Unforgettable Fire

Two decades ago, the editor and intellectual historian Paul Elie wrote The Life You Save May Be Your Own, a critical biography of four questioning Catholic writers that put the shoe thrillingly on the other foot. The social worker Dorothy Day, the fiction writers Flannery O’Connor and Walker Percy, the literary monk Thomas Merton—these were the courageous skeptics, the renegades, the living counterculture of the American Century. It was the striving, thriving country of the 1940s and ’50s—usually lionized back then as the Greatest Generation—that was judged for its superstitions and found wanting.

In The Last Supper: Art, Faith, Sex, and Controversy in the 1980s, Elie attempts a similar feat with a newer group of writers and artists. He is convinced that we are living amidst a paradox that first became evident about forty years ago. Ours is “an age in which religious belief seems to be at once in steep decline and surging out of bounds.” Two very different narratives crowd Elie’s book: One describes a diffident, “crypto-religious” artistic style that emerged among religious (mostly Catholic) painters, photographers, musicians, and writers in the 1980s. That is the surging part. The second describes the Catholic Church’s confrontation with two sexual crises of the decade: the rapid spread among homosexuals of AIDS—new, deadly, and incurable—and the revelations of priestly abuse beginning to emerge from the Catholic Church. That is the declining part.

“Crypto-religious” is how the post-war Polish poet Czesław Miłosz described himself to Merton in 1959, in a correspondence that was a highlight of Elie’s first book. Anti-communist Poles were rallying to the Church, but Miłosz demurred. He presented himself as Catholic in private but repudiated the label of “Catholic poet” in public. “I have always been crypto-religious and in conflict with the political aspect of Polish Catholicism,” he wrote Merton. And elsewhere: “This problem—how much we should say openly—is always present in my thoughts.” Intriguing, but what does “crypto-religious” describe? Writerly independence or pusillanimous evasion? Elie admires the word but makes only a half-hearted effort to define it. “Crypto-religious art,” he writes,

is work that incorporates religious words and images and motifs but expresses something other than conventional belief. It’s work that raises the question of what the person who made it believes, so that the question of what it means to believe is crucial to the work’s effect: as you see it, hear it, read it, listen to it, you wind up reflecting on your own beliefs.

This definition will strike certain sensibilities as a roundabout way of saying, “all art.” Since crypto-religiosity is the concept driving this book, it is a major flaw that at no point in its almost five hundred pages does Elie ever sharpen it. He is nonetheless convinced that it tells us something specific about the 1980s. Perhaps it does.

Though the book flits among dozens of artists, there are a handful by whom Elie is particularly fascinated. Andy Warhol, raised a Ruthenian Catholic in Pittsburgh, was a lifetime churchgoer—although one could argue over the verb “go.” According to his biographer Blake Gopnik, Warhol mostly visited churches, for habitual or aesthetic reasons, and avoided them during Mass. Elie draws on Warhol’s diaries to show that he did pray there, and helped at Thanksgiving food banks. We meet him in the late Eighties, working without stint on a series of irreverent paintings for a Milan exhibit linked to Leonardo’s Last Supper. It would be his last major work before he died at fifty-eight during a gallbladder operation. Another Elie favorite is the Canadian songwriter Leonard Cohen, Jewish by background but drawn to Christian themes in his music, on the verge of writing his anthem “Hallelujah.” There is the Irish rock band U2, a group of young men shaped by a charismatic Christian fellowship called Shalom and earlier inclined to give up their music-making for their faith. They are at the point of transitioning into stadium rock and social activism, with a vaguely religious undertone. (“I still haven’t found what I’m looking for” might stand as the archetypal crypto-religious lyric.) And there are the Neville Brothers of New Orleans, four siblings long separated by drugs, prison, and penury, suffering on the streets and sobering up through Marian devotion, and on the verge of coming together as a family band for the first time in their lives.

But there are dozens more: novelists such as Louise Erdrich (prophetess of priestly sex abuse), William Kennedy (who “had grown up hearing Irish Catholic men tell their stories”), and Toni Morrison (who “had once embraced religion with the ardor of a convert”). There are rock stars: Patti Smith, who prays ardently for her dying friends even as she blasphemes in her songs (“Jesus died for somebody’s sins but not mine . . .”). Sinéad O’Connor, who is constantly reciting the ninetieth Psalm but rips up a photograph of Pope John Paul II on Saturday Night Live. The Smiths, who are taken for archetypal Mancunians but are actually all of them faith-haunted Irish Catholics of immigrant parentage. There are visual artists at the edge of the downtown gay scene: the forty-two-year-old photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, who, having compiled the vast catalogue of homoerotic portraits that will in a few months turn him into a national symbol of obscenity and degradation (though he will be dead of AIDS by then), must explain to his incredulous Catholic parents and siblings that he is gay. The painter Keith Haring, a pious Pennsylvanian who became the world’s favorite poster artist before expiring of AIDS himself in 1990, aged thirty-one. His work, full of crosses and angels, Elie tells us, “is crypto-religious precisely because it is unstable in its significance.”

