Please explain Catholicism and emotion in Catcher in the Rye. How is it important, and what does it symbolise?I am writing an essay about Catcher...

There's two instances of Catholicism in The
Catcher in the Rye: one with Ackley at Pency and one at breakfast with the
nuns.

Holden asks
Ackley:

readability="6">

"Listen. What's the routine of joining a
monastery?" I asked him. I was sort of toying with the idea of joining one. "Do you have
to be a Catholic and
all?"

readability="6">

"Certainly you have to be a
Catholic. You bastard, did you wake me up just to ask me a dumb
ques-

readability="8">

"Aah, go back to sleep. I'm not going to join one
anyway. The kind of luck I have, I'd probably join one with all the wrong kind of monks
in it. All stupid bastards. Or just
bastards."

Holden is
definitely a conservative: he relishes the past and doesn't want to grow up and be a
phony materialist.  He wants to live a holy life, but he doesn't know how to do it.  His
father was a Catholic, but he left the church when he got
married.

Like everything else, Holden is caught in the
middle.  He's not a child or an adult: he's a teenager.  He's not a Catholic or a
Protestant.  He's not a lover or a fighter.  He's desperately searching for a place to
call home.  He runs away from home and school.  Could he find a home in the church or a
monastery?

Holden also fears being a hypocrite, or a phony.
 He wants to live a quiet life surrounded by books instead of people and money, but he's
afraid that he'll be the "wrong kind of monk," a "stupid
bastard."

Later, on his run-away journey in the city,
Holden sees two nuns and their dilapidated suitcases.  The nuns also are symbols of
holiness, and their suitcases are symbols of modesty, humility, and anti-materialism.
 Holden likes the way they look and the way they "never [go] anywhere swanky for lunch."
 As such, nuns are some of the few non-phonies in the entire
novel.

These nuns are teachers too.  Holden gets into a
conversation about the nature of tragedy, focusing on Romeo and
Juliet's first character who dies, Mercutio.  Holden loves Mercutio because
he's an outspoken rebel, like himself.  Holden really shows his intellectual and
emotional side with the nuns.  He gives them ten dollars, mainly because he doesn't like
to see cheap suitcases.  Like him, the nuns are travelers, and rather than engage in
empty small talk, like the girls in the Lavender room, the nuns engage in meaningful
conversation.  Holden feels like a pilgrim talking to
them.

All this is echoed near the end of the novel when
Holden gets advice from Mr. Antolini, an Italian and--like Mercutio and the nuns--likely
a Catholic.  He says Holden is “in for a terrible
fall”:

"The
mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of
the mature man is that he wants to live humbly for
one."

Was Mercutio a noble
man?  Are the nuns noble?  Would Holden be noble if he becomes Catholic?  Or joins a
monastery?  What is Holden's noble cause?

Holden could end
up like Mercutio or the nuns.  He could die for a noble cause, like Mercutio and James
Castle, both of whom committed suicide.  Or, he would live humbly for one, like the
nuns.

In the end, what does he choose?  We don't know.
 But, we do know that he lives to tell his tale.  And, his "rest home" sounds a lot like
a monastery of sorts.  Ironically, too, Holden's creator J.D. Salinger, a Jewish
Catholic himself, became a monk after writing this book until his death.  No one saw his
face for 50 years.