Sinners and Fools

by Guy Consolmagno, SJ

The Tower of Babel (1563) by Pieter Bruegel the Elder

It was a Sunday morning Mass in Saint Cecelia’s Church, an almost empty edifice in Back Bay, Boston. I was 27 years old, a postdoctoral research fellow at MIT. My life as a Jesuit brother was still ten years in the future, a future I could never have imagined.

Sitting in this church was a homecoming of sorts. I had just moved into a gentrified apartment not far from where, 75 years earlier, my grandfather had gone to school. And now I was attending the same parish that my grandparents had gone to during the years of World War II. There was even a plaque in the back of the church listing the men of the parish who were “serving in action,” and my father’s name was on that plaque; when his parents lived here, he was flying bombers out of Britain and was later held in a prisoner of war camp in Germany.

And now, at the start of the 1980s high-tech revolution, I was living in this same neighborhood and attending this same church. The neighborhood had changed a lot since the war years. As the Irish and Italian immigrants had risen in economic status, they’d abandoned the city for the suburbs. Row houses had turned into slum houses. Then the baby boom and the high-tech boom had launched a new generation of young urban professionals like myself who had rediscovered the charms of living in the heart of a vibrant, trendsetting city like Boston. We were transforming those slums into very posh neighborhoods. But when I looked around the parish that Sunday morning, I realized I was the only Yuppie in the pews. Well-educated, well-off single folk in their twenties and thirties went to nightclubs and cafes, bookstores and record shops. Not churches. On Sunday mornings, they slept in.

Instead, the few people I saw across the aisles from me were just the opposite of my contemporaries. They were old. They were poor. Their clothes had a Salvation Army look to them. Some of them were street people. Some of them were minorities. Some were grossly overweight. Others were handicapped or disfigured. One of them was drooling.

All of them were definitely uncool. None of them, I realized, were people I knew—or wanted to know.

Or even wanted to be seen with.

I was sufficiently insecure, unsure of my own coolness, that I was getting very nervous at finding myself in company like this. Wasn’t I on the appropriate path to social success? A university job, an apartment with hardwood floors and exposed brick, season tickets to the Boston Symphony and the Boston Shakespeare Company. I wore the right clothes, had the right stereo, went to the best ice-cream shops. But my status was not yet secure. I still didn’t have a tenure-track job or a good salary at a high-tech start-up. I didn’t even have a girlfriend. I hadn’t yet arrived.

So what was I doing here in a church? Wasn’t my presence there more than just a little bit dangerous to my social status? Should I really be hanging out on a Sunday morning with this ragtag congregation of life’s losers? Surely, I was just a victim of a mindless routine, dating from the compulsion—guilt—that my grade school nuns had instilled in me. And wasn’t it about time that I broke free from those childish habits?

I took a deep breath.

I had come to church to be with God. And these people around me, these “life’s losers”—here, with them, was precisely where I would find him.

In fact, compared to my soft life, the challenges that every one of these people must have to face every day, challenges that would terrify me to contemplate, meant that I was flattering myself to think of myself as their equal.

That may have been the moment that started it all, the moment that made me uncomfortable enough with where I was headed that I turned down a job at an up-and-coming software firm, left my research position at MIT, and joined the Peace Corps. (By the way, that up-and-coming software firm went belly up while I was serving in Africa.) After the Peace Corps, I spent four wonderful years teaching at a great little liberal arts school, Lafayette College, while I finally figured out that the girlfriend I had been pursuing so intently hadn’t been right for me—something she’d been trying to get me to see for some time. Then I joined the Jesuits, thinking I could keep teaching in small liberal arts colleges. Instead, the order sent me to the Vatican Observatory.

Now, instead of a luxury apartment in Boston, my home is an ill-furnished ten-by-sixteen-foot room, cold in the winter and too hot in the summer. But it’s a room in a palace.

Living in Rome these past ten-plus years, I have seen my share of venal, ambitious, foolish, pompous churchmen. I see one every morning in the mirror. This is where I belong. Not in a church of saints but in a church of sinners.

Admitting our sinfulness in all its depth is the first step in the Jesuit spirituality known as the Spiritual Exercises, but it is just the opposite of a breast-beating guilt trip. In fact, it is a joyous occasion, for only when we understand the depths of our failings can we appreciate how deep and real is God’s forgiving love. And the more you’ll admit he’s had to forgive you for, the more you can realize he loves you. The same is true for a church as for an individual.

In my studies as a Jesuit (which never end; I seem to forget more than I learn), I have taken special delight in reading church history and the biographies of saints. A common theme in the lives of many saints is the fierce opposition they endured from within the very church they loved and served. For example, even Robert Bellarmine, the great Jesuit theologian and defender of the church during the years of Reformation and Counter-Reformation, had to fight to keep his greatest works off the church’s own Index of Forbidden Literature. When the church later made him a cardinal, he noted wryly that of all the Jesuit saints and blesseds up to his time, none of them had been in the church hierarchy. He finally broke the streak; but it took three hundred years after his death before he was canonized, thanks to his enemies within the church.

(That’s another reason, in case there was any doubt, that I know I’m not a saint; I don’t have those enemies, I haven’t suffered like that. Mind you, I’m not complaining.)

And it is clear that all the fools in Rome today have nothing on the incredible parade of knaves who have populated the history of my church. Disagree all you want with the recent popes, but there’s no question that at least they’ve tried to be holy men, sincerely attempting to do what they thought was God’s will. That’s more than you can say about a lot of popes in history, whom I wouldn’t entrust my car keys to, much less the keys to the kingdom of heaven. And yet somehow the church and its doctrines have survived. I am only half-joking—less than half—when I say that this is the ultimate proof of God’s existence, a miracle only God himself could have pulled off.

I’ll be honest: the first few times I had a chance to meet Pope John Paul II, I was disappointed. I saw a mere man whose English wasn’t all that great (of course, neither was my Italian), just reading to the public from a page that someone had handed him. But by the end of his life, even when his illnesses made him almost impossible to understand, I saw this incredibly frail old man radiate a power and a holiness that had nothing to do with the mere words he spoke. It wasn’t just me; everyone I know who saw him at the time felt it. It was fun to watch how our visitors at the Vatican Observatory, friends and family, reacted to meeting him: the more skeptical they were about it all beforehand, the more awed they were when they finally shook his hand.

Br. Guy Consolmagno, SJ, is a planetary scientist who works at the Vatican Observatory in Castel Gandolfo, Italy. He recently wrote God’s Mechanics: How Scientists and Engineers Make Sense of Religion (Jossey-Bass 2007), from which this article is reprinted with permission.

God is in our weaknesses. God is in our frailties. God is in this pompous, sinful, arrogant, scandal-ridden, and tired old church of mine. He is constantly forgiving her. He whispers in the still, soft voice that has echoed down the centuries through her voids and vacancies. How he must love her!

I love this church with all her faults (which are, after all, only my own faults writ over and over again, a billion times in its billion members). I love her in the way that as adults we can appreciate the human frailties and triumphs of our parents and love them more deeply than we ever could when we were children.

It is through the church that I have come to know God. I love her because I love Him.