Excerpt: What God Allows

DARKNESS

[This is the prelude to What God Allows: The Crisis of Faith and Conscience in One Catholic Church by Ivor Shapiro (Doubleday, New York, 1997)]

SATURDAY NIGHT, but the Sabres are playing away tonight and the War Memorial Auditorium, the “Aud” to the crowds who would otherwise be massing here, is deserted as a pink dusk falls over the Niagara frontier. On the shore line of Lake Erie, a handful of walkers, jackets bravely open over their sweaters, celebrate the apparent onset of Spring, but the wind off the lake’s ice pack brings shivers as it makes its way north, between Waterfront Boulevard’s brand new townhouse condos, under the I-190 thruway, past the rust stone of City Hall, and up Delaware Avenue. Three short blocks over to the right, Saturday nighters are beginning to congregate at the Sports City Grill and Network, the restaurant and nightspot “as dedicated to sports as the town of Buffalo,” a monument to its owner, Jim Kelly, indefatigable quarterback of the nation’s most reliably almost-but-not-quite NFL team. Just ahead, high atop a Fleet Bank building, twin green Statues of Liberty flash solemnly in the dusk over an empty banking district and beyond to downtown’s east side, where the cops of the 12th precinct are readying themselves for whatever violence this night may bring.

As the lake wind dissipates to the left and right of Delaware, the crowds are moving into the theatre district. Jethro Tull is playing a one-nighter at Shea’s; they’re doing Fiddler on the Roof, again, at the Pfeifer; The Game of Love and Chance is at the Studio Arena Theater. At the Kleinhans Music Hall, pianist Angela Cheng joins the Philharmonic to play Greig. The wind has become a breeze by the time it passes Cleveland Street, named for one of the two Buffalo-raised U.S. presidents, and Millard Fillmore Hospital, named for the other. On Main Street to the east, they’re gathering for jazz at the Anchor Bar, where Buffalo-style chicken wings were invented; to the west, the serious drinking is just beginning at the hangouts near Buffalo State College.

Where Delaware dodges under the Scajaquada expressway near the parkland site of the Pan American Exposition of 1901, where President William McKinley was shot dead, the night air is almost still and almost warm. A mile and a half to the north, past the new and used lots of Tunmore Oldsmobile and the intersection of Kenmore Avenue, unremarkable but for a low white-on-wood sign (on a low brick wall opposite Louie’s Texas Red Hots) which proclaims entry into the “village” of Kenmore, some 500 adults and children stand in near silence and near-total darkness as the flint of a gas clicker meets a can of Sterno in a sand-filled brass bowl to make fire at the back of a Gothic cruciform church. In the dark silence, a small child’s voice echoes, “Light out! Why?” As if to answer, a disembodied amplified voice says: Dear friends in Christ, on this most holy night, when our Lord Jesus Christ passed from death to life, the church invites her children throughout the world to come together in vigil and prayer…. May the light of Christ, rising in glory, dispel the darkness of our hearts and minds.

In a quiet chaos of shuffling and squeezing, those pressed into the rear vestibule light long thin candles off the tall repository of holy paschal flame, and make their way back to their seats, preceding and following the Easter candle itself as it moves slowly down the centre aisle. Three times, from the balcony above, a tenor announces: The light of Christ. Three times, as the light spreads slowly from candle to candle and creeps up stone walls amid incense fumes to brighten the white ceiling and shine on teak rafters, low untrained voices intone the response: Thanks be to God.

Tonight, the ancient ritual will be played out hundreds of thousands of times in cities and towns on every continent and in most of the languages that exist. Here in the parish of St. Paul, Kenmore, in the diocese of Buffalo in the ecclesiastical province of New York, they are celebrating not just the discovery of an empty tomb in first-century Palestine, but the adding to their numbers of eight newcomers. Four women, three men and one pubescent girl stand with their families in the dark, still holding lit candles as Monsignor Paul Whitney, pastor of St. Paul’s church, chants the Exultet in Gregorian style and occasionally crackly voice–Rejoice, heavenly powers! Sing, choirs of angels! Exult, all creation around God’s throne! Jesus Christ, our King, is risen!…. These eight are The Elect–before this great vigil ends, two and a half hours from now, the eight will belong to the Roman Catholic Church. Among them stands Mike Merrill, a student of medicine, a reader of philosophy, and a habitual questioner of things both sacred and profane. As he listens to the ancient chant, Mike ponders with foreboding the fact that he must shortly proclaim his acceptance of and belief in the church’s creed. Born to Presbyterians but married to a Catholic, Mike has taken his preparation for baptism with great seriousness, but he is too ambivalent by nature to be comfortable around creeds. He wonders, half-seriously, if he might be about to set a record for the fastest time from baptism to excommunication.

