Posted on 05/16/2004 11:48:27 AM PDT by AskStPhilomena
There is an air of pride that circulates in the halls of Academe and they who walk its corridors cannot help but inhale great draughts of it. It swells the head yet compresses the brain, leaving little entrance for large and generous thoughts. As it descends to our lower parts, it excites the tongue but chills the heart, evoking endless streams of uncharitable babble.
My experience in college confirms all of the above, yet I was innocent of the knowledge when I entered those halls as a vulnerable undergraduate in the heady days of 1967. The school which I had chosen and which, with some reluctance, acceded to my choice, was in the custody of the Jesuits, and several of my friends had sought and been denied admission there, a fact that lent some prestige to my election. This occurred late in the cycle of admissions when there remained but a few places to be filled and candidates for the lower tiered slots were gleaned from the stubble of applicants not yet cast out with the chaff.
During my interview with the pleasant and mildly condescending priest who was to recommend my acceptance, it was made clear to me that were I to be received into the school such a happy event would be due chiefly to the dean's largesse and only in some small way attributable to my meager merits. As no vanity goes unpunished, I was granted a place in the freshman class.
And so I began my higher education as a kind of poor relation in the great house of a more respectable family. I was a 'day-hop,' a demeaning term applied to those local students living in the city with their families and daily arriving at school by car or public transportation and departing by the same means in late afternoon, long before the social life of the campus commenced. But all of these disadvantages were as nil when set beside the exhilaration of being a college student, the first in my family to ascend to so lofty a status. My success was considered assured in my native precincts and, although I was a humble English major, one of my uncles, either embarrassed by or mistaken about this fact, always introduced me as an engineering student, so that the legend got abroad that I would someday build bridges and highways. I had few opportunities and little success in correcting this misconception and so let it stand, enjoying for a few brief years an undeserved esteem in my neighborhood.
Although college was even then considered more as a trade school and less as a locus of wisdom, the world of ideas fascinated me and I devoted little attention to my possible occupation as I pursued what appeared to be the higher truths. The core curriculum still re- quired several credits in theology and I was thrilled by the high-sounding description of my first course in this field: Biblical Exegesis. I had to look up the second word in the dictionary. This was truly higher education.
The course was taught by a Jesuit of some attainments, including a doctorate from the University of Fribourg. Although we are told not to judge a book by its cover, I would oppose to that counsel against rash judgment a lesser known adage: Every man is sooner or later responsible for his own face. Father C., though not yet 40, was bald and bespectacled, with sagging circles about his weak eyes and a fleshy face with little definition. If God had ever given joy to his youth, Father C. had quickly shirked it off and hastened to premature middle age as to that habitation in life's time where his temperament felt most at home. A great world weariness appeared to weigh upon him and he had the air of one more bound by duty than moved by love. His mono- tonal lectures proved very relaxing for some of his auditors and not a few times did he have to pause and nod for someone to shake the elbow that held the head of a snorer. I, however, re- mained animated, dutifully taking notes in class and, in my evening study, reading the lessons with a diligence that included delving into the cited passages and the textbook's appendices. Herein lay the cause of the troubles that were to come upon me.
One day Father C. made a remark that unsettled me for reasons that had more to do with an unarticulated sensus fidei than with any clear apprehension of heterodoxy.
"God reveals Himself to people in different places and at different times in different ways. The meaning of Revelation is conditioned by particular history and culture."
He paused after saying this, lowering his head and looking over his eyeglasses as though checking for reaction. There was none, and he continued. I had written down the remark verbatim and pondered it in the light of what I had been taught as a boy. I had never heard before that God's revealed Truth is culturally relative. On the contrary, it had been dinned into me by many pure souls who loved God and had consecrated their lives to teaching His children that Truth does not change. It may come to be understood more fully by personal reflection and the insights of blessed intellects, but it remains now what it always was and always will be.
I scanned the textbook that evening, searching for an explanation of Father C.'s remark that might remove my unease. It did not then occur to me that a priest- teacher of the sacred science would deliberately oppose the magisterium. While looking through the index I happened upon the word, "historicism," and the accompanying entry that referred the reader to an appendix that contained a brief explanation of St. Pius X's combat with modernist scripture scholars, a list of the 65 propositions of Lamentabili and the Oath Against Modernism. I read through the appendix once, then returned to certain passages again and again. I was particularly struck by condemned propositions 59 and 62 in Lamentabili:
"59. Christ did not teach a determined body of doctrine applicable to all times and all men, but rather inaugurated a religious movement ad- apted to or to be adapted to different times and places.
"62. The chief articles of the Apostles' Creed did not have the same sense for the Christians of the first ages as they have for the Christians of our times."
I turned these propositions over in my mind, considered them in every light and, setting Father C.'s remark beside them, could not distinguish any difference in content. I found this disturbing, but not nearly so disturbing as the realization that Father C. must have taken the Oath Against Modernism, which contains these words in its penultimate paragraph:
"I firmly hold, then, and shall hold to my dying breath the belief of the Fathers in the charism of truth, which certainly is, was, and always will be in the succession of the episcopacy from the apostles. The purpose of this is, then, not that dogma may be tailored according to what seems better and more suited to the culture of each age; rather, that the absolute and immutable truth preached by the apostles from the beginning may never be believed to be different, may never be understood in any other way."
