The Tragic Case of the Catholic Theologians and the Village Explainer

Any Catholic theologian who chances to read this will probably wonder, “Whose words are these, really? What renegade steward of book learning betrayed his gifts and calling by rendering the subthalamic twitchings of a member of the simple faithful in human language?” Well, the words belong to nobody but me, a member of the species Boobus laïcus – “half-devil and half-child,” as the poet says – a modern bushman with nothing but a bachelor’s degree to distinguish him from the beasts of the field. They’re not so different from stone hewing-axes, words, except you can make new ones without worrying about mashing your thumb.

I employ them now to set the record straight. A peer-reviewed article appearing last month in Catholic Theologian Quarterly depicted the people of our village in terms we believe unjust. I don’t mean the asides about our poor personal hygiene – the “hermeneutic of suspicion,” I believe the expression was, which the authors claim we adopted toward the toothbrushes and bathroom tissue handed us as gifts. No, I refer to the role we were said to play in the disappearance of those two field researchers. Abduction and murder are serious charges, even among our people, and I think we merit a day in the court of public opinion.

They arrived unannounced, like the hoar-frost. There were two of them – a man and a woman, hereafter to be referred to, respectively, as Man and Woman. (From certain quarters, we’ve drawn criticism for making too much of these distinctions, and it must be conceded that these two smelled more or less alike.) Speaking very slowly, they often drew back their lips, displaying their teeth. Our people consider this a sign of friendliness, except when they consider it a sign of fear. When they summoned us all to the great hall and gave each of us a plate of chicken fingers, we decided they were friendly.

“I told you,” Woman was overheard to tell Man, “Spam is for Pacific Islanders. These people will trade their own mothers for chicken fingers.” Indeed, they did put us in a tractable mood, especially after we’d all cleaned our plates, and Man handed each of us a donut.

“I’d like to ask you people some questions about the Church,” Woman said, joining the tips of her fingers, apparently to represent a steeple. “You see, the men who run the Church, that is the bishops, are operating very undemocratically. They shut their ears to your lived experiences, your voices.” We couldn’t help noticing that she pronounced the words men and bishops with distaste. Even Man grimaced and stuck out his tongue.

“So I guess what we’re asking,” Woman said, “is how has the Church failed you? What would you tell the bishops if they were standing where we’re standing, listening?”

For a long moment, we were silent. That, we thought, was a deuced odd question. The bald fact, embarrassing to many of us, was that most of us rarely thought one way or another about bishops or churches. Back in the old days, when we stalked our prey and roasted it around the communal fires – and a little later, when we wrung our living from the soil – the sacred had felt very close at hand and relevant. Now that we worked in offices and call centers, often remaining on call through our iPhones, we’d gotten into the habit of treating Sunday as a day of rest.

Initially, we expressed consternation the way we usually do – by grumbling wordlessly. Man hissed to Woman: “I told you we’d confuse them with open-ended questions. I say we hand out the questionnaires now – or maybe get them to articulate their experience through a folk dance.” Woman was nodding grimly when Meg, the cosmetologist, spoke up.

“The music’s kind of boring,” she said.

Woman’s and Man’s faces lit right up. They started beckoning toward Meg with both hands, a little frantically, like someone trying to coax a puppy out from under a house. “What’s boring about it?” They demanded. “Tell us more! Boring how?”

But before Meg could elaborate, Derek, the Hansons’ layabout son, piped up. “They don’t want anyone to get l –.” Mrs. Hanson clapped a hand over his mouth before he finished, but his outburst had captured Woman’s and Man’s attention completely. Man was shouting, “Over-emphasis on sexual ethics, right? Right?” Woman looked as though she were going to be sick.

At that moment, from the very back of the hall, came a sound like the earth’s vast, flat expanse spinning on the back of the cosmic turtle. Turning, we beheld Carl, all 400 lbs of him, squeezing out of his chair and hauling himself to his feet. Carl served, in a sense, as the village explainer – except he explained things about which nobody felt any curiosity. He earned his living by lumbering up to people on the street or at Denny’s, just as they were digging into their Moons over My Hammy, and holding forth on the Peloponnesian War or the Fabian Society until his desperate marks handed him all the spare bills on their persons. It was widely rumored that Carl had the lowest debt-to-income ratio in the village.

“I’m curious,” he said in his booming wheeze, “about the synod. The one about the family. The one that just ended.”

