Friends would say my religion is eating lunch at Pizza Hut — the breaking of the breadsticks — 1 do it more often than I attend Mass. I’m a struggling American-Catholic, if that is not a tautology in this day and age. Notice the order of the words “American-Catholic”: church wins the noun position; state earns only an adjective, but not without a fight. It is not easy to belong to the most hierarchical of churches in the most democratic of countries. Choice struggles with tradition, freedom with authority, science with dogma.
Only in my writing do these conflicts find a resolution, and not through any conscious practice of my own. I realized this one day in March of 1996, just after The St. Petersburg Times had run my month-long series on a family struggling with AIDS. An acquaintance approached me in Pizza Hut. “I was impressed with how spiritual the story was, ” she said. “How Catholic.” She even quoted a line I had used to describe my protagonist’s anxiety while waiting on line to have her blood drawn: “It was like waiting for communion — only it was her body and her blood.” But that was just a metaphor, she realized, for my character was not even Catholic. What she found most powerful in the series, she said, were the themes of sin and redemption. This was an unusual response to the series.
Most of the attention went to the form of the story — 29 short daily chapters with cliffhanger endings — and to the sexual content: scenes of fantasy and frustration, a photo of transvestites, descriptions of the Brazilian Carnival, analyses of different cultural definitions of homosexual behavior. Other chapters were devoted to a church support group, to a hospice ministry, to the character’s prayer life, and to the unconditional love of friends and family members. I guess if you did a careful content analysis of the series, you’d find equal quantities of prayer and promiscuity, aspiration and degradation, compassion and passion.
As I approach the age of 50, I now admit, without qualification, that I write with a Catholic voice. (This is a significant accomplishment for a man raised with the help of a Protestant father and a Jewish grandmother.) Readers tell me they can hear that Catholic voice even when I’m writing with the strategic neutrality of the journalist. They hear it in my choice of topics, in my attraction to certain characters, and in my choice of metaphor and allusion. I’ve tried to imagine what might be the characteristics of an American-Catholic voice, and have come up with this list:
- I write with a moral vision, and I’m attracted to characters who either share such a vision or lack one. I assume that I’m writing for a reason or reasons, and that they are connected to the Ten Commandments and the Sermon on the Mount. I don’t apply this in a simple-minded way to my analysis of the world. I think an adulterer can make a good president and a faithful spouse a bad one. But I write many stories with moral frames, and I try to make those frames visible rather than transparent. I want people who read my work to conclude that journalism has some higher purpose.
- Part of my training as a Catholic was to believe that we share some responsibility for the poor, starving, ignorant, suffering, imprisoned and out-cast. A hunger for social justice is satisfied by a journalism that exposes wrongdoing and celebrates the healers and peacemakers. So I find myself at the end of the second Christian millennium writing about AIDS (the plague of the century), and the Holocaust (the crime of the century) , and Vietnam (the defining moral event of my generation).
- I believe in rootedness, not only in a religious tradition and culture, but in a place and time. A particular sense of community and continuity shapes my journalism. I write about the Lakewood neighborhood of St. Petersburg from the inside out because I have 20 years invested in it. I care about schools and neighbors and girls who play soccer there. I resist a journalism that depends too heavily on technology or on communities of interest. I look for real people, living in close proximity, who depend upon each other.
- Recent surveys reveal that there is actually little disagreement among American-Catholics on social and theological issues. The battle is between rank and file Catholics and the hierarchy. Yet we are not schismatics. We love and need the very club whose rules we’re defying. This questioning of authority is in harmony with some of the best kinds of journalism. It requires a practical skepticism but not cynicism, for men and women may be sinners, but they are also redeemed. We reject a Skinnerian universe for one which imagines that people can choose good over evil, and should. An old newsroom adage goes, “If your mother says she loves you, check it out.” I’d say, “If your mother says she loves you, for God’s sake, tell her you love her too, and then send her some flowers.”
- I retain a sense of the miraculous in a scientific and mechanistic world. Hey, don’t we call publication of the newspaper “the daily miracle?” I pray when my children are sick or when people I love are in trouble. I pray for other reasons, too. Even when the journalist’s job is to explain or shed light, I love stories that preserve a sense of wonder or that defy understanding. The chance meeting on the train. The reunion of family members. The dog who saves a child from drowning, or the child who saves the dog.