I found myself in a novel situation. Never in my life had I questioned anything a priest or nun had told me, so absolute was my confidence in the truthfulness and loyalty of consecrated souls. And who was I? A bus driver's son who lived in a rowhome; an 18-year-old undergraduate who came to the great campus from a none too distinguished inner city high school; a nobody. And there was Father C. -- a Jesuit, a linguist, a biblical scholar, the holder of ad- vanced degrees from prestigious universities here and abroad. What was I to say to him? How was I to say it? Yet I knew I must speak, if only to have him clear my callow mind of its misapprehensions, for I still hoped and half-believed that he could do this.
At the following lecture, he asked, as was his custom, if there were any questions about the preceding material before he continued. I raised my hand and was acknowledged:
"Father, am I correct in understanding that in your last lecture you said that Revelation is meant to be understood in different ways by people of different times and cultures?"
"Yes."
"Father, can you explain to me how that statement differs from the condemned propositions 59 and 62 in Lamentabili and how it can be reconciled with the next to last paragraph in the Oath Against Modernism?"
I had said something. That was obvious. Even those who had settled in for another soporific session sat up straight and listened for a response. Father C.'s mouth tightened and his eyes bore down on me with an animation we had not witnessed before. We waited, he kept silent for almost a minute, then he spoke.
"If you have to ask that question, I can only assume that you haven't the intelligence to be in my classroom."
I felt perplexed and humiliated. My classmates were astonished. Father C. was obviously flustered. He stumbled his way through that day's lecture, losing his place several times, starting a remark, then stopping it. He left many sentences unfinished.
"What was that all about?" a friend asked me after class ended and Father C. had departed. A group of curious classmates had gathered to hear my explanation. I had none.
"I don't really know," I said.
"If I were you, I'd drop this class," my friend advised and the others assented.
But I was too far into the semester to drop the course, so I endured Father C.'s disdain, kept my peace and, in the end, while those who had dozed through his lectures received As, I was dealt a punitive C, a grade that denied me the dean's list.
I had known nothing of modernism and little about St. Pius X before Father C. made his fateful remark. I was to learn more in the following years as I took a succession of courses during which it became obvious that the very men who were sworn to uphold and pass on Catholic teaching had become its determined enemies. Something had happened to the Jesuits; something had happened to the Church. The terra firma of Catholicism on which stood the humble people in the working-class neighborhood where I lived turned into quicksand when I stepped onto my college campus. And then, with the changes in the Mass, the doubt endemic in the classroom infected the people in the pews.
I had learned to my dismay that I could not trust my priest-teachers to have the faith. Then, the people in my neighborhood began to look with suspicion upon their pastors and the blatant novelties they were told simply represented a better adhesion to tradition. Doubt turned to derision and ended in defection.
It is no trick now to find condemned propositions in Vatican documents and bishops' pastorals and, admixed with ambivalence, even in todays papal speeches and writings. Rather than as a warning against modernism, Lamen- tabili appears to have been inverted and serves as a blueprint for the new theology. Catholics wearied by their wayward prelates have become almost shock-proof, and heretical clergy appear somehow less detestable than homosexual predators and child molesters and hit- and-run bishops. My en- counter with Father C., in retrospect, was but a small portent of the unimaginable cataclysm that was to plunge the Church into the direst doctrinal and disciplinary crisis in her history.
But one thing puzzles me.
Why do men pledge their lives to love that which they hate? Why do priests who reject the Church's teachings pretend a loyalty to them? Why do they become priests at all? I cannot understand this. It is as though a man took for his wife a woman he despised, so that he might spend his marriage insulting, de- meaning and destroying her. I can furnish plausible psychological explanations for such confounding behavior, but the ontological explanation -- the reason for its very existence -- appears to rest in the dark impenetrable heart of evil, what St. Paul calls the mystery of iniquity.
More than three decades after my confrontation with Father C., I learned that he is still a priest, still teaching Scripture at a Jesuit college. This discovery came to me by way of a newspaper article. A local synagogue had invited Father C. to address the congregation on the state of Jewish-Catholic relations in light of the Pope's Mass of Pardon, which had then just occurred. According to the article Father C., as was expected, beat his breast over the sins of the Catholic Church, or rather, the sins of unnamed dead Catholics presumed to have persecuted unnamed dead Jews. I rather wished I had been there. I might have asked him to apologize for humiliating a poor undergraduate who once asked him an earnest question he should have answered.
"while those who had dozed through his lectures received As, I was dealt a punitive C, a grade that denied me the dean's list."
Yeah, that's the kind of petty nastiness liberals get up to.
"I might have asked him to apologize for humiliating a poor undergraduate who once asked him an earnest question he should have answered."
He had no answer except, "I am evil," and it's really too much to expect him to be able to deal with that.
Bumpus ad summum
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