What Do You Use for Brains?

I was fortunate enough to be educated in Catholic schools - from grade school (Immaculate Heart of Mary in South St. Louis, MO) up to my first two years of college (Sacred Heart College, now called Newman University, in Wichita, KS). Anyone who is a product of Catholic education will tell you straight away that Catholic schools (at whatever level) are extremely curious institutions (I mean, for God's sake, look at Notre Dame!). For good or for ill, Catholic schools have a profound effect on our spiritual (and emotional) lives.

Just before I entered high school, my family moved to one of the new suburbs sprouting up outside the city of St.Louis. I'd been happily attending I.H. of M. in the city, gaining friends and enjoying growing popularity with my classmates. I expected to attend St.Mary's, the Catholic all boys high school in the city with the rest of my I.H.M buddies (the same high school my father attended a generation before). But it was not to be.

(A side note here on Catholic grade schools being extremely curious places. As witness to the Church's golden age in primary and secondary education, I can tell you there is nothing sexier than seeing a Catholic school girl kneeling before one of the teaching Sisters and having the distance measured between her cute little Catholic school girl uniform's hemline and the classroom floor below.)

But that's not what I want to talk about. I really want to talk about what happened to me one day in art class at St. John Vianney (the brand-spanking new chrome, glass, and brick all-boys school in the suburbs where I did go to high school). It is an episode so tiny, so insignificant as to be almost irrelevant in the totality of my Catholic education.

I was helping to put away materials after class and asked our art teacher (whom I greatly admired), Brother Martin, S.M. how to store some particular paint or paper or brush (the details are murky). Brother Martin turned and looked me straight in the eye and said, "What do you use for brains? Shit??"

At first I was stunned. Dumbfounded. I had never (never!) heard any priest, brother or other "official" representative of a Catholic religious order talk in such coarse terms. I wasn't quite sure if Brother Martin, in all sincerity, really expected an answer from me. (In my grey remembrance, I struggled internally to offer my best guess as to the constitution of my brains).

The reason I remember this event, I think, is because it signaled the end of my childhood faith in the Church, and the beginning of a more leavened (and critical) faith as an adult. In the fullness of time, my Catholic educational experience ended. I went on to public university and became one of the great army of students who protested the Vietnam war, rallied for civil rights, and joined hands with the sisters to fight for equality for women. And, for a period of time, I left the Church behind (call it the "post-Vatican II blues").

Looking back over the years, from the perspective of someone who loves Christ and loves the Catholic Church, here is the lesson I learned. The clergy are just men! (And frankly, that could be a part of the problem). And these men who toil in God's service, who indeed are "servants" to the spiritual needs of their flock ... they have no more of a lock on the Catholic faith than you or I. Did the clergy abuse scandal take a toll on me? Sure. It took a toll on all of us Catholics. Because we were there - in the schools and in the churches - and we should have noticed. (Forget about blaming the bishops and the cardinals. We the faithful should have been the first to notice.)

So in our lives as Catholics, we should get our minds wrapped around a simple truth. Once in a while we are going to stumble upon an "erring priest" (possibly several of them, the longer we remain in the faith). We are going to find bishops, archbishops, cardinals and (dare I say it) even popes who contradict our own beliefs - who do things that fly in the face of what we consider "right" or "fair" or "loving" - that violate how we perceive this great, mysterious faith that we share.

(I believe it was the church father, St. John Chrysostom who said, "Hell is paved with the skulls of priests." But the sentiment is not that priests are just inherently "bad". It's that priests, just by the nature of their work, have so many more opportunities to screw things up. And of course we blame them because we hold them above us and "closer to God". After all, they're priests!)

What to do, what to do? My advice? Get out your Bible and turn to Romans 8:38, 39.

"For I am convinced that neither death nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor present things, nor future things, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature [even a priest] will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord."

Shit for brains, indeed!