Why I Am Catholic: For "Ghetto Catholicism?" Not Hardly.

Why I Am Catholic: For "Ghetto Catholicism?" Not Hardly.
Excerpt:

Here we are, all together, and we can behave as though there were nothing in the world but Christians. The ghetto policy consists in thinking of the Church not only as the autonomous community of salvation (which she is) but as an autonomous society in every field. So a Christian has to consider [a Catholic poet being] greater than Goethe, and have no opinion of any magazine except [Catholic magazines]; any statesman who makes his Easter duties is a great statesman, any other is automatically a bit suspect; Christian-Democratic parties are always right, Socialists always wrong, and what a pity there isn't a Catholic party.

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My Response:

I catch a lot [a whole lot] of flak for always blasting communism/socialism.

Although I was raised in small Texas towns among very fundamentalist, Calvinistic family and friends, I was not formed or shaped to be so. In fact my education was European and Spanish---very liberal, existentialist, impressionistic and, thus, socialistic. It was also forged by artists. As you can well imagine the years of youth and young adulthood were mostly marked by loneliness and tempestuousness. Plus I had to deal with a lot of death early.

Those I have loved the most profoundly whether personally or as artists are liberally existentialists. Elie Wiesel, Primo Levi, Simone Weil and Albert Camus taught me well. On the other hand my patron saint is St. Therese of Lisieux. She tends to take her job very seriously and much to her praise, she won’t let me go. Into the mix quite early at the University of Texas I collided with Alexander Solzhenitsyn who keeps popping up to ground me. The old man in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch did me in and Vincent van Gogh as well as Ranier Marie Rilke saved my sanity.

To reflect on Frank, the ex-Marine, and his thought of the easy polarization we Catholics and other fundamentalists often resort to when confronting socialism, I have to battle first with myself. This is not an easy battle. After meeting Solzhenitsyn’s work I was forced to confront the real meaning of ‘red’. Blood. The confrontation for me has never been easy. Christ would not allow me one hair width in this.

Almost immediately after seeing the movie, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch, when it first came out!, I was casually having coffee at the Parisian-style restaurant on the corner at an outside table. Joining the large group around the table that day was a young British woman who was working on her doctorate at UT in aesthetics. She openly, quietly identified herself as a socialist and was a card-carrying communist. It didn’t bother her but meeting her so soon after that movie it bothered me. I was an ass; she was reflective and maddeningly reposed. I have never forgotten our exchange. To her credit we continued to be friends. After I got over the initial shock, I asked her, knowing all the results of bloody regimes and their destruction around the world, how on earth could someone so intelligent and sensitive be a communist. She calmly replied my parents are communists. They, in fact, owned a communist newspaper in Great Britain. Then she went on discussing her aesthetics. I was silenced for a long time but always the gulags of the world, the murders and thievery, the torturing, the destruction of churches, etc. haunted my spirit.

As for a Catholic party. Unfortunately that is what many countries already have and it is ‘socialist’ [i.e., Liberation Theology/ Alinsky, etc.] Again my patroness came to my aid. In The Hidden Face I was freed from the extreme of polarization. Thus I was literally saved from the ex-smoker syndrome of becoming an ‘émigré l’interieur’. This is an important point. It clarifies my thinking and beliefs.

The magnetic draw of communism lies in the deceptive ‘communal’ response to grave injustices. It began that way. If people really studied the entire lives of the people they admire and follow perhaps there would not be as much confusion. Communism/socialism is ersatz community. It is a lie. It always promises, just around that corner, but never delivers. The violence erupts from that continued denial of satisfying the greater and greater emptiness of heart, mind and spirit which is never filled by socialism.

Abbot David told me that all the aberrations in society occur because of something the Church is not facing or dealing with. Not Jesus Christ, the human beings in the Church. I see it starkly and existentially. When a man has a sword thrust through his gut he could care less about your theology. That is where we are. But it does not justify the socialism. It just means that we need to understand why we are attracted to it enough to follow it. Some of these people really are closer to Jesus in their suffering. They are my friends.

The culmination of what I continue to learn from each of them is that often we as individual Christians have forgotten what it’s all about. Christ makes it clear. When we die and stand before Him He said He will ask each of us: “Well, did you love….? But Lord when did we see Thee hungry, sick, poor, ….? And He will respond, “Whatsoever you did to the least…you did [OR NOT] to ME.” Now if each of us begins there in our hourly walk through life we cannot go astray. It is not new. I find it solidly in The Sacred Hearts.