Cakes and Ale

Jimmy Carter was on the Colbert show this week, offering to become Roman Catholic if Pope Francis remained in office and the invitation was extended by a woman priest.

That’s probably farther than most Baptists would go, but Carter has never been most Baptists. His evolution from born again Southern Baptist to radical advocate of peace, racial justice, gender equality, and marriage equality, has moved him far to the left of many Baptists. But he understands Jesus stands far to the left of many Baptists.

Carter’s presidency was a heady period for Baptists north and south. He regularly worshipped at Washington’s First Baptist Church and most Sundays he taught the adult Sunday school class. Many of my Baptist colleagues rushed to attend the class and returned with highly public anecdotes about their private conversations with the president. One story was that a Baptist executive who taught the class on alternate Sundays was called out of town at the last minute. He called the White House and told Carter, “Mr. President, I just can’t be there Sunday.” Carter replied, “That’s okay, I’ll teach the class. I know you’re busy.” The story is probably not apocryphal.

I met Carter once at the White House, along with several dozen religious magazine editors. We were there to hear the president’s defense of a proposed treaty to return ownership of the Panama Canal to Panama.

I came prepared with a copy of an American Baptist resolution that supported the treaty, and I insinuated myself into a huddle of rabbis, priests, ministers, and other editors who had gathered around Carter. The President had turned away from me to talk to Jim Wall, editor of the Christian Century, and I felt myself being pushed uncomfortably close to him. Bill Dudde, a Lutheran editor who stood behind me, tripped and pushed me against the President. I was could smell his hair spray and jumped back in alarm, expecting to be tackled by the Secret Service. Carter turned toward me and he was not smiling. I held up a copy of the American Baptist resolution and reduced my carefully rehearsed speech to six words: “Mr. President, American Baptists support you.” He turned away and said, “Thanks, I need all the help I can get.”

My subsequent encounters with Carter, when he was an ex-president, went much smoother. Duke McCall, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, invited me to a small reception for Carter during the Baptist World Alliance meeting in Los Angeles in 1985. Carter was gracious and witty and considerably more charismatic in person than he was on television.

Later, the Carter Center in Atlanta called a meeting of church health agencies to discuss health care issues and I went to represent American Baptists. Carter mingled with the bureaucrats for most of the meeting. I stood beside him in the food line and listened to him say to no one in particular that the Center had provided “a Mormon meal, because Mormons follow a diet that makes them the healthiest people in the nation.” My colleague Hugh Pickett of the American Baptist pension board, noticing the absence of red meat on the table, said loudly enough for Carter to hear him: “I’d rather live with Jesus than in Salt Lake City.”

Following the Baptist World Alliance meeting in Los Angeles in 1985, I wrote a column for The American Baptist magazine to praise Carter’s leadership, in and out of the White House. Naturally, I sent Carter a copy of the magazine. His reply was quick and efficient. He made a photocopy of my letter, and wrote his response on it. “Thanks,” he wrote in longhand, “both for the editorial & for sending it to me. Jimmy.”

I tend to disagree with historians who believe Carter’s presidency was lackluster and unsuccessful. He maintained high standards of morality and decency that most of his successors could not match.

And in the 33 years since he left the White House, Carter’s moral leadership, based on careful biblical exegesis, has been exceptional.

And if his conditions are met for leaving the Baptists to become a Roman Catholic, I would be inclined to follow him into the fold.

I’ve posted this reminiscence of bygone Central New York television on another blog devoted to the Morrisville-Eaton Central School class of 1964 fiftieth reunion. I’m reposting it here for others who may have similar experiences growing up in various television markets.

The Wonderful Magic Toyshop (“A smile is a frown turned upside down”) was on Syracuse WHEN television for 27 years. The program was as well produced as any network fare and, as a recent book on Syracuse Television noted, we viewers didn’t know Merrily and Eddie Flum Num weren’t from Hollywood. In 1996, Jean Daugherty — the toyshop’s Play Lady — recorded the history of the show in Syracuse University’s Courier.

