Buddhist Catholic Contemplative Evangelical General Christian Hindu Jewish Latter-day Saint Muslim New Visions Progressive Christian

Beliefs

Topics

Columnists

Resource Library

Research Tools

Video

Podcasts

Thought Readers

Faith In Media Tracker

Newsletters

Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In Subscription Support

Follow Patheos

Home
Progressive Christian
A Stranger (Protestant) in a Strange Land (Catholic)

A Stranger (Protestant) in a Strange Land (Catholic)

Last updated on: March 7, 2022 at 9:33 pm by Vance Morgan

A Stranger (Protestant) in a Strange Land (Catholic) 2022-03-07T21:33:10-04:00 Vance Morgan

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

Last Wednesday the student in front of me in line at the little on campus coffee shop in the building next to mine plopped what looked like a pre-packaged chicken Caesar salad on the counter. While fumbling for her card to pay, the cashier said “that isn’t chicken, you know. It’s tofu.” “WHAT?” the student cried. “It’s Ash Wednesday. We aren’t allowed to serve meat on Ash Wednesday or Fridays during Lent.” The exasperated student left her no-longer-wanted tofu Caesar salad on the counter, muttering “this is f—king bullshit” as she walked by. Maybe so, but It’s always useful to understand the lay of the land, as I learned a long time ago. I was reminded of a similar experience from a few years back.

As I stood in line at the campus Dunkin’ Donuts, I was truly thanking God that it was 9:15 on Friday morning. Not because of the usual TGIF thing, although Fridays are generally fine. In my life at the time, 9:15 on Friday morning was great because it meant that I was finished with my weekly 8:00 appointment at the Concannon Fitness Center, where my personal trainer, Kevin the Red-Haired Nazi, put me through experiences I could not have survived fifteen years earlier.

“The usual coffee (medium black with a shot of caramel—a shot, mind you, not a swirl) and a turkey sausage sandwich on an English muffin,” I said to the young lady behind the counter. “No meat today! It’s Friday!” some disembodied voice shouts from the little office on the side. “Shit!” I thought. That shouldn’t include turkeys—as a friend of mine once said, chickens and turkeys are just plants with weak root systems. “Then I’ll have a veggie egg white flat” (although I didn’t really want one). “It really sucks to be a non-Catholic on a Catholic campus,” I commented to the young lady as she swiped my card. “Tell me about it,” she replied without making eye contact as she returned it.

I guess it must not suck that badly, since I’ve been doing it, first as a PhD student then as a professor, for thirty-five years. No one could have guessed, given my background–especially me–that I would spend my professional life with Catholics. I grew up in northeastern Vermont—we called it “the Northeast Kingdom.” Although my town was only forty miles or so south of Quebec, and there was undoubtedly a French-Canadian (hence Catholic) presence all around me, I did not meet a Catholic, or at least anyone presenting themselves publicly as such, until my early adult years. My world was hard-core Baptist, fundamentalist-the-Bible-is-the-inerrant-Word-of-God-evangelical-everyone-who-isn’t-like-us-is-going-to-hell Protestant to the core.

I was a preacher’s kid; my Dad was the founder and President of a Bible school, for God’s sake. I knew there were Catholics around—they had a stone church across town that was much more impressive than the community center my church met in. I had no more idea of what went on in that stone church on a weekly basis than the ancient Romans knew about the secret meetings of the early Christians.

But I knew that whatever it was, it wasn’t anything like what was going on in my church, so they were all going to hell. Actually, it seemed that just about everyone other than my nuclear family, my extended family in upstate New York and in western Pennsylvania, and the fifty or so people who came to my church was going to hell. The God I believed in was pretty picky.

Once I met and married Jeanne, a Catholic from the cradle who had grown away from the Catholic Church in her early adult years, I learned a great deal more about Catholicism than I really wanted to know. Down the street from our apartment in Milwaukee where we lived while I was in my doctoral program at Marquette University, was Saint Sebastian’s Catholic Church, where we made friends first with the organist, then the priests. Before long Jeanne was cantor once in a while on Sunday morning, sang the occasional funeral, I subbed a few times on the organ, and I began thinking that this Catholic stuff was kind of cool. I had fallen in love with liturgical worship through being exposed to, then joining, the Episcopal church several years earlier and didn’t really see that much that was different here. The Dean of the cathedral where I was confirmed Episcopalian had said several years earlier that he became a priest because he liked to play “dress up” and called the Episcopal Church “Catholic Lite.”