Like Tolstoy’s unhappy families, each crypto-religious singer or painter or writer is crypto-religious in his own way. Some are awakening to religion, some have grown out of it, some are quite religious but trying not to frighten their fan base or their producers, and some are just playing with religious symbols to get attention. Elie loves all the art of the period, particularly the rock music. If you happen to be of his generation, his book will offer you a trip back to an era when young people waged passionate arguments about the nature and destiny of rock and roll, as disputatious a genre war as the one New York literary critics had fought decades earlier over the Death of the Novel. There are a lot of fun facts here: Bruce Springsteen read Flannery O’Connor. Tom Waits’s wife is Irish Catholic. And there is lots of fanzine-level rock criticism: “Funk,” Elie writes of a Neville Brothers album, “gets things rolling: ‘Fiyo on the Bayou’ and ‘Sweet Honey Dripper,’ two end-of-the-seventies throwdowns to establish that the Nevilles can pump a groove as deep as Parliament and Earth, Wind & Fire were doing.” If, on the other hand, you were not born between 1955 and 1975 and don’t know the tunes, then such passages will sound like so much dancing about architecture.

Elie writes of crypto-religiosity as a better kind of religiosity. It is open-minded religion. It is young people’s religion. Its distance from dogma might even give it an evangelizing power: U2’s “Gloria,” for instance, “was the first sung Latin we’d ever heard.” But this power is an optical (or aural) illusion. The symbols of religion were becoming detached from religion because people were becoming detached from religion. The book sometimes feels like a mere scavenging for exceptions. Irish rockers—U2, the Pogues, Sinéad O’Connor—play an outsized role in it not because young Irish people had discovered something new and cool but because they had retained something old and staid. Bono and the Edge, in their exuberant teenage attachment to Jesus, would have been oddball New Yorkers or Californians. They were pretty normal Dubliners. In 1973, ninety-one percent of Irish people attended Mass every Sunday. The number was in slow decline, but it would remain higher than any place in the West—eighty-five percent in 1985—until the Harvard-educated feminist Mary Robinson, elected president in 1990, set out to break her country’s Catholic culture in the name of progress and Americanism.

One thing that makes this book confusing is that Elie usually speaks about “religion” generally but usually means Catholicism specifically. All Western languages are naturally colored by the centuries in which Catholicism was at the center of our culture. But Elie is wrong to signal Warhol’s use of the word “presence” in a 1963 interview as proof that his work has a “religious aspect.” (“All painting is fact,” Warhol said, “and that is enough; the paintings are charged with their very presence.”) Nor is the stock market crash of October 1987 a religious event just because people described it as “a judgment day.” Such language is a vestige, not a revival.

Elie believes, without ever offering much proof, that crypto-religiosity is a response to religious taboos and sexual repression. It was “the Catholic inability to speak frankly about sex that sparked a crypto-religious response in the eighties.” The U2 song “The Unforgettable Fire” starts with seeking God and ends with finding sex. “Desire is the unforgettable fire,” writes Elie. Cohen’s “Hallelujah” “joins religious desire and sexual desire as few songs have done before or since.” The stained-glass image of Bob Dylan on the cover of his Biograph album “presented Dylan (who had put out Desire in 1976) pursuing carnal desire and spiritual desire without fretting over the distinction between them.” But it was Madonna who exceeded all of them in bringing “the Catholic girl and the bad girl together.” In the video for her song “Like a Prayer,” “devotion and desire are mysteriously and seductively combined.”

“Mysteriously” is an odd word to use in the context of Madonna’s video. Watch it: There’s a lot going on there, not much of it mysterious. A cross-wearing young woman in a church cuts stigmata into her own palms and makes love to a black plaster saint who has come to life while crosses are burned and a woman is raped. Far from showing the power of repression, the video reveals the old taboos to have been so weakened that Madonna needs to throw four or five of them at the viewer to convince him that she’s doing anything wrong at all—and she doesn’t succeed. Far from activating a taboo about interracial marriage, in the really existing semiotics of the 1980s the presence of so many black people signals the viewer: “These are all good people here.”

To travel across the decade with these artists is to be struck by how minor, how tired, how perfunctory most of their work is. That should be no surprise. By the 1980s, modernism, which had begun six or seven decades before, with Duchamp’s toilets and Eliot’s Waste Land, was dying of exhaustion, along with the political system (socialism) of which it was often the cultural expression and various social-science disciplines (like psychoanalysis) it had spawned. It wasn’t even pregnant with anything that would matter when the United States came to dominate the post–Cold War world. Compared to, say, the computer industry in Silicon Valley, the New York art world was dissipating rather than consolidating. Rock itself had exhausted its possibilities. Desperate to pump their work full of meaning, artists resorted to every trick in the book.

