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(My next Catholic Register column...)

Swimming with Scapulars: True Confessions of a Young Catholic
by Matthew Lickona
Loyola Press, hardcover, 2005
US$19.95

Matthew Lickona's spiritual memoir Swimming with Scapulars is less like The Seven Story Mountain than The Two Story Townhouse with Finished Basement. Lickona is a 31-year-old cradle Catholic, and a scrupulous one at that, so his memoir lacks the built in frisson of a colourful sinner's conversion story.

This puts Lickona at a disadvantage. Romantic movies and novels end at the "I do's" for a reason: the drama, suspense and comedy of courtship are, let's be honest, more entertaining than the mundane everydayness of married life. Likewise, Merton's first (and by far most popular) book concludes with his entrance into the monastery, the ultimate "The End" (or so readers thought.)

Lickona's family are "professional Catholics" of the type not unknown, say, here in Toronto: folks whose familiar surnames adorn Catholic newspaper mastheads and faculty lists -- maybe even the occasional church building. Lickona's father is a respected psychologist, professor and author, with a public passion for the pro-life cause. Lickona mentions, apropos of something else, that he and his mother once attended a friend's ordination -- in Rome. His grade school nickname was "Captain Catholic."

In other words, Matthew Lickona may start to get on your nerves around page twelve.

That would be a shame.

Lickona has something to tell you, something you may not want to hear: that he's pretty happy with his fruitful if undramatic life, one unmarred by divorce, drugs or dissent from Church teaching.

Give the book a chance and you'll learn that life hasn't been a doubt-free dream of perfect faith for this "young fogey", even though his loving, gifted family was the perfect Catholic petrie dish:

"When I was about fourteen years old, I was kissed by a priest: Father Dave. The act did not have the character of an assault, but a line had been crossed..."

Lickona forgave Father Dave (who, like all the other "players" in Swimming with Scapulars, is beautifully rendered), but he was angered by the Church hierarchy's often cynical, worldly reaction to the widespread abuse crisis that exploded years later. In both cases, Lickona calmly asserts that the Church is full of sinners, including him. Even if the Pope himself were a molester, while "his heart would break", Lickona maintains that his faith in the Church's Truth wouldn't waver.

And you believe him.

Lickona's attitude will puzzle, if not infuriate, older (lapsed, "professional" or otherwise) Catholics who are still mad because Father told them that chewing gum was a sin in Grade Four.

Yet oddly enough, Lickona comes across as much more "hip", not to mention mature, responsible and self-critical, than those resentful Boomer Catholics who just can't accept the brutal fact that "the cafeteria is closed". Lickona was a virgin when he married, and he and his beloved wife had four children in short order. He never misses Mass. He went to Medjegorje.

Yet Lickona frankly admits to truly shocking thoughts and actions, to embarrassing personal failings, without giving a whiff of morbid self-pity or boastfulness.

For example, he confesses that he still finds Church teaching on the "inherent evil" of contraception completely baffling, but he obeys it anyway. He shares his own clumsy attempts at apologetics, his fits of uncharitable bad temper, his impatience (one we share) with those showoffy "priest tinkerers" who ad-lib bits of the Mass.

Swimming with Scapulars cracked me up more than once, although this bit remains my favourite:

"Though I agreed with my father about abortion, I did not share his zeal, his willingness to soldier on. Once, as a teenager, I hurt him deeply by complaining that abortion was all we ever talked about. I joked with my brother Mark about waking the old man some morning.

"'Hey, Dad, time to get up.'

"'Mmnh? 'Bortion.'"

Swimming with Scapulars represents a break from two popular kinds of spiritual memoir. With the first, authors like Henri Nouwen (whose continued popularity is a greater mystery to me even than Church teaching on birth control) seem to be holding something back, not quite wanting to risk their future canonization (or present day book sales) by being completely candid (about, oh, I dunno, their closet homosexuality...)

Then there's Anne Lamott, whose millions of fans admire her "honesty and bravery" -- but what's so terribly courageous about admitting to things, like drug use and two abortions, that your liberal readers don't consider sins anyhow?

Lickona may never sell as many books at either Nouwen or Lamott. Swimming with Scapulars won't appeal to those who want to be "affirmed in their ok-ness", swaddled in someone else's saccharine sanctity, or to live vicariously through a smart-alecky freespirit who mentions Jesus once in a while.

Catholic booklovers awaiting the appearance of a "timeless classic" will have to wait another day. And perhaps the whole notion of "timeless classics" needs to be revisited, anyhow. Swimming with Scapulars is what it is: a frank, thoughtful, funny first book that I hope won't be Lickona's last.