Saint Sebastian’s, along with the intelligence and earthiness of my Jesuit professors at Marquette University, led me to believe that Catholics were pretty normal after all. I knew that, technically speaking, it was against the rules for a non-Catholic barbarian to receive communion in a Catholic service, but I became used to the Episcopalian attitude that everyone with a pulse is invited to communion. The priests at Saint Sebastian’s made a point of letting me know that I was welcome at communion, even though they knew I am not Catholic.

I had no idea at the time just how “out of the box” this actually was. My first teaching position after graduation from Marquette was at a small Catholic university in Memphis, where I innocently and ignorantly went with my sort-of-Catholic wife to communion on occasion. In truth, my internal resonance with liturgy probably made me more in tune with things Catholic than Jeanne’s years of working past her Catholic upbringing made her, but as the scriptures say, God looks on the heart and we look on outward appearance.

The outward appearance of a known non-Catholic receiving Catholic communion was too much for one of my colleagues to take. Soon I received an anonymous note in my campus mailbox consisting of a Xeroxed page from a local Catholic parish Sunday bulletin which, in pious and sympathetic words, essentially said that “if you are non-Catholic, we don’t want to share our communion with you.” “F–k you, Bob,” I thought in my best non-Catholic language (I knew exactly who had dropped the “anonymous” note in my mailbox). “I don’t want to go to communion if you are there anyways.”

But I learned my lesson. When a couple of years later I was hired at my current Catholic college in Rhode Island and we managed to escape from Memphis, I asked the chair of the department that had just hired me, a Dominican sister, about what would happen if I as a non-Catholic went for communion at the chapel on campus. She replied with what I have come to recognize as a typical response on this matter: “I would have no trouble with it, but there are some on campus who probably would.” Given that those “some” probably included a few of the geezer Dominican priests in my new philosophy department, I decided that discretion was the greater part of valor and chose not to try it out. I never have received communion on campus in twenty-eight years.

And that’s been fine. I’ve even made a point of attending mass once in a while and being one of the handful of people among hundreds not to go to communion. Given that many students are unaware that there are such things as non-Catholic Christians, it’s a good “show-and-tell” and learning moment. But the issue arose once again unexpectedly a decade ago when, while on sabbatical for four months, I found myself at daily prayers several times a day with a bunch of Benedictine monks. During those months I was experiencing a great deal of internal spring cleaning and scouring; my spirit was reviving, and I was discovering inner resources I had been unaware of my whole life. As I gradually awakened to a new perspective, I realized that not sharing communion—something that had been hit or miss with me for years—with these new Benedictine friends was becoming a problem.

One Saturday at dinner I asked one of the older monks, a physicist who had taught at the university attached to the Abbey for decades before his retirement a few years earlier in his middle seventies, what I should do. “Wilfred, I would like to receive communion at the Abbey,” I said, “but I’m not Catholic and I know that it’s against the rules for me to receive. What do you think?” “I’ll tell you what Kilian (an even older monk at the next table) always says,” Wilfred replied. “Our policy is ‘don’t ask, don’t tell.’” “But I just told you.” “And I forgot what you said.”

The next day I queued up to receive communion after several weeks of sitting in the pew while others went to the front. “The body of Christ,” the Abbot said to me with a huge smile as he held the host in front of me. “Welcome.” Over the succeeding years I have returned to the Abbey on many occasions, usually unannounced. Each time after the first morning, noon, or evening prayer I attend, Kilian seeks me out and gives me a big hug. “Welcome home.” That’s exactly how it feels.

In the middle of the sixteenth century, as his French countrymen and women were swept up into the violent storm of the Wars of Religion that followed in the wake of the Protestant Reformation, Michel de Montaigne had a simple observation to make about our ludicrous human pretensions to know the mind of God. As Protestants and Catholics regularly killed each other in the name of orthodoxy and right worship, Montaigne wrote that

Nothing is so firmly believed as whatever we know least about . . . For a Christian it suffices to believe that all things come from God, to accept them with an acknowledgement of His holy unsearchable wisdom and so to take them in good part, under whatever guise they are sent. . . . It is hard to bring matters divine down to human scale without their being trivialized.

