Dad's Centenary Ten Years After His Death`

Madeo, a fancy little Italian eatery, whose clientele has been both celebrity and celebrity watcher since 1985, has closed within the last couple of weeks. When I read this I felt another pang of inevitable change that disturbs the pleasant memories of days gone by. This was the place I took my late father for dinner on the occasion of his 90th birthday. We were joined by a woman he had not seen in nearly 30 years. She was a love for which the timing had not been right, someone to whom he had been introduced a few years after my mother had died back in the seventies. It had not worked out, but their year or so together he ever remembered and savored. I was gratified that she was willing to fly to Los Angeles from New York to spend a weekend of memory. Dad was very sick. He would die only a few weeks later. But that evening with Sophia, Dad and Andrew and Len and me was a special one. Over the last ten years, every time I passed the restaurant, comfortably still serving food and charm, that evening and Dad's small dance step with his former love as we waited for the valet, always came to mind and brought me a comfortable nostalgic smile.



Dad had the linguine with clams, which was about twenty-five dollars at the time, and observed, "I could have made the same dish for a lot less."



There is a rumor that when whatever build out is being done in the former ICM building is completed, Madeo may return to the location. That would be nice. But it won't be the same.

Last night, I was at a dinner at my parish, of which my Dad became a parishioner at age 85, to celebrate both St. Patrick's Day and our third annual, "St. Joseph's Table".  There was much Italian music, many pieces I heard routinely as a child growing up in the Bronx, which my father accompanied with his mandolin. I really wished he were with us. He would have said, "This was the best party that I have ever been to!"  He said that pretty much after any party. And he would have been joining the dancing, twirling a much younger lady whom he found interesting, with debonair flair.

In a couple of weeks, had he lived, he would have turned one hundred years old. His eldest sister made that great age, but she suffered from dementia and it was a difficult last few years. I like to think that if he had survived his doctors' ministrations, he would have easily made this milestone.

He would still be telling me, and my friends, all of us now officially senior citizens, what to do. He would still be telling me, and my friends, how little we know of the world (and he might well have been right about that), and he would still be enjoying a little bit too much wine at one of those parties he loved. He would still be holding forth on the difficult past, the wild and crazy present and the apocalyptic future.  If he was dissatisfied with the political direction of the country in 2008, he would be positively apoplectic today. He would not hold back his views. I would be begging him not to raise politics and he would, as always, ignore me. It is not that I necessarily disagreed with his views, then, or as I think they would be today, but I am not a provocateur. When he got to a certain age, Dad relished being a provocateur.

My relationship with Dad was complex. It was the subject of many psychotherapy sessions--as Dad suspected and about which he probed, unsuccessfully. In so many ways, we were of a kind, and so we clashed, two waves crashing on shore from different angles.  But one thing was sure. Dad would throw himself on railroad tracks for me. He even attended a session with me--how many near octogenarians would do that for a daughter? I don't know that it accomplished much on his side of things--he thought therapy was an indulgence, but he was stoic in his discomfort if it would help me.

If you are lucky, when you get older, you get a bit wiser. Children expect perfection from their parents. No parent is perfect. Some are better than others though. Like many people, my father came from a difficult background. He grew up in the Depression. His parents, as he often said, with both regret and not a little resentment, "were peasants". In an of itself that 's not a bad thing, but he was speaking in short hand for how his father was trying to create a mini Greek fortress within the home, and how he held his children back with his fear and autocracy. As to his mother, it sounds as if the instinct for love was somewhat muted. As a child, I couldn't warm up to her, and she was an old lady at the time. My Dad managed to become an educated, cultured, industrious guy. His way of loving was to make a lot of food (common I think to immigrant families), and try to solve my problems, even if they weren't amenable to mere logic and persuasion. He was father, and in many ways, mother to me. As I said, it got complicated, but when I look back, I had it better than most, and with all my eccentricities, I have managed to keep my head, physically and emotionally, above water, and even, when one is really fair about it, to thrive in many ways.  And he is largely the reason. He would have liked me to say that when he was alive.

The thing about Dad, which I share regrettably, is that he held himself back. That fear transmitted from his family to him was hard to overcome. He could have enjoyed more of life had he let go a little. I tried to encourage him. He counselled caution in all things.  I have a sense of him sometimes, nothing really specific, having pierced the Cloud of Unknowing, telling me to let go a little now, while I still have the chance. I know he is looking after me, one of several intercessors, who I have come to trust.

"Eternal Rest grant unto him O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon Him."

You want to hear something, Dad?  I miss you.

Amoris Laetitia and the Ordinary Catholic like Me

Karl Marx mused that religion was an opiate for people, a way of escaping hard reality. Well, if so, then somewhere along the line I missed the hand out of numbing solace religious faith supposedly provides. Putting aside for a moment whether faith is worth it from an eschatological point of view, one thing I can say about it is that it is very hard to be a Christian. For my money it is harder indeed to be a member of the progenitor Christianity, Catholicism. When I was growing up, the dogmatic schema and its application were one and the same. There were the "rules" laid down and if violated, led to various consequences up to and including Hell itself. Confession was the safety zone, if true contrition were manifest. It was unambiguous stuff. It was difficult, nearly impossible, but at least those who were part of the faith, knew for what they were striving.  At least you knew there were rules, that somebody, and/or Somebody knew better than you, that you could look into the theology maybe when you grew up, had moved to a more sophisticated locale and had the capacity to scratch the surface of Thomas Aquinas and find it sound. One problem, of course, is that the teaching of the faith back in those days did not much mention Aquinas or the Church Fathers. I mean, how do you explain all that stuff to five year olds? Or 20 year olds for that matter?

