“The Adventures of a Bad Catholic at a Time Near the End of the World” 

      That’s the subtitle of Walker Percy’s novel, Love in the Ruins, “A great adventure...[s]o outrageous and so real, one is left speechless,” proclaimed the Chicago Sun Times.  True enough, I suppose, but for me it was a bit on the dark side… just, I believe, as Percy intended.  And given the main point of the novel, rightly so.  For, you see, the main character, Tom More, is convinced that disaster has hit and is all the more disastrous because hardly anyone has even noticed:  things have derailed and are heading toward the precipice, and the brink is about to be reached…. 

      Modern man, More speculates, has a deadly spiritual flu, an illness that has sundered spirit and body, the spirit or soul of man now a ghost inhabiting a physical machine. And the only means of “reconnecting” the two is bodily pleasure, most often of the illicit kind.  Thus the reference to “bad Catholic,” for More is indeed a bad Catholic. Surprisingly he knows and admits it, even if a bit confusedly:   

I, for example, am a Roman Catholic, albeit a bad one.  I believe in the Holy Catholic Apostolic and Roman Church, in God the Father, in the election of the Jews, in Jesus Christ His Son our Lord, who founded the Church on Peter his first vicar, which will last until the end of the world.  Some year ago, however, I stopped eating Christ in Communion, stopped going to Mass, and have since fallen into a disorderly life.  I believe in God and the whole business but I love women best, music and science next, whiskey next, God fourth, and my fellowman hardly at all.  Generally I do as I please.  A man, wrote John, who says he believes in God and does not keep his commandments is a liar.  If John is right, then I am a liar.  Nevertheless, I still believe. 

      Yes, Tom More is a bad Catholic, but he’s not really an evil man.  What sort of man is he?  Fallen, that’s what.  But he’s not a liar either.  He really does believe in God (so too do the demons, wrote St. James, and they tremble).  St. John does not contradict More, since what John the Apostle wrote is quite different from More’s words above:  “He who says ‘I know Him’ but disobeys [God’s] commandments is a liar, and the truth is not in him; but whoever keeps [God’s] word, in him truly love for God is perfected” (1 John 2:4,5).  More’s problem is not one of belief, but of love.  His loves are all disordered.  He sums up his state with, “Generally I do as I please.” 

      Again, his problem is not really with belief or even with knowledge.  He believes and knows there’s a God, that the world around him is headed the wrong way – “…in these dread latter days,” he muses, “of the old violent beloved U.S.A. and of the Christ-forgetting Christ-haunted death-dealing Western world, I came to myself in a grove of young pines….” – and he sees that there is some strange soul-sickness that afflicts him and others.  The human spirit is forlorn and seems imprisoned in a body that has become merely instrumental, a tool of pleasure and means of guilt.  Kind of like Adam and Eve in the Garden after they had sinned:  “Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized that they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made loincloths for themselves,” as recorded in today’s first reading.

      Tom More is, then, according to nature, a son of Adam; but according to the supernatural, a son of the New Adam (Christ), a status that is his by being a member of Christ’s Body the Church to which he maintains a tenuous connection (like so many “non-practicing” Catholics).  The difficulty is, well, with what he “loves”: all kinds of things above and before God.  Even in that area of the essential love between man and woman, More, so “disorderly,” fails; he “loves” three different women and is torn between them.  Music and science – such noble things and endeavors – rank above, in More’s affections, the God who is Beauty and the Omniscient One.  Even whiskey, one of More’s few solaces, comes before God.  And neighbor is hardly in the picture… unless she’s an attractive woman.

      Tom More then is, after a fashion, Everyman – all men and women left to themselves as sons and daughters of Adam and Eve, who in sinning loved things more than God.  But humanity is not left to itself, as St. Paul so triumphantly insists in today’s second reading, where the Apostle reminds us that what Adam rejected – friendship with God, our first love – God offers back to us in and through Christ, the New Adam.  This is that supreme work of grace in us:  to bring our loves back into order.  And the Holy Season of Lent is the prime time to concentrate on that very project. 

      Thus penance, a word so often misconstrued and assigned high-handedly to the “negative category,” when actually it is so very positive.  And here we are speaking of acts of penance – the giving up of something good in itself (meat, dessert, coffee, entertainment, etc.) or the giving of oneself in a special way to help others, so that we might realize in a very practical way the greater importance of other things above and beyond our mere comfort or convenience, first and foremost our closeness to God, Who is so often in our busy lives shunted off to the side; and we, like Tom More Everyman, end up having to confess, “Generally I do as I please.” Which, translated into something more definite, means, “I love only myself.” 

      That’s the trap and prison fallen into by More and so many of his fellow denizens “of the old violent beloved U.S.A. and of the Christ-forgetting Christ-haunted death-dealing Western world.”  But the iron bars have been broken… by Love Himself.  The Season of Lent now beckons us towards freedom by means of the right ordering of our loves – God first, to love Him with all of one’s heart, soul, mind and strength; and one’s neighbor as oneself.  And then one can say:  “Generally I am learning to do what ultimately brings me the most pleasure – loving God and my neighbor for His sake.”  For such a Love really is the highest pleasure.