In large and small ways they let me know they thought that I too had what it took to hurl myself out onto thin ice and skate ahead of a great crack. Over time, getting wet, I began to think so too. The entire project of moving through the seminary in the 1960s—thin ice and a minefield—began to feel exactly like such an act of abandon. The priesthood itself would seem an ultimate leap like that. We thought of it, with Kierkegaard, as a leap of faith.
The most fateful and unexpected affirmation I received from the Paulists was as a writer. Nothing obvious in my family history had made such an ambition likely, although my love of and knack for storytelling were gifts from my mother—those twilight tours of Washington, when she repeated and elaborated wartime tales about every monument and office building she pointed out. But the story I had to tell was different.
"I carried inside me a cut and bleeding soul..."In Saint Augustine's Confessions, no less, I came upon a familiar story. "...and how to get rid of it I just didn't know. I sought every pleasure—the countryside, sports, fooling around, the peace of a garden, friends and good company, sex, reading. My soul floundered in the void—and came back upon me. For where could my heart flee from my heart? Where could I escape from myself?" The answer that suggested itself to me, as to Augustine: instead of escape, try expression. I wrote my first poems and stories in seminary English classes. Paulist professors, especially Al Moser and John Kirvan, who would later edit my first book, considered my efforts good enough to tell me what was wrong with them. (One story's resolution depended on the main character's being run down by a Fiat automobile, as in Fiat voluntas tua.) When, in the "Cellar Theater," a seminary version of a sixties coffeehouse, I read aloud not from Eliot or Stevens but from compositions of my own, I heard no humming of "Mr. Wonderful." Some of the fellows made me feel my poems were good. The poems themselves, meanwhile, made me feel whole.
How had I come to poetry? I see now what it meant to be reading the work of writers who were themselves wrestling with demonic angels. I was responding not only, say, to the complaints of a celibate cleric—Gerard Manley Hopkins's "Thou art indeed just, Lord, but so is my plea!"—but, equally piquant, to the agonized howls of those we think of now as antiwar poets. I never recovered from lines I read, say, in Galway Kinnell or X.J. Kennedy–lyric meditations on, of all things, the B-52 and napalm. Their language opened me–as a soldier's son and would-be priest–to the utter inadequacy of language." Wordsworth defined poetry as "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings," taking "its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity." Through the 1960s, I had more than I wanted of powerful feelings and just enough of tranquillity to begin my own naming of the nameless powers of the dark.
My teachers recommended me, and the Paulist superiors approved me, for a special program to study writing in the summers. That led, in 1966, to a life-changing encounter at the University of Minnesota with the poet and critic Allen Tate. A member of "the Fugitives," a Southern agrarian group of writers, Tate was associated with John Crowe Ransom, Robert Penn Warren, Hart Crane, and T. S. Eliot, all of whom I was now discovering. As editor of The Sewanee Review, he had helped shape mid-century American literature, and only recently I'd begun seeking out back numbers of the magazine. In Tate's poems, in his novel The Fathers, and in his book of essays The Man of Letters in the Modern World, I began to see the shadowy form of a new idea of myself.
Tate was known as a Southerner, but he had spent summers as a boy in Washington and nearby Virginia, where I, a would-be Johnny Reb, had experienced such confusion. To discover in his masterpiece "Ode to the Confederate Dead" Tate's own confusion, a final inability to glorify those dead even while grieving them, was a lesson in the way poems reveal us to ourselves. At the end of The Fathers, a son sees his father as "arrogant," but also, more compellingly, as "beautiful." The mystery of holding two such perceptions in one act of love drew me irresistibly in. The thought of actually traveling to the Midwest to study with this writer came to me like an epiphany that year, and the: permission that made it possible seemed miraculous. I allowed myself to dream that Allen Tate, the famous friend to writers, would be a friend to me.
