An American Requiem

by James Carroll

  Hans Küng told me that too, which was why I'd so wanted my own copy of that book. I know now that the seminary rector was as moved by Küng's vision as I was, but he did not let on. He could have expelled me, but instead he confiscated the book and sent me away. I choked with humiliation and shame. The rector's response was rooted in his own conflict between the liberal moment and the long-standing authoritarian system imposed even on the Paulists, his version of our being caught in two worlds at once. And we seminarians sympathized with him no more than student protesters would with the anguished college administrators whose offices they later occupied.

  Our resistance to authority was less direct, more passive-aggressive, and probably more personal. We grew to hate the rector. In the summer we would stand on the edge of our little camping island in Lake George, New York. We would face south toward the main Paulist retreat, a pair of rambling Adirondack arks where the rector and faculty were housed twenty miles away. We would holler his name—let's call him Joe Blow—and the sound would curl across the water and lose itself :in the hills on either side: "Come and get me, Joe Blow!" Or, in later years, the era of free speech, "Fuck you, Joe Blow!" Once a small motor boat pulled up to our island and a camper from a site down the lake asked, "Who is this Joe Blow? I've been hearing his name in the air for years."

  Another time, I helped to organize a seminary conference on LBJ's Great Society legislation. We'd landed the pioneering community organizer Saul Alinsky as a speaker, something I recognize now as a signal of a new spaciousness of political imagination, a sign of my growing capacity to transcend the narrowness of my upbringing. I was proud of snagging Alinsky, and I asked the rector if I could invite an old friend of mine, namely the president's daughter.

  "The president of what?" he asked with a condescending sneer. I took mortally sinful pleasure in replying, "Of these United States."

  Perhaps the real beginning of the transformation of my authority "problem" into a "solution" was not Hans Küng's book but the impact of his personal presence when he came to lecture in Washington. Although I have a distinct memory of Küng's appearance, the incident I have in mind could have involved Bernard Haring, Edward Schillebeeckx, Karl Rahner, or another of the touring European theologians who came through Catholic University during the Council. But as I recall it, Hans Küng's lecture was explosive. I was one of the first people to arrive at the hall. We Paulists took pride in our distinctive habit, a sashed black soutane with a high Marine Corps-like collar, a linen-covered "leather neck," in fact. In gatherings at CU and Georgetown, with the multitude of Old World monks, friars, and Jesuits with their cowls and sandals and body odor, we always felt like an American elite, not Marines but liberals. That evening seminarians, scholastics, and student nuns came from all over Little Rome, and soon the auditorium was packed. The Beatles would not have been more eagerly awaited, nor Elvis.

  But instead of the ovation I expected we would give the curly-haired, bright-faced Hans Küng when he appeared, the room fell into a hole of amazed silence. He was barely older than we were. It was him. But no one applauded. We remained mute as he was introduced by a white-robed Dominican, one of the sponsoring theologians. Then we listened fearfully, hardly believing our ears as Küng let loose a withering attack on the cruelly restrictive structures of Catholicism. He could have been quoting John Stuart Mill: "My love for an institution is in direct proportion to my desire to reform it." Faced with such forthright criticism of the Church, I finally recognized the ways Catholics, especially us would-be priests, had been kept dependent, puerile, and timid. The young Swiss firebrand made me see how the system I had only recently embraced depended on a scheme of sanctions, ex-communications, and anathemas that were authoritarian, even un-Christian. The divisions among denominations, which the smug Catholic assumption of superiority guaranteed, struck me as a scandal too. Luther was right, I imagined Küng declaring. To me he sounded like Luther himself.

  But Küng, like Haring, Schillebeeckx, and Rahner, was no mere revolutionary. These theologians were widely regarded as giving voice to the dreams and visions of Pope John XXIII, who had died only months before. When we heard them defend the Council's promise, Küng and company spoke with an authority unprecedented for institutional critics—Luthers with a mandate from Rome! We could thrill at their iconoclastic vision without feeling disloyal.

