LESSONS FROM THE GARDEN

 

Lessons from the Garden

Brad Miner

Monday, April 7, 2025

 

Then the Lord God formed man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being. (Genesis 2:7)

My journey into the Roman Catholic faith began in Rome a long time ago. I was a 20-year-old college student, in Europe for the first time in the summer of 1968. I took the overnight train from Paris, found a room in a small pensione, and began wandering.

At Ponte Sant’Angelo I crossed the Tiber. (As a Methodist kid from Ohio, I did not then know that expression of Catholic conversion.) I turned west to the Piazza Pia and shortly came to the Via della Conciliazione and glanced to the right to see St. Peter’s.

That was not the moment I decided to enter the Catholic Church, but I did enter the basilica. Inside, I turned right and saw Michelangelo’s Pietà. This was four years before a Hungarian kook named Laszlo Toth took a geologist’s hammer to the sculpture, specifically to Our Lady’s nose. I found the Pietà beautiful, luminously so. But I found the interior of the basilica overwhelming and, frankly, garish. After all, I was a Methodist.

Back home, I was in the middle of a two-year course on Western Civilization. In the previous spring, my professor – who considered me an otherwise clever student – called me into his office to gently chide me. I’d written in a term paper about the hanging and burning of Girolamo Savonarola by, as I called him, the “fornicating” Pope Alexander VI – father of at least seven children – and stating this was a typical expression of the intolerance and hypocrisy of the Roman Catholic Church. “However,” I added, “it would make a great movie.”

Professor Gifford Doxsee, an Episcopalian, suggested that were I to dig just a little deeper into Catholic history I might find my accusations of intolerance and hypocrisy were projections of my own youthful rigidity and shallow intellectualism. He smiled.

“After all,” he said, “we’re all sinners.”

The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to till it and keep it. (Genesis 2:15)

In an office meeting in the next academic year, he asked me what I was reading besides European history. “Lately, just this,” I said and reached into my book bag to show him a library copy of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, the novel based upon the author’s internment in a German POW camp during World War II.

“Do you know the book?” I asked.

Dr. Doxsee said: “Yes. And the author.”

“Personally?” I asked.

“Intimately,” he said. For he too had been an inmate at Schlachthaus fünf.

Es geht los – especially in the education of one’s character. So it goes.

Doxsee and Vonnegut were held at Stammlager IVB and were in Dresden when the Allies carpet-bombed the city.

 

Angel with the Fiery Sword by Henry Wolff, 1893 [Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, MA]

 

By 1973, I’d read enough and seen enough (and failed enough and suffered enough) to have overcome prejudice against the Church – in part because I’d also shed roseate illusions about mankind’s innate goodness (we really are all sinners). And quite suddenly (or so it seemed to me but wasn’t really), I did cross the Tiber at the age of 25.

And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, “You may freely eat of every tree of the garden; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die.” (Genesis 2:16-17)

Paul VI was pope in 1973, and he seemed to me an austere and mysterious figure.

As I say, I had been a Methodist – but I was functionally a pagan from my late teens and into my early twenties. I shouldn’t dignify it so, but it was a “belief system” hard to cast off, this jumble of selfishness, syncretism, and sexuality.

That began to change after I read Humanae Vitae, published five years earlier on July 25, 1968 (while I was in Rome, in fact).

I never imagined then that half a century later the Church would begin to consider scuttling the wisdom of that great encyclical. Those theological liberals who rent their garments after Humanae Vitae dashed their fever dreams have lived to fight another day.

They won’t completely win, I suspect – recent comments from the Vatican to the German synodalists may be some indication of that. But just as the move to versus populum from ad orientem, the elimination of altar rails, and the adoption of the vernacular Mass – all permitted but never mandated after Vatican II – became rigid, de facto practices, the synodal palaver will likely filter down, especially in the confessional, to make moot the genius of Humanae Vitae.

There is so much power in that encyclical, not least this:

The Church, in fact, cannot act differently toward men than did the Redeemer. She knows their weaknesses, she has compassion on the multitude, she welcomes sinners. But at the same time she cannot do otherwise than teach the law. For it is in fact the law of human life restored to its native truth and guided by the Spirit of God.

He drove out the man; and at the east of the garden of Eden he placed the cherubim, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to guard the way to the tree of life. (Genesis 3:24)

From the Synod on Synodality (and now the “Ecclesial Assembly”), we’ve heard frequent references to guidance by the Spirit of God, which is blasphemy.

Too strong? No. To assert that the Holy Spirit has come to overturn God’s Word is a clear case of evil-speaking.

And even as a tactical matter, such reforms – offering same-sex blessings and allowing divorced couples who remarry without annulment to receive the Eucharist – will not bring former or prospective Catholics into the Church any more than guitars and dances and clowns did. Quite the opposite: the ardor of faithful Catholics will chill; interest in the Church among potential converts will evaporate.

I sometimes wonder what I got myself into.

https://www.thecatholicthing.org/2025/04/07/lessons-from-the-garden/