Why I Am Still a Catholic.

Edited by Kevin and Marilyn Ryan Riverhead Books, $13, 322 pp.

Michael O. Garvey

When Thomas Merton remarked that it takes all kinds to make a world religion, he may have had in mind exactly the sort of full-throated and polyphonous chorus of voices which issues from these two books. Kunkel and the Ryans have provided reassurance that the song of the great church is still able to subsume and even exalt the worst whining, howling, croaking, and caterwauling. And God knows there is plenty of all that on offer here.

The Ryans have selected "twenty-five storytellers from among the famous, the near-famous, and the soon-to-be famous" to demonstrate the validity of their conviction "that one can be a success, can do good work in the world and still be a vital Catholic." The sort of reader who responds cynically to such claims may derive a certain furtive amusement from the pedestrian remarks of NBC reporter Maria Shriver; Maryland's lieutenant governor, Kathleen Kennedy Townsend; Boston Celtic color commentator Bob Cousy; former treasury secretary William Simon; and Indy 500 champion Mario Andretti, among others.

In presenting expressions of Catholic faith solely from "accomplished Americans," this anthology provides an opportunity to marvel anew at the prophetic wisdom of Pope Leo XIII's denunciation of the "phantom heresy," Americanism. It also tends to justify Pope John Paul II's restraint in celebrating the vaunted "vibrancy" of the Catholic church in this country. Admitting that the Americanist controversy is slightly more complicated than that, if Catholicism truly did require as priggish a witness as most of these ascendant Americans are inclined to recommend, I doubt that Jesus would enlist, let alone Karol Wojtyla.

But the very gates of hell can't prevail against our church, and the pomposity which pervades the Ryans' collection is relieved by several pieces which, to borrow a phrase from one of them, the late Walker Percy, "deliver religion from the merely edifying." In his numinous essay, "Sacraments," for instance, Andre Dubus provides a detailed account of an interior life made excruciatingly comprehensible by the Eucharist. It is a life blemished by sin, burdened by physical pain and handicap, and broken open by grace. Confined by injury to a wheelchair, the writer packs school lunches for his daughters, knowing that "the sandwiches are sacraments. Not the miracle of transubstantiation, but certainly parallel with it, moving in the same direction. If I could give my children my body to eat, again and again without losing it, my body like the loaves and fishes going endlessly into mouths and stomachs, I would do it. And each motion is a sacrament, this holding of plastic bags, of knives, of bread, of cutting board, this pushing of the chair, this spreading of mustard on bread...even if I do not feel or acknowledge it, this is a sacrament...it simply means that I know what I am doing in the presence of God."

Readers who believe, as I do, that Dr. Bernard Nathanson's conversion from prominent abortionist to prominent defender of the unborn is one of the few heartening stories in one of the ugliest periods of American history, will be interested in his account of his conversion to Catholicism two years ago. The story he tells of his first flirtations with the church, lurking as a fascinated nonparticipant in Manhattan parish Masses, includes this agreeable observation: "And there was that moment in the Mass when each turned to his neighbor - most likely a stranger - and shook the proffered hand, murmuring 'Peace be with you' or responded 'and with you.' It was a moment of human contact, of touching, of warm flesh upon flesh - as welcome to me as the heat and security and utter safety of a mother's enveloping love."

Now safely enwombed in that love, Nathanson is able to write: "Why am I a Catholic? I give you in all seriousness, and with no 'smartmouthedness' Dr. Walker Percy's only half-facetious answer: What else is there?" The reference is to one of Percy's best and most durable essays, a characteristically wry and fierce apologia which is the only posthumous piece in the Ryans' collection. For Percy, the survivor's plight in the "age of the theorist consumer" at the close of "the most scientifically advanced, savage, democratic, inhuman, sentimental, murderous century in human history" is to be a pilgrim in search of signs. There are only two signs of significance in this post-modern desert, oneself and the Jews, and "by 'the Jews,' I mean not only Israel, the exclusive people of God, but the worldwide ecclesia instituted by one of them, God become man, a Jew."

But the legal scholar John E. Coons best articulates the intuitions and instincts animating most of us ordinary churchgoing barbarians: "I take a rather conventional and uncomplicated view of what is Catholic, standing roughly amidships and satisfying the magisterial litmus test," he writes. "That is, I am content not only with the recognized versions of the creed but even with papal infallibility, though wanting the wit to grasp exactly what it is. To my credulous mind, Scripture and common sense conspire toward some unique species of authority within the church. If ! am sometimes unclear about its nature, and just when it has been used, I am nevertheless prepared to honor it up to that final barrier called conscience that no pope would ask me to betray. So there you have it. Count me in."

Me, too. And it is with shiftless folks like us that most of the twenty-eight priests Thomas Kunkel interviewed for his provocative and valuable book habitually concern themselves. A careful - dare I say accomplished? - journalist, he seems to have mastered a formidable amount of statistical material, and much of his narrative is underwritten, but not overburdened by it. What is most absorbing in Enormous Prayers is, of course, the voices of the priests themselves, and if Kunkel's apparently random selection is truly representative, Catholics in America are far better served by our shrinking clergy than we deserve to be. Despite the well-documented stresses (celibacy, officialdom, time, flagging morale, parochial discontent, and all those sexual scandals) afflicting their all but beleaguered apostolate, most of these men admirably negotiate modernity, acclimating themselves and their flocks to an alien culture without capitulating to it.

Father Thomas Wenski, for example, who works in Miami among deracinated Haitians, regards American secularism and voodoo as equally pagan mission fields. "You might be a practicing Christian," he says, "but that doesn't mean the secular world view doesn't influence you. You get sick, you don't think of going to Lourdes first. You think of going to your doctor. Same thing in the Haitian world. You might have people who are practicing Catholics, [but] in a lot of ways the Haitian world view is that things happen because of evil spirits, evil plotting, the evil eye - stuff like that. So sometimes people who have the faith, they hedge their bets. What you have to do is witness the gospel in both contexts."

Of course, the denizens of our age, of Percy's "age of the theorist consumer," many of whom are "accomplished Catholics," call upon witch doctors and Catholic priests alike to give a quaint, maudlin, and ultimately irrelevant witness, a sort of comforting homage to a simpler and more innocent time and world view. That so many of these fine men fail in that idolatrous task is cause for rejoicing.

Michael O. Garvey is the author of Finding Fault (Thomas More).