  A few years later, this audience of young clerics would form the core of a protest that shut down Catholic University—a "pontifical institute"—after another theologian, Father Charles Curran, was fired for dissenting from Humanae Vitae. That defiance, like the anti-papal defiance of which I am guilty to this day—here is the heart of what Küng and the others gave us—was and is only an act of faithfulness to Pope John XXIII. Hans Küng, embodying John's vision, awakened in me a passionate hope for the future of the Catholic Church which has yet to be quashed, in part because Küng himself, long condemned and marginalized in the era of Pope John Paul II, has nevertheless steadfastly continued all these decades to defend and articulate that vision. The same is true of Schillebeeckx, Curran, and Haring, and probably would be of Rahner, had he lived. The greatest Catholic theologians of our time are regarded with suspicion by today's Vatican. Despite the thunderbolt sanctions and threats of anathema regularly hurled at them, they have never yelled "Come and get me!" much less "Fuck you!" Nor have they refused to speak the truth to power.

  That night in the lecture hall, what struck us even more powerfully than Küng's words, what had struck us dumb, undercutting our ability to applaud him when he'd first appeared before our black- and brown- and white-robed pieties, was the disorienting fact that Father Küng was not wearing a cassock or a black suit and Roman collar or any kind of "clericals." He was dressed in a trim gray suit and a blue necktie. His getup itself was a thesis nailed to the door. A priest in mufti! A priest looking like everyone else! A priest with a phallic symbol hanging down his chest! A priest a man.

  "Oh, the slow shall be fast..." Küng got his ovation and more at the end. We cheered him wildly. He was our Elvis, our John Lennon, our Bob Dylan. "...and the first shall be last." A rafter raiser. A shindy kicker. "Oh, the times they are a-changin'."

  All of the transformations, even sartorial ones, ushered in by the Vatican Council were rooted in the momentous changes brought about by the prior and esoteric revolution in biblical studies. After the advent of form criticism, the historical-critical method, and a fuller understanding of what a Bedouin shepherd had found in the caves of Qumran, it was as if, all at once, the magnifying, scorching lights of Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Darwin, Einstein, and Freud were focused on the heretofore immutable Word of God.

  I read the Bible, actually read it, for the first time in my life. In the classroom, the Book became a living thing. I found myself turning to it even when I wasn't required to. Except for that old impulse to bury my face in the abyss of my folded hands, the only overt show of piety to which I am still given, prayer had meant nothing to me, though I had never admitted that to myself. By prayer I mean purposeful attention to the presence of God. Gradually I realized that prayer had become the content of my encounters with the Book. When, say, I recited psalms in unison with my brothers at lauds, matins, and compline, or when I turned over in my mind the stories of Exodus or of the Galilean peasant, the Scriptures themselves could seem shockingly addressed to me.

  "In my inmost self I dearly love God's law"—this passage from my new patron, Saint Paul—"but I can see that my body follows a different law that battles against the law which my reason dictates. This is what makes me a prisoner of that law of sin which lives inside my body ... Who will rescue me from the body doomed to death?"

  In other words, sex.

  But perhaps not. I was urged to read Paul's lament not as a description of the struggle with the flesh but as a description of the struggle against the ancient human impulse to flee from the burden of history—these bodies doomed to death—into absolutes.

  Here was proof that al
l those popes had been right, that reading the Bible could be dangerous. For a Catholic boy of my generation, this was a nuclear question: what if the sin to watch out for is not sex but what the Bible calls the worship of false gods, the making of idols? In the Bible, I learned, that is in fact the first definition of sin. Golden calves? We create a golden calf, I learned, every time we take something of the earth and declare it exempt from the laws of history. In effect, I entered the seminary to learn that the tendency to claim eternity for what is only temporal corrupts both patriotism and piety. It is the oldest story there is, although lately we have worshiped not golden calves but our nation, and our Church.

  My Paulist professors, one of whom was the first Roman Catholic scholar ever to receive a Protestant doctoral degree in the theology of Martin Luther, challenged my inbred assumptions about the Reformation, helping me to see it as the beginning of a great modern refinement of the faith. The reformers rejected the self-absolutism of the Catholic Church. Rome, they said, is not forever. Not even the Eternal City is eternal.

