How I Lost the Faith and Found the Spirit, Part II: Discovery

The first preadolescent thought that I had about my received Catholic faith’s relationship to the outside world was this:  Gee, my friends–Jeff, David, Don, Mark, Tim–are all going to hell when they die.

My family was the only Catholic family in my wooded country neighborhood among the corn fields and pastures outside of town.  I had learned that all of the several other families there were Protestant.  According to what I was being taught in my religion classes at St. Margaret Mary elementary school, since my friends had not been saved by Catholic baptism as babies, they were all condemned to an eternal afterlife of hellfire.  I was pretty sure that they did not know this. 

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Oddly enough, this thought did not create an existential crisis for me.  Somehow I was able to carry two incompatible ideas at the same time in my young head:  That these were good and happy boys whom I liked, and that they were eternally damned.  I saw no contradiction in these facts.  My faith was already hard set.  It permitted no worldly contradictions, so there were no contradictions.

Until there were.  My first experience of such tension involved my parents’ troubled marriage (which I have described elsewhere).  One day not long after I had begun my Catholic high school, my mother was telling me how distressed she was at my father’s ongoing unfaithful behavior.  It was a familiar event.  I had been her sounding board on this problem for some years by then, and this time I finally asked her whether she had talked about it with our parish priest.  To my surprise, she said she had.  I asked, “What did he say?”  She replied, “He told me to pray about it.”

My heart sank.  In the face of all of her endless pain, all our pastor had to offer was prayer.  My mother had been praying about this for years by then.  She always prayed–every night on her knees at her bed until she died at age 83.  I didn’t realize it until she answered my question, but I had asked it in the hopes that he might offer some worldly wisdom.  At least marriage counseling so that my father would have to face her pain and his misconduct before a third party or, failing that, my parents’ separation.

But of course our priest’s tool kit for marital distress was extraordinarily limited.  After all, he could not counsel divorce, which the Church prohibited, even if the marriage was in obvious failure and was badly harming one spouse and four children over a long period of time.  For the first time I realized that my Church had not only failed my family, but also that it could do real harm to good, faithful people.

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Moments like this built up slowly but regularly as I coursed through my teens and early twenties.  One high school episode in particular stunned me.   Because my family moved from Indiana to Minnesota at Christmastime in 1965, in the middle of my junior year, I had to transfer from my Catholic high school to a small public high school just outside of Minneapolis.  On my first day at the new school in January 1966, the guidance counselor walked me to my first period class–algebra–and introduced me to Alan, a student whom he asked to show me to my second period class, French.

Alan and I hit it off immediately, and remain close friends more than 50 years later.  A couple of months later, in chemistry class, another new friend happened to tell me that Alan was Jewish.  My immediate reply was not one of interest or surprise, but one of denial.  “No, he’s not,” I shot back.   Immediately I was shocked by my own words.  Why couldn’t Alan be Jewish?  What was I thinking being “Jewish” was about?

It did not take me long to realize that I had some ill-defined stereotype about Jewishness lodged in my subconscious.  To this day I cannot precisely identify the features of the stereotype I was carrying.  But that day at school two things quickly struck me.  I realized that I had never had a Jewish friend before.  Ensconced in Catholic schools until our move to Minnesota, and surrounded by my Protestant friends in my neighborhood, I had never even met a Jewish boy or girl.  So I had no direct experiences from which to draw any conclusions or stereotypes about Jews.

What I did have were more than 10 years of daily religion classes in school and countless Masses.  I don’t recall any vitriol being spoken directly against Jews in those lessons and sermons.  But the lesson that “the Jews” killed Jesus was certainly a theme.  Otherwise all I recall as a boy is wondering this:  If, as we were constantly taught, Jesus’ death was preordained as the means by which our souls were saved from enslavement by sin, then why was anyone to blame for such a glorious outcome?

I never found an answer to this question and by and by I set it aside.  What my subconscious apparently retained instead was the shadow of an age-old prejudice: that Jews had killed the Christ.  And this simple notion had metastasized into thinking that Alan could not be Jewish because, what?, he clearly did not embody evil?

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I last went to Confession during my third year in college.  I had not done so in a long while by then.  But I still carried a good bit of Catholic guilt about sexuality, and I had recently had a sexual experience with another University student and felt that I should confess it to a priest.

So I went to a church in downtown Minneapolis on a Saturday and walked into the confessional booth.  I began as usual with the unknown priest sitting on the other side of the veiling screen:  “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.”  I was embarrassed to be speaking with a stranger about my sexual “deviance,” so I described it only vaguely.  But he wanted specific details, repeatedly asking me to elaborate on just what I had done with the young woman.