Judy Nice, standing in the gloom between her husband and daughter just behind the section reserved for families of the Elect, can, if she strains and peers, just pick out the backs of the heads of the seven adults whom she led through the initiation process culminating tonight. As Director of Adult Formation at St. Paul’s, her chief preoccupation had been the progress of Mike Merrill and the others toward membership of the church. Had been, that is, until a year of self-scrutiny reached its climax and she was obliged to face head-on the question of whether, in conscience, she could continue to teach the doctrines of the Catholic Church. Two aisles to her right, both hands clasped tight on his misalette, stands Dennis Hurley, who wrote the letter that pushed Judy to that brink–after Dennis himself had decided that he could no longer, in conscience, keep silent about what was being taught in the church’s name.

O happy fault, sings Father Paul, his voice rising and falling sporadically in the ancient rhythm, O necessary sin of Adam, which gained for us so great a Redeemer…. Bernice Graff, standing among the eucharistic ministers ready to distribute the Easter communion much later tonight, watches the two priests in the sanctuary and thinks how fine her son Paul would have looked among them; never mind, she knows he is here, right here, lightly present in the air just above her right shoulder. And, over the other shoulder, another dead son, Bob, free at last of AIDS. …The power of this holy night dispels all evil, washes guilt away, restores lost innocence, brings mourners joy….

Among the lectors, ready to deliver a prophecy from Isaiah, stands Dick Shaner with his wife Jamie–an encounter with tragedy nearly six years ago began their evolution into pillars of the church, although agents provocateurs might seem more like it of late, with Jamie, especially, emerging as a critic both of universal Catholic doctrine and local pastoral practice. A few feet away, Ken Monaco, a loyal member of the legions of Pope John Paul II and vociferous admirer of the Holy Father’s recent blunt attacks on liberal theology and loose morality, stands with his wife and son. The short distance between Jamie and Ken tonight conceals the torrid battle line between them, a line also staked out, largely by lay people, in parishes and dioceses across America. On both sides of the line, combatants see themselves as underdogs, with the questioners ranged against the might of Rome and the orthodox against the very culture of modern America; they share only the certainty that the result of the war of the laity will determine the future shape of Catholicism. And they are right in this, because, given the ever-declining state of the celibate priesthood, lay leaders like Judy and Bernice and the Shaners and the Monacos are their church’s only practical hope of survival.

…It casts out hatred, brings us peace, and humbles earthly pride…. Several rows back from these protagonists, Ruthie Hemerlein, who has difficulty staying on her feet this long, sits down carefully, one hand pivoting from the back of the pew in front of her, the other holding her lit candle vertical. It was Ken Monaco who drove 72-year-old Ruthie to church tonight, and she is as fond of him as she is of Judy Nice. As a divorcee and longtime opponent of Catholic fundamentalism, she shares Judy’s profound antipathy for religious autocracies; as a devotee of the Blessed Virgin and of the holy rosary, she has much in common with Ken. But tonight, the ideological war is far from her mind. Tonight, despite the weakness of her knees, a strange sense of inner peace has filled Ruthie since the moment the Monacos arrived to pick her up for the vigil. Amid the night’s many reminders of death and new life, the prospect of her own dying seems as close as the flame of the candle in her right hand. This is a bit odd because she has not felt ill lately, although a sea of diagnostic storms lies behind her–systemic lupus and breast cancer among them–and ahead, somewhere, must lie the port of last refuge. The inevitable solitude of that event scares her as much as it always has, but the idea of death itself has lost its sting.

…Night truly blest when heaven is wedded to earth and man is reconciled with God…. Ruthie closes her eyes–better just to listen for a while, since she can see nothing from her seat but the backs of a couple who, unlike all the others, have asked for their names to be changed here for reasons that will become clear. Call them Dave and Claire Taylor. Like many in church tonight, Dave and Claire understand little about the ideological warfare between liberal and conservative Catholics, and care less; they just hope for an early end to the doctrinal arguments that have divided a segment of their parish’s leadership core. In Dave’s and Claire’s shared view, love and a sense of family are all that matter in the end. Ken, Jamie and Judy have all heard Dave tell, more than once, about another dark night, during a time when love and harmony seemed far away. Claire had left him, and Dave had filled his lonely world with rage. On that other night, Dave had been visited by a scene from his childhood–the family at table, little Dave announcing he “hated” potato salad, his father saying: “No, son, you dislike potato salad. Only animals hate.” And Dave had heard a voice in his head, saying clear as the pastor’s chant here and now: “Well, either my father was wrong, or I’m an animal. Because I do hate her.”

But that was three years before this night, and two years before the summer of Dave’s rejoicing.