New York, June 12—Time magazine’s biennial essay on the vicissitudes of the Roman Catholic Church is launched with an epigraph attributed to an “elderly woman parishioner of St. Thomas Aquinas Church, Ames, Iowa”: “I hope I die soon so that I can die a Catholic.” The lady expresses the misgivings of many Catholics, here and abroad, though the statement of her frustration is philosophically perplexing. Rather like the story of the man whose doctor informs him that he has terminal cancer, and asks what he proposes to do. The patient reflects for a moment, and then says he will join the Communist Party. “Better one of them should go than one of us.”
The travail of the Catholic Church is of continuing interest to non-Catholics, for reasons analogous to the curiosity Republicans feel about Democratic sentiment, in the historical knowledge that their own platform of a few years hence is being written. As Catholicism is, so to speak, Protestantized, so is Protestantism. If you find Catholics wondering out loud about the doctrine of the Trinity, you will find more Protestants like the famous Unitarian who believes in “at most one God.” At the same time, you find a growing hunger for the formal stuff of Christianity. That formal stuff is really quite simply stated in the Apostle’s Creed, or whatever they decided to rename it at Vatican II when, on a rainy afternoon, they ran out of more subversive ideas. It is of course the notion of the Incarnation—that’s about it; all the rest is derivative, and interpretive.
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