Top Ten Religious Experience # II : The St Dominic Savio Mockery Backfire
It was June of 1971. I was in seventh grade. I was thirteen.
I was in a sorry state religiously. I had decided that I was a Bible-believing Protestant. I was rebelling against the Catholic Church as represented by our pastor, a Benedictine monk who was known for being either a latter day St Bernard, learned and ferociously orthodox, or an ultraconservative crank. But he WAS a character by any reckoning. A Southerner who was prone to Baroquely rolling phrases and, sometimes, shocking candor about the ills afflicting the Church in the late Sixties. I had started to think of him as a latter day Savonarola. Spooky. Grim. Too Romish for his own good. Shows how much I knew at thirteen. I think that I MEANT Torquemada. But he LOOKED a bit like Savonarola.
He had a Choir. I had left a special program for young geniuses in public school for our parish school because I wanted to be in it, and to be in it you had to be in the parish school. Maybe partly just so that you would be available on short notice to sing the Requiem Mass at funerals. I sang in the Choir for two and a half years. We were good. We had an international reputation. We made records with famous opera singers and well-known conductors. The widow of a famous composer once accepted an invitation to hear us perform one of her husband's works. Her verdict? "Nice, but not what my husband wrote." But the point is that she accepted the invitation. (Or is it?)
Something horrible had happened to me in sixth grade. I had lost interest in religion. I was more interested in being truly modern and enlightened in my thinking. Inwardly, and just once, outwardly, I had sided with the pro-choice side in the great debate over abortion. "Well, if they really don't want the baby, as wrong as that is, as Americans we can't tell them what to do..." Then, in January of 1971, our lay religion teacher exposed us to JESUS CHRIST SUPERSTAR. All the teachers in our school had been given it for Christmas, I would imagine by our updated Dominican nun principal. (Modified habit, modified Messiah.) "I don't know why some people call it blasphemous. It's not," Teacher opined testily.
I was enthralled. Of course, I knew that its presentation of Jesus Christ WAS, by and large, blasphemous. "You're far too keen on where and when and not so hot on why." Nice way for ANY Jewish Boy to talk to his father! I didn't care. I edited that out in my mind. I focused on what I liked about him. His Coolness. My favorite part was the scene in the Temple before his comically dreadful screech ("Heal yourSELLLLLVVVVESSSSS!!!!!!") Before that he was almost Pure Gospel. With the all-important element of Cool. "Neither you, Judas, nor the fifty thousand... understand what power is, understand what glory is..."
On Holy Thursday SUPERSTAR was presented in its entirety on a local radio station. I listened to it in our living room with the lights out. If things had gone differently in my religious life I might have considered THIS one of my Top Ten Religious Experiences. The feeling I had was similar to the Catholic rapture I had as a kid looking at statues of Saint Lucy and Saint Francis in Keene's Gift Shoppe on Main Street. Similar to the Godly American ecstasy I had a little later on watching KING OF KINGS. But it was VERY different.
I was trying to say, "I love You!" to the Cool Christ of my childhood dream. It didn't quite work. But it did feel very liturgical and sacred.
Jesus was suddenly popular in 1971. "Put your hand in the hand of the Man Who stilled the water, of the Man From-a Galilee," diner jukeboxes advised. (Dig that From-A!) There were even Cool Christ TV commercials. This 70s Christ was not selling peace in Vietnam like the 60s Christ I mentioned in Experience I. He was selling only Himself. Himself revised, of course, according to Cool 70s standards. Come to think of it, I think that that Cool TV Christ broke the Black Hair Taboo. In any case, it was dark brown and tousled. He seemed YOUNG. He saved the Woman Caught in Adultery, but did not tell her to cease and desist in the sin department.
I ate it all up. I craved it. I started reading the Gospels. I discovered the unpopular pericope, never read to the faithful on Sunday, of the Canaanite (Matthew) or Syrophoencian (Mark) Woman. Jesus calling an hysterical mother a DOG? I figured out that Mary Magdalene was not really Mary of Bethany, the sister of Lazarus, no matter what my little Saint books had said. But I wanted out of my own religion. I remember taking a walk instead of going to Mass right around the time of the St Dominic Savio Mockery Backfire.
