Some of My Best Friends Are Catholic

by Marie T. Sullivan

When Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was fourteen years old, his father took him to Rome. They went to the Sistine Chapel and heard something astonishing. The choir sang the Miserere Mei, Deus of Gregorio Allegri, a composer who had himself joined the Sistine Chapel choir in 1629. The work is a double-choir setting of Psalm 51 and is marked by a recurring solo line that soars above the choir to a high C. It is typically sung by a boy treble. Those high Cs make grown men weep.

For decades, the Miserere was sung in the chapel each year during Holy Week. People would flock to hear it, and the Vatican knew it had a good thing, so they kept the score under wraps. Along came young Mozart, whose ear was so superior that on the single hearing he sat down that night and wrote out the piece. The jig was up. The work is now sung worldwide during Holy Week. It is a sublime example of the beauty that springs from Catholicism.

The Catholic Church has been much in the news this past year. Oceans of ink were spilled on the election of Pope Leo, who reportedly is admired by people of both Left and Right. Long may he live.

It’s curious that so many non-Catholics are interested in the election of a pope, judging from the massive coverage in secular news outlets. In the same way that many Americans eagerly consume news of the British monarchy with all its formalities, they consume news of the Vatican with its ritual and beauty, its white smoke and incense. These offer relief from our ever-more-casual culture. That’s why so many people rise in the wee hours to watch real-time coverage of coronations and conclaves. Apparently we need transcendence.

If the Catholic church had a PR office in downtown Chicago and I were chief, here are some talking points I would address in particular to “none’s,” meaning persons who reply on surveys that they subscribe to no faith at all. Why? Someday they’ll need it. It’s easy to be a “none” when things are going well, but I have observed hardened organized-religion-scoffers sing like canaries for a priest when a loved one lay dying. Faith shields you when misfortune strikes. It also richly answers the question famously posed by Peggy Lee back in 1969: Is that all there is?

As PR man, I would first make public a list of notable Catholics. Mozart was one. He despised the archbishop who was long his employer, so many assume he hated the Church. Not true. He got on well with most other clerics and recognized with his father that his genius was God-given. Despite his ribald ways and earthy sense of humor Mozart was a lifelong Catholic, as his own letters make clear. When his mother died suddenly, he was bereft. “And yet God, in his mercy, bestowed on me the grace I needed,” he wrote to his father. William Shakespeare had deep ties to the Catholic underground in Elizabethan England and his plays are sprinkled with double meanings signaling allegiance to the faith, though suppression was so severe at the time he could not possibly profess it. It can’t be proved, but the evidence is strong. So, at the top of the list: Mozart and very likely, Shakespeare.

Walker Percy, Edwin O’Connor and of course Flannery O’Connor are some of the modern writers on the list, along with Ernest Hemingway, a two-time convert.

On the big screen, Spencer Tracy, Gregory Peck, Walter Brennan, Alec Guinness, Maureen O’Hara, and Rosalind Russell were all Catholic, as was director John Ford. Both John Wayne and Gary Cooper converted to Catholicism later in life. It was Hemingway who influenced his friend Gary Cooper to convert. Later, when Cooper was on his deathbed, Hemingway visited him and found him lying there, clutching a crucifix. Cooper thanked his friend for steering him to the faith, with words to the effect of “It was the best thing you ever did for me.”

Jazz pianist and composer Dave Brubeck, best known for “Take Five,” was received into the Catholic Church at around sixty years of age, after exploring it for decades.

Men of science also appear. Louis Pasteur, the inventor of pasteurization, wrote “Posterity will one day laugh at the sublime foolishness of the materialistic philosophy. The more I study nature, the more I stand amazed at the work of the Creator.”  Examples abound of distinguished priest-scientists over time. Gregor Mendel, the father of genetics, was an Augustinian monk. Copernicus was not only a lifelong Catholic, he earned a doctorate in canon law.

