Catholics and Protestants

A short post on something I’m trying to think through. One of my categories to understand Lafferty is the oceanic, that place where the undermind of all humanity comes together, his version of the Jungian collective unconscious. Lafferty was remarkably open to radical soteriology, something I am still trying to understand, though it makes sense for someone so interested in the history of the world. He was intensely interested in the history of peoples, yet he was also, as he said, an old-fashioned Roman Catholic. If it all comes together, it comes together in his collective view of what washes through all of us, the oceanic.

One of the major changes in Catholicism after Vatican II is what is usually called a reorientation to the theology of religions: how much Catholicism can learn from other faiths, how much lies outside the deposit of faith that can be taken up in the future development of doctrine, how Catholicism can rethink extra ecclesiam nulla salus, and how salvation relates to the lived reality of other religions. I don't see much radical exploration here in Lafferty. Closer to home for him is the question that post-Vatican II Catholics sometimes talk about in terms of “our separated brothers and sisters.” What did Lafferty think about Protestantism? He clearly had great religious respect for certain Protestants. One thinks of his saying how disordered he often was as a man as well as his recognition of Clifford D. Simak's faith.

From Lafferty's correspondence and his fiction, a few points stand out. He casts Protestants—especially those he calls WASPs—as culturally and intellectually alien to his Catholic identity. Writing about his time in the U.S. Army, he notes that his sense of kinship was defined more by shared liturgy than by a shared passport:

It came to me one night that I was much nearer in mind and understanding and everything to the Tagalog-speaking Catholics around me (by that time I could talk Tagalog pretty well) than to the mostly WASP Protestants that I lived with. These WASPs have always been sort of alien to me in a way that Mexicans are not, that Italians are not.

For him, shared Catholic faith created a bond stronger than national, cultural, or linguistic closeness. This shows up most clearly in the Coscusin work when taken as a complete set of novels, where he writes across large political and religious geographies, offering his historical vision of the prehistory of the 20th century, but it also appears in the short fiction.

That said, he has a harsh view of religious loss, and he draws a contrast along confessional lines. Lapsed Catholics, he says, tend toward agnosticism or a kind of “indifferentism.” Protestants who lose their religion, by contrast, tend to become mild humanists, spiritual milquetoasts.

Catholics, for instance, when they lose their religion, usually become agnostics, or indifferent-ists. Protestants usually become the milder sort of humanists. But the Atheists hardly ever return to their original belief, and others very often do.

They go limp. I take this to imply that he saw the Protestant habit of mind as especially vulnerable to his own bête noire, secular humanism.

At the same time, Lafferty is unfailingly irenic. He gave a Catholic correspondent the following advice: be friendly and neighborly toward other denominations, Anglicans, for example, while warning against obtaining spiritual instruction from them:

If the rectory and the priest next door to you is Roman you might as well get some instruction on the Most Important Subject in the World. If on the other hand he's some variety of Anglican, be friendly and neighborly but do not look to him for instruction.

Lafferty is blunt about Protestant commentary on Vatican II, which he thinks misses the necessary Catholic and papal perspective, but he can also show real intellectual respect for particular figures. One example is the Lutheran scholar Jaroslav Pelikan, whom Lafferty admired as one of the few non-Catholics capable of offering meaningful commentary on the Church’s documents:

Most of the other commentators were Protestant Clergyman. But the only one who seemed to understand that there might be a Catholic and Papal commentary to make on the Documents was the Lutheran Jaroslav J. Pelikan.

To Lafferty's credit, his views in these areas show that he was not as old-fashioned as he would have us believe.