The Class of 1964 was the vanguard of the post World War II Baby Boom, and our coming of age coincided with the rise of television. For our parents, the tube was a miraculous phenomenon and buying a TV set was a major goal for most households. In 1950, 9 percent of U.S. households owned a TV; by 1964, 92.3 percent of homes had at least one TV.

Local Syracuse television contributed importantly to our entertainment and education. At least two MECS students attended live broadcasts of Toyshop. When we were in junior high, Don Miller took his English classes to WSYR to see Jim DeLine’s show, which pioneered the talk-entertainment format. In 1964, late night movies on channel 9 were hosted by Baron Daemon, a scenery-chewing extrovert whose vampirish antics attracted a small but devoted following among MECS students.

Even in the days before HDTV, televisions provided us with a virtual reality that seemed real enough to us. The Mercury rocket launches, the Mantle-Maris race to match Babe Ruth’s home run record, the star-crossed Ernie Davis’s heroics on the S.U. grid iron, JFK’s speeches and assassination, all were events we will never forget.

These events were so real, in fact, that it’s hard to believe they were merely the electronic flickering of a vacuum tube electron gun firing electrons on a fluorescent screen. (See my earlier commentary on television and reality here.)

Sam Rayburn was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives during the presidency of Woodrow Wilson, and died 49 years later during the presidency of John F. Kennedy. He was Speaker of the House for 17 years, the longest tenure in U.S. history

Rayburn was a protégé of Vice President John Nance “Cactus Jack” Garner, and a mentor of Lyndon B. Johnson. Many historians believe Rayburn maneuvered the narrow House vote that prevented a drastic reduction of the U.S. military only months before Pearl Harbor was attacked in 1941.

Rayburn supported Lyndon Johnson’s presidential candidacy in 1960, and warned LBJ not to accept Kennedy’s offer of the vice presidency. Rayburn considered Kennedy callow and opportunistic, but he loyally supported JFK and his legislative program in the first few months of the New Frontier.

I watched a television interview in early 1961 in which Rayburn was asked if thought Kennedy would be a great president. “He’s a young man of destiny,” Rayburn replied, which was an adept evasion. Even so, I accepted it as a great compliment for the untested president. Back then, I thought all Democrats were friends.

In September 1961 Rayburn’s office announced he would take a vacation in his hometown of Bonham, Texas to be treated for lumbago.

I wrote to him immediately, addressing him as Mr. Sam, and wished him a speedy recovery. He replied quickly, restating his complaint about “a pretty bad case of lumbago.”

Sam Rayburn died two months later of cancer.

His New York Times obituary on November 17 said he was told on September 27 – 15 days after this letter was written – that he was terminally ill.

If his letter to a teen-aged non-voter in New York State is any indication, Mr. Sam kept working until the end.

March 23, 2014 – The revival of Les Misérables opens tonight.

The Divine M and I saw the final preview last night and plan to see it again (and again) during what we hope will be another long run. The re-imagined staging and computer-generated backgrounds recreate the gloominess of early 19th century France, and the show remains one of the best three-hour sermons extant. It is soul moving, profound, and — as Hugo intended — a testament of God’s subtle presence in the worst of times.

I’ve written about the show several times, including this two-year-old reminiscence:

I always looked forward to Bill Schmidt’s visits to The Ecumenical Center in New York, where I worked between 1995 and 2012.

Bill, who often accompanied his wife, Jean, to the U.S. Office for the World Council of Churches where she was treasurer, looked like the retired church history professor he was.

Tall and lanky with spiky eyebrows protruding like escaping spiders over the top of his spectacles, Bill always wore a dark suit and tie to the office. It was easy to imagine him striking an austere pose behind the podium at St. Peter’s College or New York Theological Seminary, resurrecting the ghosts of bygone ecumenical leaders. I never heard him lecture, but no doubt he was good at it.

Bill would also have made a great pastor. His eyebrows would shoot up whenever he saw old friends, and his supercilious grin always assured them he was glad to see them.