In the years since the various self-serving misinterpretations of Vatican II-which as it happens did not sanction the cowboy hijinks that gutted the liturgy, provide permission for the demolition of altar rails, or give apparent, but not de jure permission to "Sister Felicity" and "Fr. Kant" to redefine faith in terms of variable, and often contradictory, human reason, unattached to the Transcendent- the dogmatic and doctrinal schema got separated from their application. Application more and more became a matter of private interpretation of Scripture and veered into a private judgment of religious truth and the requirements for salvation. In the  private you decide ultimately what is good or what is not. And woe betide someone whose private good does not accord with your own, or vice versa. Truth is the province of the visceral. In Catholicity, at least, there was some staunching of the theological blood letting during the Pontificates of Saint John Paul II and Benedict--with reference back to the Objective. It was not enough to protect the average Catholic from constant ambiguity between what is taught by the Church and what the Church  "winked" away in Archdioceses and parishes around the nation.  If being a Catholic had been nearly impossible back when the rules and implementation were consistent, being one hit the event horizon of impossible for those of us who stayed with or came back to the faith after the revolutions of the 1960s.

I am troubled by the various groups that, in their way, take the road of private revelation which they decry in the modern Church. Their private revelation is that if the Church  restores the 1950s version of the faith, all will be well. A lot of them look at Francis and nod to themselves that we are in a time of sedes vacante (that there is no Pope on the Chair of Peter). Not so. Francis is the Pope. Where he will sit in terms of the judgment of history, I do not know. The Church has survived venal and violent Pope and Francis could never be said to be one of them. To me there is as much danger from the so-called Conservative Catholic who demands the return to ad orientum, Communion only on the tongue, and the chapel veil, as if nothing happened before the mid-20th century, as there is from the Progressive who would personally dictate the direction of the Novus Ordo into a dance free form.

This has been a long preamble. I hope you are still with me.

Those who have critiqued Amoris Laetitia and issued the "filial correction" that has been, shall we say, ignored by Pope Francis, believe, according to the December 2017 New Oxford Review, that the Pope is supporting positions on the Sacrament of Marriage, and the reception of Holy Communion, and on the moral life which are in error, if not heresy. (p. 19). The NOR posits seven problematic propositions presented by the Pope.

As quoted by NOR, I note five of them:

"1.  that God's Grace is insufficient to allow a justified person to carry out the demands of the divine law, as if the commandments were impossible for the justified to fulfill.
. . .

3.  that a Christian can have full knowledge of a divine law and voluntarily choose to break it but not be in a state of mortal sin as a result.
. . .

5.  that sexual acts between persons who have contracted a civil marriage, although one or both of them is sacramentally married to another, can be morally right or requested or even commanded by God.

6.  that moral principles and moral truths contained in divine revelation and the natural law do not include negative prohibitions that absolutely forbid particular kinds of actions;

7.  and that Christ wills that the Church abandon her perennial discipline of withholding the Eucharist from the divorced and 'remarried' who do not express contrition and a firm purpose of amendment."

If what the Pope writes in Amoris Laetitia, related to Catholics who have divorced and remarried civilly to receive Communion while continuing in the civil marriage--and most significantly, continuing to engage in the conjugal benefits- stands, then the conduct of a single woman is open to similar flexible interpretations, not merely de facto, as has been the reality of the last 50 plus years, but, with the Pope's un-clarified position on marriage and sexuality, de jure. 

I am sure I am not alone, but I struggled deeply with the Church's discipline, complicated by my own psychological inhibitions. I left the Church in the 1970s because I did not believe I could carry out the demands of my faith. I was not a very nuanced individual in a nuanced world, and the idea that I could break what was God's law as promulgated by the Church and not be in the state of mortal sin simply seemed mutually exclusive. I did think the Church's discipline was beyond me. I certainly could be contrite, so much so it was torture, but I did not believe I could form or express the purpose of amendment. 

I didn't leave the Church, so much as run away from it.  I couldn't be inside picking and choosing what I would accept. And I couldn't reject my faith outright. To be brutally honest, looking back, I sometimes wish I had done one or the other. I have a not so grudging respect for those who have made and do make a decision, and are content.  I suppose, since I suffer from ruminating OCD (Obsessive Compulsive Disorder) in all other areas of my life, I was doomed to marinate in indecisiveness about my faith. I was gone for a very long time. I came back just before I turned 30. As I sit here, I can't quite express what my thinking was. It was something along the lines that I needed to be inside the faith, with all of its inconsistencies, in danger of picking and choosing, rather than outside of it whirling without an anchor. I thought, perhaps, that I would get irrevocably lost in a world that, even in the 1980s, was bordering on the insane. 

Here's the thing I realize as I have been writing, Amoris Laetitia  makes me more than a little angry. If certain things are not True, and if we are free in fact to vary what has heretofore been posited as unerring Truth by acting as we will, it always was so, and I have been among the unmitigated fools, who suffered a purely unnecessary struggle. Let's me put it this way--I should have been having a lot more fun in this world, because when you get right down to it, even inside the Catholic Church, there is no sin. There is always a way to explain it away. 

I ran across a quote by The Venerable Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen. "Moral principles do not depend on a majority vote.  Wrong is wrong, even if everybody is wrong. Right is right, even if nobody is right."

Sometimes my head hurts when I contemplate what I am or ought to be, as a Catholic. I agree with the Archbishop. But the problem has come to be, even at the hands, perhaps particularly at the hands of my Church, that it seems even the most assiduous thinker could not fathom when wrong is wrong, and right is right, or where any of us falls in the determination. Sometimes I want to scream, like a kid in a classroom with an obfuscating teacher, "Just tell me what the right answer is!"

If you believe in the Guidance of the Holy Spirit, then the Holy Spirit will somehow coalesce all of it, and all of us. In my more cheerful days, I believe that. And I pray for it.