The courage to be Catholic when wise men say no

By George A. Kelly

    Where the idea first gained currency, in the United States, that it was easy to be a Christian is hard to say. Further, how one can be a Prodigal Son or a Mary Magdalen and still consider himself a good Catholic is equally mysterious. And, whoever reduced the function of a Good Shepherd to providing sheep with a lot of roving room on their way to pasture did us no favor. In the real Christian world, the Son praised in the Gospels was no longer a Prodigal, and the Mary Magdalen celebrated in the Church’s July 22 liturgy was an overnight convert. And Christ, the foe of all hypocrites, surely was no mere sentimental moralist. Not on the Cross, of all places.

    From the earliest days of Judas the traitor and of Stephen the martyr, a good Christian was (1) one who had faith in the Person who preached a message which earthbound mortals thought ridiculous, (2) particularly when the message promised a great afterlife without assuring believers that heaven on earth was theirs, too. The fact is that Christ performed very few miracles, leaving most of his blind contemporaries blind. (The wise men of our time are not too sure that he did any wonder-works at all.) Furthermore, he warned his followers that faith in him meant a Cross like his, not another Garden of Eden (Matt. 10 and 16). In the earliest churches of Rome, the first Christians were noted for their “obedience of faith” (Rom. 1:5), not for their status in the theater, or in the amphitheater, or in the Senate, or among the gladiators, or at the Roman baths.

    In summary, Christ expected a good Catholic (a) to have that piety which placed God at the center of a believer’s universe, and (b) to have faith that would do works of holiness for Christ’s sake. If faith without good works was dead in that script (James 2:17), then good works without faith in Christ, whatever else they signified, did not a practicing Christian make.

    Given the state of the human condition, from Cain through Constantine down to the Counter-Church revolutionaries of our day, a great deal of work was expected from pastors to form pious and courageous Catholics. Simple Catholics of olden days may not have known how to define the faith or the courage needed to live it, but they demonstrated both better than wise men explained either.

    Permit me to trace the story of how this has been done by the Church, at various times and places, and to tell it in a personal way.

    While on an errand of mercy in 1949, my parents were seriously injured in an automobile accident. When a chief surgeon decided to operate on my 60-year-old mother’s knee, her family physician intervened to say: “Don’t let him do it. He could ruin that leg. The worst thing that can happen to you, if you leave it alone, is that you’ll have a stiff leg the rest of your life.” A pause, and then my mother’s question: “Will I be able to genuflect?” My father, ever the same within a hospital or out, was in the corner of a dark room, thumbing through a black book. Standing in a doorway I posed a question: “What are you doing with that black book?” He looked at me and said: “I’m praying to God for your mother’s recovery.” This man was his parish’s Trustee and co-founder also of his local labor union.

    The offspring of those immigrants, born in America in the early part of the 20th century, were doubly blessed. Partly because, however poor the families were, they were citizens of a country coming into its own as a paradigm of prosperity and civility. Privileged, too, because we were baptized into a Church on the verge of becoming a model of practicing Catholicity for the world. Neither of these statements could have been made of Irish Catholics or their children had the timing been 1850 instead of 1900.

Cullen Catholics

    My parents arrived on Ellis Island in 1908 with 25,000 of their countrymen, already formed as practicing Catholics, thanks largely to the wisdom and courage of one Paul Cardinal Cullen of Dublin. This prelate, almost single-handedly, transformed the impiety of the Irish Church into piety. By the time those Cullen Catholics appeared in New York, the American Church itself was beginning to be recognized worldwide for what Vatican II later called its “works of charity, piety, and the apostolate.” The timing was Ireland’s gift to American Catholicity.

