Bohemian Catholic?

When I heard that a friend had described our family as "Bohemian Catholic" I was flattered. We do not deserve that accolade, but it has always been an aspiration of mine.

"Bohemian"

The word often refers to countercultures of artists, eccentrics, anarchists and others who reject mainstream, middle class or bourgeois culture and gather in places like Greenwich Village or the East Village of NYC. The word has a complicated relationship to the literal Bohemia, now  the Czech Republic, ethnically German/Slav, formerly part of the Holy Roman and then the Habsburg empires. The word was first used in France to designate the Gypsy or Roma people, an entirely alternative or "other" group, who had come from Bohemia. At a point in the middle ages, a gracious Bohemian king had welcomed the Roma and so many settled there as they were not welcome elsewhere. The origins of this ethnicity are unclear but it is thought that they migrated 1,500 years ago from India into Europe. Eventually the French expanded the word to refer to Gypsy-like groups, alternate countercultures. 

Can a Catholic be Bohemian?

Yes, but only with strict scrutiny. The word connotes (but does not denote): free love and sexual license, indulgence in drugs and alcohol, weak work ethic, an anarchic and iconoclastic sensibility. Perhaps more spiritually toxic is an underlying arrogance, superiority and condescension towards the ordinary. We see these clearly in the beatniks and hippies. Such are anti-Catholic. 

On the positive side, the expression suggests: poverty of spirit and identification with the poor, pursuit of the true-good-beautiful for itself, freedom of spirit, release from toxic social pressures, and rejection of the "bourgeois" as materialistic, careerist, consumerist, status obsessed, privileged, secure in wealth accumulation and its accoutrements, confident in the omnipotence of science/technology.

We are directed by Jesus to be "in the world but not of it." And so the discerning Catholic may find a prophetic element in the bohemian critique of society. Many of the important renewal movements were similarly disruptive in their times: hermits, monks, friars, active religious orders, and such.

Bohemian Catholics Today

1. Catholic Worker is a pure example. Dorothy Day herself lived a bohemian NYC life prior to her conversion to Catholicism and her encounter with the eccentric, exceptional Peter Maurin. Their poverty of life style, care for the poor, pacifism, consistent anarchism, political advocacy for the disadvantaged (farm workers, civil rights, etc.) and wholehearted rejection of "the system" together constitute a flourishing, vigorous Bohemian Catholicism. I myself have emulated their care for the poor and radical simplicity of life but not their anarchistic/pacifistic political ideology.

2. Neocatechumenal Way has its origins when Kiko Arguello literally buried himself with his Bible, guitar and (was it 10?) dogs with the Gypsies in a ghetto of Madrid, Spain. It would not describe itself this way but it is radically bohemian in the sense used here: an alternative Catholic culture given over to simplicity/poverty/community/praise/Eucharist/Scripture and an exhaustive critique of modern society as dystopian and apocalyptic. It cultivates its own habits, music, art, and patterns of life as it detaches in many ways from modern culture and much of the contemporary Church.

3.Others: In my own college years (1965-9) I was myself influenced by radical left critiques of society: Goodman, Illich, Day/Maurin, Schumacher, Ellul, Freire, Holt, King, Chavez, Rieff, Alinsky, Marcel, Maritain and others. I received these, especially Illich, as a deepening and clarification of my Catholicism. Later, immersion in the Charismatic Renewal brought an entirely new dimension. The Cultural Revolution elicited an further intensification of my Catholic resistance.  This was followed by exposure to the theology of Balthasar, John Paul, Ratzinger, the Schindlers and a more distinctively Catholic and philosophical critique of American modernity. 

Recent developments express aspects of a Bohemian Catholicism:  the "Benedict Option" of Rod Dreher, home schooling, staunch Catholic colleges (Franciscan, Benedictine, Ave Maria, etc.), Latin mass communities, and a new "post-liberal" Catholicism (Vance).

4. John Rapinich, my best friend, was a certified, authentic Bohemian Catholic in the league of Kiko and Dorothy Day. His Jewish mother spent her entire adult life in a mental hospital, where John worked later, and where she was later reconciled to his father. They were both baptized and married in the Church. We were there. John was raised by his father, a tough, non-religious Slavic sailor. John suffered nervous breakdown and shock treatments in the military. He opened a coffee shop which was the gathering spot for Kerouac, Ginsburg and his other beatnik friends. He travelled with Kerouac and became a character in "On the Road." He ends up in Mexico and has a powerful conversion into Catholicism. We met in our charismatic prayer group. He lived in our house: he was uncle to my children, little-big-brother to me as I was big-little-brother to him. He worked in the mental hospital where his parents lived; went on mission with a charismatic Jesuit priest to slums on the Mexican border; worked with Hawthorne Dominicans in care of the poor dying of cancer. His last decades he was passionately (everything John did was passionate!) involved in the first Neocatechumenal community in this country. His was an extraordinary intellect and heart. He inflamed my own bohemian tendencies. I was honored to be his friend.

Conclusion

The biggest temptation for the aspiring Bohemian Catholic is an aesthetic/moral arrogance that looks down upon the mainstream and the ordinary. Catholic and "catholic" instincts will countervail this tendency and strengthen Christlike friendships across cultures and classes, appreciating the good in all things!

I am currently rereading Myles Connolly's Mr. Blue, a favorite and formative read from my high school years. Blue is the ultimate Bohemian Catholic: a modern-urban St. Francis, madly in love with God, deliriously delighted with his Creation, militantly anti-bourgeois and absolutely impractical. I am motivated to emulate this Don Quixote. My wife thinks the book is a bad influence, intensifying my worst non-pragmatic and idealistic tendencies. She is herself a good balance to me with her own blend of the bohemian and the mainstream. Countervailing my intellectual abstraction, she is an artist, a superb cook, a gardener, an earth mother with a deep faith and a heart of gold. Together we have enjoyed an ordinary middle class Catholic life, with a delicious bohemian flavoring.