Several years ago a young man came to talk to me.
He had some major problems, among them alcohol abuse. He was a bright young man with a volatile temper and some pretty anti-social behavior when he was drinking.
So we began talking on my front porch, sometimes way into the night. He wanted help and took direction well. He started attending recovery fellowship meetings, reading recovery materials and listening to what others who had been there were telling him. The young man also loved to read and he had a good foundation in the classics. He seemed to be able to attach his new found sobriety to an interest in the larger world, the world of the western intellectual tradition. He understood the symbolism and the rituals associated with recovery.
I’ll never forget the night I said, “John,” (for John Doe, to protect his anonymity) “don’t take this the wrong way… but it seems to me you think like a Catholic!” Of course, he asked me what that meant and, of course, I couldn’t adequately answer. I think I mumbled something about seeing the sacred in what is seemingly profane, about believing in the intercessory powers of those with whom we come into contact and of those saints and sages who have come before us.
He seemed to grasp something of the importance of tradition, what Chesterton famously called, “the democracy of the dead.” He seemed to understand on a deep level the possibility that with God’s grace decrepitude could actually be transformed into holiness.
The discussion continued over many nights: we spoke of the Blessed Mother and the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist and of apostolic succession. Before I knew it, the young man had joined the RCIA group at my church. It was my privilege to sponsor him and he was received into the Church the same time as my wife. What a day that was!
The young man went full force at everything he did and the next year he was in a French Benedictine monastery out west discerning a vocation. The monks lived mostly in silence there and were rather self-reliant, keeping up a working farm. John wrote once that all they seemed to have to eat was soup! Then he added, “But you have to remember, Fred, these are Frenchmen and the soups are fantastic!”
In discerning that he did not have that calling, John left the monastery after a year and returned to his childhood home in southern Illinois. He helped his parents on their farm and started building houses. He was of course, very active in his local Catholic church there and met a young lady also active in the church. They fell in love and came back to our area to be married. I was proud to be his best man.
In the ensuing years, he started his own house building business and he and his bride tried unsuccessfully to have children with a heart breaking string of miscarriages. They finally decided to adopt and started the long and, for them, grueling process as John had some issues related to his past drinking to clean up. They got very close to adopting using a Catholic Charities organization in southern Illinois but at the last minute it lost most of its funding because it did not allow same-sex couples to adopt. So John and his wife had to start all over again.
As time went on, they just weren’t making any progress. They wanted a baby but they had few other requirements. Finally, at their wits end, John said to himself that God must be asking something else of him. He thought about it. He talked it over with his wife and they went to the agency and basically said we’ll do anything we need to do: any child, any age, any background. In a couple of weeks the agency came back and said there is a family of siblings getting ready to be split up for good and it would be such a blessing if they could stay together. So on Tuesday John and his wife were childless, and on Wednesday they were the proud parents of four children all under the age of 6.
John’s tale brings me back to that time when I said he thought like a Catholic. It seems that so many moves of his since that time serve to support that opinion. So what is it to think like a Catholic?
I still don’t know. It has something to do with grasping the big picture. It is larger than racism or nationalism or sexism. The global experience of the Church, her universality and her familiarity with thousands of different cultures the world over become a part of our perception as Catholics. The truth of the sanctity of all human life is part of our DNA. Our thinking is enigmatic to many these days, for Holy Mother Church can be the most charitable of private institutions (indeed, she was the originator of charitable institutions) while sticking to her guns theologically. For instance, in a culture satiated with sexual license and gender fluidity, we still honor the traditional definition of marriage and respect the sacredness of human sexuality, while refusing to condemn those who berate us for it. We quietly go about our charitable business, like being the largest private institution on the planet helping victims of AIDS.
As the world sinks in a mire of relativism, to think like a Catholic is to still believe that objective truth exists. We also still believe that our senses, though prone to perversion and disorder, can lead us to God. We know that when we seek the beautiful we are seeking the good. To think like a Catholic is to wonder at the artistry of the paintbrush and the pen and the figure rising from the stone. It is to welcome the font of reason, not as a tool for skepticism but as a highway to truth and therefore an aid to faith.
Is this what I meant when I said my new friend thought like a Catholic? I’m not sure. Maybe it was simply his overwhelming desire to be in touch with the transcendent, to know a reality greater than we are, to know it in the grace and beauty he found around him and to surrender himself to that grace and that beauty. Maybe that was it. At any rate, as a Catholic, I think about it.
Fred Gallagher is an author and editor-in-chief with Gastonia-based Good Will Publishers Inc.