The Road Less Traveled

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I -
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference

- Robert Frost, The Road Not Taken

Of all God's creature, none is a better tactician or a more skillful manipulator than Satan. He employs many tricks to keep us in the dark and turn us away from the truth. It is no coincidence that, as mentioned in a previous post, noted Marxist and crowd manipulation specialist Saul Alinsky acknowledged Lucifer as "the first rebel," the first to employ the very techniques so skillfully employed by modern-day enemies of truth to brainwash or coerce others into adopting their points of view. Lucifer is, after all, the origin of such techniques; Alinsky concedes as much through that acknowledgement (whether this was a deliberate concession on Alinsky's part is a question I will not presume to answer, preferring instead to leave the matter between Alinsky and the God he so brazenly defied in life).

Such manipulation techniques are a staple among so-called "Catholic progressive" organizations such as Call to Action, Voice of the Faithful, the ARCC, SIECUS, CORPUS, FutureChurch, and JustFaith, just to name a few. It happens on the national, diocesan, and parish level, and is employed most effectively in areas where Catholics are poorly catechized (largely owing to decades of watered-down catechesis foisted upon an unsuspecting public by members of these very same groups) and where bishops and pastors lack either the desire or the moral courage (or both!) to use their authority to counter these spiritually corrosive influences.

Despite this prevalent and highly disturbing trend of individuals with decidedly un-Catholic ideas trying to reshape the Church from within, the silver lining is that, no matter how skilled at deception and manipulation the evil one is, he can never get the better of the One who created him. I imagine it is no small source of rage for Satan that his tricks often backfire. Hard as it is to imagine, it does occasionally happen that the actions of heretics drive poorly-formed Catholics deeper into the heart of the Church rather than away from it. I should know, since this is exactly what happened to me.

Before I go any further, I want to make a couple of things clear: first, I do not imagine myself to be some great Hammer of Heretics (St. Anthony assumed that role far more humbly and more capably than I could ever hope to do). I know God has a purpose for my life, and I believe the events I will summarize below will play a great part in helping me fulfill that role. However, I do not imagine my role to be more important than the role anyone else has played or will play in God's design. And I certainly don't envision my actions having the far-reaching effects that the actions of the Saints have had. If it does happen, I pray that I not know it in this lifetime, lest I succumb to the sin of pride in the process. I must always be aware of the fact that all things are from and through God, and that all things must be for His greater glory.

The second thing is this: the path that led me deeper into the heart of the Church is not a commonly traveled one, nor is it one that I recommend anyone else follow. I started down this path in ignorance, and it was only by the grace of God that the obstacles along this path did not consume me. It was the will of God that I see firsthand the things that I saw. Such may or may not be the will that He has for any of you. If it is, I pray that you are in a better position than I was to be able to sort fact from fiction.

Those who know me personally and have had the opportunity to speak with me at length already know most of this story. Some of you actually shared in these experiences.

I graduated from high school in 1995. I enrolled at the University of Florida that fall. When I first came to UF, I essentially came alone. I had a cousin who lived in town, but he and I led very different lives and our paths did not cross very often (actually, I went with him to a fraternity party the first night I was in Gainesville. It was the first and last frat party I ever attended; but that is a story for another time). Likewise, I only had a handful of high school classmates come to UF with me; and I didn't cross paths with them either (there was one person who graduated the year before me that I spent some time with, but she traveled in very different circles, and I won't elaborate beyond that). Gainesville did not feel like home to me that first year, and I found myself doing the 75 mile trip back home to Jacksonville every weekend.

Life during the week was rough. I would meet different classmates, have lunch with them, even occasionally go to the movies with them. I joined the College Bowl team (yes, I'm a geek, a fact that should have been made painfully obvious by now) and had the chance to spend time with people there. Some of the people I knew on the same floor of my dorm seemed nice as well. Despite all of this, there really weren't any people in the bunch that I had a great deal in common with. I felt incredibly isolated and alone, and this feeling began to increase inside of me until it reached a boiling point a few weeks into the start of the spring semester, 1996. I was in Jacksonville, and was set to go back to Gainesville the next morning; and I was dreading it something fierce. I remember it was Super Bowl Sunday, because we were watching the game on TV (a game not fondly remembered by Steelers fans, if memory serves). Long story short, I was with family, and I started to think about the fact that I was leaving home again to go back to what was at the time the most depressing place on earth to me; and I started to cry. I resolved that week that I would have to do something in Gainesville to not feel so desolate while there. That something, as it turns out, was attending daily Mass at the Catholic Student Center. From the time I arrived in Gainesville to the time I first set foot inside St. Augustine's was about six months. Within a week, one of the associate pastors had signed me up for the ALPHA retreat, which I attended about a month later. And thus began in earnest what was a tug of war for my soul.

