My Fan Year - #45
@U2,
December 12, 2005
By: Angela Pancella
I grew up in a Catholic family. That's still where I'm coming from, religion-wise, unless you count rock and roll as my religion. (An embarrassingly strong case could be made for that. Let's see -- have I ever travelled cross country to hear a bishop give a talk? No. Do I ever travel cross country to go to a U2 concert? Yes. What do I spend more time writing about -- God or rock and roll groups? Er...will it help my score if I write about God in my column on a U2 fan site?) In the peer-pressurest years of my youth, there were no "Jesus Is My Homeboy" T-shirts, no WWJD? bracelets. I may have gone to Catholic schools all my life, but by no means were they safe environments to let a Jesus-freak flag fly.
You look, when you're young, for people worth imitating. You'd like to know, as you come up with an identity, that people with similar identities have Made It in this world -- that just because you're mocked now doesn't mean you won't someday be fabulously wealthy -- like all those computer geeks who now own the planet.
But when I was growing up, I noticed that anytime someone Catholic got talked about in the media, the phrase used to describe them was "fallen away." The assumption I picked up was that the famous people, the successful people, if they came from my religious background, they abandoned it. It was easy to conclude the abandonment had to happen first in order for one to become famous or successful.
I was interested in staying Catholic, but even after I got older, I still wanted media-sanctioned evidence that this was the right choice. The idea that I had to justify my own choices by looking for similar examples in celebrity-world dies hard.
That's the only excuse I can give for why I got such a thrill out of seeing Bono with John Paul II. I thought, wouldn't it be SO COOL -- for me, I meant; wouldn't auxiliary coolness descend upon me -- if the biggest rock star in the world, as a result of this meeting, underwent a dramatic conversion to Catholicism? (And by "the biggest rock star in the world" I meant Bono. The Pope was already Catholic.)
I can imagine, though of course it's just a guess, that this score-one-for-the-home-team attitude might be behind a lot of speculation over the years about the faith life of the members of U2. Luckily, though, it seems like people are starting to get over this. I'm seeing more and more events like the one I just went to at Covenant Theological Seminary Friday night -- a talk called How to Dismantle an Atomic Band (part of a series called Friday Nights @ the Institute, sponsored by the Francis Schaeffer Institute. The audio of the talk will be archived here. This is the second talk on U2 put on in this series; the first was http://www.atu2.com/news/article.src?ID=2532">profiled here.). It was a U2-centric discussion in a Christian setting that did not waste time wondering about the Christianity of anyone in U2. Instead, the speaker, Ned O'Gorman, looked at lessons Christians -- and anyone, really -- could learn from the band's career: How and why to use irony, how and why to chop down whatever Joshua Tree might be in one's own life. Along the way O'Gorman visited St. Augustine; he showed us what picture we'd see if we typed "irony" into Wikipedia; he related The Picture of Dorian Gray to the Fly and Macphisto. He neither apologized for his choice of main subject matter nor over-glorified U2. It gave me reason to hope there will be plenty more heady talks on U2 'n' God that will say useful things.
St. Augustine, by the way, was Catholic. And very famous. Not that I'm bragging or anything.
© @U2/Pancella, 2005.
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