In a conversation several months before his death, my father abruptly told me, “I’ve been praying the Rosary every morning on my way into the office.” He said it in his brusque, matter-of-fact, even challenging manner. I was stunned—not that he would pray the Rosary but that he would speak about his prayer life at all. That was not his way. Wanting to encourage him in this good practice, I stammered some brilliant priestly counsel: “That’s great, Dad.” “Yeah?” he shot back. “Do you think it does any damn good?” I pointed out the theological truth that, no, with that attitude it probably doesn’t. He laughed, our conversation moved on, and that brief glimpse of his devotion was gone. His point was made, and so was mine.
My father’s answer should not be taken as an expression of doubt about the power of prayer, though he shared a frustration common to all believers: he struggled to understand why God did not seem to answer prayers in a timely manner, or sometimes at all. His abruptness and deflection came from a different place, from a discomfort and reticence in speaking about his prayer life. As much as Dad spoke about the Catholic faith, often publicly, he rarely spoke about his personal faith. Today’s emphasis on giving a personal witness or speaking about one’s faith journey would have been foreign to him. As far as he was concerned, what mattered was not his faith but The Faith.
For years I have heard my father referred to as a “devout” Catholic. I always wince at that word, which typically describes one who comes easily to his religious practice, prays peacefully, and speaks naturally about his faith. That wasn’t my father. He was indeed a man of faith and, in his own way, devout. But like everything else in his life, faith had something of an argument and contest about it. After all, this was the man who, when asked by reporters about how he responds to those who question his public practice of faith, made a dismissive (misinterpreted by some as obscene) Italian gesture on his way out of Mass.
My father was devout in his own rough-and-tumble manner. He practiced the faith, but he didn’t think his own example worth imitating or his own spiritual life worth speaking about. He believed what the Church taught, treasured the Mass, confessed his sins, and attended retreats. But grace before meals was always a quick-run thing, the drive to Sunday Mass was helter-skelter, and his opinion about music and sermons (never “homilies”) was unvarnished.
He would call fairly regularly to ask me to offer Mass for an ill or deceased friend of his. The first of many exchanges was indicative:
DAD: “Don Paolo, I want to buy a Mass.”
ME: [sigh] “Dad, you can’t buy a Mass.”
DAD: [exasperated] “I know that! But…well, you know what I mean! I want you to say a Mass for someone!”
On future calls he would deliberately ask to “buy a Mass”—to keep the joke going and, no doubt, to get under my skin. His asking to have Masses offered was certainly devout…but not in the usual sense.
Over the years we did catch occasional glimpses of a piety that his gruff, contrarian exterior typically concealed. On one occasion he told me about a powerful experience from his childhood. While at Boy Scout camp, he rose early one morning for Mass. He arrived at the chapel to find no one else there except the priest and the altar boy. That was, he explained, when the Mass started to take hold of him. He was struck that the Mass was of such importance that the priest would offer it even if no one else came.
On another occasion, one weekday afternoon, he loaded all of us (however many were at home) into the van and drove us to the local parish to pray for a dying friend. The trip stands out in my mind precisely because it was so unusual. Church was for Sundays and holy days of obligation, not random weekday afternoons. Although most details of that brief visit escape me, I do remember him kneeling in prayer, and in tears. Another moment that comes to mind is when he walked my sister Mary and me through Saint Ignatius of Loyola’s demanding prayer of abandonment, the Suscipe. He spoke passionately about how much he liked it and yet how difficult he found it to pray.
That is what we witnessed growing up. Dad was a Catholic living a dogged fidelity to the Church’s teachings and Sacraments. He did so, imperfectly but perseveringly. He practiced the faith, but he didn’t think his own example worth imitating or his own spiritual life worth speaking about. One time, after my brothers and I had been irreverent at Mass, he gave us a well-deserved scolding. It was not a personal reflection on what the Eucharist meant to him in his faith journey, but a firm and heartfelt lecture on what the Mass is.
