He felt at home, compatible, with things that had specific answers, bottom lines, absolutes. He didn’t admit it to anyone, but he liked addresses. When he worked as a carrier, all he had to do was line up envelopes in numerical order, find the house with the matching number, and the job was done. Stamps were comforting too. One had either sufficient or insufficient postage. And the good old scale would provide that answer. Sufficient and one put it on its way to delivery; insufficient and one returned it.
It was that philosophical attitude which disenchanted Carson with regard to the Episcopal Church-all of Protestantism, for that matter, revealed by his investigation: Too many questions did not have absolute answers.
For instance: Could one be married more than once, more than twice, in the Episcopal Church? It depended.
Then, in I960, at age twenty, he had stumbled onto Catholicism. Catholicism was crammed with absolutes and comfortable numbers. One God, two natures, three persons, four purposes of prayer, five processions in the Trinity, seven sacraments, nine first Fridays, ten Commandments, twelve promises, fourteen Stations of the Cross, and so forth.
Could one marry more than once in the Catholic Church? Of course not. Not unless the petitioner could prove to scrupulous curiosity that a previous marriage was so null and void that it had never happened-or unless one’s spouse died.
Carson searched and studied and investigated and questioned until he thought he had found heaven without benefit of death.
Home! Home was the compulsive, home from insecurity.
Then what to his wondering soul should occur but Vatican II. He couldn’t believe it: They had a perfect system and they fixed it.
Carson didn’t take it lying down. He studied the new monster to the best of his limited ability.
Maybe Martin Luther was right! Maybe “Father Martin,” as he was respectfully treated by the hated new breed, was a saint! What happened to the ordinary magisterium? What happened to actions and thoughts that were evil to their very core? What the hell was situation ethics? What in hell was liberation theology? What happened to the enveloping, mesmerizing Latin? When did nuns start wearing miniskirts? Where did the priest’s lifetime commitment go? What happened to all the goddam absolutes?
Carson had found heaven on earth, and as a result of a four-or five-year meeting in Rome it had been demolished.
Arnold Carson was not amused.
Indeed, he was fighting angry.
He could have taken several tacks. He could quit Catholicism by a simple act of will. Or he could join one of the organizations spawned by and because of Vatican II, organizations for conservatives upset by the council and determined to, in effect, save the Church from itself.
There was Catholics United for the Faith (CUF). Most of the members of this organization were reasonable people, though vigilant and active. They actually pretty much played by the rules set up by the hierarchy.
One program the Catholic Church has wrestled with for the past slightly more than one hundred years is what to do with an infallible Pope when he’s not being infallible. Which is most of the time. Infallibility was defined and adopted (some would say rigged) by the First Vatican Council in 1870. Since then, arguably, there has been only one infallible pronouncement, and that was Pius XII’s regarding Mary’s Assumption into heaven.
All the other thousands of pronouncements by Popes and Popes-with-bishops fall into the category of the ordinary magisterium, or ordinary teaching office of the Church. What to do with that?
Liberal Catholics tend to regard papal pronouncements as being extremely important messages from a unique and well informed source. Only for a most serious reason would such a Catholic eventually disagree with the Pope. But such disagreement is possible.
Not so in the eyes of CUF, or, for that matter, Church law. In effect, if a Catholic disagrees with the ordinary magisterium, he’s not excommunicated; he’s just wrong. And he is advised to go away and pray a while until he sees the light.
Arnold Carson gave CUF a shot and found it inadequate. All very well to write letters to newspapers, call radio talk shows, and argue at meetings. But Carson found such comparative inaction frustrating. He had always believed one had to hit something to get its attention.
So Carson joined the Tridentine Society, so-named for the Latin word for Trent, as in the Council of Trent, Catholicism’s legislative response to the Reformation. Trent (A.D. 1545–1563) was the precursor to Vatican I.
The Tridentines were so much in sync with Carson’s makeup that in no time he became their leader. Under him they became, though small, yet, as they say in sports parlance, a force to be reckoned with.
Arnie Carson was not the type of general to position himself at the rear of the troops and send orders to the front. He was always in the vanguard-as he had been this evening at the funeral home.
On short notice, only Carson and his two most faithful lieutenants, Dwight Morgan and Angelo Luca, were able to assemble less than peaceably outside the Ubly Funeral Home, wherein Helen Donovan’s wake was to be held.
The Tridentines had carried hastily and crudely made signs communicating the general theme that the archdiocese of Detroit equated whores and nuns. And that Cardinal Boyle’s message to his flock was to “Live it up and whore.”
They had done their very best to be obnoxious to the clergy and religious, who tried without much success to ignore them. Father Cletus Bash had phoned his civic counterpart, the spokesman for Maynard Cobb, mayor of Detroit. That intercession had attracted several blue-and-white police cars whose officers had orders to find some lawful way of moving the troublemakers out.
Thus when the small contingent of hookers arrived and gave as good as they got, the Tridentines-mainly Carson-transformed picketing to a contact sport, in which the police joined. The result: Morgan and Luca heeded the police invitation to “Drag ass outta here!” Carson chose to challenge the order and thus capped the evening in Detroit Memorial Hospital with a banged-up cheek and a cut lip.
Carson had been stitched up and left in the cubicle for a while to make certain there were no unforeseen complications. He now sat on the gurney, feet dangling over the side, as his companions offered moral support.
Carson moved gingerly, stretching his legs to touch the floor.
“Maybe you shouldn’t be getting off the bed so soon, Arnie,” Morgan said.
“Yeah, there’s no hurry; why don’t you wait a while?” Luca agreed.
Carson slid back onto the gurney. “Maybe I will wait just a couple more minutes or so. You know, if I get a concussion or something like that, I will sue. Did you get the badge number of that cop that hit me with his nightstick?”
“Geez, no, Arnie,” Morgan said. “I couldn’t get close to him. The other cops were holding me down.”
Actually, Morgan and Luca had obeyed promptly each and every police order and thus had been nowhere near Carson, who had conducted a doomed offensive against a superior force.
“It’s okay,” Carson said. “I remember the creep. I could identify him if I have to. And if I end up with any kind of serious injury, you can bet I will.”
“You were great, Arnie,” Luca said.
“We did okay. The big thing is you can’t let these people get away with stuff like this.”
“Yeah,” Luca agreed. “They say-and of course it wasn’t in the obituary-that this hooker hadn’t been to church in ages. No way she should get a Church burial. She’s just an unrepentant whore who is roasting in hell now. But her sister’s a nun. And a big shot in the diocese. So all the rules be damned; the whore gets a Church burial.”
“By a bishop, on top of everything else,” Morgan added.
Carson started to shake his head. Then he thought better of further scrambling his facial wounds, and gently massaged his temples instead. “Yeah, a bishop!” He almost spat the word. “A retired old geezer who should be dead already. Instead, he finds a comfortable home in Detroit.”