary in the world. The day started beautifully enough, but as the ceremony began, the sky turned black and the lake was lashed by a violent thunderstorm: “The papal canopy clattered in the wind, nuns’ veils were whipped and torn, their habits pasted to their bodies by the driving rain. . . . Most of the processants broke ranks and ran for the shelter of the woods, but Bonzano slogged on, and the rest of the procession rejoined the parade. Then, as suddenly as it began, the rain stopped; the sun came out and painted a rainbow through the towers of dark clouds across the heavens. Almost in unison, the crowds oohed and aahed; Irish and Italians, Poles and Germans, nuns and priests, cardinals and bishops, smiled and looked up, blinking, at the sky.”

Weaving together such vignettes, Morris divides his story into three parts, “Rise” (the hundred years preceding the International Eucharistic Congress), “Triumph” (through the 1950s) and “Crisis” (from the 1960s to the present). Some of the most entertaining and fascinating stories that Morris presents include the building of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City; the work in the 1930s of Thomas Quigley, Joe Breen and other Catholics on the very successful--although much mocked--Movie Picture Production Code (Joe Breen was awarded an Oscar in 1953 for “his conscientious, open-minded and dignified management” of the code); the making of the great Catholic movies of the 1940s, some of which still hold box-office records; the sad end to the spectacular TV career of Bishop Fulton J. Sheen; and a loving account of the brilliant, farsighted and autocratic Dennis Cardinal Dougherty of Philadelphia, who rose from the coal fields of Scranton, learned 10 languages, became an accomplished Vatican diplomat, an astute developer of Philadelphia real estate and a builder of churches and schools (he was known as “God’s Bricklayer”--in 1925 alone, he had 60 schools under construction). So strict was he that he once forbade Catholics in the archdiocese from going to the movies under pain of mortal sin; movies have become, he said, occasions of serious sin. Movie attendance dropped; Hollywood moguls sought a conversation with him; but for him, there was no question of a deal, it was a matter of principle. Dougherty’s action caught Hollywood’s attention, foreshadowing the code.

“American Catholic” covers them all: the dissidents and the heroically faithful, the entrepreneurs, the benefactors, the labor priests and such organizational geniuses as the great superintendent of education in Philadelphia, Msgr. John Bonner, who built, inspired and tended to 350 Catholic schools and died at the age of 55 without having heard a word of thanks from Dougherty. There are the politicians and activists: Al Smith and John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Dorothy Day and Father Charles Coughlin, whose radio show (before his anti-FDR and anti-Semitic broadcasts after 1936) had an audience twice as large as Rush Limbaugh’s when the nation was half as large. And there are the intellectuals: John Courtney Murray, the patrician theoretician of religious liberty; Avery Dulles; Andrew Greeley; Thomas Merton; and Richard John Newhouse.

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In researching “American Catholic,” Morris delved into archives and uncovered unknown diaries. He talked to scores of people, humble and great, young and old. He has assimilated a multitude of documents and conversations and incorporated them into the narrative with exceptional skill. I was particularly won over by his ability to write detailed accounts of life in the most conservative and most liberal dioceses in the country--Lincoln, Neb., and Saginaw, Mich., respectively. He makes the protagonists of both seem reasonable on their own terms.

Naturally, Morris makes some mistakes; his canvas is vast. When he speaks of original sin as “aboriginal human depravity,” for example, he goes too far; it’s a wound, certainly, but not total depravity, and is obvious in daily experience. Popes Leo XIII and Pius XI did not “condemn equally” socialism and capitalism; they condemned the first and severely criticized abuses in the other. More broadly, Morris ignores the immense impact Catholics have had on the conservative resurgence of the last 50 years; never mentioned are William F. Buckley Jr., Russell Kirk, Paul Weyrich and hosts of others.

Because his sympathies run more to the liberal than to the conservative side, Morris seriously misreads and underestimates the impact of Pope John Paul II in two badly flawed chapters, Theological Visions and The Struggle with Sexuality. He does not really inform himself of the views of John Paul II, who is the most philosophical and articulate pope in 300 years. He never really asks, “Why does the pope believe what he believes? What are his actual arguments?” but he contents himself too often with dismissively snide remarks made by others. This is a real failure.

Having dedicated his pontificate to the task of uniting Europe; having presided over the defeat of Soviet communism, the church’s worst foe in centuries; having become the first universal, planetary pastor; having published encyclical after encyclical, plus a best-selling collection of personal reflections and the first new catechism in 450 years, John Paul II may be the most accomplished pope ever. He has won a reputation for being the one churchman in the world who fearlessly preaches hard truths without yielding an inch to cultural winds (which, as he knows, tend to shift quickly). To people everywhere, the Catholic Church, mostly thanks to him, unflinchingly stands for something.

Conversions to Catholicism are running extremely high. At the Easter Mass in some cathedrals, unprecedented hundreds are being baptized into the faith. Los Angeles alone, mostly (but not only) by immigration, is gaining as many as 100,000 new Catholics a year.

As Morris’ narrative makes clear, leadership and discipline have always been good omens for a next chapter in the long history of the Catholic Church. As is true of the U.S. Navy Seals or of any other spirited organization, discipline instills high morale, and difficulties bring exhilaration. I am much more positive about Pope John Paul II than Morris and more upbeat about the near future, but otherwise I heartily congratulate him.