St. Francis's Cleaning Bills

I can't get anyone to publish this, and one contest judge thought it bad taste to attack the Catholic Church in a short piece. Sancta simplicitas! (Latin for blessed idiot, too stupid to be morally culpable.)

St. Francis’s Cleaning Bills

Browsing in the gift shop of the Center for the Arts in Tubac, Arizona, I saw a small statue of St. Francis of Assisi with birds perched on his shoulders and wrists. This was not surprising, since Tubac lies between two missions served by the Franciscans after the Jesuits were thrown out in the eighteenth century for being pains in the ass. And of course, as a cradle Catholic born in 1934, I have been familiar with the iconography for nearly seven decades.

Suddenly I wondered, aloud, if his birds had ever acted like normal birds. My companion, raised as a Southern Baptist, now a member of some less exacting heretical sect, and in any case bemused by most signs of Popery, was shocked. “I can’t take you anywhere,” she said reproachfully. But the woman behind the counter snorted in surprise and what sounded like delight.

Looking back, what strikes me as odd is not the fact that I raised the question but that it took almost seventy years for it to occur to me. Anyone raised Catholic in my generation could probably come up with a number of reasons for that, all of which reveal a good deal about Catholic education and practices up at least until the mid-1960s and, in some enclaves, beyond. For example, a near-contemporary who went to a Catholic girls’ boarding school said, speaking for the nuns who taught her, “Of course the birds wouldn’t do that to St. Francis! God wouldn’t allow it!” Made sense to me: His eye is on the sparrow, and presumably on the other species as well.

Of course, neither my friend nor I nor any of our contemporaries would have put such a question to the nuns, or to each other, because it would never have occurred to us that anything connected with a saint or even with the clergy could have had anything to do with bodily functions. Sure, in saints lives people got eaten by lions and torn on wheels and fried on griddles and a whole lot of other things that would make Stephen King retch, but the pace of the narrative was as swift and painless as a Roadrunner cartoon; the distinction between bad guys and good made Gene Autry westerns seem by comparison as complex as The Brothers Karamazov; and the resolutions glossed over any possible internal conflicts or questionings. No time for zits, wet dreams, flatulence, or any of the minor grossness that makes adolescence seem purgatorial.

Even worse than the brief saints’ lives were the pious stories printed in Manna, I think it was called—anyway it was the magazine given to us in fourth or fifth grade—about supposedly real people. In the only one I can remember, a very pious boy drinks holy water in order to better himself spiritually and dies—though not, unfortunately, as a result—in an odor of sanctity. If this was supposed to move us to emulate him, it failed. No one we knew, even the good kids, would be that much of a dork, a term we didn’t have, though we understood the concept intuitively.

As this story illustrated, in the 1940s and 1950s almost everyone we encountered who was officially connected with the lower rungs of Church hierarchy seemed to assume that profane, everyday experience had nothing whatever to do with the sacred world. Actually, the sacred was pretty much overlaid by a wide and heavy stratum of piety, and piety precluded not only questions about St. Francis but about the stories in Manna and everything else having to do with religion and religious people. This attitude was fostered implicitly by the visual and narrative art we saw and more or less explicitly by priests and especially by nuns.

The pictures and statues available in Catholic churches and schools in my youth would have had to struggle to rise to the level of kitsch. The term is all the more apt because the style was heavily influenced by nineteenth-century German sculptors and painters, though the Italians, debasing the style of Tuscan Renaissance painters, also contributed, and in the mid-1950s I heard a rumor that distribution of pious art was controlled by the Mafia before the organization discovered that pornography was more profitable.

Pious religious art was pastel, genteel, unthreatening, unremarkable. Even depictions of Christ’s passion and death in the Stations of the Cross was sanitized, the graphic reality of the Gospels undercut by the style.

Fortunately, ecclesiastical pseudo-art was easy to ignore because it was, literally and otherwise, put on pedestals above the common gaze. The statue I saw in Tubac was by comparison to the art I saw in my youth—and in a recent newspaper story about a Catholic school--worthy of Malliol or Moore.

