You’d Better Come Quietly – Three Sketches, Some Outlines And Additional Notes

For the past dozen years I have been noticing that every now and then, with sometimes a six months’, never less than a twelve months’, regularity in one of the in-between magazines in this country — and by an “in-between” magazine I mean that sort in which you sense here and there a certain amount of stale Christian sentiment, but never an iota of Christian dogma (the names are too obvious to mention) — there appears an intimate confession-story from the pen of some lapsed Catholic telling how he lost his Faith.

These revealing Apologias originate usually from one of two sources: a) from the writer of a recent lubricious novel which has shocked his co-religionists and won him a certain amount of temporary kudos with the devourers of scandal (always finding in the moral defection of a Catholic, who once believed in something as sublime as the Virgin Mary, a little more spice, let us say, than in the loss of faith by a Holy Roller who never believed in considerably more than exercise); and b) an unconscionable nobody, whom nobody has ever heard of before, or ever wants to hear from again, but who serves “the cause” for the moment by making a display in public of the way in which his religious convictions went to the dogs because of the unreasonableness or cruelty of some item of Catholic teaching.

One’s first reaction to such an exhibition is always noticeably this: that the magazine which takes and pays for the article is not in the least sympathetic with the author as a person, only as an exhibitionist. The editors have not the slightest charity for or sympathy with what the lapsed Catholic once believed, nor are they in the least concerned about the fact that even in his present petulance and revolt there may still be some point of sensitiveness in which he would not want to be too far pressed. All they look to is the result. “Here is another Catholic,” they say, “who in his youth was an angelic little altar boy. See what he has to say for himself now! We loathe the dog. We would not tolerate him for ten minutes as a regular contributor to our columns. The fellow has no style, no competence, no art. But he does serve a purpose. And so we will allow him this one chance to vent his spleen. And it will give us the feeling of having obliquely rebutted the intellectual challenge of the Catholic Church, from which we must veer away by every subterfuge we can. Here is something we picked up in the waste can outside the door of a Catholic sacristy. Can you ask us to believe that it ever smelled sweetly? Or that anything in the place it has been discarded from is more agreeably redolent?” . . . This is invariably the attitude of the in-between magazines who stage once a year a piece of exhibitionism by a lapsed Catholic.

Now, in the type of article I am describing you will find, though you may have to wade through a few pages before you come to it (or even through a few installments), that the outstanding grievance against the Catholic Church is persistently, monotonously, always, the doctrine of Hell. There may be other, minor resentments, but these can be waived aside. The sore spot, the inevitable and inescapable sore spot, is our teaching on Eternal Punishment. And there is probably nothing in the world so pitiable as the spectacle of a cashed-in Catholic endeavoring to explain to a public that never believed in anything supernatural the supposed terror aroused in his mind as a child when he had to face the fact of Damnation and devils as propounded — the example chosen is always grotesque — by some nun who told the boys in her class that if they threw stones at the church they would incur God’s eternal displeasure; or of some missionary priest who related in a sermon how a young boy, given to practices of impurity, saw the Devil appear at his bedside the night before he died to tell him that forevermore he would be writhing in pitch and blackness, and salted eternally with flame.

Now, I am greatly skeptical of statements attributing one’s religious and psychological collapse to a mental trauma occasioned by hearing in one’s youth of the horrors of Eternal Punishment. I cannot believe that these authors were constituted so vastly different from myself and my best boyhood friends, to say that the Hell-stories they heard drove them out of the Faith, and the Hell-stories we heard kept us in. And did they keep us in? Precisely. I do not say that they were always the ideal form in which to present Hell to a child’s imagination, and there may have been on occasion a superstitious excess (an excess which is admirably removed from the excellent Cathechism instruction which is imparted to Catholic children in our schools today). But the horror stories we heard about Hell, when they were such, were on the whole eminently salutary. And I will tell you why.

A boy’s problem, if I know anything about boys through having been one myself, is not the fear of retribution for sin. A boy has a terrible sense of justice. His problem is a fear that there will be no retribution at all. Retribution against whom? Against those living nightmares of everyone’s childhood: the bullies.