The darker side of my personal Reformation was a drive to exorcize my childhood saints. I picked on St Joan of Arc. Imagine God wanting a Saint to kill people! I picked on St Dominic Savio, as so many sterotypical Lapsed Catholics like to do. Dominic Savio was a sweet, friendly, holy Italian lad who died at 15 in the mid 1800s. He loved the Virgin Mary a lot and -what was the story?- used to walk around with his eyes closed or something so that he wouldn't see anything that might tempt him against Holy Purity. Imagine God wanting a Saint to be so medieval! So out of touch with Life and the goodness of this world!
I had left the Choir because my voice had changed. So I was old enough now to know what Purity really was all about. I'm really not sure if I approved of it or not as a hip and happenin' sort of Bible-thumper. Luther certainly didn't care about Purity, no matter how Jesus and Paul felt about it. I probably would have recoiled from the idiocy of, "Imagine God wanting a Saint to be pure and to take drastic measures to avoid temptation!" The point is that I was not honest enough to put it that way to drive home to myself the meanness and phoniness of my criticism of the saint's charmingly naive precautions. All I know is that there was great hypocrisy in my ridicule of the noble youth Dominic Savio.
I was in the House of the Judge. That's what I call it. My best childhood chum was the son of our Village's Judge. He had a large family. He had more of an explicitly Catholic Home than mine was. The Biblical, Apocalyptic ring of "House of the Judge" is justified by the importance of the way that family and that house figure in various personal and religious experiences in my life. My buddy was in the Choir too. He was STILL in the Choir. His voice had not changed. We were upstairs in his room. I was telling him how stupid and ridiculous Catholic devotion to Saints is. I brought up St. Dominic Savio and his version of cutting out his eyes and casting them away lest they be a scandal.
My friend was not the tattle-tale type. He was the furthest thing from it, actually. He was the kind of kid who would TAKE blame to keep someone else out of trouble. So I don't know why he had to go running right down the stairs to pass on what I had said in mockery of the Saint to his devout Catholic mother. I'm pretty sure that he agreed with me completely, and thought that she was Renewed enough that she would too.
She didn't. His Mom was a very smart and refined woman. She was kind of a tough cookie too. She spoke in an undertone, gravely. She let him know that she did not approve of mocking the Saints of Christ. And furthermore, far from mocking this particular Saint for that particular reason, a young man in this day and age would do well to admire and, within reason, emulate him.
This was "bad" enough, as I listened at the top of the stairs. But it was not the clincher. The clincher was the presence and contribution of the Daughter of the Judge. She was very pretty. Petite and brunette. She looked like Janet Margolin, who played the above-mentioned Mary of Bethany in THE GREATEST STORY EVER TOLD. She was smart. My chum's older brother, the one with the Leon Russell album, was what some people would have called a hippie just because he had long hair and played the guitar and was outspokenly against the War. He was kind of a cool guy. But it was this daughter who was the REALLY cool one. She was too cool to be a hippie or even seem like one. She was just her own chick.
All she did was observe in a wry tone that all things considered it might not be such a bad idea for young men to walk through Times Square with their eyes closed.
I know why they talk about "burning" shame. That is what I felt. Not just the devout 1950s Catholic Mom but the Cool 1960s Chick had weighed me and found me wanting. Suddenly I saw the nastiness and hypocrisy and shallowness of my parroting of stereotypical Child of Belial mockery of Catholic saints. I can't say that I RESOLVED never to be guilty of such disgusting vices again. It just seemed that Life Itself, subject to the Lord of Life, had forced me to see the error of my ways. This is an important distinction. It's like the Jesuits versus the Dominicans in the 1600s. The Jesuits emphasized man's cooperation with Grace. The Dominicans emphasized God's Almighty Power in bestowing it. Then there were the Jansenists who were heretical in claiming that it is impossible to resist a Grace God is offering.
I had no sense of making a choice. Of choosing a good path over a bad one. I just knew. It was obvious. There is no choice about seeing the obvious. I had been wrong to mock Dominic Savio in particular and the the traditional norms of Catholic Holiness as a whole. I had been dishonest too. I was really mocking Purity itself. God Himself.
It was early in the evening. I looked out the hallway window. Suddenly I thought of the spire of our unusually (for Long Island) venerable-looking Romanesque church which perhaps, in the winter, you could see from that window. I had a flashback to the holy, holy feelings and FACTS of my Catholic childhood.
