Growing Up Catholic

Recollections of churchly experience pre-Vatican II, and of drifting away after

A French professor at university once remarked that a French Catholic goes to church three times in their life, for baptism, marriage and their funeral. Of course, marriages are only legal in France if they’re done at the mairie, so perhaps the number should have been two.

Living in Massachusetts with an Irish mother, the statistics were much different: we went to church every Sunday, and then some.

We lived in a very small town on the South Shore of Massachusetts. At the time it was divided between an old “yankee” section of town, an exclusively white, well-to-do and predominantly Protestant area hugging the coastline, and a more rural and agricultural section with family farms and Catholic families of Irish, Cape Verdean/Portuguese and French heritage. My family was part of the latter minority population, in the Crooked Lane neighbourhood in the northern part of town, nestled among small working farms and cranberry bogs.

Early days

My earliest recollections of church are of unexpected events. A very early memory is of walking up the centre aisle of the church and seeing the distinctive back of my mother’s winter overcoat—tan wool with a short belt across the back, fastened with two very large tortoise-shell buttons. I followed behind and took hold of that belt; she felt the tug, turned around, and … it wasn’t my mother !

I also had a penchant for fainting in church. It was a small building—the smallest church in town I’d say, and the only one made of brick—very stuffy in cool weather when the windows were closed. These fainting spells happened in the summer when the windows were open, too, when I would sit in my white shirt and strangling tie in the sweltering sanctuary, inhaling the hot scent of burning votive candles, thinking of how the Protestant kids were at the beach and that all the parking places would be gone by the time we got there. When we children observed that the Protestant churches closed for the summer, my Irish mother’s response would be “God doesn’t take a summer vacation.”

There were things about the church and its ceremonies that confounded or distressed me. I dreaded Holy Week, for example, when we would sometimes be brought to see a Passion play at a nearby seminary. When they simulated nailing that young loincloth-wearing seminarian to a cross it was just too difficult to detach from reality. And the Easter Vigil spooked me—sitting late in the evening in the darkened church clutching candles, surrounded by shadowy figures, inhaling the aromatic smoke from the clanking thurible. The priest would amble down the centre aisle, wielding his aspergillum like a blackjack and dousing the congregation with freshly blessed holy water. The sacred rule was that our candles be lit from one large, ornate candle—the Easter Candle—carried by the priest, and he in turn had to light the Easter Candle “with flint and steel,” which turned out to be a Zippo cigarette lighter.

Most excruciating was the ritual where the crucifix was detached from its usual place and held at an angle by the altar boys in front of the altar. The congregation queued in the central aisle to kiss the bloodied feet, which were then wiped by the priest with a cloth before the next person pressed their lips to it. We children had always been sternly warned to never drink from a cup or bottle after someone else had done so … and then there was this !

First Communion, Father Howard in the back, I’m third from the right in the first row, my friend Steve is the tall one to the left in the first row

There was also Sunday school to contend with. I prepared for my first communion and confession with Sister Jacqueline, who I called Sister Jack-O-Lantern. For confession we had “practice sins,” minor offences against God’s wishes that took the place of “real” sins when we practiced confessing. Once we had graduated from confessing school and entered the confessional, the practice sins were the only sins I could think of and I recited them there, too. But the priest would then have follow up questions that we’d not been warned about:

• Me: I stole a pencil (I hadn’t, but this was a “practice sin”)

• Priest: Did you give it back ?

• Me: No Father.

• Priest: Was it wrong to take the pencil ?

• Me: Yes Father.

Then with the penance came the requirement to apologise to my victim and to return the pencil. Of course, I’d now complicated things by not having confessed that in confessing, I had lied. Lying, however, was my cousin’s solution to “making a good confession.” He attended parochial school in a Boston suburb so he knew about such things and shared with me his secret. Initially confess some fake, innocuous sins, not the real sins, then always end with “I lied.” That covered all the bases. (My cousin later attended divinity school, which he claimed turned him into an atheist.)

Having some level of confusion about the church’s teachings was normal, it seems, as friends would often talk and sometimes laugh about church matters. Even my father, who became Catholic in order to marry my mother, admitted that when he heard the Lord’s Prayer, he thought one line of text was “Harold be Thy Name.” A friend, who I know to this day, was similarly confused. The priest in our parish was named Father Timothy Howard, and my friend accordingly believed he was hearing “Howard be Thy Name” in the same place of that prayer. Apparently this bestowed some special and undeserved reverence on my own family as well. (By the way, Father Howard could say mass faster than any other priest. He reduced the “Hail Mary” to just three words: “Hail Mary … Jesus.” He could whip through the rosary in about three minutes flat.)

Being the son of an Irish Catholic mother, it was also expected that I become an altar boy—something I truly did not want to do, but was coerced into. This meant attending altar boy training under the tutelage of an older and extremely religious Irish gentleman who had constructed an unconsecrated altar in his home as a prop. It was at at the very top of the stairs in a Cape Cod style house, so that when you entered the house the staircase was dead ahead and the altar was visible as soon as the door was opened. I was not motivated to memorise all the Latin, but learned that if you memorised just the first line or two, you could utter them loudly then bend over as if in prayer and quietly mumble Latin-like sounds and get away with it. Just the way my grandfather would say “In mud eels are, in clay none are” such that it sounded like classical Latin.