Here, in a nutshell, was my dilemma; and like so many others who have faced this particular dilemma, I was not aware at the time that it was a dilemma: I was a poorly catechized Catholic in an emotionally needy state. Far too often, that particular combination is a recipe for disaster. This is especially true in a place like St. Augustine's, which does a great job of fostering a sense of community and making people feel like they belong (provided, of course, that they don't "stir the pot"; but I'll get to that in a moment). It didn't matter what kind of ideology was being promoted at the parish, because a) I was too ignorant about my own faith to notice and b) I was too wrapped up in the fact that I had found people who genuinely wanted to be around me to really care.

Emotionally needy people are especially ripe for the picking at St. Augustine's. I remember having a deep desire to want to be accepted by others, and this made me particularly eager to please the established leadership at the parish. Prominent among the people I wanted to impress was the then campus minister, who also happened to run the ALPHA retreats. He was also (and still is) actively involved in Pax Christi and the Catholic Worker movement, and has been a militant advocate of Marxist ideology and liberation theology for most of his adult life. I was involved with just about all the young adult activities at St. A's: the ALPHA retreats (I was on the team 7 times), Newman Club (I served as VP in 1998), CSF (I was involved with the group almost from the time of its inception in 1996, and was part of the group's leadership from 1999 through the end of 2001, which factors heavily into this story), and the ministry formation program. I spent more time at the parish than I did in class (as a testament to how messed up my priorities were at the time, I went from being a high school valedictorian to losing all of my merit-based scholarships and barely avoiding academic probation at UF because I rarely showed up for class); and over the next few years I became a very recognizable face in the parish.

One of the saving graces I had during this time was the presence of a small circle of friends who were far more knowledgeable about their faith than I was, and they would occasionally express frustration at the way things were being done at St. A's. This would prompt me to ask them why they were frustrated. I didn't understand their responses at the time, but as it turned out they were planting seeds that would come to fruition later. What was also important was the fact that they were not forcibly trying to win me over to their point of view. They trusted me to arrive at the truth on my own, which I think was ill-advised given my stubborn streak. Thankfully, it turned out for the best.

I also possessed a socially conservative philosophy throughout this time. I couldn't tell you the first things about why homosexuality was wrong, but there was something about the lifestyle I always found unsettling; and discovering something of a homosexual subculture at the parish was a bit of a shock to me. I also knew that abortion was wrong, though I wasn't especially keen on challenging others on their views about the issue. I had a more permissive attitude about pre-marital sex, largely because I didn't know any better. Not surprisingly, I saw nothing wrong with contraception until I began to read the Church's viewpoint on the matter. Seeing that the values espoused at the parish differed so much from my own was a contributing factor to my eventual "awakening" to what was going on around me.

There were other things, too. The lack of ministries in the parish dedicated to promoting an interior life of prayer and devotion seemed odd to me, as did the lack of Eucharistic adoration and Marian devotion (the explanations given by the priests and parish staff for why this was the case always seemed flimsy to me, but I always dismissed any reservations I had on the grounds that they knew what they were talking about). I remember one day I was looking for a copy of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, only to find that there were no copies present (years later, I would put copies in the library only to see them disappear within a week or so - longer if I did a good job of hiding them, which kind of defeated the whole purpose of putting them there in the first place). After hours of searching, I asked one of the assistant liturgical directors if she had a copy I could borrow. She did, and let me borrow it. I assured her I would return it by the end of the day. Her response: "Take your time. I never use it."

Slowly, doubts began to form in my mind; but since I was still unfamiliar with the concept of dissent, I could not piece the whole puzzle together. Then I began reading books from the parish library by the notoriously heterodox Fr. Richard McBrien. Sensing that there was something wrong in what I was reading, I began to do some research about the man on the Internet. Within a few days, I knew more about dissent than I ever wanted to know.

Then there was the day I sat down with the aforementioned campus minister and director of the ALPHA retreats. I was at the time interested in finding out more about what it took to become a campus minister, and thought he would be the person to ask. He encouraged me to begin my formation by reading a number of books written by known dissenters - including McBrien - and discouraging me from reading the Catechism and various spiritual classics. His exact words were: "let me decide what you should read." Slowly but surely, increasing numbers of warning bells were going off in my head.

There was one final piece left to the puzzle. It arrived in the form of a religious sister from the Sisters of Notre Dame in the summer of 1999.

