Providence (10 page)

Katherine and her new husband moved to St. Louis, taking the children, of course. Within a couple of years she was beginning to manifest some of the less attractive attributes of he-manhood, and she was speaking wistfully of her former husband’s “thoughtfulness” and “sensitivity.” The marriage struggled on for a few years, then ended in a noisy, rancorous divorce.

———

Thanks largely to sympathetic advisors like Michael, I began to come back to life. This was not an unmixed blessing, however, because the better I felt, the more painful my situation became. You see, according to the Church and my own belief, I was married to Katherine till death did us part, civil divorce notwithstanding. I was therefore condemned to a lifetime of chastity, and what was the good of having a new life if I could never share it with anyone in a relationship of real intimacy? Being a deadly serious Catholic, this was a deadly serious problem for me. Not a problem, really, because problems are things that have solutions, and this did not. I was just completely stuck.

Luckily, I talked about it to a coworker who was a Catholic, not looking for advice or ideas—I knew there weren’t any—but simply bemoaning my fate. She suggested I talk to her brother, who was a priest. I couldn’t imagine what good that would do, but I was desperate enough to try anything.

I believe he was a diocesan priest or a member of some order on loan to the diocese. I have a terrible memory for details like this. All I know is that he wasn’t just an ordinary parish priest; for one thing, he’d had essays published in
Commonweal,
probably the country’s leading journal of Roman Catholic thought. He was unusual in person as well; he lacked the patronizing attitude that laymen learn to expect from members of the clergy—he didn’t try to pretend that there was no question on earth too tough for him to answer. We talked for awhile, and he
listened to me explain the hopelessness of my situation. I think my plight made him uneasy—or rather, his reaction to my plight made him uneasy. He knew that if he told me what he truly thought, I’d be scandalized. (There’s a word you don’t hear much anymore.) Finally he spoke a few simple words that were to change the direction of my life once again. He said, “I find that the longer I live, the more I worry about
people
and the less I worry about
rules
.”

I doubt if you can imagine the impact these words had on me. This was practically a sacrilege, and of course doubly astounding coming from a priest. Not worry about
rules?
My God, if you don’t worry about
rules
what
do
you worry about—if you’re a Roman Catholic? The conversation was at an end. Nothing needed to be added to this bombshell. I staggered out of there in a state of shock.

The Church is a magnificent edifice, a structure composed of flawless, crystalline logic. It’s like an enormous, perfect argument, unshakable and unassailable, and indeed inescapable—provided that you accept its premises. But its very perfection constitutes a weakness. You see, in a perfect argument there is no redundancy; every brick in the structure is necessary to the stability of the whole. This means that, if you pull a single brick out of that perfect structure, the whole thing collapses. This is why the Church has been so apparently stupid about refusing to moderate its stand on birth control. To someone on the inside, it’s not at all stupid. The Church will only stand so long as every brick remains in place, and it’s madness to think the pope himself is going to start pulling
out bricks in order to placate the laity. The Church can go on perfectly well without the laity but will cease to exist if it compromises its own dogma. As far as the hierarchy is concerned, rewriting dogma to win popularity is cutting off your head to get rid of a headache: The ailment is temporary and endurable but the cure is permanent and lethal.…

No, that isn’t quite what I mean. It isn’t just that the Church “stands for something.” It’s more than that.

This is worth spending a little time on. In
Ishmael
I articulated a living mythology that is so integral to our culture that it’s never examined or even noticed by anyone. It’s like the sound of blood rushing through your veins—you hear it so constantly that you don’t hear it at all. A similarly unarticulated mythology has driven the Church from the beginning. The Church’s mythological vision of itself and of its function in the world was so well-known and so unquestionably accepted (through the first fifteen hundred years of its existence) that it didn’t need to be articulated—didn’t need to be explained or pointed out to anyone.