    However, when our more distant forebears headed for America on sailing ships fifty years earlier, they were not considered assets either to their new Church or their new land. John Hughes, New York’s Irish-born bishop (1839-1864), saw them as “the scattered debris of the Irish Nation.” He may have been the shepherd of a large part of two million émigrés from the Emerald Isle, but one historian described those who landed here between 1847 and 1860 as “part of the pre-famine generation of non-practicing Catholics, if they were Catholics at all.” Illiteracy, drunkenness, broken families, bad priests in the homeland, bishops fighting bishops there, and querulous with Rome, too, were hardly the qualities of a Church that would likely be endowed with solid family life or piety. According to Emmet Larkin, little opportunity was given to the Irish citizens of those days to approach the sacraments, and even when they did, often in what he called “filthy cabins,” not churches. Once their kind landed in mid-19th century New York, the jails, the foundling hospitals, and the reformatories were filled in short order with their criminals, their unwed mothers, and their young Irish-American thugs. But those bedraggled ancestors also arrived in a new world where “priests knew not how to obey” and “Catholic laity lived by non-Catholic norms,” or so Church historian Peter Guilday claimed.

    Our parents, coming to John Cardinal Farley, were luckier as Catholics than those who came to John Hughes. They were born after Paul Cullen’s 30 years’ mastery of Irish Catholicity. This comparatively young newly created bishop returned from Rome as Apostolic Delegate to the Irish Church, courtesy of Pius IX, to find that only 25 percent of his countrymen attended Sunday Mass regularly. Thirty years later, he could take consolation on his deathbed in the knowledge that 90 percent of the Irish would be praying for him at Mass the Sunday after he was laid to rest. Cullen’s “devotional revolution,” as Emmet Larkin dubbed it, made it a bit easier for the American bishops who between 1900-1920 became pastors to 900,000 of the Cullen kind of Catholic. The American Church still owes a large debt of gratitude to Cullen and to Pius IX, who had the stamina to bring inspired faith out of little faith, remarkable piety out of scandalous impiety, particularly that at the clergy level. The Armagh/Dublin Archbishop was lucky, of course, to have the backing of a strong Pope, and to be born himself with the daring of a Crusader. By unifying the faith and religious discipline of Irish Catholics, he also strengthened his nation for its running conflict with England, surely no mean accomplishment by itself.

“Dagger John” paves the way

    So, John Cardinal Farley of New York (1902-1918) became the beneficiary of what he received from Ireland in the person of Paul Cullen, but also from what he inherited from John Hughes, who a dozen years earlier than Cullen (1838), took over New York in similarly troublesome circumstances. For example, his first parish (1840), St. John the Evangelist, built on the present site of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, ran into trouble with its first curate. Alfred Dayman, who proved to be undisciplined, had peculiar ideas about the Church and the priesthood. One of his most memorable lines was “Hell is paved with the skulls of bad priests,” a sentiment which he did not mind expressing in public.

    In due course, the bishop suspended him. When Dayman then took his private religion to the streets of mid-Manhattan, Hughes excommunicated him, restoring him to good standing only after the errant priest made a public confession of fault before the entire city. New York’s “Dagger John,” as the bishop came to be called many years after his death, appeared to one reporter more as “a Roman gladiator than a devout follower of the meek founder of Christianity.” But he also lived in a culture, and worked for a Church, which held people to account for their misdeeds, to themselves and to others. In the Hughes perspective, priests and religious, especially, were to be exemplars before the people of God, and of “the obedience of faith.” Christ’s words were the Archbishop’s own: “If he refuses to listen to the Church, then treat him as you would a Gentile or a tax collector” (Matt. 18:17). By the time “Dagger John” died, New York was the leading archdiocese in the nation. His successor became America’s first Cardinal.

    During Cardinal Farley’s pre-World War I time in New York, newcomers like many of our parents walked down the gangplanks into parishes with a fair share of legendary pastors, city rectories staffed with two or more curates, free Catholic education, hard working nuns, Sunday Mass often in both upper and lower churches, long confessional lines every Saturday, four-week-long parish missions, and a harvest of religious vocations underway. It was not an easy matter to be a good Catholic, because poverty was the rule, and anti-Catholic feeling was strong in the ruling class. Yet, even the weak and the unreconstructed Catholics of those years knew what it meant to be Catholic, because they came from an old country where, thanks to Paul Cullen, the one, holy, Catholic and apostolic faith prevailed, into a new land where, thanks to John Hughes, pious Catholicity was beginning to blossom. Just imagine what those Cullen immigrants might have become, and what the American Church would be like today, if Alfred Dayman-types overran the Church, and bishops of the day were fearful of restraining their contumacious lot, lest Protestants think worse of believing Catholics, than they already did; and if there had been no shepherds of their quality.