I know what some people might say. This experience did not HAVE to lead to my returning to my childhood Faith. That horrible sense of shame and self-disgust could simply have taught me to be a more honest and humble and respectful Protestant or agnostic. This was always obvious to me: I don't think that the Daughter of the Judge was what you'd call a devout orthodox Catholic at that time. But what was also obvious was that this Grace absolutely prevented that I ever become an irreligious sophomoric wise guy of the sort who passes on blasphemous and/or obscene jokes from NATIONAL LAMPOON. It prevented my becoming the sort of piously and bumptiously censorious son of the Iscariot who tsks-tsks over the Desert Fathers, "They would have done better to let their light shine among men! Made themselves USEFUL with some serious Social Work!" and then goes off to have a few brewskies at the local Hooters. And it prevented my becoming something far, far worse. A Liberal Catholic such as Father Andrew Greeley or the average American Catholic bishop or half the priests we ended up with when the diocese finally ousted "that meddlesome priest", our Benedictine Savonarola (and I mean that last as a high compliment).
I feel that Providence forced this Grace of Shame upon me. I am not proud of my cooperation. Are you proud when you're dying of thirst and you choose to drink the water you're given? My humility firmly, if ironically, established, I have no compunction about transcribing for the first time one of my favorite personal prayers: "I thank Thee, O Lord, that I am not as Andrew Greeley and the so-called Catholic bishops and all blasphemous, worldly-wise, and carnally minded Liberal Catholic hypocrites and mockers..."
I was in a sorry state religiously. I had decided that I was a Bible-believing Protestant. I was rebelling against the Catholic Church as represented by our pastor, a Benedictine monk who was known for being either a latter day St Bernard, learned and ferociously orthodox, or an ultraconservative crank. But he WAS a character by any reckoning. A Southerner who was prone to Baroquely rolling phrases and, sometimes, shocking candor about the ills afflicting the Church in the late Sixties. I had started to think of him as a latter day Savonarola. Spooky. Grim. Too Romish for his own good. Shows how much I knew at thirteen. I think that I MEANT Torquemada. But he LOOKED a bit like Savonarola.
He had a Choir. I had left a special program for young geniuses in public school for our parish school because I wanted to be in it, and to be in it you had to be in the parish school. Maybe partly just so that you would be available on short notice to sing the Requiem Mass at funerals. I sang in the Choir for two and a half years. We were good. We had an international reputation. We made records with famous opera singers and well-known conductors. The widow of a famous composer once accepted an invitation to hear us perform one of her husband's works. Her verdict? "Nice, but not what my husband wrote." But the point is that she accepted the invitation. (Or is it?)
Something horrible had happened to me in sixth grade. I had lost interest in religion. I was more interested in being truly modern and enlightened in my thinking. Inwardly, and just once, outwardly, I had sided with the pro-choice side in the great debate over abortion. "Well, if they really don't want the baby, as wrong as that is, as Americans we can't tell them what to do..." Then, in January of 1971, our lay religion teacher exposed us to JESUS CHRIST SUPERSTAR. All the teachers in our school had been given it for Christmas, I would imagine by our updated Dominican nun principal. (Modified habit, modified Messiah.) "I don't know why some people call it blasphemous. It's not," Teacher opined testily.
I was enthralled. Of course, I knew that its presentation of Jesus Christ WAS, by and large, blasphemous. "You're far too keen on where and when and not so hot on why." Nice way for ANY Jewish Boy to talk to his father! I didn't care. I edited that out in my mind. I focused on what I liked about him. His Coolness. My favorite part was the scene in the Temple before his comically dreadful screech ("Heal yourSELLLLLVVVVESSSSS!!!!!!") Before that he was almost Pure Gospel. With the all-important element of Cool. "Neither you, Judas, nor the fifty thousand... understand what power is, understand what glory is..."
On Holy Thursday SUPERSTAR was presented in its entirety on a local radio station. I listened to it in our living room with the lights out. If things had gone differently in my religious life I might have considered THIS one of my Top Ten Religious Experiences. The feeling I had was similar to the Catholic rapture I had as a kid looking at statues of Saint Lucy and Saint Francis in Keene's Gift Shoppe on Main Street. Similar to the Godly American ecstasy I had a little later on watching KING OF KINGS. But it was VERY different.
I was trying to say, "I love You!" to the Cool Christ of my childhood dream. It didn't quite work. But it did feel very liturgical and sacred.
Jesus was suddenly popular in 1971. "Put your hand in the hand of the Man Who stilled the water, of the Man From-a Galilee," diner jukeboxes advised. (Dig that From-A!) There were even Cool Christ TV commercials. This 70s Christ was not selling peace in Vietnam like the 60s Christ I mentioned in Experience I. He was selling only Himself. Himself revised, of course, according to Cool 70s standards. Come to think of it, I think that that Cool TV Christ broke the Black Hair Taboo. In any case, it was dark brown and tousled. He seemed YOUNG. He saved the Woman Caught in Adultery, but did not tell her to cease and desist in the sin department.