Here is how it came to be understood: God has made two covenants with man during man’s lifetime. The first he made with the Jews, and the results were decidedly
unsatisfactory. As a Chosen People, the Jews were a washout. They flouted the laws he gave them, they much preferred to worship their neighbors’ gods, they scorned the prophets he sent them, and generally ignored the whole thing. Nevertheless, though they didn’t keep up their end of the bargain, God kept up his: He sent them the messiah he’d promised, and the only thing they could think to do with him was to have him put to death. (Once again, you understand that I’m not expressing my own views here but rather the Church’s.)

The New Covenant was designed to avoid the errors of the Old. The Old Covenant was based on the notion that God could deal with a few selected individuals who would transmit his directives to the Jews at large, and the Jews in turn would pass these directives on to their children. It made perfect sense in theory but didn’t work out well in practice. Let me give you an example. The event God wanted the Hebrews to remember most conscientiously was their liberation from Egypt, which occurred in about 1210
B.C.
This event, which was to be commemorated as Passover, exemplified in a definitive way the kind of care and attention they could expect from God if they would be faithful to him. But once they were finally allowed to enter the Holy Land after forty years of wandering in the desert, the first thing they did was abandon the celebration of Passover. Not a single Passover was held under all the judges and kings of Israel until the eighteenth year of the reign of Josiah, just a few years before the Babylonian exile began. During all that time—six hundred years!—the Israelites worshiped not the God who had led them from Egypt but rather the gods and goddesses of the
Sidonians and the Amorites and the Moabites and the Philistines and the Babylonians. During most of this time, if you’d asked them about the God of Israel, they wouldn’t even have known what God you were talking about. This is literally true. Their gods were Baal and Ashtaroth and Dagon and Azazel and Milcom and Asima and Succoth Benoth and Anamelech and Nergal and Kemosh and Moloch. And if you’d asked them to point out a priest, it would have been one who burnt offerings to Baal or who tended one of the hill shrines.…

Oh, yes, the temple was set up in Jerusalem. No doubt about that. And inside that temple you’d have found altars dedicated to all those gods and goddesses—except for Moloch; he was set up in the valley of the sons of Hinnom. And attached to the temple you’d have found quarters for the temple prostitutes—male prostitutes.

The Mosaic teachings had been abandoned from the outset—abandoned and then lost. It was Josiah who rediscovered them around 610
B.C.
, and Judaism as we know it began with this event—not with Abraham, not with the Exodus, not with the Israelites’ entry into the land of Canaan.

So you can see why I say that this system had proved to be a flop. There’d been a monumental lapse in continuity, and the New Covenant would be structured so as to assure continuity. Under the New Covenant, religion would no longer be a family affair or an ethnic affair, it
would be a corporate affair, an institutional affair. There was going to be something wholly new in the history of the world, something never even heard of before: a
church.
Jesus said to Simon, son of Jonah, “I’m going to give you a new name. I’m going to call you
rock—peter
—and on this rock I’m going to build a strange new thing called a church.” Then he added this: “And the power of death shall never conquer it.” This was very significant, of course. The Old Covenant had depended for its continuity on
individuals,
and this is how the power of death conquered it. Abraham died, Moses died, David died, Isaiah died, Jeremiah died—and God’s contact with the Jews through them was therefore ineffectual. Under the New Covenant, death would no longer have the power to interrupt the continuity of God’s contact with mankind. This thing called a church would not be built on prophets or families or peoples. It would be built on a rock, on a foundation that would
hold things together.
Here is how it would hold things together: To Peter Jesus next said, “I’m going to give you the keys to the kingdom of heaven itself. What you forbid on earth will be forbidden in heaven and what you permit on earth will be permitted in heaven.” Obviously the keys weren’t meant to be buried with Peter when he died; there’d be no continuity in that. The keys were meant to be passed along to Peter’s successor, who would pass them along to his. Otherwise there’d be no rock, and the church would pass away after a single generation.

