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News Notes Writer's Memoirs Among Best-Selling Catholic Books in the Country

"Talk About Movies" Columnist, Matthew Lickona, Outs Himself in This Self-Interview

Matthew Lickona, who has been co-writer of the "Talk About Movies" column for six years, recently published a spiritual memoir (through Chicago-based Loyola Press) called Swimming With Scapulars. The book, which has received high praise from such Catholic luminaries as Cardinal Francis George of Chicago and Father Benedict Groeschel, as well as from secular publications, is among the top five best-selling Catholic books on the market. In the following self-interview, Lickona reveals what went into the book as well as one or two well-guarded secrets.

Why didn't you want to write this book?

Lord help me, I wanted to be a novelist. I didn't want the memoir serving as a Rosetta Stone for my novels. I'm a Catholic, and my early attempts at fiction clearly arise from a Catholic sensibility. But there's a difference between a sensibility and a sermon. I was afraid that people would accuse the novel of preaching simply because they already knew what I thought about this or that. "Oh, when he writes x, it's just because of his personal sexual mores."

Personal sexual mores?

I adhere to the Catholic Church's traditional teaching on sexual matters, up to and including the prohibition of contraception. I do this not simply because the teaching is traditional — though that does count for something — but also because it makes sense to me. I understand the Church's claims about sexuality, not in a way that I could logically demonstrate (the book is a memoir about my life, not a defense of my beliefs), but in a way that resonates with my experience. I don't think the Church is trying to oppress me; I think the Church is on the side of love. This puts me in the minority among Americans, even among American Catholics. So if I've wrote a novel, even a comic novel, in which a guy's sexual appetites muck up his life, you can see how easy it would be to say, "What did you expect? The author's a freak."

So why did you end up writing the memoir?

Enough circumstances coalesced for me to call it providence. For starters, I gained an appreciation for just how hard it is to get a novel published, and realized that if I ever succeeded on that score, I should just be grateful and not worry so much about how people might react. That removed my chief obstacle. After that, a friend of mine, Abe Opincar, found a publisher for his food memoir Fried Butter which began as a collection of columns written for the Reader. After it came out, Jim Holman, publisher of the Reader and News Notes asked me, "So, when are you going to publish Confessions?" In this, he echoed my wife, my father, and a dear friend, all of whom thought my Confessions column was my best work. Confessions was (and is) called Confessions; I wrote it under the pseudonym Broderick Barker because I didn't want people I knew reading about my sins, and I knew there would have to be sins in any serious account of my spiritual life.

What sort of sins?

Off the top of my head: pride, ambition, lust, anger, and greed, plus offenses against faith, hope, and charity. I'm not trying to convince anyone of my holiness. Maybe of my interest in being holier than I am.

The book is published under your own name. Why abandon the pseudonym?

I think (hope) that most of the people who read it won't know me, and it's always easier to tell your secrets to a stranger. But the main reason was that the column was me musing on stuff, while the book is my life story. It seemed silly to put someone else's name on it.

How were you hoping to engage the world with your life's story?

I was hoping it would show that there were in fact young people — I'm 31 — who took the faith seriously, but who also took the world seriously, and who were aware of the difficulties that each presented the other. I'm acutely aware that a number of my beliefs — that bit about contraception, for example — will seem outdated, quaint, or downright insane to a modern-minded audience. I was hoping that that awareness would make me (and my beliefs) a little more approachable — "I think he's a loon, but at least he knows I think he's a loon."

I also wanted to show there were young, thoughtful Catholics who still believed in the old things — the devil, confession, the Eucharist, the saints, reverence, chastity. In some cases, it was enough that these things had been handed down to me. Twenty centuries of tradition is not something you cast off lightly; neither is the faith of your parents, especially when you see that faith make a serious difference in their lives. Other things I accepted because I had investigated them for myself and found them worthwhile. My formal religious education was spotty — I don't think I went to confession between the ages of 13 and 18, though I certainly needed it. It wasn't until I left home and went to college that I started to really appreciate the sacrament.

Was Loyola Press the first publishing house you tried to interest in the book

No. I had this foolish pride that made me determined to make get published through a secular house or not at all. First, I thought that the stamp of approval from a secular press would validate me as a writer more thoroughly — I would be getting published purely on the strength of the work, and not partly because the work fit the publisher's mission. Second, I imagined that publication by a Catholic press would mean that only Catholics would read it, and I was hung up on engaging the world. I didn't want to preach to the choir.

Hopefully, I'm a little more humble now, and a little wiser. I've realized that publication anywhere is a blessing, and that it's good to have a publisher who's interested in your subject matter. I've realized that a Catholic publisher doesn't necessarily mean exile to the Catholic ghetto, and even if it did, I wouldn't be preaching to the choir. There are a lot of different sorts of Catholics in this country, and I suspect that not a few of them would regard me as something of a curious specimen.

Though none of the secular houses wanted to publish my memoir, one editor at a secular publishing house wrote to me saying my book would be stronger if it was more firmly grounded in the particulars of my religious experience, the way I encountered God. I took his advice seriously, and I kept it in mind during my revisions. I tried to create a particular focus on my concrete experience of God. But when I started thinking about it, I realized that not only were my encounters with God few in number and questionable in character — you wouldn't want to bet on God's existence based on my experience of Him — but also that such encounters had little to do with my faith. That is, my faith did not depend on the experience of God. Faith was something I had been given. It was up to me to make it my own, but experience was not one of the ways I sought to do that. Rather, I sought (and seek) an increase in knowledge and charity. The Catholic faith made sense to me on an intellectual level, and I found I was able to profess the Creed honestly. What remained was for me to conform myself to Christ. Experience of God was the ultimate goal — the happiness of heaven consists in union with Him — but I wasn't counting on any earthly previews. In the end, I realized that the book couldn't be about my experience of God, or my attempt to justify belief through that experience. It could only be about a young guy making his way in the world as a Catholic.

So how'd you end up with Loyola Press?

That same editor had passed my name along to Jim Manney and Joe Durepos of Loyola Press; they had come to him looking for writers. Manney contacted me in December of 2003. He and Durepos were pleased with the columns, but they needed a memoir not a collection of essays. So I tore the Confessions columns apart and used them as the foundation for my book.

The Church in America is suffering through a crisis these days. Stories of priestly abuse and apparent hierarchical mismanagement keep coming out. It seems kind of hard to write about being a Catholic without mentioning it.

The scandal is horrific and heartbreaking, and I wish I had a better understanding of the way it is being handled by Church authorities. But I try to keep my treatment of it limited to my own experience, which, thankfully, is pretty limited — though not purely vicarious. I got kissed by a priest when I was a teenager, but that was as far as it went. Sadly, that priest went further with others.

So, do you still want to be a novelist?

My mother might answer that by saying, "What I want is not as important as what the Lord wants. If He wants it, it'll happen." That kind of piety used to drive me crazy, but Mom's wearing me down. For one thing, she means it. For another, if there's anything experience has taught me to believe in, it's providence. So I'll go with her answer. Though if it happens, I hope to God my mother never reads the thing.

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