Walker Percy's Commencement Address to St. Joseph Seminary, A "Cranky" Novelist Reflects on the Church

Have you ever read the most famous of commencement speeches given at a Catholic seminary? 

In 1983, a great novelist in his twilight years gave the commencement address at St. Joseph College Seminary in Louisiana. That novelist, Walker Percy, was one of the precious few to fit in a noble sub-phylum of writers: the Southern, Catholic novelist. 

His commencement address is as relevant now as it was prescient then. Percy talks about the state of the Catholic Church; it's never-gonna-happen, yet imminent demise; and the "strange and unprecedented" chaos confronting the priests of the new millennium.  

You can find this in a whole book-full of Walker Percy essays: Signposts in a Strange Land.  

I like to share great reads with you, dearest reader. I am thankful to the priest who share it with me. 

I have added subheadings to the following for the ease of reading, as well as bolding certain key lines and phrases ... mostly to help me find them again, some time down the road, for inspiration. To paraphrase T. S. Eliot, good writers borrow, but great writers steal. And I'm not much of a thief. 

 

A "Cranky Novelist" Reflects on the Church

Let me express my pleasure at being at St. Joseph College Seminary and congratulate you for successfully completing your college seminary years. I envy you your four years in a Benedictine community. There is my own satisfaction in having a Benedictine abbey near the small Southern town where I live. I've heard more than one diocesan priest say affectionately that their four years at St. Ben's were among the happiest in their lives. 

My understanding is that you are bound for a major seminary, perhaps at Notre Dame, and, one hopes, for Holy Orders. As a Catholic layman, I can only wish you well, for your own sake and for our sake, and express the hope, for good and selfish reasons, that it works out. We need you. I notice there are not many of you. We are all familiar with the famous shortage of vocations. The statistics are dire. The last numbers I saw were that the average age of a Catholic priest in the United States is presently fifty-six and that at the present rate of vocations it will be seventy-three in the year 2000. 

This is all the more critical in view of the concomitant steady increase in the Catholic laity. There has been much talk, especially in the secular press, about the bare ruined choirs and the imminent dissolution of the Church, an end which has been regularly predicted for 1,900 years. A recent article in Newsweek spoke of worried bishops and even offered some suggestions for relaxing the standards of the priesthood, standards of education, the rule of celibacy, ordaining women, and so on. Since everyone is free with his expert opinion, let me put in my own two-cents worth. My own feeling is that the diagnosis is not all that difficult. One doesn't have to look beyond the values of a society which is ever more consumer-oriented, ever more inclined to view man as an immanent organism in an environment; therefore, a view of man which is in subtle ways not so much hostile but rather indifferent to Christ's radical injunction to his first priests: To follow me, go your way carrying neither purse nor scrip nor shoes. Hostility is no stranger to the Church; she often thrives under it: witness Poland. But there is a species of bland indifference which is all but invincible. The diagnosis, I say, is not hard to come by, but the solution is more difficult. I make bold to suggest one dimension of it. My own impression, from talking to some of you and your generation, is that the one place where the answer is not to be found is in the relaxation of the standards of the priesthood. It seems to me that with the best of you it is exactly the other way around, that far from it being the case that you might have been attracted by this or that fringe benefit-like the college graduates you used to hear about who, when they were interviewed by General Motors or Dupont, would first off inquire about the retirement plan. The best of your generation-perhaps of any generation-want something else. Aside from the supernatural dimension of your vocation-that it is God and not the fringe benefits who calls one and whose summons must be dealt with by each man in his own way-my impression is that your generation is less and less impressed by the easy pitch and more and more exhilarated by the singular challenge. 

The Priesthood: An Elite Corps

The very smallness of your number puts me in mind of a rather commonplace military metaphor. It is the recruiting policy of the Marine Corps. I notice that at the very time that the Army, Navy, and Air Force are advertising this or that benefit, good base pay, educational opportunities, the glamour of world travel, early retirement, the Marine Corps says in effect: "We're only the best, you are free to apply, you probably won't make it, there are not many of us and it's a tough life, but if you think you're good enough, we'll take a look at you." 