Living faith

    Those twentieth century newcomers from reformed Ireland, unlike their nineteenth century predecessors, did not know they were charitable, pious, or apostolic, as most of them were, even those who managed to miss Sunday Mass on occasion. What they did understand in their simple faith was that Christ’s words, “You will live in my love if you keep my commandments” (John 15:9-11), were meant for them. Their parish missions made clear what a good Catholic was meant to be. These immigrants, eventually naturalized, may not have been conversant with the latest theological theories of atonement, but they realized deep down that the crosses of this life—raising a large family, losing a child at birth or in babyhood or in war, being sick and poor, working two jobs, putting up with each other’s foibles—made them kin to Christ on Calvary. And co-sharers with the Lord in their own salvation, here and hereafter. Many of their crosses were self-imposed, of course; others were laid on them by life situations, sometimes by a bad priest, occasionally by a martinet nun. (Fortunately a Pastor or Mother Superior was always at hand to blunt the harmful effects of scandal on their neighborhood.) Going to confession, to Mass, to Novenas, to the Knights of Columbus or to a Rosary Society, to a business or union meeting kept them feeling Catholic, as well as being Catholic.

    Modern wiseacres underestimate the intelligence of those who fled the poverty of literate and culturally Christian old countries. But those émigrés from places like Ireland knew how important faith in Christ was to their lives, and to the Church. They also appreciated the fact that faith convictions were not theirs to hide. Their ghettoes were filled with good Protestants, and their pastors taught them that they had to witness the Church’s “sense of Christian faith.”
Living Church

    By World War II time, a priest son of those families would also find in his parish Catholics who had acquired a similar piety and love of the Church from younger but significant other Catholics. The faith’s hold on their consciences was deep, only because they experienced good parents, good teachers and good pastors. Belief in Christ may have been a gift of God, and the patrimony of their extended family, but they were also enriched by a vital Catholic Church which kept their faith alive in what then was a vibrant Protestant America. Their fathers and mothers gave them personality and character, but the courage to persevere in worship, in observance, in the quest for forgiveness, came from their living Church. Christ may have been merciful to his betrayers, to those of little faith, and to contrite adulterers, but they knew that he preferred the Good Thief to the Bad Thief. They might not have known why the Church called her sacraments of baptism and confirmation “rites of initiation,” but they sensed that being born into faith and defending it went together. And, that if they only paid lip service to Mother Church, the Body of Christ would suffer all over again.

    The Catholic faith, when they fully embraced it, was personal and consoling. But God did not give faith solely for their private benefit. Christ certainly called his faithful to acknowledge the Father before the world. Believers might not have understood the mystery but, know it or not, they were called by baptism to be “martyrs,” the Greek word for “witness.” They likely came to associate martyrdom only with dying for Christ. But if that were really the case, the Lord had comparatively few witnesses throughout history. (Although saints like Thomas More and Isaac Jogues gave unusual testimony, to be sure.) Most of the Church’s saints were after all, and are, like our forebears, martyrs, witnessing Christ, and defending his Church’s faith, day by day. Suffering at the hands of enemies outside or betrayers within took more courage than dying once for a cause: like bearing and raising children when everyone around looks upon childbearing and child-raising as an unreasonable burden on people’s freedom; for the theologian who loses tenure, or even an academic position, because he is a Catholic theologian as the Church defines the term; for the Religious Sister or Brother who stands almost alone for poverty, chastity, and obedience when their Community “leaders” deny the relevance or meaning of evangelical vows. What about the martyrdom involved in “thinking with the Church,” or in refusing to do wrong to the Church, while living in Catholic communities where heresy, quasi-heresy, schism, sinfulness are no longer recognized as evils? How about the living martyrdom of the likes of a Cardinal Cullen? Or a John Hughes? Is not such perseverance more painful than dying only once? These were the crosses Catholics of courageous faith carried in the hope that Christ would protect them, and give them earthly peace. Partly for this reason Christ gave them Shepherds to help them persevere in the faith.

