why
why, though
A theme that keeps coming up in these essays, besides oblique references to MCR albums or David Lynch films, is my inability to properly articulate why I’m Catholic, and especially why I’m still Catholic now, when so much of the church in American public life is actively harming vulnerable people and homilies in my neighborhood have like a 30% hit rate. Why am I still doing it, why do I still care one way or another, maybe it’s a response to boredom, or a response to suffering, or because all my family’s there anyways, or because I’m too lazy to learn about any other religions. For the past at-least-fifteen years, I’ve thought a lot about one passage from one book as an answer to “why are you Catholic?” The book is the 1940 novel The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene, who was famously a chill and normal guy that everyone liked hanging out with, and who wrote this very powerful novel about Catholicism.
The unnamed protagonist of Power has had a much harder time being Catholic than I ever had, because he’s an alcoholic Mexican priest on the run from his government, which in the 1930s was violently suppressing the Catholic church. At one point early in the story, a family shelters him, and one of the children asks the priest if it wouldn’t just be easier if the priest just renounced his faith, so he wouldn’t have to worry about being caught and executed anymore. Another writer might have had the priest say that he couldn’t possibly renounce his faith, that God was testing him, that his faith was the one thing he had to hold onto in times like these, that this is, ultimately, the struggle that all of us may face some day and we need to be ready for it. But Greene’s priest shrugs off the question, responding only that “it’s impossible. There’s no way. I’m a priest. It’s out of my power.” That’s the most interesting response to that question I’ve ever heard or read. Why are you Catholic, why are you still Catholic when it’s hard, why are you Catholic even when it could and probably will cost you your life, and the guy’s response is to just say it’s not really up to him in the first place.
Shūsaku Endō is a Japanese Catholic novelist that Greene greatly admired (and who greatly admired Greene), and who got called “the Japanese Graham Greene” in a lot of reviews of his international hit novel Silence, also about priests having a very negative experience with the local government (Martin Scorsese adapted Silence into a film in 2016). In the translator’s preference in my copy of Silence, there’s an excerpt from a magazine interview Endo did where he said:
“I received baptism when I was a child…in other words, my Catholicism was a kind of ready-made suit…I had to decide either to make this ready-made suit fit my body or get rid of it and find another suit that fitted…There were many times when I felt I wanted to get rid of my Catholicism, but I was finally unable to do so. It is not just that I did not throw it off, but that I was unable to throw it off. The reason for this must be that it had become a part of me after all. The fact that it had penetrated me so deeply in my youth was a sign, I thought, that it had, in part at least, become coextensive with me.”
Why are you Catholic, why are you still Catholic when it’s hard, and the guy’s response is to say that he tried to stop and he just couldn’t. Almost as if it was never really up to him in the first place.
I have no real reason why I should still care about my church or what it does or what happens in it or more generally what our last subject called “the awful demands of God”. I certainly have it way easier than either of the above two fictional characters did, so it’s not like there’s a ton of pressure for me to leave, but there’s also no real pressure for me to stay. But I have tried to stop caring about these things and I have failed, almost as if it’s not up to me. Perhaps this way of thinking about Catholicism will be helpful for you, and if it’s not, check out the MCR single “Boy Division” which will not be helpful for thinking about Catholicism but is a fun song to listen to and is more on-brand for my whole thing.