Op-Ed - Jim Moore

Rocking the Cradle Catholic
If we don't grow up, who will?

All right. Somebody has to admit it. It might as well be me. I sometimes feel incredibly stupid while reading certain Catholic journals. Once the Latin and the Greek and the litany of great European Catholic thinkers start parading by, I feel like the only guy at a chancery cocktail party who missed the movie everybody is talking about. And when the article is written by some guy who converted a week ago, already has the entire Catechism memorized, and quotes Aquinas as if he were an old Italian uncle from Newark — well, I start thinking about calling RCIA and starting from scratch.

You guessed it. I'm a thirty-something cradle Catholic.

I belong to that poorly catechized generation you hear so much about; a generation of God's children in sore need of doctrinal booster shots. Greek is Greek to me, European Catholic thought as foreign as the French habit of drinking coffee from a bowl. Where I come from, hot liquid in a bowl is "soup." And if it tastes like coffee, you've got problems. And as for Latin . . . well, I don't know my quid from a quo in the ground.

This is not meant to criticize the intellectual level of my betters. I learn from them monthly, bimonthly and quarterly. This is rather a plea for the well-versed to evangelize the unrehearsed in plainer fashion. You may just flush out some young souls in need of intellectual outreach; people educated to the point of reflexive skepticism, allowed to mature without significant theological challenge.

Does the following dossier sound at all familiar?

I attended Catholic schools from K to B.A. My doctrinal education ended with the Q&A on my Confirmation quiz card. Much of the 1970s high school religion which followed stressed sociology over theology, emotion over intellect, Jesus my Buddy over Christ my Savior.

On then to a Catholic university, where I took a few Faith-related courses, but spent most of my time on my major and related areas (carousing, poker, corporal works of idiocy). Upon graduation, I tucked my light catechetical baggage into a corner of my mind and hit the bricks, to earn my keep and keep the basic mechanics of the Faith.

I am not crying victim, mind you. It's just that my background taught me more about the practicalities of religious practice than it did about understanding even the simplest doctrine. And we the simple now desperately need to understand, because we are fast becoming Catholicism's primary American standard bearers. Declining vocations and the graying of the priesthood can mean nothing else.

George Weigel has written, "Few Americans of the 21st century will inherit their Faith . . . Catholics in America in the early years of the third millennium will choose to be Catholics through a deliberate decision. And many of them will be stronger for having self-consciously chosen . . . the Faith" (Crisis, April 1997).

Who will show those decision-makers the Catholic choice? They will choose Catholicism over denominationalism only if it can be proved worthwhile by people whose lives resemble their own. They will need the example of a well-versed laity. Too many of us, however, simply do not have the tools of evangelism.

Awhile back, I attempted to shore up a disillusioned friend against some damage done to his Faith by the moribund state of certain parishes in his area. This disillusionment was happening in the shadow of his wife's well-oiled, well-financed Protestant congregation. I drove home the importance of Catholicism's essential truth over human, cosmetic and administrative shortcomings, but fell far short of reviving his faith. Banging on the table probably didn't help, but hey, he got my Irish up. And I had reached the limits of my apologetics. I wanted a Berlitz-style doctrinal phrase book to translate what my heart wanted to say.

Indeed, the conversational command of doctrine has passed from Catholic America over time like an immigrant family's native language. How many post-Vatican II Catholics could even make it through the Apostle's Creed without missing at least one line? How many, if they made it as far as "the Communion of Saints" would know that they're supposed to be a part of it? How many would describe it as the really good wafers they use at the Vatican?

In fact, the officially saintly members of that communion are a prime example of a squandered inheritance. By the time I hit high school, the saints had become pretty much like the Brooklyn Dodgers, a team your parents used to root for that had passed into league history. "You shoulda seen Tony Padua play, son. Never once did I see him lose a fly ball in the lights." The role those souls can play in people's lives has been reduced to a mere tale . . . which even as a tale remains largely untold.

And with every generation, the Catholic inheritance is squandered further. Most of the children in my wife's religious education class never get to Sunday Mass. Their parents don't go, and in suburbia, a kid goes nowhere without parental transport. While desperate to get their kids confirmed, parents seem indifferent toward teaching them to affirm. It's soccer over the sacraments every time.

I can't help thinking that at least some of this distaste for religious practice has to do with ignorance of doctrine; ignorance of the thought behind the motions today's parents were made to go through as children. They were told that the motions are important, but not necessarily why they are. As a result, too many fully grown cradle Catholics remain catechetically in the cradle.

Those cradles need to be rocked — and none too gently — over the threshold of the third millennium.



Jim Moore (jimmoore@nac.net), is the author of the play Acts & Contrition, available through Baker's Plays of Boston.