As someone who clocked more time in mosh pits and at pro–choice rallies than kneeling in a pew, Kaya Oakes was not necessarily the kind of Catholic girl the Vatican was after. But even while she immersed herself in the punk rock scene and proudly called herself an atheist, something kept pulling her back to the religion of her Irish roots.After running away from the Church for thirty years, Kaya … years, Kaya decides to return. Her marriage is under stress, her job is no longer satisfying, and with multiple deaths in her family, a darkness looms large. In spite of her frustration with Catholic conservatism, nothing brings her peace like Mass. After years of searching to no avail for a better religious fit, she realizes that the only way to find harmony—in her faith and her personal life—is to confront the Church she’d left behind.
Rebellious and hypercritical, Kaya relearns the catechisms and achieves the sacraments, all while trying to reconcile her liberal beliefs with contemporary Church philosophy. Along the way she meets a group of feisty feminist nuns, a “pray–and–bitch” circle, an all–too handsome Italian priest, and a motley crew of misfits doing their best to find their voices in an outdated institution.
This is a story of transformation, not only of Kaya’s from ex–Catholic to amateur theologian, but ultimately of the cultural and ethical pushes for change that are rocking the world’s largest religion to its core.
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“I was born in 1971,” writes Oakes at the beginning of this memoir, “and thus am a child of a decade that began in radicalism and ended on the verge of Reaganomics.” And she was Catholic, “but the Catholic Church I grew up with,” she adds, “was not just about clunky tradition, it was about service to others, liberation theology, and the legacy of scholarship used to enlighten the present day.”
She found her struggles with religion unpopular among her friends, and, besides, “there’s something irresistibly sexy about unbelievers, since it requires such high self-esteem to reject the idea of God altogether.” Still, drawn irresistibly back to that memory of a Church that does the right thing in caring for the poor, the marginalized, the sick, Oakes began the adult catechism course that would culminate in her “confronting and trying to make peace with the Church I’d left behind.”
And so she takes readers on a tour of the Catholic Church through the eyes of an intelligent, politically aware woman, no easy task. And reading the book is no easy task, either—not because of Oakes’ style, which is light and amusing, but because ultimately one is left with the same unanswered questions one had at the beginning. If you’re looking for answers, for a neat fit between Roman Catholicism and feminism, then you won’t find them here. And perhaps, in a way, that’s the point.
As Oakes works her way through the adult class, with its weekly meetings and constant challenges, she begins to appreciate the depth of thought behind the activities that baffle believers and non-believers alike. Fasting for Lent? “The rigor of spiritual fasting has a long history in Catholicism,” she writes. “It’s supposed to sharpen your senses, thus make you more open to the ways in which the Spirit is sending you messages from God. It’s also a way of being in solidarity with the poor.”
This is the Church Oakes is coming back to and that she wants her readers to understand: a Church that at its core believes in doing the right thing, even tries to do the right thing, but has been pulled off the tracks by the institutionalization and corruption of power in its history—and is still struggling with equating that core and that history.
It is this institutionalized Church that brings her back to the basics of faith. “Since God doesn’t literally speak to ninety-nine point nine percent of us, we have to cling to anything resembling a sign: the conversation we have with a friend that leaves us with a feeling of being deeply and intimately understood; miraculous things in nature, like oceans and sunsets and mountains and other hippie-ish pleasures; or simply ordinary acts of grace. The problem is that most of us, myself included, are so busy and distracted and frankly annoyed by life that those signs whiz right by us and we miss almost every one.”
But the politics of the Church are the ultimate stumbling block for every thinking Catholic, and Oakes shares her problems with them. “I’m inexorably drawn back toward a Church that seems to understand women only as mothers or nuns,” she writes in distress. Does it ever get resolved? Of course not: there are no answers to some of the questions Oakes poses, and I found myself disappointed when she brought up difficult issues without explaining how she’s resolved them in her own mind.
What she does do is engage the reader in a great deal of intentional joy, and that alone is worth the read. “As adults, we seek communities of like-minded people. We find our families of choice. If the adult Christ found his own family of choice among the most despised and marginalized people in his society, to me that means that many of us, whether we grew up here or arrived seeking a tolerant community, should feel more of a kinship with him. We love one another more for being outcasts, and accompany one another. We are lights to one another.”