Bill usually had a special word or greeting for everyone. Whenever he spotted me in the office, his brows would dance and he’d proclaim, “Frauds ‘R’ Us!”

That may have puzzled others in the room, but I knew what he meant. The phrase was the title of a column I had written for The American Baptist magazine in 1992. It was Bill’s gracious way of telling another writer, hey, I read your stuff. A prolific writer himself, Bill must have been an insatiable reader as well.


I was thinking of Bill the other day (he died in August 2009) and – wondering neurotically whether I had shown him my best rhetoric – decided to explore old volumes of The American Baptist to find and re-read the column.  



The column was actually a review of Les Misérables, the musical by Claude-Michel Schönberg with an English libretto by Herbert Kretzmer. Martha and I have seen many productions, most recently last March in Hartford. 



Each production has been distinguished by different musicians, performers and staging but they all have two things in common: performances are invariably tear-inducing and they are always sermon inspiring. My eyes overflow each time the chorus sings the words originally penned by Victor Hugo himself: “To love another person is to see the face of God.” 



There are several love stories in both the musical and the novel, none of them more moving that the unrequited love of Éponine for Marius, who only has eyes for Cosette. Éponine loves Marius so much she is willing to give her life for him, even knowing he will never love her in return. Even Jesus doesn’t go that far. Greater love has no one than this.



 The original “Frauds ‘R’ Us” focused not so much on the romance of the story as the morality. Like all good literature, the characters in Les Misérables face decisions that make us all introspective, sometimes painfully so. 



With fond memories of my friend Bill Schmidt, here is the way it looked to me in the July/August 1992 issue of The American Baptist:



Each year tens of thousands attend performances of Les Misérables, and it’s a good thing the theater is darkened during the show. When the dying Jean Valjean is joined by the spirits of Fantine, Éponine and all the righteous dead, eyes overflow like the cisterns of Paris.

Ever since my preteen catharsis at Old Yeller, that’s the kind of thing I prefer to do in the dark.



The operatic musical is based on the book by Victor Hugo. To summarize it in the way my Lit teachers never would, Jean Valjean steals bread and gets sent to a chain gang for 19 years. When Valjean is released he is inspired to live a righteous life but his criminal path is discovered by the adamant Inspector Javert,* who is determined to bring the bread bandit to justice. While trying to raise Cosette, the daughter of the ill-fated Fantine, Valjean is pursued relentlessly by Javert.

There is also occasional romance and a violent revolution, neither of which is much help to Valjean.



I think one of the reasons people are moved by the musical is that most of us know how Valjean feels. One does not have to be paranoid to get the feeling there is a Javert on our heels, too.

Someone out there knows we’re not as good or as kind or as talented as we pretend we are. The late David Niven felt this way. “I secretly know that I am not good enough an actor to be as successful as I am,” he said. “All my life I’ve been waiting for someone else to find that out. Someday someone will tap me on the shoulder and say, “I’m sorry, old boy, but you’ve been found out. You must come with us now.”



David Niven (who, in my opinion, was a marvelous actor) was not alone. Most of us tend to believe we are actually frauds, and we dread the day Inspector Javert will have us arrested for pretending to be something we are not.



I know the feeling. I was the least athletic member of my family, and after I grew up I tried to cover up that fact by compulsively jogging. Granted, jogging is a rather talentless process of picking ‘em up and putting ‘em down, but I hoped the grunting and sweating would obscure the fact that I am athletically inept.

I was jogging in Philadelphia’s Franklin Field one morning when I was overtaken by the entire University of Pennsylvania Women’s Cross Country Team. 



Attempting to pay my respects to them, I ran on my toes and strained breathlessly to hold in my stomach. I lost my bearings and collided with a tackling dummy. As I lay on the grass looking up at the dummy, it appeared to be a worn, grass-stained piece of second-hand athletic equipment.

