The usual “religious crisis” came during my freshman year at Kent State. I had continued to attend mass at St. Patrick’s, the local parish on North Depeyster Street. This was also the gathering place for the KSU Newman Center, although special events were held on campus in the Student Union building. The Newman Center was the focus for Catholic college students, not only here but at practically every secular, academic institution in the country. Although the Centers now include every part of the spectrum for Catholic education, in the ‘50’s the emphasis was on social activities for young adults, a continuation of the CYO events of high school. Here young Catholics found fellow Catholics for dates, especially if they did not stay in either a fraternity house or an on-campus residence hall. At the beginning of the year, I went to Newman with guys from Stopher as often as I could.
I believe the name of the Newman chaplain was Father Dom. I wished he were more like Saint Dominic, although, at the time, I knew very little about either the saint or his followers. Advanced instruction in the faith was minimal. There were few, if any, discussion groups or ways to learn more about what it meant to be a Catholic in the years following the Second World War and the Korean conflict.
I had questions. Fr. Dom did not provide answers. Whenever there was an occasion for a religious discussion or Q&A, he had only one, standard response to all of the questions I attempted to raise. His answer: “Well, you have to believe that if you want to be a Catholic.” It was not until years later, after I had entered into my own, personal study, that I realized all of the questions I had raised had been answered a thousand years previously by the brothers of Saint Dominic, scholars like Thomas Aquinas, to say nothing of Augustine who had come nine centuries earlier. There were few modern questions that had not been addressed by the Church throughout its 2000 years of history, but the answers to them were avoided in order to accommodate the major problem, the “heresy of modernism,” which had prevailed in academe prior to Vatican II.
And so, as my freshman year progressed, I began to drift away from the formal Church. If some friends wanted to attend mass and the time was not inconvenient for me, I’d go to St Patrick’s. But as the college years passed, I became a lapsed Catholic.
At the same time, I did remain a cultural Catholic. Christmas and Easter continued to have religious meanings. If asked, I would respond that I was a Roman Catholic. I did not attend services offered by any of the many Protestant denominations or fellowships found at Kent State, even though I was invited to do so by friends who continued to be active participants in them.
My sense of morality continued to exist in a Roman Catholic mode. It would be difficult, however, to distinguish what was Catholic and what was merely a conservative-American sense of how a college student really should behave, one that was not necessarily consistent with the fictionalized view of what they did. Hooking-up, binge-drinking, engaging in deviant sexual-behaviors and using opiate drugs were still in the distant future. Even marijuana and LSD had to wait until the late 60’s to be part of the college scene. The Silent Generation was well underway during my years at Kent State.
The positive result of being a lapsed Catholic of the fifties, if it can be seen as positive, is that I was able in 1958 to marry in the Congregational Church and be “excommunicated.” My return to being a practicing Catholic awaits another time period in my life.