This can’t be stressed too strongly: The rock on which Jesus founded his church was not a
text,
it was a
deputy,
a stand-in for Christ himself, who would speak for Christ
and wield a power that had never existed on earth before. It was a whole new concept, a whole new dispensation. In the old dispensation, God would pick out someone and say, “Tell everyone that this is what is permitted and this is what is forbidden.” Never again would it be done this way. In the new dispensation, his permanently established deputy—one of
us,
a human living right in our midst—was going to decide what’s permitted and what’s forbidden, and we had the word of Christ that his deputy’s decisions would be ratified in heaven!

The New Covenant put mankind and God in an entirely new relation. In the old dispensation, God tried to do everything himself, and his chosen people weren’t expected to participate in a very active way—and they didn’t. Under the Old Covenant, people were clearly put too much on their own, given too much leeway. The church of the new dispensation was going to change all that. This was going to be an
organization.
People weren’t going to be put on their own, they were going to be watched over and guarded like a flock of sheep. And they were going to be given extraordinary new means of participation in their own salvation. Entirely new institutions called
sacraments
opened channels to divine grace that had never been available before. The human race and God—earth and heaven—were to be joined
in a new mystical intimacy: Holy Mother Church was the bride of Christ, forever yearning to be united with him.

The Church (and now we begin again to speak of the Church with a capital C) didn’t see itself as merely the trustee and conservator of a revelation that had occurred and ended in the past. The conversation between Christ and his bride would continue to the end of time, and this is why no great emphasis was ever placed on reading the bible. Your source of revealed truth wasn’t an ancient text to which not a single word could ever be added, it was the living Church. If you wanted to know what was what, you didn’t reach for your bible, you asked your priest, and if your priest didn’t know, he’d ask the bishop, and if the bishop didn’t know, he’d ask the cardinal, and if the cardinal didn’t know, he’d ask the pope. The Vicar of Christ, speaking
ex cathedra
—from the chair of St. Peter—spoke with precisely the same authority as the apostle, and what he bound on earth was bound in heaven and what he loosed on earth was loosed in heaven.

Within its own ranks, the Protestant Reformation cleared away all this rich mythology to make room for a much simplified and more austere vision of the relation between God and man. With the bible now available to virtually everyone, thanks to the advancement of printing technology, it seemed self-evident to the Protestant mind that nothing like the Church and certainly nothing like the pope needed to stand between the individual and his or her God. As it was now understood, the keys to the kingdom were in Everyman’s hand.

I say “within its own ranks,” referring to the Protestant Reformation. The Church itself never relinquished its
own vision and will never do so unless it loses its mind—becomes confused about its own identity. Until that happens, ecumenical negotiators will never see the primacy of Peter become a chip on the bargaining table. That is indeed the rock upon which the Church is built, and any ecumenical movement that hopes to include the Church will inevitably be shattered on it.…

Yes, you’re quite right, I would have made a powerful apologist for the Church. Perhaps only an apostate can fully appreciate its glamour and magnificence—glamour in its original sense of “enchantment” and “magic.”

What the priest had done with his casual remark about rules was to show me that the rock of papal primacy was standing in a desert. According to Peter and his successors, divorce and remarriage were forbidden, no two ways about it. What the priest had said was: Yes, you’re right, this is certainly the rule, but … maybe rules don’t matter all that much.

Now this priest was obviously not speaking
ex cathedra.
The Church wasn’t revising its estimate of the importance of rules—hardly. According to the fundamental notions of the Church, forbidding and permitting is what it’s all about, and Jesus himself made this crystal clear in his directive to Peter. And it isn’t just a little part. If you look at that passage in Matthew, you’ll see it’s the whole job description.
Now I had to compare this priest with the God who had conceived of this new dispensation. It took about ten seconds to see that I liked and admired this priest a whole hell of a lot better than I liked and admired this God. What kind of God is it who worries more about rules than about people? I didn’t doubt that this God existed, I simply doubted that he deserved my allegiance. Was he seriously proposing to send me to hell for eternity if I remarried? If yes, he was a monster. If no, he was a liar. Either way, as I saw it then and today, he deserves nothing but my contempt.…