Book Review
Ridiculous Prodigal
Radical Reinvention: An Unlikely Return to the Roman Catholic Church
by Kaya Oakes
Counterpoint, 2014
(256 pages, $15.95, paperback)
How and why and when stragglers slog their solitary path to the Church of Rome is a fascinating topic. Some, like me, become convinced of the validity of the ecclesial claims Rome asserts. Others come in following a traumatic life event. Still others turn up at a parish church because of a genuine curiosity as to just what goes on inside those doors. Fortunately, the Church is immense, capacious enough to handle all who come, whoever they are and whatever their motive. Kaya Oakes is a middle-aged Californian who teaches writing courses at the University of California at Berkeley. Radical Reinvention: An Unlikely Return to the Roman Catholic Church is her conversion story.
Raised in a Catholic home by a devout but troubled father, Kaya spent her hippie years denying, even despising, the Church. She tried many contemporary "isms"—feminism, environmentalism, vegetarianism—those sirens that offer ersatz religion, but none proved able to fill the God-shaped hole in her heart.
Nor was she attracted to the Catholic Church. She writes: "With the election of Pope Benedict XVI in 2005, the Vatican became even more vocal about the so-called evils of birth control and abortion, and as a lifelong feminist who had depended on Planned Parenthood for medical care in my pre-insurgency years, this was an obvious problem." She further denigrates Pope Benedict for allegedly making church teaching repulsive to people of her generation; neither before nor after her entry into the Church does she display even a facile understanding of what church doctrine is or how it came to be. Even Pope Benedict's slight improvements to the Novus Ordo Mass she condemns as "sounding like shit."
Guts over Dogma
Nevertheless, Kaya Oakes decided that she wanted to become a Catholic. "Would the Church ever have any hope of changing if people like me bailed on it?" she asks. So she duly entered an RCIA (Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults) program. At her church, the priest prays regularly for women priests, and the RCIA program there confirmed rather than challenged her (shall we be polite and say heterodox) views. As she puts it: "Screw the dogma, I figured. I'm Catholic in my guts. Let's just deal with that."
The local priest finds her a sponsor, another middle-aged woman whose first question to Kaya is, "Why would a modern woman want to be a Catholic?" but then allows that "the Church can do some good in spite of its egregious flaws." And so these two women, utterly secure in the conviction that their knowledge exceeds two thousand years of church teaching, make their way toward the Easter vigil. Oakes chooses Mary Magdalene as her patron saint (the sources she cites for her understanding of Mary Magdalene include the Hollywood movie The Last Temptation of Christ and Dan Brown's novels), and sure enough, at Easter Ms. Oakes becomes a member of Christ's holy, catholic, and apostolic Church. Immediately after being received, she goes to the Catholic cemetery where her father is buried and commiserates with the man who "foisted a love of this ridiculous church on me."
After being received, she finds her life changing; she helps cook meals for the homeless and becomes a volunteer at a women's shelter. She experiments with the Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius and discovers a sense of personal intimacy with God. She reports, however, that meanwhile, "every week, some ridiculous new edict erupts from the Vatican. Bishops are told not to report abuse cases to the police. Gay men are banned from entering the seminary. Vasectomies are declared 'intrinsically evil.'"
Of course, not a syllable of this is true, but Ms. Oakes is too ill-informed to distinguish truth from nonsense—and she is quick to discover that there is a ready market for her rantings in an unnamed "Catholic web magazine." There her views are said to be welcomed by "alienated Catholics, wandering Catholics, Catholics whose faith was lost and found"—in other words, "Catholics" (and I use quotation marks advisedly) just like her. And she finds herself in demand as a speaker at churches and women's groups.
Life in the "Foreign Environment"
Ian Hunter is Professor Emeritus in the Faculty of Law at the University of Western Ontario. He is the author of biographies of Robert Burns, Hesketh Pearson, and Malcolm Muggeridge.
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