If this sounds like I'm comparing you to an elite corps, a chosen few, it's because I am. 

Surely it is the high calling, the challenge, the very difficulties to be surmounted which attract one. There are also the peculiar difficulties and the challenge of a vocation in a world which never needed it more, yet which in a strange and unprecedented way is incapacitated, has ears and cannot hear, is both blind and unheeding. 

The Parish Priest

But let me just say a word about some unnecessary difficulties, some areas where we laymen and lay women may have been at fault and have added inadvertently to the rigors of a vocation which, Lord knows, is difficult enough. I am speaking in particular of the vocation of the parish priest. In my book he is one of the heroes of this age. There is one positive good which may come to pass from the present crisis in vocations and the coming scarcity of priests, and it is this: the time may come when we, the Catholic laity, may come to value the very person we have taken for granted all these years. What we took and take for granted is the parish priest. Father was always there, is there, and is expected to be there, something like Coleco and Ma Bell. So natural did it seem that Father was always there that we took it as a matter of course when he was an extraordinarily good and faithful pastor and we were accordingly quick to criticize him when we detected a human failing. 

We Catholics have a way of taking things for granted, the very sort of things which other people find extraordinary. I'll give you one example. The other day I happened to read a short review of a book in a magazine. The book was a new edition of the Rule of St. Benedict, published to celebrate the sesqui-millennium of the saint's birth. Do you know what a sesqui-millennium is? I had to look it up. It is 1,500 years. Now, that is remarkable. What struck me as even more remarkable is that no one seemed to find this remarkable. Yet every day we hear about this or that anniversary celebration: five hundred years since Luther's birth, two hundred years since Goethe's birth, seventy-five years since the Wright brothers' flight, a stamp commemorating James Audubon or Joe Louis. This is all very well. But here is a man who was born 1,500 years ago, who lived in a critical, disorderly time with certain resemblances to our own, who devised a rule for living in a community, a practical, moderate, yet holy rule which apparently is quite as useful now as it was 1,500 years ago. 1,500 years. I call that remarkable. Yet very few people seem to find it remarkable, very few Catholics. Maybe the Benedictines do, but they don't say much about it, and the Jesuits practically nothing. 

And so a favorite recreation among some is either to take the parish priest for granted or to complain about him. Father did so-and-so. Father is always asking for money. The roof of the church is leaking; why doesn't he get it fixed? Why is Father always asking for money? Father's sermon was too long. Father didn't give a sermon. Father read a letter from the Archbishop instead of giving a sermon. Father read a letter from the Archbishop and then gave a sermon. Father so-and-so in the next parish has a better sense of humor, so we go over there. Or: Do you know what that priest said to me when I told him I wanted to get my girlfriend fitted with an IUD? And so on. 

I have written a couple of science-fiction novels about the future. But one doesn't have to be a prophet to guess what may happen if the present trend continues. Instead of Father always being there at the rectory to answer this or that complaint, the time may come when Father shows up once a month to say Mass, perform baptisms, and hear confessions-or maybe arrives in a jeep once a year, as he does in some parishes in South America. Then we may be as happy to see Father as is a Brazilian Indian. 

A Saving Remnant

The point is that the time may come when the Catholic Church and the Catholic people, both priests and laymen, will have become a remnant, a saving remnant, and that will be both bad news and good news. The bad news is that the familiar comfort of the parish in which the Church was taken to be more or less co-extensive with the society in which we lived is probably going or gone. The good news is that in becoming a minority in all countries, a remnant, the Church also becomes a world church in the true sense, bound to no culture, not even to the West of the old Christendom, by no means triumphant but rather a pilgrim church witnessing to a world in travail and yet a world to which it will appear ever stranger and more outlandish. It, the Church, will be seen increasingly as what it was in the beginning, a saving remnant, a sign of contradiction, a stumbling block, a transcultural phenomenon, a pilgrim church.