Today I know better, It was my own personal Inspector Javert. “I’m sorry, old boy, but you’ve been found out,” it was saying.



Actually, that anecdote is a bit of a cop-out. There are dozens of nasty little secrets in my psyche and in my past – most of them I’d just as soon not index in a national magazine. I don’t need much prompting to remind myself that I am racist or an elitist or a homophobe or a self-absorbed boor with scant sensitivity to the important people with whom I live and work. 



I spend a lot of time trying to improve on that, of course, but the image of innocence I project seems fraudulent to me.


I must hasten to add that I don’t think this is a particularly major confession. It just places me within the mainstream of the human race.

When Paul said all are sinners, he meant all of us are frauds and all of us will eventually be found out. And Paul could not escape the anguish himself. “I know that nothing good dwells within me,” he confessed to the church in Rome (Romans 7:18ff). “I can will what is right but I cannot do it.”



Did Javert ever catch up with Valjean?

Was Valjean thrown back into a drizzly Parisian prison?

Of course you know what happened. If not, Victor Hugo’s thick volume awaits you at your local library.



Javert is a haunting figure because he reminds us what our lives would be like if God had not intervened. Without the Cross, all of us would be relentlessly pursued by the truth of our sins, and all of us would be condemned. 



Happily, there are no Javerts on our tail. God has sent Jesus to seek us out: a tireless pursuer who knows we are frauds and loves us anyway.

With Javert there is only punishment.

With Jesus, there is the promise that ever our fraudulence will one day be transformed for both our sake and his.

* Will Swenson (Pictured above) is Javert in the current run.

In politics, location is as important as it is in real estate. Hubert Humphrey was one of the great political and moral leaders of his generation. Unfortunately, he was located too closely to politicians who had more charisma and more power than he, but less vision.

No candidate for president in 1960 has a better record on civil and human rights than Hubert Humphrey, but he couldn’t match the magnetism or pocketbook of John F. Kennedy. In 1968, his presidential campaign was overshadowed by his closeness to Lyndon Johnson and Vietnam. Richard Nixon eked out a narrow victory that year, though skeptics believe that was because Nixon deviously convinced North Vietnam to ignore LBJ’s peace overtures until after the election.

Looking back, one suspects it was tragic that Hubert Humphrey was never President of the United States. His philosophy of government was not always embraced by actual Oval Office occupants:

“It was once said that the moral test of government is how that government treats those who are in the dawn of life, the children; those who are in the twilight of life, the elderly; and those who are in the shadows of life, the sick, the needy and the handicapped.”

If that sounds like ordinary political rhetoric, the difference is that Humphrey meant it. He was a profile in courage from the beginning of his career. When he was Mayor of Minneapolis in 1948, he pushed his fellow Democrats to strengthen their commitment to labor, welfare, and civil rights. He burst upon the national scene in 1948 with a firey address to the Democratic Convention in Philadelphia, calling for a stronger civil rights plank:

I do not believe that there can be any compromise of the guarantees of civil rights which I have mentioned. In spite of my desire for unanimous agreement on the platform there are some matters which I think must be stated without qualification. There can be no hedging – no watering down. There are those who say to you – we are rushing this issue of civil rights. I say we are 172 years late.

The speech helped precipitate the walk-out of southern delegates, who formed the Dixiecrat Party and rallied behind Strom Thurman’s presidential candidacy. The party split seemed to doom President Truman’s chances for re-election.

Humphrey’s speech may have annoyed Truman, who did win the 1948 election, but it propelled him into the U.S. Senate. His progressive record commanded national attention and in 1960 he ran unsuccessfully for president in primaries that were dominated by John Kennedy.

Humphrey continued in the Senate during the Kennedy years and I wrote to him on several occasions, usually eliciting a thoughtful response from him.

In 1964, Humphrey spearheaded support for Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society legislation, including the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Both Humphrey and the president realized the bill would not be supported by southern Democrats. LBJ recruited Republican leader Everett Dirksen to bring moderate Republicans into the fold, and Humphrey played a pivotal role in bringing the bill to the president’s desk for signing.

