A Graced and Authentic Place

Being Catholic among Quakers

Not long ago, I needed to sneak out of a Quaker meeting early and, I hoped, unnoticed. Just as I slipped out the front door, I ran into somebody trying to sneak in late. Since I’d heard him speak during meetings, I knew he was a retired college professor, passionate about social justice. He had the look of a prophet: large and tall, a booming voice, and a long, unkempt white beard.

As we shared our moment of mutual embarrassment, he looked at me intently and asked a question that felt as startling as it was direct: “Are you a Quaker?” he wanted to know.

It seemed a question that resisted a simple yes or no response, so I thought for a second before answering: “I’m really not a joiner,” I said, “but I guess I’m a Quaker as much as I’m anything.” With that, he stepped into the meetinghouse, and I escaped to my car.

The columnist David Brooks once described himself as a religious amphibian, with one foot in Judaism and the other in Christianity. I could describe myself like that too, with one foot in Catholicism and the other in Quakerism. When I’m with Catholics, I sometimes think of myself as a Catholic Quaker; with Quakers, a Quaker Catholic.

I’d like to share how I got involved in both religious traditions, and then contrast my experience straddling these two contrasting religious and spiritual traditions. Actually, it’s a story about how opposites really do attract.

My Catholic identity was a cultural given, a nonnegotiable part of my Irish heritage. My parents grew up in heavily Irish Catholic neighborhoods in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in the 1930s and ’40s, when Catholic culture was particularly stouthearted and sure-footed. As I got older, I personally embraced Catholicism because it met my inborn hunger for religious rituals and sacraments: community events that mark and celebrate many of life’s significant transitions.

Philadelphia is not just my hometown; it’s also a hometown of sorts for American Quakers, a religious path that has always fascinated me, particularly its devotion to silence, living in and for peace, nonviolence, and social justice. Ironically, what draws me to Quakerism seems just the opposite of what keeps my Catholic roots alive.

I attended my first Quaker meeting 40 years ago in Cambridge, Massachusetts. If I remember correctly, it took place in a large, white-walled room with mauve padded benches that faced each other rather than facing forward, the custom in Catholic churches.

I left the meeting resolved to attend another. And I did. It just took 30 years.

I was then living in Saint Paul, Minnesota, and drove past the Twin Cities Friends meetinghouse every day. Finally, an irksome interior nagging told me it was time for my second meeting. I showed up the next Sunday, hoping, as is my style, to enter and exit unnoticed. But just the opposite happened.

At the worship’s end, I was asked to introduce myself and say whether I had attended a Quaker meeting before. I stood and told the assembled Friends about the meeting in Cambridge 30 years before and my resolve to attend another Quaker meeting. “But I didn’t want to rush into it,” I added. Polite yet restrained laughter followed.

I attended meetings in Saint Paul for the next eight years, and in keeping with my observational temperament, I never once considered membership—something I’ll return to later. I became even more involved in Quaker life and practice after I wound up, either by chance or grace, serving in interim leadership positions at Friends schools in Minnesota, North Carolina, and Indiana. These positions helped me learn how to navigate the strengths and limitations of Quaker process, particularly in organizations like schools that, unlike meetings, are inherently hierarchical.

When I attend meetings, I find solace and consolation just being with people content to sit together in silence—a silence completed in peacemaking, compassion, and heroic stands on social justice issues. 

I’ve already explained what keeps me rooted in Catholicism, but here are two dilemmas I face with Catholicism: internal predicaments that I’m trying hard to learn how to manage well. Over the years, these dilemmas have inched me closer to Quakerism and turned me into a Catholic “attender” rather than a card-carrying member. I’m not complaining or badmouthing the Catholic Church; I learned years ago to accept it on its own terms. But as it turns out, my dilemmas have less to do with the Christian heart of Catholicism and more to do with how Catholicism has historically come to be practiced.

First, I struggle with the way worship often happens in too many Catholic churches I’ve attended. Second, I struggle against official Catholic stands on various issues of personal morality, particularly sexual issues.

Many Catholic worship services (Masses) seem to have a grudge against silence. An opportunity for silent prayer or reflection will emerge, and right then a song is intoned that, at least for me, eclipses opportunities for silence and reflection. Since Catholicism is a heavily liturgical and sacramental church, many Catholics think singing is filler rather than prayer: certainly different from the practice in most mainline Protestant denominations. I’m not the only one who feels this way; there’s also a second edition of a book that continues to get attention since the original came out over 30 years ago entitled Why Catholics Can’t Sing.

While there is a prescribed silence at the end of the communion service in the Mass, it’s often short-lived, and many priests seem anxious to get past it quickly and get busy doing things again. Just the other day, a friend told me that at the end of most Sunday Masses, he feels, at least metaphorically, out of breath. That’s why I often seek out monasteries for Mass: places that comfortably and unhurriedly live and pray in the complementary back and forth between silence and speech, contemplation and action.

While I identify with more progressive Catholic theology and practice, calls for changes in worship today are coming from more traditional quarters. Grassroots “restorationist” movements in the Catholic Church are growing quickly. Among other things, they desperately want the church to return to the Traditional Latin Mass (TLM) that was in place before the sweeping liturgical changes the Second Vatican Council initiated in the 1960s.

It’s worth noting that the TLM seems particularly attractive to younger Catholics, many of whom favor a more traditional and even literal interpretation of Scripture and Catholic doctrine.  Independent of age and doctrine, however, all TLM groups militantly advocate for more silence and reverence in worship, arguing that Vatican II rudely stripped Catholic worship of its reverence and sense of mystery.