Actually being an altar boy was a bit like being on stage in a play where you hadn’t bothered learning the lines and had never rehearsed. I was able to fake the prayers well enough, but there were other tasks where timing was important. Ringing the bells during the consecration of the bread and wine, for example. But before that happened, knowing the exact right time to carry the cruets of water and wine to the priest from the side of the altar was trickier. It was not good to do this too soon and find yourself standing next to a very annoyed priest waiting for the actual right time to arrive.

There was also the phenomenon of the laughing fit. The slightest incongruity could set off a physiological need to laugh, especially if there was another reluctant altar boy saying mass with you. It could be the squeak of the priest’s shoes or an odd cry of a baby in the congregation. Once it started, the laughter was painfully irrepressible and extremely contagious. A nasty glance from the priest was like throwing fuel on the fire.

As children, we were taught by our mother not to chew the eucharistic wafer after taking communion. Sister Jack-O-Lantern stressed this as well. This usually meant that the thin, dry piece of unleavened bread would stick to the roof of the mouth like peanut butter and one would struggle to manoeuvre it into a swallowing position. As an altar boy, however, I witnessed something almost inconceivable. After the communion service, the priest inevitably had a surplus of “hosts,” the bread wafers representing the eucharist. I had never thought about the question of what happens to all of those leftover consecrated pieces of bread. I recall the horror I felt when the answer came: the priest would lean closely over the chalice containing them and stuff all of them into his mouth. I could hear the crunch as he chewed them—biting and chewing the Body of Christ! It was stunning and horrible to witness.

Growing irreverent

When I was twelve my family moved from Massachusetts to Connecticut. We moved in 1964—the year when changes to the liturgy mandated by the Second Vatican Council began to go into effect. The Mass was suddenly said in English, the priest no longer faced the altar but the congregation, and the music was terrible—I was embarrassed just by listening to it. I refused to attend Sunday school (called “confraternity classes” or something like that) and began to say irreverent things about church and priests in particular. However nothing I could say kept me from being dragged off to church every Sunday morning.

This new town in Connecticut was the opposite of what I had known previously. It was large and had a major industrial base. And it was predominantly Catholic, with Poles and Hungarians outnumbering any other immigrant group. There was even a Polish-language Catholic church in town. We ended up going to a relatively new Catholic church which had a modern, unconventional design. It was wider than it was long, had a sloping floor like a cinema, and felt more like a high school auditorium than any church I’d seen before. A public address system was in place and microphones were deployed to amplify the priest’s voice, no matter where he stood. There was an older priest in charge, and the younger priest was from Italy. He spoke slowly and—forgive me for saying so—sounded very much like Chico Marx.

On religious holidays when my grandparents visited, my grandfather—a devout atheist—would attend, ostensibly to make my French Catholic grandmother happy. He was deaf as a haddock and often spoke much too loudly, which assured that the entire congregation would hear his irreverent comments during the service. As the priest would elevate the chalice of wine during the consecration—the quietest and most sacred part of the mass—his voice would ring out with “HE’S THE ONLY ONE WHO GETS ANYTHING OUT OF THIS!” When the Italian priest, who had jet black oiled hair, combed back like Elvis Presley, ascended to speak at the pulpit, he once bellowed loudly “HE LOOKS LIKE A SEAL !”

My mother was distressed that I refused to attend the confraternity classes since it meant I would not receive the sacrament of confirmation. Confirmation had always been explained to me as a ritual where one vowed to be “a soldier of Christ,” a concept that seemed inherently strange and contradictory. I don’t remember learning anything about Jesus leading an army. My mother would not give up, however, and a few years after the time when I would ordinarily have been confirmed, she arranged for me to attend a confirmation ceremony overseen by a priest she knew in Massachusetts.

The only thing that captured my interest around confirmation was the notion of being able to take a new name—the “confirmation name”—the limitation being that it had to be the name of a saint. My mother had her own ideas about this. Her sister, my aunt Mimi, and I were close, and my mother felt that it would be meaningful for me to take the name of her recently deceased husband, whose forenames were “Jeremiah Matthew.” I opposed this on principle—I didn’t want to undergo confirmation in the first place, so I should at least get to choose my own confirmation name! And I asserted this when my mother shared with me her expectations.

I said “I’ve already chosen a name.” She noted that it had to be a saint’s name and asked what I’d chosen. “Nicholas,” I replied, to which she barked “There is no Saint Nicholas.” I’ll give her credit: when she heard herself saying these words she laughed at how absurd it sounded. But she went back to insisting that I take the name Jeremiah. I told her that I had a second choice: “Valentine.” She was disgusted and the argument continued. Ultimately we arrived at a compromise, I’d take my uncle’s middle name, Matthew, as my confirmation name. I did so reluctantly, and still wish I’d been able to use one of my own preferred names.

