Good Pope John and his polychrome cat

Grace moments are a Catholic obligation.  I recently fulfilled that obligation amply by having two within three days:  one in a bookstore, one in bed.

The first occurred as I shopped for a gift for a little girl.  Browsing the children’s books by Filipinos, I endured pages and pages of banality, bad grammar, and nightmare-provoking violence.  But just as I was about to give up and get a velveteen turtle instead, I found a story that was delightfully transgressive, grammatically correct from start to finish, wholesomely free of severed heads and limbs, and joyfully, if perhaps unconsciously, Catholic.

“The Cat Painter,” by Becky Bravo and Mark Salvatus, tells of two angels whose duty in co-creation is to color cats.  Miral, head of the cat atelier, paints cats as they have been painted for millennia: black, white, or yellow, never any other color, never more than one color.  Then young Rahal, with “a halo just the slightest bit askew,” comes in as an apprentice with vexing questions.  Why only those colors?  Why only one color per cat?

Miral’s answer is always the same: “Because that is how it has always been done.”

In time Rahal stops asking questions and toes the color line.  But one day, left alone in the atelier, he experiments—striping, spotting, and speckling in colors never before seen on a cat.

Miral’s sense of scandal can be expressed only in silence.  Grimly he picks up a specimen of the crime and marches off to God.  Rahal trails him tremulously…

“And God likes the cat,” sniffed my Jesuit colleague, abruptly ending my narrative with blasé impatience. “It’s a common plot.”

“But,” I pleaded earnestly, “it’s a parable of the Church.”

“Hmmm,” he intoned, exuding underwhelmed disdain.  Clearly this parable would not make it into his homilies.

My second grace moment occurred a few hours after that casual deflation of my first grace moment.  I had taken to bed with me a book on the Church, hoping it would put me to sleep, as books on the Church often do.  Instead I found myself yelling “Yes!” not once, but multiple times.  This ecstasy was induced by Michael J. Daley’s introductory essay in his book “Vatican II: Forty Personal Stories,” co-edited with William Madges, which celebrates the Second Vatican Council.  Much of what follows comes from that essay.

When John XXIII became pope in October 1958, the Roman Catholic hierarchy was still mostly shuttered against the modern world.  But many of the laity, religious, and lower clergy were already engaging the modern world in ways never before seen in the Church.  Most bishops were tepid toward this experimentation.

The rest formed two hostile camps: those who saw this engagement as complicity in the devil’s creation, and those who saw in it an opportunity for co-creation with God.  John XXIII was a compromise pope, identified with neither camp.  Close to 78, he was deemed unlikely to live long, hence unlikely to swing the Church either way.

How wrong that calculation was became evident when, three months into his papacy, he called for an Ecumenical Council.  The Church, he said, was due for an aggiornamento, a “bringing up to date,” which he demonstrated by throwing open a window and declaring: “The Church needs to let in some fresh air.”

Many cardinals met the announcement with silence, confusion, or opposition.  Francis Xavier Murphy, CSsR, in his “Letters from Vatican City,” quips that some who urged the pope to postpone his plan may have hoped “eternity would spare them the ordeal of a Council.”  But eternity favored the advocates of critical and collaborative engagement with modernity.  A sense of his own mortality pushed John XXIII to advance the Council’s date.

In the course of the Council preparations, he showed his colors.  Peter Hebbelthwaite, in “Pope John XXIII: Shepherd of the Modern World,” tells how the pope took a ruler to a page of the Council’s draft discussion papers and remarked: “Seven inches of condemnations and one of praise: is that the way to talk to the modern world?”

To a similar statement by Giovanni Battista Cardinal Montini (later Pope Paul VI) that the modern world must be awarded more charity than condemnation, the conservative Alfredo Cardinal Ottaviani muttered: “I pray to God that I may die before the end of the Council—in that way I can die a Catholic.”  His Catholicism was defined by its rejection of modernity.  His episcopal coat of arms bore the motto “Semper Idem (Always the same).”

Cardinal Ottaviani outlived the Council, and died a Catholic in a Church that was no longer the same.  It was John XXIII who died before the end of the Council—but not before he had thrown open the Church’s windows to let in modernity.

In “The Cat Painter,” God takes Rahal’s polychrome cat and laughs for joy.  Miral, confounded, protests that cats have never been painted so.  God replies: “You have always been free to color my creatures in ways other than how you were taught by those who came before you.  Many ages have I waited for a change such as this young angel has made.”

A year from now, on Oct. 9,  2012, we will mark the 50th anniversary of the start of Vatican II.  In his opening speech to the Council, John XXIII said: “Everything, even human differences, leads to the greater good of the Church.”  Catholicism since then has been in tension between those who paint in many colors and those who prefer the old color scheme. But it’s too late. The polychrome cat has come in through the open window.  I bet God is still laughing.

The Church has her grace moments, too.