I have seen a bully take hold of the hair of a little girl, twist it, and torture her until she nearly fainted. I have seen a bully on a skating pond hurl a rock with a hockey-stick against the leg of a little girl skater, cut her stocking and draw blood. I have seen a young boy, who tried to protect his sister from the foul language of a neighborhood gang, jumped on by a group of them and knocked unconscious in the street. I have myself been chased into an alley and unmercifully beaten for nearly half an hour by five bullies for having done no more than appear in a tough neighborhood with a violin under my arm, on the way to take my lesson. The violin was taken as a symbol that I was a sissie. This is not one tenth of the horrors I have seen.

I remember there was in our town a very nice bakeshop where one could buy a very especial kind of cream-cake. Not the inferior sort, full of milk and corn starch which cost only five cents, but a superior brand, costing ten cents, prepared with a fluffy crust and stuffed full of pure whipped cream.

On a certain Holy Saturday afternoon (Sister had told us that we should fast from sweets during Lent, in honor of Our Lord’s Passion; she had also informed us, to our immense delight, that Lent ended precisely at twelve noon on Holy Saturday), another boy and myself, richer because of our penances by thirty cents, entered the bake-shop described above, and purchased three of these luscious cream-cakes. The lady deposited them in a bag. We smiled, thanked her, and walked out of the shop . . . and right into the arms of the bullies! (It was not that they were so formidable individually. I once had the pleasure in single combat of breaking one of their noses with my fist. But they always traveled in gangs.) The bullies seized us, pinned our arms behind our backs, punched us a great deal, stole our cakes, blew wind into the bag, and exploded it in our faces.

And what was my only comfort, my rampart, my safeguard when, on the nights following such scenes, I lay in bed, tried to put the world’s injustice out of my head and get to sleep? Hell! That was my comfort. Hell — and the fact that all bullies, if they went on being bullies, would some day at God’s hand pay for the cruelties they had inflicted on the innocent children I loved.

Nor would it have done me any good in those days to have had Hell depicted to me merely as a place where one incurred “the loss of the Beatific Vision.” A boy’s theology must be imaginative, just as all his stories about any event. Jack must be the Giant Killer if he is to receive any attention at all. So, Hell must be a place in which you suffer in terms of something you know is suffering. And fire was a splendid instrument for that. “The bullies will be burned” was infinitely more comforting than “they will not be considered nice little boys by God.” And if I had not known that the bullies would be burned, would I have ever got to sleep at all?

I am not in favor of grotesque descriptions of Hell that outstrip sound theology in their extravagance. And I am all too conscious of the danger of injuring the imagination of a child with details of too much horror. But Hell is a place of horror, and was described so in no unmistakable terms by Our Lord, Whose great fondness was for little children. And I was always taught that I could expect with completest confidence that One so merciful and forgiving as He would assuredly save me from Hell if I did not desert Him by joining the ranks of the bullies.

Another thing I discovered as a child, all by myself. If you were to suppose that our religious teachers were allowing us to be committed to Hell for minor and pardonable faults, all out of proportion with the enormity of the punishment to be received (let us say, such as “throwing stones at the Church window,” or “giving way to desires against holy purity”), was it not strange that the very ones who did throw stones at the Church window, and who did show by their language and the writings they inflicted on the walls of latrines that their desires were reekingly impure, were the very ones who were also the bullies, trying to tear the hair off the heads of poor little girls?

I must confess that in later years I have wanted to tone down somewhat a few of the descriptions of Hell that I heard or read as a child. Having been on many occasions perilously near being committed there forever, naturally I have wanted to furniture the place with as many comforts as the statements of Revelation might permit. It has always become more important to me of late to view my Eternal Damnation in terms of the loss of the Beatific Vision, which is Hell’s essential sanction.

But in childhood it was not quite so. And the reason I did not lose my Faith during childhood is because no one ever does. One loses it later on in life, by willfulness and sin. Whereupon the temptation is to become retroactive. Never, of course, to ascribe anything to one’s own fault; but rather to the conditions of one’s childhood. One can be induced to recall, with the aid of a psychiatrist, how one was once frightened by a rat, which accounts for one’s emotional instability; and then, of course, the horrible story of Dives and Lazarus related by gruesome little Sister Genevieve, which was the root cause of one’s religious collapse.

Then there is left only to doctor up a story about one’s spiritual awakening to the absurdities of the Catholic Faith, and sell it to one of the in-between magazines. They will take one about once a year.