Music was another matter. Some people apparently can shut out tunes they find banal or offensive; others, like me, are doomed to listen to anything remotely rhythmic and melodic. Anyway, school children in my parish, regardless of desire or talent, were expected to sing in the choir. It was possible to sing, with aesthetic as well as religious fervor, Benediction hymns like “Tantum Ergo,” “O Salutaris Hostia,” and “Holy God We Praise Thy Name.” But most hymns in English, like “Daily, Daily Sing to Mary,” strained credulity as well as the larynx.

And it wasn’t only statues and other forms of art that were pedestalized, raised above the common view of experience. Members of the clergy were regarded as special, above criticism, reproach, or, as recent events in the Church have shown, criminal investigation. When I was in high school, a youngish assistant priest came into the men’s room and complained that lay people didn’t think that priests went to the bathroom. But his colleagues and predecessors had done a great deal to foster that illusion.

Nuns were a bit lower on the scale of ethereality, partly because some of them were likely to go upside our heads when annoyed, but even had we high school boys known anything at all about menstruation, it would never have never occurred to us that nuns menstruated because we never thought of them as women. (On the other hand, PMS would have explained the behavior of some nuns we encountered.)

Nor, as the reaction to the priest in the men’s room shows, did many of us think of them as real people. They seemed removed from ordinary concerns, sorrows as well as joys, untouchable and out of touch. I can think of perhaps a dozen members of the clergy whom I found really attractive as human beings, and in all cases I did so because they were intelligent and well-educated and sensible and aware of human as well as pious values.

Jacques Maritain held that piety is no substitute for technique, and it took me a long time to discover art that confronted the complexities of human experience. When I did, the pious art and legends formed a useful backdrop. At the very least, they prepared me to enjoy the fake hagiographies in Norman Douglas’s novel South Wind. One tells the story of an impossibly precocious ascetic virgin; the other of Saint Dodekanus (etymologically speaking, a name derived from twelve inglorious parts of the human anatomy), clearly based on an earth-deity of an island with twelve noxious mineral springs, in which the saint is led into the woods by a figure who may be a man (later a woman) “or only an angel.”

And when I finally read Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory—almost condemned by the Vatican before common sense prevailed--I empathized with the young boy restive at his mother’s reading of a pious legend who responds to the real pain and martyrdom of the whiskey priest. Years before, I had read Morris L. West’s The Devil’s Advocate—probably a selection from my mother’s membership in the Book-of-the-Month Club—in which the central, absent figure being considered for beatification had problems and passions and conflicts that I was beginning to be able to recognize. Years later, Ignazio Silone’s Bread and Wine showed me how someone technically a non-believer, in fact a Communist, could respond to others’ need for the world of the spirit.

Still later, I was able to experience the remoteness and mystery of Byzantine art, the sense of real and compelling temptation portrayed in Cranach’s diptych of Eve seductively offering the apple to Adam, the vision of the unknown artist whose Crucifixion hangs in the museum of ecclesiastical art in Esztergom, Hungary, or the practical sense of Flemish and Dutch painters who made the job of prophet seem like a really tough hustle, unlike the Tuscans who painted aged holy men with foreheads as smooth as those of praying virgins.

Obviously, not everyone feels this way, and in fact can’t imagine their saints looking any other way than pastel and dehumanized. This exasperates real artists like Sister Giotto, who found money to restore and redecorate the church in San Ysidro, New Mexico, and who painted santo-like murals above the altar only to discover that many parishioners preferred the nineteenth-century blond Madonna and her plaster companions to the style of their Hispanic heritage.

