Courtney Love has tenuous Catholic roots? That’s what I read last week. Though she comes from a genealogical line of tortured writers, her mom, Linda Carroll, was adopted by Italian-Americans who raised her Catholic.
Linda herself doesn’t appear to have safeguarded much of the Catholicism. She kept a lot of her adoptive mother’s precious holy cards, which Courtney angrily burned later, but other than that, Linda believes more in free spiritism than Roman Catholicism, as evidenced by her lax moral ways and string of husbands.
The story about Courtney’s mother reminded me of something that I’ve observed frequently: When childhood Catholics fall away from the Church as adults, they fall away hard.
I have no statistical proof, but in less than 15 minutes, I was able to come up with this list of anecdotal evidence: Charlie Sheen, Rosie O’Donnell, Andy Warhol, Jack Kerouac, many of the Kennedy clan, even Adolph Hitler. I realize the list is hardly exhaustive and imperfect (the Kennedy folks haven’t technically left the Church), but in addition, I have personally known a lot of adults who have left the Church in a hard way.
By “hard,” I mean leading a life or holding beliefs that are anathema to Church teaching. Those Catholics who leave the Church for no other religion often become moral antinomians of some sort, and those Catholics who leave it for another religion (e.g., fundamentalism) tend to hold the Church in intellectual contempt.
On the other hand, converts to Catholicism don’t hate their former religions (on the contrary, many of them, like me and my former Lutheranism, have enormous soft spots for their former spiritual haunts). Of course, if they came from a godless background, the converts often hate their former lifestyles, but that kind of hate is centered on sin — where it should be — not on individuals or institutions.
The former Catholics tend to have an easy explanation for their hatred: The Catholic Church stinks, yet it continues to exert power and enjoy prestige. In the mind of the former Catholic, he or she sees through all the ridiculousness and evil, yet a billion others — including a few fine fellows, like John Paul II, who was admired by throngs of non-Catholics — don’t. It’s maddening.
My explanation for their hatred is similar, but a little different. The Church’s teaching is the source of the former Catholics’ hate, but not because the teaching is wrong. It’s the source of hate because the former Catholics have rejected it and (here’s the rub) they haven’t replaced it with anything else.
The Charlie Sheens of the world replace it with hedonism, but that’s hardly fulfilling, as almost every debauchee has realized by the age of sixty. Fundamentalist Christians replace it with the Bible, but nowhere does the Bible say it is sufficient by itself for salvation or virtue.
The famous convert Ronald Knox liked to talk about “the real absence.” When you go into a Catholic Church, the Real Presence is there. When you go into a different church — whether it’s a Baptist church, an Austin-Powers-like singles club, a golf course, or some other house of worship — the Real Presence isn’t there. And neither are the sacraments. There’s a real absence.
When a person “breaks” with his past, it is traumatic. No matter how gently I tried to leave the Lutheran Church for Catholicism, at some level it was traumatic.
After the trauma, healing needs to start. When the break is followed with the sacraments and Jesus’s Body and Blood, the healing is easy and any hard feelings or hatred wash away quickly.
But when it’s not followed by anything, what happens?
It’s then that you get the Linda Carrolls, Charlie Sheens, and Jack Kerouacs of the world.
© Copyright 2006 Catholic Exchange
Eric Scheske is an attorney, the Editor of The Daily Eudemon, a Contributing Editor of Godspy, and the former editor of Gilbert Magazine.
