In this account, the author explores the role of Catholicism in Catholic institutions, presenting three Catholic universities and discussing their lack of religious conviction, arguing for more Catholic theological education and less secularism. God and Man at Georgetown Prep How I Became a Catholic Despite 10 Years of Catholic Schooling By Mark Gauvreau Judge The Crossroad Publishing Company Copyright © 2005 Mark Gauvreau Judge All rights reserved. ISBN: 978-0-8245-2313-8 Contents Chapter One My Dad the Catholic, Chapter Two The Collapse, Chapter Three Mercy, Chapter Four Prep, Chapter Five Rock and Roll, Chapter Six The Unknown Hoya, Chapter Seven Catholic U., Chapter Eight Twelve Steps to Man, Chapter Nine Reversion, Chapter Ten The Passion, Works Cited, Index of Authors and Titles, CHAPTER 1 My Dad the Catholic My father had been dead for several months before it dawned on me that he'd been a Catholic. It should have been easy to figure out that Dad was Catholic. He went to Catholic Mass every Sunday. He owned a St. Joseph's daily missal book, the same one he had had since he was a kid. He could read Latin, and even though he wrote for a scientific magazine, National Geographic, his journalism was garnished with Christian references. He had gone to three Catholic schools in Washington, where he lived: Blessed Sacrament, the Jesuit all-boys school Gonzaga, and the Catholic University of America. His favorite book was one with heavy Catholic overtones, The Lord of the Rings. And yet, in the summer of 1996, I found myself surprised to finally realize that my dad had been deeply, seriously, and mystically Catholic. He believed in the supernatural world and believed that we could catch glimpses of it in this world. He saw in nature not only beauty but the face of Christ. In all my years of Catholic schooling I had never heard or read anything that brought these worlds together — that explained Catholicism as a religion about both faith and reason, about the reality of this world and of the next. I always considered my father's mysticism, his love of nature and poetry and beauty, to be the sign of a brilliant man who occasionally had his head in the clouds. No one ever explained that his mysticism may have been the sign of someone whose feet were planted firmly in reality. Then I started going through Dad's old stuff in the basement, and I came across some books: G. K. Chesterton's Orthodoxy, Thomas Merton's The Seven Storey Mountain and No Man Is an Island, prayer and meditation books from the 1940s, a biography of Cardinal Newman. I picked up Chesterton's Orthodoxy and for the first time began to understand Dad's Catholicism. I was stunned by one passage in particular: Mysticism keeps men sane. As long as you have mystery you have health; when you destroy mystery you create morbidity. The ordinary man has always been sane because the ordinary man has always been a mystic. He has permitted the twilight. He has always had one foot in earth and the other in fairyland. ... He has always cared more for truth than for consistency. If he saw two truths that seemed to contradict each other, he would take the two truths and the contradiction along with them. His spiritual sight is stereoscopic, like his physical sight: he sees two pictures at once and yet sees all the better for that. Thus he has always believed there was such a thing as fate, but such a thing as free will also. ... The morbid logician seeks to make everything lucid, and succeeds in making everything mysterious. The mystic allows one thing to be mysterious, and everything else becomes lucid. ... As we have taken the circle as the symbol of reason and madness, we may take the cross as a symbol at once of mystery and of health. Buddhism is centripetal, but Christianity is centrifugal: it breaks out. ... The circle returns upon itself and is bound. The cross opens its arms to the four winds; it is a signpost for free travelers. I was thunderstruck — not only by the brilliance of the prose, which in a flash made me understand more about Christianity than almost twenty years of Catholic schooling had, but by the realization that this passage beautifully summed up my father. In my mind Dad was many things: an intellectual and scholar, an explorer, a hilarious — and occasionally bawdy — Irish storyteller who could keep a room rapt with attention for an hour, and someone who loved rock and roll. In my mind, none of those things were Catholic. Being Catholic was going to Mass and to confession. It was old priests and strict nuns. It had nothing to do with philosophy, science, love, or anything else worthwhile in the world. It was the religion I had left behind in high school. Yet here, in Chesterton's great masterpiece about Christianity, was the spirit, and the brilliance, of my father. As I pored through his things, I began to reflect on his life, trying to pinpoint exactly where, besides Chesterton,