The Lapsed Catholic

A man can’t really claim to know himself. Only God knows him. But being, I suppose, an arrogant man who has been made just wise enough to fear his own arrogance, I have often wondered why some lose the Faith and some keep it. This was never out of abstract interest, but to make it less possible page 407 that any power at all should ever take the light from my eyes and the heart out of my breast – for, as I imagine it must be for all Catholics, the Faith is for me not perhaps life itself but the meaning that prevents life from becoming a living death. Therefore I would like to point out some of the obvious ways in which a man may endanger the virtue of faith, and more for my own preservation than in order to enlighten others.

Freedom is the element for which each man is born. Having the power of rational choice, he is immeasurably freer than his fellow animals, whose mysterious lives are controlled by powers they themselves neither govern nor understand, and freer perhaps than his fellow spirits, the angels whose choice to obey God is not in the same sense voluntary. The freedom of a seabird at home flying or resting on the breast of the apparently infinite sea, either in calm or in storm: this is (to me) the clearest symbol of the relation of man to God, who is at one and the same time man’s home and his illimitable freedom.

‘No boundaries’, that is the exact meaning of the word ‘infinite’ – our finite hearts are magnetised and pulled to Heaven by the unwalled freedom which exists for us only in God. Yet man is capable of the delusion that freedom is possible away from God; that the will of God is man’s gaol; and this delusion is a common cause of the revolt of particular souls from the Faith.

A man may say to himself: ‘If the Faith were not true, or at least not wholly true, then I could leave the woman whom I married and no longer love (and who has obviously long ceased to love me) and marry Sally Jones whom I have come to love for her excellent figure and charming disposition.’ This man has already conceived of the will of God as a gaol.

The second stage is to say: ‘I have now established a relationship with Sally Jones. This relationship has a very real human value for me and her. I am a kind man. It would hurt Sally unbearably if I were to leave her. I am a genuine humanist. When human values and the will of God conflict, there has to be a bit of give and take – after all I am free. Flesh and blood is more important than an abstract law. Moreover, Sally is now going to have a child. As the father of the child, I have a responsibility to see it gets paternal love and a proper upbringing.’

The third stage is to say: ‘The Faith cannot be wholly true. If it were true, then God is a child-devouring Moloch. Of course He’s not that at all. He’s a loving Father. But the Church has twisted the Faith and turned it into a gaol too harsh for human beings (like me and Sally) to live in. I’m a warm-hearted human being. I’ll leave the Church and worship God as he really is – till such time as the Church reforms herself and allows divorce and re-marriage. . . .’

I think I have traced adequately enough the thought processes of a man whose loss of the Faith is brought about by a moral failure. One can sympathise with his situation and pray to be delivered from any such snare. page 408 To the eyes of the narrow Catholic, all loss of the virtue of faith appears to be essentially of this kind. I suggest that there are other kinds.

A girl has been educated in a convent boarding school. It so happens that the nuns who run the school are in the main old-fashioned Puritans who have never grasped nor are likely to grasp the liberating spirit of the Second Vatican Council. Most of them assume unconsciously that the best thing any girl in their charge could do would be to become a nun herself. And there are several of them who have dreams in which they curiously identify the Devil with a long-haired boy on a motor-bike.

The girl we are discussing – let’s call her Veronica – is being told the facts of life by a verbose fellow pupil one night in the dormitory after lights-out. The Sister in charge of the dormitory hears them. There is an incredible hullabaloo. Veronica and her fellow pupil are given the impression that they have both contracted leprosy; and moreover, that Satan has gained an all but total possession of their souls. Undoubtedly this situation would make an ordinary adult break into gales of laughter. But, they believe what they are told; or at least Veronica does. And she comes to believe a great deal of similar nonsense, imagining it is all part of the teaching of the Church.

Ten years later she marries, and strikes so many psychological snags in her relation to her husband that she goes to a psychiatrist. The psychiatrist gives her a truncated but realistic account of the cause of her difficulties – namely that the Church had taught her to identify sex with Satan. She leaves the Church, becomes a free-thinker, and possibly a better wife and mother.

Veronica’s problem came, of course, not from the Church herself, but from the disadvantages of a Puritan education. Yet Veronica would have had to be an analytical genius to distinguish what was Catholicism and what was Puritanism in her upbringing. I suggest that her loss of the Faith would be in the main an affliction unconsciously engineered by others.

Bill Mulligan, on the other hand, has had none of these difficulties. He had a happy childhood and grew up to take on a white-collar job in the Drainage Department. At first the habits of a Catholic upbringing stayed with him. He went to Confession once a fortnight and to Mass every Sunday. He said his prayers night and morning. Admittedly he had very little to confess – an occasional bout of ill-temper or snaffling of the office stationery.

When that funny business cropped up, and Joe Flanagan was sacked for disagreeing with the Director, Bill was wise enough to keep his mouth shut. After all, he’d signed an oath not to divulge departmental information to the general public; and he was next in line for Flanagan’s job. And when the Drainage Department drove the bulldozers through the Maori village at five in the morning, and some old people who were still in bed got hurled out on the grass in their night-shirts – well, Bill was sorry about it, but he had the memoranda to prove they’d been given a clear warning the pa was going to be demolished. If they were too old-fashioned to want to shift to a new model page 409 township where all the houses had refrigerators, that was their peculiarity – he couldn’t really have much sympathy with them.

By the way, Bill Mulligan isn’t a Catholic any more. There’s been no formal breach with the Church – nothing like that!He still sometimes goes to Mass at Easter and Christmas. But he doesn’t worship the God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob. He worships the god of Commerce and Efficiency and Hygiene that rules the modern world. He’s Director of the Drainage Department now; and everybody agrees he’s doing a very fine job, even if he has that little habit of looking over his shoulder every now and then and staring at nothing. Bill thinks it’s high time the Church dropped the notion of there being an actual Devil. He’s got married to a nice girl (I was present at their wedding; an elegant undenominational affair), and she’s managed to hold on to her play centre job. She’s quite an enthusiast.

The Mulligans have only one child. They feel that more than one would throw their social life right out of gear. Bill’s mother isn’t happy about this, especially as Bill himself was the fourth child of a big family. But, as Bill said to me when I last met him, we’re not living in the Dark Ages and the Mulligans aren’t millionaires.

And then there are some people who long for God and can’t believe in Him; or at least not in the way that the Church teaches. If they could they would. In some cases they did once believe. When I meet these spiritual wanderers – in the pub, in a bookshop, in a kitchen, in a socialist organisation – I notice two things about them – their endless performance of works of mercy, which makes me burn with shame at my own laziness – and the inconsolable sorrow that shows in their faces. I think their destiny is very much God’s business; for they are probably His hidden saints. I hope some of them still pray; for if they do not, then they will be unable to pray for me, and that will be my misfortune.

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