LBJ rewarded Humphrey by naming him vice president inn the 1964 election. For the most part, Humphrey was treated badly by Johnson — who, as a former vice president himself, should have known better. But Humphrey was a loyal supporter of the president and his Great Society.

Humphrey’s loyalty included support for Johnson’s Vietnam policy. There is a sad footnote to his vice presidency in which Humphrey was invited to address the general assembly of the National Council of Churches, a long-time progressive ally. He may have been expecting a friendly reception, but the faith leaders lambasted the administration’s “immoral war.”

Humphrey was re-elected to the senate after his difficult turn as vice president and he continued to serve with distinction. After the election of 1976, when Jimmy Carter defeated Gerald Ford, Humphrey paid a friendly visit to the outgoing president.

“I only wish I had had more time,” Ford told him.

“Aw, Mr. President, don’t complain,” Humphrey said. “I would have given anything for a day in this office.”

Looking back, I have no doubt this country would have been much better off if Hubert Humphrey had indeed been our president, if only for a day.

Fifty years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, I wonder how many people remember Everett McKinley Dirksen.

If you watched television news in the sixties, you knew exactly who he was. He was an Illinois Republican, the Minority Leader of the United States Senate, a man with deep crevices in his face, a mop of tousled hair, and a deep and mellifluous voice. Historian Michael Beschloss, who grew up in Dirksen’s home state of Illinois, said he and his brother thought Dirksen sounded like Mr. Ed. (Of course you remember Mr. Ed was a talking horse with his own TV program, 1961 to 1966.)

I loved listening to Dirksen speechify, and that was one of there reasons I sought to add his autograph to my collection. The picture he sent was a somewhat idealized artist’s sketch, but his elegantly old-fashioned fountain pen signature was impressive. Each letter of his name was carefully crafted and it must have taken several seconds to complete the task. I wondered how long it took him to sign his constituent mail each day.

In addition to his stentorian voice, Dirksen played a significant role in U.S. history.

In a college lecture, Beschloss put it this way:

Spring of ’64 Johnson calls up Dirksen and essentially says, “Ev, I need your help on this Civil Rights Bill because the southern Democrats are going to be against it and I need Republican votes.” And he essentially says, not verbatim, but the essence of it is, he says, “Ev, I know you’ve got some doubts, but look at it this way, if this bill passes it’s going to change the country and make history, and if all that happens everyone will give credit to you. And if it happens a 100 years from now the school children of America will know exactly two names, Abraham Lincoln and Everett Dirksen.”

And Dirksen heard that and he liked what he heard, and I think it was not the only reason, but he supported the Civil Rights Bill and it passed, and history was changed.

Fifty years on, Lincoln’s name is still better known than Dirksen’s, at least in Illinois school rooms.

Perhaps Dirksen allowed himself to succumb to the famous Johnson Treatment when he should have been wiser. But surely it’s a good thing he didn’t.  Almost certainly, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 could not have been passed without his nonpartisan effort.

In addition to U.S. politicians, I began writing to world statesmen (the gender exclusion is deliberate  because I didn’t know any world stateswomen except Eleanor Roosevelt and, if you will, Jacqueline Kennedy).

I wrote to the Pope (as reported earlier), Charles DeGaulle, and Winston Churchill. Aside from a note from the pontiff’s secretary I heard from none of them. Later I learned that Churchill was fragile with advanced age and had retired from routine correspondence.

I wrote to Pakistan President Ayub Kahn and India Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, in part because they were visible in the U.S. media as President Kennedy sought to align their nations with the so-called free world.

I never heard from Ayub Kahn, but many months after I wrote to Nehru I received a tattered brown envelope from India. The letter had traveled by surface mail, suggesting it had been on a boat for several weeks. Inside was a small card engraved, “With Compliments,” and a photograph autographed by Nehru.

