The Education of an American Catholic.

Anyone seriously interested in the fate of the Roman Catholic church would profit from reading Paul Beeching's sad account of how he lost the faith of Holy Angels (his grammar school). It is, of course, an individual journey toward disillusion, but at least in the case of this reader, the pathway is familiar indeed. Beeching and I are about the same age, we grew up in Gary and Chicago respectively, underwent early education in "devotional Catholicism," and both recall Luke Appling's talent for hitting foul balls.

The "devotional Catholicism" of the prewar, pre-Vatican II church seems to Beeching (and to myself when the wind is brisk) somewhere between daffy and disastrous. Beeching has a particular fix on Saint Blaise and wonders how many modern Catholics congregate to ward off catarrh with crossed candles. Perhaps the most telling anecdote in the book is Beeching at age twelve or so asking his mother if she had noticed what the prayers at the Sorrowful Mother Novena actually said: "I mean they keep talking about how you have never ceased to offend God and how you should be thankful he has not annihilated you already. Do you believe that?"

"Of course not...that's just a prayer. Now where did we leave the car?"

Beeching's title is a deliberate echo of The Education of Henry Adams. In his own modest way, Beeching compares his Catholic loss of faith to the loss of Protestant conviction experienced by Adams. Where Adams fancies the Virgin Mother as counter to the mechanical "dynamo" of the present world, Beeching is clear that the dynamo won out and he cannot settle for an aesthetic romance with the Lady of Chartres.

Beeching is no literary stylist or profound spiritual writer, but he has an awkward candor which needs to be fairly considered. This is a plain, unvarnished tale which speaks straightforwardly about the bizarre quality of so much traditional devotional life and the arguments (from pulpit to textbook Thomism) which were used to defend it. I expect that there are many Catholics (or ex-) of our generation whose spiritual journey has descended along the same slippery slope--and if they haven't reached the same denials, they should certainly ask why not.

For all his criticisms, often bitter, Beeching is not Christopher Durang malignantly skewering Sister Mary Ignatius. He confesses a deep nostalgia for the traditional church and suggests that if he were to be a believer in 1993, he would be with Cardinal Ratzinger. What he appreciates in Ratzinger is the cardinal's insistence on "the supernatural." It is the loss of any belief in the supernatural which Beeching develops as the central theme of his own "loss of faith" and which, he insists, is the central reality (and problem) for the post-Vatican II church.

Beeching senses loss of the supernatural on a broad scale: not just odd devotions to dubious saints, but the whole main story of Christian life. His own rejection of the supernatural stems from two sources. Although a professor of English literature, he studied more than enough philosophy, post-the-Jesuits at Saint Louis University, to accept the basic skepticism of David Hume and the logical positivists. Perhaps more important than his own philosophical predilection, however, is his clear perception that the average Catholic of the day gives not a thought to the supernatural. He quotes Rahner: "How many still have, deep in their hearts, the Christian fear of death and the last judgment? How many are capable of feeling desperately worried ... when some Catholic acquaintance of theirs dies without the last sacraments?"

Beeching thinks that Rahner certainly didn't worry about such matters. (He regards Rahner as "an extreme example of minimalism"--not in the same universe with Holy Angels!) Worse yet, Beeching charges that the Fathers of Vatican II abandoned the supernatural. "As the bishops discussed the details of the church's pilgrimage, they seemed to see it primarily as a horizontal mission of material salvation understandable to all creeds, the kingdom of the here and now."

What Beeching regards as loss of the supernatural (at least as devotional Catholicism would have it) is, I believe, altogether common. What makes Beeching so compelling is his valiant try to be honest about the loss. He has read widely in a variety of revisionist theologians and biblical scholars--most of whom he sees as the successors of early twentieth-century Catholic Modernists. He often finds himself agreeing with their conclusions. (He ended his teaching career happily teaching the New Testament as the hodgepodge of texts and traditions it represents.) What Beeching cannot accept is that these minimal/critical conclusions have much at all to do with the Great Church. Thus he says of Thomas Merton: "By the end he had accepted so much of the new theology that only a thin affirmation of a God in Nature and a reverence for tradition kept him in the church."

I think Beeching is substantially correct in locating the problem of the post-Vatican II church somewhere in the region of the "supernatural." Modem church sermons can certainly be earnest in pursuit of social justice--but what do all those odd New Testament stories have to do with South America? Can't I have my good works without fantastic faiths?

