“This is not a book “about” Hans Urs von Balthasar, Dorothy Day, Peter Maurin, or the Catholic Worker movement in general. This is a book inspired by them and formed within the thought-world that they have created within me. But to understand why it is that these particular thinkers have had such an influence upon me, and why therefore in my old age I have decided to commit myself to penning this “confession of faith”, you need to understand how I got to where I am now. I do not wish to bore my readers with the details of my life, especially since I tend to despise such narcissistic, therapeutic public displays; but it is my conviction that it is the sheer normalcy of my own life as a quintessentially American tale of spiritual boredom that will also, and for that reason, have resonance with a lot of others who have shared a similar “ordinary” autobiography.

And since I think this is so, I do not think it pretentious of me to develop this “confession” of mine for public consumption since I think it will find an audience of the like-minded who might find it helpful.

So as in most things it is best to begin at the beginning. When I was a young man, my own upbringing was quintessentially postwar American: suburban, middle class, patriotic, and Midwestern. I attended decent, but not great, public schools and received a better-than-most catechetical formation for that era at my local Catholic Church. Lincoln, Nebraska (my hometown), had been preserved from the worst of the post–Vatican II insanities, and therefore my experience of Catholicism was a rather ordinary affair of Sunday Mass attendance and sacramental preparation. And when I got confirmed in the fourth grade (why so early I cannot recall), all catechetical formation ceased.

And I was quite happy about that since as I grew older I found “religion” to be a dreadful bore and saw in none of the catechesis I had gotten anything that rose, even remotely, to the level of something “interesting”. I was a nerdy little Munchkin of a kid—bookish, gangly, and obsessed with science—and could most often be found in my underground lair (my basement bedroom) reading books on evolution and astronomy, while listening to my Monty Python albums. I became convinced at about the age of twelve that God, even if he existed, was some distant entity that you would meet when you died so long as you had been “a good person” in this life, and that all of the religions of the world were equally adept at making us into such good persons. But since you could also be a good person without being religious, I just did not see much point to religion at all. And after all, don’t religions cause wars and wasn’t Hitler Catholic . . . or something?

I did like meatless Fridays since for my family that meant eating shrimp instead of beef or chicken, which was a delightful step-up in culinary enjoyment. Heck, I even liked fish sticks so long as they were drenched in cocktail sauce (still do, actually).

Hear Larry Chapp in a Catholic Answers interview on all things Catholic Worker

But on the whole, religion for me was just a monumentally drab affair of silly men in colorful costumes talking about ancient miracles that most likely had never happened, distributing little tasteless wafers of bread that looked like poker chips, after a boring ritual that was nothing more to me than something to endure before hitting the post-Mass breakfast at Perkins.

I loved praying the Agnus Dei at Mass but only because it was the telltale signal that the entire affair was fixin’ to wrap up and bacon and Belgian waffles were soon to follow. It is kind of the same feeling one gets at the end of Beethoven’s ninth when you know the fat tenor has sung his last “Tochter aus Elysium” and the rousing ending is soon to follow.

But the words of the Mass were no Schiller to me, and the hippie lady who smelled of jasmine and cigarettes directing the folk group was no Beethoven. And don’t get me started on the homilies. Mein Gott in Himmel, they were awful. Almost all of them could be summarized as follows: “It is nice to be nice to the nice.”

I sometimes also refer to this type of preaching as “lettuce homilies”, as in, “Let us go forth and love our neighbor”, which, in the context of all that preceded it in the homily, really meant nothing more than I learned from my second grade teacher concerning lunch-line etiquette. This was the infamous beige Catholicism of bourgeois—spiritual rice cakes that challenged nothing, said nothing, and stood for nothing beyond the culturally obvious.

And it was all shot through with a “don’t rock the boat” ethos lest the envelopes start to disappear from the collection basket. After all, somebody needed to pay for all of those Catholic schools that churned out future lapsed Catholics by the millions.

What is the point to this sarcastic trip down memory lane? The point is that despite some of the idiosyncratic oddities of my own personality and history, there is an all too typical and, I think, paradigmatic script embedded in that narrative. And by “script” I do not mean a superficial set of intellectual ideas that are a mere gloss on our deeper, truer selves. Rather, I mean this is how we think most aboriginally and it is what defines for us what is truly real.

And once I rediscovered the beauty and the depth of my Catholic faith (through reading G. K. Chesterton and John Cardinal Newman, mainly), I decided to commit my entire life to the living out of a counterscript to the script given to me by my suburban American cul-de-sac culture of spiritual indifference.” — from “Confession of a Catholic Worker: Our Moment of Christian Witness” by Larry Chapp –