There is no more Christendom and it may be just as well. Thus, it may very well come to pass that you, graduates of St. Joseph's, if you should become parish priests, will be practicing your ministry in a world very different from the one we grew up in. You are less apt to be seen as a familiar artifact of the culture, a recognizable familiar figure, like the priest in movies who dresses like a priest -- "Here's the padre" -- "Hi, Father" -- says things priests say, and is treated with a kind of unseeing deference. 

This is not to say that Father Mike, in order to break out of the old cultural tableaux in which he felt perceived as a static figure, must necessarily shed his Roman collar for a T-shirt and designer jeans in order to appear as a man among men-or that Sister Scholastica has to shed both her name and her habit (in which I always thought she looked great, to tell you the truth) for a J. C. Penney pants suit in which she does not look so great, and takes back her old name of Debbie or Carol Jean, which I always thought she did well to get rid of.

This is not to say that ... Sister Scholastica has to shed both her name and her habit (in which I always thought she looked great, to tell you the truth) for a J. C. Penney pants suit in which she does not look so great, and takes back her old name of Debbie or Carol Jean, which I always thought she did well to get rid of.

There was a great deal to be said for the traditional role of the Church in which it was more or less co-extensive with the culture in which it found itself. One might have lived, for example, in the thirteenth century in a Catholic culture in which the culture itself was informed by the sacramental order of the Church. Or perhaps in Puritan New England or Irish-Catholic Boston, where one's church was as familiar and all-pervasive as the furniture of one's house. And even as a minority church, as a tiny beleaguered community, which the Catholic Church was and still is in much of the South, it was as a miniature culture that it survived, a small besieged enclave in which Father said such-and-such, Sister said so-and-so, and, besieged or not, it was the Catholic-ethnic culture which made one feel comfortable and at home, redolent as it was with incense and candlewax and all the vivid parochial particulars. It was beloved for the same reason it was detested. When a Catholic writer rebels against his faith and his past, as he seems so often compelled to do nowadays, it is really the whole cultural complex he is kicking out.

Aside: Ridicule & The Coming of Age of the American Catholic Novelist

It is to be hoped, by the way, that American Catholic novelists and playwrights will someday achieve sufficient maturity that they can put their heritage to some better use than ridiculing their own tradition: noting some unfortunate nun who gave him a whack, probably deserved, in the third grade, some weary priest who bruised his feelings in the confessional. No more of that, says a certain sort of writer, and walks out of the Church forever, a free spirit he thinks now, except that it turns out he is not free after all and that he can only get steamed up by doing the same old number on the priest and sisters back at St. Aloysius. I look forward to the time when the Catholic writer comes of age, as American Jewish writers have come of age in the last generation, and produces a comparable literature of affection and celebration. I suspect that these writers are rebelling not against God and the Church, the priest, and the nun, the man and woman who have given up his and her life to serve God and the people of God-but rather against the cultural furniture of their own past, the wax-and-varnish smell of St. Aloysius's, Father Mike's peculiarities, Sister Scholastica's bad temper, under the romantic delusion that only if one can escape the particularities and constraints of the past can one breathe the pure air of art and freedom, when in truth what the truly Catholic writer knows, a writer like Flannery O'Connor, that it is only through the particularities of place, time, and history-even when it is, as the poet Gerard Hopkins said, "seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil; / And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell"-it is only then that the writer achieves his art and all of us achieve humanity. 

No Longer Quaint

What is happening, I think, is that the Church is emerging from the stable, perhaps somewhat closeted community of the past into the dangerous and exciting atmosphere of a world community, a global village in which the Church and her people are no longer an exotic enclave but very much a voice among world voices, exciting because the Catholic presence is felt and the Catholic good news is heard and evaluated in its own right and not merely as a pleasant, quaint cultural item like that kindly old movie priest, Father Pat O'Brien, or the swallows at Capistrano. 

