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The Perils of Baptism

APRIL 23, 1985

 

Toward the end of last week Lew Lehrman called a few friends appropriate to the message he had in mind to give them. He quietly communicated the most solemn decision any man can communicate: specifically, in the case of Lewis Lehrman, that on the following Sunday, at three in the afternoon, at St. Thomas More Church, he would be baptized into a different religious communion from that of his ancestors. Lew Lehrman, who in 1982 came within a few votes of becoming governor of the state of New York, and who campaigned unabashedly as a Jewish conservative, had decided to join the Catholic Church.

It is one thing for the private man to convert to Catholicism, or for that matter to Judaism. Another for the public man—in the case of Lehrman we deal with someone widely accepted as more, merely, than just any other office seeker. He is a magnetic field: brainy, wealthy, resourceful, determined. He has even been spoken of as a presidential candidate down the line.

All this may be dismissed as wild speculation. What can’t be dismissed as political opportunism is his decision to become a Christian, indeed, a Catholic. For all the latitudinarianism of Vatican II, a Jew becoming a Catholic is on the order of a Christian becoming an Orthodox Jew.

The noisiest voice in town, following Lehrman’s quiet conversion, was that of Jimmy Breslin. Never mind that Lehrman made no public announcement, nor reported his decision to anyone likely to turn his confidence into a news story. Breslin, in the Daily News, began a long, ornate account of the development by writing, “Lewis Lehrman, the politician, went out and changed his religion from Jewish to Roman Catholic and then announced it in all the political stories.” Lehrman did no such thing, of course. When newspapermen called (dutifully) to check the rumor that he had poped, Lehrman confirmed that he had become a Catholic, and went on to say that such decisions are private, and please would the reporter ask him about the deficit, or about the takeover bid on CBS, or about the Mets?

Breslin went on with several long paragraphs about adolescent sex, the Catholic confessional, Breslin’s autobiographical difficulties in growing up according to the Catholic code while all the time a sinner, etc., etc.—and well along the way the reader was reminded of the critic who wrote a few years back that, “Sometimes, on reading Goethe, one has a paralyzing suspicion that he thinks he is being funny.” Breslin was as funny as the jokester who yuks about Jewish circumcisions or Baptists’ immersions. But he intended political harm (Jimmy is an ardent Democrat), and so after all the boilerplate business of Breslin as a sixteen-year-old who petted a girl and had apocalyptic thoughts about heaven and hell, he concluded his article:

“The outcry here [i.e., in Breslin’s world], then, is not about Lehrman using a change of religion as if it is a change of voting addresses.... Politicians are allowed to do this sort of thing because most of them are either crazy or dishonest. My anger, however, is directed at the notion that a person can escape the anguish of being a young Catholic and then get all the benefits of being an old Catholic when, as a member of the true faith, you can get to heaven and these others can’t.”

That passage is as freighted with ignorance as any even Breslin could contrive. Suffice to say that it is not a Catholic position that heaven is only for Catholics (for preaching that doctrine, the Reverend Leonard Feeney of Boston was all but excommunicated in 1953), and the notion that a conservative Jew can multiply his votes by becoming a Christian is politically superficial. Lehrman’s Jewish vote in 1982 was not large, and what there was of it came largely from conservative, Orthodox Jews, who would be most affronted—most hurt would be a better expression—by what they must deem apostasy. What saddens is the callousness of secular commentary, which supposes that any decision, if reached by a man of public affairs, is dictated by political considerations.

Breslin, if he had been around, would have commented that in going to Mt. Sinai, Moses was after good ink; and that Paul, on the road to Damascus, figured he was safely past puberty. There can’t be any higher price our public men pay than that of exposure to the cynics and the Philistines, who for reasons not readily explained cannot understand what it is that happens to people, even public people, when they believe they have heard the voice of God.