Using his pinky finger, Man pushed his glasses back from the tip of his nose to the bridge. “And just how,” he asked, “did you learn about that?”

“The Internet,” Carl said. “Obviously.” He continued: “It seemed to me that a bloc of progressive bishops wanted to admit remarried Catholics to Communion without their having to annul their first marriages. Wouldn’t that have vitiated the Church’s approach to sex, as well as the sacraments of matrimony and the Eucharist, in all but name?”

We all held our breath, wondering how long it would take Carl to talk the pair out of their surplus chicken fingers and donuts. To our surprise, however, Man looked only mildly perturbed. With a dentist’s smile, he said something about there being a difference between pastoral and doctrinal changes. But when he moved on to hierarchies of truths and development of doctrine, Woman – who until then had been eyeing Derek warily – kicked him in the shin.

“Sir,” she said to Carl. “Don’t you think that’s a little above your pay grade?”

“Well,” said Carl, with a chortle that rattled the windows. “That depends on who’s doing the grading. Around here, I earn a pretty good living explaining and, when necessary, provoking. Besides Lumen Gentium says laypeople are duty-bound to speak on matters concerning the good of the Church.”

“Let me stop you right there,” Woman broke in, aiming both index fingers at Carl like a brace of pistols. “Yes, laypeople are duty-bound to speak. But there are different kinds of laypeople. Lumen Gentium means us-laypeople” – she gestured toward Man and herself – “not you-laypeople. Got it?”

Carl raised one of his eyebrows, though witnesses remain divided on which. “Pardon me, madam – doctor, professor – but did you, or did you not, invite us here and ply us with comfort food precisely in order to learn our opinions?”

“No!” Snapped Woman, in a voice so vehement that even Man stopped rubbing his sore shin to give her his undivided attention. “That is a category mistake, sir. You do not have opinions. We have opinions. You have lived experience.”

“What she means,” said Man, in a somewhat placating tone, “is that forming opinions requires a certain, uh, professional qualifications – qualifications we possess and which, I think it’s safe to assume, you all don’t. But don’t worry! You can still be part of the process. By sharing your lived experience with us, you’ll help us form our opinions. Think of your lived experience like the manure that fertilizes a lush field of curds and whey, or whatever.”

Carl started breathing heavily. “Even leaving aside the fact that curds and whey are dairy products – a category mistake if ever I heard one – and that the use of synthetic fertilizers has spread considerably since the last time you cracked Piers Plowman, I take strenuous exception to that analogy. Not only are you saying that our lives are, literally, crap, you’re telling us to leave all our thinking to you.”

As long as Carl spoke, Woman had been glaring at him in a way that made us wonder whether her foot didn’t have an even harder kick stored up for his shin. When he finished, she said, “Don’t distort our position. You’re perfectly welcome to think your heads off as long as you stay within your areas of competency, although in your case” – here her eyes seemed to burn a hole straight through the middle of Carl’s bald spot – “I can’t guess what that could be.”

Carl thrust his upper chin forward, causing a general tremor among the lower ones. “For your information, I am a tribune of the people. The broad scope of my duties obliges me to be a generalist.”

“In that case, Jabba,” said Woman. “May I suggest that you get a real job?”

With a grin suggesting that he was, in fact, preparing to encase her in carbonite, Carl answered, “And the very same to you.”

At this point, everyone agrees, Derek shouted, “Real job? How about a blowjob?” What followed, however, is a matter of enduring controversy. Some say Woman flew at Carl, others that Carl flew at Woman. (Personally, I tend to credit the former account, as Carl was ill-constructed for flight.) In either case, we quickly separated them, packing Man and Woman off to their motel and fleeing Carl before he could create an opening to explain Sun Tzu’s Art of War.

It is a sad matter of public record that neither Man nor Woman was ever seen alive again and that, a week later, their shrunken heads were discovered on the doorstep of the local telecommunications provider. Though the culprit is still being sought by police – who, alone, have the professional qualifications to resolve his or her identity – I must remind readers that head-shrinking has never been a custom in our village. (Stoning, yes, but that’s strictly an annual event, with the victim chosen in a balloting process approved by UN inspectors. It also offers a major windfall to whoever gets the fried Twinkie concession.)

Even at the risk of compromising the investigation, it must be observed that Carl has been overheard to mutter, “Nobody deserves that many brains.” But no witness has stayed around long enough to find out what he meant.