My Dad the Catholic

My father had been dead for several months before it dawned on me that he'd been a Catholic.

It should have been easy to figure out that Dad was Catholic. He went to Catholic Mass every Sunday. He owned a St. Joseph's daily missal book, the same one he had had since he was a kid. He could read Latin, and even though he wrote for a scientific magazine, National Geographic, his journalism was garnished with Christian references. He had gone to three Catholic schools in Washington, where he lived: Blessed Sacrament, the Jesuit all-boys school Gonzaga, and the Catholic University of America. His favorite book was one with heavy Catholic overtones, The Lord of the Rings.

And yet, in the summer of 1996, I found myself surprised to finally realize that my dad had been deeply, seriously, and mystically Catholic. He believed in the supernatural world and believed that we could catch glimpses of it in this world. He saw in nature not only beauty but the face of Christ.

In all my years of Catholic schooling I had never heard or read anything that brought these worlds together — that explained Catholicism as a religion about both faith and reason, about the reality of this world and of the next. I always considered my father's mysticism, his love of nature and poetry and beauty, to be the sign of a brilliant man who occasionally had his head in the clouds. No one ever explained that his mysticism may have been the sign of someone whose feet were planted firmly in reality.

Then I started going through Dad's old stuff in the basement, and I came across some books: G. K. Chesterton's Orthodoxy, Thomas Merton's The Seven Storey Mountain and No Man Is an Island, prayer and meditation books from the 1940s, a biography of Cardinal Newman.

I picked up Chesterton's Orthodoxy and for the first time began to understand Dad's Catholicism. I was stunned by one passage in particular:

Mysticism keeps men sane. As long as you have mystery you have health; when you destroy mystery you create morbidity. The ordinary man has always been sane because the ordinary man has always been a mystic. He has permitted the twilight. He has always had one foot in earth and the other in fairyland. ... He has always cared more for truth than for consistency. If he saw two truths that seemed to contradict each other, he would take the two truths and the contradiction along with them. His spiritual sight is stereoscopic, like his physical sight: he sees two pictures at once and yet sees all the better for that. Thus he has always believed there was such a thing as fate, but such a thing as free will also. ... The morbid logician seeks to make everything lucid, and succeeds in making everything mysterious. The mystic allows one thing to be mysterious, and everything else becomes lucid. ... As we have taken the circle as the symbol of reason and madness, we may take the cross as a symbol at once of mystery and of health. Buddhism is centripetal, but Christianity is centrifugal: it breaks out. ... The circle returns upon itself and is bound. The cross opens its arms to the four winds; it is a signpost for free travelers.

I was thunderstruck — not only by the brilliance of the prose, which in a flash made me understand more about Christianity than almost twenty years of Catholic schooling had, but by the realization that this passage beautifully summed up my father. In my mind Dad was many things: an intellectual and scholar, an explorer, a hilarious — and occasionally bawdy — Irish storyteller who could keep a room rapt with attention for an hour, and someone who loved rock and roll. In my mind, none of those things were Catholic. Being Catholic was going to Mass and to confession. It was old priests and strict nuns. It had nothing to do with philosophy, science, love, or anything else worthwhile in the world. It was the religion I had left behind in high school.

Yet here, in Chesterton's great masterpiece about Christianity, was the spirit, and the brilliance, of my father. As I pored through his things, I began to reflect on his life, trying to pinpoint exactly where, besides Chesterton, his Catholicism had come from. The son of a professional baseball player for the Washington Senators, Dad had been a "whiz kid" on the radio in the 1930s and at a young age had fallen in love with literature, devouring everything from classics such as the Iliad to what were then-new books such as The Lord of the Rings and The Chronicles of Narnia. He had a book of poems published when he was sixteen. Dad went to Catholic University in Washington, where he was editor of the Tower, the school newspaper. There he met a fellow student, Fred Maroon, a photographer. The two men became colleagues and close friends, working together in 1950 as coeditors of the Cardinal, the school yearbook. The book won a national competition, and my dad and Maroon were hired by Life magazine, whose staff referred to Judge and Maroon as "the gold dust twins" because of their flair for financially successful ventures. The two men loved Washington, however, and soon moved back from New York. "I remember the first time I saw Joe's bedroom," Maroon wrote in the CUA magazine after my father died. "Every one of his four walls was lined with books, which prompted me to ask cynically how many he had actually read. 'All of them,' he answered. And knowing Joe, I believe he remembered everything in them. He was a walking encyclopedia, and his curiosity and interests were universal."

After a few years in Washington working for a local television station and then the Department of Labor, my father landed a job with National Geographic in 1962, two years before I was born. He would be there for the rest of his life. He wrote about places all over the world — Boston, Jerusalem, Ireland, Disney World. In the 1980s, after years of research, he discovered the landing site where Columbus touched down in the New World. His press conference in 1986 announcing the discovery garnered the most coverage of any in the storied history of the magazine. In his work at the magazine — he rose to associate editor — he could on one day talk to his friend Stephen Jay Gould about evolution, then a day later take me to Emmitsburg, Maryland, to visit a woman who claimed to be in communication with the Virgin Mary.

Dad loved nature, which, as I imagined, was not a really Catholic philosophy. He could name every flower in the garden and every constellation in the night sky above our house in Potomac, Maryland. He knew every type of bird and would spend mornings on the C&O Canal that runs by the Potomac River, softly padding along the path and bird-watching through his binoculars. As kids we would make fun of him, imitating his incredible knowledge. "That's a mockingbird," I would say, pointing to a random bird in...