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Long before the current clergy sex abuse scandal, a significant portion of American Catholics had already come to identify themselves as survivors. Viewed rhetorically, the response to this all-too-real current crisis follows the script of an earlier abuse scandal of somewhat more questionable veracity: Catholic education. American Catholics who came of age in the 1960s like to identify themselves, for better or for worse, as the people who were beaten by nuns. As comedy or tragedy, this story has been American Catholics' chief contribution to late 20th-century American popular culture, as witnessed by the broad appeal of stage productions such as Do Patent Leather Shoes Really Reflect Up?, St. Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You, Nunsense, and Late Night Catechism.
God and Man at Georgetown Prep: How I Became a Catholic Despite 20 Years of Catholic Schooling
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In God and Man at Georgetown Prep, Mark Gauvreau Judge writes as a survivor not of abuse, but of neglect. Coming of age in the 1970s, Judge missed out on the gory/glory days of tough-guy priests and ruler-wielding nuns. Drawing on the theological spirit, if not the anglophile cultural posturing, of the conservative Catholic William F. Buckley's classic God and Man at Yale, Judge exposes and indicts the functional atheism that has shaped Catholic educational institutions in the decades following the Second Vatican Council (1962-65). Judge's book is an unabashed plea for Catholics to recover the world they have lost and reclaim the birthright they have sold for the material comforts and cultural respectability of mainstream, middle-class American life.
As an approximate generational contemporary of Judge, I can attest that he knows the world of which he writes. Growing up in the Washington-Baltimore area, the son of a successful journalist who wrote for National Geographic magazine, Judge found himself in an Élite Catholic educational milieu that fully embraced the liberal interpretation of Vatican II. Judge's account of his education gives me new appreciation for provincialism: reform came a bit later to upstate New York, so I was spared the worse excesses of vanguard Catholic liberalism. Judge began his Catholic education at Our Lady of Mercy grammar school, run by the Sisters of Mercy in Potomac, Maryland; he continued on at Georgetown Preparatory School, the Jesuit prep school founded by John Carroll, first bishop of Baltimore, in the 1780s.
From 1850 to 1950, Catholic schools stood as the single most important marker of Catholic separatism in America. But by the 1970s, Catholic education had become a pale imitation of an already bland liberal humanitarianism. In one example, Judge cites We Follow Jesus, a third-grade religion book used at Mercy in the 1970s, which retells the Gospel story of Martha and Mary with Jesus simply saying "Now, Martha, do not worry too much about dinner; just do the best you can."
If the Sisters of Mercy watered down the faith, Georgetown Prep directly undermined it. After centuries on the front lines of the Church's war with modernity, the Jesuits had finally gone native. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the French Jesuit censured by Rome for his efforts to synthesize Catholic theology and Darwinian evolution, became an intellectual hero. Teilhard's displacement of the cross for a progressive vision of humanity evolving toward an "Omega Point" in history fit all too neatly with New Age spirituality. At Georgetown Prep in the 1970s, Eastern mysticism trumped Catholic theology and situational ethics replaced traditional Catholic moral teaching, particularly in matters of sex.
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