At 16, I knew little about Nehru beyond the fact that President Kennedy treated him with great respect. In the book Odyssey of a President by Merriman Smith, a report of President Eisenhower’s 1959 visit to several friendly nations, a memorable passage described the Prime Minister standing next to Eisenhower in an open car that was slowed by welcoming crowds in its path. Nehru, Smith reported, jumped out of the car and began pushing people out of the way. That alone would have earned respect from any U.S. president.

Many years later, when I worked for the U.S. National Council of Churches, a colleague from India made a reference to “the first prime minister of India,” omitting his name because he assumed no American would know who he was.

But perhaps my friend was wrong. I think a lot of Americans know Nehru was Mahatma Gandhi’s primary lieutenant, and the architect of modern India. I have few possessions I value more than the photo on which he scrawled his name and the date, 18-5-63.

Nehru’s health was in decline by then, and he died a year later on May 27, 1964. Even so, he was evidently managing both the impossibly large and incredibly small duties of his office — including writing his name for an American teenager he never met.

In October 1967, when I was an Air Force chaplain’s assistant in England, I helped organize a pilgrimage of Catholic airmen to Rome. The itinerary included visits to major statuary, crumbling ruins, and St. Peter’s Basilica.

As it turned out, only a handful other airman joined me in the tours, including my fellow chaplain’s assistant, Doug Greene, and a six-and-a-half foot tall Minnesota Lutheran named Moose. The other 30 guys disappeared on Fernandina Beach, and we didn’t see them until they showed up at the airport on the last day, sunburned and sated.

I didn’t skip a single opportunity on the itinerary. The day after our arrival, a Sunday, we stood in Saint Peter’s Square to watch Pope Paul VI bless the crowd. It was an exotic moment for sheltered young Americans.

We stood next to a huge speaker when the Pope spoke, so his nasally voice sounded like an air horn. He addressed the crowd in Italian for several minutes as we held our hands over our ears.

An woman in the crowd told us to find something to lift up when the Pope started speaking in Latin.

“That’s the blessing,” she said. “It covers anything you want.” As an example, she showed us a small golden crucifix.

She held the crucifix in air and closed her eyes prayerfully when the Pope began the blessing. We reached into our shirts and pulled out our dog tags, lifting them as high as the chain would allow. It probably looked like we were sniffing them.

The next day,we found our way to a Vatican courtyard where the pope was receiving a smaller crowd. The tour agent told us the courtyard would fill up quickly, so we got there early and waited beneath a small balcony.

It was difficult for people to slip ahead of Moose, who stood tall and implacable, unwilling to give up his space to see the pope close-up. But a short, stout nun, followed by a half dozen school girls, pressed her large bosom against Moose’s arm and he flushed and jumped aside. The nun did the same thing to others in front of Moose and soon she and the school girls were in the front row.

Even so, Moose and I were fairly close to the window and when the pope emerged we could see the crinkles around his eyes.

The Pontiff, a fair linguist, began to address the crowd in different languages. “Français,” he announced, and when the French speakers applauded, the pope lifted his right hand to his ear and made a giggling sound. “Português,” and when persons from Portugal applauded he giggled again. Soon, he announced, “English,” and after his giggle he offered a thickly accented greeting to the English speakers.

“That was neat,” Moose said as the crowd dispersed. “We got closer to the pope than we ever get to the chaplain.” That was true, because when the chaplain mounted the pulpit, the airmen retired to their desks to drink coffee.

We saw Pope Paul one more time that week, on October 28, when he stood at the main altar of St. Peters next to the Ecumenical Patriarch Athenagoras I.

The Pope and the Patriarch had already met in 1964, ending a centuries old rift between the western and eastern churches. The October visit was a follow-up, an auspicious occasion when the two church leaders were to join in a concelebrated mass.

For us uninformed boys, the pair looked mismatched at the altar. The Patriarch with his long beard towered over the petite pope.

