CHAPTER ONE
OUTSIDE IN TO INSIDE OUT
What is here being initiated is not an academic enquiry; the point of interest is an “existential” one. Christianity originally proclaimed itself as a way of life; Catholicism, in particular, has developed, schematically at least, as an all-embracing philosophy. How real is that “way,” how vital is that “philosophy,” to the average man and woman, even among the Church’s adherents, today? How adequate to humanity’s needs, physical, mental, moral, and spiritual, is the Catholic message as it now presents itself?
The simplest and most obvious answer to these questions is that nobody knows. There is plenty of evidence to show that, besides persuading vast numbers of the faithful to attend Sunday, and even weekday, Mass, Catholicism at one level is succeeding impressively. Those who derive satisfaction, or advantage, from church-sponsored variants of rotarian “togetherness” are provided for. Such requirements are easily met. But what of the others? Or, rather, what of all of us—including, indeed especially they, the gregarious ones—when we are alone, quietly, if it ever can be quietly, by ourselves? Kierkegaard, though a decided oddity, observed truly that to be linked emotionally with “the crowd” is to be involved in unreality. “The larger the crowd, the more probable that that which it praises is folly, and the more improbable that it is truth, and the most improbable of all that it is any eternal truth.” But whether we are alone or with the crowd, a relevant question remains—how satisfying an insight into the problems that burden most of us do we derive from our understanding of Catholicism?
At the normal level of consciousness we are at a loss to account for our depressions. Yet how overwhelming, for many, the anxiety can be: the sense of foreboding and frustration, the feelings of insecurity that dog the lives of thousands, which bring them in their extremity to the psychiatric clinic or mental home, or, beyond a given point of desperation, to suicide. Many, perhaps most, of th
