This Sunday's Parade magazine (all right, all right, so it's not the New York Times) carried an interview of movie star-Scientologist Tom Cruise. In case you haven't been focusing on essentials at the supermarket check-out counter, I'll fill you in. The 43-year-old Cruise has been making headlines this past year by gushing over his mid-20's girlfriend Katie Holmes, who's baby is expected to appear any week now.
What's this got to do with the Catholic Church? Well, up until Sunday, I thought the tie-in was Katie Holmes, who grew up Catholic and whose family is reportedly pitching fits about her Tom-inspired conversion to Scientology. But Parade magazine informed me that Tom too had been a cradle Catholic, even spending time in a minor seminary during his teens. So now I've left off brooding over his enticement of Katie from the Catholic Church and added him to my lengthening list of famous fallen-aways to pray for.
It's a family thing. You may not warm up to overbearing Aunt Adelaide or annoying cousin Conrad, but they're bone of your bone and flesh of your flesh. You'd rather not have to hobnob with them at holidays and family gatherings, but you'd also rather not hear of bad things happening to them — or of their doing bad things to others.
The Body of Christ is like that too. It is hard not to feel connected, for better or worse, to the extended family of the baptized. Of course, there are lots of annoying Catholics who never leave the Church — the Kennedys leap to mind — and plenty of non-famous fallen-aways to pray for. But my special sideline is praying for famous people who also happen to be fallen aways.
Take George Harrison, the gaunt-cheeked, “sensitive” Beatle. He came from a Catholic background and grew up in heavily-Irish Liverpool, though he'd long since ceased practicing the religion of his birth when he embraced the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi's brand of Eastern enlightenment. Paul McCartney too was baptized Catholic, but he was born into a mixed marriage and reared nondenominationally. And yes, I know that “Mother Mary” in “Let it Be” refers to Paul's dead mother, but to anyone who's ever grown up around Catholics, “Mother Mary” cannot avoid also referring to our second mother.
There are many famous fallen aways, because families are messy. Lots of my favorites are literary, like Shakespeare, whose Catholic father was fined for not attending the Church of England, and who was at least sympathetic to the persecuted faith of his father, if not a secret believer.
And there are deathbed reversions, too, such as the controversial final moments of Jean-Paul Sartre, or the finale of inconstant convert and unhappily homosexual Oscar Wilde's life. Then there are children of mixed marriages where the Catholic partner's example was for one reason or another less attractive to the offspring. Ronald Reagan, for example, followed his warm-heartedly generous mother's brand of Protestantism, while a brother chose the Catholicism of his alcoholic father. What a wonderful second Catholic president Reagan would have made, washing out the bitter taste of JFK's “I-won't-let-my-faith-influence-me” brand of Catholicism.
Finally, there are the convert children who draw their famous parents into the great chaotic Catholic family, at least with in-law status. William Tecumseh Sherman, for example, had a son who chose to become a Catholic priest, to his father's displeasure. Around roughly the same time, author of The Scarlet Letter Nathaniel Hawthorne's daughter Rose was gravitating toward Rome. Following her conversion, she founded a branch of Dominicans devoted to the care of terminal cancer patients.
Family ties are all over — the black sheep you'd rather not acknowledge, and those more progressive relations who've “grown” so far away from you that they'd rather not acknowledge you, as well as big brothers and sisters who make us proud. Now Katie, Tom Cruise, and their little Scientologist baby will swell the multitude on my list. Maybe someday that baby will become curious about his or her lost relatives in the faith.
Madame X works in Washington DC for the federal government. Because of her employer, she must write under a pseudonym.