Religion is one of these. The cross Madonna wears is her best shot at drawing titillation from some disapproval, some trespass, somewhere. Artists needed the Church’s judgmentalism, if only to make sex meaningful again.

The collision of American Catholicism with sex in the 1980s would make a magnificent one hundred fifty–page book. One can often discern the vague shape of this book underneath this ocean of observations about crypto-religiosity. Two tremendous challenges to the Church arose in that decade: AIDS (and the Church’s pastoral responsibility to those suffering from it) and the first reports of priestly molestation.

For Elie, these are closely related ideological problems, and they have something to do with the Church’s preference for dogmatic religiosity over crypto-religiosity. Times were changing. Where Thomas Merton had cut Miłosz a lot of slack in their discussions about crypto-religiosity, Pope John Paul II cut him off: “You always make one step forward and one step back,” he told his fellow Pole when the two met after Miłosz’s Nobel award in 1980. Across his quarter century in power, the pope led—in Elie’s view—a “counterrevolution” against the Second Vatican Council, one marked by “heavy-handed traditionalism.”

Elie views the Church’s sexual battles less in ecclesiological or sociological terms than in partisan political ones: through the so-called “culture wars” around public funding of obscene and anti-religious art that roiled the latter half of the decade. The campaign to block Martin Scorsese’s adaptation of Nikos Kazantzakis’s Last Temptation of Christ, which portrayed Jesus as having a sexual fantasy on the cross, had been launched by evangelicals and fundamentalists. But Catholic clergy sympathized, some, such as Bernard Cardinal Law of Boston, without having seen the film. New York’s John Cardinal O’Connor was similarly ready to criticize Salman Rushdie’s treatment of Islam in The Satanic Verses without having cracked open the book. Prominent Catholics, too, including the New York Republican senator Alphonse D’Amato, objected to a showing—funded by the National Endowment for the Arts—of Andres Serrano’s photos of a crucifix soaking in the photographer’s urine. “Echoing the British Muslim imams who had decried The Satanic Verses,” Elie writes of D’Amato, “he called it ‘filth.’” Of course, it might be objected that while those imams urged killing Rushdie, D’Amato only advocated defunding Serrano.

By the late 1980s, the Church had become—for no obvious logical reason—the target of AIDS protests. These included the Stop the Church action before Christmas in 1989, when members of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (A.C.T. U.P.) disrupted a Mass at Saint Patrick’s Cathedral and desecrated hosts. Elie makes a rather arcane argument that by failing to accede to gay identitarian movements within the Church, the Church itself had actually committed the desecration. “The Church had failed to grasp the full significance of sacred space,” Elie writes. “It was a big fail.” He considers the protest to have been a victory for A.C.T. U.P. but thinks the Church should have been grateful, too, for the fury of the communicants at Saint Patrick’s—that was evidence of how seriously they took the Real Presence!

As Elie sees it, the Church of the 1980s was pursuing a reactionary policy. When it was right, it was right only by accident. He describes a papal visit in 1987 to a Church-run AIDS hospital in San Francisco’s gay neighborhood, the Castro. The pope gave what Elie calls an “exquisitely mixed” message that “God loves you all, without distinction” and spent much of the day in the company of AIDS sufferers. But then Elie adds,

The next day’s papers featured a photograph of John Paul embracing Brendan O’Rourke, who had AIDS. O’Rourke was not a gay man or an addict in recovery. He was a four-year-old boy who had gotten the virus through a blood transfusion. God’s love aside, the pope’s embrace of people with AIDS was limited and conditional.

That the pope might also pity a child who was on the eve of dying an excruciating death at the age of four is rather weak evidence that he was stingy with his compassion. On the contrary, the Church’s work on AIDS has been, one can see more clearly in retrospect, unique. Today the Church cares for a quarter of the world’s AIDS patients. In the 1980s, when even doctors were terrified by the disease’s deadliness and stigma and majorities of the American public wished to see gays quarantined, the role of the Church was even more significant. Caring for AIDS patients did not just mean taking a public position or showing solidarity. It meant pouring blood out of bedpans, blotting running sores, and embracing people who were shaking to death. Mother Teresa and her Missionaries of Charity became the face of this work in the United States.

The scandal over Catholic clerical molestation began around then—although the lion’s share of incidents had occurred before the Eighties and the most sensational revelations would come after. The journalist Andrew Sullivan remarked on a “creeping obsession with sex” on the part of Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI), leader of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Elie senses that the priestly abuse itself had something to do with the shortcomings he perceives in the Church’s response to AIDS—and that the link concerned Church doctrine. Criticism of others was meant to divert Catholics’ attention from their own misconduct and to cover the way their church “broke young men in the name of God.” The two problems are indeed related, but not in a way that progressive Catholics have been eager to examine.

