What God Allows: The Crisis of Faith and Conscience in One Catholic Church

James Noonan is an adjunct professor of English at Carleton University
in Ottawa and

the author of Biography and Autobiography: Essays on Irish and Canadian
History and Literature.

What God Allows is a remarkable book about the tensions, struggles, and
satisfactions of being Catholic in North America in the late 20th
century. For one full year, from May 1993 to May 1994, Ivor Shapiro
studied and documented the lives of people in the parish of St.
Paul’s, Kenmore, a village on the outskirts of Buffalo, New York. In
the course of that year Shapiro, a South African–born journalist now
living in Toronto and working as managing editor of Chatelaine magazine,
commuted regularly to Kenmore to interview priests and parishioners, to
attend parish meetings and instruction classes, and to be present at
their liturgies and social gatherings.

And what a year it was. Besides following closely the lives of eight
adults who would be baptized in the climactic Easter Vigil liturgy of
1994, Shapiro was witness to the reactions of Catholics to the papal
encyclical Veritatis Splendor (The Splendor of Truth) and the newly

released English translation of Pope John Paul II’s Catechism of the
Catholic Church. Much of the “crisis” referred to in the title of
the book involved Catholics’ confronting the tension between the papal
and moral authority stressed in those documents and the claims of the
indivi-dual conscience so dear to North Americans. Without trying to
resolve those tensions, Shapiro shows how they are played out in the
lives of ordinary Catholics, from the parish priest to his assistants to
the parish staff to families and individuals, as each is confronted with
such issues as belief in Church doctrine, attendance at Mass, priestly
celibacy, gay priests, involvement in the parish community, abortion,
contraception, and divorce and remarriage in the Church.

Shapiro also documents how Catholics today often line up on different
sides of these issues, and the conflict and pain that result. At the
same time, he recognizes that most of these people would rather come to
grips with the issues within the Church than leave an institution that
has been their home for so long.

One might ask why Shapiro felt the need to travel regularly from
Toronto to Buffalo to do his research. For despite the book’s many
resonances for Canadian Catholics, we would be better served by a volume
that documented a Canadian parish.