After his death the church banned his book placing the sun at the center of the solar system and yes, the church famously placed the Catholic Galileo on lifetime house arrest for his defense of Copernican heliocentrism (sun at the center), though its viewpoint was shared by most educated people at the time. But they reversed in 1835, after more evidence came to light. Is the Church on earth perfect? No. It’s comprised of human beings. The Vatican Observatory today is one of the top institutions of astronomy in the world.

The greatest artists in human history are on the list, too: Da Vinci, Michelangelo, Caravaggio, Bernini.

Which brings us beauty. Were I granted only one talking point as the church’s PR man it would be the beauty it offers, which reaches the deepest places in the human heart. The art, the architecture and especially, the music. I happen to like the Latin Mass. I am not a terrorist. Why do I like it? The beauty. And even as a little girl, I came quickly to understand it; not every word, but the important ones. The finest choral works ever composed are settings of Latin texts. Latin vowels are pure. A chord sung well in tune on a pure vowel multiplies the harmonic overtones like light hitting a prism at just the right angle, making that chord ring. (Less so in English, with its chewy dipthongs.) To hear a good choir sing the Allegri Miserere in a beautiful church is so transcendent it’s best not spoken of. It gives us a tiny glimpse of heaven. This viewpoint is not elitist. We want good music for the same reason that chalices are made of gold or silver.

An illiterate medieval peasant, no elitist, could gaze at the stained-glass windows of Chartres Cathedral and understand that the faith was important. Much harder to get across to an educated American urbanite sipping his Starbucks latte, who may not experience such beauty in person.

In this writing I refer not to the diluted form of Catholicism now so prevalent in the United States, what papal biographer George Weigel calls Catholic Lite, which though valid is aesthetically as a Hallmark card to the Mona Lisa. No, I refer to the genuine article, with all its beauty and wisdom: full-strength, red-meat Catholicism that G.K. Chesterton likened to “a heavenly chariot [flying] thundering through the ages, the dull heresies sprawling and prostrate, the wild truth reeling but erect.”

When Chesterton himself converted, his friend Maurice Baring wrote to him. Baring was an English man of letters. “I was received into the Church on the eve of Candlemas, 1909, and it is perhaps the only act which in my life I am quite certain I have never regretted,” he wrote. “Every day I live, the church seems to me more and more wonderful, the Sacraments more and more solemn and sustaining; the voice of the Church, her liturgy, her rules, her discipline, her ritual, her decisions in matters of faith and morals more and more excellent and profoundly wise. . .”

Enter St. Peter’s in Rome and you immediately realize that it is about something important. Such architecture is no accident; the building alone makes you think of Things Eternal. Or visit a Byzantine Rite church where the choir is singing Rachmaninoff. Those low basses recall to you that you have a soul.

Some of what’s written here is true of other faiths, too. In any event, this writing is no veiled sell job on organized religion. Things of ultimate value can’t be bought and sold. But in a highly competitive society, church is one place where you’re valued as a human being, not for how you perform. How refreshing is that? A dignified church also offers something else we need on occasion: silence. “Music and silence—how I detest them!” declares the senior devil to his pupil in C.S. Lewis’ Screwtape Letters. “We [demons] will make the whole universe a noise in the end.”

To be Catholic in some circles today is like what being gay used to be. Revealing it invites social persecution. No matter. Yet people who are spiritual-but-not-religious often themselves create faith substitutes, such as an extreme fixation on health or environmentalism. As to those who are virulently hostile to the church for its many sins, well, sometimes the vehemence of their protests tells you they know it’s true.

I have omitted the topic of the Church’s rich intellectual heritage, one so vast that it can’t be included here. But one last point. The Catholic Church is not only the most sensual of religions, with its incense and oils, chant, and candlelight—it’s fun. We drink, dance, and have lots of babies. The French writer Hilaire Belloc summed it up:

Wherever the Catholic sun doth shine

There’s always laughter and good red wine,

At least I’ve always found it so,

Benedicamus Domino!

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An Ohio native, Marie T. (Terry) Sullivan has lived in Chicagoland for all of her adult life. Her background is in music. For two years she served as culture editor for the now defunct Chicago Daily Observer.

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