Ralph Branca: Remembering Jerusalem

August 18, 2011 By Max Lindenman 2 Comments

The athlete whose career seems in retrospect to have been defined by an instance of decisive failure can be forgiven for imagining himself accursed, particularly if the failure itself looks wildly anomalous.

When the Red Sox’s Mike Torrez gave up a pennant-winning homer to Bucky Dent — normally one of the most harmless batters in American League history — he could at least remind himself that the whammy was on his team, not on him personally. Harry Frazee had earned the wrath of Zeus, or whoever, 60 years earler, when he sold Babe Ruth to the New York Yankees. If Dent had grounded out as expected, something else would have happened to derail the Red Sox — Yaz might have been struck by lightning, or perhaps Jim Rice would have had a fit and swallowed his tongue. At least this way nobody got hurt.

Former Brooklyn Dodgers’ pitcher Ralph Branca had no such consolations. In 1951, when New York Giant Bobby Thomson pulled Branca’s fastball into the left-field stands for a three-run homer, he effectively brought down an aristocracy — at least momentarily. The Dodgers called themselves Bums, (or permitted themselves to be so called), but the nickname must have struck a note somewhere between irony and false modesty. As pennant winners in 1941, 1947 and 1949, they were an elite — practically the Yankees of the National League. Thanks to Thomson’s homer, they lost the pennant to their arch-rivals — and had to hear Ralph Hodges scream about it.

Thanks to New York Times reporter Joshua Prager, Branca has a new theory: God fed Thomson that four-bagger to punish him for not observing the Jewish commandments. In the course of researching The Echoing Green, his book on the fateful Branca-Thomson duel, Prager discovered quite by accident that Branca’s mother, Katherine, had been born Kati Berger, in the Hungarian half of Austria-Hungary. Her parents, Ignatz and Antonia Berger, were both Jews, had were married by a rabbi, and had all their male children circumcised.

Through Branca’s sister-in-law, Mildred, Prager learned that Kati, upon meeting Branca’s father, had written her parents asking for permission to marry a Catholic, and to raise her kids in the Catholic tradition. They answered both questions in the affirmative — so Mildred had heard from Fanni, Kati’s sister, who had emigrated to America but remained Jewish. Since then, Kati lived as a Catholic, and raised her 17 children in the Church. The Berger family roots were an open secret — not quite out in plain view, but available to anyone who thought to dig.

For whatever reason, Branca didn’t. When Prager shared with him his family history, adding that Kati’s relatives had been murdered at Sobibor, Auschwitz and Majdanek, he said, ““Maybe that’s why God’s mad at me — that I didn’t practice my mother’s religion…He made me throw that home run pitch. He made me get injured the next year. Remember, Jesus was a Jew.”

Branca must have been at least half-joking, but still, there’s real Old Testament sensibility in his statement. “If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand wither,” goes the psalm. Though Branca’s career ended with an injury to his back, not his hand (it was the observant Sandy Koufax, a lefty, who got arthritis), it could pass for the work of the same El-Shaddai who sacked Saul for hoarding Amalekite livestock.

In the 1950s, one of Branca’s own spiritual advisors, a Jesuit, suggested he interpret his trials as a backhanded compliment: God had chosen him to yield the home run because God knew his faith was strong enough to sustain him through what would follow. Yes it was, thought Branca. And so ever since, even as the goat endured public discourteousness for 60 years, he praised God, reciting every morning and night the ‘Our Father,’ a ‘Hail Mary’ and a couplet of his own: ‘Make me worthy of your love; make my love worthy of you.’”

It’s a good explanation –it works as well for a Christian as a Jew. It evokes Job, and also that other perennial losing pitcher, Charlie Brown, whose Christmas special is considered a Biblical coup against commercialism. In any case, Branca still considers himself a Catholic. If he‘d known he was Jewish, he pointed out to Prager, he couldn‘t have performed chores for his Jewish neighbors on the Sabbath. All worked out for the best.

