Interfaith Ignorance
Patrick Gray on Religious Illiteracy & Its Discontents
Davey Concepcion introduced me to the Roman Catholic Church in the summer of 1978. He doesn’t remember it, though, since he was busy at the time playing shortstop for the Cincinnati Reds, the “Big Red Machine” that dominated the National League in the 1970s and won the World Series in 1975 and 1976. Although he was overshadowed by future Hall of Fame teammates like Pete Rose, Johnny Bench, Joe Morgan, Tony Perez, and Tom Seaver, Concepcion became my favorite when my Little League coach gave me the job of starting shortstop when I was eight years old.
Each time I went to bat, I would make the sign of the cross—only I had no idea I was doing so. But Coach Duggar did.
“Son, what are you doing?”
“I’m doing what Davey Concepcion does when he goes up to the plate.”
“Are you Catholic?” he asked.
“No, sir,” I replied, wondering what religion had to do with baseball.
“Well, that’s what Catholics do.”
So I stopped making the sign of the cross. All I really knew about Catholics back then was that I wasn’t one. For me, the signum crucis pretty much summed up Catholicism: superstitious and ritualistic.
Two-Fold Ignorance
That was the first, but by no means the last, false impression I had of Catholicism. I would acquire many more in the years to come: Catholics worship Mary. They worship the pope. They think the pope is sinless. They advocate cannibalism (and believe they practice it on Sundays). In these and many other beliefs I was hardly alone.
Patrick Gray teaches in the Department of Religious Studies at Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee, where he lives with his wife and their two children.
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