Little Electric Chairs

” If Jesus had been killed twenty years ago, Catholic school children would be wearing little electric chairs around their necks instead of crosses” -Lenny Bruce

Just today, a friend of mine made a wisecrack about the pitfalls of a , ” Catholic Education.” As a veteran of the catholic education environment- including a few years in the seminary- I felt the sting. Most of my fellow students are no longer practicing catholics but a significant number ARE, all the way to deacons and knights of Columbus. This divide between the “fallen aways and the fallen-ins is a comment on the nature of the education itself.

The gold standard of the education is scholarship… my high school teachers were all PHDs with a life-long dedication to scholarship and the life of the mind. Some were guest lecturers at prestigious universities and others were authors of many books. They had the intellectual hardware, to be sure. A the same time, the education was doctrinaire in the extreme. As one of my fellow students cleverly opined, ” they taught you to think and then got pissed off when you did it.” Curious.

Jesus – an iconoclastic, Jewish hippy – always defaulted to the progressive, visionary, and altruistic interpretation but the Catholic educators I knew wanted none of that. The premium was on the approved, company line. I guess the goal was not to be happy in this life but to be a strict follower of the rules, a partner in a complex contract with the God of Israel. If you met all the performance standards in the convoluted agreement you would see the big pay day we call heaven.

They wanted to make saints.

We sat in interminable, proctored study halls memorizing Cicero, Horace and Ovid. We actually had a formal class in Gregorian chant. We were being formed into razor sharp soldiers of Christ… an idea that Christ himself would find abhorrent. It soon became clear that we were being groomed to fill a role in one of the world’s largest political organizations. We forgot that Jesus was an outlaw and an intellectual radical and tried to create sturdy little Roman lads that would tame the provinces of the Empire.

But I have to admit that I loved the pace and the rewards of cloistered scholarship. Spending an afternoon on a sunny day with a challenging story or argument is a pleasure, even now. There are so many conflicting things in this education… first, I believe that play is by far the best way to learn anything not a crack on the knuckles from some penguin who is a bride of Christ. I suspect that Jesus would think the whole “bride of Christ’ thing is a bit smarmy too.

I guess the short answer regarding a “Catholic Education” is that the whole experience is a mares nest of contradictions…some aspects are wonderful. others not so much. Remember Satan was once an angel of the highest order. Yes I know the orders for Seraphim through Cherubim, Thrones, Dominions and Virtues. Powers. Pricipalities and archangels are in there too.

Last but Not least are the Guardian angels and my Guardian Angel is skepticism

I would not recommend a Catholic education…and I wouldn’t miss it either.