I ate it all up. I craved it. I started reading the Gospels. I discovered the unpopular pericope, never read to the faithful on Sunday, of the Canaanite (Matthew) or Syrophoencian (Mark) Woman. Jesus calling an hysterical mother a DOG? I figured out that Mary Magdalene was not really Mary of Bethany, the sister of Lazarus, no matter what my little Saint books had said. But I wanted out of my own religion. I remember taking a walk instead of going to Mass right around the time of the St Dominic Savio Mockery Backfire.
The darker side of my personal Reformation was a drive to exorcize my childhood saints. I picked on St Joan of Arc. Imagine God wanting a Saint to kill people! I picked on St Dominic Savio, as so many sterotypical Lapsed Catholics like to do. Dominic Savio was a sweet, friendly, holy Italian lad who died at 15 in the mid 1800s. He loved the Virgin Mary a lot and -what was the story?- used to walk around with his eyes closed or something so that he wouldn't see anything that might tempt him against Holy Purity. Imagine God wanting a Saint to be so medieval! So out of touch with Life and the goodness of this world!
I had left the Choir because my voice had changed. So I was old enough now to know what Purity really was all about. I'm really not sure if I approved of it or not as a hip and happenin' sort of Bible-thumper. Luther certainly didn't care about Purity, no matter how Jesus and Paul felt about it. I probably would have recoiled from the idiocy of, "Imagine God wanting a Saint to be pure and to take drastic measures to avoid temptation!" The point is that I was not honest enough to put it that way to drive home to myself the meanness and phoniness of my criticism of the saint's charmingly naive precautions. All I know is that there was great hypocrisy in my ridicule of the noble youth Dominic Savio.
I was in the House of the Judge. That's what I call it. My best childhood chum was the son of our Village's Judge. He had a large family. He had more of an explicitly Catholic Home than mine was. The Biblical, Apocalyptic ring of "House of the Judge" is justified by the importance of the way that family and that house figure in various personal and religious experiences in my life. My buddy was in the Choir too. He was STILL in the Choir. His voice had not changed. We were upstairs in his room. I was telling him how stupid and ridiculous Catholic devotion to Saints is. I brought up St. Dominic Savio and his version of cutting out his eyes and casting them away lest they be a scandal.
My friend was not the tattle-tale type. He was the furthest thing from it, actually. He was the kind of kid who would TAKE blame to keep someone else out of trouble. So I don't know why he had to go running right down the stairs to pass on what I had said in mockery of the Saint to his devout Catholic mother. I'm pretty sure that he agreed with me completely, and thought that she was Renewed enough that she would too.
She didn't. His Mom was a very smart and refined woman. She was kind of a tough cookie too. She spoke in an undertone, gravely. She let him know that she did not approve of mocking the Saints of Christ. And furthermore, far from mocking this particular Saint for that particular reason, a young man in this day and age would do well to admire and, within reason, emulate him.
This was "bad" enough, as I listened at the top of the stairs. But it was not the clincher. The clincher was the presence and contribution of the Daughter of the Judge. She was very pretty. Petite and brunette. She looked like Janet Margolin, who played the above-mentioned Mary of Bethany in THE GREATEST STORY EVER TOLD. She was smart. My chum's older brother, the one with the Leon Russell album, was what some people would have called a hippie just because he had long hair and played the guitar and was outspokenly against the War. He was kind of a cool guy. But it was this daughter who was the REALLY cool one. She was too cool to be a hippie or even seem like one. She was just her own chick.
All she did was observe in a wry tone that all things considered it might not be such a bad idea for young men to walk through Times Square with their eyes closed.
I know why they talk about "burning" shame. That is what I felt. Not just the devout 1950s Catholic Mom but the Cool 1960s Chick had weighed me and found me wanting. Suddenly I saw the nastiness and hypocrisy and shallowness of my parroting of stereotypical Child of Belial mockery of Catholic saints. I can't say that I RESOLVED never to be guilty of such disgusting vices again. It just seemed that Life Itself, subject to the Lord of Life, had forced me to see the error of my ways. This is an important distinction. It's like the Jesuits versus the Dominicans in the 1600s. The Jesuits emphasized man's cooperation with Grace. The Dominicans emphasized God's Almighty Power in bestowing it. Then there were the Jansenists who were heretical in claiming that it is impossible to resist a Grace God is offering.