There was no impertinence in my approach to him. I arrived in his classroom feeling like an interloper, but feeling also that a door was opening. In effect, he stood at that door inviting me to enter an entirely new room. He was a slight man with a head that seemed overlarge for his body. Wispy hair half covered his pate, but his white mustache and linen suits and British shoes gave him a dandyish air. One always expected to see him sporting a cane as an item of apparel. He was glamorous, a literary Fred Astaire, the beau ideal of the Man of Letters in the Modern World.
He was also a teacher. During his office hours I imposed on Tate, and he let me. I showed up early in the term with a sheaf of poems, hoping to leave them with him. He took my folder, flipped through it quickly, and handed it back. My heart sank. He said nothing while, slowly and deliberately, he opened a new pack of cigarettes, took one out, and lit it. He waved the match out. Then he said, "Come every Thursday. Bring two poems each time. We'll see what you can do."
Those sessions taught me more about reading and writing than anything I had experienced. Tate was a severe critic, but he was also the most courteous teacher I'd ever had. I left every session determined to be worthy of the next one, but eventually I realized that, to him, I already was. At the end of the summer he told me that, yes, I was a poet. Allen Tate's approval allowed me to think of myself as a writer, and the difference that has made in my life drives my own energetic commitment to teaching young writers today. When, in 1974, the Paulist Press, under Jack Kirvan, published my collection of poems, it carried this comment from Tate: "James Carroll's first book of verse, Forbidden Disappointments, is impressive. The general theme is the conflict between belief and existential disorder. 'Resurrection Poem' and half a dozen others announce a new, original talent." It is shameless, perhaps, to include here what was after all a blurb, but those words were as much a laying on of hands as anything the cardinal archbishop of New York could ever do for me.
At one point in that Minneapolis summer, I asked Tate to sign my copy of his Collected Poems. He wrote, "Inscribed to James Carroll with all good wishes for his two vocations." He watched me read what he'd written. When I looked up at him, he said sadly, "You can't have both, you know."
I think now that my Paulist superiors sensed that in time my vocation as a writer would take me away from the community, yet their support and encouragement never flagged. Paulists produced my first play, in the seminary. Years later, a group of them showed up at the Berkshire Theater Festival in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, for my first professional production, though it literally marked my break with the order.
Against their own institutional interests, Paulists affirmed me in other ways than as a writer. When, during the Vietnam era, I spent a night in jail, the president of the Paulists, instead of rebuking me, named me chairman of the order's Social Justice Committee. When the cardinal archbishop of Boston complained to headquarters that I was counseling Boston University students to use birth control, the Paulist president refused to transfer me. Eventually, it was through him that I made a formal request of the Vatican for dispensation from my vows. Having steadfastly supported me in each of the steps that took me out of the priesthood, he wept with me as I explained my decision to leave it. And then he gave me his blessing, another laying on of hands that touched the very core of me.
The Paulists as a group, in other words, finally gave me a version of the affirmation that had begun with Patrick—that I could do no wrong. It was not literally true, of course, as we all knew. But what a relief to find in their tested support a way to let go of the much older, deeper feeling—one derived not, perhaps, from parents or brothers but from the pulse of my own heart, the true effect in me, I'd long since concluded, of the doctrine of original sin. This feeling—that if it was my act or my desire, it had to be wrong.
Three personal revolutions,
I said. The second revolution, the primordial one, was, to use a loaded word, religious. This aspect of my fits-and-starts transformation is hard to describe without falling into the mushy pit, but "religious," after all, is the technical word for what I'd become in joining the Paulists in the first place. I had the great advantage, despite my years as an altar boy, or because of them, of arriving on that scene with no authentic religious training. I was biblically and theologically illiterate. The catechism, even the highbrow version laid out in mandatory religion classes at Georgetown, had not come within a mile of touching anything but my good manners and guilty conscience. Thus I had less need of conversion, pace Hecker, than of initiation.
