Notes From The Underground: The Spiritual Journal of a Secular Priest by Donald Cozzens (review)

Right off, the spiritual journal of Father Donald Cozzens, priest of the Diocese of Cleveland, Ohio, is a rollercoaster ride, a cridecoeur, a now personal crisis which began in the 1980s and worsened with the ongoing revelations of secrecy, incompetence, and dishonesty of church authorities around the pedophilia crisis:

I came to feel, and soon came to think that I belonged to an underground church … disoriented, slightly out of place … and much of the time unsure of my identity as a priest.

Give or take five years, I am the same age and priestly vintage as Donald Cozzens. A younger set of priests calls us, or at least some of us, “Vatican II Priests,” as though we are relics of a curious state of misplaced enthusiasms.

Donald Cozzens’ story is my story. I can only wonder and hope whether this journal is also the story of many of our contemporaries in ministry because the brotherhood, as I experience it, is very reticent to express how uncomfortable we are. The author’s words can at least verbalize what many of us sense and feel. Thomas Merton says somewhere “I never wanted to be anything but a monk. But, if I had it to do all over again, I wouldn’t be a monk.” I believe this crisis which the authorities ignore is that desperate.

Cozzens holds on to faith so long as faith does not mean merely belief in the sense of subscribing to some (and often too many) teachings. Faith for Cozzens sounds more like trust, the confiance of Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, who in her later writings gave up words like belief and more and more called it confiance. And Thérèse is now a Doctor of the Church. Cozzens quotes Leo Tolstoy saying “Everything I know, I know only because I love.” Or Graham Greene, who said, “I don’t believe my unbelief.” Or William F. Lynch, S.J., who suggested that the virtue of faith is like that other theological virtue: “The greatest of these is love.” Lynch says that if faith, like love, has a body in the world, which of course it does, then we can speak of a wounded faith, or a suspended faith, or a partial faith. The authorities then should be gentle and kind, even loving if “the greatest of these is love.” Certainly the crusades for faith that resulted in inquisitions and trials by torture offended grievously against love. Cozzens comments:

Without denying the intense good we see in the church, I’m scandalized by its capacity for meanness – a meanness we’ve seen erupt lately in a number of Rome’s abrasive critiques and condemnations of her creative theologians, her faithful religious, and prophetic priests.

Jesus seemed to accept the plea of the man who responded to him: “Lord, I believe. Help thou my unbelief.”

And Cozzens, in his underground church, holds on to the expression of love that we call communion:

For more than two decades now I meet with a dozen or so friends for coffee and conversation. I’ve dubbed us “the coffeehouse theologians”.…. What we are about is serious conversation leading to blessed communion.

Father Cozzens thus reveals his personal history as a diocesan official, a seminary teacher, and rector. Since such Saturday morning gatherings would be difficult for the ordinary parish priest with his funerals and weddings.

I found Father Cozzens comforting and helpful in his chapter on prayer, something which can eventually become a dark tunnel. He recounts a short story by Miguel Unamuno, the Spanish writer famous for his A Tragic Sense of Life, the story of a son of an ailing woman who cannot pray for his mother because he does not believe in God. A priest tells the son, “That’s nonsense; you don’t have to believe in God to pray.” The priest might be in the good company...