Child #2 and a Tangent on Catholicism (While We're on the Subject)

I recently became a father. . . again. People don’t get as excited for you the second time around, but if anything it is just as monumental as the first. I remember laying around and staring at Owen for long periods of time after he was born, and if I try to do that with my daughter my son will throw a ball at my head and ask me to play with him. In other words, one kid is life-changing and hard, but two kids is a whole different world. And as my experience in that world is not yet two weeks old I will decline from making any observations that might get me in trouble.

Instead, here is a quote from Walker Percy’s unspeakably excellent Lost in the Cosmos, which I read to my wife out loud in the hospital. After the baby was born, of course.

“It is a nice ambiguity that Catholics have the least use for the very thing, if not the only thing, for which they are admired, the artifacts, the accidentals of Catholicism, e.g., the buildings, folkways, music, and so on. Thus, a trivial by-product of New Orleans Catholicism, Mardi Gras, has been seized by tourists, appropriated by local Protestants, promoted by the Chamber of Commerce, as the major cultural attraction. Nice ambiguity, I say, because each party is content to have it so. Nobody is offended.

The Catholic is content to practice his faith in a dumpy church in York, while the tourists gape at the nacreous pile of the York minster, an artifact of a former Catholic culture, as beautiful as the shell of a chambered nautilus and as empty. It is not argumentative, I think, to note the niceness of the ambiguity because, if the Catholic is content to have it so, so is the unbeliever. Thus, the esthetic delight of, say, Hemingway in the Catholic décor of Pamplona would perhaps be matched for his contempt for actual Catholic practice in Oak Park, Illinois. It is an ambiguity because it can be given two equally plausible interpretations, Catholic and non-Catholic. The Catholic: what matters to me is faith and practice; the cathedrals and fiestas are incidental. The non-Catholic: what is attractive to me is the Catholic décor, cathedrals, and fiestas; what I want no part of is the belief and practice, which is often in bad taste, if not vulgar. Both are right. Catholic practice is often drab or outlandish, drab in Oak Park, Illinois, outlandish in Chichicastanango. And yet the beautiful York minster is empty. It is a nice ambiguity because each party is content that the other have it his own way.”

I understand exactly what Percy is talking about here. A number of years ago I flirted pretty heavily with Catholicism. Nothing too serious, some stolen glances, a few nervous flutters in my stomach. But Percy nailed me to the wall here. I was not seeking Catholic doctrine but Catholic aesthetics and a tradition with a rich intellectual heritage. But if you’re truly a dyed-in-the-wool Catholic you can never fudge doctrine to enjoy the pretty buildings. And eventually I realized just that: to get access to the aesthetic you need the faith otherwise you are in awe of an empty shell. And I did not and do not have faith in many doctrines of the Roman Catholic Church.