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The Paradox of Richard Rodriguez

SAN FRANCISCO AUTHOR DISCUSSES FAITH, CAREER

By John R. Dunlap

"Minority student--that was the label I bore in college at Stanford, then in graduate school at Columbia and Berkeley: a nonwhite reader of Spenser and Milton and Austen."

It didn't sit well with San Francisco author Richard Rodriguez to be thought of that way. At Berkeley in 1976, with several job offers in hand from the Ivy Leagues, Rodriguez put an early end to his budding academic career by walking away from it.

His opposition to affirmative action had taken shape amid feelings of revulsion against "the decadent romanticism of the sixties" and the subsequent "careerism of the seventies." There was the obvious unease caused by his acquaintance with white graduate students "who hadn't received a single job offer," but Rodriguez had already taken public issue with affirmative action programs that benefitted middle-class Hispanics like himself while doing nothing for the poorly schooled underclasses of all races.

Out in the world after leaving academia, Rodriguez worked for an ad agency in Los Angeles and "began to exercise myself as a writer" by doing reviews and op-ed pieces for the Los Angeles Times. Settling in San Francisco, his birthplace, in 1979, he continued working gradually ("I am a very slow writer") on what would become Hunger of Memory (1982), the intellectual autobiography that made him famous. "It was something quite unexpected," Rodriguez recalls. "I'm not sure how I connect to it anymore--I get e-mail every day from all over the world about that book."

His autobiography launched Rodriguez, at age 38, on a career that he had never specifically intended: magazine and newspaper journalism, lecture tours, television commentary. "I work with words every day, either the written word or the spoken word." A wide-ranging collection of his essays, Days of Obligation, was published in 1992, and he is finishing a third book "about how I see America turning brown."

Although his topics on lecture tours are usually affirmative action and bilingual education (he is against both, and still attracts angry protestors when he speaks), a more recent topic has been Hispanicity in America, and "I do get invited by religious groups--more often non-Catholic than Catholic...and I talk about Catholicism in those contexts."

In Hunger of Memory, Rodriguez recalls with a mix of warmth and regret his Catholic upbringing in Sacramento and his perception of the sudden changes that came in the aftermath of Vatican II. Educated by the Sisters of Mercy in grade school and by the Christian Brothers in high school, he "grew to the assurance that my life, my every action and thought, was important for good or for bad." Even in his secular college years, a time of spiritual drift, he remained "grateful to the Church that took me so seriously and exposed me so early, through the liturgy, to the experience of life."

Rodriguez is sharply critical of the new liturgy in Hunger of Memory: "The informal touches; the handshaking; the folk music; the insistence upon union--all these changes are aimed at serving Catholics who no longer live in a Catholic world." Even a small detail like "we believe" in place of credo ("I believe") communicates a nervous assurance of community among Catholics who have lost their distinctive sense of community: "The lack of high ceremony...betrays a loss of faith in communal Catholicism."

And a "diminishment of the priesthood," Rodriguez now adds. "The auditing of the priest's credo [in the old liturgy] was an important event that both united and separated us from the priest--he incorporated the entire voice of the community with that single assertion of I believe, and the insistence now of the entire community having to say we believe...has also diminished the possibility of the paradox so deeply evident in the first person singular"--the shared aloneness before God.

"The notion that we're dealing with is a translation--what apologists [for the new liturgy] call vernacular--this is not just 'vernacular'; this is a quite new and a much less interesting theology."

Asked for his sense of the Catholic generation now coming of age with no experience of the older liturgy, Rodriguez allows that his nephews and nieces are "almost totally illiterate about the Church and vague about the liturgy." But he thinks the more important question concerns "the failure of their parents." What happened to the generation that came of age about the time of Vatican II or shortly before--Rodriguez's generation?

"The brilliance of our [Catholic school] education Americanized us in a way that would force us to reject the very education that created us." Looking back "from the distance of the modern secular city, we, the very products of that [Catholic] education, ended up scorning it, mocking it--we couldn't accommodate that memory to the people we had become. What we didn't recognize was that the people we had become was exactly the result of that [Catholic school] system we were now mocking--we were oblivious to the paradox of our creation."

Rodriguez admits that his own life's journey so far may have connected him too intimately to the secular city. "By choice," he writes in Hunger of Memory, "...I have come to embrace the city's values: social mobility; pluralism; egalitarianism; self-reliance." In "Late Victorians," an essay published in the October 1990 issue of Harper's and collected later in Days of Obligation, Rodriguez disturbed and puzzled many friends with the passing revelation that he is a homosexual.

He also infuriated homosexual activists, sparking organized protests and threats against Harper's for publishing the piece. Written in Rodriguez's distinctive voice, a kind of lyrical detachment, the essay frankly wonders about the homosexual's retirement into "the small effect, the ineffectual career, the stereotype, the card shop, the florist."

Although he insists that he is not "conflicted" by his homosexuality ("it is part of my being...it informs the way I write a sentence, it colors everything"), Rodriguez concedes he is "haunted" by the possibility that the condition may truly be disordered in some way. "The so-called gay culture is enormously disturbing to me in its materialism, in its fecklessness, in its adolescence--but I do find (maybe I'm fooling myself about myself), I have found homosexual men and women who seem to me as sober and as mature and as spiritually interesting as any heterosexual people I know."

What does he think about the apparent homosexual subculture within the Catholic priesthood? "I'm horrified by it. I find it unmanly in many cases--it is more freakish, more garish than I would choose. I don't find it sober enough. I don't know what to make of it exactly--I think it's a neurosis."

Other troubles in the Church are equally disturbing to Rodriguez: the permeation of many convents by the "feminist culture"; the dissolution of Catholic identity at many historically Catholic schools and colleges; the intense pressures on a clergy struggling to survive "without the support of the community."

Although broadly sympathetic with current efforts to recover the Church's orthodoxy, Rodriguez thinks the efforts are clumsy-- "intelligent enough, but not smart, not stylish." He believes that the Catholic left has lost its moorings, but the Catholic right seems "in love with its own premonition of its passing; it doesn't take the secular culture on with enough humor, it doesn't laugh it off the stage."

"One of the things you and I should hold ourselves accountable for is our performance as public Catholics--we need to seduce the world, we need to represent the Church in places that are not churchly--and I'm not sure that Catholics are prepared to do that right now."

Among the paradoxes of being Catholic, Rodriguez believes, is that the Church cannot give more joy unless she rediscovers the deeper lessons of Good Friday: "I think we have to restate a theology of suffering that makes sense to a culture that's as preoccupied with pleasure as this one is."

The "she" is important: "that feminine feature of Catholicism," as insistent as Mother Teresa, "severe in her faith, in her scoldings."

"When I hear some people say that they are no longer Catholic, it makes no sense to me. You can't be 'no longer Catholic'-- Catholicism doesn't let you go. There's this feminine impulse within the Church--she takes you, regardless."

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