I kept bobbing and weaving as best I could to avoid directly answering his questions, until a dark thought entered my mind:  this guy is sexually excited to hear the details!  I left the confessional never to return, the sacred mystery of Catholic atonement and God’s forgiveness forever lost to me.

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As I grew into my twenties my discoveries became more focused and intentional.  Despite my lingering Catholic guilt about sex, I had come of age in college during the 1960s, and sexual liberation was in the cultural air.  I did not object to or judge my friends’ sexual activities, and I understood and accepted the rapid spread of new methods of birth control, especially the role of “the pill.”

Not so coincidentally, in the summer of 1968 Pope Paul VI issued his encyclical, Humanae vitae (Of Human Life).  It was the Catholic Church’s major statement on artificial methods of birth control.  And it was a blockbuster ruling:  it banned all forms of these methods from use by Catholics.  At the time, though, it did not draw much of my attention.  I was not yet sexually active.

Four years later, in 1972, it finally got my attention.  Just after my college graduation in journalism, I was a cub reporter for a chain of weekly newspapers in the Minneapolis area, working out of the local office just north of the city.  Sitting at my desk one day, and for reasons I cannot recall (serendipity?), a thought occurred to me.  Really, it was more a question and a proposition.  What did American Catholic priests think about the Pope’s ruling on birth control?  Given what I knew about people’s behaviors with birth control, I imagined that priests had a difficult time coping with the gap between those behaviors by many Catholics and Catholic law on the subject.

I also guessed that at least some priests may not be drawing a hard line on the matter, that some of them might not think it a sin to use artificial birth control and might say as much to their congregants if asked.  So to my managing editor at my paper I tossed the story idea of asking area priests what they thought of the Church’s prohibition.  She quickly sent me out to do just that.

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On February 23, 1972, I published a full-page report on the results of my interviews with eight members of the Catholic clergy.  They ranged from a bishop to an official of the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis to several parish priests.  I discussed each of the interviews in separate stories in my report.  The results ranged from faithful support of the encyclical’s ban, to a “don’t ask/don’t tell” take on the matter, to an interpretation that the Pope’s ruling did not constitute a total ban on artificial methods of birth control.

The clearest support for the ban came from the Archdiocese official, unsurprising given his formal role in the hierarchy of Catholic governance.  Even he, though, imagined a potential crack in the Church’s condemnation, that one day, “If science can develop a method in tune with the natural law, then the Church is willing to underwrite this thing.”  I note only that this abstract view makes the “crack” vanishingly small.

Another priest, designated by the pope as a monsignor for his exceptional service to the Church, immediately took a firm line:  “I can’t change Church law, I have to stick by it . . . An encyclical is the teaching of the Church, and we can’t be changing that.”  But this elderly priest suggested a quirky safety valve for Catholics who were using medicinal or mechanical means of birth control:  their consciences.  If they were practicing birth control with a clear conscience, there was no sin against God.  He said that unless parishioners ask whether it is alright to use birth control, “we don’t interfere.  But if they ask, we have to correct their consciences” as to the immorality of artificial birth control.  And so corrected, these seekers would be committing sin by continuing to use birth control.  “Sometimes,” he said, “it’s better to keep quiet about it for a while.”

At the other end of the spectrum of priestly views on birth control stood the director of the University of Minnesota’s Newman (Catholic) Center.  Contradicting the plain language of the encyclical, he asserted that, “I don’t think (the Pope) forbids every form of of artificial birth control and I’m sure he doesn’t forbid every form under pain of mortal sin.”  His moral flexibility on the point may have been related to the fact that his parishioners were primarily university students of my generation.

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What did my 22-year-old self take from all of this?  Mainly this.  Even when stated in clear language, the Church’s most profound rulings were subject to interpretation precisely where they met American Catholics in their real lives: in confession and counseling with their local priests.  This did not surprise me.  Rules from on high often misfire when they seep into the context of people’s actual lives and needs, because rulers often misunderstand those lives and needs.  And priests on the ground are routinely confronted with people’s real lives, not their imagined or idealized ones.

In fact I took some comfort in the variability of these priests’ approaches to the papal encyclical on birth control.  It revealed some progress since my old parish priest had been unable to free himself enough to help relieve my mother’s pain years before.

But it also highlighted for me the very human control of religious strictures.  It left me even more disturbed by the Church’s other prohibitions around sex and gender: that priests are forbidden to marry and that women are forbidden to be priests.

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Note to reader:  If you would like to have a look at Part I of this short series, you can find it here.  Part III is forthcoming.