In the seminary, facts that now seem mundane hit me like the boulders of an avalanche. An example: the divinely inspired Bible is nevertheless a human composition subject to the laws of history and literary form. The great twentieth-century developments in biblical studies of the historical-critical method had impinged not at all on the Catholic Church as I had experienced it. It jolted me to hear professors and classmates discussing what I had taken to be God's great interventions in time and space as myth and story, constructions that may or may not have "really happened," heroes of the faith who may not have existed. Adam and Eve. Noah. The Tower of Babel. The Parting of the Red Sea. The Fiery Chariot. David and Goliath. Stories all. I struggled to get my mind around the new idea that fictions could surpass "facts" as a revelation of the truth. Once I grasped that, my own real journey of faith—what would become a fiction writer's faith—began.
Form criticism undid my notion not only of Noah but of Jesus. It staggered me to learn that Gospel accounts were anything but historical records of Jesus' life and ministry. Theologians said these "faith accounts" reflected the beliefs of Christians living a generation or longer after the death of Jesus. I learned that none of the Gospels was written by an eyewitness; that the exalted Roman Catholic Church began as scattered groups of Jews who sensed the presence of their Lord in their own decidedly unreligious acts of eating and drinking together; that the oral telling of His stories—sources of the Gospels—was a way of making Him present; that those stories said almost nothing about the historical Jesus; that the portrait they offered was of, in Rudolf Bultmann's phrase, "the existential Christ of faith."
Bultmann was a Protestant, as were most of the leading figures in biblical studies. Hard as it is to credit now, it seemed exotic, almost dangerous, to be taking cues from "heretics" like Soren Kierkegaard and Karl Barth. Early in this century, the Vatican erected walls against the challenges coming from new biblical studies. Indeed, certain Paulists were excommunicated as part of the Vatican crackdown on modernism. Hecker himself had been considered suspect, the inspiration of a heresy called, of all things, Americanism. But by midcentury, Catholic scholars like Pierre Benoit and Roland de Vaux had clawed through Vatican resistance, and breakthroughs like the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1947 destroyed what remained of it. It was the otherwise reactionary Pius XII who declared, in Divino Afflante Spiritu, "The interpreter [of the Bible] must go back wholly in spirit to those remote centuries of the East and with the aid of history, archeology, ethnology, and other sciences, accurately determine what modes of writing the authors of that period would be likely to use, and, in fact, did use." This principle, once applied to the underpinnings of a calcified Counter-Reformation faith, caused its superstructure to crumble. The foundation-shaking work of these thinkers, Protestant and Catholic, laid bare the anachronistic absurdity of the denominational divisions that at the start of this process had seemed so absolute.
All of this required a new way of thinking of the Church; it too was subject to the laws of history. Much of what I'd been told was timeless had been put in place only at the Council of Trent (1545–1563). The monarchical papacy, the law of celibacy, the idea of infallibility, the form of the sacraments, the cultic priesthood toward which my whole life was aiming, none of it had been instituted or even imagined by Jesus Christ. I wasn't the only one having to come to terms with such radical notions: the bishops meeting at the Vatican Council had to do so. Indeed—and here was the real rarity of Pope John's initiative—it was because the bishops of the Church dared consider such questions that the rest of us could.
At remote Mount Paul in New Jersey, we were forbidden to watch television, but an exception was made within a few weeks of our arrival that fall of 1962. An oval-framed Motorola was hauled into the common room. We gathered around it one night and the bespectacled face of my own Pope John appeared on the screen. He was sitting on the great throne behind and above Bernini's altar in St. Peter's Basilica—which itself, because of indulgences sold for its construction, had been a cause of Luther's break and all the subsequent malaise it was this pope's intention now to undo. I had to resist the urge to punch the novice next to me and say, "I've been there. I've met the pope. He kissed me." I didn't tell him or anyone else. As was true of so much of what I'd been given, I kept it a guilty secret for reasons I never understood.
The papers in Pope John's hands shook slightly as he addressed the robed throng. And even at Mount Paul, knowing nothing of what prompted the words, and hearing them rendered in the halting voice of an unseen interpreter, we felt the heat of the pope's blast at "prophets of gloom, who are always forecasting disaster, as though the end of the world were at hand. In these modern times, they can see nothing but prevarication and ruin. They say that our era, in comparison with past eras, is getting worse, and they behave as though they had learned nothing from history, which is, nonetheless, the teacher of life."