Powerful sociological factors made it almost inevitable that the Church would eventually clash with the secular world over sex. Demographically the 1980s were set to be the most sexual decade in the history of the country. The vast generation of the Baby Boom—a third of the population—was in its sexually active years for the whole time: aged sixteen to thirty-five at the decade’s beginning, twenty-six to forty-five at the end. And the so-called Sexual Revolution had happened. Effective birth control was universally available. So was abortion.

The 1980s were also a delicate time for the Church. The three-year Second Vatican Council, which ended in 1965, had aimed to modernize and vernacularize Catholicism. Like the later effort of Mikhail Gorbachev to reform the Soviet Union, it wound up dismantling more than it fixed. The difficulties the Church faced after the mid-1960s were mostly not matters of political ideology. They were tragic, though Elie’s vocabulary is too narrowed by his progressive commitments to permit him this view of it.

Vatican II opened a sociological fault in the middle of the Baby Boom generation. Any Catholic over thirty when the 1980s began had been accompanied through puberty by sex doctrines identical to those his father had learned, and his father’s father, and so on back through the centuries. Any Catholic under thirty was living in a different religious civilization, effectively under a secular dispensation. The Church taught many of the same things, but—how to explain it?—they seemed more historic than vital, rather like learning a dead language. Numerically these groups were of equal size—thirty happened to be the median age in 1980. The older half held the institutional power; it made doctrine. The younger half was having all the life experiences. It was forging its sexual way in a world that seemed to have abandoned all inherited rules.

AIDS and the molestation crisis were both evidence that homosexuality, through no particular fault of homosexuals, had become newly dangerous to the Church, after centuries in which the Church had enjoyed a productive modus vivendi with it. For decades before Vatican II, in fact, the Church had become a haven for the homosexually inclined—decidedly not for pedophiles, though in our own era of gay liberation it became politically necessary to label the source of the Church’s greatest difficulties as something other than homosexuality. This is not the place for a more exhaustive examination of the ways the Church’s requirement of priestly celibacy had effects other than the ones for which it specifically evolved. Surveys at the end of the last century showed about a sixth of priests to be homosexually inclined. At one time this wasn’t a particular problem. That it became one was due to a moral transition outside of the Church.

Possibly the Church did not even know it was welcoming a disproportionate number of homosexually inclined men. What is clear now is that the stability of the arrangement rested on a high-stakes paradox. The Church could, without any risk of disorder, be the most tolerant of institutions towards the homosexually inclined—but only if the wider society did not echo that tolerance. As long as zeitgeist, folkways, and penal code were what we would now call homophobic, the Church could simply reap the wondrous windfall of gay intelligence, empathy, and artistic talent without any worry that it might compromise Church teachings on matters of sex. This regime of celibacy, meanwhile, was a gift to the men who availed themselves of it, allowing them to conceal their homosexuality from parents and others, and to stand before society as exemplars rather than outcasts.

When society became tolerant, however, the Church had a problem. Now its sex teachings were not self-evidently a gift. In the modern way of looking at things, they were an oppression, preventing the young and homosexually inclined from blossoming into people with a fully developed sexuality of the sort that was increasingly in evidence in the individualistic society outside the Church. That was the problem that confronted the generation of priests who had entered the Church in the stern world before Vatican II and had pursued their priestly careers in the loosey-goosey world after it. That they chose to honor their old vocation and pursue their new sexual identity is why, for a brief while at the turn of this century, the ancient Church and the newfangled gay lifestyle appeared to be dying together.

The sexual revolution of the 1960s and ’70s was part of a more general dissolution of the compromise between modernity and tradition—to the detriment of the latter—of which Vatican II was symptom as much as cause. Uncoincidentally, the decades of the Seventies through the Nineties overlap with the ones in which the political scientist Robert Putnam placed the latest of America’s “great awakenings.” The arguments these developments provoked appeared ideological at the time, and appear so still to Elie and others. It is better, though, to think of them as contingent and ultimately tragic. In the early 1980s, a generation that had been assured that the moral strictures against sexual experimentation were baseless, antiquated, and ridiculous was confronted with sex-borne plague of biblical severity. Rightly or wrongly, it was natural for us to feel not only lied to by those who had espoused the new doctrines but also mocked by those who espoused the old. So the Catholic Church was enlisted as a plausible-seeming moral stopgap to make an episode of hallucinatory terror look more like a manageable moral problem. Some of those who alluded to it were believers, others were dedicated enemies of the Church, and still others were just political activists who didn’t know the first thing about it. The one certitude they all seemed to share was that the Church could somehow render sex (and, with it, love) meaningful again. As Elie notes, that is what a number of artists at the time were doing too. They weren’t the first and won’t be the last.