I do not finally agree with Beeching's conclusion about the content of the new theology, but I do agree that it is often so buried in phenomenologese or overwhelmed with footnotes to all the Fathers, that the plain conclusion is substantially (and discreetly?) obscured. Beeching much admires Dietrich Bonhoeffer whom he sees as the prophet of "the death of God." Personally, I have always cherished Bonhoeffer's comment about his experience at Union Theological Seminary. He said the great lesson of his year in America was "that God had not revealed himself solely to German theologians." Beeching's text draws an American-style "bottom line" to what might well be gathered from some of the new theologies.

Is Beeching correct about the loss of public interest in the supernatural? It seems to me that a taste for something supernatural (or at least nonnatural) is everywhere in evidence. Rahner is probably correct about the Last Judgment, but what are we to make of the cult of the rock band the Grateful Dead? Rudolph Otto defined "the holy" as mysterium, tremendum, et fascinans. Maybe Beeching should have attended more rock concerts and read less Rahner. The BVM may no longer be mysterious, tremendous, and fascinating, but MTV certainly is to lots of hearty youth. Pick your own Madonna.

From the standpoint of David Hume, rock and religion are equally suspect. (Hume favored "the calm passions.") While I admire Beeching's assiduous pursuit of philosophy, his allegiance to logical positivism seems to me only slightly less out of date than adherence to traditional Thomism. Modem "analytic" philosophy (post-Wittgenstein), while hardly enthralled with theological issues, is at least more broad-minded about the many, varied, and often peculiar uses of language. Maybe even the language of prayer.

Is there a sober theory for the supernatural? I hope so, because I agree with Beeching and Ratzinger that it is the crux of the church. At the same time, I have no immediate sympathy for the supernatural of the curator of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith--or the Grateful Dead for that matter. Those supernaturals seem all too often not supernatural but just plain strange.

This is no place to attempt a full discussion of the supernatural, but it does seem to me that beings who write autobiographies somehow fall out of the merely natural set of categories. Beeching faithfully records his first taste of Kool-Aid. In the great impersonal machinery of Nature, who cares? Only when Kool-Aid is transubstantiated into the person of Paul Q. Beeching in this act of memory is it of any significance.

I am quite convinced that any attempt to redescribe human experience in naturalistic categories is impossible. The problem is choosing the category for the "other-than-natural." Demurely, one may point to homo faber and suggest that it is in human artifice that humanity springs off of nature for good or ill. Flamboyantly, one may assert that human beings are "absurd." We are a sort of cosmic joke or disaster, beings whose loves and hopes exceed what nature would prudently constrain. Or, of course, one may think that these very loves and hopes reveal something supernatural about human history. The fault of so-called devotional Catholicism is that on its face (or with the passage of time and culture) it is disconnected from the deep currents of human life, creating a kind of extrinsic, supernatural "game" of indulgences and devotions.

Beeching's main story is disillusion with the church. There is a parallel text which is worth mentioning: an almost equal disillusion with his chosen academic profession. For a time he had hoped that a Newmanesque pursuit of "liberal education" would offer substitute salvation. He has concluded that no one--including most of his fellow faculty--had any more real interest in the great tradition than modem man has in the Great Church.

This disillusion with academia may be related to his problem of faith. Coming to religion from academic theology or antitheology (Thomist, Postivist, Modernist, etc.) is a likely loser from the start. One of the sins fostered by Beeching's brand of Catholicism is casting faith as a set of true propositions which could be proved by the literal historicity of the Bible or Thomistic deductions. The Baltimore Catechism and Q.E.D.! That sort of faith is a supernatural add on to natural science. But faith is not a "spiritual science."

In physics the more facts we know about atoms, the better; so in devotional Catholicism: the more truths you accept, the better. "Minimal Catholicism" as Beeching regards it is not so much a drastic reduction in the number of truths held to the vanishing point--it is an attempt to recapture the core structure of belief in sin and salvation. Rahner's effort is not a reduction of faith facts to a minimum; it is making sure that we understand the "grammar of faith" before we utter its "truths." (A point I tried to make in my review of The Catechism of the Catholic Faith in Commonweal, May 7, 1993.)

I have said that Beeching has the great virtue of attempted honesty. But the trouble is knowing how to be honest about either faith or un-faith. Beeching worries about a revisionist church following him in his unbelief like "the hound of heaven." "I couldn't even defect properly." He concludes that one may need "a grace for disbelief." Amen.