When I was appointed pastor of my family’s old parish, I was blessed to have him attend Mass there regularly. Of course, I see the blessing only in retrospect. He could be demanding. He desired clear and faithful sermons, good music, and Latin properly pronounced. And he was not shy in letting a priest know when one of these was lacking. In fact, the summer before my ordination to the priesthood, I had jokingly informed him that he would not be allowed to attend my Masses for precisely this reason. He was shocked by my ban and blurted out: “But…but I want to kibitz!”
Years later, and despite my prohibition, there he was every Sunday. And it was a blessing. Yes, he was free with his suggestions about what I could do differently. And on more than one occasion he generously shared his unsolicited thoughts on discipline with the parents of unruly children. But these things were in the background. The blessing that emerged was to observe his devotion in a different way—no longer as a boy, but as a grown man and as a priest.
He still had the old Latin hand missal that he had always brought to Mass. Such a book was standard years ago. It contained the readings and prayers for Mass in Latin and English, side by side, and other devotional prayers. His was well worn. He had bought his copy in 1960, the year he married my mother. The page ribbons had long since broken off. Holy cards from fifty years of funerals, retreats, and anniversaries served as bookmarks. The missal had lost much of its usefulness when the Mass was changed in 1970, but he still knew how to make the most of it. He knew exactly where to find his favorite prayers and readings.
In 2007, the Traditional Latin Mass (or “Extraordinary Form,” as it is officially termed) became more widely available in the Catholic Church. Suddenly that old missal had a new lease on life, as Dad typically came to the Traditional Latin Mass. It was the Mass of his childhood, youth, and first years of marriage. At that Mass the faithful kneel at the Communion rail to receive Holy Communion. As they kneel, the priest walks along the rail and places the Host on their tongues. There is something wonderfully democratic about the Communion rail. It is no respecter of persons and reveals the fundamental equality of all God’s children. Everyone must adopt the same humble posture of kneeling. At the Communion rail the great variety of Christ’s faithful—rich and poor, learned and ignorant, old and young—kneel side by side, with no regard for their differences. The priest often encounters people shoulder to shoulder who would never otherwise be found together. So it was that I frequently found my powerful father—a “Supreme Justice,” as he liked to joke—kneeling next to, well, anyone. Perhaps the little girl who just made her First Communion, or the harried mother of a large family, or the out-of-work father, or the clerk from the grocery store. In short, next to ordinary people who neither knew nor cared about his important office. Dad appreciated that in the Church it didn’t matter how much he had accomplished or attained. As a Catholic he knelt for the Lord, like all the rest.
“Here comes everybody” was James Joyce’s description of the Catholic Church. Wrong about many things, he got this one right. That the Church is catholic means that she is universal; that she draws all kinds of people, and for all kinds of reasons. One person is drawn by the Church’s social doctrine and service of the poor, another by her missionary zeal. For one it is her liturgy, for another her moral teachings. For my father, it was the integrity and clarity of the Church’s teachings.
Catholicism requires the investment of the entire person. It engages not just the will and the passions, but also the intellect. “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind” (Matthew 22:37). We are to be “transformed by the renewal of the mind” (Romans 12:2). In practice, however, many believers have accepted a false dichotomy between faith and reason. Because the truths of faith are beyond the mind’s ability to grasp fully—hence the Catholic Church calls them “mysteries”—people consider them disconnected from or even opposed to human reason. In many churches, faith has become the realm of feelings; thought is checked at the door. This quickly makes liturgy mere sentimentality and doctrine a matter of opinion. One of my greatest frustrations as a priest is not that people ask questions, but that they do not ask more of them. It is astounding how otherwise intelligent people willingly suspend their minds in matters of faith.
My father made no such division between faith and reason. He understood that the act of faith does not mean the end of thought. His library (which I had been plundering for years) reflected this. It was full of authors who combined genuine piety and clear thinking: Augustine, Aquinas, Newman, Belloc, Chesterton, Lewis, etc. I remember one Lent speaking with him about Cardinal John Henry Newman’s discourse The Mental Sufferings of Our Lord in His Passion. He loved the way Newman united the exercise of the mind with the devotion of the heart. The two were not opposed but meant to complement each other.