His grandparents’ liberal attitude may not have been so unusual. Conversion among Austro-Hungarian Jews was fairly common — Freud himself considered it, though he’d probably have remained a Freudian in any event. Even those who remained Jewish absorbed more Catholic culture than their ancestors might, perhaps, have thought proper. Theodor Herzl referred to his bar mitzvah as a “confirmation.” Both of Kati’s parents shared names with Catholic saints — “Ignatz” is German for “Ignatius” — as did Franz Kafka. It would be interesting to learn whether “Fanni” was short for “Franziska.”

I’d be curious to see how my dad, whose birthday was yesterday, would have reacted to this news. Having grown up Jewish and a Brooklyn Dodgers fan, he ended up uninterested in either sports or religion. Left to my own judgment in both areas, I became a Yankees fan at the age of five, when Reggie Jackson homered three times in game six of the 1977 World Series. Thirty years and a few months later, I entered the Catholic Church. Just goes to show that every family has its conversion stories.

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News Flash: Catholics and Jews Still Largely Cool

August 10, 2011 By Max Lindenman 10 Comments

In one of the Simpsons’ earlier seasons, Marge writes to the producers of Itchy and Scratchy to complain about the show’s rampant and graphic violence. After some finagling she gets what she wants — in spades. A typical episode of the new, socially responsible Itchy and Scratchy finds the former antagonists sitting side-by-side on a creaking porch swing, drinking (probably sugar-free) lemonade.

In National Catholic Reporter, John Allen, Jr. reports that relations between the Vatican and Rome’s chief rabbi have become exactly this collegial. Sketching out the spiritual basis for the upcoming Assisi summit in an article published in l‘Osservatore Romano, Cardinal Kurt Koch, wrote of the Cross as “the permanent and universal Yom Kippur.” Di Segni, who thought he caught a hint of substitution theology in Koch‘s metaphor, wrote another article for l’Osservatore stating so, but politely. In a third article, Koch clarified:

On the one hand, Jews should not have the impression that Christians see their religion as obsolete; on the other, Christians must not renounce any aspect of their faith. Without doubt, that fundamental question will occupy Jewish-Christian dialogue for a long time. Here, it can be mentioned only briefly. In any event, this is certainly not an obstacle to the fact that Christians and Jews, with mutual respect for their respective religious convictions, commit themselves to promote peace and reconciliation and thus to journey together towards Assisi.

This, by gum, is how representatives of different faiths should relate: with a courtier’s politesse and a wonk’s precision that makes the whole dispute unbearably dull. According to Allen, it’s nothing to take for granted. Neither di Segni nor Koch is the type to make an empty conciliatory gesture. The Vatican’s newspaper was not in the habit of running opinion pieces by chief rabbis until Gian Maria Vian took over as editor. That this exchange took place where and how it did marks real progress.

Since I first began preparing to enter the Church, I’ve been on guard for signs of lingering anti-Semitism. I’m delighted to say I haven’t found any. Even the dimple-faced sedevacantist who befriended me has never lectured me on the myth of the Holocaust or the truth in the Protocols of Zion. All she’s done is show me pictures of altars that look as though they were designed by Siegfried and Roy.

If I sound surprised , I must admit with a great deal of chagrin that I am — or, anyway, was. But I did have my reasons. The push for the restoration of Catholic identity has seemed, at times, to stir echoes of pushes to restore various national identities. Historically, when that’s happened — when superpatriots have started hollering about the adulteration of Volk, Geist or Heimat, guess which rootless cosmopolites have gotten their shop windows broken first?

This simply does not seem to be on anyone’s agenda. Last year, when media coverage of clerical sex abuse had many in the Church howling — and not without reason — like wounded beasts, I heard many complaints about the “secular media,” but never did I get the sense that “secular” was a code word for anything else. Or rather, I did once. In his homily, a priest praised William Kristol for “getting it,” — “it” meaning the injustices suffered by the Church — in some column he’d written for the Weekly Standard. Noting Kristol‘s ethnicity in a tone of delighted surprise, he sounded like someone praising a black man for being articulate. But that was a backhanded compliment — small stuff — and need not have been sweated.