There was general concern about my lack of preparation. The bishop overseeing the ceremony could ask any of the candidates a question of theology and I had not been educated as required. Once we arrived, the likelihood of this happening seemed much greater, since I was a few years older than the others and stood at least a foot higher than the tallest of the other boys. Placing me at the very end of the procession only served to make my presence more conspicuous. Fortunately the bishop asked me nothing—perhaps he recognised that doing so would just have been asking for trouble. He and I also probably had one thing in common: a desire for the ceremony to be over with as quickly as possible.

Over the edge

The truly decisive moment in my relationship with The Church came when I was twenty-one. I had driven to North Carolina to visit with a friend who had been drafted into the army and was stationed at Fort Bragg. On the return trip I stopped to visit my brother and sister-in-law in a Washington DC suburb, then continued on toward New England the next morning. As I drove a pain developed in my abdomen which became unbearable. I had to loosen my belt to ease the pain, and was soon driving with one hand on the wheel while the other held my stomach near the centre of pain. I saw a blue hospital sign and swung off the highway at Havre de Grace, Maryland. Ah, what a mis-named town it turned out to be.

At the hospital I entered the emergency room and registered my details, checking the box next to “Roman Catholic.” I then sat for an hour or more in the empty waiting area, repeatedly being told that a doctor would see me in a minute. Finally I transgressed protocol and walked into the clinical area behind the desk and was met by a doctor who was clearly angry that I was not outside, still waiting. At least that is what I assumed he was angry about. He was not a native English speaker and I had the impression he spoke almost no English at all. He finally walked away in disgust and left me waiting again, but this time in the clinical area. After a nurse interviewed me and checked my vital signs a surgeon, an Egyptian gentleman who communicated well, met with me and told me I had appendicitis and required surgery, right away. I rang my brother in Washington and let him know what was happening, and he alerted other family members. Off I went for surgery.

I awakened in the recovery room and was subsequently wheeled into a single room. My brother and sister-in-law had arrived by this time and I was glad for their presence. I was less pleased about the strong, acrid odour in my room. When I asked the nurse about it she replied that it was “the cancer smell.” No other rooms were available so I was for the moment in the cancer ward. I had recently read Solzhenitsyn’s Cancer Ward so this did not come as uplifting news to me. I was, however moved to another ward the next day and was at least spared the intense scent and atmosphere of the original location.

Another two days passed, even though I had been told that I would likely be discharged after two days. This was not likely now, however, since the doctor had not changed my bandages since the day of the surgery, and they had become a bloody, oozing mess. The nurses told me repeatedly that only the surgeon could change the bandages and I could see the expression of horror on their faces as, on consecutive days, they witnessed my degradation. Red lines had begun to appear in my legs, then my arms and chest—both blood poisoning and lymphadenitis had set in. I looked like a human road map. This development however prompted the surgeon to finally visit and change the bandages. By this time my legs were convulsing. Each time they would jolt and lift me off the bed the pain of my incision intensified exponentially.

The religious counterpoint to this American Medical Experience was the visitation of the Catholic priest. By ticking the box “Roman Catholic” on the form when I registered at the hospital I had assured that my name and room number would be on a Catholic priest’s list. On his first visit he seemed kind and well meaning and sympathetic to my agony. He ended the visit by asking if I’d like to take communion, to which I politely answered “No Father.” On the next visit, a day or two later, he asked the same question and I responded as I had before. He then said, “I tell you what, John, I come here on Sunday to give communion to the faithful, will you take communion then?” I thought it would get him off my back so I said “Yes.”

He then craftily asked me if I went to church every Sunday. When I answered “No,” he quickly replied “Then you’ll have to go to confession” and immediately started in on the prayerful introduction to the Act of Confession. There is a moment when the priest finishes his preamble and one is to say “Bless me Father for I have sinned …” but I said nothing. I was sick and in pain and this was not what I needed.

But he pressed ahead. “Do you have anything you would like to confess?” he asked, to which I responded “No.” This did not bring things to an end, but instead escalated the situation. The interrogation began. As I recall it seemed to go on forever, moving from one category of sin to another, starting with the least offensive “venial” sins then ascending toward the most heinous “mortal” sins. Ultimately we arrived at the summit of sinfulness as he posed the question “Have you sinned with women?” After I asked for clarification, another lengthy sub-category of sins was explored, each with follow-up queries such as “how many times” and “do you regret it,” etc. He gave me my penance at the end and left, returning on Sunday to give me communion without conversation. I never saw him again after that although I remained in the hospital for a miserable three weeks.

When I told the story to my brother, he asked about the penance, wondering if the priest had told me to “walk on my knees to Lourdes.”

And yet …

Since that time my attendance at church has been, I think, limited to funerals. But having been raised as a Catholic, there is a cultural residue and identity that remains. Some of it still annoys or angers me. Some of it—the positive things—belongs to the domain of ingrained personal values, reflecting philosophically the New Testament orientation of Catholicism. The negative parts seem to boil down to hypocrisy. It’s hard for me, for example, to think of some of the “Christian sects” in the United States as fundamentally Christian, except through some perverted theology that detests the poor and never turns the other cheek. But if that is what remains of the Catholic experience in this, my eighth decade, then things could have been worse.