Practicing Catholic by James Carroll

Author:James Carroll [Carroll, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

It was around then that I encountered William Sloane Coffin, Jr., the Yale University chaplain. He had become a national figure in the sixties as one of the first white men to throw in with black civil rights protesters in the South and then as a leader of the antiwar movement. Only somewhat younger than Merton, he arrived in my life as a kind of counterfigure.

Coffin, like Merton, had spent some of his youth in France, and he, too, had come of age in Morningside Heights, at Union Seminary instead of Columbia. Like Merton's, Coffin's was a conversion story, but instead of progress from bohemia into a monastery, his route was from the cloak-and-dagger world of the CIA (he had been part of the brutal repatriation of Soviet POWs after World War II) to the high-profile Protestant establishment (his father had been chairman of the board of the Metropolitan Museum of Art; his uncle had been president of Union Seminary). Instead of the aura of burdened sexuality, Coffin had the air of robust masculinity, an unapologetically sexual energy. He was then married to the first of his three wives, and a much-told story about their engagement captures Coffin's rambunctious spirit. Her father was the famous pianist Arthur Rubinstein, and when he was introduced to Coffin, he said, "I'm not sure how I feel about my daughter marrying a Billy Graham." To which Coffin reportedly replied, "I'm not sure how I feel about marrying the daughter of a Liberace."

Coffin was a preacher, not a writer. An activist, not a contemplative. Indicting the worst aspects of American life with a fierce moralism, he seemed entirely free of the interior anguish of which Merton had become our poet laureate. As noted earlier, I had been in the anonymous throngs of demonstrations in Washington where Coffin had been prominent. In October 1967, with four others, he had led a ceremony at a Boston church where young men turned in their draft cards, which Coffin then handed over to the government, saying, "You must arrest us, too." The government did, and his trial in Boston was one of the other high dramas of 1968. With his fellow defendants10 he was convicted, and then their convictions were overturned.

Coffin carried on, as he said in a phrase of Robert Frost's, "a lover's quarrel" as much with his church as with America. I did not grasp the significance of his position as a man protesting from within, however, until I met him in person, when he came to our seminary to give a lecture. Later I would go to jail with him, would be sustained in the cellblock by his singing, would find the courage to stand erect in court by imitating him. Eventually I would become his friend. But he never made a more powerful impression than in that first encounter at the Paulist seminary, when he gave me an unexpected glimpse of a new kind of religious identity, one in which contradictions were not the problem but the solution.

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