But we I knew it was a major historic event because the basilica was filled with ecclesiastical celebrities. Included in the procession was Bishop Fulton J. Sheen, known to Moose and me as the “Uncle Fultie” of 1950s television fame. Sheen, like the American politician he was, kept straying from the procession to shake hands, repeating, “How are ya, how are ya …” For years, shaking Bishop Sheen’s hand was my most vivid memory of the day.

Years later I began to realize what an important day that had been, when a historic split in the Christian church began to mend. At the end of Athenagoras’ visit to Rome, the Patriarch and the Pope issued a joint statement, thanking God “for enabling them to meet once again in the holy city of Rome in order to pray together with the Bishops of the Synod of the Roman Catholic Church and with the faithful people of this city, to greet one another with a kiss of peace, and to converse together in a spirit of charity and brotherly frankness.” (See http://bit.ly/1i5m2c7)

And years after that, when I was on the staff of the National Council of Churches, I reminisced about this day in October 1967, and said it was probably the most historic event I had ever attended. “It was,” I told colleagues who might have missed it, “a concelebrated mass by the pope and the Patriarch.”

But my friend Father Leonid Kishkovsky, ecumenical officer of the Orthodox Church in America, raised his hand.

“It was not a concelebrated mass,” he said quietly. “Where did you get that?”
“That was what they told us,” I said. “I was a 21-year-old Baptist. There’s no way I could have made the word up.”

Leonid shook his head gently. “It was not,” he repeated. “It couldn’t have been.”

There is no one on earth better informed about interreligious relations than Leonid Kishkovsky, so I will take him at his word.

But I will never forget that in October 1967, Doug and Moose and I saw Pope Paul VI and Patriarch Athenagoras I stand side by side at the central altar in St. Peters Basilica.

And what ever they were doing together that day, it was for us an incomparably historic event.

When I sent Eleanor Roosevelt a list of questions in 1962, her prompt response inspired me to write to other luminaries.

Almost immediately after he became pontiff in June 1963 I sent Pope Paul VI a list of questions and asked that he respond to them for Smoke Signals, the student newspaper of Morrisville-Eaton Central School in New York State.

God knows what questions I thought appropriate to send the pope. I never kept carbon copies of my correspondence so they are lost forever.  I was also oblivious, at 16, of the administrative chaos that must have prevailed in the Curia in the transition between John XXIII and Paul.

After a year, when I had completely forgotten my letter to the pope, an ordinary looking envelope arrived in the mail.

Inside was a note from Father Pasquale Macchi, the pope’s private secretary. This note is also lost, but I recall its friendly tone and Father Macchi’s assurance that the Holy Father, as the son of a journalist, was always glad to hear from journalists, even if he couldn’t respond to every letter. I think Father Macchi also assured me of a papal blessing.

The blessing was nice but it was even nicer that a priest in Rome was willing to play along with me as I posed as a genuine journalist.

I didn’t think about this correspondence for decades until April 1999 when my father, Elmore Jenks, died and the family gathered for his funeral in Morrisville, N.Y. The Rev. Walt Ketcham, an old family friend presided at the funeral. Walt added this anecdote to his eulogy:

“When I was Elmore’s pastor in Morrisville, I was contacted by a prominent and very alarmed Catholic layman who complained that Elmore’s son, Phil, was writing to the pope. I had no idea what Phil would be writing to the pope about, so I contacted Elmore to see if he had any idea. Elmore rolled his eyes and smiled. ‘Phil does stuff like that,’ he said. ‘He doesn’t mean anything by it.’”

I had no idea, in my teenage naiveté, that it was such an alarming thing to write a letter to the pope. As a Baptist, I also had no clue about apostolic succession, though I’m pretty sure I would have written to Saint Peter, too, if I had had the chance. But it was a startling revelation years later that my letter to Paul VI had been so distressing to old-fashioned Catholics who must have been reeling from the potential of Vatican II.

Looking back, I’m pleased that at least two persons were not alarmed by my effrontery. My father never told me that he had brushed aside an ecclesial complaint about me.

And Father Macchi, clearly unoffended by my letter, sent warm words and a blessing.