I had no sense of making a choice. Of choosing a good path over a bad one. I just knew. It was obvious. There is no choice about seeing the obvious. I had been wrong to mock Dominic Savio in particular and the the traditional norms of Catholic Holiness as a whole. I had been dishonest too. I was really mocking Purity itself. God Himself.
It was early in the evening. I looked out the hallway window. Suddenly I thought of the spire of our unusually (for Long Island) venerable-looking Romanesque church which perhaps, in the winter, you could see from that window. I had a flashback to the holy, holy feelings and FACTS of my Catholic childhood.
I know what some people might say. This experience did not HAVE to lead to my returning to my childhood Faith. That horrible sense of shame and self-disgust could simply have taught me to be a more honest and humble and respectful Protestant or agnostic. This was always obvious to me: I don't think that the Daughter of the Judge was what you'd call a devout orthodox Catholic at that time. But what was also obvious was that this Grace absolutely prevented that I ever become an irreligious sophomoric wise guy of the sort who passes on blasphemous and/or obscene jokes from NATIONAL LAMPOON. It prevented my becoming the sort of piously and bumptiously censorious son of the Iscariot who tsks-tsks over the Desert Fathers, "They would have done better to let their light shine among men! Made themselves USEFUL with some serious Social Work!" and then goes off to have a few brewskies at the local Hooters. And it prevented my becoming something far, far worse. A Liberal Catholic such as Father Andrew Greeley or the average American Catholic bishop or half the priests we ended up with when the diocese finally ousted "that meddlesome priest", our Benedictine Savonarola (and I mean that last as a high compliment).
I feel that Providence forced this Grace of Shame upon me. I am not proud of my cooperation. Are you proud when you're dying of thirst and you choose to drink the water you're given? My humility firmly, if ironically, established, I have no compunction about transcribing for the first time one of my favorite personal prayers: "I thank Thee, O Lord, that I am not as Andrew Greeley and the so-called Catholic bishops and all blasphemous, worldly-wise, and carnally minded Liberal Catholic hypocrites and mockers..."
posted by James Ghiorsi at 10:47 PM
2 Comments:
This post has been removed by a blog administrator.
Um, sorry, but the Eyes of Texas (or rather NY and NJ) ARE upon us...
Thanks for the kind words. The year was 1971, so yes... The difference is between PRIVATE human weakness and cold-bloodedly throwing filth into the face of Society and turning the open forum of Society into an occasion of sin.
My friend and I made our own version of JCS on a cassette tape. It became somewhat sacrilegious, I am sorry to say, in a cheeky rather than a malicious way. Nothing against the Lord or about His sufferings, just one of the Twelve trying to slap on the ointment as aftershave (with an enthusiastic shtick borrowed from a Brut commercial) on Easter Sunday morning and being rebuked by Mary Magdalene... Anyway, I do regret being a bad influence on younger family members...
I didn't mention the MUSIC of JCS, which I loved... Still do, I suppose. I've sometimes considered making an expurgated version of the legendary rock opera for my own private use. But I suppose it would be wrong to spend one cent on something that was so disrespectful of Christ and so harmful to Society. It was harmful to me too, precisely because I was NOT influenced by its errors and outrages, and therefore thought it was cool to support it, no matter how bad it was per se and no matter how much my liking for it might scandalize orthodox Christians. Wow, never thought of this before: I was starting to act and think just like a Liberal Catholic. Like WooWoo and Poppa Prada. The placing of the "Adult" and "Sophisticated" Modern Self above simple "childlike" loyalty to God and gut level revulsion against the totality of what offends Him.
I remember now that the Daughter of the Dry Cleaner said that her Monsignor or someone had told her class that "Pope" Paul VI had loved SUPERSTAR. No big surprise there, if true. Pitiful Paul would have liked the bad parts too, or not seen them as so bad. I also neglected to mention that Vatican Radio played it once, and that "reactionary" protesters in the Church were condemned as Pharisaical idiots who didn't know the difference between supporting something and putting something out for discussion. (As if Vatican Radio would ever have played a rock opera about abuse of kids by priests and bishops with a cynically backside-covering pope as the chief villain of the piece.)
And yet... And yet... It would have been great if some cool Jesus Person with musical talent had come up with an alternative in the rock/pop style.
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