Lunch with an Old Friend

When you get all hot and bothered that the man they choose as pope is the former head of what became of the Inquisition, it means you still care about the Church. On this, we could agree. I had lunch today with a Paulist priest I used to know in Santa Barbara. He has become the head of Vocations at the "mother ship":http://www.stpaultheapostle.org/ here in New York. His job's hard. There are very, very few young men in the United States willing to give up a lot of options, including sex, for a life devoted to prayer, mission, giving. Of those few, the main competition for the Paulists are the Domincans (love that swishing white habit and searing mind) and the Jesuits (love that intellectual worldliness). Guys come to the Paulists -- a particularly American order -- if they want community but not too much. Want to preach in a parish. Want to reach out to apostates like me or college students. Over portobello mushrooms and mozzarella with him I pondered this. What was it that drew me to the Catholic Church in the first place? I ask because I have several friends (notably "here":http://www.cassandrapages.com/ and "here":http://mulubinba.typepad.com/mulubinba_moments/) who are deeping thinking, questioning Episcopalians, a religion into which I was baptized. I find myself wondering why I left THAT, as opposed to why I left at all (which is a different question). It all comes down to the Eucharist, for me. Strayed though I am, and trouble that I have with most of it, in Catholicism, everything, everything revolves around this: Eat me. I am the body and the blood. Ingest your deity. It's a lot for the squeamish, but it doesn't lack cojones. I see women who embrace Rome but not its nitwittedness, abandoning the Ratzinger cliques and becoming womenpriests. I would like to meet them. Sophia, benedicta tu. Cojones and then some. I was hesitant about bitching about th pope with Ed. Why, he said. We do it all the time. We agreed that there probably a lot of things in the world that warranted the attention of the Church more than whether or not some priests may or may not be gay. I did go to Mass today with him, the first time in a long while. The church of St. Paul the Apostle is the third largest in New York, after the cathedrals of St. Patrick and St. John the Divine. What can I say: I felt right at home. I write this because it's one of the subjects about which I rarely blog: my faith. It's tattered and torn and somedays I wake up railing against what God may or may ot be there but it has to be mentioned, sometimes: I felt right at home in this place.