A Postscript to a Postscript

I think it is a desire to increase truth and open up dialogue which leads me to reply to Father Kevin Maher’s comments, since they are both charitable and intelligent. Certainly he is my friend and my fellow Catholic; and our respective disciplines would mean little if we could not differ, even radically, in our approach to social and theological problems, and remain friends.

It was unfortunate that my habit of printing rather than typing led to one of those misprints in Dialectic which seems to be engineered by malicious poltergeists. A ‘fat-butted priest’ should be and was a ‘fat-gutted priest’ – there is, I think, a subtle difference, the difference between quarter-staff practice and an anti-clerical bias I do not and have never possessed.

My ‘Letter to a Catholic Poet’ is both humorous and fictional. Certainly there is anger in it. I trust it is anger-on-behalf-of and not anger-against. I suggest to Father Maher that it is my no doubt inadequate version of the same anger that made Swift advocate cannibalism as a solution to the ‘problem’ of the Irish poor. And the humour is of the same genre.

Now, I have a problem of my own which Father Maher may not consciously share. It is the communal Catholic problem that perhaps fifty per cent of young Catholics, male and female, may leave the Visible Church in page 220 this generation. It is not a vision that I endure with resignation or equanimity. And I think present habits of Catholic education may justly carry a share of blame for this problem. In this context my ‘Letter to a Catholic Poet’ may seem less extreme both in its tone and in its content than Father Maher has sincerely supposed it to be.

Many Catholic parents prefer to send their children to State schools and advocate the abandonment of the Catholic school system. Such people are not renegades. I think they have a right to express and act upon their considered preferences. But my own view is different. Both religious and secular education systems share many of the same defects. Such people may be shifting their children out of the frying pan into the fire. Personally I have a strong preference for the Catholic frying pan because communal values are learnt there and the children have contact with the Sacraments and grow up in an atmosphere of shared belief.

Nevertheless my preference does place on my back the obligation to be a trenchant critic of whatever is malformed or inhumane in Catholic education. My personalist habits of thought lead me to consider always the effect that our educational pattern has on people. I am not in love with abstract ideas.

A Catholic boy who has become a Buddhist turns up on my doorstep. In conversation we are able to isolate at least three factors that played a part in his conversion to a non-Christian religion – the chain of logic his educators had given him as a substitute for belief had broken down at a weak link; a fortnight after a caning he was undressing in the dormitory and found that the blood was still running into his underpants; and he formed a conviction, possibly erroneous, possibly correct, that at least one of his educators was trying to break his spirit. Such occasions are far from unique.

A Catholic girl who is struggling to retain her belief in God opens her mind to me. It appears that her departure from the Visible Church hinges largely on a traumatic loss of virginity. I do not minimise the negative effect of such an event. But her educators had given her the fixed impression that any girl who lost her virginity automatically became a tenth-rate Christian. My chief job then is to eradicate this false impression. Such occasions are tragically common.

The voice of Rachel is heard in Israel mourning for her children. But I suggest that Rachel herself may be quite unconsciously contributing to the butchery. She may contribute in many ways – by insistence on nursery morality as a rule for adult life (whether a man swears or not, for example); by unrecognised Jansenism; by an interpretation of the virtue of obedience that destroys the power of self-determination under God; by an attempt to substitute a wholly rational and abstract frame of doctrine for the awe-inspiring mystery of simple belief; and by a style of thought and living derived not primarily from the Gospel ethic but from unconscious memory of the Victorian Catholic ghetto. And our gravest danger never comes from outside page 221 – from that spirit of turbulence which Father Maher quite naturally regards as menacing – but from inside, from a largely unconscious Pharisaism that uses religion as a burrow in which to hide from the unpredictable living God.

I think my ‘Letter to a Catholic Poet’ has to be seen in context to be understood. The imaginary Catholic boy to whom I write is a young explosive person on the verge of leaving the Visible Church. I would grant Father Maher that I, like other men, have my times of intellectual order and emotional excess. But we might differ very honestly as to when they occur. It is excessive, I feel, for Father Maher to suggest that I may be a ‘menace’ because in a fictional document published in a restricted periodical I take the view that the sexual and aggressive impulses of a Catholic teenager are natural, if disordered, rather than demonic.

‘I suspect he inhabits the gunpit as well as the tabernacle’ – that is the point where Father Maher and I part company. I wish he could join me. He wishes I could join him. But he is mistaken, however honestly, in imputing dishonesty to me at this juncture.

In the fictional ‘letter’ I am not describing a situation where a teenager is using a girl as his private garbage disposal unit. I am describing an early, possibly tragic love affair, with degrees of innocence on both sides, where there has been full consummation outside Matrimony. The butcher’s knife of a wholly objective theology does not even touch the bottom of the mystery. Objectively, sin is involved; yet, subjectively, each may truly for the first time have discovered an Other. The intuition of positive good cannot be dismissed. Thus I believe that God can, in given circumstances, inhabit the gunpit. And this admission, more than any other, might give my young and imaginary friend the courage to remain with the Church and work his way through his conflicts.

I think that Father Maher’s training predisposes him to set an unbridgeable gulf between Eros and Agape. But I see Eros as the horse and Agape as the rider. Shall Agape go always on foot for fear of ever taming a difficult horse? I hope not. The issue goes much deeper than any morality of body areas. And I would be happy if Father Maher, my friendly but sorrowful critic, were able to share my hope. In the degree that this hope is shared and expressed, some of the teenagers who will otherwise leave the Church in this generation may stay to pray and grow alongside us.

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