Other styles and rituals came into the Church after the Second Vatican Council—not always or, in my experience, often for the better. Sometimes, like the concept of “disposable art” advanced in the early 1970s by a religious education director who liked to have kids blow up balloons to demonstrate the action of the Holy Spirit, it was often for the worse. So, it seemed to me, were borrowings from popular music like “Kumbaya” or from Protestant hymnals, especially songs proclaiming to God that He is great. Come on! He’s omniscient! He knows that. Why insult his intelligence? And of course, when we started singing Martin Luther’s “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God,” I figured that it was all over. But perhaps the religious education director was right to reject my suggestion that, to welcome the newly imported bishop, we sing “I’ve Never Been to Heaven, But I’ve Been to Oklahoma,” though that might have reminded the bishop that he was coming into a real context among real people. Still, in the ceremony celebrating the religious education director’s departure for a new job, I did manage to slip in a passage from Bread and Wine extolling the virtues of the communist disguised as a priest. He and the congregation loved it—perhaps because, as the Virginian says in Owen Wister’s novel, it was about something.

It was also heartening to see that children even younger than mine are able to let practical good sense override piety. In the 1970s, I attended a children’s Mass where a hippy-dippy priest was giving a dialogue homily on the theme of freedom. Imagine a bird in a cage, he said to the children in the front pew. What do you have to do for the bird? “Feed him,” one child said. What else? “Give him water.” “Good,” said the priest. “And then what does the bird do?” The answer, based on experience rather than sentiment, convulsed the whole congregation. The last I heard of the priest, he was selling antiques in Colorado.

Unfortunately, some members of the clergy seem immune to even stronger doses of reality. For example, the former bishop of the Phoenix diocese plea bargained his way out of charges of obstruction of justice for concealing evidence that priests under his care had molested young men and in some cases young women. In this he was clearly following the practice of many bishops, if not stated Church policy, as many other cases have shown, based on a clerical culture that put loyalty to the institution above concern for the laity supposedly in their charge. I’m reminded less of the injunction to “Feed my sheep” than of the joke about Montana, where the men are men and the sheep are terrified Even after the Phoenix bishop signed the plea bargain, he denied doing anything wrong until the district attorney threatened to abrogate the deal. The bargain itself should have meant instant disgrace and dismissal, but the Vatican refused to accept his resignation.

It did allow him to retire when, two weeks later, the car he was driving struck and killed a pedestrian. The bishop did not stop. Told by a trusted aide that the police wanted to talk to him, he not only did not call them but refused to answer the door when they came to interview him and asked his secretary how he could get his windshield repaired. In fact, testimony in his trial indicates that he acted as he had done in the molestation cases: hoped it would just go away. It turns out that some eighteen months earlier he damaged another car in a parking lot, got out to look at the damage, and drove away without notifying the owner of the other car. Although he never admitted responsibility, the incident didn’t quite go away, for his insurance company paid for the damage. In his trial on the charge of leaving the scene of the fatal accident, his defense attorneys contended, unsuccessfully, that he thought that he might have hit a dog or been hit by a rock. One can’t know what was in his mind, but from the outside his actions portray a man who never had to confront a serious moral issue—at least one that involved him directly. Certainly not much evidence of heroic virtue in him or in his fellow bishops who allowed priests to run over at least 11,000 lives—and those only of the victims who were willing to bring lawsuits. Nor, come to that, much evidence of manhood.

Running away from or refusing to acknowledge the consequences of one’s actions doesn’t sound much like St. Francis, even in the account wavering between piety and dryness from an early edition of the Catholic Encyclopedia that I found on-line. He was often dirty and ragged, hungry and ill, not always from choice. Perhaps, however much he loved the birds and even sentimentalized them, he knew something about the ways they lived and acted. Another question bubbles up from early training: if they did leave souvenirs on his habit, would their feces be accorded the status of relics of the second order (that is, anything not bearing the saint’s DNA)? And would he have brushed them off in annoyance, or would he, in the phrase notorious in my youth, have offered it up and worn the stains in honorable acceptance of the nature of birds? I like to think so. And I’m pretty sure that he would have stopped to see if he had hit a dog.