The Church-as-She

By Martha Duffy

DIVINE DISOBEDIENCE: PROFILES IN CATHOLIC RADICALISM by Francine du Plessix Gray. 322 pages. Knopf. $6.95.

For many American Roman Catholics over 30, religious faith is both a disturbed and disturbing reality of their lives. The Holy Mother Church of their childhood has become a rather wayward lady who has cast off her Latin, fish days, and half the saints on her calendar. Even bishops have reopened discussion on doctrines that were recently thought to be as unassailable as the existence of God. For some, Pope John's revolution and the Second Vatican Council have seemed nothing short of a betrayal. For others, including Francine du Plessix Gray, 39, the new, questing spirit of Catholicism became an uncomfortable problem after private doubts had driven them away from a religion they thought to be irrelevant and outmoded.

Francine is back in the church now, inspired partly by a number of quixotic and unorthodox experiments in social radicalism that have challenged the conservative premises of institutional Catholicism. Her own return began one day in 1967, when she found that her sons' religion class was discussing the inner meaning of the Apostles' Creed rather than the Q. and A. textbook answers of the Baltimore Catechism on which she had been raised. Listening to her children, Francine decided that they were learning nothing she could not accept. She then learned of a new tribe of radical Catholics: priests, nuns and laymen who were challenging both civil and ecclesiastical law in the name of a higher commitment to God. Divine Disobedience is a detailed, empathetic account of three focal points of this new Christianity. It is couched in the measured prose of The New Yorker, where most of the book first appeared. It is also--although the thought is never explicitly stated--the record of one person's rediscovery of her church.

Divine Disobedience is divided into three long sections. The first, and sketchiest, is an account of the communal lifestyle of East Harlem's Emmaus House, a prototype for countless so-called "underground churches." When Francine began her project, Emmaus House was a hotbed of zealous ecumaniacs bent on building a new kind of parish with home rule and spontaneous liturgies. The community has become considerably more secular since then, and is evolving into a center for nonviolence.

There is material more to the author's liking in the chapter on the new Catholicism of Cuernavaca, particularly as personified in Ivan Illich, the impresario of the Center for Intercultural Documentation (CIDOC). A dispossessed Dalmatian nobleman with a brilliant and unlikely career in the arch diocese of New York behind him, Illich set up the school to "de-Yankee" the building-fund-oriented American priests who were unprepared to serve in trackless poverty zones of Latin America. His radical ideas, particularly about education, alarmed the Vatican enough to cut off the flow of priest-students; finally, after a farcical latter-day inquisition, Illich felt forced to turn in his monsignor's biretta.

37 Arms. A restless genius, Illich runs a quasi-theological seminary that trains workers for the Latin American poor and attracts an increasingly large flock of the sort of youthful idealists who want to join VISTA or the Peace Corps. He likes to say that there are really two churches: "The 'Church-as-She' is the net, the pearl, the mystery, the kingdom among us. The 'Church-as-It' is the institution, the temporary incarnational form."

It may be many years before Illich's contribution either to his church or to society can be assessed, but in the case of the noted draft-card burners, Daniel and Philip Berrigan (TIME, May 4), there can be little doubt. The Pied Pipers of Syracuse, as the author calls them, have radicalized thousands of Americans from priests to nonbelievers into joining their passionate crusade against the Viet Nam War. The Berrigan section is the best in the book, perhaps because the author is also an ardent pacifist. Another reason is that the author's ear for speech is more like a playwright's than an essayist's, and she took special care never to confuse the two men's voices. Dan's was much the harder to get down. "It resembled a Hindu goddess with 37 arms," she recalls, "rich, circular and diffuse."

The inherently fascinating character of the subjects accounts for part but not all of the book's appeal. It may be that Francine Gray is a bit of a Pied Piper too. Although she notes that the Berrigans have developed a streak of arrogance during the course of their martyrdom, she sees the men she writes about as heroes--a breed that flaunts its fortitude at the rest of humanity. They form a kind of natural aristocracy with which she identifies. At times, she identifies a bit too obviously. Illich is repeatedly referred to as tall, aquiline, elegant and witty. Describing a rally for the Catonsville Nine, she writes, "The priests were young, beautiful, and terrifying." By contrast, she barely accords humanity to the Catonsville jurors, "whose pale and flabby faces, in the afternoon light, seemed made of unrisen dough."

Strip Poker. Mrs. Gray would surely agree that her book reflects a deep identification with heroism, if not with aristocracy. It springs from a love for her father, who was shot while serving with the French Resistance in 1941. Francine and her mother came to America that year. While at Barnard she spent a summer at North Carolina's now defunct Black Mountain College. "I danced with Merce Cunningham, played strip poker with John Cage," she recalls. In art class she produced academic drawings that Teacher Robert Motherwell loathed. The writing course was worse: after reading her stories, Poet Charles Olson was moved to yell "Don't write at all!"

For years Francine did not know just what she could write. She filled in the time by marrying Painter Cleve Gray and doing pieces for Vogue like "The Well-Kept Foot." A far cry from Divine Disobedience, perhaps, but her credentials were at least authentic: she is a beautiful woman whose delicate bone structure precludes bad feet. Reminiscences about her family, published in The New Yorker, helped her to find the right milieu.

Her religious life has not been as smooth. Many of the priests who first inspired her have left the clergy. Her Connecticut parish is radically right wing, but she feels that the blind faith of Ivan Illich will see her through. "When I sit there listening to a sermon claiming that Mary strung the first rosary beads herself and handed them personally to St. Dominic, I keep repeating to myself: The Church-as-She, the Church-as-She, the Church-as-She.' " sbMartha Duffy

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