Born To Be a Newspaper Man

by Martin J. McGowan Jr.

Becoming a Catholic

All my early life I considered myself to be a Catholic. I attended Release Time from school for religious education. I attended Mass every Sunday. My family was Catholic so I decided I must be Catholic, too.

My father wasn't the greatest Catholic in observance of the faith. He was at Mass regularly and was the parish trustee. Yet he didn't much believe in Confession. He did it once a year, just in time to meet the requirement on Trinity Sunday. Somebody else like that was a fellow I knew, George McCarthy, a hard-drinking Irishman of Benson. He did his annual duty the same way and made no bones about it. He called it closing the books for the year.

My philosophy followed the pattern that if everybody else does it, it must be right. In college I learned this is called following the folkways and mores. But when I took my first religion class at Notre Dame I learned the majority could be wrong and there is only one truth. The goal should be to find that truth and I thought I found it in the philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas.

The priests of Notre Dame belonged to the C.S.C. order which in Latin translated to the Congregation of the Holy Cross. The order was not noted to be highly intellectual like the Jesuits. The president of the university when I arrived, Fr. O'Donnell, was best known for centering the football over the halfback's head into the end zone and causing a loss to Army.

But I must have been lucky. My first-year philosophy teacher was Fr. Woodward, a kindly, relaxed teacher who taught us syllogisms and how to determine the truth. He made it clear that the teaching authority of the church, the magisterium, had studied for centuries to find the truth. This was revealed through St. Thomas Aquinas in Thomistic philosophy. Through this instruction my eyes were opened and I finally knew why I was a Catholic.

In those days we were taught the Ten Commandments but also the six Commandments of the Church. The latter included such things as obligatory attendance at Sunday Mass. Not doing so was regarded as serious as violating one of the Ten Commandments. This led me to become too zealous. If I was a liberal politically I was a conservative in religion.

This came out in a situation with our first son, Mickey (Martin III). When he was a Boy Scout he wanted to go on a canoe trip to the Boundary Waters Canoe Area. It was on a weekend and I asked if there would be an opportunity to attend Mass on Sunday. He said that was not possible in the middle of the north woods. So, I forbade him to go on the trip. Other Catholic boys went and they wondered why Mick could not go. Years later after he was married he went on that trip with his wife and another couple. At that time with a more relaxed attitude about such things and the Sacraments of the Church did not seem to be stressed, I probably would not have been so hard-nosed about it.

Although I learned much from Fr Woodward, he played a trick on us. I thought the class was great since we didn't seem to have any tests. I expected we would have at least one at the end of the year. But near the end of the course Fr. Woodward announced one day we would have a test that day, the only test we would have all year and our course grade would be determined by the test results. I was not prepared for that possibility and I failed the test and the course.

When I showed up the following year to take the course again, Fr. Woodward greeted me, "Good morning, Mr. McGowan. Nice to see you back again." I made certain that year that I was on top of the course. With the repetition of the material I passed the course this time. I still thought highly of Fr. Woodward and when Betty and I attended an Elderhostel at Notre Dame I went to the cemetery for the religious order and said a prayer at Fr. Woodward's grave. I did the same for Fr. Dupuis, my Freshman rector.

In my junior year I had trouble with another religion course called Metaphysics. This was an abstruse course which examined the relationship of mind to matter. This came up in a discussion of transubstantiation, or how the wine and water could be changed into the Body and Blood of Christ. I thought I was going to fail that course, too, and I didn't see how my father could afford to send me to a summer session to make up another course. This was one reason why I thought I should change to the University of Missouri to attend Journalism school. However, just as I was leaving town to transfer I saw the grades posted and I passed Metaphysics.

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