My father expected the same intellectual honesty and clarity from the Church’s pastors. A priest did not have to preach with the intellectual depth of Cardinal Newman, but he should at least speak with reverence for and confidence in the Church’s teachings. Suspension of thought in favor of religious platitudes was bad. Lazy reasoning that deformed doctrine was worse. There was one stock homily phrase that always merited particular condemnation: “In a special way…” Those words, in Dad’s estimation, signaled either fuzzy thinking or just plain sentimentality—neither of which was acceptable. We were all on the alert for that phrase from the pulpit and grinned knowingly when it came.
At the same time, his insistence on clear thinking did not lead him to intellectualize religious practice. Dad understood that salvation comes through faith, not through thought. He defended simple, seemingly naive faith against an intellectual elitism. Indeed, he delighted in coming to the defense of those believers the Washington Post once called “largely poor, uneducated, and easy to command.” His famous “Not to the Wise” speech was one such example, as was his mischievous baiting of an incredulous New York Magazine reporter with talk about Satan: “I even believe in the Devil….Of course! Yeah, he’s a real person. Hey, c’mon, that’s standard Catholic doctrine! Every Catholic believes that….If you are faithful to Catholic dogma, that is certainly a large part of it.”
Dad was devout according to both faith and reason. He liked to “kibitz” about the faith. Many times he came up to me after Mass, excited about some particular phrasing of a prayer or translation of a passage, jabbing his finger at the relevant text in his missal, wanting to discuss its meaning. Just moments before he had been kneeling in his pew after receiving Holy Communion, recollecting himself, giving thanks to God, and thumbing through that same missal for the perfect prayer of faith.
Dad also treasured the Church’s beauty. Some years ago, then-Cardinal Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI) observed that one of the most convincing demonstrations of the Catholic Church’s truth is “the beauty that the faith has generated.” That statement by a man of such intellectual standing might surprise us because we tend to associate beauty with feelings and not with truth. Dad would have understood it immediately. He was a cultured man and appreciated beauty at the opera, at the symphony, and in museums. But he appreciated the Church’s patrimony of beauty—her architecture, sculptures, paintings, and music—not only as an aesthetic phenomenon, but as an expression of her truth. He understood that truth and beauty are two different but complementary ways of expressing the Catholic faith. This is one reason he was drawn to the Traditional Latin Mass. He found that the beauty of its ancient rituals, chants, and prayers provided a particularly strong expression of the Church’s faith.
When I was ordained a priest in 1996, Dad had been on the Court for a decade. By that time, he had become a coveted speaker for Catholic and other religious groups throughout the country. Although he abhorred the idea of his being a “Catholic jurist” or that there was a peculiarly Catholic way of reading the Constitution, he gladly spoke about faith and its importance in our nation’s life. As he told me the summer of my ordination, he considered his giving such speeches to be an apostolate, an opportunity to build up others in faith.
My father understood that because of his position he had an opportunity to encourage others by his own religious practice and candid words about faith. He saw this witness as a responsibility not only as a Catholic but also as an American. Over the past fifty years our culture has privatized religion, sidelined it from public life. This segregation takes a toll on the believer, making him feel like a misfit in his own nation. More importantly for my father, the privatization of religion is out of keeping with our nation’s founding and strongest traditions. Dad knew and appreciated our nation’s historical dependence on a religious citizenry. He wanted to do his part to encourage believers.
Only after his death did I learn how right he was. I was overwhelmed by the number of people—from all religions, from all over the world—who expressed thanks for his witness to faith in the public square. That a man of such stature and intellectual caliber would present himself also as a believer moved them to take their faith more seriously and live it more boldly. It was a great consolation to learn that his faith, which had always guided and inspired me, had also helped many others. Dad was unapologetically Catholic. But his open witness to the Catholic faith inspired believers of every kind.
Father Scalia is a priest of the Diocese of Arlington, Virginia, where he serves as Episcopal Vicar for Clergy.