Hunger of Memory

This essay opens with a handful of memories from the childhoods of Rodriguez’s mother and father. Rodriguez emphasizes that his parents recall growing up in Mexican towns “where everyone was a Catholic.” Rodriguez, on the other hand, knew of non-Catholics growing up—yet, both at home and at school, he was surrounded by Catholics. (He emphasizes, however, that his Catholic schoolteachers gave him an excellent public education and that he was not “a ghetto Catholic.”) Rodriguez says his experience of religion as a boy was unlike anything he experienced afterwards. Since college, he has identified as “a Catholic defined by a non-Catholic world.” In contrast, when he was a child, he experienced Catholicism “continuously in public and private.”

Rodriguez writes, “I was un católico before I was a Catholic.” As a child he didn’t notice the many differences between “home Catholicism” and “school Catholicism.” Instead, he embraced the fact that “when all else was different for [him] (as a scholarship boy) between the two worlds of [his] life, the Church provided an essential link.” As an adult, however, Rodriguez is aware of the many differences between the gringo Church and his parents’ Mexican Catholicism—and he goes on to detail some of them. One striking example is the different depictions of the Virgin Mary. In the gringo Church, she was depicted as a “serene white lady”; at home, she was “dark like [Rodriguez]” and Rodriguez’s mother proudly reminded him that the Virgin “could have appeared to anyone in the world, but she appeared to a Mexican.” After reflecting on some of these differences, Rodriguez notes that his Catholic schooling is also different from today’s Catholic schools—his education (which emphasized memorization and submission to the authority of the Church) “belonged to another time.”

Rodriguez outlines some key lessons from various stages of his education. He goes on to recall differences in the religious calendar, which governed his school year, and the secular calendar, which governed the city of Sacramento at large. He continues to compile assorted memories of his childhood in the Church (most notably, the enjoyable experience of serving as an altar boy), reflecting particularly on his love for the liturgical elements of the Church. He focuses specifically on the ritual of Mass, which he loved because it exemplified his feeling toward other Catholics: “We were close—somehow related—while also distanced by careful reserve.”

Rodriguez shifts to detailing some of the changes he has noticed in the Church over time (he particularly dislikes the shift from Latin to English Mass). However, Rodriguez recognizes that, just as the Church has changed, so has he. He marks this change has having begun when he entered high school and began to receive a more Protestant-based education. The change was solidified during his time at Stanford, where he became “a Catholic who lived most of his week without a sense of communal Catholicism”; as a result, he writes, he began to rely more heavily on conscience. Though he lambastes changes to the Catholic liturgy, Rodriguez recognizes that these changes are aimed at his demographic: Catholics living in a secular world. He even admits that he has come to embrace cosmopolitan values. Despite the reforms that have occurred within the Church, Rodriguez writes that he clings to his religion. If he were to abandon it, he writes, he doubts there is anywhere else he could he go to have the experience of feeling himself alone with others. “If I should lose my faith in God,” he writes, “I would have no place to go where I could feel myself a man.”

Rodriguez admits that, when he was younger, he would never have discussed his spirituality openly. He recalls reading the diaries of seventeenth-century Puritans some time after graduating from college, and he remembers his realization that “Protestants were so public because they were otherwise alone in their faith.” Writing about his spirituality, Rodriguez argues, thus makes him like a Protestant, because he is addressing his religious concerns to readers he assumes are non-religious themselves. He concludes that this is the only “appropriate” setting (surrounded by people who do not share his religious beliefs) in which he can attempt to resolve his “spiritual dilemma.”