  But Luther and his followers absolutized something else, the Scriptures. "Scripture alone!" they said. Nowhere is the idolatry of the Bible more obvious than in the desperate insistence that its affirmations are exempt from the laws of history, of time. The literal reading of miracle stories, the use of Biblical data to justify anti-Semitism or the second-class status of women or hostility toward other religious traditions or prescientific ideas of the origin of the cosmos—are all common forms of the idolatry of the Bible. Alas, it followed upon Luther's isolating the Word of God from the principle of authority that interprets it.

  That is why the historical-critical deabsolutizing of Scripture in this century has been so invigorating. The lifeless oracle of fundamentalism, in its Catholic as well as Protestant forms, was replaced by a vibrant understanding of the living community out of which the Scriptures grew, and out of which new insights into faith continue to grow. When the Bible was deabsolutized, the modern renewal of the entire Church was launched—and I was there!

  That was not all. Soon it became clear even to Christians that, like the Church and like the Scriptures, Jesus had been made into a kind of idol. He too needed to be deabsolutized. What Jesus never did Himself, His followers had been doing ever since—exempting Him from the laws of time according to one of which Jesus is gone, simply gone, which is what it means to say that He died. His body too was doomed. A Jesus who meant it when He claimed to have been abandoned by God at the end—what else is death?—reveals far more about God than the triumphal Christ on a gilded cross.

  But Jesus was God, wasn't He? The Church's true answer, I learned, is yes and no. The notion of Jesus-as-God that had been pounded into me by nuns, monks, and monsignors, and that had been taken as gospel by my mother and father and every Catholic I knew, was in fact heretical. We had been taught to believe that the divinity of Jesus was such that He had only, as it were, pretended to be human. Which meant that as an infant He gurgled when He could have given speeches to rival Pericles. As a boy, for His own amusement and when no one was looking, He could turn birds into little stone statues, snap. And as a man He went through the motions of anxiety, suffering, and death, but He never really experienced such things. The Resurrection, a magic trick that He Himself worked from the grave, was proof that He was God.

  All wrong. The heresy of Docetism. Most of the divine wonders attributed to Jesus in the Gospels—beginning most obviously with the virgin birth and nativity narratives, extending more problematically to the Resurrection appearances themselves, including perhaps the phenomenon of the empty tomb—were mythic constructs intended to make a point of faith, not fact. I learned that the starting point of any train of thought about Jesus must be His humanity. The Nazarene was a fully human person, fallible and mortal. He never considered Himself to be divine. He came to be conscious of His own prophetic character through a spiritual awakening in relation to John the Baptist. Jesus repented and was baptized and saw something new about Himself, about what He called the Kingdom of God. He embraced a life mission to preach it.

  What kind of kingdom was this? Jesus told us everything we needed to know when instead of as a king riding in a chariot, He came to us as the parody of a king. On Palm Sunday we still remember his "triumphal entry," but this is the king who arrives on a donkey. Even the story of the crucifixion—the purple robe, the crown of thorns, centurions hailing the king of the Jews—has the form of purest irony. It is a revelation of the folly and tragedy of wanting to be exempt from the laws of history.

  For the first time in my life, Jesus was not a remote and almighty savior but a man whom I came utterly to identify with. Not identify as with a Christ figure from some messiah complex (my mother's name is Mary, my father's name is Joseph, my initials are J.C.), but only as somebody who ached to do what was right, and for the longest time didn't know how. I recognized Jesus' spiritual awakening, His feeling ambushed by a "vocation," conscripted into a mission, compelled by an urge to tell the story, but unlike the Baptist, never immune to the sirens of eating and drinking and the company of women. I turned Jesus' openness to prostitutes into a particular point of connection, seeing it as a version of my own youthful, nervous curiosity.

  But the connection that really solidified my, yes, love of Jesus was the transcendent and ongoing crisis we shared. His central struggle for identity was tied up with what that word "God" meant to him. The key lies in the fact that Jesus called God "Abba."

