Your People Are My People; Your God is My God: A Catholic Convert Reflects on His Protestant Ancestors

Last Friday, I attended an appreciation dinner sponsored by Christ the King Church, my local parish, given as a way of saying thank you to the parish's many volunteers.  Father Bob led us in the Catholic grace before we sat down to eat our dinners.

Bless us O Lord,

And these thy gifts which we are about to receive

From Thy Bounty

Though Christ Our Lord

Amen

I have come to love this brief table prayer, said daily by millions of Catholics all over the world.  Those of us who say it are acknowledging our dependence on God and our gratitude for all the blessings of life, including the food we eat.

And I find its brevity, its humility, its almost childlike simplicity strangely touching.  This little prayer is utterly refreshing to me compared to the long-winded Protestant table graces of my youth, with pastors going on and on and on as the fried chicken got cold in front of us.  If anyone wants to know what these Protestant prayers are like, they should see the movie August: Osage County. Chris Cooper's character gives a lengthy mealtime grace, delivered in the sweltering heat of an Oklahoma farm house, that is a pretty good approximation of the real thing.

This prayer forms part of our Catholic heritage--my  Catholic heritage. As I say it, I feel a kinship with all the American Catholics over the centuries who clung to their faith in spite of scorn and prejudice from  the predominant American culture.  The Irish immigrants of Boston, the Italians of New York, the Poles of Chicago, the German Catholics of Texas and the upper Midwest, the Hispanic immigrants of California--all these people are my people.  Their God is my God.

Sometimes when I reflect on my Catholic heritage--freely given to me when I came into the Church--I feel pity for my Protestant ancestors who gave up the power, the beauty and the glory of Catholicism--and for what?  To become Methodists? To become Presbyterians? To become Episcopalians? They threw their inheritance away for a crust of stale bread.

And I wonder sometimes, over the centuries that have passed since the Reformation, did any of my Protestant ancestors turn back to the Mother Faith?  Did some Fossey in ages past marry a Catholic French girl or an Irish-American girl and return to the Church?  Did one of the Andersons stumble upon the reality of Christ in the Eucharist and begin to weep as St. Elizabeth Ann Seton did more than 200 years ago on the coast of Italy?  Did even one of my Protestant ancestors ever wander into a Mass and be overcome by its beauty  as happened to Dorothy Day early in the last century?

Or am I the only one among all the generations of my Protestant ancestors stretching back to Henry VIII who turned back?  Did God call me alone of all my family to return to the fold? Of all my blood relatives who crossed the River Styx in error, am I the only one--through the wideness of God's mercy-- to mysteriously come floating back toward the abundance of life on the healing streams of the Tiber?

"Everyone's problem is no one's problem": Elliot Rodger, the UC Santa Barbara shooting spree, and Dorothy Day

With distressing regularity, young American men are committing mass murder.  The Columbine killings in 1999,  the Virginia Tech massacre in 2007, Jared Loughner's killing spree in 2011, the Sandy Hook Elementary School shootings in December 2012.  And now we learn about Elliot Rodger, a 22-year old student at UC Santa Barbara, who killed six people last week before taking his own life.

Every case is different of course--particularly with regard to the casualty lists. So far, I think, Seung-Hui Cho's attack at Virginia Tech holds the casualty record: 32 killed and 17 wounded.

But most follow a common pattern.  First, all the attacks were planned and some were planned meticulously over a period of many months. All the attackers were students or had recently been students at American schools or colleges. All the attackers gave some warning or clear indication that they were contemplating violence. And all were male. (The Amy Bishop killings at the University of Alabama-Huntsville was a case of workplace violence and is in a different category altogether.)

In most cases, the attackers killed themselves before they could be captured; but Jarod Loughhner and James Holmes (the Aurora, Colorado movie-theater shooter) were captured alive.

In most of these cases, the attackers used at least one semi-automatic weapon to shoot their victims. Often they were well supplied with ammunition and extended-ammunition magazines. But Elliot Rodger stabbed three of his victims to death and injured some people with his automobile.

All these cases have provided fodder for media commentaries--from Bill O'Reilly of Fox News to Frank Bruni of the New York Times. (After all, Frank can't devote all of his columns to attacking the Catholic Church.) And everyone has a solution for stopping these killing sprees, which seem to be escalating in frequency.

Some argue for better gun control--particularly restrictions on access to semi-automatic weapons and extended-ammunition clips. Some argue for better mental health care. Some blame violent video games, and some blame America's supposedly misogynistic culture.

I found myself wondering what Dorothy Day would say about all of this. Dorothy died in 1980, but she saw her share of violence and mental illness. Her writings and diaries contain frequent descriptions of  mentally ill people that the Catholic Worker took in and sheltered. Indeed, she wrote in 1972 that "[i]nsanity is the problem of our era. . . . One can call it many names, alienation, withdrawal, depression, nervous breakdown--we have them all . . ."

Dorothy thought the Catholic Worker's farm settlements were one solution to violence.  She called one CW farm "a school for the living, a school of nonviolence."  Musing in her diary in September 1972, she reflected on our society's tendency to see violence as a collective problem, not a problem that requires an individual response. "'Everybody's problem is no one's problem,'" she wrote. ""Seems to me there is some kind of proverb or aphorism like that."

Dorothy did not have any clear solution to the problem of violence in American society, although she thought state-sponsored abortions--by sanctioning violence against the unborn--might be contributing to the problem.

I do think, however, that Dorothy would counsel us to be kind to all the troubled, unstable people we meet, even though mentally ill people can truly be a bother and an irritation.  Dorothy and her CW comrades certainly lived by that philosophy. They sheltered a number of truly exasperating people--people who clearly suffered from mental illness.

And this causes me to wonder whether Elliot Rodger would have murdered six people last week if just one person had showed him a little kindness on the day before he went on his killing spree.  But who knows? Maybe someone had been kind to Elliot Rodger on the day before he stabbed and shot people. But maybe that person wasn't quite kind enough, patient enough, compassionate enough to turn the tide.

I'm not saying of course that Elliot's friends and acquaintances share responsibility for what Elliot did. But I am saying that we all have opportunities in our day-to-day lives to show a little patience, a little compassion, and a little kindness to the abrasive and annoying people we meet. We never really know, do we, just how close to the edge that any person might be in any given moment.

References

Dorothy Day. The Duty of Delight: The Diaries of Dorothy Day. Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 2008.