Radical changes are occurring in the world into which you are graduating and which you may find yourself serving as a priest. It is like no other world in Western historical experience, both in its opportunities and in its perils. Of course, it is now a commonplace that the Church itself is shaken by unprecedented internal stresses. Given any social or political issues, whether it be the arms race or liberation theology in Latin America, the Church finds itself badly divided. But is this such a bad thing, a falling apart of the happy consensus of older, safer times, or is it a sign of the maturity of the Church emerging into the clamor of the marketplace, however seriously disordered it is? And here, surely, is the most difficult challenge of all: to proclaim the Good News in a world whose values seem increasingly indifferent to the very meaning of the Good News. It is a strange world indeed, a world which is, on the one hand, more eroticized than ancient Rome, and yet a world in which the Good News is proclaimed more loudly and frequently than ever before by TV evangelists and the new fundamentalists. There occurs a kind of devaluation of language, a cheapening of the very vocabulary of salvation, as a consequence of which the ever-fresh, ever-joyful meaning of the Gospel comes across as the dreariest TV commercial. How to proclaim the Good News in a society which never needed it more but in which language itself has been subverted? Salvation comes from hearing, according to Scripture, but what is the bearer of the Good News to do when the hearing becomes as overloaded as the circuits of an $80 TV set? 

Your task is very simple. As the Lord said: "All you have to do when you go out among the wolves is to be wise as serpents and gentle as doves." But the wolves these days are of a very different order from the ravening wolves of former times or the totalitarian persecutors of the present day. They are of a far subtler sort and perhaps more dangerous than the ravening species. 

The Three Enemies

There are, as I see it, three enemies of the Good News in American society, wolves in sheep's clothing, for they are not overtly hostile, and yet the upshot is an indifference more subversive than hostility. They are the new idols of society. 

The first is a [#1] consumership mentality, a bland but nonetheless tenacious addiction to the diversions of the media and the manifold goods and services of a technological society. It is difficult to see how the man, woman, or child who watches TV eight hours a day, in which the good triumphs every half hour on sitcoms, cops, and hospital shows, can be open to the Good News. 

Another idol, even more subtle in guise, is [#2] the growing fascination with what can only be called the occult, the magical. Though it often masquerades under the honorable title of science, it is in fact anti-scientific. It hungers after any new curiosity or puzzle or mysterious phenomenon but is altogether indifferent to the vast mystery of life itself and the human condition. Sustained by an insatiable appetite for the superficially mysterious, it mistakes religion for its own credulity toward such things as astrology, the Bermuda triangle, UFOs, reincarnation, this or that self-appointed guru with mystical powers. I can remember when the traditional foes used to be science versus religion-which never made sense to me, because both lay claim to a certain order of truth, and truth can never be contradictory. But one does not have to be a seer to see what is happening before our eyes: a loss of interest in science in favor of pseudo-science. One happy outcome of this turn of events may well be a new alliance of science and religion such as existed in medieval times against the old and the new Gnosticism which periodically threatens the openness and catholicity of both science and Christianity with its appeal to the occult and mystical powers of the elite few. 

And here in the South particularly, you will encounter a third force, not quite enemy perhaps, who ought in fact to be reckoned friend and ally but in these peculiar times may not be. So confused indeed are the battle lines these days that one can almost envy the Catholics in Communist countries where the enemy is plain to see and to rally against. I am speaking of some of our co-religionists and co-believers in Jesus Christ our Lord, not our brothers the mainline Protestants, but [#3] the new fundamentalists. They need to be mentioned because, here in the South at least, it is they who utter the name of the Lord loudest and most often, who are most evident both in media and in marketplace, whose schools are proliferating at a rate exceeding both public and parochial schools. In my opinion, they do a disservice by cheapening the vocabulary of Christianity and pandering to a crude emotionalism divorced from reason. I know that St. Paul said that the Gospel was a stumbling block to the wise, but it does not follow that in order to save the faith it is necessary to believe that the universe was created six thousand years ago. And it is not necessary, to save the integrity of man's soul and its likeness to God, to believe that God could not have created man's body through an evolution from lower species. 

