On January 20, 1928, I had the good fortune to be born on a farm just north of Pocahontas, Iowa. I have an ornate baptismal certificate affirming that I was baptized in Sacred Heart Church in that town. My godparents were Art and Bernice McCarten, friends of my parents, Lawrence and Grace Schall. On my birth certificate, my father was listed as a farmer, an occupation he soon gave up to become a small-town businessman. As I have often said, the best things our folks give us are brothers and sisters and, in turn, their families. In my case, I have one sister and two brothers, one of whom, my brother Jack, died a couple of years ago in Spokane, Washington. My mother died when we were quite young—I, the eldest, was nine. My father remarried a lovely widow with two daughters. This too was a blessing.
Recently, in our community at Georgetown, we celebrated the 95th birthday of a wonderful Jesuit, Fr. James Martin. Several weeks before his birthday, Jim told me one morning at breakfast, “You know, I never expected to live this long.” We laughed at the idea of someone actually expecting to live till ninety-five. At his 95th birthday dinner celebration, Jim remarked that someone asked him, “What do you have to do to become ninety-five?” Jim replied, “Well, the first thing you have to do is become ninety-four.” I reflected that if you’ve reached seventy, you are working on ninety-four.
We human beings are notoriously inept at summing up our seventy years. “Call no man happy until he is dead,” is the famous remark from Solon, recalled by Aristotle. Obviously, even if we believe in eternal life, as I do, we want to interpret Solon as Aristotle did: Our temporal life can always be unexpectedly fragile. Most of our unhappiness in this life, however, comes from ourselves, granting that if we love anyone, we can easily be unhappy because they are, even if they caused their unhappiness themselves. Both Socrates, executed at seventy, and Cicero, murdered at sixty-six, in their reflections on old age tell us that if we complain all through old age, it is not because of we are elderly, but because we have not ordered our lives toward the important things.
With such principles in mind, you are not going to catch Schall complaining about old age. I asked one of my classes the other day how long adolescence lasted for the Greeks and the Romans. “Till about forty-five,” someone rightly answered. “And why was that?” I asked. “Because it takes all that time to gain the needed experience of yourself and others.” A good answer. I have the impression that it took me longer.
Likewise, I was struck the other day after having read a book of Aristotle for about the hundredth time that I was sure I understood it all. I was elated about it. I have been lucky to have had the opportunity to read and reread Aristotle, that sane man. The next day in the mail, I received a reprint of an essay on Aristotle by a young man from Boston College making a point about him that never occurred to me. I will need a hundred and first time.
I read a remark somewhere, from Ralph Mclnerny I think, that if you sat down for eight hours a day at twenty-one and read the Opera Omnia of Thomas Aquinas, you would probably not get through just reading him before you are forty-nine. These dates, twenty-one and forty-nine are significant because this is all the time St. Thomas had in his life to think and write these things out in the first place—and he didn’t have a computer. We can barely read all he wrote let alone understand it or compose it ourselves. Yet we are grateful for St. Thomas, that his life was as orderly and disciplined as it was. His truth still makes us free—though he would be the first to say that the truth was not his, even when he knew it.
So I was a “born Catholic,” a rather good thing to be as Belloc used to say. Nothing better is on the horizon and never has been, as far as I can see. Catholicism is a description of what we would want if we could have it. The only objection to Catholicism, that is, the Catholicism of orthodoxy, is that it’s too good to be true, as Chesterton said. This is not an argument from wish to reality, but rather an honest look at reality and at what is revealed. They uncannily correspond on any objective viewing of things.