International Catholic Nerdry in Action: This year's Paris-Chartres Pilgrimage, from Andrew Cusack's website.

The Taxonomy of the Catholic Nerd:
Thoughts for Day Three of the Anniversary Octave of The Shrine of the Holy Whapping

I sometimes find myself wondering, as I watch the conventional stereotypes of another TV show flit fleetingly past my eyes, if someone made an unvarnished, true-to-life sitcom of the daily life of the Catholic Nerd, if anyone would actually believe it. Some of us are too good--or simply too strange--to be true in the prosaic world of fiction. It's a parallel universe, a hidden dimension, in comparison with the quotidian grind of the modern American teen or young adult, and sometimes it seems as if we carry a vast and mirthful secret around inside as we slip unnoticed through reality. We seem like members of some vast unintentional fraternity, like sleepwalking Freemasons who never intended to start a conspiracy but got it rolling anyhow against all odds.

The subculture has become the principal unit of modern American life, ever since Tom Wolfe chronicled surfers and hotrod madmen in the days of The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby. In the past, from Leave it to Beaver to Saved by the Bell, the sociodynamics of the American high school were reduced to the simple categories of Nerds and Populars, and the Nerds, with the occasional token Screech Powers, were largely invisible save for the occasional laugh-tracked stab at the school Chess Club.

However, today, the love and death that accompanies high school is studied with the horrified fascination of a parent beholding orange mold growing on a teenage slacker's dishes that he's forgotten to take back down to the kitchen. The dozen flavors of high school cliques have been dissected in such Jane Austen detail that their continued existence today almost verges on self-parody. Everybody knows the peroxided Drama Queen, the surfer dude, the skater boy with his capacious shorts and enormous wallet-chain, the chain-smoking art students, the pallid Goths and their earth-mother wicca friends, and even the nerds (of the non-Catholic genus) have gotten a second hearing and become semi-cool after all: argyle as an alternative lifestyle rather than a leprous defecit of cuteness.

But what about the Catholic Nerd? The image conjured up is nebulous, some frizzy-haired horror in a dental headpiece and a convent schoolgirl skirt. In TV Land or Hollywood, serious Christians (usually of Nondenomenational Church of God in Christ or vice versa) pop up from time to time, either horrible big-haired bigots or radically unfashionable souls who nonetheless have the redeeming social value of being the spitting image of Mandy Moore (Hollywood Axiom: If weird people are pretty, they're also automatically good). There's not much laughter to be found with either variety.

So, when faced with explaining Catholic Nerddom to your heathen friends, what do you do? There is always a sort of strange wonder among my old high school pals when I tell them that, for example, the senior girl on whom I had a life-threatening crush in Freshman year is now in a convent, as if I had just told them Eleanor of Aquitaine had stood me up at a dorm dance. Forget that: how the heck do you explain ninety percent of your jokes?

There've always been those strong, earnest do-gooder types who are the backbone of church youth groups, especially among our Protestant brethren. They go off on missions to Honduras, build homes in Belize, sing in the contemporary choir. They smile constantly, earnestly, and even laugh, but could you imagine one of them making jokes about Calvin sumo-wrestling? The modern archetypes of youth strains to make this odd little world we discovered understandable to outsiders. Who would expect to find an arcane love of Latin and incense outside of the domain of the (all-too-real) Goth and the (far-too-fictional) exorcist of so many movies? And yet, go to a Tridentine mass at an out-of-the-way chapel and an out-of-the-way time and half the pews will be filled with articulate, normal bright young things who are just as likely to like Bruce Springsteen as Hildegarde of Bingen. Or Star Trek and even the cultic inanities of Father Ted.

What distinguishes the Catholic Nerd from all these other cousins and aunts is the unity of his sense of humor and his faith. Humor and levity become the lubricants that keep his progressive traditionalism a potent fighting machine for God. And the reason this sense of humor works is because Catholic Nerddom draws on a vast culture that stretches back two thousand years. Catholicism is not so much an individual religion as it is a whole universe.

You see this most clearly in the Catholic nations of Europe, where the line between culture and faith is nebulous indeed: shrines spill out onto streetcorners and men revere the Madonna as they might their own mother. Admitted, many don't darken the pews of their parish church more than once or twice in the span of their lifetimes, but it is that interwoven union of the sacred and the secular which has not only given us the works of Caravaggio, Bernini and Balthazar Neumann, but also the tenacious, culture-soaked faith of the German Catholics of the Midwest and the Italians of New York and Boston.

And because this is a universe, it has room for almost anything. The Catholic Nerd breaks down those barriers gleefully: Spider-Man can become an argument for clerical celibacy, while something so gilded and stiff as the life of a saint can be the focus of delight or even flat-out laughter. The Catholic Nerd, a modern-day jongleur, feels free to lovingly tease the saints, because, unlike the stonily historic figure of Luther justified by faith, he knows the saints are alive, as alive as you or me. I won't claim we're more in touch with the holy than anyone else--I know myself, I know my friends--but I think the chief virtue of the Catholic Nerd is he is more at ease around sanctity. The Church becomes, rather than a place one goes once a week, a place to know as intimately as one's sitting-room.

Perhaps the Catholic Nerd is more than a member of a mere subculture. The multifurciate nature of his fellow jongleurs de Dieu suggests that what we have discovered is not a mere clique, but a full-blown culture, the culture that gave birth to Abbot Suger and Dante and even T.S. Eliot, that mournful Anglican Catholic Nerd. The Catholic Nerd universe is as broad as the real one.

Perhaps the truth is, the reason we appear so infrequently as a recognizable stereotype is that we are catholic in our Catholicity. Catholic Nerds come in all shapes and sizes: over-credulous mediaevals like myself. Or intellectual Tridentine aristocrats in coats and ties. Quadrilingual girls in overalls who can do needlepoint and clean a deer carcass in the same afternoon. Cassocked seminarians who watch Family Guy and want to bring back the maniple. Young women who might have a vocation to either the C.I.A. or the Dominican Order. Celtic harpists and hippie guitarists who dress like a collision of Santiago de Compostela and Woodstock. There are even ecumenical Catholic Nerds: tonsured Russian Orthodox lectors who crack jokes and Anglican divines with a predilection for weird relics and solid theology. Like us, they are all united by a love of God expressed in a thousand ways and a thousand mediums that stretches back for two millenia, the visible manifestation of the ineffable Communion of Saints.

Can we hope to see our Nerdly brethren show up in the casts of archetypal characters that so often populate the small-screen recreations of college life? Probably not. The Catholic Nerd as a phenomenon will, like the Church he belongs to, always be somewhat of a mystery to the outside world. But, then, sometimes the finest things in life are best when kept a little bit secret.