The crisis of the Church and the crisis of our youth often manifests itself in young Catholics rebelling against what they perceive as the dryness and ritual prayers of the Church and turning to the emotional appeal of the new evangelicals. Catholics have a lesson to learn here, I am sure, but I give myself permission to indulge my own prejudice--as a cranky novelist I can do this--and to say that the young person who turns his back on the apostolic Catholic faith with its two-thousand-year-old synthesis of faith and knowledge, art and science, with the sacramental presence of God Himself on the altar, to take up with some guru or Bible-thumper who has no use for sacrament or reason, this young person has in fact sold his birthright for a mess of pottage-or, as some wag put it, a pot of message. But, very well, let us leave off the criticism and recognize our own failings.

The young person who turns his back on the apostolic Catholic faith with its two-thousand-year-old synthesis of faith and knowledge, art and science, with the sacramental presence of God Himself on the altar, to take up with some guru or Bible-thumper who has no use for sacrament or reason ... has in fact sold his birthright for a mess of pottage-or, as some wag put it, a pot of message.

Some of us older Catholics, I know, take pleasure from the very things many young people find missing: the very understatement of emotion in the quiet corporate worship, and, above all, the ancient, enduring liturgical form of the Mass. 

Enemy #4?

And, of course, at the opposite extreme from the young Pentecostal, with whom I have no quarrel, there is the older parishioner-and I know several-who are convinced that most of the troubles not merely of the Church but of the entire modern world can be traced to the abandonment of the Latin Mass after Vatican II. These are the types, God bless them, who look straight ahead during Mass, glowering, and put their hands in their pockets during the handshaking. Actually, we're not quite as bad as Auberon Waugh, Evelyn Waugh's son, who was so outraged at what he saw as the barbarous liturgy and the atrocious English renderings of the Mass that he departed for the Anglican communion, only to find the Book of Common Prayer so butchered by revisions that he came back, still disgruntled, to the Catholic Church as the lesser of evils.

Not All That Bad 

To tell you the truth, despite all the cries of havoc, I don't find things all that bad. I have mentioned a few well-known difficulties and contretemps only to illustrate the general thesis that the cultural manifestation of the Church often gets confused with its historical and apostolic mission. Being human, which is to say creatures of a particular culture, we don't like changes. So, having taken note of what is commonly called the crisis of the Church, let me make a final personal observation: that if one judged only from the media, the national press, or network news, one would conclude that the Church is washed up, hopelessly divided politically, the Holy Father hopelessly behind the times. Yet one goes to Mass on any ordinary Sunday and there they are, the Catholic people, more than ever, at five, six, seven Masses a day. And there is the priest still, thank God, holding aloft the body of Christ. And let the Holy Father, this marvelous man, appear anywhere and there occurs all over the world a tumult not of despair and division but of rejoicing and hope, and not merely among Catholics. 

Never In History

That is why it is such a pleasure to see you here. I don't know how many of you will become parish priests. But I know how welcome you will be. I have mentioned the challenge only to emphasize the opportunities. The opportunity is simply this: that never in history has modern man been in greater need of you, has been more confused about his identity and the meaning of his life. Never has there been such loneliness in the midst of crowds, never such hunger in the face of satiation. Never has there been a more fertile ground for the seed and the harvest the Lord spoke of. All that is needed is a bearer of the Good News who speaks it with such authenticity that it can penetrate the most exhausted hearing, revive the most jaded language. With you lies the future and the hope. You and the Church you serve may be only a remnant, but it will be a saving remnant. 

I salute you and congratulate you. God bless you.

1983, St. Joseph College Seminary, St. Benedict, Louisiana 

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