  I still recall the musty basement classroom in which I sat—the rows of unvarnished one-armed desks, the green blackboard, the window at shoulder height opening onto corrugated iron half-pipe sleeves of light shafts, and clanging heat pipes—the day I understood that "Abba" means "Daddy."

  "'Abba,'" the professor said, "is ipsum dixit" —one of the few words recorded in the Gospels that the historical Jesus can be said to have actually used. "Abba," not Yahweh, Mighty One, Wholly Other, or Being Itself—but Daddy. Jesus came to understand Himself by understanding His father. And why shouldn't the same thing have been happening to me? The Bay of Pigs, the assassination of JFK, the Cuban missile crisis, the Vatican Council, the words of Hans Küng, the challenge of Martin Luther and of Martin Luther King, and the first stirrings of the sixties revolution—remote as I was from Boiling Air Force Base, the Pentagon, and the life of my brothers and mother, in my worried mind and haunted soul I referred every such event to my own "Abba." And the word's meaning wasn't even "Dad," but "Daddy," evoking the easy intimacy, and also worship, that surely I had felt for him once, years before. My nostalgia for a lost bond—before he was a general? before Joe got polio?—was like everyone's nostalgia for the Garden of Eden. We can never pin it down, when things began to go wrong, but we know it wasn't always so. When had "Daddy" become "Dad" to me? It hit me that the shifting away from the seamless bond implicit in "Daddy" had begun in Wiesbaden, where I'd admitted for a minute an ambition of my own that was not his.

  By now the ground was moving everywhere I stepped—religion, politics, poverty, chastity, obedience, a stubbornly emerging sense of self. But beneath every rumbling fault line and every quake was the steady, subterranean shifting of the tectonic plates of my relationship with Dad. Daddy. If Jesus could feel forsaken by "Abba," what would that be to me? And if Jesus could still trust Himself to Abba, how could I? For finally this came clear. The message He offered was one of trust. How I longed to hear it. Trust in this life, this process, this history, wherever it takes you. Live without idols. As for religion, go about your eating and drinking and being together, and let that be the ligament binding you to God. Regard death—not only of the planet or of America or of Rome, but of ones you love and of yourself—as the ultimate moment of history, a fulfillment as much as a denial. Death would teach me a fuller lesson later, but here, in this discovery of His meaning, Jesus prepared me for it. The knowledge of death, that we all face it, is what enables us to live now in communities with each other, without arrogance. In this co
mmunion, the one I had with Paulists and with everyone, we affirm that death has moved from being the end of life, an absolute moment alone, to being a part of life, which is all any of us are. The whole of life belongs to God. It is God.

  This was the religious education I received in the community it was my great good fortune to have stumbled into—and over a pair of penny loafers!

  The message of our faith, what I'd begun to learn personally from Patrick Hughes on the ice, is trust. And here I was learning it theologically. But would it stand up? Three personal revolutions, I said before. The third was political, which in my case turned out to be the most personal of all, for I was about to undergo the loss of the only real trust I'd ever had. My father, my Abba, my Daddy, Dad. I was soon to find out that our bond of trust was not forever. Welcome to the earth, kid. Welcome to real religion. And welcome to politics, family style.

  7. CAPERS IN CHAINS

  WHEN MY FATHER was a brand-new FBI agent in Chicago, one of the targets of that field office was a man named Morris Chilofsky, an immigrant from the disputed region astride the Polish-Russian border. Chilofsky was a graduate of the Lenin School in Moscow. In Chicago throughout the 1930s, he'd been working as an organizer of the Communist Party. It is certain that my father would have known of him, and it is likely that, in the early 1940s, he'd have participated in surveillance of him. Not long after my father's transfer to Washington, Chilofsky himself, now known as Morris Childs, was transferred by his organization to New York, where in 1945 he took up the post of editor of the Daily Worker. But in 1947 Childs fell out with the Party and disappeared from its ranks. That should have been that.