Good to remember, every time we get worked up about who may or may not be part of our group or about those who get worked up about such things. I’m reminded of a song I heard many years ago in church, a song with an annoying tune but an important text: “The kingdom of God is not meat and drink, but righteousness, peace, and joy.”

And oh, no meat on Fridays in Lent on campus isn’t that bad after all—it means that the soup of the day in the cafeteria will be New England Clam Chowder. Awesome.

Previous Post

March 6, 2022

It's My 66th Birthday, and I'm Still Here. Deal with it.

Next Post

March 9, 2022 Confessions of a Tree Hugger

Browse Our Archives

Select a Category abortion Advent AI Angels Artificial intelligence atheism attention baptism Baptists beauty belief Benedictines Bible bicycling Big Bird books Bovina Camaldoli hermitage Canada Catholicism cats certainty change Christianity Christmas Collegeville Covid-19 creativity Development of Western Civilization dogs doubt Easter Enneagram Epiphany Episcopal ethics Eucharist evil extroverts Facebook faith family fear flowers forgiveness freedom friends God goodness grace happiness heaven hell history Holy Spirit Holy Week hope human nature humility humor idolatry incarnation introverts irreverence Islam Jeanne Jesus Joe Biden joy Judaism justice Kamala Harris knowledge Lent listen literature liturgy love Marsue Memorial Day miracles movies music mystery mythology NPR Old Testament optimism paradox peace Penguins philosophy piano podcast politics power prayer Protestantism Providence College Religion Rhode Island sabbatical sacrament science seeing silence Simone Weil Socrates soul sports St. John's College stories suffering tattoo teaching technology television theology thinking time tolerance transcendence travel trees trust truth Uncategorized Vermont wisdom wonder writing

Select a Month May 2026 April 2026 March 2026 February 2026 January 2026 December 2025 November 2025 October 2025 September 2025 August 2025 July 2025 June 2025 May 2025 April 2025 March 2025 February 2025 January 2025 December 2024 November 2024 October 2024 September 2024 August 2024 July 2024 June 2024 May 2024 April 2024 March 2024 February 2024 January 2024 December 2023 November 2023 October 2023 September 2023 August 2023 July 2023 June 2023 May 2023 April 2023 March 2023 February 2023 January 2023 December 2022 November 2022 October 2022 September 2022 August 2022 July 2022 June 2022 May 2022 April 2022 March 2022 February 2022 January 2022 December 2021 November 2021 October 2021 September 2021 August 2021 July 2021 June 2021 May 2021 April 2021 March 2021 February 2021 January 2021 December 2020 November 2020 October 2020 September 2020 August 2020 July 2020 June 2020 May 2020 April 2020 March 2020 February 2020 January 2020 December 2019 November 2019 October 2019 September 2019 August 2019 July 2019 June 2019 May 2019 April 2019 March 2019 February 2019 January 2019 December 2018 November 2018 October 2018 September 2018 August 2018 July 2018 June 2018 May 2018 April 2018 March 2018 February 2018 January 2018 December 2017 November 2017 October 2017 September 2017 August 2017 July 2017 June 2017 May 2017 April 2017 March 2017 February 2017 January 2017 December 2016 November 2016 October 2016 September 2016 August 2016 July 2016 June 2016 May 2016 April 2016 March 2016 February 2016 January 2016 December 2015 November 2015 October 2015 September 2015 August 2015 July 2015 June 2015 May 2015 April 2015 March 2015 February 2015 January 2015 December 2014 November 2014 October 2014 September 2014 August 2014 July 2014 June 2014 May 2014 April 2014 March 2014 February 2014 January 2014 December 2013 November 2013 October 2013 September 2013 August 2013 July 2013 June 2013 May 2013 April 2013 March 2013 February 2013 January 2013 December 2012 November 2012 October 2012 September 2012

TAKE THE

Religious Wisdom Quiz