After all these years, I am still sometimes taken aback when someone in church refuses the sign of peace.

Converts to Catholicism, as everyone knows, bring a fresh perspective to the experience of the Church. Going to confession is new and harrowing and liberating in ways that a “cradle Catholic” might not quite appreciate. Participating in Mass, receiving communion, saying the rosary—everything has a newness to it, and the convert gradually learns the patterns and expectations of Catholic life. But remnants of cultural difference remain, at least if my own conversion 45 years ago this March is any indication.

I grew up in Middle Georgia attending the local Methodist church with my parents and siblings. As part of family life, I went to Sunday School, regular Sunday morning church services, and Sunday evening services. For a week in the summer, I attended Vacation Bible School. Most of my friends at school were either Methodist, Baptist, or Presbyterian, and if doctrinal differences came up, they never seemed important, especially given the great communal unanimity achieved in the stands at high school football games on Friday night. Out in the county there were more ardent and marginal congregations, such as the Primitive Baptists, but generally (if a little vaguely), we were all Protestants, beneficiaries of Martin Luther and his bold break from the deeply corrupt Roman Catholic Church.

I never knew a single Catholic growing up. I had no contact, good or bad, with priests and nuns; no exposure whatsoever to confessionals and sacristies, stoles and chasubles, mitres and croziers, chalices and tabernacles, monstrances and sanctuary lamps. “Catholicism” obviously existed in Atlanta, even Macon, and up north there were big cities like New York and Chicago full of Catholic immigrants. I suppose we were all generally suspicious of Catholics and infallible popes, but I did not have a virulent anti-Catholicism drummed into me, probably because it was not a matter of such remote concern.

But one of the differences of coming into the Church as an adult, drawn by the Eucharist, is that many of the things dear to lifelong Catholics, especially more traditional ones, remain even now alien to the sensibility of my formative years. I have a hard time even remembering the names of various things. This is clearly cultural. At eight or nine, Catholic boys might have been altar boys wearing cassocks and surplices, deftly handling patens and cruets and thuribles, but I was in a Methodist pew with a hymnal in my lap, drawing faces on the back of an offering envelope while my mother nudged me to pay attention to the sermon and my stepfather regarded me sternly from the choir loft behind the preacher.

When I joined the Roman Catholic Church in my mid-twenties, I soon discovered a difference not just between converts and cradle Catholics, but among Catholics themselves. After all these years, I am still sometimes taken aback, for example, when someone in church refuses the sign of peace. When I first began to attend mass in the decade after Vatican II, the priest or deacon would say “Let us offer each other a sign of peace,” and this invitation sometimes signaled an occasion for such an extended session of visiting and talking and waving that it seemed like the mass had been suspended. Sometimes the priest would come out into the congregation and walk around to shake hands, and what was clearly supposed to be a brief, formally symbolic moment would turn into a demonstration of—how to put it?—the empowered laity liberated from their former liturgical bondage. It was a bit ridiculous, and in my experience, this kind of excess disappeared within a few years. Now the moment is usually one of pleasant dignity: we acknowledge our neighbors in Christ.

Well, most do. For some, even at Wyoming Catholic College, the request to offer each other a sign of peace is a clear affront. Turn toward them in church, and they not only refuse to look up, but their refusal radiates high-minded repudiation, as though you were offering them chicken pox or a copy of The Watchtower. If they do look up, their eyes hold a kind of pitying reproach, because you have shown yourself to be deeply if ignorantly invested in the decline of the Church. They can no doubt cite some text proving the “kiss of peace” to be an invalid part of the mass. But in the moment, it is hardly a lesson so much as a little assertion of their own superiority, a little gesture by the eternal Pharisee—little in every way.

Republished with gracious permission from the Wyoming Catholic College Weekly Bulletin.

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