I fail to see the TLM movement, however, as a genuine path to renewal: returning to the past is rarely a trustworthy path into the future. Pope Francis has also recently acted to limit the availability of the TLM because he fears it will, for all practical purposes, create two competing churches: one progressive and the other traditionalist. I’m afraid these Catholic liturgical skirmishes will grow even more strident in the future, and I also know I have little interest and even less patience with these kinds of intramural issues.

On the other hand, I deeply admire the official church’s stand on many issues of social morality, particularly war and peace, violence, human trafficking, and immigration. In the 1980s, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops published well-reasoned, progressive letters on war and peace in a nuclear age and on economic justice during a period of widening wealth inequality. And today, Pope Francis continues to plead with everyone—not just Catholics—to take more seriously the ethical challenges of climate change.

But when it comes to sexual ethics, the church’s positions too often strike me as philosophically and theologically antique, lacking contemporary scientific and psychological nuance and sophistication. By way of example, let’s look at how LGBTQA+ people do and, more to the point, don’t find the official Catholic Church today a welcoming place.

As a gay man, I know firsthand how the Catholic Church can be an unfriendly place for LGBTQA+ folks. For instance, official church documents from the 1990s describe homosexual acts as “intrinsically disordered,” expecting those who experience what’s described as “same-sex attraction” to live lives of heroic celibacy, if they want to be part of the church in good faith.

Once more, I appreciate Pope Francis’s call for open dialogue rather than bitter debate about homosexuality, yet I see little change on the horizon. Sexual activity by LGBTQA+ people, in addition to being labeled “intrinsically disordered,” is seen as a choice for sin and deviancy rather than an opportunity for love, commitment, and grace. It’s for that reason the church and traditional Catholics talk about “same-sex attraction” as something to be resisted rather than admitting that constitutive homosexuality even exists.

When I lived in Minnesota, I used to attend Mass on Friday mornings at a large suburban church served by a religious order of priests who, in addition to daily Mass, gathered three times each day to pray the psalms together. I often recited psalms with them before Mass in a small chapel located in the rear of the church. When it was time for Mass, everybody moved into the nave of the church, sitting together in pews right up front. But I usually took a seat by myself, off to the side in a pew close to the back of the church. One of the priests once approached me and asked whether I wouldn’t feel more comfortable coming closer, sitting with everybody else. I told him I was exactly where I belonged, because, I explained, “As a gay man I’m sitting in the shadows, out of sight, where the official church wants me to stay.”

Sadly, yet altogether understandably, many LGBTQA+ folks want nothing to do with the Catholic Church. While I can understand their point of view, I choose to keep one foot in Catholicism, even if it feels like I’m dragging it most of the time.

Many people I know see my selective practice of Catholicism as nothing more than disguised passive-aggressive behavior directed toward an organization that doesn’t deserve my attention at all. While I can’t dismiss this possibility, I still refuse to be frozen out of or just walk away from a church that, despite all of its all-too-human shortcomings, I still love.

Quakers typically give religiously fluid people plenty of space to explore serious questions of religious and spiritual identity in communities whose members are themselves free enough to keep exploring, growing, discerning, and even revising their spiritual assumptions. 

When I reflect on my experience with Quakers, it’s typically just the opposite of my Catholic experience. Most Quaker meetings that I know encourage people to bring their whole selves to worship and community, choosing to see difference as enriching rather than threatening. When I attend meetings, I find solace and consolation just being with people content to sit together in silence—a silence completed in peacemaking, compassion, and heroic stands on social justice issues.

The Quakers, unlike the Catholic church, also have processes in place to encourage ongoing dialogue and discernment that, given ample time, usually move individuals and communities to good-faith conclusions. All of the Friends schools I’ve served had effective conflict resolution processes in place to help students learn how to resolve differences with words rather than violence. In any kind of open dialogue or serious discernment, not everyone will get their way, but healing often happens when people just feel heard rather than marginalized from the start.

The Catholic Church, however, has few effective processes to solicit feedback from and involve lay people rather than only priests and bishops in actual decision making. Pope Francis’s emphasis on “synodality” is an attempt to consult widely to make sure all voices are heard and respected. Unfortunately, synodality is in its infancy, with many traditional Catholics, both lay and clerical, opposed to it both in concept and practice.

Before I conclude, I’d like to suggest that the notion of being a religious amphibian seems out of date. Every day, it seems, we’re bombarded with studies and surveys with hard data showing steep declines in church attendance and membership. I’m also sure most of us know people who say they are “spiritual but not religious,” or who were raised in one tradition, but now participate in another.

In today’s velocity-obsessed and institutionally allergic culture, spiritual seekers and church attenders don’t hesitate to try out a wide range of religious and spiritual traditions and practices from both Eastern and Western sources. Seekers can also easily migrate from tradition to tradition to find what they want, which may or may not be what they really need. That’s why I’ve come to describe seekers as religiously “fluid” rather than amphibian.

Few seekers and spiritual-but-not-religious folks attend services regularly or become church members. Trying to grow spiritually without a community of support and accountability can prove to be a lonely and even isolating experience. The saving grace is that Quakers typically give religiously fluid people plenty of space to explore serious questions of religious and spiritual identity in communities whose members are themselves free enough to keep exploring, growing, discerning, and even revising their spiritual assumptions.

It’s probably my observational temperament that keeps me attending rather than joining. But at least for now, that seems a graced and authentic place for me to be, both religiously and spiritually.