- As a writing teacher I preach the value of concreteness and specificity: the name of the dog (Rex), the brand of the beer, the color of the rose. These help readers see and remember. They also inspire, I hope, a sense of the holiness of ordinary things, things that are imbued with meaning by the actions, for good or evil, of ordinary human beings.
- I once heard the great reporter Francis X. Clines of New York Times say that the purpose of journalism is “to tell the morbid truth” and that we should not apologize for that. To be sure, reading a daily newspaper, (or viewing a newscast!), is like staring into the abyss of original sin. But I believe in the possibility of sainthood in the world, of the transformative power of genuine goodness, embodied in the work of a Dorothy Day or Mother Teresa or Elie Wiesel, and thousands of others who are lesser known — the cancer clinic nurse, the dedicated school teacher — who could and should populate our stories. When I wrote about a Catholic nun who founded the St. Petersburg Free Clinic and Food Bank, I knew that democracy and theology were both being served.
- Few Catholics of my generation can escape without a highly developed sense of sin. And even if we lack the scrupulous consciences that drove us weekly into the confessional box, we still believe in evil and people’s individual responsibility for it. We are less tolerant than most of trying to explain, through journalism or psychology, the social causes of evil. Why did Mike Tyson bite part of his opponent’s ear off? Maybe the devil, and not Don King or childhood poverty, made him do it. But we think that goodness has its rewards, and evil its punishments, and that as journalists, when we celebrate charitable work or expose corruption, we may serve — but only with humility — as instruments of justice.
- I believe in the formative power of stories. I’ve heard it said that among all the great religions, Catholics have the best stories. I don’t know if that’s true. I’ve heard some great stories from Jews and Southern Baptists. But not only did we grow up with Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Noah and the Ark, David and Goliath — and the amazing Gospel narratives — but also with the legends of the saints. The stories took many forms: biography, hagiography, homilies, allegories, parables. Whether their meaning was clear, it was always assumed that these stories made us better. Part of the current malaise in journalism is expressed by doubt over whether our stories make people better at all. Some people think they make us worse, that the cumulative effect of telling the morbid truth is, well, morbidity.
- The naughty bumper sticker says that “Journalists do it every day.” Jesus said “the kingdom is now.” And in the convergence of those two sayings I find my voice. Not that journalism and religion lack a teleology, a direction toward a bright future, either the good society or the beatific vision. But Christ taught, and exemplified, how the divine is experienced in the human moment, the feeding of the hungry child, the consolation of the grieving mother. So, too, the greatest journalism captures and renders the significant moment, the one that reveals where we have been as a people and where we are going. In that sense, the newspaper is a book of revelations.
None of this suggests that members of other religions, or agnostics, for that matter, lack these sensibilities. I am describing what I feel in my own character and work, and why “Catholic” — make that “American-Catholic” — is the best label for it.
For the first time, I’ve written about matters of faith directly, in a series titled “Sadie’s Ring.” In 11 chapters, appearing in several newspapers, I explored what it was like to grow up as a Catholic boy with a Jewish grandmother. I described a journey of faith which forced me to re-examine the meaning of the Jewishness of Jesus and the roots of the Christian ethic in Jewish law.
I was astonished by the response: more than 500 phone calls and messages of support from readers of The Miami Herald alone. I thanked them in a brief column that concluded with this observation: “’Sadie’s Ring’ violates traditional definitions of news. The same can be said of the Torah or the Gospel. Yet both of those works speak about what is enduring and noble in the human spirit, about people’s experience of the presence of God in the world. That experience is so powerful that it should, on occasion, command the attention of journalists. Readers, I have faith, will reward the risk.”
The series also appeared in The Minneapolis Star Tribune, and a Lutheran minister up in the northland used it as the text for his sermon. I scratched my head as I read his words. What is going on when a Lutheran minister praises from the pulpit the work of a Catholic man writing about his Jewish grandmother? America.
Two stories from the Bible are relevant. The first comes from Genesis and describes the folly of men trying to build the Tower of Babel high enough to reach God, who curses mankind with a confusion of languages.
But this curse is redeemed in the moments after Pentecost, when the disciples, filled with the Holy Spirit, preach to the people from many nations and are understood by all. In a sense, journalists have to choose between these two models. Will we write in a voice that only captures and magnifies confusion through the culture? Or can we write in authentic voices that can be heard across the land and for the benefit of many? And for a higher purpose?