Attack from within

    During periods of religious upheaval, good Christians and good pastors suffer together at the hands of those within the Church who no longer believe in the truth of what Christ taught or what the Church teaches. Patrons of loose morality are troublesome to more than Catholics, but inflicting more pain on the faithful are those who deny that the Ten Commandments are really the Word of God. Or that the Church is Christ’s. Or that he is really present in the Eucharist. The faithful no longer are tossed to the lions, or otherwise executed by Neros and Trajans, but in a secular saturated Church they are also made to feel like fools by “wise men” who think that the faith of the typical churchgoer is simple-minded, unenlightened, or out of date. Maintaining the Catholic faith as taught by a Pope is not easy; defending it can be dangerous to peace of mind, or to one’s tenure. The serious disturber of Catholic tranquillity may not be an outspoken schismatic, but a half-believer who, while radically unfaithful to his Church, clothes his own ecclesial intentions or personal skepticism in clever language and seemingly pliant behavior. In many contemporary situations, pious Catholics must have courage as well as brains to sift the chaff from the wheat, faith from pseudo-faith.

    Twice within the past five hundred years, the Catholic Church has faced two mortal adversaries—Martin Luther in the 16th century and Alfred Loisy in the 19th—both priests; one was the founder of the Protestant Revolution against Catholicity, the other became the greatest expositor of a Modernist Crusade against Christianity itself. Protestantism said that Christians did not need pope or Catholic bishops to tell them what the revealed Word of God was; Modernism insisted there was no revealed Word of God at all, only the word of man about God, if there is a God.

    Two Popes suffered when called upon to confront these heresies within the fold: Pius V (1566-1572) and Pius X (1903-1914), the only two canonized Saints to sit in Peter’s Chair since the 13th century. Apart from the good things almost every commentator must say about a canonized Saint, here are some of the unflattering adjectives used by The Oxford Dictionary of Popes to describe each: Pius V was an “inquisitor,” “harsh,” “single-minded” and “devout to the point of bigotry”; Pius X was “unyielding,” “intransigent,” “paternalistic,” “defensive” and “deeply conservative.” Remember what Jesus was called? A blasphemer. An agitator. A criminal. What can believing Catholics expect today, other than disdain, at the hands of those who do not like the Church, or who would choose to have her Protestant or Modernist instead? Some sufferers can only unite their cross with Christ’s in propitiation for the sins of dissenters, and their own. Others are free to work for another resurrection to new life, this time of the Church, this time orchestrated by bishops like the John Hugheses and Paul Cullens of our time. The new resurrection can occur, however, only if the pope and bishops in union with him are in command of the Catholic community, as Christ was of his Apostles. The Church has been in trouble many times in history, and escaped collapse only when the successors of the Apostles took charge of authentic reform. Back in the 6th century, for example, when schisms were commonplace, an African author, who is remembered only in Daily Prayer, was of little practical help to his distressed faithful simply by crying out: “The Church is the House of God . . . Take care that he never has the sorrow of seeing it undermined by schism. And collapsing in ruins” (Saturday, 7th Easter Week).

    Gregory I of that same century (590-604), called the Great because he effectively healed a few schisms during his papacy, placed responsibility for Church unity where Christ did: “Pastors who lack foresight hesitate to say openly what is right because they fear losing the favor of men. As the voice of truth tells us, such leaders are not zealous pastors who protect their flocks; rather they are like mercenaries who flee by taking refuge in silence when the wolf appears” (Ordinary Time, 27th Sunday).

    No one alive may be around to witness the resurrection of the Church from its present malaise. But, when the time comes, may we all look down from heaven gratified that people like our parents, pastors like Paul Cullen and John Hughes, nuns like Mother Teresa and others, made it all possible by their living martyrdom. And that it happened because the reformers had the courage to say yes to the Pope and bishops in union with him, and no to the Scribes, the Pharisees, and to the Pilates of our generation. Amen.

Msgr. George A. Kelly was formerly Secretary for Education to Cardinals Spellman and Cooke. Before his retirement, he was the John A. Flynn Professor in Contemporary Catholic Problems at St. John’s University in New York. Formerly president of the Fellowship of Catholic Scholars, he is the author of The Crisis of Authority: John Paul II and the American Bishops (Regnery Gateway, 1982) and Inside My Father’s House (Doubleday, 1989). His last article in HPR appeared in the June 1995 issue.

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