The Council would run in a series of sessions from 1962 until 1965. In the "Pastoral Constitution on the Church and the World," the bishops would declare, "The Church has always had the duty of scrutinizing the signs of the times ... The human race has passed from a rather static concept of reality to a dynamic, evolutionary one." And not only "of reality" but of the Church itself, was the point to us. During those years our once fixed attitudes toward the Church and priesthood, toward the meaning of sin and salvation were turned upside down. When I arrived in Washington in 1963 to begin the six-year course in philosophy and theology at St. Paul's College, the Council's impact was just beginning to be felt. In our classrooms we read the works of heretofore suspect theologians—John Courtney Murray, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Henri de Lubac, Karl Rahner—whose liberalizing program was finally being vindicated. Our Paulist professors and superiors were as enthralled as we, although the rigid Tridentine seminary discipline continued to inhibit us.
In the beginning, magazines like The New Yorker were forbidden to us, but when the classic series "Letter from Vatican City," by the pseudonymous Xavier Rynne, began detailing the behind-the-scenes maneuvering and competition between Church liberals and conservatives, we passed contraband copies among ourselves, as if The New Yorker had a centerfold.
Rynne was rumored, and later revealed, to be a Redemptorist priest, Francis X. Murphy, a theologian who, when not in Rome, was at Catholic University in Washington. His residence was only a crisp seven-iron shot from the lawn outside my room. No wonder he knew so much about the Church. The thought: of a priest not being cowed by a tradition that claimed there were no such things in Catholicism as power grabs, turf fights, and self-protective secrecy took our breath away. Where was his piety about the Holy Ghost? Murphy's work in The New Yorker transformed the way the Council was reported elsewhere in the secular and, ultimately, religious press. But its more immediate impact on us, aside from the magazine's suddenly showing up in the seminary library, was the new view of the Church it offered. By shining a light on its hidden corners, Murphy made the institution seem more limited, fallible, and flawed. All at once the magnificent, intimidating, timeless Church was made to seem hospitable to the limited, fallible, and flawed members we knew ourselves to be.
The book that had broken open our minds, preparing us for Xavier Rynne and helping us to grasp what was really at stake in the Vatican Council, was The Co
uncil, Reform and Reunion by the young Swiss theologian Hans Küng. That book contained this shocking statement: "Renewal and reform of the Church are permanently necessary because the Church consists, first, of human beings, and, secondly, of sinful human beings."
It was no news that I was a sinful human being. A pointed sense of my own fallenness had been attached to my heels like a shadow ever since my brother, through some fault of mine, had contracted polio. I was the son of an Irish Jansenist, and why else did we have the sacrament of penance? But Küng was talking about the Church as such. The communion of saints, he was saying, is a group of sinners. No one is exempt from this judgment, not Cardinal Spellman, not the pope, not all the bishops in the Council. The revolutionary meaning of this all too obvious truth? First, that no human being has the right to sit in absolute judgment of another. Second, the essential note of our relationship to God, and to each other, must be forgiveness. Beginning with this idea, articulated by Hans Küng, I would learn to criticize the Church and to love the Church as the only true home a "wretch like me" can hope to find.
Wretch indeed. I committed my first serious breach of my solemn promises of poverty and obedience when, sneaking off to a downtown bookstore, I "bought" my own copy of The Council, Reform and Reunion. I accomplished this in that pre-credit card era by convincing a clerk to send the bill to my parents. He agreed to do so not because of my status as a seminarian but because of my father's rank, the best credit reference in Cold War Washington. I was still the general's son. Within days, racked with guilt, I went to the seminary rector and confessed what I had done. This incident—first defy the rule, then bend to it, miserably—was typical of the pinball course on which I'd been launched. Often I would be in my spiritual director's room, weeping inconsolably with confusion and fear as the pillars and posts of my flimsy faith fell apart. The only language I had for the experience prompted me to insist that I was not worthy to be a priest. My father confessor kept telling me that was why I'd be a good one.
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