Instead, the basic strategy for the reconstruction of Catholic identity seems to be one of internal police work. The criticism of Notre Dame for bestowing an honorary degree on President Obama, the campaign in some quarters to deny Communion to pro-choice politicians, the withdrawal of the Bishops Conference from the Leadership Conference of Civil and Human Rights — all amount to Catholics telling other Catholics what’s what. This strategy has a down side; it runs a constant risk of turning into fratricide. Still, the basic framework is a mature one — much more so, at any rate, than inventing external enemies and lashing out at them.

The main man to thank here, of course, is the brand-new beatus, Pope John Paul II. His friendly overtures to Jews are too well known to require rehearsal at any length. The point isn’t so much that he made them, but that he, of all people, made them. When the pontiff who issued Veritatis Splendor and Evangelium Vitae says he wants to live in brotherly peace with the children of the Covenant, it doesn’t matter how tradition-minded you are — you jolly well listen.

Yeah, I know that’s hardly news. But if Weigel can make a career out of admiring Papa Wojtyla, why can’t I?

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The Beard: Blessing and Banner

June 23, 2011 By Max Lindenman 17 Comments

How I'd probably look with one.

Of all my colleagues in the Catholic blogosphere, no one makes me look to my own brittle laurels like NC Register‘s Mark Shea and Jimmy Akin. Part of my trepidation where these two are concerned comes from the recognition that both have immersed themselves more deeply in the Catholic faith and its peculiar logic than I’ll ever be able to do. If Natural Law and Canon Law were oceans, they’d have gills; I, a snorkel.

But, as that description implies, I am a shallow person. I would probably be able to ignore any disparities between their acumen and mine if it went unmarked by any eye-grabbing personal affectation. In other words, I might have missed their brains if not for their beards.

There is a great deal of serious writing on the interplay between personality, perception and facial hair. In his Vanity Fair essay, “Becoming Adolf,” Rich Cohen wonders whether Hitler would have turned out quite so Hitlerian had he not at some point begun to wear a toothbrush mustache. “Did the mustache affect history, or was it just a matter of style? Did it attach itself to a person and drive him crazy? Was the man in charge of was the mustache calling the shots?”

If that sounds a little too arch, he fills in the thesis with a quote from historian and journalist Ron Rosenbaum, who argues, somewhat controversially, that Hitler began wearing his signature mustache after Charlie Chaplin had claimed it for his own. “Chaplain’s musache became a lens through which to look at Hitler…A glass in which Hitler merely Chaplniesque: figure to be mocked more than feared…”

Now, partly because of Hitler, I have deeply mixed feelings toward the mustache. Toward the beard, however, I feel untrammeled reverence. This is another aspect of the Jewish hangover. As Meir Soloveitchik writes in his Commentary essay, “Why Beards?”, Jewish tradition esteems the full beard as a marker not so much of virility, but of maturity, of gravitas. He recounts the story of Elazar ben Azaryah, whose election — at the age of 18! — to the leadership of post-Temple Jewish scholars was ratified only after a full white beard grew from his face overnight. That it was ratified even so is remarkable to me, but if anyone thought to say, “Beard-schmeard — you’re still a teenaged pisher!” his thoughts have been lost to history. Even for the notoriously fickle Jewish mob, the beard did the trick.

Having been born in 1972, right at the beginning of the so-called Age of Aquarius, I’ve tended to attach an additional meaning to beards that complements the rabbinic sense of sagery. At the progressive schools and summer camps I attended, beards tended to take root in those teachers and counselors who were renouncing — or trying to renounce — the pomps and empty promises of modern society. They were the men who raised chickens or vegetables in their suburban New Jersey backyards, and gathered their nobler garbage into enormous compost heaps. During water shortages, they were the first to mark their toilets with signs reading: “IF IT’S YELLOW, LET IT MELLOW; IF IT’S BROWN, FLUSH IT DOWN.” Who needs delicacy, the lifestyle trappings — including the beards — seemed to demand, when you’ve got purity? Tolstoy did it right; Al Gore did it wrong.

To my eye, at least, the beards on the faces of Shea and Akin would appear to represent an analogous frame of mind. Though neither, of course, is Jewish, either would be mistaken for a rabbi long before he would, say, a colonel of Confederate chasseurs a cheval. Whether either indulges a distributist kink I don’t know; whether either exercises a tyrannical stewardship over his water I am inclined to doubt. The point is, both men write with a special, very bearded seriousness of purpose. Their very words haev beards.

