A Book Review… Lighthearted Look At Church History, From Highs And Lows On A Hiking Trail
By DEXTER DUGGAN
1054 and All That: A Lighthearted History of the Catholic Church, by Karl Keating, illustrations by Kurt R. Kress, Rasselas House, El Cajon, Calif., ISBN 978-1-942596-43-1, 140 pages paperback, $18.95, 2022. Other formats also available.
Veteran Catholic apologist Karl Keating takes a whimsical look at highs and lows of Catholic Church history as an author who also knows something about highs and lows in the arduous world of hiking.
The mental concentration that may be demanded of a best-selling author at work might sometimes seem less arduous than Keating’s challenges in the outdoors, another topic of his book writing, although he first came to wide attention through his work at Catholic Answers (www.catholic.com), of which he is founder and senior fellow.
As befits his lighthearted look, Keating’s overview skips through history like a hiker over puddles, with the collapse of the Roman Empire receiving two paragraphs. The dustbin of history being a dark place, we’re informed, this disintegration was a suitable beginning to the Dark Ages.
To be on secure ground, like any assured hiker, a reader needs to know his facts before exposing himself to Keating’s deadpan delivery. Citing the early heresy of Montanism, Keating improbably notes that many centuries later, the 16th U.S. president was named after the capital city of Nebraska.
It’s good, I guess, that the 16th president wasn’t named after the capital city of the United States, or else we would have had two presidents named Washington and no President Lincoln.
Were there really Popes Leo XIII or Pius XII? The fact that mischievous Keating mentions them may cause the wary reader to doublecheck with an alternate source, to make sure that Keating didn’t just make them up.
While the figure 1054 in the book title refers to the year of the Great Schism between the Western and Eastern churches, one wouldn’t be surprised if Keating were to disclose this is actually the distance in feet for the longest jump shot ever taken, or how many times he has driven over from his California home to hike Arizona’s Grand Canyon.
Rest assured, in these Keating chronicles 1054 remains only the Schism year, although his erudite footnotes disclose such facts as that (p. 79) “No Renaissance artists lived in Iceland, Greenland, or Scandinavia. Snow matters.”
Erudition is one of his targets. After too much serious study of centuries of Church history, a scholar may benefit from such moments of levity as learning that St. Junipero Serra’s “strict self-discipline prepared him for the hard life of being a missionary in California. (Even today being a missionary in California is a hard life, but for different reasons.)”
As for Catholic veneration of relics, Keating recalls that the body of the well-traveled missionary St. Francis Xavier eventually was taken to Goa while the right forearm went to Rome and another arm bone to Macau. But, he assures us: “No record exists of what Francis thought of this distribution of his remains.”
The papacy of St. Pius X early in the 20th century featured opposition to the heresy of Modernism, which, Keating writes, “was popular for years, but today the only self-described Modernists to be found are gray-haired. Young people genuinely interested in Catholicism think Modernism is too old-fashioned.”
I remember running into Keating carrying his attorney’s briefcase one afternoon on the hilly sidewalks of downtown San Diego decades ago, about the time he was getting involved in the enterprise that would become Catholic Answers. Meanwhile, I had just finished writing Wanderer articles regarding protracted legal proceedings in an entirely separate matter in Orange County, Calif., just to the north.
Keating later would write a 30-part series in The Wanderer that became his book Catholicism and Fundamentalism (Ignatius Press, 1988). He has written a total of 20 books, ranging from his How to Fail at Hiking series to What Catholics Really Believe.
On his recent road trip to hike the Grand Canyon again, Keating stopped off in Phoenix for burgers while making sure that I had received my review copy of this book in the mail. His subsequent account at Facebook of how this Canyon trek went shows that a guy who was an attorney back in the 1970s has remained in very strong shape.
I’ll preface quoting him by noting, for those unaware, that the Canyon’s abyss doesn’t open up on flat desert land. Arizona’s terrain ranges from near sea level by Yuma to more than 12,600 feet high near Flagstaff. The Canyon’s rims are from around 7,000 to 8,000 feet high, so snow is expected up there every winter. (Phoenix, by contrast, is at around 1,100 feet.)
Or, as one description of Arizona elevations says, “Due to its many mountains, the state of Arizona actually has one of the highest average elevations of the entire U.S., with an average of 4,100 feet.”
Posting at Facebook on March 17 that “MY BODY HARDLY FUNCTIONS” upon his return home by Jeep from the three-day hike, Keating noted excruciating-sounding conditions along the trail where the end of the day wasn’t spent in a cozy motel but a tent in the unwelcome elements.
Just a sample: “At Indian Garden I was able to unpack on a picnic table under a shelter and set up my tent out of the rain. That night I wore my muddy but dry rain pants to bed along with a fleece and puffy. They kept me warm enough under my quilt, and by morning my pants were dry enough to wear, even if not completely dry.
“The hike up the Bright Angel Trail was far slower than expected,” Keating continued. “Because of snow and ice on the upper reaches (there had been neither on the upper reaches of the Hermit Trail), I had estimated four hours to hike the 4.5 miles (3,300 feet of elevation gain), but it took six hours.
“The main problem was that I already was exhausted from the previous two days, even though I had eaten adequately,” Keating wrote. “The rainy slog just took too much out of me, I guess. (This was the first backpacking trip in five months, so I have the partial excuse of being out of shape from inactivity.)”
The very least a person could do to acknowledge this heroism, I think, would be to reward Keating by adding 1054 and All That to the bookshelf. In this era of city living, he has retained the endurance that brought the Church through the centuries.
Perhaps for his next volume, Keating will explain the unlikely coincidence that both he and his talented illustrator have the initials K.K. Does that have something to do with the capital of Nebraska?
The book also is available in hardback, ebook and audiobook formats via Amazon.