I think the beginning of my "awakening" was sometime in the fall of 1999, when I became involved in the leadership structure of the Catholic Student Fellowship group. My aim was to help increase turnout for the meetings while keeping the general format of praise and worship and apologetics-related discussions. The newly arrived sister became the parish liaison for the group. By this time, I had begun to become frustrated with many of the liberal tendencies of the parish (though I still did not allow myself to believe that their politically liberal philosophy would spill over into their views on Catholicism. I was that ignorant). I began to confide in this sister, naively thinking that all professed religious women were faithful to the Church (over the next few years, this particular sister would shatter that illusion with extreme prejudice). In retrospect, she turned out to be someone well-versed in the implementation and practice of the Alinsky method. She pretended she was everyone's friend, lulled her way into everyone's confidence, and began to play various groups off against one another. She was also adept at convincing students to not only embrace her ideas as their own, but in convincing students that these ideas had been theirs in the first place. I made the mistake of thinking her someone worthy of my trust, and I began to confide things in her I should not have. It was a gradual process, but I soon began to realize that my trust in her was misplaced; and when she began to subtly push things such as women's ordination and contraception during the CSF meetings, I lost confidence in her completely. I also noticed how neatly she would deflect my efforts to include topics for general meetings dealing with Catholic teachings on spiritual and moral theology. By the time I and a good friend of mine had taken over CSF in the fall of 2000, I began to realize that my goal of promoting authentically Catholic intellectual and spiritual formation within the group was not shared by the priests, the sister, or the parish staff. The resistance to our attempts to lead discussions dealing with apologetics and issues of moral theology continued, and we had to fight off numerous attempts - usually initiated by the sister - to allow presentations friendly to things like women's ordination and liberation theology. And every time we tried to do a talk on abortion, there was always an outcry against it for fear of offending the sensibilities of "pro-choice Catholics." So we began to play a game of cat and mouse with the sister. Even though she remained the official parish staff liaison to the group, we began to exclude her and others we knew to be friendlier to her than to us from the planning meetings, so we could better control the agenda. She would respond by having students e-mail the CSF listserv (which I started as a way to post news and other events for the group) and arbitrarily change the topics for the upcoming week. We, for our part, had to crack down on that sort of behavior, eventually forcing a standoff of sorts with her about who was really in charge of the group. To some extent, she backed down, though her undermining of our status as leaders of the group continued in subtle ways; and less than a year later, after I relinquished control of the group, she started asserting herself again; and within a semester she was for all intents and purposes calling the shots. I think she had figured out that I wouldn't be there much longer, and so she backed down knowing that all she had to do was wait me out.

All the while that this was happening, I was on the payroll of the student center as a parking lot attendant. If not for the fact that the parking lot manager (my immediate boss) and his father (the head of maintenance) were friends of mine and often stood up for me, I think I would have been fired for reasons not at all related to my job performance. This is not a situation I ever care to find myself in again.

Looking back, I know now that I was in over my head back then. I had a group of about 6-8 people that I worked with over the course of 2 years to try to bring about an orthodox revolution at the student center; but I was young, intellectually and spiritually immature, and dealing with people who were better educated and in positions of greater influence than I could ever hope to be. I often came across as a control freak in the way I did things, when in truth I am the exact opposite of a control freak; there just happened to be very few people I could trust to help me effectively with what I was trying to accomplish. I'd rather not accuse anyone of character assassination, but for years after I left Gainesville I continued to hear from friends still in Gainesville about how I was sometimes bad mouthed and likened to a bogey man by students I never even met. This was something that had been going on ever since my orthodox sympathies (and vocal criticism of the parish's heterodox sympathies) became known.

When it comes right down to it, though, my experiences at the Catholic student center played a prominent role in my going to Steubenville. I look at the situation in Gainesville and I find myself constantly worrying about the spiritual condition of those who get involved with that parish (indeed, with any of the Gainesville parishes), especially those who come in with a fragile and untested faith. I've met so many who left the Church after leaving Gainesville because they were left craving the sense of community they found at St. A's; and all too often they could only find that again in Protestant circles. And because they came to Gainesville poorly formed in their faith and left no better (and oftentimes worse), they found the sense of community to be more important than adhering to a faith they never truly understood (and which was under constant assault by their newfound and seemingly knowledgeable friends). I wanted to work to promote intellectual and spiritual formation among individuals before, during, and after their time in college; but I realized that I needed better intellectual and spiritual formation of my own before I could effectively do that. I had resolved to seek that formation by the time the opportunity to go through the MA program at Franciscan University presented itself. I am not by nature a person who makes snap decisions; but fifteen minutes after the thought of going to Steubenville entered my head, I wanted to realize that goal as badly as I had ever wanted to realize any other goal in my life, and once I was accepted I never looked back. I have never been more certain of God's will in my life than I was about knowing that He wanted me in Steubenville (this point was strongly reinforced when, over the course of nearly a year, just about every obstacle that presented itself and stood between me and Franciscan University was blasted aside with an ease I simply never experienced while dealing with obstacles in other aspects of my life). And that would never have happened if I had not been exposed to the rampant dissent at St. Augustine's to such an intimate extent.

I'd like to say I followed the path that I have just to spite the devil. Truth be told, that was just an added bonus. God bless!


In Jesus and Mary,
Gerald