Take Shea‘s recent piece, “Againt Idolatry, He begins by writing: “The apologetics subculture in the Church is a place with both rewards and dangers,” and I have to stop right there. Until reading those words, I had no idea any apologetics subculture existed. If anyone had asked me what it was, I’d have misheard him to say, “apologetic subculture,“ and imagined a group of young people — urban, college-educated — who meet in lofts and specialty bars and tell each other, “Sorry.” (In fact, “Whence the Culture of Apology?” sounds just like the title of an article I’d expect to read in NC Register.) Mr. Shea, on the other hand, is so dedicated to the science of apologetics that he knows all the “do’s” and “don’t’s,” and can sniff out an apologetics poseur at 1,000 meters. That’s serious stuff right there.

But wait, there’s more. In the piece itself, Shea effectively sabotages his own job satisfaction as surely as if he’d set of a car bomb by the entrance:

Neither I nor any of my fellow yakkers in the apologetics subculture have ever brought a living soul to the Church. The Holy Spirit does that. We humans yak about the Faith and sometimes, by the grace of the Spirit, something we say scratches where somebody itches and they receive the grace of the Holy Spirit to obey Jesus. But they do not receive that grace from Keating, Akin, Shea, Hahn or whoever, but from God. Because (mark this) no human being has any power at all to convert a human heart to faith in Christ or to trust that He is present and teaching through Holy Mother Church.

With an attitude like this, Shea pretty much kills his chance of ever editing Maxim. Something tells me he knows this, and is perfectly cool with it. If I wore a hat, it would be off.

With Akin we move from the virtuous to the sublime. At the beginning of last Lent, when Fr. Corapi announced be’d been placed on administrative leave, everyone cried for clarity. Jimmy Akin served it up with a steam shovel. In this piece, he dissects Corapi’s initial, ambiguous, statement, works through each possible meaning to its logical conclusion, and then, as if that weren’t enough, determines which outcome Catholics ought to hope for. It’s not as obvious as I would have thought:

In that case, what does hoping that they are not true amount to? Seemingly, it would amount to hoping that either 2 or 3 is true. That is, hoping that the woman making the allegations is delusional or that she is lying.

If she is delusional, then she would seem to be quite delusional — and, in fact, gravely mentally ill — if she believes wrongly that Father Corapi has had sexual “exploits” with her when in fact he has not. Further, her delusion is even projected onto other women, with whom she also falsely believes Father Corapi to have had such exploits.

If she is lying, then she would be sinning, and sinning in a particularly grave way because she would be accusing an innocent person of grave sin with multiple exacerbating circumstances (he’s a priest, he’s very well known, it’s a sexual sin, he’s religious and thus has taken a vow of chastity — not just made a promise of celibacy — and the Church has been reeling from sexual scandals in recent years). If she’s lying, she’s telling an abominably horrible lie that is gravely, gravely sinful.

Of course, things are also appallingly horrible if No. 4 is the case and the accusations are true. In that case, there is a very well-known priest who has taken a vow of chastity who has violated that vow multiple times with multiple women — with an unknown degree of their cooperation, and in abuse of his sacred office — at a time when the Church has been reeling from sexual scandals.

This makes hoping that the allegations aren’t true a little trickier.

And how! He goes on — read if you like — but you’ll already have gotten enough to be suitably impressed. I actually have a tiny bit of experience with this kind of thing. In grad school, I took an ethics class — highest grade I got, believe it or not — where we practiced moving through something called the Potter Box, a visual aid for ethical problem solving. We divided every ethical question into a number of sub-questions, which we distributed throughout the four quadrants of a square. Working our way clockwise though each quadrant in turn, we came to something like a reasonable answer.

Akin stretches the Potter Box into something resembling the Daytona International Speedway, and whips through it at 200 mph.

The point is, if either man were beardless, I doubt I’d be so quick to believe. Rather spitefully, I’d write it all off as vanity — both Shea’s enlightened ego-guardianship and Akin’s brainastics. But the beards? The beards seal the deal. They make everything, so to speak, kosher.

Don’t ever change, gentlemen. And don’t ever shave.

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