My grandparents were like most other Americans. They were Protestants, but you could never find out precisely what kind of Protestants they were. I, their own grandson, was never able to ascertain. They put money in the little envelopes that came to them from Zion church, but they never went near the place itself. And they also contributed to the Salvation Army and a lot of other things: so you could not tell what they were by the places which they helped to support. Of course, they had sent my uncle in his boyhood to the choir school of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, on the rock above Harlem, which was then a peaceful bourgeois neighborhood. And they sent John Paul there too, in due course. Indeed, there was even some talk of sending me there. Yet that did not make them Episcopalians. It was not the religion that they patronized, but the school and the atmosphere. In practice, Bonnemaman used to read the little black books of Mary Baker Eddy, and I suppose that was the closest she got to religion.
On the whole, the general attitude around that house was the more or less inarticulate assumption that all religions were more or less praiseworthy on purely natural or social grounds. In any decent suburb of a big city you would expect to run across some kind of a church once in a while. It was part of the scenery, like the High School and the Y.M.C.A. and the big whale-back roof and water-tank of the movie theater.
The only exceptions to this general acceptability of religions were the Jews and the Catholics. Who would want to be a Jew? But then, that was a matter of race more than of religion. The Jews were Jews, but they could not very well help it. But as for the Catholics--it seemed, to Pop's mind, that there was a certain sinister note of malice connected with the profession of anything like the Catholic faith. The Catholic Church was the only one against which I ever heard him speak any definite bitterness or animosity.
The chief reason was that he himself belonged to some kind of a Masonic organization, called, oddly enough, the Knights Templars. Where they picked up that name, I do not know, but the original Knights Templars were a military religious Order in the Catholic Church, who had an intimate connection with the Cistercians, of which the Trappists are a reform.
Being Knights, the Knights Templars had a sword. Pop kept his sword first in the closet in his den, and then, for a while, it was in the coat closet by the front door, mixed up with the canes and umbrellas and with the huge policeman's club which Pop evidently believed would be useful if a burglar came around.
I suppose that at the meetings of the Knights Templars to which Pop went less and less frequently, he heard how wicked the Catholic Church was. He had probably heard that from his childhood up. It is what all Protestant children hear. It is part of their religious training.
I have to say that it surprises me that Merton's grandparents had such a strong bias against the Catholic Church, since Merton is often touted for possible canonization. Of course, a lot of saints' families did nasty things to them. The father of sister saints Agnes and Clare tried to forcibly remove them from their convent, dragging Agnes by her hair. Thomas Aquinas was imprisoned for two years in a fortress by his family, and they sent a prostitute to tempt him.
People can do a lot of bad things in the name of familial love, up to, and including, years of imprisonment, it seems. My mother, when I was a senior in high school and had no clue what I wanted to study in college, said to me one day, "I think computers would be good. Lots of money in that." So, when I went to the university, I got a full-ride scholarship to study computer science and math. I took classes in Pascal programming; Calculus I, II, and III; abstract algebra; and artificial intelligence. Fives years of my life I devoted to computers, all because my mother told me to. Granted, my mother didn't pull out my fingernails or teeth to get me to do it.
Of course, I now work in a cardiology office and teach composition, mythology, film, and poetry at the university. I can't remember the last time I put together lines of computer code. When I have an issue with my computer at work, I don't roll up my sleeves and figure out what's going on. I pick up the phone and call the IT department.
When I decided to switch my major from Computer Science to English, my mother was not very happy. If she could have, she probably would have hired a prostitute to change my mind. As luck would have it, I was pretty gifted with words. My mother knew this, but she just came from a generation that equated happiness with money, not poetry or devotion to God (although, had I become a priest or monk, my mother would have accepted that happily).
My mother has been proud of all my accomplishments--from grad school to teaching to writing. Eventually, I came to understand that all my mother really wanted was for me to be happy in whatever I ended up doing. She didn't care if I could write lines of elegant programming. Or wrap a disk around and axis and calculate its volume. All she really cared about was that I smiled a lot, laughed a lot, and had a lot of love in my life.
Eventually, the families of saints do one of two things: 1) they accept the saint's choices and become Catholics (and sometimes saints) themselves, or 2) they kill the saints, burn them alive, or cut off their heads.
Thank goodness Saint Marty's mother didn't have a sharp sword in the coat closet.
