The Smoke and the Robes

If you’ve ever watched NBC, you’ve likely seen Larry Kudlow the host of CNBC’s “Kudlow & Company“.   Mr. Kudlow is a familiar face in Washington and on Wall Street — a renowned free market, supply-side economist armed with knowledge, vision, and integrity acquired over a storied career spanning three decades.  Problem is that he got addicted to alcohol and cocaine, and had to spend time in a treatment centre.  In a 2001 article in The American Spectator, he tells how he had pretty much hit rock bottom, when a friend came to the rescue and sent him a priest, eventhough he was brought up Jewish.  In this excerpt you can see what a little daring can do, and how rules and ritual have this stabilizing affect on someone awash in a moral ocean without a compass:

Then one day Father C. John McCloskey appeared at Bear Stearns. My secretary said, “This priest is here to see you.” No appointment, but a lot of the partners donated to various charities. So I was ready to pull out my checkbook and write a thousand dollars to whatever. But this guy didn’t want any money. He was a friend of Jeff Bell’s and he wanted to talk to me. And he was a very engaging man.    

TAS: Wasn’t he a gold trader before becoming a priest?

 Kudlow: Right. At Merrill. But that day he said he had been watching me on TV on the financial shows. “You’ve changed,” he said. He was right. I was trying to be more restrained, calmer, things they taught me in treatment. So then he asked me, “Do you believe in the hereafter?” My answer was yes, because that’s what you’re taught in the Jewish faith, though I had not been raised very religious and I hadn’t been in a temple since I was fifteen. Then, “Do you believe in Jesus Christ?” And I said I didn’t know. But I didn’t say no. He gave me a book or two to read and then said: “Why don’t you try going to Mass?” I told him I had never been. “Do you have any opposition to it?” I said no. But, I would feel a little odd just walking into a Catholic Church. He said, well, lots of people do it. Then he introduced me to a friend who went to St. Thomas More on 89th and Madison, near where I lived. And I loved it. I loved the Mass.  

TAS: Why? 

Kudlow: If done right it has a certain mystical quality, and it appealed to me. It was different from anything I had been exposed to. I went to a retreat and I didn’t like it because I didn’t understand it, mostly. But it wasn’t church. The church part is what I liked, the actual Mass. I liked the robes, the smoke. I loved it. All these rituals and rules. I began to realize that for the past eight or ten years I had been living without them. I was the rule. I was so self-centered. I’d just do whatever I felt like. I was in my master-of-the-universe period. You can’t live that way. Nobody can. I knew it wasn’t good and the drugs and the booze were part of it.  

 You can guess the rest.  Kudlow did convert to Catholicism, and he still loves the Mass.  So try just inviting someone to the Mass, so that they can see it all for themselves.  When they’re ready, they’ll be able to receive communion worthily.  It is a further testimony of how much it really helps the faithful when priests follow the rubrics faithfully and play by the rules in the Mass.  You can get the rest of the interview as it was published in TAS right here at his blog.